Time Will Tell (23 page)

‘Good low notes,' he offered.

Ollie, keeping his eyes on Andrew, flicked his head towards Allie to indicate the direction in which the praise should be directed. Allie neither moved nor spoke.

‘Nice low notes,' Andrew ventured again, thinking that perhaps Allie hadn't heard him the first time.

Allie made a noise that Andrew felt rather than heard, a dismal rumble like a heavy table being dragged across a stone floor.

Andrew had been impressed by the viscous lines traced by Allie and Ollie in the
Missa Fors seulement
and
Intemerata Dei mater
. These singers were singing exactly the same low lines that Ockeghem would have sung, though he doubted the composer would have belittled the experience so easily by slipping into the nearest pub afterwards.

He couldn't leave it there, he knew. His comments were inadequate, but the only thing he could think about was the structure of the second half. He ploughed on. ‘A shame to end with Josquin, don't you think?'

Ollie looked up sharply. ‘So you didn't read your programme either, then?'

Andrew was confused. Was there something in the programme notes that suggested that
Nymphes des bois
was not by Josquin? That made no sense.

‘It said quite clearly that there wasn't going to be an encore,' said Ollie, a touch of exasperation in his voice. Allie drained the remains of dark beer, stubbed out his roll-up and looked at his watch.

‘Better join the others,' he said to Ollie. Ollie downed his drink in one short gulp and put his empty glass next to Allie's on the counter. They were both now looking at Andrew who had thus far taken only two sips.

‘Better neck that,' said Ollie.

‘I didn't mean the encore,' stuttered Andrew, trying to continue the argument and give himself time. ‘I just feel that a concert of Ockeghem's music should end with Ockeghem's music, not Josquin's.'

‘Yeah, but it's Josquin's music about Ockeghem, isn't it?' retorted Ollie. ‘And it means the concert's all about Ockeghem the man, and not just Ockeghem's music.'

Andrew realised that Ollie had a point. Perhaps his own response was too, well, too musicological, too positivist even, a narrow appreciation of what was seen on the page and heard by the ears, not experienced in the heart.

‘We're keeping the others waiting. Swallow your medicine and let's go,' said Allie. Andrew had no choice but to drink it down.

‘So,' Allie said to Andrew, pushing open the door to reveal St Gatien floodlit against a matt-black sky, ‘we're going to be working together?'

The cold night air slapped Andrew full in the face and he realised suddenly that he was drunk. As the door swung back on its hinges, he instinctively held out his bandaged hand to catch it. The pain shot from the centre of his palm along his forearm and into his funny bone.

‘Yeeees,' he yelped, straining to keep up with the two singers as they strode towards the brasserie.

As Emma walked through the front door, the champagne corks were theatrically popped by three waiters and the
Maître D'
rushed towards her. The
femme au chapeau
, as they greeted her, was ushered to the table, her place reserved on the red banquette next to Ollie and opposite Allie.

‘He's a tosser,' Ollie had hissed, referring to Andrew. It explained why the American musicologist was seated so far away, being looked after by Susan, Peter and Claire.

At first, conversation amongst the group was directed towards the centre of the table, a communal celebration of what they had been through together over the past two days. Marco was called upon to rule on a dispute about the design of the brasserie, suggesting that it was
fin de siècle
with elements of
art nouveau
. He pointed to the ornate flowing lines in the posters and paintings, dated some of them, and made reference to the Impressionists and Toulouse Lautrec, before Charlie cut him off by calling him a smart-arse.

With their champagne glasses filled, everyone rose to toast Ockeghem. The brasserie with its the unfussy yet distinctively French menu was more suited to their post-concert revelry than the stuffy
Les Tuffeaux
would have been, which, lest anyone had any doubts, Allie had pronounced ‘too pink'.

With the formalities over and the starters served – garlicky escargots, salade niçoise, and creamy fish soup – more intimate discussions started. Emma heard Marco, Charlie and Craig arguing about the pronunciation of ‘Degas', while Allie and Ollie talked about the merits of Alsatian beers. Susan, who had angled her chair towards Andrew, was interrogating the musicologist, relaying each detail of his personal and professional life to the table at large, as if conducting an interview.

‘Where exactly is Ohio?' Emma heard her say, and for a moment Andrew looked as if he wasn't entirely sure.

‘He doesn't look that comfortable,' she commented to Ollie, who grudgingly lifted his eyes from his beer before throwing a few more croutons into his fish soup.

Indeed Andrew wasn't very comfortable. Walking in the fresh air from the Académie de la Bière, with the two basses ahead of him, he'd felt as if he was fighting his way through jungle undergrowth. His legs were heavy, he felt feverish and his hand throbbed. As soon as he'd reached the brasserie, he had sought out the nearest bathroom, convinced that he was going to vomit. The mirror confirmed his physical deterioration, his skin slick with sweat, heavy circles of tiredness beneath his eyes. He poked at his cheek with a finger, exploring a puffiness that he had never seen before, wondering vaguely if it presaged some rare disease.

He had splashed cold water on his face and returned to the table to discover that a place had been reserved for him between the two sopranos, the one heavily made-up and flirtatiously attentive, the other brusque and continually, inexplicably annoyed at something. Ollie and Allie, his recent drinking companions, were as far away from him as possible, something he was sure was no accident and which he regretted only because it also meant he wouldn't be able to talk to Emma. Clearly he would have to suffer the meal before he could get down to business.

He had intended to drink only water and had ordered a bottle of Badoit, but it had arrived just as Emma walked through the door and, in that moment of confusion, it was placed at the other end of the table where Allie and Ollie had made a joke of it, pushing it back and forth towards each other, an unwanted object that threatened their attempts to get drunk. Glasses of champagne had been poured for everyone and, knowing it would have been inappropriate not to, Andrew had joined in. He had sipped it as slowly as he could, but a new game had started which required them all to stand and toast various random suggestions – Emma's hat, Peter's scarf, Allie's dog – and the bottle of water, despite several requests, had remained stubbornly at the other end of the table.

He was confident that he wasn't going to be sick, at least. When the waiters brought bread to the table he had started on it straightaway and almost immediately his complaining stomach had been quelled. The pharmacist was right: he should have taken his antibiotics and painkillers with food. Something seemed to be interfering with his hearing, which might explain why he had lost his balance in his hotel room and fallen over. The excited chatter of his dinner companions washed over him and then receded into the distance like waves on a seashore, an acoustic effect which made him feel slightly seasick. But there was no denying the more immediate attention of Susan, the soprano, who had kept up an unstinting barrage of questions for the past half hour or so in a shrill voice that sliced through his head like cheese wire through a mature brie. There was seemingly no chance to interrupt and ask her a question, something that would at least afford him a moment to glaze over and adopt a pose of interest behind which he could figuratively breathe again. Finally he saw his opportunity: the waiters began serving the entrées – bleeding steaks, grilled freshwater fish and coq au vin – and, as Susan leaned back to allow the waiter to place a large bowl of crisp thin frites in the middle of the table, Andrew addressed his question loudly towards his other neighbours hoping to include them and break his hitherto singular exchange. With the broadest, most encouraging smile he could muster, he raised his voice over the hubbub, which, as each member of the group took their first mouthfuls of food almost as one, suddenly dropped.

‘What's Lillet?'

He immediately realised that he had unwittingly committed some form of social faux pas. Glasses parked themselves in midair, faces freeze-froze, hands reaching across the table for a piece of bread stalled, and forks failed to find their targets, hovering inches away from open mouths.

Andrew was the only one who moved, giving a darting, despairing survey of his fellow diners. It was Emma who rescued him. Following the original direction of his gaze she discovered the source of his question: a mirror in the corner with the word ‘Lillet' etched on it.

‘Garçon,' she called to the waiter. ‘Qu'est ce que c'est “Lillet”?'

‘You can't ask that!' screeched Peter, burying his head in his napkin. The others laughed nervously, glad that the embarrassing silence had been broken.

‘Un Lillet? C'est un apéritif. Désirez-vous un Lillet? Rouge ou blanc?'

‘A Lillet,' explained Emma to Andrew across the table, ‘is an aperitif in this country, and a tampon in the UK. I don't think you have the brand over there. Grow up, boys,' she added, looking at no one in particular.

‘I told you he was a tosser,' Ollie whispered.

A waiter then presented Andrew with a glass of the cocktail which, with due ceremony which felt to him like penance, he drank.

 

Champagne, they all agreed, got you drunk quicker than anything else: it was the bubbles. It also woke you up and, given the day they'd had, none of them deserved to be awake, let alone like this: eyes bright, faces shining.

The table was strewn with various glasses and bottles, not just the champagne flutes with which they had begun the meal. Badoit and Evian, token gestures towards good health and sobriety, were lined up between various local red and white wines, some of which Allie had insisted on buying to prove his point that in a blind tasting none of them could tell which was the most expensive. In this he had been confounded by Andrew, whose palate had been able to discern not only the grape, but also the region. When the musicologist then successfully ranked them in order of value, Allie declared that from now on he should consider himself the group's
sommelier
.

For the first time that evening, Andrew felt that he belonged. He was tempted to announce that he would be honoured to accept the duty as long as it was used in its twentieth-century meaning – as a wine waiter – but not if they meant it in its medieval sense – as a clerk responsible for the maintenance of all the household items. Instead he suppressed his dry observation and congratulated himself on his social awareness, settling instead for what he hoped they would read as a shy smile. Nevertheless, he couldn't resist telling Susan that he wouldn't carry their bags for them. The duties of a
sommelier
, he explained, included the organisation of the baggage for long journeys and, indeed, some of the singers at St Martin during Ockeghem's era were designated as
sommeliers
.

‘How fascinating!' she exclaimed, though he was relieved that, as she turned towards the others to tell them, they had their backs turned, focused on Craig who had lined up the table's cruet sets and was demonstrating a theory about cricket. In a group situation like this, with no divide between the private and the public, anything he said to Susan would be repeated and amplified. He was beginning to understand the rules of social intercourse and he wouldn't, as he had earlier, be so quick to speak. Already an aside to Susan about Loire wines had landed him in the middle of the wine-tasting, just at the point where he'd hoped he would be able to spend the rest of the evening drinking coffee. Still, he seemed to have discovered a second, or perhaps third, wind. He'd taken more painkillers and antibiotics, and the pain in his hand had once again faded. He did a rough calculation in his head: midnight here, six o'clock in Ohio. He'd left home at three o'clock the previous day and had about two hours' sleep, maximum. It didn't make any sense; he was beginning to feel better and starting to enjoy himself.

It was after the desserts were finished – crème brulées and îles flottantes, cheese and another bottle of red wine for the basses – that the stories began. His ignorance about the word ‘Lillet', a linguistic confusion for which he now seemed to have been forgiven, had prompted a discussion about puns, and Andrew was pleased to note that modern singers seemed to share the same kind of fascination with wordplay that their fifteenth-century counterparts had.

‘Hey, it's like the Julian St John story,' said Craig. ‘You know, the Utrecht incident, with the telephone?'

Around the table people nodded and smiled; only Marco shook his head.

‘You weren't there?' exclaimed Craig. ‘But you must have heard it, surely?'

‘No,' said Marco. ‘I was on that Gabrieli trip to Rome. The one where all the luggage went missing?'

Craig, who sensed that Marco might himself be about to launch into an anecdote of his own, cut him off. ‘You'll love it,' he said, and all other conversations petered out as chairs were pushed back and people turned expectantly towards the alto.

For Andrew's benefit, Craig began with a brief portrait of Julian St John, a singer known to most of them from other contexts, but whose sole appearance with Beyond Compère had been notable more for the amount of complaining he had done about having to learn the music from memory than for any musical or social contribution. Marco, it seemed, held him in particular contempt; he still hadn't forgiven Julian St John for his characteristically xenophobic dismissal of pasta as ‘wop food'. While others, for whom eating and drinking was the primary perk of touring, scoured the town for good restaurants and bars, St John would eat cheaply with provisions bought from supermarkets or even brought with him in his luggage, and never, ever bought anyone a drink. Such myopic disinterest was similarly manifest in a general snobbery about people, colleagues included, for which he made no apology, his frequently voiced ambition being to quit the world of music and enter the world of high finance. Other than ambition, he lacked any relevant experience but nevertheless kitted himself out with what he considered to be the essential tools of the business: high-end gadgets.

‘He turned up at Heathrow carrying this new laptop. It was huge,' said Craig.

‘About the size of a breeze block. And about as heavy,' added Allie.

‘And he had a mobile phone – and this was in the days when only a few people had them. So he's playing with his phone in the departure lounge and on the plane. The stewardess told him to switch it off and he got all uppity. And then it was the laptop on the plane. You know what he's like – he just kept showing stuff to people. Spreadsheets and things like that.

‘Anyway, we get to Amsterdam and we get picked up and drive to Utrecht. It's one of those late-night gigs so there's time for lunch and we all arrange to go out to find something to eat, and Allie and Ollie go and do their thing.'

(‘Bert's Beerhouse,' said Allie.

‘The first time I came across Oerbier,' said Ollie.)

‘So we come down to the lobby to meet up for satay and frites or whatever,' continued Craig, ‘and he's in reception waving his phone around above his head, like he's trying to get a signal. And he looks really annoyed. So we ask him if he wants to come along and he says “I've got better things to do”.'

Marco and the others laughed at Craig's perfect impersonation of St John's plummy accent. Andrew thought for a moment that that the story had ended, but Craig
hadn't finished.

‘Off we go, and he obviously decides to go and buy his lunch at a supermarket, and after a while he works out that there's something wrong with the phone. In fact, what he hadn't done was tell them he was going out of the country – it was his first time with the phone overseas – and so they hadn't lifted the block on it. So he's furious with the phone company and wants to sort it out. Of course, to do that he'll have to ring back to the UK and you know how much hotels charge for that. But he thinks, sod it, I'll get the money back off them, ‘cos he's the complaining type, you know. So he rings the UK. And that doesn't work.'

Craig, a natural story-teller, was into his stride now.

‘So by now he's furious with the hotel as well. He reckons it must be their fault. They haven't switched his phone on, he guesses, so he comes down now to give the guy at reception an earful, just as we get back.'