The Big Music (9 page)

That when she needs to go back there, that same place would take her in.

Helen’s young. That’s all. Don’t mind her large ideas, then. And her
quietness
you could take for fierce anger, that sense of her independence and opinions and her clear sense of a way – but no. She doesn’t have that certain kind of ire. She’s herself. And I know why she keeps to that room of hers, reading and writing, the window open to the seasons the way she has it open. Even in winter I’ve seen the casement wide open to the air and the cold inside the room like glass.

She’s young, still. That’s the all of it. And, as I say, I know why she stays in the room. The window open in the way of her imagining she might be leaving, as I know she does, imagining leaving all the time. Although I think it’s here she’ll stay.

Anyway, it’s not like he needs to feel sorry for the old fool. He can go to hell and no way back. After what he did this morning, taking a child away from her mother …

There’s nothing about him that is fit.

And it’s been going too long, with his mind poor, and getting weaker, and that means even more work to do for Margaret and for them all.

Helping him.

And never once a word of thanks.

Just like through the old days. The ‘Bring the Land Rover down’ days, the ‘Get the dogs ready for the morning’ and the ‘We’ll be needing the rods’ days. The ‘Tidy up the place a bit after, the bottles and so on, at the riverbank …’

Never once a word.

Of thanks.

And not today either. Out there. After getting him in. There was no thanks for that either – and the state he was in. The fool. Acting like –

‘Iain, I’m back!’

But no. Not like that, like before. Not ‘fool’ like that. Today …

Was different.

Crying and alone out there today on the hill. Wet through to his
trousers
and not able to stand.

That was not like he used to be.

‘Iain, I’m back!’

Because look at him, Iain thinks. Lying through in that little room in the dark. He’s not back anywhere, the old boy.

He’s not back and he’s not going.

Anywhere.

And Helen? Yes, I can understand her kind of dreaming. I’ve been like it myself. Parts of me still feels what it is to be that girl who wanted much, much more than home could give. To go in amongst the hills or across the flat cliff paddocks or to be taking a boat around the top of the firth in a little schooner, deep into the cold of the North Sea … I imagined these voyages, saw myself on them. Taking the train south or way across to the west. Visiting Edinburgh, maybe, Glasgow. All the cities. Going away as I did to the university for that year in Aberdeen.

Little came of it all, I know. Those dreams of mine, when I was a girl,
or thoughts or plans. In the end it was only a ride on the bus, sixty miles away. That’s how far I went away.

Still, one might say my restlessness has come out in Helen.

If it didn’t come out in what went on between me and John
Sutherland
, you could say it’s come out in my daughter. All my restlessness, in the end, all her travelling and her shifting my idea of what it was to change.

Because when I think of it, the way it was for me when I went to John those nights back then, when I was younger, the way I went up to the room we shared at the top of the House and waited for him there … Some nights when he had his friends in, too, and he’d be late, but still I’d wait for him … All those times. Or I would go to him where he sat, in the evening or at the table after dinner. I would put my hand to the back of his neck, to the soft dent at the base of his skull and he leant back into me then … All those times. Those small, small times … It was a yearning, a moving in me, kind of restlessness, maybe, that wanted to be near him and the small times with him could be enough. To have me inclining towards him, that I needed his leaning back. For all during those years I had a good husband who loved me, and we looked after each other, Iain and I have always looked after each other.

My Iain Cowie.

My shy, shy man.

What restlessness must have been in me to take me away from you? To wait in another man’s bedroom that he’d made for me under the eaves, at the top of the stair?

And, yes, he put a blanket across the old boy’s shoulders today, because anyone would have done it.

Like he’d hope someone might do that for him, when the time comes and he’s alone and doesn’t know who he is or where he’s going.

Even though he could have brought him down.

Just as easy, if he’d wanted to, he thinks. He could have.

As he cleans his gun.

Because who is old John by now, anyway, that Iain couldn’t bring him down if he wanted to – but just some old man with money, half dead. And so he has enough to pay for a housekeeper, a hired gun. Let him feel what that gun could do.

He would have felt it this morning, sure enough, if Iain had seen fit to use it.

For let Iain show him, the hired gun. Let them be together just once and there to be an excuse for Iain to take him on …

Has always been like a sort of prayer for him.

Just once.

Let him have the excuse. For him to show the old boy then what real power’s like. Not money. Or a voice that calls and commands.

But a stone or a rock or a gun.

Because it’s like a clench for Iain, of the fist, in his heart, the way that voice calls for him. With his ease, his damn music that he thinks makes him a Highland gentleman – it doesn’t make him a gentleman, the way he is with Margaret doesn’t make him a gentleman.

‘Tidy up here, will you? After we’ve finished here?’

Though he may have been born in this House, John Callum MacKay, and his father before him. Though he might be the son of a family who made of this part of the land something that could be owned …

He despises that, too, Iain does. That one family could shear off from the ways things have always happened here and gain some portion for itself. He’s read enough, he knows the stories of what went on around here – though his own family are not from around here – he knows enough, Iain does.
33
And he knows all old John Callum’s family ever did was charge tenancy for the time the animals could be on the hill, like a tacksman might charge other men, or a factor. Like a thief.

So all of it … Despise.

Because his reading and knowing tell him, Iain: no real Highlander would ever do that, think that way about the land. As money and business. That the land could be seen as no more than a path from one place to another – how that’s all wrong. And just for the fact that some ancestor or other had a few more sheep than others, more than one or two, but charged out the land to his neighbours for theirs so it might stop his own bit of scratching at the earth. So it’s other men’s work’s made him rich.

Another man doing his work.

And times have changed. And people learn, and they watch. And when something happens like what happened here today … Just as well Iain has his own life, that he doesn’t feel he must be owing to anyone.

He has his own gun.

And shouldering it this morning as he did, stepping out the door. Down the brae in the Argocat and off up the hill the other side of the river, the dogs all about him – to get him, like a hunt.

That felt real enough. That was real – not the other, false Highlander who took himself away.

Because once you’ve gone you don’t get to come back.

Do you, dogs?

Is what he’s always thought, what he thought this morning while he was going up there.

When it was like a hunt.

Hunting down a criminal off a hill.

And that he could have finished him off this morning, too, easy, with a bullet or a stone.

Could have. Course he could have.

But …

Once he was away up there on the tops and had caught what he was after …

To see the poor old fool pissed himself through to his trousers and not able to stand …

He didn’t do that.

And yes, he put a blanket around him.

Put a blanket about the false shoulders.

Though anyone would have done it.

And, yes, he lifted him, the body of a criminal, the body of a man who had lived the way he had, treated people the way he had, who would behave towards Margaret the way he behaved … Still he lifted him. Laid him into the seat of the Argo, laid him there.

But so he might hope another would also lift him. Lift Iain.

If he was wet through and alone and shivering. And had not a wife to go back to in the House, or a young woman who’s like a daughter to him and he’s looked after her all these years.

So he might hope then he would also be lifted.

And he was light, the other man was. Like a child, lighter even. Like a leaf.

And –

‘Come on now, John’ Iain had said. ‘We’re here to take you home.’

So, through all those years with him …

Who could say I didn’t love John then?

When I was a young woman and when I first met him I was only a girl.