The Big Music (4 page)

By this time the weather has fully turned. The clouds that were laid over thinly on the blue, taking out the sun’s warmth, have thickened, darkened, the rain come in from the west.

And John has no coat on.

Johnnie has no coat.

Just the cotton jacket and the thin, silly shoes. The baby is covered in the white blanket and it is this, in the end, the others will see up against the grey when Iain strains to get a glimpse in his binoculars, casting across the tops, along the green face: There it is! This tiny fleck of white against the greyness of the hill, against the rain. Is what will bring him in. Iain sending the dogs up first, once he’s got the Argo over the river and across the flat, and then coming himself at a run behind them, closing in on the old man, minutes and minutes getting nearer to him and the child.

But for now you wouldn’t guess it. That the morning’s to be saved this way. All you’d see is an old man with a baby he shouldn’t be carrying out alone with her in the weather and the child moving in his arms, a good
sign perhaps, for I worried before when she lay so still and quiet. But this is her awake now, and twisting enough in an old man’s grasp for to make him think for a second he could drop her. Christ! For not like a parcel at all, remember, he thought that before – she’s a baby, Christ! – and now she’s shaking her head, starting fretting, and turning and harder and harder for him to hold and – No! Making that sound, like No! again. No! And wide awake and in a temper and twisting and moving and screwing up her face and now she’s crying, pure crying out into the air and loud and he’d need a lullaby now, all right, a real lullaby,
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to keep her still and steady.

But not the one he’s been hearing for none of that is about comfort – and he has heard all the words of that tune and they’re not his to sing. With the weather turning into heavy rain it seems as though the hills themselves could hear that the song, and the dark air too could hear it, down by the House and up by the rivers and the loch, like Johnnie’s poor mind can hear it, down by the House and up by the rivers and the loch, like Johnnie’s poor mind can hear … That the voice of the song is not his, it never was, though the notes may be formed for it from out of his own tune. Because it’s a woman singing, the whole lullaby in place now within the theme and set in the first part of the music, in the ground, this small thing contained within it and never his part to sing the words at all.

When it’s a mother’s song. Not his song. Only listen:

An old man taken the baby away,

He’s snatched her up in his arms for to see

Her life in his, to stay his dying

but the child’s not his, her mother is me.

The people at the House and what they thought of him

Thinks nothing. Sits cleaning his gun. Glass of Morangie set down on the floor by his right foot, eye on the barrel.

Why should I be thinking about him?

Of the three of them, he’s the outsider here. Knows fine what went on between the old boy and Margaret all that time ago. And –

To hell with him.

Because he knows fine, too, that was in the past and he’s the one
married
to her, not that other. So:

To hell again.

For look at him, when he last looked at him. John Callum MacKay. He’s old.

He takes a sip of his whisky. And Iain’s the young one. Feels like it. He’s the one fit and strong. He breaks the gun and takes up a cloth that’s full of oil. Rubs the gun down the long length, turns it in his lap, once, twice. So just make it that there’s nothing to think about that other one. Nothing. He’s only old. And all that business with Margaret, it’s in the past and long before he came along, before Iain came.

And by now he’s been here longer than that other, too, when that other
only returned to the House after his father had passed. Iain the young one from the beginning, you could say, in place here already when that other returned, and always younger than him, always, and stronger.

So –

To hell.

And most women, anyway, when you meet them … Well, they’re going to have something from before you knew them hidden in their skirts.

He drains the glass then, sets it down. Takes up the bottle and pours himself another. No point going back into that bit of time anyhow, the past, with women. You move on. You marry. And he’s the one did that, took Margaret that way. She was a woman with a child and he was the one, Iain, who gave her a ring, a name –

All right?

A decency you could say, for people still care about those things, and she did, Margaret cared.

So all right again.

For she needed it, didn’t she? Margaret did? For Helen back then? A marriage and a place for Helen in a family when Helen was just a child? For them to be together here, working at the House, to be a family of their own.

They all wanted that, the three of them.

And nothing to do with that other. Nothing.

So just think nothing, think –

To hell. To hell.

For just because people like old Johnnie always get what they want, have a certain way with them, with women, with people. Just because they have money and a bit of power, maybe, or so they think … Well.

He’s not going to let that trouble him now, Iain’s not. He’s not going to let a single thing trouble him now.

So.

He takes another sip of whisky.

Good whisky, too.

And just …

Don’t think.

For he’s got his own run of the place here, and Margaret, and Helen … They all do, they do things their own way. And Iain the one sorts it all out, it’s Iain they call for, with the animals and the land, he the one in charge and not that other who thinks everyone’s just here to do his
bidding
, swanning up from London like he used to, calling them from the end of the road, like some king, from the old call box there: ‘Bring the Land Rover down for me, will you, Iain? I’m back!’

For who does he think he is?

Old man?

Nothing bit of a man?

It’s Iain who has the power here. You can see it, he still has it. In the strength of his arms, his legs. Like a young man is what he is.

And fit.

He takes another sip.

And strong.

(transcript)
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I see a look, sometimes, in his eyes and yes, it is then like it used to be. As though … Perhaps. Is what I see. That look, and only that, nothing more. For it’s been a long time now since we were together in that way, and him married at the time but with Sarah all the way down in London.

Do you have feelings about him now?

I don’t have any feelings about any of that now.

But he was lonely. And you were lonely too. I’m like you were back then, that time in your life, alone with a young child.

I could tell you what the feelings were back then.

I could try and write it down.

(notes)

How I was then, and you will understand this, any woman who’s had a child but without a man around her, who’s been on her own, would understand. How a woman like that, after childbirth and alone, is aware of her aloneness, somehow more aware, I think, is my feeling, in a way that a woman within a marriage is not.

I could tell you, Helen.

About the gaping kind of open feeling from having had a baby but no man there in the bed afterwards. After you’ve let yourself wide open for the child …

But you already know. You’re my daughter and with a child of your own. Of course you know. How, after birth, one is made to be all open. I can tell you about this because you know too what it is not to value
marriage
in the same way – once you’ve gone through a labour on your own. You just don’t.

So it is if there’s no man to be with you at the birth, or afterwards in the bed. You just learn early it’s on your own you’ll be managing, alone, and you do manage, you get on with it, you’re the one taking care.
Nothing
else for me to do now than keep that habit. Looking after the House, the mealtimes, taking care of the bit of the garden we’ve got left,
managing
the place for the guests when the guests used to come.

I’m busy enough. And as for John, well, you could say I’ve always been the one to keep a look out for him, take care of him. And so I will continue.

Turning over his bed –

(though it’s not the same bed)

– and his sheets, in his bedroom –

(though it’s not the little room at the top of the House)

– taking care of that room –

(where we used to go …)

– cleaning out his bath. I lay the table in the dining room like we’ve
always done, using that room in the evenings even though it’s only him here and the visitors may love it when they come, sitting around the lovely wood of that table, and the candles lit, and the patterned china laid out that was his mother’s. But for the most part it’s just one man at the table. Though Iain will go in there sometimes, I know, to sit in his same seat, and he’ll take a dram there. I’ve seen him.

(transcript)

It’s always been this way.

Always?

For ease, yes, let me say. Certain ways, patterns of doing things. Like his mother used to do before him, and the mother before her no doubt. The time passing not noticed because the House stays the same, the way we do things the same.

So, yes, because of that maybe, that feeling of no time at all passed between then and now … I can still see that same look in his eyes. And …

Perhaps.

Is the look. Yes, I do know that. For it’s been the same look all these years, though I’m with Iain now for more than thirty.

A long time.

A long time.

So …?

Yes, perhaps.

I understand the look. I understand that feeling, too.

Her part would be to say: ‘I don’t feel I have any more choices about being here than the others.’

And she could say that. Claim inevitable. The being here. The being on her own in this empty place. That her mother’s right, she’s like her mother. That she understands that all of it’s a thing of no choice in the end, and her bringing a child into it, too. Could say she had no more will in that either than her mother did all those years ago when she brought her own child in.

So, she could say: ‘I don’t feel I have any more choices about being here than the others.’

For it’s like she’s never been gone now she’s back here at the House again. Though she’s had all her travelling and her study, and all her friends and lovers and her life. I n the end she’s no different than Margaret and Iain, no more variation in her than they who’ve never lived more than sixty miles from where they all bed down now, eat, work, as rooted here, brought back to the place she belongs to, as a plant dug up waits to be put back in the same kind of soil. Just as the old man himself came back after years of being gone, came back for good.