The Big Music (33 page)

Iain’s nod, just, when his father spoke to him –

‘Can you get the car down to the station, tomorrow, Iain? Some friends will be coming on the train in the afternoon.’

‘Can you have the guns cleaned and ready, Iain?’

‘And the rods.’

Then his father walking away, leaving Iain behind him.

And yes, all of it in the past, and a long time ago, but here, too, with him and present. His father. And Iain. And Margaret …

Margaret.

Callum has that thought, too, as he lies here in the dark with Margaret’s daughter …

Because by then, in his memory, when he came back to the House with his father, Margaret was there somewhere in the House but later his father would come and find her.

And Margaret.

And his father.

Callum knows about the two of them together. He’s seen his father, as a boy he’s seen … The way his father is when Margaret walks into the room. He knows … As a man he’s always known it, about Margaret and his father, yet now, as he lies here with Margaret’s daughter, he thinks about how he knows this about the two of them as though there was something else to know …

But he doesn’t know.

Though everything is come together, here, all of a piece. Though he is back in this House, back with Helen again …

Still, he’ll never know.

For, ‘What’s the baby’s name?’ he’d managed to ask Helen. They’d woken, briefly in the night, turned to each other again. It was still dark. It would be a while yet before dawn. ‘Margaret told me’ he’d said, ‘but I forgot.’

‘Her name is Katherine’ Helen had replied. ‘Katherine Anna. And she looks just like my mother.’

‘Like you, then’ he’d replied, and he wanted to kiss her again, be fully awake with her together again in the dark so that it would never get light, could never be light, that there was no such thing as day and that they might stay together always.

‘She has the same face shape as my mother’ said Helen, ‘the same eyes.’

‘Like you,’ Callum said, smoothing her hair back from her forehead, ‘All you …’

And Helen could have added, but Callum would never know for she didn’t say a word:

And you.

So Callum may have remembered the past, and going right back, sometimes, deep into the past, but there he is and he doesn’t know, any more than his father knows, of the way the music is coming together, the layers and the notes of it, wrought all in. Though it’s coming together, there, on the page. And … Clever, he thinks. John Callum thinks now. As he lays down the next set of notes upon the stave. So, clever. The way he’s made all this on his own, the little building here with its window and its glass, the table with the notes spread out, his music and his books …

And with the sun out there on the water! The sheer blue of the sky!

But can he get that part in somehow? That element that’s missing, that he needs, like strength in the sun that all will be fine for him, that it will be as though he can live for ever?

He doesn’t know.

Because in the end, like his son, he has no idea. And as Callum will never know, so he will never know … How the piece of music that he’s writing comes to shape itself, how it fits. How the mother and her
daughter
who’s his daughter, how the baby he will take from her basket is his daughter’s child … How they’ll come together in his arms, all caught up together, the theme of his and the melody within it and the
embellishments
to follow … He doesn’t know. Any more than he knows, as he sits
here working at the table in the Little Hut up in the hills, that in a few short weeks his son will be on his way to see him. And by that time he’ll be in bed and he’ll be dying – but there, Margaret’s in to tell him and the dogs are barking the same:

That Callum has come home.

And, ‘Margaret?’ he’ll say to her, looking for her, there in the dark.

‘I’m here’ she says. ‘I’ve never gone away.’

So for now he picks up one of Callum’s pens and draws in the clef, prepares the manuscript for the small piece of music to be set within the theme. The stave is open and waiting. And it occurs to him as he puts down the first marks on the page that it doesn’t matter that he can’t hear at this moment how exactly the notes will play out across the tune, because that will come to him when he has Margaret’s grandchild in his arms. He looks across at the divan where he sleeps when he comes here. They’ll lie together on it, he’ll think, later, when the season has turned and he’s up on the hilltops and he’s windbeaten and cold and confused. He’ll bring her here with him to the secret place and the music will be complete.

Preceding pages of ‘The Big Music’ have referred to a story of fathers and sons, that, in turn, reference certain Appendices relating to that great dynasty of pipers and composers, the MacCrimmon family, who, for
successive
generations and to the present day, have dominated the sound and character of piobaireachd music. This has been to highlight the theme of hereditary musicianship that plays through the various movements of this book – to bring about in the narrative a kind of echoing from one generation to another, down through the years to the present situation of a father who has been long estranged from his son, in the same way that he himself was cut off from his own father – deliberately, and by design.

Yet, as we have seen, though there is the disjunction between the three generations of men – between John Callum MacKay Sutherland and his son Callum in the same way that there was between John Callum MacKay and his father before him – so this rupture to the line of sons, this space between the story can be closed up, somewhat, by the singling and
doubling
of John Callum’s theme in ‘Lament for Himself’.

In this sense, the space in the text might be seen to be closed by the music. Certainly, while he is composing the Lament in the Little Hut, though there is no thought of a theme or a set of notes for Callum – and, indeed, the absence of his son is felt, in separate moments by the composer – nevertheless the story of Callum, once introduced in the Taorluath movement, comes to play stronger and stronger throughout
‘The Big Music’, both as counterpoint and reinstatement of John Callum MacKay’s own set of notes, the ‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’ sequence in particular.

This kind of layering, as we have already seen, is a distinct feature of piobaireachd and may be described as well in the table overleaf – itself a sort of ‘under-composition’ of ‘The Big Music’ – providing as it does a clear sense of the doubling and singling of the various generations over the years. See how the names themselves seem to sound as notes that are repeated and echo throughout the tune, one placed upon the other as though transparently, as though one man may be them all:

Sutherland Pipers at The Grey House

Note: seven generations are shown, although at the time of writing it is unclear as to whether Callum Sutherland will take up the instrument his father has bequeathed to him

John Roderick MacKay of ‘Grey Longhouse’ (‘First John’)
b.1736 – d.1793

Roderick John, a tacksman (‘Roderick Mor’)
b.1776 – d.1823

John ‘Elder’ Roderick Callum
b.1800 – d.1871

John Callum MacKay (‘Old John’)
b.1835 – d.1911

(Roderick) John Callum (‘Himself’ – the great twentieth-century ‘Modernist’ piper; known as Callum)
b.1887 – d.1968

John Callum MacKay
b.1923 – d. within these pages

Callum Innes MacKay – his son

John Callum MacKay Sutherland: born 3 February 1923
41

When Elizabeth Clare Nichol became a mother she found her life returned to her. Brought to a lonely place, far inside the hills of the northeast Highlands, she’d been a town girl, a girl who had loved the shops and the dancing in Perth, the lovely fabrics and stuffs there you could have made up into any kind of dress you wanted, and they had the lace there, too, for trimming, and all kinds of beads and seed pearls … She had been that kind of girl. She had her hair cut short and went to the dances in the town hall most Saturdays, and there were tea places, too, with large mirrors set behind the tables, where she and her girlfriends could catch glimpses of themselves in the glass, and there were thick white china plates and cakes with jam and cream, and here was this young woman with all her girlfriends about her, sitting there, all of them with their hair cut short and shingled and their dresses to the knee and they put lipstick on and powder, using the big mirrors to see their reflections … Like so many bright daisies in a vase. This is how Elizabeth’s life had been, before marriage. With this kind of brightness about her, the light of the mirror
and the shine of the glass. All to lose for the empty hills of Sutherland and for a man she realised, after the wedding ceremony in her parish church in Crieff when she’d had to travel far north with him by motor car and train, was a silent kind of man, and frightening, she discovered, after their first night together in the bed. She understood then, when she was with him alone that way for the first time, that all the sweet words he may have had for her as they’d whiled away the hours in the dance halls of Perthshire, and in her mother’s pretty sitting room, all the letters
42
he’d passed her the next day, after their short, fierce entwinings at the dance when the jazz and the tea music had stopped playing and he’d driven her home to her parents’ safe villa on the dark streets of Crieff … Realised then, after the marriage, after the bed, that all those physical moments before had been as nothing compared to the way he really wanted her. For he wanted to have her. To keep and to be inside her, all the way in and have her silent there. To make of her a kind of possession, to create something between them that might be as implacable as the hills around them, the
I don’t mind
of those empty hills, that would be as lonely as the land and the house he’d brought her to, that she’d had no idea of, its isolation and its quiet and high uncaring sky … She realised when it was too late to realise. For by then she was arrived. He was sleeping beside her. Then his eyes would open and she knew then he was wide awake.

But the baby! Who could have prepared her for this?

The birth of him one thing, dreadful, with the nurse coming too early
to the House and being angry with Elizabeth it had seemed, for not producing the child in the right kind of time, in the right way, and then being brutal with her in the birth so the baby would start, so she had to make a little cut – that one thing. And then the pain becoming so bad and the laudanum drops they kept giving her having no effect and the baby was stuck there part-way so the nurse cut freely again, and cut, to make him come out. All this, the horror of this, seeing the little knife, feeling the blood, and the great weight of the thing that was to be her own child then pushing himself out of her, trying to get out from the place where his father put himself each night …

But then! There he was, amidst the blood! Dainty boy, tiny living scrap of a thing and all she wanted was to hold him, have him right there with her, hold him close, hold him. While they took their time, it seemed, to give him to her, the fierce nurse and the maid who’d been doing so much work for her, helping her in the house, to get her in and out of bed when she’d been too heavy to move, now boiling water and giving Elizabeth the kind of cloths for between her legs and then to wrap around the baby … And no one told her – as they finally gave him to her and she looked into her son’s unblinking eyes, his crumpled face red from the washing they’d given him to remove the smell of her from him when all she’d wanted was to cry out, oh give him to me now! – what it would be like to want someone so close, have him there with her so close. Him! Her own child, her son. She’d thought to herself, wildly, in those opening seconds after he’d been born and they were washing him and trussing him up to make him presentable to her:
Just give him to me now. I could lick him clean.

To Elizabeth Clare Sutherland (nee Nichol) and John Callum
Sutherland
: a son.

John Callum MacKay Sutherland: born 3 February 1923.

Elizabeth’s little boy.

There have always been the affairs of the place to manage. That’s in the life, too, as we have read already – the keeping of this House, the
management
of land a working operation always and with Iain there in place to organise the physical side of things, to take over, in time, the practical day-to-day running of what was a successful business as well as a family home, a House that could pay for its upkeep and the livelihood of those who worked and lived here – and Callum Sutherland had been able to be confident that, after his death, the House and land could continue to have the associations with this part of the country that they had always had: to be open and isolated, a place for music and weather and high, lonely hills.

It was a few years after Margaret and her daughter had come to live here, then, that Iain was employed by the Sutherlands to come and work at The Grey House. By then the old man and his wife were quite frail – though Elizabeth went on to live for several more years after her husband’s death and continued to enjoy the things she had come to appreciate about living in this part of the country, its large and changing skies, the tenderness of the brief summers. Year by year she’d found herself further and further away from the Perthshire villages and towns where she’d grown up so that though it had taken all her adult life, the House was now her home. It was where her son had been born. These rooms the rooms he had grown up in, her little boy, where she had fed him and talked with him and cared for him. There were to be no more children. That was maybe something
in the Sutherland line – for they were never a family who had produced a great number of sons and daughters, and through the years, going back all the way to when the records were kept, there were never many sons and many who died. Certainly Elizabeth was aware of it. The pattern of the men not to father many sons. John himself would grow up to marry but have only the one boy, and late in life – like so many of his grandfathers before him – and as Elizabeth came to see and understand more and more how the music might take the men away, so too she came to understand how that might give a concentration to a woman of the things a woman might need. For to have her own time … To be able to keep her own counsel, think her own thoughts … These qualities were as much a part of the world she’d become used to as its House and hills. In this way was the girl she had been once left far, far behind. Here, after all, was where she had come to be a mother to a son – and so of course she would always want to stay, where John had been. Any day he might come home again.

Margaret coming to live in the House could only deepen this way of thinking for Elizabeth. It was Margaret, after all, who had called her son to come back here that first time when she’d been so ill, and then, after Callum’s death, when he started coming every summer and for longer and longer, it might have seemed to Elizabeth as though the young woman had been a kind of lovely charm. Besides, Elizabeth loved having the presence of another woman and her child in the House, loved the sense of them both there – another mother to hear calling out for her child to come to tea, have a bath, go to bed, another child’s laughter and shouting and talking lifting out of the hallways and rooms. It was like an echo of her own life come back to her, having Margaret and her daughter here. All through the years there was Margaret restoring order and with a sense of life and vigour, giving her back her rooms light and warm and aired as though they may give nothing but pleasure. And, as time went on, she was letting Margaret more and more be in charge of the arrangements in this way, all the domestic responsibilities of the House given over to her care – when there were guests or not – so that by the end she was doing not just the cooking and cleaning but organising everything to do with the House’s upkeep and Elizabeth just managing a little in the garden,
sometimes, or tidying up a set of drawers here and there, to see if there was anything in them she might clear away. But for the most part lovely Margaret had taken over for her, was taking care, and so Elizabeth could just sit in her little armchair in the old Schoolroom … She could sit up there for hours if she wanted to and dream. All the time knowing that this other woman was somewhere below her in the House, preparing the
supper
in the kitchen or making up the fire, singing to her daughter who ran around the place with the same light footsteps John used to have, when he was that age, Elizabeth remembered, her little boy. Margaret like time given back to her that way, all time.