The Big Music (18 page)

Coming in here, as a boy, as a young man, to stand and wait at his father’s chair.

So, yes. Just think about that.

Callum.

Remember that.

The
My father
…

A man,
Callum says to himself now,
who could never come close.

And this, after all, is his father’s House. It’s not Callum’s house. So there’s that, too. To remind himself of, tell his family, his wife and his sons. How none of this – him being here, seeing the rocks through the glass, the high hills – how none of it should be to do with Callum
anyway
, because this is his father’s home, his father’s House. Callum is only visiting, remember? He’s passing through. Following the call from his mother to come up here and get his father away. And any minute he’ll go in now to the little bedroom off the hall where the man who used to sit in the chair is now lying … And –
Goodnight, Daddy
indeed. For that will be intimate enough. Going in to see him there, to stand right next to him, kiss him on the forehead …

Callum takes a sip of his whisky. Takes another sip.

God knows none of this will be easy.

No more than it was easy all those years ago, when he was a boy and he had no choice then but to have to come through to his father in the evening – so in the same way there’s no choice now but for it to be Callum who must be the one to go in there and this time try and get his father to leave, come away with him to London as his mother thinks is best.

And tell Anna that, too. Tell the boys. That it’s only him here. Who has to do that. There’s no one else.

You’ve got to be the one to do it, Callum.

Because his mother would never do anything.

By now it may as well be as though his mother’s never even been
married
to his father.

You’ve got to be the one.

So, yes, it’s only Callum here.

A man who could never come close.

Leaving his family so early this morning and driving through the dawn, coming up all through the hours of daylight to that bleak and lovely road, the cut peat into the earth and the crumbled drying heather …

You took your time, though.

Arriving …

And don’t think I’m coming with you either.

Is where this is leading, Callum knows. To the dark room and what his father will say.

Callum moves to the window again, restless, then back to the sideboard. It’s that word again, inevitable. That run of duty into will and to desire. All of it wrapped around him now, holding him, keeping him – because he knows of course that his father won’t be going anywhere and his own presence here makes no difference to that fact. But that doesn’t mean he now wishes he hadn’t come here either. Because now he’s here he sees so clearly how the end of his father’s life belongs here, of course it does, met with him in the place where Callum has arrived, the place where his father started out from. It’s like his father’s music, Callum thinks, is the way it feels – the ‘A’ note always wanting to keep the tune, to hold the other notes
against the line of the drone below. So there’s no choice about where the tune will go, only the inevitability of its eventual return. And it’s a lovely sound, how could it not be, with a High ‘A’ to pitch the harmonic off the base note and the fine wide octave in between – though there’s no straying from it, there can’t be, from that lovely ‘A’. The beginning of all the music is there.

And it occurs to Callum then: where does his father keep all the stuff for his music, anyhow? All his books and the papers and the manuscripts? There’s no place for any of it here he can see, in this room, though his father’s always called it the ‘Music Room’ and he used to do all his
practice
here. And it can’t be upstairs, all those papers and notes, when it’s clear he’s not been up in his own bedroom for some time, since they’ve moved him down here.

So where are the papers? On a table, they used to be, laid out …

Where is that table?

Where –?

And then, something.

An image.

A memory, though he was not to have any of those memories and he was to call home, remember, he was to phone Anna and the boys …

But –

something.

About what he’d heard today. And after his mother’s telling him, he’d remembered, too … Something. About his father.

Margaret saying that they found him up on the top of Ben Mhorvaig and trying to get over on the west side … And he’d thought about it
yesterday
as well, when his mother called … Started to …

But now the memory is complete. With seeing that part of the hill just now when he looked through the glass – to the black rocks and the river and in the distance Ben Mhorvaig – the memory … Of papers on a table … Another table …

And himself and Helen.

Helen.

That memory.

And no good now, trying to suppress it. No good trying to think about his father, or the way his father is.

No good saying again to himself the words
My father.

No good. Because the memory is here. Of how they had got up to the top of that hill, he and Helen … An old, old memory that he hadn’t allowed …

Of a private place.

That they had used. He and Helen.

Helen.

‘Yes.’

When they’d got to the top and gone over.

‘I do remember’ he says.

Because he’d seen all his father’s papers that day, hadn’t he, when he’d been there to that place with her, with Helen, as she’d drawn him to her and …

Helen.

Helen.

Helen.

All his father’s music was there. In files. In boxes. On a big table by the window …

Pages piled up, and books and notebooks and manuscript papers all covered with notes, with writing …

All the music there that day. Long ago when he’d seen it. When he’d been there in secret with Helen, to his father’s secret place. With all his father’s music around them there – and not thinking about it since, remembering her, the sensation of her …

Helen.

But it comes back to him now.

That it’s where the music is. And where his father was taking himself to today, when they found him … It was to that place. To that same place. But with a child – why a child?

With Helen’s child.

He’s restless now, all right.

He could be doing without any of this. He needs another drink. He pours himself a large measure, takes a sip from his glass. He could be doing without any of these thoughts now pressing in. Of touch and taste and scent and the past, his past, not his father’s past. He could be doing without all of it. Thoughts about himself, his own memories and a girl he used to know when he was a boy, she was just a girl, although she behaved towards him as though she had known him all her life … Still she was just a girl, even though –

Helen.

Helen.

She’s all through him now, in his mind and body. When he’s supposed to be in with his father. Thinking about him, being with him right now and he should have gone through there by now, to see his father. As he takes another sip from his glass, and another. And he must go through to him, he must. Not stand about here, thinking about himself,
remembering
. Listen to the dogs! Even the dogs know it! That going through to his father is his duty here. He can still hear them barking now like they were when he arrived. Just before, when he’d excused himself from the kitchen, gone back out to the car for his bags, Iain behind him to help him –

‘Don’t bother, Iain. I can get them.’

– though Iain was there already, grabbing the cases, the two of them, and ‘Be quiet!’ Iain had shouted at them, the dogs had seemed to be reminding him then, what Callum is here for, for his father, his duty, for they were still at it now in their kennels, in the same way their barking had started up when he’d arrived. As though reminding him. That he should be through there with his father now. That that’s what he’s come for. Their barking his welcome – to be with his father, at the end of his father’s life – their barking his return.

But Helen is here, too.

In the midst of the dogs’ cries. As much as any other memory of his father’s life, she’s here, as are the black rocks and the hills and the secret place. And so are all the parts connected …

Helen and Callum in the notes of the tune with his father’s music all around them.

All of it connected.

The ‘A’ to the ‘A’.

And so he’ll go in to see his father because there’s no undoing of the tune that holds them all together, though his father will be like a corpse already, Callum knows, lying in the dark room. He’s been given something to help him sleep, Margaret said, before. When he’d been thinking he’d seen all kinds of people out on the hill with him this morning, his own father, he was talking about his mother. Thinking he himself was his father, then, and that he’d seen Callum, too. Whoever he thought he was, he was calling out, Margaret said, from the room, and calling out for him, for Callum, ever since they’d brought him down off the tops and laid him out through there.

And it is like a tune, all the parts of it intricately made to be together, and familiar to Callum, all of it somehow familiar …

Though he’s never been in that little room before, has he? Callum?

Just as he’s never been here at the House this time of year before – when it’s so dark now, and so cold.

As he turns from the window, turns.

And there on the sideboard by the whisky is a recording of one of his father’s tunes. He picks up the recording.

And terrifying, yes. To be back in this country of his father’s now, at the time of his father’s leaving it. To be in a place of such emptiness and bitter beauty, bitter cold. There’s the endless light but also the dark this time of year, like a cloak to cover them all until the spring will come again as it will come but how long to wait …

And here’s the recording in Callum’s hand, written on the case, from fifty years ago:

Ceol Mor/23.
41

So that everything – Callum is aware of it now – is here where it needs to be. This House alone in the landscape, and his place in it, lit rooms in the dark. Beyond the thick glass of the window, the fires, lamps in small rooms, the entire hillside falls down around him, all the air, the storms, all the riverfalls, coming in off the lochs, the straths, down from all the high streams …

And looking back through the dark through the window, from out in the open land, there’s his father’s chair, the pipes lying like an animal at his feet silent for now but any minute he’ll pick them up in his arms, his father will knock the bag into place beneath his arm, straighten the drones which start up that second, tuning them – the first ‘A’ – then a
better
– higher – ‘A’ to ‘A’.

This.

And this.

And this.

Callum turns on the CD – turns the volume right up – and his father begins to play.

No wonder he got to London after Edinburgh so fast!

‘No wonder!’

There’s his own voice saying the words!

‘Johnnie!’ he calls out – or is that his father? Calling for him?

‘Johnnie!’

Or is it his own voice he can hear?

It’s all dark here, in the room – only it must be his father talking. Or his grandfather. His grandfather or his own voice he can hear – or could be any one of them, all of them in this together – and it is no wonder either! That he got himself fixed up there, in that big city! Away from his father and the flex and with his own business, too, and nothing to do with the old man by then, nothing at all! So he would put himself apart! From that old man and from his land and his music and all his concerns! So he would get out of bed on it, so he would! Just get up right now and take him on, his father. Like on the hill before, this morning, and he’d had a few words with him then, after all the time they’d been apart, they’d met and they’d spoken – and he’ll say a few more words with his father now, too, if his father’s here in the room. For it was a good thing, it was, that he did it! Went away! A man would do it! Set himself apart from his father, well apart, so he can make his own way in life! He feels it still – the
setting
of himself away from this place and from the past. So let him stay up there, he’d thought back then. His father. Let him. With his mother.
Let the pair of them sit up there if that’s what they want, what they want to do.