The Big Music (14 page)

Piper. Teacher. Composer. This was the man who was Johnnie’s father. Who stood over him as the boy played. The one who shouted at him that word ‘Again!’ That man.

They knew at the House that Callum would be on his way. Sarah had phoned and spoken to Helen first and then to Margaret and said that she’d talked to Callum yesterday afternoon and that he’d leave London as soon as he could. This after Margaret had already called her, after the long morning out on the hill, finding the old man up there having got all that way with the baby in his arms, but Iain faster in the end – and he was havering by then, old Johnnie, out in the rain and thinking his father was with him, and that Callum was there … But Iain had had the
injection
ready and they were able to give him that, get the baby safely in her mother’s arms and dry and fed, old Sutherland slumped like a body into the seat of the Argocat, so it took no time at all to get him back to the House and into bed and the doctor was called, though what would he do, or say – there’d be nothing.

In his dreams all that day the old man was still talking to his father. It would be the afternoon but he was well away from them by then and thinking he was with his son and with his father as though they were both right there in the room with him, laughing with them both at times so you may have thought they were just there at his bed. Just as up on the tops this morning you’d have thought the same thing, that they were standing there beside him – his father and his son – you’d have believed from the way he turned back on the path to talk with them both that they were present, not just ideas or hopes in his mind.

In the end that’s what made Margaret want to phone them in London and tell them, tell Sarah that Johnnie had had a turn, out there on the hill. Not tell her what he’d done, of course, with the baby – that would just bring the police in, or Sarah would find a way for locking him up in that hospital of hers for good – but just to let her know that help was needed now, that they could no longer manage on their own. And that he’d been calling for Callum, Johnnie had, that he was lying in his bed now and
asking
for his son.

So there in turn Sarah had got hold of Callum, she’d called him at work where he was trying to finish a project he’d got started, a big project, Sarah said, and he’d been going over the final drawings for it when she’d called. So he would have been busy thinking about that, she said, and not about his father at all but about the plans before him and perhaps thinking about his wife’s birthday, too, for it was Anna’s birthday that next day and he might have been thinking about a dinner or doing something to celebrate in the evening ahead …

But all that changed when the call from his mother came through.

‘I need you to go up there’ she’d said. ‘I need you to leave straight away.’

Which is why Callum had done what he did. Missing his wife’s
birthday
and just getting in the car. Not bothering with organising a flight because that wouldn’t have been much quicker in the end, he worked out, by the time you allowed for the schedules and getting out to the airport from work and then the hiring of a car. It would be easier simply to get up in London and be gone.

‘See you soon’ he’d whispered to Anna in the dark before leaving, and kissed her, going through to his sons’ bedroom to kiss them, too, on the tops of their heads. ‘I’ll be back in a few days.’ He’d had a couple of hours’ sleep, no more, the night before, but was wide awake, alert, ready to be on his way. The feeling in him then that what he was doing was the right thing, he would say later, getting up like that and leaving, and that long before the coming dawn and later on the road when the knowledge in him had fully risen that here’s the right place to be, coming up here to be with his father. That none of the rest, the sleeping wife or children, the business plans, none of it matters as much as getting to the House. The
seconds counting off, the distance closing. That nothing is as important as that. His father’s life.

For all that, though, he takes his time arriving. Having stopped off,
finding
himself waiting, hanging back, at the service station where he lingers for petrol, water. For all the sense of urgency before him and at his back, still he found himself there near Clashmore and stopping at a services again. Checking the tyres. Buying some food, fruit, sandwiches, a coffee that he drinks right there in the forecourt, leaning up against the side of his car, reading over the headlines in the papers that are bound up outside, looking at advertisements for chocolate and lottery tickets and cigarettes. Taking time, more time. Then after that, driving some more he stops again, switches off the engine again, at the side of the road, twice, just before the turnoff, trying to call the House on the mobile, on the clear open bit of the road there, but of course there’s no reception, and then again, later at the pub in Rogart, going into the bar but nobody he knows or recognises, still … He found himself anyhow taking a seat at the bar, buying a beer, and waiting some more.

So that finally when he gets up the road and turns off into the farm track it’s late afternoon and the light’s near gone. Here’s the sky that’s been all around him from dawn to long morning and silver grey, clouded as it was back over the Moray Firth with a kind of a sun in it beneath the cloud, like an underbelly and soft, but since then, leaving Rogart, all that’s been getting darker, and darker still, so all he sees as he drives the long narrow track to the House is the peaty bank cut in deep either side, reflected back in the car’s headlights as black welts in the heathery dark grey land.

Then he comes around the final corner and there it is, lights on in the side lodge but the House itself, its peaked gables in darkness, just a silhouette against the last of the colour, when he turns off the car’s lights, of the sky.

The End of the Road.

A good name for a house, Callum thinks. A good name. Ailte vhor Alech. The End of the Road. A good name for a place that has nothing
more ahead of it, and now that he’s here in the growing dark, no sense of anything behind him either. Better than The Grey House, ‘the End of the Road’. And better in English, too, than the Gaelic that makes it sound less lonely than it is. Just say ‘End of the Road’ instead.
27
When the track he’s been driving on has disappeared into shadows and all around is the sense of building night, the hulk of the hills, the sweep of distance contained within the quantities of the night time … The Grey House. The end of the road, all right.

Margaret’s at the door in the time it’s taken to turn up into the driveway.

‘We thought it would be today you’d come’ she says to him as she approaches.

Nothing about her changed as far as Callum can see, though it’s been a good ten years.

‘Your mother said, when we spoke to her …’

‘Margaret’ he says.

‘Hello, Callum.’

‘How are you?’

There she is. Still the same stature, the same calm. He takes her hand, gives her the customary kiss upon the cheek and the dogs in the kennels up behind the generator have started barking. It’s the strange car, their sense of an arrival, that’s set them off.

‘You’ll see a difference in him’ Margaret says, straight away. ‘We’ve had the doctor in but –’ She pauses. The dogs’ barking increases. They’re wanting to find out who it is, who’s there. ‘I know I don’t see it in the same way’ she is saying, ‘when he’s here all the time, as he has been, and these last few years … But even so. Just today, after yesterday. I’ve noticed him quickly going down, going right down. We’ve all noticed it. Quiet!’ she calls to the dogs then – as though she’s only just become aware of them –
for their barking sounds desperate. ‘Quiet!’ With Callum standing there, the strange car – it’s as though the dogs can sense him and know that it’s him, that it’s Callum, even though they’re not his dogs and the kennels are turned the other way from the House where he is standing, still the sound of their barking makes it seem as though they all this minute want out, to fling themselves out of their enclosures and rush out to meet him, whirl all about him, barking, to greet him.
Hello! It’s me! It’s me! You’re home!

Margaret is still talking. ‘You’ll notice’ she is saying, ‘that in his mind – he’s wandering now. Imagining. Seeing things. The doctor says it’s to be expected.’

They’ve started walking towards the House and the sound of barking is even more frantic.
It’s me! It’s me!
Callum feels as though he can barely hear Margaret’s voice over it. There’s the sound, too, of some of the larger dogs thrashing themselves up against the wire meshing of their pens, he can hear that too, through their barking and Margaret’s voice.
It’s me! Let me out! Let me come and say hello! Please!
As though it’s his return they’ve been waiting for all this time, that it’s Callum they’ve been waiting for, all this time they’ve been waiting.

‘He’s not the same as he was’ Margaret is saying. ‘And yesterday …’

Yet really there is only the one old retriever who would remember him. Callum stops, as though just now he’s recognised that one particular bark. A pale yellow Labrador who he used to take out on the hills when she was just a young dog, in the same way that he’d taken her mother and her mother’s sister. So this last dog of his now is the one whose bark is louder than the rest – or no, not louder, more insistent:
Let me out!
she’s crying.
Let me come to you!
Just the one dog, then, but making all the dogs bark louder as though they too remember him, as though they’re all of them not Margaret and Iain’s dogs but that they’re his dogs, Callum’s dogs, and he’s home to take them out again.

‘Where did you find him –’ he starts to say, but Margaret’s pulling him inside against the cold, and this noise, the sound of the animals at their enclosure.

It’s me!

Please!

It’s
–

Then she closes the door behind him.

‘He’d not just gone for a walk, you see’ she says then. And suddenly it’s very quiet. ‘He was far away, Callum, high up in the hills.’ She waits a couple of seconds. ‘For the best part of the morning’ she says. ‘He must have taken himself off at dawn, Iain thinks it must have been, for he’d gone a fair distance before he got to him. And the weather had turned, you can feel it now, winter’s on its way. And worse. For he had with him …’ She goes before him, opening the kitchen door that leads from her little hallway. ‘Well’ she says, ‘you’ll find out soon enough, I suppose. Helen –’ She holds the door open for him, looks at him.

‘What?’

‘We couldn’t tell your mother that part, though. She’d worry. And Helen –’

‘What about Helen?’

But by now they’re inside the kitchen and it’s bright, and strange all at once, to be inside and in the warm. Callum feels faint, suddenly, with it – the lights on everywhere and hearing Helen’s name.
What about Helen?What was it that Margaret just said about Helen?

‘Here we are’ Margaret is saying, to him, and, he realises, to Iain, where Iain is sitting at the table, with the guns and a bottle of whisky and a tumbler set before him. He looks up at Callum, nods.

‘Callum.’

‘Iain.’

And there’s a pause then, like there’s always a pause. As though the time between when he last saw Iain was nothing, as though the drive up here was no distance at all, as though it makes no difference at all actually whether Callum was here or not. As though nothing makes any difference.

Yet –

Helen.

There was her name.

What about Helen?

Twice Margaret saying her name and nearly something but not saying it.

Helen.

Helen.

Like Callum would say her name a hundred times over and still be wanting to say it:

Helen.

Helen.

Helen.

Helen.

But instead he says, ‘How are you, Iain?’

It’s what he does, of course. No matter what happens, what has gone before, what might come after. Even now, with circumstances so changed, and him being here for his father and the way his father is and
something
happened, something taken place and twice Margaret not finishing the sentence that she started with Helen in it … Still it’s what he does, what he always does when he comes here, nods, ‘How are you, Iain?’, then shakes his hand. As if any of that might mean anything to Iain, too. As if any greeting he might give would ever change the way things are between him and that man. It’s the same now as it’s always been, whether yesterday, or ten years ago, or when he was a teenager or when he was a boy.

‘You’re well?’ he’ll ask Iain. ‘Things have been going okay?’

‘Okay enough’ Iain says. He unscrews the head of the barrel, looks down it, takes up the cloth again. ‘You’ll know from your mother Helen’s had a baby now.’

Iain turns away then, gets up from the table, lets the words settle.

‘Just this past month she’s back from the hospital’ he says.

Callum looks at him. At Iain’s back. ‘No, I didn’t –’ he says, starts to answer but he can’t speak. He just stands there. It’s as though he’s waiting, only he’s not waiting.