The Big Music (32 page)

So the Urlar.

So the Taorluath with its leap, its Leumluath change.

So the notes, all the notes …

To coming around him by now, in this section, the Crunluath, the crown.
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John drums the fingerings against the edge of his table to remind himself, to remember. Hears in his mind the long draw of the theme that begins like breathing. The draw of his breath …

‘Lament for Himself’ he might call it.

For that is what has been collecting here. In the papers and manuscripts … For weeks, now. All through the summer making notes, outlining his thoughts for the content, his themes. Getting up here to his special place, where his music is, to work on the shape of the piece, the overall idea. To hear where it’s going, where it’s taking him …

And getting everything in, he thinks, everything. The leaps, the change,
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the variations and the shift that will come from the first movement, and the returning, too, while working on the changes, to build up the ground. So then the Taorluath and the Crunluath can come after. And the A Mach
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to follow, the showing in the notes how the whole composition has been made …

Before the Urlar returns and the music fades away into silence.

So don’t stop writing, Johnnie, don’t stop. Don’t take a dram. Get the shape laid down across the pages and then the embellishments can be worked through as they should – they’ll show through as detail and as fine, fine study. Then the main theme can be left to complete itself, worked through in a company of phrases as the ending is marked and the notes of the Urlar come back into the tune again.

‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’

‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’

‘B’ to ‘D’, ‘G’ to ‘G’

‘B’ to ‘D’, ‘G’ to ‘G’

Get everything down then so as to reach them, those last few notes. The ending that sounds the beginning. The opening lines played one more time before the piper moves off across the top of the hill and disappears over the other side.

The little black felt-tip pens he needs – to write everything down.

Callum never said out loud to anyone – not to his mother when she called, or to Margaret when she met him at the door, when he arrived and she told him about his father – that he suspected where his father had been trying to get to that day.

Though he had already thought it –
He’ll have gone to the secret place.
There was too much going on, in those first few moments of him getting back to the House to even remember that that’s what he’d thought. There was his arrival in the cold, after the long day’s driving, the dogs barking in their enclosure, Margaret there, and Iain – and then his heart had dropped to the pit of his belly when he heard Helen had had a child, did he know?

No, he didn’t know.

But everything seemed to be coming together then. Though in a way he couldn’t figure. Still, everything.

Helen.

The Little Hut.

His father.

And he himself, his father’s son, being back here again after all this time away.

All of it was coming together and making him feel sick, something lurched within him – for he could understand, though he didn’t know why, it made perfect sense to him, that his father would be taking Helen’s child with him, up there, to that place. Even though there’s no reason at all he can think of why his father would do such a thing, steal a baby away, put her in such danger, head off with her that way into the hills … Still, his taking her could make sense to Callum even so. So from the minute Margaret told him … That she was there in the House, Helen … That there was a baby …

Did he know?

No, he didn’t know.

All the parts were coming together, in a pattern, nevertheless.

So that, for a second, Callum thought he was going to fall to the floor.

Up until then, who can tell? Perhaps, he might have managed things. Perhaps. Managed as any visitor might have done, to be detached but thoughtful. He could have been involved in the situation here but only to the extent that a visitor may be involved. So – polite, he would have been then. Kind. Enquiring.

How are you, Margaret?
saying.

Iain?

As though he were a visitor here.

You’re well? You’re keeping well?

As though he might be here again after all this time, to be seeing his father in the House where his father used to bring him when he was a child – but staying outside the intimacy of the place, his role to be a guest here, quiet and simple.

But from that second he heard that Helen was in the House, upstairs in one of the rooms and with a baby to care for, her baby … He could no longer think he might pretend.

‘No, I –’

Even when pretending was the way he’d always managed things in the past, with Anna, or the boys. With any of his friends, even. Whenever he was talking about his father, pretending. Making it seem as though his father and this place where he lived had nothing to do with him,
nothing
. His own life and marriage demanding enough, he might say, without the strangeness of all that went on with his father choosing to stay way up there in the North of Scotland, ‘the back of beyond’ – how he always described it at the dinner parties in London. ‘Crouched by some fireside’, he used to say, to the people at the dinner parties, to his wife. To describe where his father had taken himself off to. ‘Put it this way’ he used to say to them all, ‘I’ll not be going back to see him!’

But that … Talk.

It was no longer possible to be like that now.

With knowing Helen was there, somewhere in the House. And when Margaret told him what his father had done, with taking Helen’s child …

He couldn’t imagine ever opening his mouth to act that way ever again.

Lying in bed with Helen now, in the deep, deep dark, back here again with her after all this time away … That’s what he thinks – that he could barely believe who that man was who could act that way, talk as though this place meant nothing to him, nothing. Say, ‘I’ll not be going back!’

Because who is that other man now? He’s gone from Callum entirely and who he is is who he turns to face now in the dark, part of himself, she’s part of him …

Helen.

And how could he be anyone else. When she’s here.

Helen.

When she’s right here beside him now.

All …

Helen.

Helen.

Helen.

Though he knows, Callum, that at some point the other man will return, that he’ll go back to where he lives, open his mouth there and speak, right now he can’t think who he is, that other lost man, what he’s composed of, what his dreams are, or his hopes, his fears – when all he can feel is Helen’s body lying alongside his as she sleeps. Part of himself with him here, and close.

So, ‘Helen’ he whispers now to the dark, and to himself.

All, ‘Helen’ now.

So there can be nothing of that other, nothing left of him at all, but only Helen here with him, only Helen in the dark.

In the old days – and this has been mentioned
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– what Callum always noticed, when he was a boy, was the way his father was when they were driving up north and he would revert to some old Highland way of speaking, a different rhythm in his voice, different words he’d be using, these smatterings of bits of Gaelic and expressions. It was as though he became a different man. In those days Callum used to make the journey regularly with his father – all this has been written about already – for his mother, as we know, would never go, and sometimes Callum would wonder about that, not really a thought so much as a slight question, why those two people ever married. Maybe it was because his father had been smart enough when he’d been a young man and full of plans and ideas and successful enough in Edinburgh and London by the time he met his wife that, he used to say, Sarah thought he was not such a bad result for a family that had come off some cold hill! Because really, what could the two of them have ever had in common? With his father, as the years went on, going on to talk about himself more and more as though he’d just got down off that same hill, just a Highland crofter after all, but with the fancy hand-made suits and the building with his name on it – what a joke. But there! he’d say. It’s what you might expect of a Sutherland from Sutherland. And Callum as a boy would look at his father when they finally arrived up at the House, after that long drive … After hearing the change in his father’s voice as they got nearer, seeing his impatience to get up the road … And he would see then how he belonged here. But so he would also see, as they arrived, his father in the suit and the brand-new car, the look in Iain’s eyes as he shook his father’s hand. ‘Oh, aye, I’m sophisticated enough now’ his father would say, to Iain, with the big smile, and Iain would seem more silent than ever in his reply to him: ‘Sophisticated, eh?’

Callum has always had these memories, they were with him in the car as he was driving up here today, and now that he’s here, in his father’s old room, with Helen lying beside him, they are piled up in the bed all around him. Thoughts, reminders, fragments from the past. Arriving with his father and the way his father was.