Time Will Tell (12 page)

He checked and re-checked his transcription, stowed it safely in his bag and then placed the original manuscript back in the spine. The only task that remained was to present his research findings to the librarian, who arrived punctually at five o'clock. What he had to show was unimpressive – a few anecdotes about singers misbehaving, records of payments to Mouton for instruction of the choirboys, a half-completed chart of references to other known composers. He struggled to think of interesting questions to ask, if only to ensure future access to the archives, and the old man showed his disappointment all too clearly, muttering something under his breath about Americans with too much money. Andrew's breath caught in his throat. The archivist, after all, could stop him returning to the library and thus bar access to the manuscript. Charm was needed. Sweating, his heart thumping, he fulsomely thanked the old man for his patience and offered exaggerated assurances that he would make more progress the next time; although he had little to show on paper, he was now much more familiar with the archaic formal language as well as the handwriting of the scribes, and he was sure that any future trip would be a success. The archivist did not, at least, argue the point, and Andrew was sure that he would yet be allowed to return to claim his treasure.

Thinking he had been left alone, Andrew began gathering his things together and was surprised to see the old man still standing there. Had he, asked the archivist, taken a look at the South Transept? Andrew hadn't. He casually glossed over his omission by saying that he intended to do so now. The old man nodded and waited for him to leave.

Outside the sun was low in the sky. Shadows rested on the complex carvings of the portal and, above it, the tracery that surrounded the Rose Window. Andrew struggled to remember what the librarian had said, but all he could recall was something about Fortune. He looked up and picked out a parade of figures from pagan religions, most of them Egyptian. Here, next to the King, sat Anubis, the Egyptian God of the Dead, a jackal, and around the window danced figures of the zodiac. The images were certainly strange. The design seemed to suggest that within the church one was safe from secular influences, but outside darker forces were to be found. Casting his mind back to a course he'd taken on Shakespeare, Andrew remembered the wheel of fortune. What went up must come down was the essential lesson, here manifest in four stages of fortune represented in the quarters of the hour:
Sum sine regno; regnabo; regno; regnavi
– I am without a kingdom; I will reign; I reign; I have reigned. The archivist had been right, and how fitting it all was. Andrew had been without a Kingdom and now things were changing. I will reign, he thought.

He rang Karen to tell her of the discovery of the manuscript, cupping the mouthpiece close to his lips so that no one could hear him through the thin hotel walls. John was crying in the background and, rather than raise his voice, Andrew remained vague about the manuscript, merely telling Karen that he'd found something very important.

He got drunk that night, as deliberately and methodically as he had copied the manuscript. He didn't order a bottle of champagne as a French musicologist would have done, but began the evening with a Kir Royale and silently toasted his good fortune. A carafe of white wine accompanied his meal and he stopped off at a bar on the way home where the locals were watching a soccer match, and ordered a Rémy Martin.

‘Santé, Andrew,' he mimed to the Ricard mirror over the bar, then stumbled to his hotel and slept solidly.

The following night saw him back home. John was delighted to see him, or at least delighted to see the cuddly toy he bore; Karen likewise gave him a surprisingly warm welcome, perhaps because the present of Duty Free scent was not only the one she liked, but also the perfume rather than the less expensive eau de toilette he'd intended to buy.

When John was asleep, he told his wife about the motet and proudly showed her the copy that he'd had laminated at a stationers in Amiens. This was the first time he'd been able to talk to anyone about it, and the release was exquisite. He outlined the future: the acclaim, the rewards, the recognition, the adulation. He couldn't get the words out quickly enough, each thought overlapping the previous one, a hectic succession of scenarios at the centre of which he stood, the modest, unassuming but deserving recipient of endowments and encomia. He described the material prospects that lay in store for him and Karen, the potential for promotion and self-promotion that the discovery afforded, and the impact it might have in his field of research. His body no longer realised that it was two in the morning back in Amiens where he'd started the day, the effects of latent jetlag manifest only in thirst and volubility, and, as he talked, he downed glass after glass of water.

As a psychology graduate, Karen was practised in the art of listening, yet she had to fight her instinct to instil in him a sense of proportion; even if he was exaggerating the manuscript's importance, it was their first night together in nearly two weeks and she didn't want to be negative.

Later, in bed, Andrew should have fallen straight to sleep, for he had now been awake nearly twenty-four hours. Instead he tossed and turned, made two trips to the bathroom to rid himself of the water that had seemed to act as fuel for his discourse earlier that evening, and found it impossible to discover a place in the bed that was cool enough. After an hour or so, Karen, who had been woken three times, mistook his restlessness for sexual frustration and asked if he wanted to make love.

‘No,' he said quickly, and immediately regretted his response. He wasn't aware that he'd casually rejected his wife, distracted as he was by the thought of sex, which he now realised was something that he would have liked. What he'd meant was that his fidgeting had nothing to do with sexual frustration, not that he was disinterested. And it was a rare offer on Karen's part, for the injuries she sustained in childbirth and the sheer exhaustion of looking after a baby had cruelly combined to render their sex life all but non-existent.

Karen turned away from him angrily. Rather than try to explain himself and precipitate an argument that he knew he could never win, he lay in silence until he deduced from her breathing that she'd fallen asleep. Finally he turned onto his stomach and pressed his useless erection into the mattress, his thoughts firmly fixed on the motet.

‘Who's Radar?' asked Ollie, gesturing with his head to the back of the plane.

‘Sorry?'

‘Radar O'Reilly. From
M*A*S*H
?'

Ollie seemed to have spent most of his formative years watching television and reading comics, in contrast to Emma, who had learned the clarinet and sung in a madrigal group. Despite the fact she was poorly versed in popular culture, Ollie made few concessions to her ignorance, constantly comparing events and people to mythical counterparts, a prism of allusion that excluded others. Part of the reason that Ollie and Allie got on so well was that they shared a common frame of reference. The basses frequently talked of Marvel comic-book superheroes (Ollie even had a Spiderman duvet, though Emma had refused ever to sleep under it) and discussed films of which Emma had never heard, posters of which adorned Ollie's cramped flat. She felt jealous at times – his life seemed the richer for it, a magical, hyper-real world layered with significance and association – and when he had to spell out his similes there was frustration for both of them, as if he had to explain a joke to her.

The reference to Radar O'Reilly needed clarification if only because the immediate prospect of sharing a van with Andrew Eiger, even working with him, meant there was every possibility that Ollie's comparison to a fictional character might well be taken up by the group; he rarely stopped repeating a new nickname until others had adopted it.

‘He was the geek in
M*A*S*H
,' said Ollie, raising an eyebrow in the way that he knew made her laugh. ‘Henry Blake's secretary. You must know
M*A*S*H
?'

‘Sitcom, right? American? Doctors and nurses?'

‘Yeah, but set in the Korean war. Alan Alda was in it. You know Alan Alda, don't you?'

Emma wasn't entirely sure, but nodded. It was easier that way.

‘Anyway,' continued Ollie, ‘Radar O'Reilly. Slept with a teddy bear. Short. Round glasses. Squeaky voice. He looks like that guy you were talking to. Who was he, by the way?'

‘He's the musicologist I told you about. The one who's got some project or other he wants to talk to me about after the concert? I'm not quite sure what it is he's got in mind, but I'll hear him out. He's giving a paper in the same session as me, this afternoon.'

Ollie grunted. He and Allie felt that the contribution of music historians should be limited to providing clear editions in modern notation; anything more than that was an unjustified incursion into the performer's private domain. A particular focus for their contempt was performance practice, the branch of music history that described the way in which the music was originally performed and which, on occasion, prescribed how modern performers should realise it today. For the basses, this was like being told how they should behave, a straitjacket of convention that interfered with their inalienable right to perform the music in whatever way they bloody well wanted. Emma could sympathise with that view. She wagered that the original performers claimed exactly the same kind of artistic licence, though her sympathy for Allie's and Ollie's position only went so far. Without academics, the basses wouldn't have a job, their parts being played by various ‘bits of plumbing', as they dismissively described all medieval instruments.

She hoped that Andrew Eiger would prove to be more sensitive than their awkward first meeting had suggested. He hadn't acknowledged Ollie's presence, and seemed physically and socially graceless, a parody of an academic in his blazer-and-tie outfit and his owlish glasses. Ollie would give him short shrift, as he did most intellectuals, an attitude stemming in part from jealousy. Whenever Paul's name came up, as it sometimes did, Ollie stiffened. He felt her former lover had treated her badly and that she was over-generous in acknowledging his role in the genesis of the group. It was Ollie's view that Beyond Compère had only really begun when it was a touring group and that the stage show was a completely different entity. Doubtless he had placed Andrew Eiger in the same category as those musicologists, including Paul, who deigned to criticise performers for exercising musical intuition.

Most of Ollie's opinions were merely bluster. He was far from the cocksure man he appeared to some, and far more astute than he liked to let on. It was not a lack of A-levels that meant he hadn't gone to university, opting instead for the vocationally oriented route of music college, but, thought Emma, a consequence of his upbringing. His father was in the Navy; he was a disciplinarian who would always put practice ahead of theory and, according to Ollie, was proud of the fact that he was tone-deaf. His mother, meanwhile, taught music in a local infants' school, which meant there had always been a piano in the house and piles of printed music. It was as if Ollie had taken his cue from both of them; music college combined his mother's love of music with his father's pragmatism. Perhaps, at times, he resented the assumptions of others that he had missed out on something by not attending university, that somehow he hadn't allowed his mind to expand either through listening to jazz and dabbling in drugs in a basement flat, or pondering the nature of the universe in a philosophy seminar. Whatever the reasons – and Emma was still slowly stripping away the defensive layers – a lot of his bluff exterior sprang from a benign, protective instinct that she found attractive. Only occasionally was he arrogant, and even then he was able to catch himself in the middle of some rambling tirade and laugh at himself. It was not calculated on his part, or at least rarely so, though knowing that his attacks were a form of shyness made it easier for Emma to indulge his occasional childishness. She knew he was sometimes incapable of stopping it, much as he might want to, and even while he displayed the most clichéd traits of the Alpha male – brawn and raw emotion – he appeared to her as a young boy, out of his depth and uncertain.

Their relationship was now three years' old, and only last week they'd celebrated their anniversary. That was a rather grand term for what was, to all intents and purposes, a commemoration of the first time they had made love. Since then, they'd managed the transition from friends to lovers and negotiated the treacherous waters of an early relationship to the more settled realm of coupledom in full view of their colleagues. Peter, who always thought he had a special insight into people's true feelings, particularly when he deduced homosexual inclinations in heterosexual men, asserted that the writing had been on the wall for some time, pointing out the number of times they had sat next to each other in restaurants and how, out of all the women in the group, Ollie had chosen Emma with whom to discuss his marital problems. Looking back, Emma was less sure. She and Ollie had not been particularly close during the runs in London and New York and there were times when she had even wondered if their relationship was a direct result of the touring life, a convenient office romance. But the opposite could also have been true, she reasoned: as a theatre director her role as objective commentator had been clearly defined, and perhaps it was that distance that blinded her to the possibility of finding love amongst those over whom she exerted authority. Nevertheless, there were times when she felt that Beyond Compère was as much the consequence of her backstage romances as her relationships were the by-products of the group's well-documented history.

The plane had begun to rumble towards its take off point and the brakes gripped one final time before the pilot set the jets to full thrust and they were hurled down the runway. Ollie had already fallen asleep and Emma took out her papers and began to study them. It would be easier to work now than later on the bus, not least because then Ollie would be peering over her shoulder.

She was used to seeing her name in print, but it looked out of place here in the timetable of conference events. Where everyone else was identified in parentheses by their university, she was qualified by ‘Beyond Compère' as if it were a place. The session at which she was speaking was entitled ‘Ockeghemian promotion and reception', to be chaired by Daniel Huibert (Université de Nantes). Emma would speak first, followed by Andrew Eiger (Ohio State University) on the subject of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reception of Ockeghem's work, something about which she had no knowledge and in which she had no real interest. Her image of Andrew was opaque, derived solely from their exchanges concerning the mooted project about which he was frustratingly vague. The brief meeting, with him hovering awkwardly in the aisle, had added nothing to her impression. In his correspondence he had hinted at new material, or at least she thought he had, but he was so guarded that it was sometimes difficult to work out exactly what he was saying. Still, she knew that some music departments in America had considerable private funding and, if it allowed her and the group to spend a few days in the Midwest working with students on interesting repertoire, then she was not going to turn down the offer. They'd talk about it later and, if it sounded promising, she would give the details to the British and American agents and let them sort it out.

The third speaker was Étienne Baraud (École Normale Supérieure), the title of his paper – ‘Ock' j'aime; L'homme/le nom' – as baffling as the brief précis that accompanied it. Such a summary was known in academic circles as an abstract, and Emma thought that the term was singularly appropriate here.

It wouldn't be the first time that she had addressed an audience of musicologists. It would, however, be the first where the audience consisted of experts in such a specialised field and, were it not for the fact that many of them had helped her in the past, providing her with editions and advice, she would have found the prospect daunting. The thrust of her argument was simple: performers created their own images of composers, often based on little more than their experience of performing the music. This mystical communion with a distant historical figure was, she argued, a necessary human identification and, imaginary though it may be, it was a corollary to convincing interpretation. How, though, did the performer react when the real historical facts collided with their expectations?

Her lecture was entitled ‘The Image of Ockeghem' and began with the famous painted miniature of Ockeghem dated thirty years after his death. No one could even agree on which person in the picture was Ockeghem. Was it the old man with the hood and spectacles? Given that Ockeghem received a gift of rich, red cloth from Charles VII, maybe Ockeghem was the man in scarlet behind him, a younger man?

When researching the original stage production of Beyond Compère, she had read many accounts of fifteenth-century composers that had brought them to life as characters. Here they were, flesh and blood, having arguments with the church officials, climbing their way up the greasy pole of advancement, securing generous annual payments called benefices from churches they would never visit. Emma thought it important that the singers were as enthused as her and thus she had once told Allie of Francesco Florio's report of Ockeghem written after a trip to Tours in the 1470s which had described the composer in hyperbolic terms: ‘so pleasing is the beauty of his person, so noteworthy the sobriety of his speech and of his morals and of his grace. He alone of all singers is free from all vice and abounds in all virtues.' Allie's response had been to dismiss Ockeghem as a goody-goody, forcing Emma hastily to reassure him that the report was literally too good to be true. According to other contemporary accounts, Ockeghem was a fine bass and almost certainly up for a drink after the gig; Dufay, the other great composer of the age, had purchased Burgundian wine when Ockeghem stayed with him in Cambrai in 1464. That kept Allie happy. She wanted her singers to like the composer whose music they would be performing extensively that year, and providing a positive image was an important aid to meaningful musical expression.

Her paper proposed a more philosophical argument about a shared psychological DNA between twentieth-century singers and fifteenth-century singer-composers, using stories of drinking and debauchery to underline more base common characteristics. To illustrate her point – and entertain her audience – she would alternate anecdotes of singers misbehaving in the Sistine Chapel and Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame in Paris and the Duomo in Florence, Cambrai Cathedral and El Escorial in Madrid, though without providing the dates. And then she would reveal to her listeners that they took place in 1456, 1987, 1478, 1995, 1476 and 1992. For all the differences in harmonic language and compositional approach, for all the alienating, convoluted codes of social behaviour, and for all the constricting literary and musical conventions, at the end of the day these composers were as human as their modern interpreters.

She would then turn to the issue of historical speculation. She had a few scores to settle with some musicologists who had demanded of her total historical accuracy, and she still smarted from a review that had criticised her for making Compère more famous than Josquin. It was undoubtedly true that Josquin was more celebrated, but it was a necessary narrative device, a matter of perspective – and here she would cite Stoppard making Hamlet a bit player in
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
. Of course the stage show was historically inaccurate: it was a fiction, not a documentary, and modern performance of ancient music was ineluctably condemned to conjecture until someone built a time machine. In Emma's view, there was as much chance that she would be proved right in the future as proved wrong and, with the amount of research in archives and religious institutions in France going on these days, there was every chance that stranger truths might yet be revealed.

As she read through her paper she underlined certain words, much as she might mark up a musical score. On the first page she wrote in red ink a reminder to stand properly and breathe freely: ‘Lengthen spine!' This would relax her and help make the most of her height of five feet and three-quarters of an inch. She provided indications of the shape of the sentences and the contours of her argument, the same kind of reminder that a singer might make in their copy to indicate the direction of a musical phrase. She then added a few pause markings so the structure of her argument might be clearer to the listener, and also to leave space for the laughter that she anticipated. Occasionally she also used the standard abbreviated musical markings –
Accel
and
Rall
– to remind her to speed up or slow down her delivery. After all, giving a lecture was a performance.