by Kirsty Gunn
(inserted paper)
And he may know all about what took place today, why the old man took the child, what you might say will continue, continue to take place … Because of course he knows about Margaret and John, the history of the two of them. He’s always known, that look that has always passed between them.
But –
What he picked up in his arms this afternoon, that was all that was left of him now. He was light, like a child in his arms. ‘Like a leaf’ he described it.
So why ever think about bringing that down? Something that was barely there? With the clip of the rifle, or a stone?
And yet both these thoughts were in his mind today …
He’ll see him dead before Iain Cowie does another thing for old Johnnie.
But no point thinking like that now.
Because he’s old, old John MacKay.
And it was Margaret who made the call, so Callum could come home here. Otherwise his own son never would have known … His own son …
How sick his father was. How near the end.
And he’ll die soon and there may as well be nothing to him, just nothing. That’s what he’d felt in his arms today, when he’d carried the old man over to the Argocat and laid him down, how there was nothing to him, just nothing – and what’s that word, that word that had come to him then? Out there on the hill?
Pity?
Yes, pity.
That was the word.
Because everything that other may have had he let it go and now he himself is leaving.
While Iain … The one who carried. He is still here. With his wife, his daughter, his granddaughter. His family are all around him. Though he knows fine, what went on, what will continue … With Margaret and John and their daughter, Helen … He would never tell.
Because look at him, Iain: husband, father.
He – not the other – is that man.
Walk into the room where his family are now and feel them rise to meet him. Feel the way they gather around him, his own family, and keep him safe.
(transcript – as before)
‘And just imagine’ Iain says, here at the end. ‘Having no one else to tell you but someone who is not your family – that your own husband is dying. And of course it would be Margaret. Who phoned the old cailleach86 down in London, to tell her to call the boy. Margaret who told her that old Johnnie had stopped with the medicine and was going down fast, who had the grace, if you like, to let her know, let the wife know – for you’d never hear from that woman one end of the year to the other and how you could call someone a wife who doesn’t look to the man she’s married? Well, anyhow. Margaret had told the woman that her husband was failing fast and that she should tell Callum, that he might come.’
Helen
She told Sarah to tell Callum to leave straight away, as early as he could – for suddenly it seems: There’s not that much time.
Margaret
For a father to see a son.
For a son to see his father.
Helen
My mother puts tea in the pot.
Margaret
And Helen sits back, sitting on her heels. The fireplace swept out.
Margaret and Helen, as though in unison
And there’s not that much time.
The two of us in different parts of the House but our minds turned to the same thing … The ticking of the clock, passing of the minutes and our place within each and every one of them. Neither of us thinking of the silence in the House while the baby sleeps. One putting the breakfast things on a tray; the other returning her gaze to the room, taking up the log basket and arranging in the swept-out place she has made the kindling and the peats.
Not much time.
No thought of our child, then, that minute, or the next.
No thought of our daughter, in these silent early minutes, late summer and all is quiet in the House.
Only …
The ticking of the clock.
The story nearly done.
About to go into the room and see that the baby is gone.
gracenotes/piobaireachd, a summary
In musical terms, piobaireachd is a theme with variations. The theme is usually a very simple melody, though few if any piobaireachd contain the theme only in its simplest form. For it is first stated in a slow movement called the ground or in Gaelic the Urlar and then has added to this subsequent movements including numerous added embellishments and connecting notes.
The subsequent variations can be of any number, usually starting in a quite straightforward manner and progressing through successively more complex movements before returning again to the ground. Variations on the Urlar usually include a siubhal (‘passing’ or ‘traversing’) or dithis (‘two’ or ‘a pair’) or both. The siubhal comprises theme notes each coupled with a single note of higher or lower pitch that usually precedes the theme note. The theme note is held and its paired single note cut. The timing given to the theme notes is of critical importance in displaying the virtuosity of the piper. If the theme and single note are repeated or played in pairs, it is referred to as a doubling, otherwise a siubhal singling. The dithis is similar. The theme note is accented and followed by a cut note of lower pitch, usually alternating, for example, between an ‘A’ and a ‘G’. If the coupled pairs are played in a repeating pattern, it too is called a dithis doubling.
The other more complex embellishments are: Taorluath (often including a Leumluath, or ‘leap’), Crunluath and Crunluath A Mach. In almost all piobaireachd in which these later movements are found, the variations are played first as a singling and then as a doubling and with a slightly increased tempo – and the piper will have to learn not to be hampered by thoughts of the difficulty of technique in order to let the music sound out in all its psychological and emotional intensity. Neither will you have your time dictated to you by the notes you have learned from the stave, but rather, in the moment of playing, will be governed by what you yourself have learned from hearing the music sung to you, as pure tune.
Piobaireachd, as has been said before, is difficult music to understand. This difficulty must be recognised and in learning piobaireachd what will matter most will not be the time spent on it on a chanter but the hours spent turning it over in your mind note by note and thinking how you lengthen one note here and shorten another there, or quicken up a little in one variation, or slow down in another.
In those thoughts your own interpretation of the music will arrive.
embellishment/3a: domestic detail: Mary’s granddaughter, mother of Katherine Anna, author and editor of all papers preceding and following that together comprise ‘The Big Music’
Helen’s Monologue87
I knew this man once and he had so much. He belonged to a part of the world I love, in the far North of Scotland, though he did not live there. It was too remote for him, and he was the kind of man could not bear to be remote.
For this place is somewhere few people drive to or would visit. If you take the A9 up past Golspie, past Brora, and turn in two or three miles after that, you’ll come in time to a fork in the road where in both directions it seems as though there’s nowhere to go. There are no signposts here, no indications of place or distance. Yet follow the way going north and as you cross the river and head deeper into the hills you will come to another small turning that looks like a farm road …
I write this paper here, at the end of that road, from out of the very place that has no marking on the map, no direction given that tells you how to arrive. I write in a room in a house that sits in the midst of all that emptiness. In a high bedroom at the top of the House that sits under the eaves, used to be a Schoolroom once. That is where my bed is. Where my desk is: over here by the north window.
This, too, is where my daughter sleeps.
My room, then – a room for a quiet kind of woman who doesn’t fuss much, doesn’t make too much sound as she’s moving through the House. A quiet, simple room for a maid, for an uncomplicated servi
ng woman. The role I have made for myself here is that of a kind of employee, on loan to another’s life. So, yes, a servant, an employee, a maid. A person who moves quietly around a house.
But in one way, not quiet. Because though, as is my place, I may watch and listen, I also record the life here. I tell. And the telling can become a calling out, a proclamation. If one is not careful a telling can become a speech. A novel, even, like a kind of false show. Starting with a quiet sentence, maybe: ‘I knew this man once and he had so much’ – but be careful, careful where the telling may go.
So, then … I first knew this man, the one of whom I write (quietly, quietly, Helen) because my mother came to work here at this House for reasons that, in the end, I think will always remain surprising to her. She never thought, my mother, when she was a girl, brought up in sound comfort and educated well … That she would end up living her life to further someone else’s means. Yet that was what did happen – following a man she loved, wanting to be near him, to be here for him should he ever choose to return – she became someone who was in waiting. Loss was at her back, her mother’s judgement down upon her, causing her to have to leave the village where she’d been born and brought up. So, though she was trained the way she was, brought up by a mother to be independent and free-thinking and clear in her opinions and thoughts, she made the decision anyway to be a housekeeper here. She stayed, and she married. Though Iain is not my father.
And you could say I’ve known Callum all my life. For when I think through my childhood I can’t think of him not being in it. He came here in the summers with his father.
Margaret looked after him. I looked after him.
His own mother was never here.
In the summers when he was here we were like a family – is how it seemed then, how it seems now, looking back on all this. Even though he and I became lovers when I was seventeen, and it was strong, that part of things between us, still, people would have said we could have been brother and sister, the way we knew each other, the way we were together, did things, looked at each other, laughed. We were the same height, had the same colour hair. What do you expect? That just because we were sleeping with each other we were going to pretend we weren’t that close? That being together in the way we were was going to change that? How could it? The other was too strong, too deep in, the belonging to each other, having something between us that was like an old, old story and we were just in it, that was all, we’d been put in the story and could not be taken out.
A brother and sister together on a narrow bed.
And we fit.
Long bodies the same, feet twisted together, entwined at the root.
Same hair, same eyes.
I knew this man once and he had so much. A bed, in a father’s hut, in the hills. In a secret place where no one could find us.
The story of a family, then, and its secrets, here.
I’ve recorded everything I know.
embellishment/3b: domestic detail: Mary’s granddaughter, mother of Katherine Anna, Helen Margaret MacKay, author and editor of all papers preceding and following that together comprise ‘The Big Music’
(notes made at the kitchen table on the evening of Callum’s arrival)
All of yesterday has gone into the past.
Already the early morning, going up to my room and seeing she was gone … It’s as though that happened in another life, to another woman. And the baby. She was some other woman’s baby.
Yet the feeling of the leap – the jump of my heart when I saw the empty basket – that’s with me. I’ll remember that.
I’ve never felt such – vacancy – like it.
The leap.
The jump of my heart.
That – gap.
And anything, anything. Could have happened to her. And I would have done anything. Killed. Gone mad. If anything had happened to her, if I could have protected her.
For if John had kept her longer – had her longer with him out on the hill …
God knows what would have become of her then – although people say that babies are hardy and my daughter is hardy. Still, the old man could have perished and that would have been the death of my Katherine then.
But the day … It tided over, the weather improved. Iain went out there. He told us all what to do.
We went out there together and Iain found them, we brought them back in the Argocat and she was fine, my daughter, she was wet and hungry and cold but she was fine … My little girl, my little girl. She was fine. And the hours that had seemed like hundreds of hours miraculously turned back into an ordinary day, and I changed her, fed her, put her to bed.
And then my mother told me that she’d called them in London, and that Callum was on his way.
Callum.
I’m writing this now at the kitchen table and he’s through there, in his father’s sitting room. He’s alone. He came up here alone – though he’s married, he has sons. He’s here like a single man.
And what must it be like for him now? To be going through to see his father, with his father the way he is? For when did he last see him? That family of his so spoilt with their own dissatisfactions that they never see each other, speak.
Something wrong with them that they don’t look out for each other.
It’s been that way for as long as I can remember.
Those visits, when he was a boy, coming up here with his father in the summer … His father never bothered with him then. No wonder that after a while, when he was older, when he was starting university … It became harder and harder for him to come here and see him.
And by then I myself had gone away.
I could no longer help him, look after him.
And so how old were we when we last saw each other? When we were with each other?
A long time.
And I myself have been away.
For a long time I suppose I thought I would never come back here again. For years: Glasgow, the university there, and then in Edinburgh, London … I stayed away. I went to America. New Zealand. I’d started my own research work by then, the idea for a paper, for a PhD. All the time my mother was writing to me, she was telling me about the House, the land. Writing to me about her life and her world, right here, in this one place, her whole world – and still I was thinking … That I had no need to return. For such a long time I thought that. And by then I had something half written, a proposal of sorts, and my mother and I were closely in touch, we were corresponding, we were talking on the phone. ‘The Use of Personal Papers, Journals and Other Writings in the Creation of Modernist and Contemporary Fiction.’ Back I came to Glasgow then, and I wrote my dissertation there, met someone, the father of my daughter, and then I let him go.
All those worlds, all those words.
But now – despite myself, all the things I may have said – I am home again.
Where I want to stay. Look after my mother. Help Iain.
Bring up my daughter here, with the hills around her.
In this House. My mother’s House.
And Callum …
Though I’ve gone halfway around the world and back, though Callum has left us, and has children himself and a wife who loves him … Though we are no longer children, and the girl he used to play with is here now, at the table, and has not yet gone in to him …
I will go to him and take him in my arms.
Because we still know where the secret place is. We know how to get to it, that cutting in the hill you can’t see unless you are upon it. Our secret.
We can find it again – for we always got along fine, Callum, didn’t we? We always got along fine.
Callum stepping out of the car with his father, in his town shoes. And Iain, Margaret, both there to meet him.
‘Run along with Helen, now’ is the first thing my mother said. ‘She’ll tell you what to do. You’re the same age, nearly. You’ll both get along fine.’
three/third paper: reprise
At the House by now there’s fierc
e concern. They know he’s gone. Helen’s just seen the baby has gone.
She came down from the bedroom, and saw Katherine was not with her mother at the table. Did not even have to ask when she saw her mother’s face, when her mother saw her daughter’s arms empty, in her hand only a piece of the baby’s cloth. In a second all three of them were up and all over the House then, with John not in his bedroom and then outside and all around the grounds and out the back, Iain squinting up against the light to see towards the hill, Helen running screaming across the grass.
‘No!’
Screaming into all the wide air that her baby is not there.
Earlier, much earlier when she thought her daughter was sleeping, she had been in the sitting room, brushing out the grate and setting a fresh fire. She’d been thinking how quiet it was, but then, this time of day was always quiet – before the old man was properly wakened, before they laid out his breakfast for him, made sure he took some of it, when the baby had had her first feed and was down and sleeping. So, yes, these hours here, between eight and nine in the morning … There would be a peace settling on the House, and so it would be quiet then, just before the day would properly begin.
And it was a fine morning. ‘High’ she would call it – these kinds of days like you get in midsummer, actually, as though the sky is far, far away from you and the sort of blue you feel you could never touch or connect to the day’s passing because it’s so far away it’s endless, still it seems like it will stay with you for ever. Though it is autumn even so you’d never know it from a day like today and it began beautifully enough just before dawn with Helen lifting her warm baby daughter like a cake from her basket and setting her against her to feed.