The Big Music (2 page)

Before Johnnie now is the passing place of the river and he approaches it, where the stones are flat and good. Even with a child in his arms he can manage it here, able to manage her, get over on the stones and he’s at the
edge of the water now and stepping out with the bundle of Helen’s baby. There’s his foot on the first flat rock, so smooth but not slippery and there’s the next. He’ll have her safely over, fine, no need to worry. He takes another step and there’s another. It’s true, he can do this, the rush of the water all around him, one foot to find another stone and there it is and the next. The sure base note of the drone keeps him steady.

Therefore he does manage it, to get over the water and to the other side, and up ahead of him, bearing down, is the green face of the first hill, the way the rise of it will take him and over. After that, well, there’s a different way of going and no one would know to take that direction for it’s a path that cuts off to the right and will bring him round the next hill, on and up through what he calls the ‘sligheach’
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way, to another hill by a path he himself named for it’s the word for secret, for the darkness of the shadows and flintiness of the ground. They’ll never find him then, that way he’ll be going. And at the end of it the Little Hut that only he knows about, only John Callum knows, waiting for him, and for the child.

He’ll have her there, to that place. She’ll be safe enough, away from them all who’ll be following them, and from the weather. He walks smoothly, this part where the incline is gradual, up over soft heather and no wet underfoot after the dryness of the summer, thinks how this is easy walking and barely noticing at first how the steepness of the hill will get under your legs, try and keep you back. Thinks how he can go on and on.

So he proceeds, and the morning still lovely all about him, the fine sound of the skylarks coming through the air now and then like little strokes of colour, little High ‘E’ notes striking through the light.
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It’s fair. It’s fair. And the hill coming under him now and strong, the peaty path underfoot and rocks stubbed into it here and there to make the steps where you need them. One there, just where he has to lift up his foot, and
another, and another, holding the bundle of the child easy against him as he makes the sharp rise.

For she must be kept quiet, undisturbed in his arms. Though the weight of her, the sense of bearing her … Is getting more and more difficult with every step, with every mark of his shoe, with every breath. And for sure he’d had no thought of change or rest or stopping when he took her up, had no thought then that a swaddled thing of her size could become so heavy in the carrying … Yet now he’s thinking, feeling, what it is to hold another human being in this way. And, no doubt he would stop now, if he could, put her down. Just to have a space from her, a bit of breathing without the carry. So how must they do it, then? The women mostly, who have to bear the weight of their children in this way? For there’s a weight to them, and before they’re born, when they’re inside the women there must be the weight of them, the babies, that weight. And yet the women walk, and you see them running with their children inside them or carrying them. And he’s never thought before how that must feel – but he’s thinking it now. And thinking too that this one here, barely three months alive, a dot of a thing – and yet. That she could arrange herself to be so … sensible, somehow. In his arms. Full of the sense of herself is what he means, the comportment of her. So there’s that, too, isn’t there? In the carrying?

He’s breathing hard now, and the sweat breaking out down his back, through his shoulders, his arms strong enough but – eighty-three years, that’ll do it. And he’s not a mother. There’s a taste in the back of the mouth you get when the exertion’s too fierce and he has the taste now, like blood, but he can’t stop. He’s at a part of the hill where they could see him, and they’ll be on their way now, and if Iain’s with them they’ll have the dogs too, and Iain may have his gun. He stops for a second even so, has to, panting. Figures it: twenty minutes. To get to the top of the face and over where he’ll be hidden and by then the rest of them will be round the corner and on the flat, following the river and their eyes casting across the hills, for movement, for the dot of white against the green that’s the child.

Should have thought of that this morning, when he took her, of course, of the colour of her cloths, for white’s the worst. If it could have
been black or blue, the thing she’s wrapped in, but he can’t undo the white and have her cold, so starts again, up the path, higher and higher and keep the walking smooth, Johnnie, don’t make yourself feel frightened, for it’s the tune, remember, the only thing that matters here. The keeping of the baby in the tune.

Because she’s the part, remember, that he needs. His new life out of old, the part of the music that’s already in his mind come in fresh here and untried. It’s all here, in the sound of her, the frank open gaze to that which is around her, the movement of the clouds and sky and light and air. That she could be so sure of who she is in the world and so open to it the way she is now, here in his arms with her eyes wide open in that lovely clear, unblinking way. She’s got that from her mother, though, that quiet and the looking, from her mother and from Margaret before her …

And Margaret.

The way she just came in.

A certain note, high and clear, though he can’t hear it now. Like
Margaret
is here looking out for her granddaughter now, out here on the hills, like she can see her, the white cloths in his arms. Her note will be
sustaining
, when it comes, holding, holding … And then slowly, but, after the held sound of the octave, descending. The big open notes coming off there at the base
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and the high fineness of her like a memory …

He’ll hear it, soon, won’t he? That certain note? Have it in the tune along with the ‘F’ and all the little ‘E’ notes that are there beside?
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Because he can hear the ‘F’ note, fine, that’s there, and the others but it’s all Margaret now, sunk into the grass for a minute like he might have to lie down with the fullness of that sound yet to come, might have to lay the weight of the carry down before treading on and up and on,
following
the soft little part of the path the deer have made for him, cut into the heather and the peat like slices of cake left in your back pocket to sit on, just like.

For Margaret …

And the little path …

Just to have her here with him, if he could have her …

With this air, sky, all around him, this soft, soft flattened earth …

But no time for any of that. His heart jumps with the awareness of it. No rest now any more than he could have rest before. Because when was it? An hour? When he took the child? For sure it’s not two. And listen:

‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’, ‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’, ‘B’ to ‘D’, ‘G’ to ‘G’, ‘B’ to ‘D’, ‘G’ to ‘G’ …
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He has those notes already down, he has them – the ‘B’ to ‘E’, the ‘A’ and ‘A’ – but that’s them coming now.

And the sound of his taking of her, the ‘A’ and the drop from the horror of what he’s done –

to ‘G’

From High ‘G’ to Low ‘G’.

That’s in the tune as well.

With snatching a child from its mother, stealing the baby where it lies sleeping in a basket while the mother is not there.

This part of Sutherland is lonely enough then, people get lonely
coming
here, they’re lonely if they stay. You’re far enough away from the little towns of Golspie and Brora and Helmsdale to feel gathered up by the interior of the place, that great space of land at the centre of the Far North, and though there are villages scattered and post offices and there’s the pub at Rogart and the Spar, still it’s not like there’s a sense of a street or other houses close by to hold on to. At the end of the night you go back to your lonely home. You turn the light on in the dark.

John Callum lives in one of these places, in the midst of the
emptiness
– though luckier than most for he’s people to look after him at The Grey House, the Ailte vhor Alech, it is also called, ‘the End of the Road’.
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He sits in his chair, or lies in his bed, and there are those who would hear him if he might call out, or if a dream took him in the night or a terror or unaccountable rage or despair. There are those who could come for him, Margaret would come for him, and soothe him or feed him, there are those whose voices he would hear, even as he kept
to his room he’d hear them. Enough to know, you might say, that they are there.

But he does not cry out, and he takes little part in the life of those who live with him. In the work they do they remain separate from him and he barely knows anything now of the running of the House or its land, of the sheep and woodland to be managed, or of the guests who may still arrive in the autumn and the spring for the shooting or the fish. And in a way, did he ever know? From the old days when his father ran the School here, the Winter Classes, and pipers came from all around the country to be here? Did he know then how his home was lived in and loved and described? Though he’s stayed so much of his life in this place, was born and brought up as a boy playing in the strath and hills that
surround
the grey stones of the House, in the kitchen garden and paddock nearby where he kept his lambs and his pony, sitting on the low wall that protected his mother’s flowers all those years and looking up at the sky … Because he left it all, did he not? Left his father and his music, called out ‘I’ll not be back!’ into the air as he went away down the road? So no wonder then it seems that the life here does not belong to him entirely. As though, even with the House and its land at his back or in the field of his eye all the time he was away, there was nothing here for him, nothing, though all of it was home.

Is why he lives now as though not fixed to the place. Eighty-three years, maybe, but he’s still like the boy with his legs dangling over the wall, banging the backs of the heels of his shoes against the stone and thinking anything could happen, anything. Could as well be he’s a traveller passing through, one of his own paying guests staying the odd night in the House that he himself inherited, while the others, the family who work for him here, Margaret and her daughter, and Iain, Margaret’s husband … They’re the ones belonging.

So who comes near John Callum, then? Who lives near? There’s no one lives near. The estate road turns off another that’s as little known, isn’t drawn on many of the maps you might buy; the nearest farm marked well beyond the House, and the one beyond further still. If you wanted a neighbour to visit, to have a drink with maybe, to come to you for an
exchange of the news, you’d have to be thinking an hour for that, easy, more like two, for the time it would take to drive down to where the road joins the back way that eventually leads into the road to Brora. You’d come to the first farm then, the Sinclairs, then the Gunns – but it’s a fair distance and that was not a thing the Sutherlands ever did much: go visiting. It’s where Johnnie got it from, you might say, the canniness to go seeking out another’s company, from his blood. Because his parents, they stayed close in the house just as he does now and never went looking for company. Even when their son grew up and went off on his own path they made no effort to turn outwards to other people but only saw those who came to them. They still had their School to run, was their thinking. John’s father his pupils, his pipers, to see. What need they then for any more companionship and interest in others’ lives? When everything they wanted was already arrived, was here, invited?

So, in the same way he kept, their son did, to the same habits of home. Though as a young man living in Edinburgh, and in London, too, he had friends and later might ask them up to the House, for parties and to stay – still, he was alone in the midst of the parties, as his father had been, and his father before him. It was as if, all through the years, the habits of the place had kept him. As if the patterning of the place, its silences and empty spaces, its quiet House, were so deep in that it didn’t matter where else he was, he could have been in Paris or New York, or married or not, with a woman, or with a son of his own, or in a bar, with men … Still those habits were fixed. To keep apart. Keep in. Eighty-three years but on these hills, for a Sutherland from Sutherland, it’s a spit. It’s a blink of sun on the grey grass. As though you’ve lived your whole life alone.

‘B’ to ‘E’ though, in the meantime. ‘B’ to ‘E’, A’ to ‘A’, all that’s counting now. Coming up the green face of the hill and Johnnie takes a breath and feels the life in it, the music, as though this is the first thing he’s done in a long time that’s real and that he’s a man and not just some shadow
creeping
about the place, doing as he’s told.

And ‘B’ to ‘E’ the notes all right, and leading to the ‘A’, and they’re getting stronger and stronger, and down on the paper, for the notes are down, he knows, they’re already written,
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but only now is the felt weight of the ground in them, the same ground that’s spread out now below him at his feet –

‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’, ‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’

‘B’ to ‘D’, ‘G’ to ‘G’, ‘B’ to ‘D’, ‘G’ to ‘G’

‘B’ to ‘E’

– so that from where he stands, up here on the tops, all he can see is the wide cast of his own music unfurling across the bare grass and heather. From the broad flats behind there towards the house up to the north side where the river makes its way heading back to the sea. All his long life coming back to rest here amongst the hills.

He puts his head up. Breathes again deeply into the air. And sure there’s a sound distant could be one of Callum’s dogs that he can hear way back down behind him but he won’t let that stop him now, he won’t. Won’t let stop any of the notes coming, not the ‘B’ to the ‘E’ and the spread of the theme that he’s already gathered up and put down on the page that’s waiting for him up there at the Little Hut in the hills, or the new theme that’s also come into the tune, more and more, the separate phrases of it are there and gentle, like a song, his lullaby for the child.