The Big Music

by Kirsty Gunn

  ‘I knew of course it was you they’d found’ he is saying. ‘Always missing you, since you’d been gone. That was them barking, they were after you before. But of course you would come home to them. To give them a good run. And to be with your grandfather, too, of course. Out in the hills. I know. I said to my daddy that of course my son would come home.’ He shifts again in the bed, sighs. ‘Though he wouldn’t believe me’ he says, and his voice is quite regular by now, as though this dream Callum is having is a conversation anyone might have, one man to another, father to a son. ‘He wouldn’t, Callum’ his father is saying. ‘He was always stubborn, my father. They played the pipes for him at the end and they gave him a flag, did you know? That they gave him a flag to wear? But he wouldn’t have worn it. He wouldn’t have dressed himself that way. It was a suit he always wore, my father, even in the House. The suit had a hard cuff.’

  He makes a swift gesture then, brings his hand up from the bed as though to strike his own face – and for a second, as his father had loosed his hold, Callum’s own hand grazed the side of his father’s face. For a second he’d felt the dry rub of stubble on his skin.

  ‘It was a harsh cuff’ his father says. ‘And he had his hand there, like this –’

  And now with his hand he does fully strike his own face.

  ‘Here –’ he says, and hits himself again. ‘When I played I’d angered him, you see. And the cuff … It had an edge.’

  He goes to strike himself a third time – but Callum stays his hand, and his father turns his face to the wall, a cry coming out of him that’s like a child’s cry. ‘I was bad to play that way! For I had no right!’

  And he is weeping now, Callum can hear. A kind of dry, silent weeping. He has a fist brought up to his mouth, a bony little fist that used to be such a hand, the hand on the steering-wheel driving north, remember? Remember that huge hand? No, he can’t. Callum can’t remember. He can suddenly not remember any of it any more. The room’s dark, has taken it all into itself. All those days when he feared the size of that hand, could not look his father in the eye. All the – Christs! You took your time! All those days – because where are they now? In this dark? Where is he? The man who said those words? Banged his hand on the wheel? Shouted? Christ? He’s not here in this little room, not in this bed.

  ‘I angered him.’

  Not in the dry sobs, the tiny cries.

  ‘I played badly and there was a cuff and there was a flex.’48

  Not here in the face against the wall.

  ‘And I had the cuff at you, Callum. The cuff was at your own soft cheek. When you were just a boy, you were just a boy …’

  ‘No, Dad.’ Callum leans over from the chair and lays his hand again on the arm of the figure who is lying there. This figure he doesn’t know, who is his father. ‘You never taught me the pipes, Daddy’ he says. ‘That wasn’t me. I’ve never practised for you. Getting the notes right … That was you. It’s you who plays. Your father who taught you. I have never –’

  ‘Shhh …’

  His father closes his eyes.

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself’ he says, he’s drifting back into sleep.

  His breathing slowing again, settling …49

  ‘You’ll know by now …’ he says. ‘I’m not going anywhere … And can you hear that?’ he says, but it’s a whisper, his voice already gone far away by now, and sounding far away.

  ‘How quiet it is?’ he says.

  Callum places his hand upon his father’s little head.

  ‘The dogs were barking before’ his father whispers, ‘but they’ve stopped now that Callum’s come home.’

  insert/John Callum MacKay

  Him answering his wife even now, after all these years, as ‘Aye’ not ‘Yes’ because he knew how she hated it, and he wanted her, it suited him, to have her hate him.

  ‘Aye, taking the pills like the doctor says’ he tells her, just to keep her quiet. ‘Oh, aye’ so he’ll tell her that he’s been swallowing them. Like an old boy off the hill’s how he makes out with her now, to annoy her, like he’s never lived anywhere but here.

  What’s your name again, missis?

  He could say to her that!

  Hah!

  And it would make her wild.

  What’s your name again then, my dear?

  As if he wants to be a stranger! That’s how he could behave! As though to have never been married to her! That he wasn’t even with her in London, as her husband, all through that time. That Callum was not the baby they took home from the hospital that day – in London, too. And don’t think he’s going back there either. With Callum. He’s staying right here.

  So he can say all he likes, Aye.

  What’s your name again, missis?

  Do I know your face?

  Because I’m just an old boy from the hills. And never been anywhere else but here.

  Hard to think now that he ever was.

  And to think that his own boy was born in London. London! There were the Houses of Parliament, in the hospital window there they were, and he had the baby in his arms, looking across the river, the Thames. His son!

  With the silence of him, the boy, remember that? The silence of the baby in his arms? Like the silence of the baby in his arms this morning. And he must get that in, too. That silence. The way you get the gaps between the notes and the harmonics coming off them like an emptiness there, in the tune.50 He’ll need all that for the music. The silence and the emptiness when it had all been so beautiful then.

  So put that in. Write that in.

  That gap – the emptiness and gap and nothing to follow.

  The pipes so perfectly tuned the silence can come in.51

  And listen …

  Hear it?

  How the note of Love can only follow the note of Sorrow?52 He can hear that, too. It was there in the Lullaby and continues now all through the tune …

  The sorrow in the air. The crying. For thinking about what he’s lost – the baby in his arms all those years ago.

  ‘F’ to ‘G’, then ‘F’ to ‘A’,

  but then ‘F’ to ‘G’, again.

  And Shhhh … he had whispered to the child on the hill. For quietening her, to comfort her. But he had never comforted his son, who he’d also carried. Perhaps he could have, but he never did.

  ‘F’ to ‘G’.

  Only everywhere he turns to listen, all he hears is sorrow now.

  So …

  Go back, MacKay.

  To ‘A’.

  And ‘A’ again.

  Go back. Go back.

  It’s your own note, after all, what you’ve always started with.53

  So go back to that, then Johnnie – before the crying and the weather. There was always that and perfectly in tune. To start with and to finish with. So it might help you now. Because you don’t need much more than that, do you? You’ve always thought that way. The ‘A’. The importance of the ‘A’. Who is there who would deny it? The need for the note to match the drone below?54

  So …

  Go back.

  Back you go.

  And let yourself be held for ever by your own held ‘A’.

  ‘Lament for Himself’, all right. Just let that be enough for now. The sound of old MacKay just sleeping, just breathing, and all of it, all of it … Just … Himself.55 Because he has the theme completely in his head by now56 and written down, and all of it to sound. Come together in his head out of the silence, the morning light and air, when he’d thought he was going to get away …

  So –

  ‘Aye.’

  He’ll say.

  And ‘Aye’ again, to all of them, to make them mad.

  For they don’t know what’s in his head.

  And ‘Aye’ to Sarah most of all. For he’ll not be taken.

  ‘I’ll not be back!’

  When it’s years gone by, all the empty time and marriage in it, and a son. And Callum a man now, did he hear that once? With children of his own – did h
e hear that, too? Was that in the doubling there, back there on the hill?57

  ‘Aye.’

  Or is it himself he’s talking about?

  For he himself did have a little boy.

  And was he kind to him? If he never comforted him: Shhh? Was he kind? In all those years, that time with marriage in it, when his son was growing to be a boy … Was he kind? To his own boy? Can he say, ‘Aye’? To that? That he was kind?

  For suddenly he was grown up, Callum, and away.

  To Edinburgh, was it? To London?

  I’ll not be back!

  He said that – didn’t he? But he did come back. They came here together in the summer … He and Callum came here …

  ‘Aye.’

  They did.

  Goodnight, Daddy.

  Yet he’s not seen the boy. Not for all these years. Not since that time, long past, when they used to drive north and he left his wife behind him.

  ‘And don’t think I’m going back with you either!’

  Is what he says.

  This – ‘A’.

  Out loud in the dark.

  ‘Lament for Himself’

  Because he’s not leaving. He’s not going anywhere.

  This endless, endless ‘A’.

  third variation/family history:58 recent

  All his life he’s not belonged here. Is the fact of it. Not born here, Callum. So not like his father, returning. Or his grandfather, or his grandfather’s father, here from the beginning. He was never going to be real that way. Sarah said from the moment she got married pretty much that she’d have as little to do with the place up north as she could, so Callum was never brought here as a baby, an infant, as a young boy, he never came here. At that time his father was so involved in his business that he had no reason to return to the House. Thinking, no doubt, that it was a long way from London – and his parents. So what need had he to see them? What were they doing anyway, up there, all that time? Just sitting? For sure Callum’s father had no cause to take his newborn son to see them – is what Sarah told Callum later. And he’d always believed his mother, Callum had, when she described her husband’s life that way. That, during that time his father had the business to think about – not sentiment, emotion. All of his interests then gone into making London a success – so what reason to go all that way up north to an empty bit of land? What would be the point in doing that? Callum’s mother would have said.

  She’d been up there the once, that was all. Just after the registry office, she’d told him. His father getting them the sleeper up to Inverness, then taking a hire car and driving up that long deserted road: ‘So I could be presented!’ Sarah said. ‘Presented! To those people!’ Those people. His mother always used that phrase. When she was talking about Margaret or Iain or her husband’s parents. About any of them, all of them: ‘Those people!’ So, she’d said, she’d been up to the House once. Had a cup of tea, the new bride had taken a cup of tea and with it a dram, but then she and Callum’s father had driven back down the road again and away. Putting behind her her new husband’s parents. And the man and the woman they had living there to help them with the place. And their daughter. Those people. Though all of them had been there at the door to wave them off. They’d never see Sarah again.

  Is how the years went on.

  So that it was only after old Callum’s death that Callum’s father started coming back up north again. At first to see his mother, to take up the place that had been left. The seat at the table. The plate, the knife and fork laid out.

  ‘There’s your supper, John,’ his mother saying.

  But then more and more …

  Returning.

  With less and less time spent between returning.

  Arriving here finally, to stay.

  And with enough suits hanging in the wardrobe that he can put them on someday. If he needs a jacket, a pair of trousers … His father’s clothes will fit.

  And Callum can remember those clothes.

  How there were enough jackets, shirts in the wardrobe belonging to his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and that his father kept them. Margaret told him, one of those summers when he was a boy, how there were enough suits in the wardrobe ‘that John says they’ll put him in one of them the day he dies’. That day, she’d said, he’ll be dressed all right. In his father’s suit, or his father’s father’s … She had touched the top of Callum’s head as she spoke. Three generations and they look enough the same.

  But not Callum. He thinks: Three generations not the same as four and he’s never belonged, like his father belongs … To the jackets backed up in the wardrobe, to the narrow bed that’s left to all the men here in the end.59 He wasn’t born here, Callum, is the difference, is what he always told himself. ‘And you don’t resemble any of those people in the slightest’ is what Sarah used to say. Those people. By then she was including her own husband in the phrase. She’d be phoning, his mother would, when Callum was up here in the summer, spending more and more time as his father stayed on each year. ‘You’re not like them at all’ she would say. Phoning every day to check the child was all right: Had he enough warm clothes? Enough things to do? Was he eating properly? Were they taking care of him? Those people? Even though he was only visiting, not staying on, and it was his father by then who’d become set in the place – and this long after Callum’s grandmother was no longer there to lay his knife and fork on the table, draw out his chair. Still Callum’s mother called about her son all the time as though, Callum thinks now, she had reason to fear for him that he might also stay. When it was always so clear to him that it was his father’s home and it wasn’t Callum’s, it would never be, he wasn’t born here. Still Sarah would be calling as though she might lose him, too, to The Grey House, in the way she’d lost her husband by then. ‘Is that woman still working there?’, saying. ‘What’s her name, anyhow? Margaret?’

  So the years pass, and his father is finally here for good, returned to the place where he was born and not ever to leave it. And Callum may remember the touch of Margaret’s hand upon his head but still he’s never been anything more than the visitor here. While the House is still the same House where he came to as a boy, where he’s come to as a man. But not his House. Though it goes back on his father’s side for generations and though he’s spent long summers here, a long time … It’s not his House. He’s never belonged here.

  To clarify: Where they’ve brought Callum’s father, where they’re keeping him, looking after him now … It’s the oldest part of the House – dating back to the original building established back in Callum’s grandfather’s father’s day. The little sitting room where Callum was earlier, where his father used to play and where he kept recordings of his music that Callum was looking at just before, they used to call that – rather grandly one might say – the ‘Music Room’ in the old days.60 That’s where all the men would sit together, Callum’s great-grandfather, then his grandfather, then his own father and his piping friends, a gathering of hard-backed chairs that are still kept, in various rooms: there’s Roy Gunn’s chair and there’s Iain McKay’s chair and Donald Bain’s … All these names of well-known musicians of the time, and the men would talk about piobaireachd then, on those nights when they came together, and how it might be played, how it should be played, and how they themselves might attempt it.61 Talking, taking a whisky now and then, before getting up, one after the other, to pick up his pipes and start them. Hitting the bag for the low drone with the first steady blow, taking some time there, in the room, to adjust the tuning, and then, once they were going, all the pipes in tune together like a rhyme, using the hall just beyond the door as the place where they could pace out the tune, going up and down, using the sitting room itself, the Music Room, to make the return. So they went, these evenings, for hours, some nights, until midnight and beyond, the slow tramp of their feet in time to the music’s long breves. Up the hall, then back again. Up and down. Up and down. Urlar. Taorluath. Crunluath. Return, return, return.
And that single room, the one just off the hall where they marched to, where Callum’s father lies now – that would have been the original bedroom after all. From that first, early, part of the House. Long before the grand extension was made, with the long and lovely drawing room there, and the dining room, before the rooms upstairs were added on and furnished by Callum’s grandfather and grandmother – that little single room would have been where Callum Sutherland’s grandfather’s grandfather used to sleep, at the end of one of his own long nights of return, return – pulling up the thin wool blankets. There was the same room, the same music: Urlar, Taorluath, Crunluath, return – sounding in his mind as an echo, just as it would sound to his son, and his son’s son, and his son’s son’s son, as they all went to sleep.

  So, yes, the room is inevitable. Is what needs to be clarified here. Inevitable that Callum’s father would end up there. Like his father before him. His father’s father. Despite the lovely rooms upstairs where large beds are and tall windows. Despite the wide halls that have been created, the landings. There is this part of the House. The earliest part where, when Callum was a boy, he remembers that you could not hear the telephone ringing for it was in Margaret and Iain’s part of the House and only they could hear if Sarah were to ring now and ask whether Callum or his father are all right. That’s how far away it is, then, this part of the House. From the rest of the House. His father’s room.62

  And look at the room. It’s a fine enough room for a man at the end of his life. There’s enough space in it for a single bed and a chair, and a small wardrobe that would take, what? Two suits? Three suits? The rest of his clothes are all upstairs and he doesn’t need them. The room would be modest in all ways, with a window giving onto the rowan tree that grows at the back there, that waves its branches so heavy with orange berries that in the high winds in autumn you’d think the berries would scatter and tumble but Callum’s father sees, in the daylight hours, as he lies here, how they hold fast to their tree.