The Big Music (17 page)

And so there were things he needed to accomplish and he did
accomplish
them. And eventually he was married, he did have a son of his own, and his business was growing and so his son would one day inherit that business … He was moving into that phase of life that was even more demanding than before, with more to do, that time when his boy was born, during those early years when he was small, more than ever to plan and organise and think about, and he sold his house, he bought a bigger house …

But his father died, suddenly, in the midst of everything. When he was not thinking about that, about any of it – but then. All at once. He was a man on his own. With his own son. A son with his father gone.

And so he travelled all the way up to Brora to attend the funeral. And he saw his mother. She was there to greet him, at the church, at the side of the grave.

‘John.’

And at once, it was back. Or rose up at him, rather, and all around him, the past that had always been there, waiting.

His mother’s scent, the same flowery scent as when he’d been a little boy.

And him putting his arms around her, not for her to hold him like she used to when he was a child but now for his arms to encircle her and she was like a stalk, like a little branch, but something of the blossom about her still.

‘John’ she’d said, and he’d held her. ‘John.’

While even then, he thought, this wasn’t returning. How could it be?

With the child grown into a man.

The mother to a twig.

The old man gone.

With everything he’d done, and been so long away? When he was so marked himself by distance, and so changed? How could this be, he thought, returning?

Yet the music was playing, his mother was there at the grave. And that was the beginning. Coming back for his father’s funeral, to help his mother first, then to have the summer with her, and then it was the following year and he found his old chanter then, in the Schoolroom, his old set of pipes, and he took them up and tuned them. The ‘A’ to the ‘A’ and perfectly they sounded. Then after that it wasn’t long – two summers, more, three summers – until his mother died but enough to form a habit and by then it was habit. To come back to the House where he’d been born, where his father had been born. To want to stay.
38

Is how the years continued, for John Callum MacKay. A Sutherland from Sutherland after all, and nothing surprising then, in the habit of being here, put back again into place after all the time away. And back again, too, the old habits. Of silence. Of music. Of expecting and getting what you might need. Of keeping all your secrets close. It wasn’t long until it seemed to John that the time he’d been away hadn’t changed him at all, not really – only that what he’d come back to had always been in him and was just waiting for him to let it out again. More and more, as time went on, that’s how it felt. That though he’d thought he’d once been someone else and had done those other things – had his work, his life, with marriage in it, had a son – any idea of being that other person was now as thin and disappearing as a dream. And, just as before, when he’d been a young man, he’d not been able to honour his past, find the words to factor its content and meaning, so now, as the habit of being home again continued with him, did he find himself counting everything that might have been dear to him once, the things he’d bought and the deals he struck, as nothing.

The substance of his whole life …

Just parts, bits.

Nothing.

So that though he was staying longer each time at The Grey House, after a while bringing his son with him, the boy whom he’d christened after all and even before his father’s death, as Callum … Still, nothing was how he felt about his boy. When the boy was – what? Eight years old? Nine years old? And they’d drive up together and stay the whole summer …

And his wife phoning, Sarah. On those old telephone lines you couldn’t hear, phoning long distance to check her son was all right –

‘John?’

All through those summers, checking up on him, asking ‘Is he okay? Is Callum okay? Has he something to do? Are you keeping him warm?’,
John listening to her voice down the static of the line … Still all of it was just parts, bits. ‘John, can you hear me?’ Nothing. Whether she called or didn’t call. Whether his son was cold or not cold. Whether it was raining or whether it was fine. The nothing so taken hold in him – and Callum twelve by now, thirteen – that nothing would let John Sutherland realise that maybe if he’d not been so interested before in all those other things, the getting away, the business and the bank accounts and the houses … He might have been able to make sense of his life before now. Maybe. Learn that something had always been wrong for him, deep in. That he’d had a wife who would be phoning him the way she did, but who’d never wanted to come back here with him, not ever.

‘John?’

Only phoning.

‘Are you there, John?’

So of course it’s been a while since the marriage was as good as over, may as well have been, and his wife … Well. A voice on the telephone is who she still is.

‘Can you hear me at all?’

Though the line is better now. With her calling him once a week for the past year or so since he came up here to live for good and he can always hear her.

‘Are you keeping well?’ she’ll say. ‘Are you doing what the doctor tells you?’

In that smooth English voice of hers.

‘John?’

‘Are you listening to me?’

‘Can you hear me?’

‘John?’

‘John?’

‘John?’

Is what becomes of nothing.

‘Are you there?’

For give it away, your past, and what do you have but only talk, only words, all the sentences … Gone clear into air. There’s no tune, for how
can there be, from nothing? No sounds. No string of bright notes that would make up a theme. For of all the certainties in the world, all the houses and the marriages and the children, without the past there’s only nothing – so never let it go.

Margaret had always known that best.

And somewhere, within his sleeping … John Sutherland knows it, too.

That what he’s left for himself is nothing.

Just parts and bits … Pieces …

Nothing.

When, with Margaret, he could have allowed himself the all.

And they did give the old boy a proper funeral in Brora, at the end there, didn’t they? The army? Wrap his box in the flag? With the medals, for his time in France. For the work he’d put in to the music school through the Highlands, for his work with education and the children who would come to learn to play, and the bands that he tutored, the competitions that he judged. And though none of it was Johnnie’s life, was it? None of it? Though his marriage over, his life in London done …

Though –

‘I’ll not be back!’ he had said.

So he did come back.

His father’s tunes all around him in the song he himself would now play.
39

Callum has to go through now, and see his father. It’s where the day has been taking him, to the moment when he will walk into the darkened room, see his father’s body lying out there in the bed, asleep.

And for him, what that feeling is like … I wonder, Callum. A father’s son who’s driven all through the day to get here, a man who has no belief in what he’s doing, no understanding about himself, who he is, where he might be going, the direction he wants to take. Who is acting out of duty here – that his mother has asked him to come and get his father, to bring him away – left the others in the kitchen and come through to the little sitting room, to be standing by his father’s chair. And yet it is not as
simple
as simple duty either. To be standing as he is, unable to settle. Facing the north window looking out into the darkness and I should go in and draw the curtains but instead there’s his face reflected by the lamplight, in the dark glass.

For duty, I know, may be no more than duty but still duty can be all. Here, where we live, duty is like return, is fixed, it’s known. It’s part of who we are, inevitable. And so there was his mother phoning him the
way she did, asking him to come up and check on his father, see how he is so that he can take him away, put him in some hospital or other, some hospice or home … But that was just the start of Callum’s journey. For of course she would think, wouldn’t she, his mother, that old Johnnie should not be here with us, that the man who is her husband should not be in such a place of terrible and dangerous isolation, she can’t imagine it. Yet Callum understands. Why his father is here, why he must stay. And he knows how duty turns to will and will into desire. Now that he’s here, after his long day, so now there’s nowhere else he wants to be but here. Because look about him in this warm room, and beyond it, through the glass. Every part of the world where he is now, he knows. He stands at the window registering that fact, of every part, seeing through the dark. The straggly tree on the hill line, that tree stripped of leaves and bent over by a wind, one tree, he can see, he knows. The strike of black water down there on the moor, broken up with sharp boulders, and he used to sit on those rocks, years ago, looking up at the hills, at Mhorvaig, with Helen.

And Helen.

‘Christ!’

That scene in the kitchen just now!

With the news that she’s here!

All that come in on him the way it did and – Christ! again, making him feel like his father, but he needs a drink, goes over to the sideboard and pours himself a whisky. For he may be here for duty, of course he is, for his father, and not those other memories – not that tree, that water, that hill and the two of them together – but how do you keep them apart? That memory, the green face of the hill and climbing higher and higher to get to the top, always wanting to go further, higher, with a new set of hills falling away to the west – how keep that separate from everything else? The light and the sun and the cold coming in across the tops so you could feel by the time summer had got to its end that he’d have to go back to London, and he’d have to say goodbye to Helen then … How be here just for his father, to tend to him, think only of him, when there’s all that other as well? Him and Helen and a new set of hills,
the two of them together on their own and the past coming raging in?

Best to have no old stories from way back, just try not to remember them. That’s what he must think, taking a sip of the whisky, another sip. Keep them silenced, those thoughts of what they used to do, he and Helen, the two of them sitting there on the black rocks and all the broad hills spread out before them to the sky …

Just forget. Forgetting is best. He’ll try and get reception in a bit, call Anna and the boys, remind himself what he’s here for: to see his father, nothing else. His father who is through there in the room off the hallway, waiting for him. Is what he’ll say to his wife and sons. How he’s here for duty, remember? For his father. To be standing here at his father’s chair, just as he used to when he was a boy, when he would come through here to wish his father goodnight –

‘Goodnight, Daddy.’

‘Goodnight.’

And yes.

For there’s always that.

The
Goodnight, Daddy.

The way Margaret used to bring him in here all those years ago,
taking
him by the hand to come in and wish his father goodnight. And sure there’s nothing of Helen in that. So he can think about that, remember that. What his father was like. Tell that to Anna and the boys. How it was to be a boy himself and coming in here to see his father in the evening. What that was like. Or later, when he was a young man, arriving like he did tonight after a long drive north and his father sitting here in this same chair, waiting for him, a tumbler of whisky in his hand and tapping out a tune against it, where the glass rested on the arm of his chair.

‘Hello, Daddy.’

Because that was just him and his father then.

No thoughts of Helen there.

The way his father would take one sip from his glass, then another, before replying.

‘You took your time, though.’

So certainly, yes, there was always that. To remember, to keep hold of
here. To tell his wife. His sons. The way his father was. The way he is. That one memory on its own should keep all the other thoughts away.

‘My father …’ he could say.

As though he’s speaking now to Anna, or to the boys:
My father.

‘There’s nothing about him that is easy.’

For what was it like all those years when he came through here to wish his father goodnight? Nothing like thinking of Helen, anyway, that’s for sure. No room there for any other thought or idea. Only ever:
My father.
It was the way his father was. Wherever he was. In the chair, in the car, when they were driving up here. That terrifying profile, his hands clenched on the wheel. Whenever he was with his father his father’s presence took up all the space, he seemed to dominate the air around him.

My father.

Sitting beside him in the car.