Time Will Tell (22 page)

‘Shall we have a coffee?' she asked.

‘Sure, but there's something you have to see first,' said Ollie, steering her towards a small shop. Everything was closed and they were leaving far too early the next morning for her to buy anything. Emma was too tired to argue.

‘It's got your name on it,' said Ollie by way of explanation and, with a gesture of triumph, pointed to the sign above the door. ‘Emma,' it read, soft pink on pastel blue: a hat shop.

‘I thought you might want to have a look. I've never seen you in a hat, of course, but it looked like your kind of place.'

In fact, Emma owned only one hat – dark blue with a stepped-up crown that she wore only to friends' weddings of which, over the past three years, there had been several. She'd never been particularly interested in hats; she'd always regarded them as overpriced and prissy with no redeeming functionality. Here though, with her eyes shielded against the streetlights to afford her a better view, splashes of bright orange and dazzling blue against a matt black background, they looked like sculpture. Un-fussily displayed on wire frames, they struck her as luxury objects, indubitably French in design, and suddenly she wanted one.

‘I love the orange one,' she said, pointing to a wide-brimmed straw hat. Ollie mumbled his agreement then stooped to tie his shoelace. She guessed he was bored, that he'd been more interested in the name of the shop than its contents, yet as she turned, she realised he was holding something, a package he had retrieved from his bag that, for some reason, he had brought to the rehearsal. Now she understood why; the package was a cardboard hat-box, which he opened to reveal a mound of soft white tissue paper.

‘Have a look,' he said.

It was a wide-brimmed straw hat like the one in the window, but black with a thin white stripe around the crown.

‘I thought the lack of colour might give you more opportunities to wear it,' he explained, concerned that the choice was the right one.

‘I love it,' she said – but was it the right size? She turned to the shop window, which acted as a mirror, and placed it gently on her head. The fit was perfect and she adjusted it so the brim came level with her eyes. She could tilt her head down and her gaze would be hidden, or lift her chin and view the world with appropriate hauteur. Ollie was standing next to her and in the reflection she could see him smiling, reaching his arm around her shoulder to pull her close.

‘It's absolutely lovely, but you shouldn't have spent all that money. It must have cost a fortune. It certainly makes my coin look rather inadequate.'

His reflection in the window shrugged: the coy, embarrassed look of a young boy.

‘I just liked the look of it,' he said. ‘Very
Breakfast at Tiffany's
, don't you think?'

Emma didn't admit that she'd never actually seen the film. Ollie often compared her to Audrey Hepburn – though, more tomboyish than the actress and with no chance of ever having a body as slim as that, she sometimes wondered if she could ever fulfil his idealised image.

‘Of course,' added Ollie, ‘that would make me George Peppard. Oh, and it makes you a high-class hooker and me a gigolo.'

She flinched. It was one of Ollie's typically clumsy comments, which over the years she'd come to believe derived from a simple fear of commitment bequeathed to him by his divorce. In the past she'd tried to explain something of the hurt he caused her, but that succeeded only in making him withdraw further into himself, annoyed and seemingly threatened by a sense that he was being studied, that perhaps someone might understand him better than he did himself. She turned away from him, back to her reflection in the window. She saw herself holding the brim of her hat in both hands, Ollie by her side, something stiff about his body now, and the yellow street lights adding a sepia halo around them.

‘Coffee then?' asked Ollie briskly, putting the box back in his bag. ‘There's a nice brasserie at the end of the road.'

The waiters fussed around them and offered them a table in the window, saying that Emma, dressed so elegantly, would attract more customers. Ollie, unable to follow the details of the conversation, smiled his approval and contented himself with his role of Knight to Emma's Belle Dame, even pulling her chair out from the table. Emma looked at the window in which she and Ollie were reflected. It offered a portrait of a contented couple, their drinks multiplied relentlessly in the etched mirrors of the brasserie. And then, as the waiter's body disturbed the light, in the distance the lambent interior of the railway station flickered into life like a nineteenth-century theatrical trick. The images of romance and travel melted into each other and it was possible to believe in the endurance of love.

 

After the concert the question with which Emma was repeatedly assailed was: ‘What happened to the encore?' When she and the singers had discussed the matter at the London rehearsals, they had agreed that an encore was inappropriate to the design of the programme and the occasion. Now, in Tours, she patiently explained their reasons, pointing out that the design of the second half, as was clearly indicated and explained in the programme, deliberately framed Ockeghem's Requiem Mass with two laments to which the only due response was silence. Returning to the stage with some brash encore otherwise cheapened the memory of a man who had died five hundred years ago to the very day. It would have been like striking up a chorus of ‘Roll out the Barrel' as the coffin left the church. When the fourth person had challenged her, she'd been tempted to offer Allie's more facetious answer: no encore meant more time for drinking.

She was introduced to the Mayor by one of his advisors in a way that suggested that it was she who had sought the meeting, but the dignitary turned out to be a fan of the group and apologised to her for the lack of reference within the town to its famous son. He would, he assured her, be asking for a statue of Jean Ockeghem to be erected in one of Tours' famous
jardins
.

Generally the singers preferred to leave the meeting-and-greeting to Emma and would head back to the dressing room to shake out the tension and plan the evening ahead, but on this occasion the welcome from the audience had been so warm (and the dressing room was so cold) that stopping to chat was no hardship. Marco and Charlie were talking to two young British musicologists, who had provided editions for the Dufay recording; Susan, Claire and Peter were speaking to locals. Even Allie, who was usually propping up a bar somewhere as the final applause died, was engaged in an earnest discussion with an intense American musicologist.

Emma hadn't spoken to Andrew Eiger since delivering her paper and she spotted him at the back of the Cathedral. He was standing at the West Door, his head tilted back and his mouth open, gazing upwards towards the ceiling.

‘Ça va?' said Emma, noting the dark rings around his eyes. She hoped he'd managed to get some sleep.

‘Oh, fine,' he said, as he returned her gaze and tried to focus.

‘I'm going to be tied up a bit here,' she explained. ‘There are always people to talk to after the concert, but I'll send you off with the singers and join you very soon. It's a different restaurant. A brasserie, not
Les Tuffeaux.
They cancelled on us.'

Les Tuffeaux
, the restaurant into which the organiser of both conference and concert had booked the group at Emma's request, had rung to say that they couldn't stay open that evening. The chef was ill and one of their waitresses hadn't turned up, an excuse sounding as if it were cover for a secret romance between the absentees. Emma had taken the call only ten minutes prior to the start of the concert, with the sounds of the singers warming up, nervously clearing their throats and talking just that little bit too loudly, making conversation difficult. It was Ollie who'd come up with the solution: the brasserie at which he and Emma had their drink and where, it turned out, Craig had taken his lunch; given its proximity to the railway station, it was bound to be open.

She felt someone touch her arm: Ollie's familiar presumption.

‘We're off now,' he said. ‘See you there?'

Looking around, Emma saw that the singers were drifting away to change.

‘Well done, guys,' she called. ‘Great gig. Marco. Susan. Can you smooth things over with the brasserie? I got the impression they were keeping the kitchen open especially for us, and I'm going to be another fifteen minutes or so. Order three bottles of champagne – it's my treat.' Turning to Ollie, she said, ‘Can you look after Andrew for me? Take him to the brasserie and I'll meet you as soon as I can?'

‘Sure.' Ollie nodded to Andrew in confirmation. ‘But I promised I'd have a snifter at the Académie de la Bière round the corner with Allie. They've got Oerbier,' he added, as if citing an exotic beer explained all.

‘Well, can you take Andrew with you?' She registered the pause before Ollie agreed to her request, and she hoped Andrew hadn't. Clearly Ollie regarded the musicologist as a social encumbrance.

‘I'll meet you here in five,' said Ollie to Andrew, and then – an afterthought which surprised Emma – kissed her on the lips.

 

♦ ♦ ♦

‘It's a beer academy,' said Oliver Martin to Andrew, holding open the door of a bar from which rushed a gust of warm, malty air, ‘so I hope you like beer.'

Andrew didn't. He'd always found it too gassy and bitter, a drink for those of limited palette and etiquette, a beverage you were supposed to drink out of a bottle in a macho display of nonconformism. His preference was for wine, usually white, ideally from this very region, the Loire valley – perhaps a light Vouvray or a flinty Pouilly-Fumé. Anyway, he wasn't going to be drinking tonight. He had been warned against it by the pharmacist and, despite Andrew's protestations in French that he was perfectly capable of understanding the contraindications himself, the shopkeeper had proceeded to mime vomiting and dizziness before, as a pantomimic finale, falling to the floor.

Allie – as Andrew had been told to call the taller of the two men – was first to the bar and was perusing the ranks of bottles in the various fridges that lined the rear wall, a cigarette in his hand that looked suspiciously like a joint. Above their heads were racks of glasses of different shapes and sizes, some of them displaying the name of the beer for which they had been specifically designed. Andrew knew from his visits to Belgium that there were many varieties, but he hadn't till then appreciated how many there were.

‘What happened to the hand?' Ollie asked.

‘Um, I caught it on a lock. Yesterday. Or was it today? Sorry. I'm a bit blurry. It's got infected.'

‘Not that one. The other one. Gangrene?'

Andrew looked at his left hand. He'd almost forgotten about it. The pain had gone and his fingers now moved freely, but his fingertips were still blackened. ‘Electric shock.'

Ollie pursed his lips, impressed. ‘You live dangerously.'

‘What do you want to drink?' Allie asked Andrew.

‘Mineral water, please. Sparkling.'

‘Yeah, right. But what do you want to
drink
?' The expectation that he would be drinking something alcoholic and probably beer was obvious, even to Andrew, and he didn't want to start off on the wrong foot.

‘I'm, er, not really meant to be drinking. Because of the hand. Antibiotics and painkillers. They both react with alcohol, I'm told. So something light.'

Allie looked at Ollie. For both of them, ‘Light beer' or, as it was spelled in America, ‘Lite Beer' was an oxymoron, a desecration of the brewing process, which Allie, as a home brewer, regarded as a sacred ritual. Ollie, already resentful that his post-concert routine was compromised by Andrew's presence, offered a misleading summary of beer colour and strength, a prank that he and Allie had played on others in a more generous spirit than now.

‘I'm having an Oerbier, and Allie's having a Westmalle Dubbel. They're both dark. And strong. But the rule of thumb,' lied Ollie, ‘is that the lighter the colour, the lower the alcohol percentage. So maybe a Duvel? Interesting glass as well.'

Andrew nodded and Allie ordered the drinks, each of which was served in a distinctively shaped glass, poured delicately by a barman who, as if all beer drinkers were made from the same mould, save for the bald head and absence of a cigarette, looked almost exactly like Allie. The bass handed Andrew a tulip-shaped glass, its bulb holding a light, fizzing beer, the ballooning neck filled with a thick, craggy cloud of foam.

‘Cheers,' said Ollie.

‘Santé,' responded Andrew.

‘Up yours,' said Allie.

The two singers considered their beer in silence, sipping occasionally and reading the details on the beer bottles. Andrew, in an effort to share their interest, picked up his bottle and turned it slowly in the dim light, confirming the details of the tastes he was now experiencing. Having read all the informative blurb, and still stuck for something to say, he began to peruse the incidental details and realised that his Duvel was eight-and-a-half percent by volume. That made it a high-alcohol beer, not the light variety he had sought, and a quick calculation told him that if he finished it he would have drunk the equivalent of a very large glass of wine.

‘Not a bad gig,' said Allie to no one in particular, blowing out a thin stream of smoke towards the ceiling. Ollie nodded. Andrew wondered if this was his cue to critique the concert. His reservations about the performance were the same as those he had about the recent recording, as they inevitably would be, given that the second half was an exact replica of the second disc. He didn't like the suggestive chronology, which, to him, pointed the listener beyond Ockeghem's death, inviting them to contemplate the composer's heritage rather than his music. Still, he reasoned, he might as well start with some kind of compliment.