The Big Music (19 page)

‘I’ll not be back to crouch at their fireside, listen to the silence all around!’

‘I’ll not be back!’

Is what he used to say – to friends, to people he once knew. And he can hear now that they are his own words he is listening to in the dark. ‘I’ll not be back!’ they say. As though the words themselves are company, and talking back to him as though they are familiar as those people who were out on the hill with him this morning, his father, his son – and someone else. The boy who was himself once. He’s here, too. That boy who remembers the touch of his mother’s cheek, the scent at her neck. The rough tweed of his father’s cuff and the crack of the flex at the back of his leg, the smart of that clear knowledge at the burn and cry of his skin, the blood that came and the ugly mark that his father didn’t care for him at all. Hated him even. That is him, too, who is lying here. The same boy. And they put a needle in him today, to keep him quiet, and they took him away with them, sure enough. Off the hill. Away from all the light and the air …

But he came back.

Remember?

That day at the funeral when everyone was there?

He came back then, to stay. And everyone his father had ever known was there that day – though who were they? All those people? He didn’t know them. Like a whole life come up to take his mother by the hand and every one of them a stranger. With the piobaireachd being played by a soldier – ‘MacKay’s Lament’, and it was one of his father’s favourite tunes – a grey tune in the grey air. Thin and high and lovely through the upper register on a day that had cold in it then too, winter, and he’d come home then, hadn’t he? With the tune? To lie here, himself the stranger.

Is how his thoughts are running now. Fast and low.

So it’s his own life, not his father’s life, that’s come to nothing. So the pills are flushed away and the food is not taken. None of it matters. For the thoughts are running low and fast and lovely. Up before dawn this
morning and away from them all like a hare on the hills, away from the dogs, gone, and not his scent left even to guide them.

Is in his mind now.

To have left them all and be away.

Up at dawn and to the Little Hut, he’ll get there. Out on the hills and far from them all to the secret place and the child with him – to stay there with him for the rest of it, for the tune to be done. New life coming out of old. Green shoots for the grouse to feed on after the heather’s been burned way back to soil.

And they won’t find him then, old Johnnie. Won’t find the old grey hare for he’s gone.

The people at the House and what they thought of him

And I don’t know who Callum is. Or where he belongs. His father no longer there in the little sitting room where he used to wait. After a time, I suppose, he stopped waiting – for his son to return home. And it’s been a while, anyhow, since he’s been able to sit up for any length of time in that chair of his. Though right up until yesterday he asked to have the recordings of certain tunes played at night so he could hear them from his bedroom. As though he were still in the little sitting room, perhaps, on his own and with a dram. Listening to the same
recordings
or playing himself, like he used to, all the tunes he’d composed over the years. The Music Room they used to call it, in the old days.

Even so, though it’s quiet now, my mother will go through to light the fire there. Each evening, early, she’ll crouch at the grate and put the match to the clean arrangement of twigs and paper I set for her in the morning. I’ve watched her, still kneeling while the flame catches, flares up and starts through the paper and the peats, staying close, making certain the fire is good. Then she returns to the kitchen, heats through soup, rolls, puts the water on to boil for tea. It’s her routine, part of who she is. What she does keeping faith with a certain order, is how I
think of it. Her present embodying all that is in her past.

When I come down from my bedroom – for Katherine is settled now and sleeping – to take the things through, the tray with the tea on it, the soup and the bread, my mother is away upstairs and Callum is standing at the chair where his father used to sit. There’s music playing, he’s turned the stereo on, something of his father’s though the notes are too bright on the recording and not as sweet and soft in the embellishments as when he used to play the tune himself in this same room. The volume is up high enough for Callum not to notice me open the door, but not so loud that I can’t still hear the dogs, intermittently now, but they’ve been at it ever since he arrived, poor beasts.

I set the tray down on the small table by the window and Callum sees me.

There is nothing, at this second, we can do, either of us, or say.

He could have gone out to the kennels at least – but he’s not done that. Though the noise won’t let up until they’ve satisfied themselves they’ve seen him, got the smell of him.

But he never went.

‘Be quiet!’

So I was the one yelling at them. When I’d taken his damn bag from him and you’d have thought then he might have turned back – there’s one old retriever there who he’d still remember if he bothered himself at all. But he just walked on ahead into the House empty-handed.

Like his father before him.

You could say that.

No thought for anyone else.

And –

‘Be quiet!’ I’d shouted at the dogs – but animals. They know. And you can’t always will them. No amount of what I said or did was going to stop them wanting out and into the House if they could, and all over him, knowing something was different here, someone come back only they’ve
not been able to get the scent from his hand to know if he belongs here, if he’ll stay.

Callum says, after a few beats, ‘Helen.’

The tray is there. The soup. The tea.

He is facing me so I can see how he’s changed.

‘Helen’ he says again – and then, like someone’s just told him to, turns away to put the music down.

‘I heard about the baby’ he says then. ‘From your mother.’

He’s been drinking. He fiddles with the volume control, turning it up, right up and then down, then up again, too loud.

‘And my father’ he says. ‘Margaret told me about that, too. What he did. About yesterday and taking –’ Suddenly it’s quiet. He’s turned the switch off completely.

He straightens up to face me.

‘She’s fine now’ I say. I look fully at him, into his eyes. I can see
everything
there.

‘She’s okay’ I say. ‘She’s sleeping.’

And I want to fall against him.

Fall.

Like I always wanted to fall. Like Katherine Anna should be his
daughter
. Like I should be his wife.

Fall, Helen.

Fall.

Fall.

He looked awful when he got in. Frightened, is how I’d put it. His face – like that. Like a knife. And tired, of course he’d be tired, after that long
drive, coming all that way – but something more than tiredness in him. Reminded me straight away of how he used to be when he was young, getting up here at the beginning of the summer, the way he used to arrive with John, the two of them together, the tall father and his son, getting out of the car.

That was long enough ago.

Long enough.

But he was up early this morning of course, Callum, and that may be part of it, why he looked the way he did – it was three o’clock or
thereabouts
, he said, when he left London. So it would have been like driving through the middle of the night for most of it. And that might explain something of his appearance – the feeling showing in his face of being shocked out of time, kind of. Leaving his wife and finding himself back here with us, his father in the condition that he’s in.

And I had to tell him, and straight away. What his father had done.

And Iain also told him that Helen had come home, that she’d had a child.

So there’s also that.

As well as everything else.

And it’s a lot. For him to be taking in.

His father. And Helen. Helen’s child …

Not his child.

A lot to find out about so soon in and of course it would show on his face, poor man. Poor boy. Always the look on his face when he arrived, all those years ago, of shock and fear and not knowing where to put himself, what to do, who to be.

Callum.

It’s all right, son. Come here to me.

‘A baby’ he’s saying. And I can see the whisky bottle on the sideboard behind him yet even with the drinking it’s as though there’s light around
him. Here in this room, as I see him, after so much time away from us … So it takes time for me, just then, to hear what he’s saying, to take him in as I do, everything about him, with the light collecting all around him, holding him, so it does take time …

But it takes time for him, too.

Callum.

There so close I could reach out and touch him, my hand at the side of his face. The light holding us both like a press, taking away all the air between us. Then he says my name again – ‘Helen’ – and in one movement comes towards me and at that moment my baby starts up to cry.

‘You should go to your father’ I say.

Though he doesn’t seem to hear me, his face clouded by tiredness and the whisky, and he’s looking at me as though I might have said something different, as I might have, with the light all about him, about us, I might have … But my daughter is there, needing me, and his father is waiting and …

‘He’s been asking after you’ I say –

And that breaks it. My words. Katherine crying upstairs. Whatever it was, holding us before, the press of light, and time and timelessness. He seems to stumble.

‘I know what happened’ he says, but he seems confused now. By me. By his father. By the idea, maybe, of the two of us together – two names, two people side by side in his mind. ‘I know what my father did’ he says. ‘Margaret told me – your baby –’

Your baby.

Those words in his mouth.