Time Will Tell (27 page)

That Andrew had entrusted Beyond Compère with this musical pleasure meant a further validation of her and the group, which was why Ollie's reaction was so strange. Her boyfriend was dismissive of academics, childishly so at times, but this was music. Perhaps, though, he was as self-conscious as she had been publicly, and now, in the privacy of her hotel room, he could share the excitement?

‘It's amazing,' she said, studying the opening bars. ‘It's one enormous crescendo at the beginning, but then you begin to get those moody exchanges between the parts.'

She looked towards Ollie but he said nothing. He was lying on the bed, flicking through the
Canal Plus
guide, a pose of studied concentration.

‘You don't seem that interested in the motet,' she said. Again no response. ‘I'm really excited by it and I thought you would be too.'

‘Yeah, but it's late,' he said, ‘and we shouldn't really get into it.'

It was tempting to take the comment at face value. Perhaps Ollie meant that it was too late to be talking about aesthetics or work: that, at the end of a long day and after a pleasant meal, they should both go to bed. But there was no sign of that. She feared that what he meant by ‘getting into it' was an argument and she assumed she had done something wrong. Whatever it was, it seemed that it was also her responsibility to discern that grievance and, just as inevitably, to apologise.

‘We should go to bed. We're both tired. And a little drunk.'

‘Drunk,' he said, looking up quickly. ‘I'm not drunk. Are you? Is that why you're so excited about this thing? I can hold my booze.'

It was a ridiculous claim, his anger a crude attempt to deflect her away from the dubious allegations that it was she who was drunk and that he was sober. She hadn't counted his drinks, but she knew he'd had at least a bottle of wine, and then there was the champagne and the Sambucas, plus the beer he'd had before the meal had even begun. But he was canny enough to have conceded that he'd drunk a lot; the issue was one of how one handled it, something which he claimed he was always able to do, and something which, in amorous, teasing moments, he reminded her she couldn't, a reference to the night when they had become lovers.

‘I'm just trying to work out why you're acting like this,' she said. She hoped that Ollie would hear in her weary delivery the love and concern she felt for him, but she saw his body stiffen. He held the magazine page vertically between thumb and forefinger. She could tell that he had found in her delivery evidence of the condescension for which he'd been searching – he the subject of anthropological enquiry, Emma the cultured commentator.

He let go of the page and it flopped down. ‘Acting like what?' He cocked his head to one side.

Emma looked at him, trying to keep her face as neutral as possible. ‘Distant. Bored. I know you don't share my fascination with the history and all that, or sometimes with the music, but I wouldn't mind a little understanding of how I might feel?'

He laughed, a short exhalation of breath as if he'd just remembered a joke.

‘Is what I said funny?' asked Emma.

‘No,' said Ollie. ‘Not in itself. It just sounded funny.'

‘What, to say that I might want my lover to understand me?'

‘Lover?' he said, looking up. ‘God, I know we're in France, but that's a little melodramatic.'

‘OK. Let me put it this way.' She was angry now, frustrated and hurt by the denial, the hostility, the attempt to divert the conversation towards a petty discussion of the status of their relationship and what they should call each other. The argument was going to happen, come what may. She just wanted to get it over with. ‘I might want a little empathy from someone who I'm going out with. Is that prosaic enough for you?'

‘Perfectly prosaic,' replied Ollie coldly, turning another page in a magazine that he had begun to read from the beginning again.

Emma lifted a page of the wet manuscript paper from the table. It stuck to the desk and she eased her fingers beneath it to release it. Behind her she heard Ollie turning another page of the magazine. She walked across the room to her empty suitcase; she had to pack before the morning, so she placed it on the floor and began looking around the room. Her toilet bag was in the bathroom, but she could pack her other possessions now and began to fold the clothes that hung in the wardrobe. The regular movements helped calm her.

‘Look, I don't know what I've done, all right? Whatever it was, I'm sorry. But I'd like to pack and go to bed now. Is it Andrew Eiger? Is that the problem?'

‘He's a tosser.'

‘Yes, I know that's what you think. You've said it more than once. And I don't think he's the greatest thing on God's earth and I think it's pretty dumb – not to say stupidly ambitious – to make a discovery like this and not talk to colleagues about it, but we've got to work with him if we want to perform this piece.'

‘Well,' said Ollie, closing the magazine and looking up at her, ‘we don't have to work with him.'

Emma was confused. There was no way to perform the piece without Andrew Eiger's involvement. In effect, he now owned the Ockeghem manuscript. Suddenly she understood what Ollie was trying to say.

‘You mean we shouldn't accept the project?'

‘Exactly.'

‘We have to,' she said, making no attempt to hide her surprise. ‘It's the most exciting thing that's happened in fifteenth-century music in our lifetime. And I'm not going to miss that.'

‘So you've made the decision, and that's it?'

‘Yes. I have.'

‘And it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks?'

Emma could sense the drift of his argument, a gentle insinuation of himself as representative of the group, isolating her as surely as if his hands were on her shoulders and he were pushing her away from the other singers.

‘It's my group,' she said calmly.

‘My group,' he sneered. ‘You should hear yourself sometimes.'

‘Well, it
is
my group, and it's mine to take in any direction I want. That's not to say I would drag people where they don't want to go. Yes, it matters what other people think, but most of them seemed as interested as I was. It was only you and Allie who sat on your own ignoring it.'

‘And how will they feel when they're just a face in a crowd?' he asked. ‘Have you ever conducted forty people?'

‘Thirty-four, actually.'

‘Have you ever conducted thirty-four people?'

‘No. Have you ever sung this piece?'

‘No. But I know I can.'

‘So you think I can't conduct it? Is that what this is about?'

Her conducting had never been an issue before, and her selfless acknowledgement that the singers often didn't need someone to conduct them was now being turned against her as a criticism of inadequacy. She felt something expanding just below her ribcage like a faded sensation of an earlier injury. Her throat was tight and she tried to swallow, her mouth dry. She was determined not to cry. She knew that, if she did, it would in some way fulfil Ollie's purpose. There was something too casual about his position on the bed, as if he had planned his attack. And now, as she looked at him idly reclining, she realised that it was a bid for freedom from her. She tried one last time to argue her case, even whilst knowing that it was incidental.

‘You know,' she began, ‘it's not much I'm asking of you here. Why are we arguing? I don't think it's much to hope that you might show some enthusiasm. After all, I try to share your interests. It just seems to me sometimes that you just want to contradict everything I do.'

Ollie looked up, the faintest of smiles on his face. ‘So we're incompatible?'

The dull ache had sunk down to her belly. Exhaustion was forcing her into the ground, pulling at her legs and her face which suddenly felt slack and unresponsive. She had her concert shoes in her hand. She knew that, whatever she said, the outcome would be the same.

‘I don't think we're incompatible. Do you?' She was surprised by the calmness in her voice. ‘Are you saying we're splitting up?'

Ollie stood up and for a moment she thought he was going to come over, put his arms around her and reassure her. That it had all been a silly test and she had passed with flying colours. That he respected her. That they would be together. That he loved her. But she knew it was the question he'd been waiting for her to ask.

He reached into his back pocket and pulled something out. It was the small coin Emma had bought for him. He rested it on his thumb and flipped it into the air. She lost track of it against the silvered mirror but traced the path by watching Ollie follow the spinning coin through the air, tumbling over itself then reaching its zenith before falling into his waiting palm. He turned his hand over and placed it on the back of his other and, without looking at it, showed it to her.

‘Yes,' he said. He walked to the door and opened it. Even then she thought he might turn, wrinkle an eyebrow and smile. But he left and she stood on her own, her shoes dangling from her hand above the empty suitcase.

 

♦ ♦ ♦

In the end, it happened just as the old man had imagined it, a nightmare in which the books that he so carefully tended were raped by fire. The archivist had pointed out many times to the Cathedral authorities that the
Salle d'archives
was one of the last parts of the building to be re-wired. Electricity, he believed, was a twentieth-century luxury that was incompatible with old books, particularly ones as rare and valuable as those held in Amiens Cathedral. History had delivered its lesson in the thirteenth century and the Clerk of Works was foolish not to heed it; hadn't fires destroyed the records that described the very construction of the Cathedral?

The University of Columbia in New York had received a major grant to digitally map Amiens Cathedral and upload the data onto a website, a project that the archivist had strongly resisted. What was the point of contriving a reproduction of a living, sacred structure for the benefit of sedentary atheists in America when the true heart of Christian worship still beat in the original edifice? Knowing that the cathedral rose a hundred and forty-four Roman feet into the air, equivalent to the height of heaven of a hundred and forty-four cubits described in
Revelations
, meant nothing unless you stood inside the building itself, craning your neck, and were awed by the reality. And to learn that the width of the Nave was the same as that of the Ark in Genesis counted for little; people needed to
experience
such facts as an act of historical imagination to appreciate fully the enormity of Noah's labour. The faithful should come and stand within the largest interior space of any Gothic cathedral, not download data.

His protests were ignored and, when the young students arrived with their theodolites and laptops, their strange cameras and measuring devices, he'd left them to it. They were in the
Salle d'archives
each morning with their coffee and, at the end of each day, he would make a careful check, picking up cups as he went and placing them in the rubbish bins. He disconnected their laptops that cost the diocese heaven knows how much in electricity and replaced any books that they might casually have browsed and then abandoned.

He blamed himself for not being thorough enough. The fire department report noted that a laptop had been left plugged into the mains. It was never made clear whether the battery itself had set alight or its heat had caused the book on which it rested to ignite, but the image was all too clear in his head: on the spine of one of the chapter records a crystalline smear of old glue had melted and a bright, liquid bubble had formed like a bead of plasma on an open wound. And then, in an instant – ‘in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye' as Paul had it in Corinthians – a lick of flame had leapt into the air.

He was grateful the fire crew arrived so quickly. In a matter of minutes the entire archive would have been destroyed. When he drew up the inventory, it soon became apparent that it was mainly the chapter records from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that had been lost and, as fate would have it, the American musicologist had spent some time copying sections from those just last year. He would not have a complete account, but it gave the old man some comfort to know that important information might yet be salvaged. He would write to the American straightaway and ask him to send details of his research.

 

♦ ♦ ♦

Emma stood for several minutes, looking blankly at the bedspread where Ollie had lain, unable to focus her eyes or her thoughts. She tried to make sense of what had happened, replaying the argument in her mind, trying to find a logic in the callous gesture. Had he planned it like this, deliberately rehearsed the final moment of confrontation? She didn't know that he was capable of such cynicism, her gift thrown back in her face, a warped reminder of the day they had become lovers. For a while she was unaware of what she was looking at – the folder he had left behind, the one which held his music. On it, in Allie's spidery handwriting, was a parodic, adolescent comment on their relationship: a heart with an arrow through it, his initials, OM, answered by hers, EM. For the first time she was struck by the coincidence of their final initials; her own initials would have remained the same if they'd married. And at that moment of banal comprehension, she began to cry.

Tears fell onto her belongings as she packed quickly, throwing things into, and sometimes at, her case. As she busied herself in the bathroom with an abbreviated version of her usual night-time ministrations, fractured moments of dialogue played in her head. Lying in bed, rigidly awake, still hearing the unwelcome tortured soundtrack, she knew that sleep would not come. She switched the light on and looked at the small white sleeping pill that lay by her bedside and tried to envisage the face of her congenial doctor, but Ollie's face, set, determined, swam into view. She picked up the tablet, swallowed it down with fizzy mineral water and lay back down. Half an hour later she was still awake. Switching the light on again, she rang reception to place an alarm call, then took another tablet. Ten more minutes passed. She was hot and had thought it was her despair and anger, but she realised the room was stifling. As she padded across the room to turn it down, she could feel a heaviness in her limbs, her muscles limp and rubbery, and when she lay down it was as if she were lying in a warm bath.