Time Will Tell

by Donald Greig

  The announcement for boarding broke the silence between them and reminded him that he needed to secure his seat to prevent a repeat of the cramped conditions of the previous flight.

  ‘I shouldn’t have called at bath time,’ he said, hoping his bald admission counted as an apology. ‘I’ll call you when I can. From France, but I don’t know when that will be.’

  ‘Fine. That would be better. And try to make it when I’ve got some time to talk, rather than at meals or bath times, OK?’

  As a request it was reasonable enough, but he resented the world-weary tone and, rather than thank his wife for the lift to the airport, he offered a curt farewell. ‘Love to John.’

  He joined the line of people boarding the aircraft, most of them Brits with harsh accents. This being British Airways, the six-hour flight would provide his first of many authentic re-engagements with European exoticism. Momentarily now meant for a moment and not in a moment. A cigarette was a fag, the trunk of the car the boot, sidewalks would become pavements. His brief stopover at London’s Heathrow would provide scant opportunity to use any of these substitutions, yet the amateur philologist in him – a string to every medieval musicologist’s bow, he observed – thrilled to the mutability of language and entertained him as he stood in line. No, not in line. In a queue. And in another ten hours’ time he’d be in France and it would all change again and queue would mean ‘tail’.

  ‘Welcome on board the British Airways flight, sir. Can I see your boarding pass, please?’

  He registered the glottal on ‘Airways’, the sibilant ‘t’, so different to the softer dental ‘d’ to which he was accustomed, and the general harshness of the open

  vowel sounds, the more so without the velvety, post-vocalic ‘r’ typical of Irish and American speakers.

  ‘Over to the other side, then down to your right, sir.’

  Directed away from the Club Class cabin, he recalled his reverie from the previous flight and, for once, felt none of the usual jealousy and bitterness towards the privileged few. Soon he would join them.

  There was a spare seat between him and the young man in the window seat to whom he nodded a hello. He arranged his luggage in the overhead bin, stowed his bag at his feet and immediately withdrew his blue folder.

  He began with the acid test: would the discantus and tenor parts fit together? If they didn’t, he was back to square one. It was too easy: they fitted perfectly as he’d instinctively known they would. He heard the careful contrary motion between the flowing lines in perfect harmony. The second test was the canon within each part. The Latin instruction made immediate sense to him and, habitually paranoid as he was, he realised that it was fortuitously impenetrable to the average transatlantic tourist. Canon ad breve. It told the singers to sing the same phrase exactly one breve after the previous singer. He heard the parts setting off at fixed time intervals, like a staggered race. The long note values in the bassus made it easy to sing, but only professionals would be able to shape that line with the necessary grace to make it sound convincing. When all the parts joined in it would sound much more rich and complex than it looked here on the page. That was equally true for the contratenor part, which, in the manuscript, was provided no musical example of its own, only text: Contratenor sequit bassus in diatesseron in canon ad breve. It told the singer to sing the bass phrase a fourth higher and a breve later. Where the bassus would sing the first note to the value of a breve, the contratenor would sing the same note pitched a fourth higher. But there was a different mensuration sign for the contratenor, effectively a tempo marking which meant that the part would be sung at a faster speed than the basses. That principle would hold for the eight other contratenor singers as well, and the net effect would be that they would overtake their bass colleagues. The image of a race was, Andrew realised, quite appropriate and also explained why there were only eight bassus parts, yet nine contratenor parts. Otherwise the contratenors would be holding long notes waiting for their colleagues to catch up.

  Andrew could imagine most of it. He heard the texture thickening like a musical stew from the lower, steady notes upwards. All his early attempts had produced loose, almost abstract lines for the basses, but now that he had correctly identified the note values, what had originally seemed a dull harmonic underpinning was revealed as a free expression of genuine melodic force. At first anticipating and then echoing the faster-moving contratenor line, the technical assurance of the complex canon was astonishing. Above these duelling parts the tenor part moved serenely in a sequence of slow-moving notes like a stretched-out plainchant tune, though not one that Andrew had thus far been able to identify. Above that, the more obviously decorative discantus parts chased after one another to produce bright cascades of running scales. The compositional design was astonishing and, more than ever, Andrew was convinced that this was the work of a composer at the top of his game.

  It worked. It really did. It was everything he had expected it to be, and, marvellously, as someone like Tinctoris might have said, it all fitted together. It had everything, as far as Andrew could tell. The final test would be hearing it sung, of course, but it was already more than promising. The canon between the contratenor and bassus at the interval of the fourth was centre stage, the same interval as Ockeghem’s chanson Prenez sur moi – though that didn’t prove it was by Ockeghem. It could be another composer referring to that work, or an unrelated echo of the same musical device.

  Yet why had this Miserere mei never been performed? A piece this large had to be a commission of some kind, which required advance planning and organisation. And the number of singers required for its performance far exceeded that of any one choral institution. Given the vocal ranges, it was doubtful that boys would have sung the discantus lines but, if they had, then they would have been singing at the very least three-to-a-part which would mean twenty-seven of them; no choir school at the time had more than eighteen. And without boys, it required thirty-two adults at a time when the largest choir numbered only twenty-four.

  The motet had to have been written for a big state occasion. Louis XI’s funeral in 1483? Impossible. The paranoid, ascetic King was buried without state ceremony. But maybe Ockeghem, as premier chapelain and Treasurer of St Martin at Tours, both direct royal appointments, had written it as a tribute to his patron? The only other possible occasion would have been one where several choirs gathered together, such as the event in Cambrai at which Compère’s Omnium bonorum plena was first performed. Three choirs – those of the French and Burgundian courts, and of the Cathedral at Cambrai – had joined forces to sing the new piece in which several of the singers were named.

  Andrew knew he was missing something and that there were other musicologists who would have better hypotheses to offer. All of them would be in Tours. He’d perused the conference proceedings on the first flight, noted its usual ragbag of topics – a keynote paper which would summarise the state of Ockeghemian scholarship and doubtless add something more provocative, perhaps a new attribution. Or maybe something that tied Ockeghem more closely to Compère and Josquin, and once again raised the question of how much the older man had taught the younger? Then there were papers by other international scholars: on Ockeghem and musical puzzles; on Ockeghem and his links with churches in Paris; on Ockeghem and his relationship with Dufay (there were rumours that the meeting between the two of them in Cambrai in 1462 was not the only one); on Ockeghem and the liturgy; and two or three papers that would present the findings of the kind of archival research that would provide details of the composer’s personal life. Andrew’s hope was that some new piece of information would emerge which would make reference to the motet and even tie it to Ockeghem, a discovery the significance of which only he would fully appreciate.

  Even without knowing the intended purpose of the piece, there was plenty to be going on with, the only possible problem being the very thing that made it so valuable: its uniqueness. Somewhere there might be another version of it, perhaps a better copy, clea
rer and more accurate, which would make his discovery a composer’s sketch like the Bouchel composition scribbled in the back of a choir book in Cambrai in the 1450s. Andrew didn’t want his scrappy version to be trumped by some later edition, and the longer he waited the more chance there was of such a catastrophe occurring.

  The hand in which the manuscript was written had given him pause for thought. When he’d first begun to copy down the notes in the library in Amiens Cathedral, he’d noted the distinct characteristics of the writing. He’d realised immediately, and with some sadness, that it was not in Ockeghem’s hand. Ockeghem’s signature was steady and upright, the lettering like modern Gothic, composed of hard angles, no more so than the ‘e’ which had the appearance of a flag on a pole. The script of whoever had written the music and the Miserere mei text was considerably more rounded, yet more functional as well; any flourishes were kept to a minimum, as if there was no time to attend to careful calligraphy. Where the ‘g’ of Ockeghem’s signature had a studied, neat swoop that ended with a horizontal serif, the tail of the scribe’s ‘g’, like all the other writing, sloped diagonally from left to right and ended with a loop.

  In fact, the scribe’s work seemed almost amateurish, far from the carefully spaced layouts of something like the Chigi codex, the text only loosely aligned beneath the notes, often abbreviated. It even contained a misspelling. It was clearly a very first rough sketch, perhaps dictated, from which a more careful and considered copy would have been made. It was no performing copy either, for no group of singers gathered round a choir lectern, let alone one consisting of thirty-four voices, could have read from something that small.

  ‘Would you like a drink from the bar, sir?’

  Andrew had been oblivious to the pre-flight checks and take-off. Instinctively he hid the score.

  ‘Oh. Er. Yes. Tomato juice, please.’

  ‘Tomahto juice?’ she confirmed.

  ‘Tomahto juice, yes,’ he replied, making the Ts slightly wetter than usual.

  ‘Worcester sauce with that?’ she asked, dropping a solitary ice cube into the clear plastic glass.

  ‘Er, no thank you.’ He took the proffered drink and snack. Sipping the thick juice, he heard the song in his head: ‘You say tomayto and I say tomahto.’ Pronunciation. That was another matter he needed to consider. How should Emma Mitchell’s singers pronounce the text? If the piece had been written for Tours, then any final consonants of the Latin texts would only be pronounced at the end of a grammatical phrase. The sound would probably be more strongly nasalised than modern French, with words ending in ‘-em’ sung as an [am] sound rather than [em]. In other words, Iniquitatem would come out ih-nih-kee-tah-tam, not ih-nih-kwee-tah-tem.

  Andrew knew he was obsessed and once again recognised the symptoms: everything, even the seemingly trivial issue of fruit juice, came back to the motet. But he could allow himself a small pat on the back now, surely? Karen would sigh and roll her eyes if she were here – but she wasn’t. The beauty of a flight like this was that he was on his own and could indulge himself. He was able to enjoy the airplane food at a leisurely pace unlike the fraught mealtimes at home or the slices of pizza he would hurriedly cram down in the staff canteen. He even had a glass of wine with the meal – French, from the Loire no less. Here, thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic, he felt cocooned and pampered.

  Over the next four hours he worked on the score, fortified by three cups of coffee. The man in the window seat was curled up in a foetal ball with a blanket over his head and once the crew had dimmed the cabin lights there were few distractions. Andrew’s overhead light and that of the spare seat next to him described his workspace: the pad of blank music manuscript paper on his seat-table and the original transcription on the spare seat to his right.

  A single sheet of paper no bigger than a greeting card contained the entire original score, but he didn’t have enough paper to provide a complete transcription. It reminded him what an extraordinary model of economy the original notation was, like a dried sponge that expanded to a disproportionate size when wet. But even with a few bars missing at the end, his makeshift edition would nevertheless be sufficient for the purposes of his meeting with Emma Mitchell. In any case, it was a valuable insurance policy: he didn’t know how much he could trust her.

  Now that he had cracked the notational key, the copying part of his task was mundane and mechanical. If he’d had a pair of scissors he could have cut up the individual rows of notes and slid them easily into place above or below the initial statements, like pushing pieces around on a chess board. As it was, his task was orderly and soothing. Occasionally he took a break and rewarded himself with a moment of aesthetic appreciation, noting an interesting clash of a semitone here, a quirky cross-rhythm there. And then the gathering storm as finally all thirty-four parts moved inevitably towards a huge cadence, the shortening notes giving the impression of acceleration, the harmony pushing the ear toward final tension and a fulfilling resolution.

  After two hours he had filled thirty pages in his neat script. The relationship between the words and the notes gave him the greatest problems for which he blamed the scribe. Nevertheless he had a good enough working knowledge of word stress and vocal line to resolve instances where the relationship between music and text was either unclear or clumsy.

  It was a rough first edit and, as far as it went, satisfactory. His finished version would be far more thorough, each editorial decision footnoted, each ficta suggestion carefully qualified, the final, massive score prefaced by a short history of its discovery and its place in fifteenth-century music. Perhaps there would be a foreword by one of the conference delegates, an expert in the field with whom he might collaborate in the future. He felt a quiet sense of reassurance as he stacked the pages. There wasn’t sufficient space to lay it all out here and he looked forward to that moment, probably in his hotel room with the bed used as a drawing board.

  He reclined his chair and switched off the reading lights to grab ten minutes of sleep. As if on his cue, the cabin lights came on and the noises from the galley announced the imminent arrival of what would pass for breakfast. His neighbour stirred and emerged blearily from a nest of blankets, yawning. Andrew stood up to allow him to join the scrum of people gathered around the restrooms at the back of the plane, and stretched both arms to loosen his shoulders. His writing hand was cramped and the palm felt stiff and sore where the metal lock in the overhead bin had pierced his skin. From the galley a freshly lipsticked stewardess pushed a trolley towards him, dispensing antiseptically wrapped breakfast-packs. Hurriedly he placed his various papers into the blue folder and pushed it into his briefcase. He was tired now, his eyes stinging from the recycled air and unnatural light, and he took off his glasses and rubbed his face while he calculated the time differences: eight o’clock in the UK, landing at around nine: two in the morning in Ohio. No wonder he felt like this. Jetlag didn’t just refer to the effects of a broken body-clock, as he knew from his experience of flying once from London to New York on a day flight. Even then, when his body knew it was only eight in the evening, the ground beneath him had shifted unpredictably and he’d found himself gabbling, as if he’d stayed up all night; the low cabin pressure and oxygen-depleted air took their toll.

  The food, a rubbery croissant and raspberry yoghurt, was difficult to digest and he tried to wash it down with a cup of rusty-looking tea. He always tried to eat and drink what the locals did. He really needed the caffeine fix of coffee but decided to keep the treat of un grand café crème for Tours. After all, once he got to France he’d experience a quantum leap in culinary know-how. He smiled. It hadn’t always been like that: in the fifteenth century it was the other way round, and the French were jealous of English cookery.

  He rested an arm on the brushed aluminium armrest, laid his head back on the flame-resistant, foam-filled chair, and sipped his Indian tea from his plastic cup. Closing his eyes, he saw notes he’d just transcribed moving slowly across the page from rig
ht to left, dancing on the inside of his eyelids. Simultaneously he heard the sound of high voices singing descending phrases, a logical, musical pursuit supported by the lower voices, their strict imitation more difficult to discern in the thicker register. He wasn’t hearing or seeing the exact lines, yet here and there a familiar shape emerged, much as the sound of his fellow passengers’ conversations offered up the occasionally distinct sentence. Wrapped in the sonorous bath of meaningless chatter from the other passengers and his imaginative re-creation of the Miserere mei, the reality of his surroundings and the fiction of the musical performance became increasingly blurred. Andrew Eiger fell into a deep, easeful sleep.

  CHAPTER 6

  The alarm went off at five forty-five and Emma snapped awake, knowing exactly where she was and what the day entailed. Despite the itinerant lifestyle, she never woke in an unfamiliar hotel room experiencing the momentary, thrilling panic of dislocation. Nor, unlike her other colleagues, had she ever been roused from a drunken slumber by The Call of Shame, as it was wryly known.

  She flicked on the light and stowed her alarm clock and sleeping pills in a United Airlines travel bag she’d filched from a Business Class seat on a transatlantic flight. The tablets were from her avuncular doctor, a fan of the group who, when she had described her lifestyle – the early starts, the late nights, the jetlag – suggested she carry them in case of emergency. It was a sweet thought, a gift rather than medicine, and, with them as a guarantee, sleep always came easily. As yet, she’d never had to resort to them and now they were merely part of her routine in an alien hotel, a ten milligram Temazepam tablet placed by the side of her bed next to her alarm clock ‘just in case’.