Time Will Tell (21 page)

As ever, the text came first. He had chosen Psalm 50 [51]:
Miserere mei, Deus, secundum misericordiam tuam, iuxta multitudinem miserationum tuarum dele iniquitates meas.
[Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy. And according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my iniquity.]

At the time I believed it was the prayer of an old man looking back on his life, a personal reparation, fittingly for a singer, taken from the Psalms of David. Yet a text for Ash Wednesday seemed a strange choice for an event which was to be, essentially, a celebration. Its expression of the desire to settle the scores of the past, to tally the good deeds with the bad acts and to obtain forgiveness was hardly appropriate for the bacchanalian excesses that would surely follow.

I decided to ask Jehan why he had chosen that passage. He smiled. It was, he said, a text that had struck him for a number of reasons. Firstly, of course, it was likely to be his last composition and so it was appropriate that he should ask God, in his great mercy, for release from the burden of his sins. And, as a psalm, it was also a hymn of praise to God, the Creator of all things.

His true concern though, was with the role that music played in worship and the way in which (as he explained it) the new generation of composers had forgotten their education and the true function of music. Quoting a passage from Aristotle's Eighth Book of Politics, he argued that music has the power to make you happy, but that you should not have too much of it. Music today, he believed, rather than serving a divine purpose, had become instead the mistress of those who shared the base desire for human recognition and the accumulation of wealth.

This sin of cupidity was no better exemplified than in Desprez, and the motet would be Jehan's warning to him: Desprez and those like him should be encouraged to pass on their knowledge to others, just as Jehan had learned from his masters. Jehan believed the younger composers had been isolated from the country in which their talents had been first developed for too long. Now they were older, it was time to set aside their concerns for personal wealth and advancement and return to their homeland to repay their debt by instructing the new sons of France. Jehan's motet would be a motet for singers, sung by singers, and, through the act of singing, they would come to understand their responsibilities.

It was not until after Easter that we began working on the motet and, when it was completed, the picture I had in my mind of singing Jehan's piece was no longer clear and the likelihood that it might ever be performed no longer so certain. Desprez had intervened. 

 

 

A combination of inefficiency and economy had landed Andrew Eiger in the
Hôtel Des Lices
. He'd only got round to booking his room the previous week and that at Karen's prompting, and hadn't expected much from the meagre description. As he knew from his stay in Amiens, two stars in a French hotel promised little other than a bed and possibly a wardrobe. Nevertheless, he'd hoped that his window might afford a view of something more interesting than a concrete wall and an overflow pipe that dripped water onto a grate some twenty feet below.

An indentation in the pink bedspread the size of a large animal betokened a saggy mattress, and the tubular pillow which, had he not been so tired might have appealed to his francophilia, held out the prospect of a stiff neck the following morning. The wallpaper was floral and peeling, a consequence of damp, and even without testing it, he knew the phone system would require him to ring out via an unattended reception.

He opened his briefcase and took out his laptop and charger. He spun the combination lock partly from habit and partly to prevent him retrieving the blue folder and laying out his new transcription as he'd been waiting to do since the long flight from New York. There were more pressing needs, a shower and shave amongst them. He opened his small case and took out his toilet bag, then quickly stripped off his clothes. As he pulled his arm through the sleeve of his shirt he caught his bandaged hand on the cuff and flinched. The pain was duller now, a gentle humming throb rather than a sharp stab. He popped another antibiotic and a painkiller from their respective blister packs and, cupping his left hand beneath the bathroom tap, washed them down with warm water. When he'd delivered his paper (received, he felt, with rather too polite applause), he'd felt all right, even awake, but during the final, tortured, self-congratulatory lecture given by the third speaker, he'd begun to wonder if it was the various pharmaceuticals that were making him feel nauseous. It occurred to him that he might have eaten something that hadn't agreed with him, but then he hadn't eaten anything in the previous four hours – which, on reflection, was probably not the wisest course of action. The pharmacist had told him to take the pills with food, but there were just too many things to do: not just the shower and shave, but also the promised call to Karen. That might have to wait. He would ring her after the concert and the meal that followed it. He'd feel better then.

He assembled the travel adaptor and inserted the plug of his laptop charger into it – no easy task with his bandaged right hand – and then looked around for a socket. There was none, or at least none visible. High up in the corner of the room was a small television set, but its power cable threaded through the window and trailed out of sight. The bedside light was nailed to the wall and controlled by a thin cord that swung from the ceiling. Finding no obvious power outlets, Andrew wandered into the bathroom. There, above the sink, was a rectangular light fitting with an inbuilt shaver socket. He tugged at the light switch and it came off in his hand. Still, the light was now on, which meant there was a source of electricity. Encouraged, he placed his laptop outside the bathroom door and trailed the power cord over the sink and up to the shaver point. With his good hand, he pressed the plug into the housing. The next thing he knew, he was sitting on the toilet in darkness. There was a smell of burning: smoked fish mingled with the sharp odour of charred human flesh. Why was he sitting on the toilet? His left hand hurt and he realised his fingers were still gripping the plug, but much more tightly than before. He willed them to open and release their hold, but they wouldn't obey. He realised, finally, that he'd had an electric shock and been flung across the room; the darkness was the result of the lights fusing. Out in the corridor he could hear the voices of guests, a rapid confusion of French that he couldn't make out, and then a voice sounding like that of the unfriendly burly proprietor who'd checked him in. His voice was deeper than the others and also more annoyed; the guests' voices sounded meek in comparison. There was a knock on the door: a loud accusing rap. Andrew slunk further back on the toilet. He wasn't going to answer, naked as he was, and be humiliated. Besides, it was the hotel's fault, not his. The knocking began again, more insistent, then stopped, and Andrew clearly heard the word ‘Merde' before the proprietor clumped away down the corridor. Various noises followed: halting questions from the guests, grudging reassurance from the man, then the sound of a chair being dragged along the corridor before a series of unidentified clicks and thumps ensued.

The light in the bedroom came on and Andrew blinked. From the socket in which he'd tried to insert his adaptor wafted a thin wisp of smoke and the light fitting itself looked dead. He studied his left hand, still grasping the charger. Finally his fingers obeyed his brain's instruction and he was able to release his grip. As he uncurled his fingers, he noticed that the tips were black. He licked them and tasted something bitter, like cloves. All was quiet in the corridor now and he padded carefully into the bedroom and placed his laptop on his briefcase.

Back in the bathroom, he was about to switch on the shower before he remembered the pharmacist's advice to keep his bandaged hand dry. He looked around for something with which to protect it. A shower-cap would have done the trick, but there was no shampoo in the bathroom, let alone anything as exotic as free polythene head protection. The small waste bin hadn't been emptied; he foraged inside and discovered a small plastic bag emblazoned with the words ‘Supermarché Foch', which he wrapped around his hand.

The smell of burning had been replaced by a smell of mould, the source of which was visible on the ceiling of the plastic cubicle into which he now crammed his body. The water dribbled from the shower rose, initially subjecting his exhausted body to a freezing baptism then, without warning, becoming a scalding deluge. The drain swallowed, burped, and then regurgitated a foul-smelling cocktail of soap, scum, human hair and a suspiciously dark liquid over his bare feet. Within the cramped shower stall there was no escape from the irruptions of an antiquated water system, and little room to soap himself. With his wounded hand wrapped in the plastic bag and his eyes stinging with soap, he switched off the water and lathered himself from head to toe before once again surrendering to a schizophrenic ablution. It woke him up, or at least kept him awake, and he dried himself as best he could with a thin brittle sheet before filling the cracked basin with brackish water and shaving.

Feeling clean and relatively fresh again, he turned his attention to the motet. He had little time to himself to correct his unfinished first draft, but his main priority was to destroy his earlier version for which the hotel, ascetic in every other respect, had provided two packets of matches in two ashtrays. Still dripping with water, he placed the paper in the sink and tried to set light to it. The damp air of the bathroom prevented the paper from catching, so he cracked open the window to let the steam escape. Turning back he saw that the fresh air had fed the flames, and black burning paper whirled above his head. He tried to close the window to stop the source of this new encouragement, but it had jammed and, with only one good hand, he could not apply enough pressure to close it.

By the time the fire had burned out, he was covered in small, charred remnants of manuscript paper, and, to wash off the debris, he once again stepped inside the shower stall. The small towel was already completely saturated and he tried to flick off what water he could with his polythene-covered hand then stood naked in the freezing bedroom to dry.

Laid out on the bed, the sheer physical size of the new transcription conveyed something of the grandeur of the piece. It was now on a scale more appropriate to a nineteenth-century symphonic score than to the intimacy of fifteenth-century polyphony. The thirty-four parts were ranged from top to bottom on three sheets of paper and ten of these vertical ranks were laid side by side describing the first fifty bars of the motet. The first page was to his left, beneath the bolster pillow, and the others were logically arranged so that, with a sweep of his head, he could read from beginning to end. Beneath him lay a gigantic musical map upon which his eye could wander, and within which he could appreciate the design and structure as a hill-walker might some natural vista.

He was awed by its imaginative scope and he marvelled at the boldness of applying the small-scale techniques of fifteenth-century counterpoint to such a large canvas. He felt almost unworthy of bringing this musical treasure to the attention of the world, but quickly reasoned away his hesitation: somebody had to do it, and it might as well be him. The recent discovery of its numerological symbolism lent the motet a new mystical significance. This was a physical embodiment of the composer himself: Johannes Ockeghem: eighty-one and sixty-four – the products of nine-times-nine and eight-times-eight. With all the parts now transcribed, Andrew could contemplate the intricacies of the counterpoint; the percussive patter of the smaller notes in the
discantus
part against the sustained sonorities of the lower two voices; the sway of tension and release; and the characteristic, meandering contemplativeness so typical of Ockeghem's style.

Andrew's meditation was not the calm, methodological approach of music analysis, but an indulgent wallow in the familiar and novel features of the motet, a rare gratification of the senses that he rarely enjoyed when listening to music. These days he was all too often distracted by an imperfection of tuning, the inappropriateness of style, or by the intrusion of a performer's ego. Here, however, the black-and-white transcription conveyed a pristine perfection that performance could never attain and, once again, he began to doubt the wisdom of offering it to Beyond Compère. He could, after all, experience something approaching transfiguration merely by reading the score, a pursuit that afforded him the added benefit of being able to appreciate the small details and the larger context simultaneously. His current range of vision granted him a moveable perspective that the muddy mundanity of choral rehearsal could never offer and, additionally, he could excise at any moment a phrase from an earlier section and contrast it with a later one. He was freed from the linearity of performance, presented here with an omniscient view, a position of privilege from which he could discern the secrets which, over the past twenty-four hours, he had magically revealed.

At first he thought he was experiencing some kind of aesthetic overload, that the sensation of dizziness was a consequence of his enhanced state of musical mastery; it must be his acute sensitivity that caused the notes to swirl inside his head like snowflakes in a globe and vibrate before his eyes. But when he found himself face down over the bed with an unexpected view of blistered lino, he knew that he had fainted. In falling, he had crushed his testicles and the thick ache in his groin presaged a deeper and more excruciating agony. It would, though, prevent him surrendering to sleep – which, now he was prostrate, was all he wanted to do. He was fairly certain that he hadn't actually lost consciousness but had merely lost his balance, presumably through fatigue; and his senses that, until recently, had been attuned only to looking and imagining now began to return. He was aware of the thrum of blood in his ears and the coldness of his hands and feet. He was still totally naked, pressed down on the harsh paper that, until a moment ago, he had been ogling in all its virgin glory.

Slowly he pushed himself up off the bed to consider the damage. His groin ached but that would pass. He was more worried about the fate of the transcription, at least four pages of which had been smudged. Laid out like this, he could clearly see the outline of his body, like an incomplete watermark: his very own Turin Shroud. The dim display of the digital clock read 7.29. He had to get dressed and get to the concert, but first he gathered the papers together, dabbing those that bore any traces of water with the pink bedspread before placing the transcription in his briefcase. Finally, he removed the plastic bag from his bandaged hand. Despite its protective shield, water had seeped beneath the plastic. His palm, the very area he was meant to keep dry, was saturated. His left hand didn't look much better. The fingertips, despite having scrubbed them with his sodden towel, were still blackened and he could flex them, but only slowly. He could also feel an unpleasant sensation not dissimilar to pins and needles, but this felt as if someone was actually inserting steel points into his fingertips. Perhaps another painkiller might help? He punched one from the blister pack and dry-swallowed it. There was no time for anything as luxurious as water now.

 

♦ ♦ ♦

When they had finished their rehearsal, the group was shown to the place which would serve as their Green Room: the Cathedral's former Library, a small chamber reached by crossing the cloister and walking up a spiral staircase to the Ambulatory and through the Scriptorium. Marco and Charlie were delighted at this privileged access (‘It only costs five francs in the daytime,' said Allie to puncture their puppyish enthusiasm), and kept up a running commentary on gargoyles, guttering and Gothicism as they made their way to the room. Susan and Claire, seeing only an echoey stone room with upright, wooden chairs, were predictably sniffy about the makeshift solution and announced that they would change in the hotel.

It was only a short walk and Emma let Ollie guide her through the streets, happy to trust his better sense of direction. She was hungry but, with the concert soon and dinner planned for later, she decided to ignore it. Had she not had a bath earlier, she would have whiled away the time soaking in warm, soapy water, and a sudden wave of tiredness made her worry that she might fall asleep if she lay on her bed as she had planned.

Ahead of them lay the light-filled, nineteenth-century railway station. It reminded her of the Musée D'Orsay. In fact, hadn't Marco read something out about it being by the same architect? Was that, she wondered, today? Heathrow, and before that Newcastle? Thinking about the relentless schedule reminded her that she deserved a holiday and, had she known how attractive Tours was, she'd have suggested that she and Ollie stay another twenty-four hours, sitting in cafés and watching France go by. She loved the mornings in particular, the air of optimism, everyone out buying baguettes, kissing each other on both cheeks, smiling.