LACUNAE

V. H. LESLIE

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs.

—THE TEMPEST

Malcolm heard Mendelssohn as the island came into view. It was hard not to think of his Hebridean overture amid the rocking of the waves, the dark hollow of the cave in the distance. It was not quite Fingal’s; the rocky façade lacked the distinctive neat, angular arrangement, though it too had been formed by a volcanic deluge many millions of years ago. His daughter, Miranda sat at the prow, dwarfed in her bright orange lifejacket, glancing back at her parents as the boat sliced through the water, salt-sprayed and smiling. Dinah shouted something out to her, something cautionary Malcolm supposed, but the sound was taken by the wind and silenced by the churn of the engine. Just along from the cave, Malcolm viewed the white stone house and he let the coin he held drop into the water, just as he had always done when crossing the strait, in payment to the Blue Men—the kelpies

With the engine chugging to a stop, the sounds of the sea took precedence, the pounding of the waves against the hull, the screech of gulls overhead. Malcolm had rolled up his trouser-legs in preparation for stepping from the boat into the surf, but as he did so, a wave broke and he felt the shock of cold, an involuntary re-baptism, as the water seeped through his clothes. He waved away Dinah’s attempts to steady him and she turned her attention instead to instructing the ferrymen about their luggage. Malcolm didn’t offer to help; it was a job for younger men. Miranda was already up ahead, running excited lengths along the beach, stopping occasionally to examine driftage, or to collect something from the shore that had caught her eye. She greeted her father as he stepped out of the sea with palms outstretched, full of limpet and mussel shells, the coiled remains of periwinkles.

“Look.”

But Malcolm was looking past her towards the cave. It could well have featured in the legends of Ossian, the supposed fragments of ancient balladry James Macpherson had discovered and translated in the Romantic era, before he was discredited as a forger. Whether the stories of Fingal and his exploits had come from a third century Highland bard as Macpherson had professed or from Macpherson himself, had never mattered to Malcolm. He saw the landscape of his youth, the crags and gullies where he played through Ossian’s lens, charged with heroic energy. But he had been away from home for a long time; like so many of his forbears, he had settled across the Atlantic, not driven out as they had been in those bygone times by the greed of landowners, but lured by bright lights, whilst the brave old world had persisted and endured. Now the songs of home would occupy his twilight years. No mere tone poem like Mendelssohn’s would suffice, but a song cycle, a fittingly epic undertaking in homage to Ossian. It would be his magnum opus.

Miranda hadn’t waited for a reply and was busy jumping the waves, so he made his way past her, up the beach beyond the machair, toward the steps of the stone house. It was just as he remembered it, sand on the flagstones, the embroidery sampler on the wall. He made his way through the warren of rooms, nooks providing vistas out toward the gray Atlantic, until he found himself on a familiar threshold. It was simply furnished, as it had always been, the desk arranged against the window, overlooking the expanse of beach, the rocky foreshore at the entrance of the cave just visible. He had composed here every summer for nine years—the duration of his first marriage—where, some would say, he had produced his best work.

He wondered if it was true, that the last four decades had amounted to nothing more than playacting the role of composer. The Edinburgh Review critic had certainly thought so, fancifully comparing him to a “shipwrecked Prospero,” exiled from the operatic vanguard, because—in words he now knew by rote—“. . . he had bartered his baton for a magic wand, invoking the Disneyfication of his early oeuvre.” He remembered pushing the paper across the kitchen table for Dinah to read, the words too potent to be said out loud. The article ended with the assertion that he had produced nothing of value since The Silence of Amaterasu. She had ripped out the page, screwing it into a ball.

“Well, fuck him!”

He watched Dinah now, helping the ferrymen carry their bags through the shallows, battling the swell and spray, while Miranda orbited their belongings on the beach, piled high like a haul of treasure, or the mound of a bonfire.

He’d expected to be instantly inspired, the music welling up from a long dormant place inside, just by virtue of being back on the island, but he could hear only the words of the Edinburgh Review critic, on a loop like a steady incantation. It struck him as ironic that words he had never voiced could become so resounding in his head. He’d had bad reviews before, especially at the start of his career, when his work was regarded as experimental, but he’d never really paid them much heed. Dinah had said that the Scots were just bitter that he’d been co-opted by the Americans, that they’d lost a national icon. He didn’t see it like that; he’d retained his dual citizenship and heeded the siren-call of home, his feet now firmly set on bleached sand, but he did wonder if he was in fact, lost. Not in the sense Dinah supposed, of being cloven between two nation states but lost to a different time and place, akin to the misty void where Fingal and his warrior-ghosts lingered.

He stared at the blank page, trying to summon a melody but fixated instead on the sounds of the house, the animated laughter of cartoons from Miranda’s tablet, Dinah clanging in the kitchen, putting away their groceries. When the house settled into silence, he found himself gravitating towards the interior, seeking sound. He found Dinah in the bedroom unpacking their bags.

“Looking for this,” she asked, handing him a gray dressing gown, threadbare in parts, his charm against writer’s block.

“I didn’t think I’d need it,” he said, though he put it on anyway.

An oft-repeated dinner party story, before the Edinburgh Review critic had styled him a modern-day sorcerer, centered on Miranda’s childish confusion between the words musician and magician and her steadfast conviction that her father only made music with the aid of potions and spells. He did, after all, conduct himself in secret, working from his locked study, and he donned a magician’s cape, albeit a rather old and gray flannel robe. Dinah had found it too endearing to correct and they kept the pretense going well into Miranda’s first few years of kindergarten, where the family pictures she drew all featured Malcolm shrouded in gray, the messy crayon marks making him appear more animal than human. As her drawing became more controlled, she would add symbols to his cloak, stars, a moon, sometimes even adding a magician’s hat to the ensemble, so there could be no doubt of his profession. The dinner party guests would laugh imagining the kindergarten teacher’s disappointment when Malcolm declined the offer of putting on a magic show for the class.

“Such a cliché,” Dinah said, taking in his appearance, “the creatives in bathrobes while the rest of us have to wear real clothes.”

He smiled back, rubbed her shoulders, “What do you think of the house?”

“Quaint. Drafty.”

The theme-tune of one of Miranda’s cartoons started up again and Dinah sighed. Miranda had clearly exhausted her allocation of screen-time for the day.

“Why don’t you have an explore with her?” “I’m here to work.”

She began to fold the garment in front of her with slow, careful creases. Malcolm noted the tightness of her lips, the silence that would ensue.

“Okay, okay.”

“And we need to talk about Ayoko,” she said as he left the room, though he pretended not to hear.

Miranda skirted the rock pools along the shoreline, testing their depths with a shard of driftwood. She’d beckon to Malcolm to follow but as soon as he caught up, her attention would be diverted elsewhere, and he found himself trailing behind her again. This new world under her feet absorbed her to such an extent that she missed the seals further out in the bay who had come to observe the new arrivals. They seemed to nod at Malcolm but by the time he pointed them out to Miranda they had swum away.

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 minimize 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 gray dressing gown.

Miranda climbed deeper into the cave and he gravitated towards a rocky obtrusion in the center, its surface eroded smooth like a crude lectern. The silence swelled as if signaling 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 recognized 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 reappeared, 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 star-struck. 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 gray 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 harmonized 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 realized 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, realizing 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 you 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 gray 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.

“What are you up to, sweetheart?” Dinah asked entering the room, heading for the coffee pot, her voice unusually buoyant, compensating for the strained atmosphere of the night before.

Malcolm made to reply but saw her gaze directed at Miranda.

“Just sorting my shells.”

“So, there’s a system?”

Malcolm doubted it. The groupings appeared entirely arbitrary, without any consistency in size or shape or color. Limpet shells and tellins, periwinkles, dog whelks, and cockles all crowded the kitchen table. A cursory glance confirmed that this was a taxonomy devised by a child’s mind.

“These ones are my pretty shells,” Miranda said, handing Dinah a few speckled examples, “and these ones feel nice.”

“They do feel nice,” Dinah said running her finger along a pearly veneer.

“And these ones,” she said, circling a cluster together very delicately, “sing.”

“Singing indeed? Malcolm, do you hear this?”

Malcolm had turned his attention back out the window, observing a glimmer of sun streaking between the clouds.

“Well, they don’t all sing,” she corrected, “some just speak sweetly.”

“And how do you find a singing shell?”

Miranda edged closer to her mother, her response almost a whisper.

“You have to listen very hard.”

Dinah’s phone vibrated from its place on the table, the shells clattering against the surface.

“Sorry sweetheart,” she said, scrolling through her messages.

“Did you know that hermit crabs don’t have shells of their own, that they find empty shells to live in, like periwinkles and whelks?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” Dinah replied, looking at her screen. “Malcolm are you listening?” He mumbled a reply, not seeing why he should listen when she was only pretending to.

“The male hermit crabs terrorize the females into vacating their shells,” Miranda continued, using two shells to demonstrate their skirmish, “that’s called the molt, when the crabs lose their shells. When they are between shells, they mate.”

Though the shells of the hermit crabs had been cast aside in her underwater scenario, she placed the shells on top of each other in simulation of intercourse, grating the husks against one another.

“Miranda!” Dinah looked up from her phone, “that’s not appropriate conversation for the table,” and ushering her out of her chair and towards the door, she added, “I think it’s time you got out of your bedclothes and brushed your teeth.”

The ringtone of Dinah’s phone accompanied them down the hall and Malcolm heard Dinah’s phone voice as she answered, the conversation diminishing as she moved toward the sitting room to get better reception. He cast a glance over Miranda’s shells, picking up a conical specimen, something distinctly sexual about the ventral cavity. He heard the ring of an elevator bell in his mind before Amaterasu’s Silence began to play softly.

“I put one of the singing shells in your pocket,” Miranda said from the doorway, startling him into nearly dropping the one he held, “did you hear it?”

As if pre-empting Dinah’s summons, she returned the way she had come, just as Dinah’s voice filled the house, calling her back.

A storm was brewing. Malcolm recognized the stillness of the water, a heaviness in the air, the unusual quiet at the sea’s edge. Miranda seemed unaware, her eyes cast down, trawling through knots of seaweed. Malcolm followed her closely, watching how she moved back and forth like the tide, harvesting the shore. What was it that she could see and hear that he couldn’t? She had found a small red bucket washed up at the strandline—its companion spade still lost at sea—and requisitioned it for her beachcombing, collecting fragments of pottery and sea-glass, redundant egg cases—mermaid’s purses—which along with her shells formed a veritable catch.

Watching Miranda at play, listening to her shells, he remembered what she’d said about her collection, that some didn’t sing, they spoke sweetly. The woman in the elevator had certainly spoken sweetly, perhaps that was why he remembered her so easily, before the memory had soured. Miranda held one of the shells higher as if to catch a better frequency before casting it aside, whether due to a lack of sound or because it emitted a sound she disliked, he hardly knew. You would have to speak sweetly, he supposed, to gain the ear of a child.

Though the wind was low, he felt a shift in the air, saw Miranda stand as if summoned.

“Listen,” she called.

A low plaintive moan filled the air and they both moved towards it, Miranda breaking into a run, her bucket clattering and spilling. Malcolm thought of the ghost of Fingal’s son, stationed at the summit of the cave where his body lay entombed, issuing his ardent battle-cry, calling men to action. And at the same time, he wondered if the voices he’d heard in the cave could carry this far, reminded of Amaterasu’s Silence rising up from the pit.

Miranda came to a stop, took a cautious step back, and when Malcolm edged closer, he saw why. A group of seals had set up camp at the entrance of the cave, basking on beds of kelp, calling to one another in doleful, drawn-out notes, their song sweetly sorrowful when echoed within the hollowed chamber.

He’d seen a lot of different set designs for Amaterasu’s grotto over the years. There were always conceptual treatments, the auditorium itself imagined as the interior of the cave, the stage pared down, either minimalist in principle or economy. Then there were those that drew on a Japanese aesthetic; one popular production imagined the space as a concave white screen onto which shadow puppets—the actors of the outside world—danced, while the haloed-boulder obstructing the cave’s entrance filled the backdrop like a full moon.

But Malcolm’s favorite by far had seen Amaterasu’s story transposed to a frozen tundra, the cave appearing to be made of crystal, the imitation stalagmites not unlike the hexagonal columns of Fingal’s cave. It reminded him of the Fortress of Solitude in the Superman comics, a place fit for a hero’s retreat. He thought of the chitinous surface of Miranda’s shells and of the mineral parity of shell and rock; how the pearlized interiors of clams and oysters, their offspring pearls formed by layers of nacre, could rival the lucent beauty of crystal.

Though Dinah’s questions had ceased for the time being, the study was still littered with the remnants of the retrospective. He rummaged through Dinah’s files, looking at photographs and concert programmes, newspaper cuttings of reviews and articles. Then he replayed the interview on Dinah’s camera, listening to his voice and Dinah’s in concert, discordant and off-key. Surrounded by the artifacts of his prolific career, it was plain that nothing had really mattered since Amaterasu. It was his magnum opus, he was the only one who refused to see it, to think so obstinately that there was still more music to make. Maybe it was time for him to take his bow and let Dinah sing his requiem.

“Who are you talking to?” Dinah said, before realizing the camera was in playback mode. She let it run and joined him in leafing through the contents of his life. Though Ayoko hardly featured, Dinah paused on a photograph of Malcolm rehearsing with the orchestra. A younger man then, he was hunched over the score, making notes, whilst in the background, barely noticeable stood a slight figure, her eyes closed, her arms raised as if conducting the music.

Veins of light flickered on the horizon, followed a few moments later by the grumble of thunder, the din of the sudden downpour.

“Will you come with me to the cave?” Malcolm asked.

He knew it was asking a lot, to relive traditions that weren’t her own, to walk in the wake of his first wife.

She looked out at the rain then back at the photograph. “No Malcolm.”

She had always loved him for Amaterasu, just as others had before, but since the interview he’d seen the doubt in her eyes, the dawning suspicion that he was not the sole author. How could he explain that the island had devised an arrangement for two voices, voices that harmonized so well that it was hard to separate their respective parts, though one had always soared slightly higher than the other. But their duet could not continue forever and as those summers had passed, the world outside had become more clamorous, disturbing their peace until they had to arrange silence just to hear their song. It was Ayoko’s idea to add lacunae to the score, to make space for Amaterasu’s voice. But her own voice wasn’t right to carry Amaterasu out of the cave and onto the stage, not at that time; it wasn’t white and male, the qualification needed to head an orchestra, to conduct their opus, so she was left to command and inhabit the silence instead.

He was soaked to the bone by the time he made it to the cave, his dressing gown sleek like seal fur. He’d thought only of Ayoko as he hurried through the rain, of the times holed-up in the cave, listening to the tempest outside, her voice rising above the dissonance. He made his way to the stone plinth and upended his pockets, arranging Miranda’s shells into a loose circle. He’d brought her entire collection, unsure which of her finds was responsible for the voice he heard on that first visit to the cave. Whether he believed in the magic of Miranda’s singing shells or not, the hope of hearing Ayoko’s voice again outweighed any feelings of irrationality.

It was an impressive collection. In the flashes of light, he recognized the hinged shells of mussels and cockles, delicate cowries and he opened them up in the absurd hope it might encourage them to sing. And there were whelks and periwinkles, their coiled peaks like the tails of mermaids turned in on themselves. Maybe this was all that remained of those fabled creatures, their imprint echoing in the waves and spirals of nature’s pattern, and he was reminded of the little mermaid from Miranda’s story, willing to give up her voice in exchange for something greater.

Malcolm heard only the storm for a long time but gradually as his ears become more accustomed to the stillness of the cave, it gave way to a different cacophony. There were voices in the shells, voices he recognized for the most part, women that he had hurt or overlooked, loved and spurned. Some spoke, others sang, and some shouted their words vehemently, spitting out their pain in plosive notes, all competing to be heard, their voices, consigned to silence, now liberated within the sanctuary of the cave. Rising above it all was Ayoko’s voice, his not-so-silent partner, singing Amaterasu’s Silence in doleful tones, not just the first few bars this time, but the entire melody, her voice soaring above the din, curating all the pain into a beautiful harmony.

“Malcolm! Malcolm!” he heard his name far off in the distance, was conscious of the reek of seaweed, his cheek wet.

“Malcolm!” came the voice again, calling him from outside the cave. He rose slightly, seeing that he had lain in the pit of the cave, interred overnight, the light streaking through the rock, along with the lapping of the tide restoring him to life.

“My god, are you okay?” He saw Dinah and Miranda run towards him, Dinah kneeling at his side, placing her hand against his head.

“Yes, fine, fine,” he replied. She tried to lift him to his feet, but he remained rooted to the spot.

“Let’s get you back to the house.”

“No. I want to stay here.”

Dinah stood over him.

“That’s preposterous! You’ll catch your death.”

“I’m fine,” he repeated, leaning against the plinth. “Miranda, fetch me some more of those singing shells,” he said and before Dinah could object, she had run back out to the shore to do his bidding. Children were much better listeners than adults, able to perceive possibilities and frequencies adults couldn’t even fathom. Untold songs lay undiscovered out there, stoppered like messages in bottles, cast out into a seemingly silent world, just waiting to be found. Malcolm cast a glance about the cave; it was a molt of sorts, an absence in-between, those silenced voices just needed the temptation of a bigger shell to entice them out.

“Malcolm?” Dinah pressed, “we have to leave.”

He thought of Amaterasu in her cave, wanting to be left alone, barring the door to the shadows dancing outside.

“I can’t,” he said, “I have to listen to the music.”

“What music?”

He glanced toward the rocky ledge; his chorus of shell already assembled. They all had stories to tell, silences to speak, their pain rendered more beautiful in the depths of the cave. Like Macpherson and his songs of old, he would weave together fragments of forgotten voices and compose a piece of epic proportions, a haunting polyphony, of silence lost and found.

“Malcolm?”

“Wait, they’re just warming up. Listen . . .”

Dinah laughed and the sound reverberated through the cave.

“Malcolm,” she entreated, after the laughter had faded and she saw he was in earnest, “please.”

But he wasn’t listening to her. Instead, he could just make out the shell voices in muted concert, muffled whispers, faint glissandos scaling higher. It didn’t matter if Dinah was angry with him because eventually her anger would subside to silence and then there was every chance it would find itself lodged in shell, washed up on the beach for him to find. Then he would add her voice to his choir, where the sound would be so much sweeter.

In the distance he heard footsteps through water, Dinah’s voice urgent on her mobile, I think he’s had a fall, calling for action, but diminishing as she made her way up the shore seeking better reception. He wanted to tell her to get her camera, to come back and document the composer’s lair but the music was getting louder, calling for his complete attention. He had a lot of listening to do, to atone for all the silence he had imposed on others, while his music had been free to rise above the cave and into the world. He closed his eyes and inhaled the salt air, pulling the damp fur of his gown about him tighter, listening to the song of salvaged voices, as the seals in the bay wailed at the loss of their pups drowned in the tempest.