The Big Music (36 page)

So he could be alone there. It was why he wanted it. As somewhere to go to, where he could be private. As though the House was not enough – even though by the end the House was private enough. But he was ill by the end, and tired. But even so – he managed it, didn’t he? To get up there to the private place?

He did. And nothing there ever interfered with his thinking. He could write there. He could listen to the notes that made patterns on the page before him. He could sit at the table and look out across the water. And still nothing to interfere there, nothing. With no memory of a father or anyone else – because this was his own secret place. A secret. Somewhere he found out that there was much, much more in the music than he’d thought when he started, that more of him lived there, within the music’s lines and phrases of that small shelter, than in all the places he had lived elsewhere, in the world, in the world.

For the world …

That was outside and in here he was alone and true.

Back in the House, well … It was as it had always been. He may have started off inviting his London friends, he’d invited those kinds of people then, and there’d been fishing, sometimes in season they’d taken out the guns … But, when he looks back, he can see how quickly those times were over, how short and thin the days. Much better that he had
different
people who were coming to the House after that, sons of his father’s friends, some of them, so pipers, and some from the colleges, in Glasgow, in Edinburgh. Because it was all music they were coming for now, like in the old days, his father’s days. And so there’d be parties, maybe, but
parties
because of the music. Up most of the night some nights. Through to dawn those summers. And John here like an owner of the place,
surrounded
by people like his father used to be. The teacher. The host. As though he’d always been here – ‘Welcome!’ ‘Come in!’

As though …

But not quite.

For though there was more to learn about the music, always more … And pipers to arrive and pupils to teach, the tradition of the Sutherlands unbroken … It was always only ever the old tunes. Only the old tunes in the House.

His own music – the thing that started in his head – that was for the other place.

Where he was completely alone.

The people at the House and what they thought of him

She’s like his own daughter. She is his daughter. He won’t think about the other – what went on, about anything else. She’s Margaret’s child, that’s all he needs to know.

Says: ‘She’s my girl.’

And today … With him on his last legs … And after all that business, up on the hill …

She showed what stuff she’s made of. Having the son back here as well and she hasn’t seen him since they were kids – and after everything she’d been through with the baby the day before, the way the old fool had her off with him and everyone thought she was lost …

‘Well, she showed us all’ Iain said to Margaret that night.

‘My girl.’

And there’s nothing he wouldn’t do to help her if he could – just like her lovely mother.

For he cares for them both, he’s the man at the ceremony who said, ‘I do.’

So of course there is nothing he wouldn’t do – even let them go as he’s had to, God knows he’s had to stand by while …

Though neither of them, not the father nor the son, deserve them …

Deserve Margaret.

Deserve Helen.

All he has to do is say their names.

Helen was doing fine with her, who said you needed a husband anyway, with a baby? That’s what Helen herself said: ‘You taught me that, Mum.’

So, all through her pregnancy – saying to me, Iain, anyone else who asked her, pretty much the same thing: ‘I’m fine.’ She spoke of her
independence
– and she’s always been a strong girl – would say that
independence
and strength, these qualities, were the most important in a parent. How she sounds like my own mother that way! Saying that she didn’t need a partner. That she would be fine. That she would manage, absolutely, on her own.

I came to see it, too. Thought then and now: She’ll be okay. I said to her, ‘Well, I was on my own, too, when I was younger than you are and without my mother to help me.’ And Helen told me that she had always had that image in her mind, from when she was a child, of a mother raising children alone, that it came from the stories I used to tell her when she was a little girl. So. Of course. It all adds up. That she would follow to a pattern somehow, from me, my own mother. And the thing is, in her case, like my mother did, she has a mother to help. Because I am always here. And our dear little Katherine. For Iain and me … She’s a gift.

Fathers and mothers all over the world sing their babies to sleep with songs that have been composed especially to calm and soothe and mollify. These songs are well known and even someone like Iain Cowie – to whom no lullaby was ever sung – would be familiar with certain tunes, certain words. Iain has heard his wife Margaret sing to Helen those quiet songs that he could hum to himself when he’s alone. Indeed, the pale lovely strain of something that Margaret used to sing to Helen when she was small … It’s playing in his mind now and soothing him.

And Helen – the child he has always considered to be his own child … She sings to her own daughter in the same way. Sings the same old songs, folk songs you might call them. And some of these, too, Iain knows, though some of them are new.

Certainly a different kind of lullaby has been an important theme of this book. It was there in the second line of the Urlar and has emerged as a developing musical idea throughout the piobaireachd ‘Lament for Himself’.

You took her away …

That song for someone else’s granddaughter, maybe, but she’s Iain’s own child, the way he considers it. So –

You took her away …

But he brought her home again. Iain did. And the notes, though they have that drop, of the shock, of a child who has been taken … Even so the tune has been composed to quiet all the crying.

That, hush.

Hush.

The Lullaby whispers.

As Iain himself sits quietly now.

For in the end, after everything that has happened, a lullaby will soothe. It’s a tune made for calmness, contemplation. Indeed, most musicians will acknowledge that the idea of a lullaby, a set of notes that are intended to bring a still centre to a composition, is at the heart of anything they play or sing or write. No matter how busy the tune may seem to be, how agitated at first, or quickening, so it has always been that the music itself will bring comfort, solace – and though John Sutherland’s lullaby that is annotated so clearly in his ‘Lament for Himself’ is perhaps the first
example
of this sort of thinking being incorporated within the piobaireachd form, nevertheless at the heart of even the most stately Ceol Mor we hear a soft song.

The earliest printed collection of this kind of music appeared, with no reference at all as to how it may be included within a composition of bagpipe music, in an edition published by a John Forbes in 1662 in
Aberdeen
. The folio comprised twenty-five old Scottish airs and lullabies, and established at the time a genre of secular music that was disseminated in a range of pamphlets and editions throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth
centuries, including
The Scots Musical Museum,
published in six
volumes
from 1787 to 1803 by James Johnson and Robert Burns, which also included new works by Burns. The
Select Scottish Airs
collected by George Thomson and published between 1799 and 1818 included contributions from Burns and Walter Scott.

From then it took several generations of pipers and Highland
musicians
to identify and highlight the links between the lyrics and tunes of these publications and certain compositions played on the Highland
bagpipe
. Most recently, following the related discussion around the
piobaireachd
‘Lament for Himself’, Helen MacKay of Sutherland has brought attention to the connections between the two in a number of scholarly papers published by Edinburgh University Press entitled ‘The Lullaby as
a Feminist Metaphor in Highland Literature – from the Ballad to Neil Gunn’, and has also written about the musical link between the great MacCrimmon piobaireachd ‘Lament for the Children’ and the tradition of song and lullaby that exisited at the time of its composition. Seumus MacNeill, in his book
Piobaireachd: Classical Music of the Highland Bagpipe,
also establishes the similarity between the sound of the pipes, when expertly played, and the human voice when it is used to sing a song with great emotional and psychological content. The connection between
piobaireachd
and lyric, sound and poetry, is at its most marked in these passages of his book and come to bear upon the timbre and tone of ‘The Big Music’ itself as a genre that blends together words and music.

From that first second when the nurse let her have him to her, to hold, she felt herself to be undone by the strength of feeling for him. Like holding her breath and then forgetting how to let it go is how it seemed, as though physically she was completely changed now that she had this infant in her care. There was nothing else she could do but be a mother to him, feed him, clean him, incline her whole body towards him, as though protecting him from the weather. Think about an animal in the field with its young –

I could lick him clean …

– is how Elizabeth’s instincts came alive for her, with her first and only child in her arms. He was tucked right in beside her, his tiny wrapped body so close against her that he remained part of her, is how she thought of him,
attached,
a part of herself just as he’d been inside her before, when her body had been his room and cradle and now here he was pulled out of that dark place, maybe, and in the light to look at, but still belonging to somewhere no one but him knew about or could see.

And how she pored over him, Elizabeth, how she couldn’t stop
looking
into his face, his scowling brow as he slept, changing in seconds to joy and fear and wonder. All the emotions of the world passing over him like weather, then opening his eyes to regard her with a shocked and steady stare.
Who are you?
His gaze seemed to say then.
Where have you come from?
Lying there unmoving in a shocked and steady stillness. Or his hands would come up at the side of his face – those tiny hands with their
miniature fingers clasping like a bird’s claw, fingernails so miniature they were unimaginable, somehow, even as she took one of his fingers between her own and examined it for size … Unimaginable.

Is why she couldn’t stop looking. As though looking might make him real. And to touch him, hold him … She never wanted to let him go. That first day, after she’d had him against her, the frail weight of him in his blankets … She couldn’t imagine then how she could ever let him out of her sight. Though she must, she knew – would have to give him up to the nurse that day, and those that followed, and when she was fully recovered from the birth … She would have to give him up for longer. Finally, at the end of the day when the maid came for him, she must go back then to the room where her husband was waiting.

And to do that! To have to hand her son over! Leave the nursery where his things were, his tiny clothes and blankets and toys, his ball, his little wooden ship. To have to leave that beautiful place and go to another part of the House, to have to see her tiny boy be taken away by the capable maid who would simply come for him, sweep him up from the crib where he had lain beneath Elizabeth’s gaze, his mother’s gaze, to have him plucked out from his mother’s arms and taken off in a bundle away from her …