The Big Music (43 page)

And not that much older than me, either.

Old Johnnie.

But old enough.

And certainly in the past, he was old enough then.

But look at him.

I’ve been in there to see him. Lying in there in the dark.

No point in hating him now.

(transcript
84
)

And the baby … All the time Helen and I were both thinking that she was up in her basket in Helen’s room. Our Katherine Anna. Lying there asleep in her white blankets. How could either of us have had even the slightest idea …

Helen was in the sitting room. It was early, but it was lovely, the day, and she was up, we were all up. Iain had already been out with the dogs down to the river and Helen was through in the sitting room. I know she was thinking about Callum, that he was coming back to the House. I’d told her the night before that I’d telephoned Sarah and that she’d said he’d be here by the following evening …

So, yes. Callum would have been on her mind.

You should be here,
thinking.

Because … Well, we all needed Callum here by now.

So, yes, thinking … That the father needs his son. But also about the years passed. Her and Callum together – all that time ago and Callum never coming back here. But now –

(inserted written page)

And I would tell him that, too. Not straight away, but later, that it was right that he should be here with us. I would turn to him in the dark …

But not straight away. Later. Much later.

When we’re together, on our own.

Everything come together then.

(story/journal extract
85
)

Her eyes go into distance. Thinking about Callum, that he’ll be here. She puts her hand to her face, to smooth her hair back from her face – in the way that, tonight, Callum will smooth her hair back so he can see her more clearly. She’ll say to him then that it’s good that he’s come home to say goodbye and Callum replying ‘When I came up here I thought it was to see my father but all the time it was you.’

She sits back on her haunches, away from the fireplace where she is cleaning it out, that she may look out the window, let her eyes be filled with hills and sky.

I don’t mind.

It’s all in the distance for her, you see. My lovely Helen. Of course everything is like that for her now. She minds fine, of course she does,
who Callum is and how they were together all those years ago for he’s still there, with her, in her thoughts and reflections … But she’s had a child now, there’s a baby, and everything changes for a woman then.

I don’t mind.

So let the sky take his place, she has a child to take care of. And the air, and the hills … She can see herself out in the open with Callum and running, she’s running. A young girl and never knowing that one day there would be this other Helen in the world, the one who is a mother with a child.

So –

Callum.

I don’t mind.

It’s why it’s going to be easier for her than for him. Easier, later, to go to him, come to be with him from out of the dark.

Unexpected, maybe, but not so unexpected – that they will take up from where they left off.

‘You’ve come home’ she will say to him then.

(inserted page)

By now is trying not to think. Sitting at the table like before, and with a whisky, and cleaning out a gun. And trying not to think. Trying to leave, by now, all that other thinking behind.

(transcript)

‘Because people do what they do.’

(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 cailleach
86
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.’

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.

For a father to see a son.

For a son to see his father.

My mother puts tea in the pot.

And Helen sits back, sitting on her heels. The fireplace swept out.

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.

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.

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 serving 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.