Through it all she strives to maintain the habit of art, in the face of depression, privation and misunderstanding. And in her home town in Northern Ireland she returns to bury a difficult father, forge a tentative peace with her mother and confront the ghosts of a constricting past. In Glasgow she gives birth to a child - and receives a career-making BBC commission. On the remote island of Islay she struggles for her artistic life in the midst of a relationship gone dangerously wrong.
Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN The one in front of her was better by far.”Ĭopyright © Bernard MacLaverty. There was the baby she had carried inside her head and there was the baby she had carried inside her body. Her baby lying in front of her, an arm’s length away. Then on a particular day, at a particular time after all the preparation, after all the theory and the rules and the speculation, she is led blindfold into a hall and an orchestra explodes into the celebratory sounds of, say, the voices’ entry in Handel’s Zadok the Priest or the final section of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy or the closing section of Messiaen’s Turangalîla symphony.Īnd the voice of her teacher leans close to her blindfolded ear and says quietly, ‘That’s what it is. It was like attending musical theory classes all her life, learning to sight-read, being shown the instruments and handling them, seeing photographs of composers, reading books about harmony and counterpoint but at no time ever hearing a single note of music. The fingernails, the dark fluffy hair of the head, the whorl of the ear, they were all part of her and yet they belonged to someone else. Her child was so much more than Catherine’s eyes could take in. And if it wasn’t a profound mystery, then her child was a burden to her, a mere nuisance. That her baby should be here, that she should be who she was, was a profound mystery. And yet when it happened, it was a miracle. She’d had this baby inside her, while she had come from inside her mother, who had in her turn been inside Granny Boyd. She saw her own family nested like Russian dolls. Everybody she knew, or ever would know, had gone through this process of being born. Yes, she had gone to pre-natal classes on the island. She could not get enough of her, this tiny person who had grown out of her body. “When she came back from the phone she lay down on her bed and watched Anna again. This is part of the life of Catherine McKenna - estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother and a woman composer making her mark in a male dominated field.
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