The Big Music

by Kirsty Gunn

  ‘John?’

  Only phoning.

  ‘Are you there, John?’

  So of course it’s been a while since the marriage was as good as over, may as well have been, and his wife … Well. A voice on the telephone is who she still is.

  ‘Can you hear me at all?’

  Though the line is better now. With her calling him once a week for the past year or so since he came up here to live for good and he can always hear her.

  ‘Are you keeping well?’ she’ll say. ‘Are you doing what the doctor tells you?’

  In that smooth English voice of hers.

  ‘John?’

  ‘Are you listening to me?’

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘John?’

  ‘John?’

  ‘John?’

  Is what becomes of nothing.

  ‘Are you there?’

  For give it away, your past, and what do you have but only talk, only words, all the sentences … Gone clear into air. There’s no tune, for how can there be, from nothing? No sounds. No string of bright notes that would make up a theme. For of all the certainties in the world, all the houses and the marriages and the children, without the past there’s only nothing – so never let it go.

  Margaret had always known that best.

  And somewhere, within his sleeping … John Sutherland knows it, too.

  That what he’s left for himself is nothing.

  Just parts and bits … Pieces …

  Nothing.

  When, with Margaret, he could have allowed himself the all.

  And they did give the old boy a proper funeral in Brora, at the end there, didn’t they? The army? Wrap his box in the flag? With the medals, for his time in France. For the work he’d put in to the music school through the Highlands, for his work with education and the children who would come to learn to play, and the bands that he tutored, the competitions that he judged. And though none of it was Johnnie’s life, was it? None of it? Though his marriage over, his life in London done …

  Though –

  ‘I’ll not be back!’ he had said.

  So he did come back.

  His father’s tunes all around him in the song he himself would now play.39

  two/third paper40

  Callum has to go through now, and see his father. It’s where the day has been taking him, to the moment when he will walk into the darkened room, see his father’s body lying out there in the bed, asleep.

  And for him, what that feeling is like … I wonder, Callum. A father’s son who’s driven all through the day to get here, a man who has no belief in what he’s doing, no understanding about himself, who he is, where he might be going, the direction he wants to take. Who is acting out of duty here – that his mother has asked him to come and get his father, to bring him away – left the others in the kitchen and come through to the little sitting room, to be standing by his father’s chair. And yet it is not as simple as simple duty either. To be standing as he is, unable to settle. Facing the north window looking out into the darkness and I should go in and draw the curtains but instead there’s his face reflected by the lamplight, in the dark glass.

  For duty, I know, may be no more than duty but still duty can be all. Here, where we live, duty is like return, is fixed, it’s known. It’s part of who we are, inevitable. And so there was his mother phoning him the way she did, asking him to come up and check on his father, see how he is so that he can take him away, put him in some hospital or other, some hospice or home … But that was just the start of Callum’s journey. For of course she would think, wouldn’t she, his mother, that old Johnnie should not be here with us, that the man who is her husband should not be in such a place of terrible and dangerous isolation, she can’t imagine it. Yet Callum understands. Why his father is here, why he must stay. And he knows how duty turns to will and will into desire. Now that he’s here, after his long day, so now there’s nowhere else he wants to be but here. Because look about him in this warm room, and beyond it, through the glass. Every part of the world where he is now, he knows. He stands at the window registering that fact, of every part, seeing through the dark. The straggly tree on the hill line, that tree stripped of leaves and bent over by a wind, one tree, he can see, he knows. The strike of black water down there on the moor, broken up with sharp boulders, and he used to sit on those rocks, years ago, looking up at the hills, at Mhorvaig, with Helen.

  And Helen.

  ‘Christ!’

  That scene in the kitchen just now!

  With the news that she’s here!

  All that come in on him the way it did and – Christ! again, making him feel like his father, but he needs a drink, goes over to the sideboard and pours himself a whisky. For he may be here for duty, of course he is, for his father, and not those other memories – not that tree, that water, that hill and the two of them together – but how do you keep them apart? That memory, the green face of the hill and climbing higher and higher to get to the top, always wanting to go further, higher, with a new set of hills falling away to the west – how keep that separate from everything else? The light and the sun and the cold coming in across the tops so you could feel by the time summer had got to its end that he’d have to go back to London, and he’d have to say goodbye to Helen then … How be here just for his father, to tend to him, think only of him, when there’s all that other as well? Him and Helen and a new set of hills, the two of them together on their own and the past coming raging in?

  Best to have no old stories from way back, just try not to remember them. That’s what he must think, taking a sip of the whisky, another sip. Keep them silenced, those thoughts of what they used to do, he and Helen, the two of them sitting there on the black rocks and all the broad hills spread out before them to the sky …

  Just forget. Forgetting is best. He’ll try and get reception in a bit, call Anna and the boys, remind himself what he’s here for: to see his father, nothing else. His father who is through there in the room off the hallway, waiting for him. Is what he’ll say to his wife and sons. How he’s here for duty, remember? For his father. To be standing here at his father’s chair, just as he used to when he was a boy, when he would come through here to wish his father goodnight –

  ‘Goodnight, Daddy.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  And yes.

  For there’s always that.

  The Goodnight, Daddy.

  The way Margaret used to bring him in here all those years ago, taking him by the hand to come in and wish his father goodnight. And sure there’s nothing of Helen in that. So he can think about that, remember that. What his father was like. Tell that to Anna and the boys. How it was to be a boy himself and coming in here to see his father in the evening. What that was like. Or later, when he was a young man, arriving like he did tonight after a long drive north and his father sitting here in this same chair, waiting for him, a tumbler of whisky in his hand and tapping out a tune against it, where the glass rested on the arm of his chair.

  ‘Hello, Daddy.’

  Because that was just him and his father then.

  No thoughts of Helen there.

  The way his father would take one sip from his glass, then another, before replying.

  ‘You took your time, though.’

  So certainly, yes, there was always that. To remember, to keep hold of here. To tell his wife. His sons. The way his father was. The way he is. That one memory on its own should keep all the other thoughts away.

  ‘My father …’ he could say.

  As though he’s speaking now to Anna, or to the boys: My father.

  ‘There’s nothing about him that is easy.’

  For what was it like all those years when he came through here to wish his father goodnight? Nothing like thinking of Helen, anyway, that’s for sure. No room there for any other thought or idea. Only ever: My father. It was the way his father was. Wherever he was. In the chair, in the car, when they were driving up here. That terrifyin
g profile, his hands clenched on the wheel. Whenever he was with his father his father’s presence took up all the space, he seemed to dominate the air around him.

  My father.

  Sitting beside him in the car.

  Coming in here, as a boy, as a young man, to stand and wait at his father’s chair.

  So, yes. Just think about that.

  Callum.

  Remember that.

  The My father …

  A man, Callum says to himself now, who could never come close.

  And this, after all, is his father’s House. It’s not Callum’s house. So there’s that, too. To remind himself of, tell his family, his wife and his sons. How none of this – him being here, seeing the rocks through the glass, the high hills – how none of it should be to do with Callum anyway, because this is his father’s home, his father’s House. Callum is only visiting, remember? He’s passing through. Following the call from his mother to come up here and get his father away. And any minute he’ll go in now to the little bedroom off the hall where the man who used to sit in the chair is now lying … And – Goodnight, Daddy indeed. For that will be intimate enough. Going in to see him there, to stand right next to him, kiss him on the forehead …

  Callum takes a sip of his whisky. Takes another sip.

  God knows none of this will be easy.

  No more than it was easy all those years ago, when he was a boy and he had no choice then but to have to come through to his father in the evening – so in the same way there’s no choice now but for it to be Callum who must be the one to go in there and this time try and get his father to leave, come away with him to London as his mother thinks is best.

  And tell Anna that, too. Tell the boys. That it’s only him here. Who has to do that. There’s no one else.

  You’ve got to be the one to do it, Callum.

  Because his mother would never do anything.

  By now it may as well be as though his mother’s never even been married to his father.

  You’ve got to be the one.

  So, yes, it’s only Callum here.

  A man who could never come close.

  Leaving his family so early this morning and driving through the dawn, coming up all through the hours of daylight to that bleak and lovely road, the cut peat into the earth and the crumbled drying heather …

  You took your time, though.

  Arriving …

  And don’t think I’m coming with you either.

  Is where this is leading, Callum knows. To the dark room and what his father will say.

  Callum moves to the window again, restless, then back to the sideboard. It’s that word again, inevitable. That run of duty into will and to desire. All of it wrapped around him now, holding him, keeping him – because he knows of course that his father won’t be going anywhere and his own presence here makes no difference to that fact. But that doesn’t mean he now wishes he hadn’t come here either. Because now he’s here he sees so clearly how the end of his father’s life belongs here, of course it does, met with him in the place where Callum has arrived, the place where his father started out from. It’s like his father’s music, Callum thinks, is the way it feels – the ‘A’ note always wanting to keep the tune, to hold the other notes against the line of the drone below. So there’s no choice about where the tune will go, only the inevitability of its eventual return. And it’s a lovely sound, how could it not be, with a High ‘A’ to pitch the harmonic off the base note and the fine wide octave in between – though there’s no straying from it, there can’t be, from that lovely ‘A’. The beginning of all the music is there.

  And it occurs to Callum then: where does his father keep all the stuff for his music, anyhow? All his books and the papers and the manuscripts? There’s no place for any of it here he can see, in this room, though his father’s always called it the ‘Music Room’ and he used to do all his practice here. And it can’t be upstairs, all those papers and notes, when it’s clear he’s not been up in his own bedroom for some time, since they’ve moved him down here.

  So where are the papers? On a table, they used to be, laid out …

  Where is that table?

  Where –?

  And then, something.

  An image.

  A memory, though he was not to have any of those memories and he was to call home, remember, he was to phone Anna and the boys …

  But –

  something.

  About what he’d heard today. And after his mother’s telling him, he’d remembered, too … Something. About his father.

  Margaret saying that they found him up on the top of Ben Mhorvaig and trying to get over on the west side … And he’d thought about it yesterday as well, when his mother called … Started to …

  But now the memory is complete. With seeing that part of the hill just now when he looked through the glass – to the black rocks and the river and in the distance Ben Mhorvaig – the memory … Of papers on a table … Another table …

  And himself and Helen.

  Helen.

  That memory.

  And no good now, trying to suppress it. No good trying to think about his father, or the way his father is.

  No good saying again to himself the words My father.

  No good. Because the memory is here. Of how they had got up to the top of that hill, he and Helen … An old, old memory that he hadn’t allowed …

  Of a private place.

  That they had used. He and Helen.

  Helen.

  ‘Yes.’

  When they’d got to the top and gone over.

  ‘I do remember’ he says.

  Because he’d seen all his father’s papers that day, hadn’t he, when he’d been there to that place with her, with Helen, as she’d drawn him to her and …

  Helen.

  Helen.

  Helen.

  All his father’s music was there. In files. In boxes. On a big table by the window …

  Pages piled up, and books and notebooks and manuscript papers all covered with notes, with writing …

  All the music there that day. Long ago when he’d seen it. When he’d been there in secret with Helen, to his father’s secret place. With all his father’s music around them there – and not thinking about it since, remembering her, the sensation of her …

  Helen.

  But it comes back to him now.

  That it’s where the music is. And where his father was taking himself to today, when they found him … It was to that place. To that same place. But with a child – why a child?

  With Helen’s child.

  He’s restless now, all right.

  He could be doing without any of this. He needs another drink. He pours himself a large measure, takes a sip from his glass. He could be doing without any of these thoughts now pressing in. Of touch and taste and scent and the past, his past, not his father’s past. He could be doing without all of it. Thoughts about himself, his own memories and a girl he used to know when he was a boy, she was just a girl, although she behaved towards him as though she had known him all her life … Still she was just a girl, even though –

  Helen.

  Helen.

  She’s all through him now, in his mind and body. When he’s supposed to be in with his father. Thinking about him, being with him right now and he should have gone through there by now, to see his father. As he takes another sip from his glass, and another. And he must go through to him, he must. Not stand about here, thinking about himself, remembering. Listen to the dogs! Even the dogs know it! That going through to his father is his duty here. He can still hear them barking now like they were when he arrived. Just before, when he’d excused himself from the kitchen, gone back out to the car for his bags, Iain behind him to help him –

  ‘Don’t bother, Iain. I can get them.’

  – though Iain was there already, grabbing the cases, the two of them, and ‘Be quiet!’ Iain had shouted at them, the dogs had seemed to be reminding him
then, what Callum is here for, for his father, his duty, for they were still at it now in their kennels, in the same way their barking had started up when he’d arrived. As though reminding him. That he should be through there with his father now. That that’s what he’s come for. Their barking his welcome – to be with his father, at the end of his father’s life – their barking his return.

  But Helen is here, too.

  In the midst of the dogs’ cries. As much as any other memory of his father’s life, she’s here, as are the black rocks and the hills and the secret place. And so are all the parts connected …

  Helen and Callum in the notes of the tune with his father’s music all around them.

  All of it connected.

  The ‘A’ to the ‘A’.

  And so he’ll go in to see his father because there’s no undoing of the tune that holds them all together, though his father will be like a corpse already, Callum knows, lying in the dark room. He’s been given something to help him sleep, Margaret said, before. When he’d been thinking he’d seen all kinds of people out on the hill with him this morning, his own father, he was talking about his mother. Thinking he himself was his father, then, and that he’d seen Callum, too. Whoever he thought he was, he was calling out, Margaret said, from the room, and calling out for him, for Callum, ever since they’d brought him down off the tops and laid him out through there.

  And it is like a tune, all the parts of it intricately made to be together, and familiar to Callum, all of it somehow familiar …

  Though he’s never been in that little room before, has he? Callum?