Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8

by Michael Kelly

  The waves were pitching steadily higher and Malcolm was glad they had arrived in the calm of the morning. He thought of the journeys made in Ossian’s time, if Ossian had ever existed. Heroes were meant to undertake epic voyages and crossing rougher seas made for better stories.

  Miranda had migrated up the shoreline and Malcolm found her crouched in the marram grass, a small shell pressed to her ear, as if it were a conch.

  “Shhh!”

  Malcolm stopped moving in obedience, trying to minimise the crunch of his footfall as he repositioned his body weight.

  “It’s singing.”

  She held out the shell to him. It was small and speckled, coiled at its peak; a whelk of some description. The habit of listening to seashells had always struck him as strange practice; that the hollowed interior could emit the rushing of the waves was hardly surprising when the shell’s cavity amplified the noise of its surroundings. Far more impressive were the shells that created sound, like the Japanese horagai, large conch shells of the right shape and composition, that with the addition of a mouthpiece appended to their spired tips could even be played to produce different notes.

  Miranda’s diminutive find could hardly compete with such titans, but he placed it to his ear anyway.

  “Can you hear it?”

  Her voice was so different to his; she’d been raised an American, her accent clear and unequivocal, lacking the melodic lilt of the islands. He sometimes felt they spoke different languages.

  He nodded noncommittally, hoping it would suffice as an answer and though she pocketed the shell, he couldn’t tell if she believed him or not.

  The rocks were more abundant as they approached the cave. Craggy pillars guarded the entrance, sharpened from where the sea tormented the shore. He remembered that the cave flooded on a spring tide, the surface underfoot rendered smooth and slippery with bladderwrack. As they moved from the light and further into the dark interior, Malcolm was reminded of what an impressive space it was, not unlike a concert hall, the banding on the gneiss reminiscent of the levels of tiered seating. He felt underdressed in his grey dressing gown.

  Miranda climbed deeper into the cave and he gravitated towards a rocky obtrusion in the centre, its surface eroded smooth like a crude lectern. The silence swelled as if signalling the commencement of a piece of music.

  The wind makes strange noises on the islands, whistling through the ravines and crofts, percussing on the corrugated roofs, strumming the rigging of the boats harnessed at the quayside. But the sound Malcolm heard in the depths of the cave was not devised by the elements, for it was one he recognised all too well. It was raw and unpolished but unmistakably the first few notes of Amaterasu’s Silence, the aria he had written for his eponymous lead, a divine sun goddess who sought sanctuary in a cave to escape torment from her malevolent brother. ‘Silence’ was a misnomer of sorts, for Amaterasu’s sojourn in the cave constituted her most vocal moments in the opera, the cave amplifying her long-dormant song, her internment in stone giving liberty to her voice.

  The sound swelled, pitching towards the familiar melody.

  “Miranda?”

  Was it here where he’d first heard the legend of Amaterasu? It must have been; the island was so saturated with Amaterasu it was hard to unravel any prior memories. It was certainly here that he’d decided to compose, in alto tones, the world beyond Amaterasu’s grotto as a place of chaos and dissonance, informed by his habit of listening to the wind and rain from within the cave. And perhaps it had been here that he’d decided Amaterasu should not sing until she was safely ensconced in the cave, the lack of her mezzo soprano voice extending for the entire first half of the opera, rendering her song, when it finally came, all the more precious.

  As well as this, he’d written a series of lacunae—arranged silences—to disrupt the flow of music and signal changes in Amaterasu’s emotional state, increasing in length with every tribulation and ordeal suffered, the longest of which marked the moment the boulder was rolled across the entrance of the cave, shutting out a world now plunged into silence and darkness, a total eclipse of Amaterasu’s divine light.

  The melody in the cave scaled higher but just as suddenly faded into the sound of the surf. Miranda re-appeared, making her way across the rocky terrain, playing stepping stones.

  “Miranda, were you singing?”

  She didn’t seem to hear him, concentrating on balancing across the rocks. But just before she bounded back into the light, he heard her whistling the familiar refrain.

  *

  Dinah was at the threshold when they arrived back, the door ajar to the island dusk, like a good fisherman’s wife waiting for her husband’s return.

  “The Museum have been in touch,” she said after helping Miranda out of her coat.

  He waved away the comment, busied himself with pouring a whisky, trying to ignore the paperwork and laptop spread out on the kitchen counter, regretful that the island’s remoteness was now marred with internet access.

  “They’re becoming impatient, we need to commit to dates.”

  He had been so flattered at first meeting Dinah, when this attractive woman had approached him at a gala dinner, tongue-tied as she tried to put forward her proposal, coyly admitting she was a little starstruck. She wanted to curate a retrospective of his work to mark the thirtieth anniversary of The Silence of Amaterasu. The museum she worked for was on board, especially since Amaterasu’s Silence had featured in a film, a box-office hit, making his work fleetingly popular with a whole new, younger, audience. She’d given him her business card, adding her personal number and underlining her name, Dinah, twice, though the angle made the lines appear more like a caesura //—the pause between music. He had agreed to her suggestion solely to get to know her better, and hardly cared when the project was deferred because of their work schedules and later due to their marriage and Miranda’s birth. Now approaching the anniversary of the fortieth year, Malcolm couldn’t help feeling that this was Dinah’s last-ditch effort to get the show on the road, quite literally, because leaving it any longer would mean him sinking further into inconsequence.

  “We never talk about Ayoko,” she said, watching him drain his drink.

  He used to dream about coming back to the island, the music calling him back across the water. But he hadn’t imagined bringing a new wife back with him, or a child. He became conscious of Miranda in the background, sorting shells on the kitchen table. Children were such adept listeners.

  “Why would we talk of her?” Malcolm replied, “it’s ancient history.”

  “She’s important, to the retrospective.”

  “It was such a small part of my life—”

  “—when you produced your greatest work.”

  He had taken off his dressing gown when he’d returned from the shore, but now he put it on again, feeling the chill of the house.

  “One of your greatest works,” she corrected, placing her hand on his arm, a condolent gesture.

  This was the problem with the retrospective, it implied that everything of worth was in the past, that there was nothing left to come. He knew that in Dinah’s eyes he was already washed-up, that it was better to salvage and polish what he had already produced before it was tarnished further by the critics, like treasure salt-worn by the sea.

  He watched Miranda move her shells, like counters in a game of her own invention. He thought about the voice in the cave and how unlike Miranda’s it was.

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” he said, and pouring himself another whisky, he withdrew to his study.

  *

  It was louder than he remembered living at the sea’s edge. The wind blew unrestrained here, rattling through the old house, blustering papers when the windows were opened, bringing gifts of seagrass and kelp to the door like a loyal pet. It was more deafening on the shore; here you could confide anything to the sea, the words swept away almost immediately by the wind. Malcolm had nothing to confess so he pushed on up the beach, keen to
prove Dinah and the rest of them wrong, that he was still capable of making music, needing the peace of the cave to hear his own thoughts.

  As he entered, he was again struck by the feeling of walking across a cavernous stage, at the head of an orchestra or playacting a character: Old man in grey bathrobe, enters stage left. He leant against the rocky lectern, relieved for the silence. Caves were important in the legends of Ossian too and Malcolm had decided to focus on the moment where Fingal’s son, slain heroically in battle, appeared as a ghost above the cave where his body is interred, calling for revenge. The ghosts of dead warriors inhabited so much of Ossian’s verse, the departed never happy until a bard sings of their exploits.

  “Excuse me?”

  Malcolm turned, shocked at hearing a voice in such proximity, though it was faint, no louder than a whisper. The cave appeared empty. He walked further from the light.

  “Hello?” he called tentatively, scanning the darkness.

  “Excuse me?” the voice rejoined.

  He was reminded of the voice the previous day, how unlike Miranda’s it had sounded. Cave systems were known to distort and amplify sound, the acoustics of Fingal’s Cave for instance harmonised the ebb and flow of the waves as if contriving a lullaby. Though this voice was different still, the sound had to come from somewhere. Malcolm explored the recesses and hollows, unable to discern anyone hiding in the shadows. He moved deeper into the cave, felt the damp surface of the chamber wall, having reached its furthest limits.

  “Excuse me,” the voice spoke again, “can I have your autograph?”

  He had answered many such requests over the years, some not always graciously, but the words and timbre of voice suddenly summoned its bearer into startling clarity in his mind. It was years ago, after a performance of Amaterasu. He’d invited her back to the hotel bar and listened to her congratulate him on his success, his singular talent. She’d mentioned something about an audition, whether he could pull some strings. He couldn’t even recall her name.

  “Excuse me?” the voice persisted, and Malcolm gazed back into the darkness. He tried to move from the sound, but it seemed to follow him, growing more insistent.

  “Excuse me!”

  It had been just after his divorce when he was seeing a lot of different women. He remembered buying her too many drinks, before leading her into an elevator bound for his hotel suite, making some vague promise of putting in a word with the producer, a quick grope in the confined space the requisite exchange. He hadn’t thought of her since.

  The voice had lost its civil cadence and Malcolm realised that it wasn’t coming from the cave but from his person. He patted himself down, unsure what he was looking for, feeling inside his pocket a small, chitinous surface. He held it in his palm, one of Miranda’s shells, helix shaped, barely significant.

  “Excuse me!” the voice said once more, as she had done all those years ago, and he was struck by the memory of her disentangling herself from his embrace as the elevator bell announced its arrival.

  The shell dropped to the ground and Malcolm endured the silence of the cave, just as he had done in the elevator cubicle in that interminable moment after his breathing had steadied and the sound of her footsteps had disappeared down the hall.

  *

  “This is all a bit staged isn’t it?” Malcolm said upon his return, taking in the spectacle of Dinah photographing his study. The room was under siege, books he had never read piled high on his desk, music-stands arranged artfully in shot.

  “The Museum want me to document the composer’s lair, I hope you don’t mind.”

  He did mind, but with the study lacking a lock, he could hardly keep the world out. He thought about issuing a warning, like the one pinned to Miranda’s bedroom door back home, Diva Den: KEEP OUT, though for Dinah, such a prohibition would only serve more as an invite. It hardly mattered anyway, the study was and always had been an empty shell, it was the cave where all the music came from.

  “I was wondering when you were going to return.”

  He had walked agitated lengths along the beach for hours, trying to make sense of what he heard in the cave. He couldn’t go back there, but he didn’t want to be in the house either, the memory too disquieting to bring indoors, where his family dwelt. When he had tired, he sat close to water, watching the seals in the bay, until the spindrift pimpled his skin.

  “Something on your mind?”

  “Just music,” he replied, realising that his lonely meandering would have been plain to see from the study window.

  Dinah beckoned him into the room, and he stepped awkwardly over her photography equipment.

  “Can you sit in the chair?” she asked from behind her tripod.

  He removed his dressing gown and folded it, peeled a red vein of seaweed from the fabric. She instructed him to fold his legs, place his hands together.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said, “pretend I’m not here.”

  He stared through the series of flashes, shifting under the scrutiny.

  “Can you stare out the window and try to look wistful,” she smiled, “divinely inspired.” His frown became more set and she smiled again before kneeling beside the camera, twisting the dials.

  “A quick filmed interview and we’re done.”

  Malcolm shook his head, “Dinah, not now, I don’t have the time.”

  “Well, you’ve been evading my questions ever since we arrived. I have a job to do too. Besides, it’s why we came here.”

  He wanted to object; he hadn’t come here to revisit his past but to write his magnum opus.

  “I can edit out anything you don’t want left in,” she assured, “please?”

  He looked out of the window, this time without her instruction, saw the waves crest higher, the seals long gone. It was easier to acquiesce.

  “So, this is the room where you composed The Silence of Amaterasu? Can you talk to me about the process?”

  “Well…”

  “Did you have a routine?”

  “I, I typically walked in the mornings and came back in the afternoons and evenings to write down what I heard.”

  “What you heard?”

  “The music in my head, it helps being in such a remote place, without traffic and people, where you can hear yourself think.”

  “And how important was your first wife, Ayoko to that process?”

  He fought the urge to look out of the window and glanced toward Dinah instead where she gestured him to continue.

  “She was musical too. She could sing.”

  “Yes, she sang parts of the early overture—there’s that beautiful recording. Why didn’t she pursue her singing professionally?”

  “She wouldn’t have made it on the world stage, her voice wasn’t quite…right. Besides, my career was just starting up, it was a busy time and we needed someone at home.”

  He watched Dinah fold her arms, “things were different then,” he added.

  Dinah pursed her lips but when she spoke again her voice was steady, professional, “Can you describe your time on the island?”

  “When we first came, things were good, we were newlyweds.”

  “And how did you spend your days?”

  “We would walk, have picnics on the beach, sometimes take a small boat out. And in the evenings, we would tell each other stories.”

  “Stories from your respective homes?”

  “Yes, fables and legends, there wasn’t a lot to do on the island, especially after dark. We had to come up with our own entertainment. When it stormed, we would head to the cave, listen to the strange sounds it made.”

  “Go on?”

  “We liked to explore the coves and crags. Ayoko used to hum this melody, which eventually became Amaterasu’s aria.”

  Dinah looked up from her notebook.

  “So, Ayoko came up with the melody?”

  “Well, yes,” Malcolm replied, “but it’s such a small part of the composition.”

  “And the story, she gave yo
u the story?”

  “She told me the story, yes.”

  “So, she co-wrote it?”

  “I don’t think I would put it like that.”

  “But the idea was hers?” Dinah pressed. She stopped the recording, lent forward in her chair.

  “What else was hers?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The silence, the idea for the silence, was that hers too?”

  Before he could say anything, Dinah held out her hand to signal an end to the conversation, a gesture normally reserved to reprimand Miranda, and gathering up her paperwork, she quietly left the room.

  *

  Malcolm scanned the horizon, sipping coffee, the morning grey and wet. The house had settled into an uneasy silence since the previous evening, interrupted only by Dinah reading Miranda her usual bedtime story, extracts of which he knew by rote: “The little mermaid sang more sweetly than them all. The whole court applauded her with hands and tails; and for a moment her heart felt quite gay, for she knew she had the loveliest voice of any on earth or in the sea”. Malcolm was relieved for the quiet, for an end to all the questions and talk of the retrospective. But with Dinah’s equipment still cluttering his study he was relegated to the corners of the old house, waiting for the rain to relent so he could walk along the beach.

  Miranda nursed a bowl of cereal and played with her shells. She was accustomed to the quiet, having been raised by nannies and babysitters, taught that time spent with her parents was to be expended in contemplative pursuits. The beach had allowed her a level of freedom she had never experienced back home, where she could run with the tides and explore the rock pools, her parents blissfully ignorant of her actions or whereabouts. Like Malcolm she gazed out of the window longingly, willing the rain to stop.