Time Will Tell

by Donald Greig

  He looked up from his magazine to see Emma and her group picking up their bags. The plane was boarding. In the light of Ockeghem Gems, his original plan looked misconceived. If Emma Mitchell could do this to Ockeghem, then maybe she wasn’t to be trusted with the Miserere mei? She’d probably want him to prove that it was by Josquin. Perhaps he should offer the motet to someone else?

  He finished his coffee and slid his magazine and paper into his briefcase, careful not to crease any of the pages of the transcription he’d made during the night. It was all there, carefully protected in its blue folder. For the third time in less than eighteen hours he handed his boarding pass to an attendant and stepped into an aluminium tube. The colour scheme was depressingly recognisable: antiseptic white with red-and-blue trim, the practised ‘Welcome on board, sir’ as stale as the recycled air. His spirits were low. Suddenly he felt tired and very alone, full of doubt, and he wished he’d apologised to Karen. He needed her.

  It was the same tortuous progress to his seat that he’d experienced on the first flight, with each person trying to cram too much luggage into the overhead lockers. He sighed and then realised he was standing next to Emma Mitchell who was seated in an aisle seat. He looked down just as she looked up and she smiled slightly at him. Without intending to, his face registered recognition. Panicked, he held out his hand. ‘Andrew Eiger. We’re meeting later.’

  She looked confused, then laughed. Her hand was small, the handshake quite definite, so much so that it hurt him. He remembered the lacerations in the palm of his hand, which was now throbbing slightly.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, smiling. ‘At the conference. I’m sorry. Of course. You’re on the same flight then?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was all he could think to say. ‘Um, later then? At the conference? Or after the concert, as we said?’

  ‘Yes. After the concert. We’ll all be going out for a meal, so do join us. The concert’s in the Cathedral, but I’ll see you at the conference, won’t I?’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. He hadn’t meant to be so forceful or defensive and realised that for some reason he wanted to impress her. He was, much to his surprise, a little star-struck, or maybe just unprepared for a meeting that seemed to have begun without him knowing it.

  ‘I’m looking forward to seeing what you have for us, by the way,’ she said. ‘It sounds very intriguing, whatever “it” is. Will you be talking about it at the conference?’

  ‘Er, no. Just talking about the reception of Ockeghem’s music at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The usual stuff, you know? The way that people see Ockeghem as mathematically inclined – more of an intellectual than an artist. It’s a myth we need to destroy.’

  He’d clicked into academic mode, now more relaxed and in control. He wanted to know where Emma stood on Ockeghem and had deliberately thrown in the final line as a challenge. She made some small gesture to him, a flick of the finger towards the back of the aircraft. Was she suggesting they go to the back of the plane and talk about it? He looked in the direction she was pointing and realised that she was trying to tell him that the aisle was now clear and he was holding up his fellow passengers.

  ‘Oh. Yes. See you later then,’ he said, taking his cue and moving forward.

  ‘Are you being picked up at the airport?’ asked Emma quickly.

  ‘No. Getting the train.’

  ‘We might be able to give you a lift. The organisers are picking us up in a minibus. If there’s room, you can come with us if you like?’

  By now the pressure of people behind him had propelled him three rows forward and he nodded to her as he was herded towards the back of the plane. She seemed nice enough, he thought, even attractive. But, as a performer she was probably used to smiling for the camera and putting on her best face; he wasn’t going to fall so easily for her charms and surrender control of the manuscript until he was certain he could trust her. Still, a lift to the conference would save him a lot of time and energy. It would be door-to-door and would avoid the complications of getting into Paris, onto a train, then from the train station at Tours to the conference. He was prepared to sit on the floor of the van if necessary.

  He tucked his briefcase under the seat in front of him. He wanted his new transcription to be within sight at all times and didn’t want to surrender it to the chaos of the overhead bins. In many ways this most recent result of his labours, an edition from which modern singers could easily perform, was surplus to requirements and it made him nervous. His guiding principle had been to cover his tracks with each new version, immediately consigning the earlier model to the shredder. Now three copies of the motet existed, which meant three times the possibility that someone else could stumble on his treasure. At his feet lay two and at home, in the safe-box bought from Staples expressly for the purpose, lay the first transcription he’d made in the library six months ago. The real manuscript, of course, still lay in the library in Amiens. He would destroy one of the copies in his briefcase when he got to Tours; he couldn’t take the risk.

  He closed his eyes and thought back to that glorious moment six months ago. He’d been alone at the time, conducting archival research, something he hadn’t done since the first year of his Ph.D. when he’d spent a summer foraging through documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale, a comparatively simple pursuit in that it required of him only a working knowledge of modern French, his main realm of enquiry being microfiched reviews of concerts and the private papers of various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musicologists. Last year’s archival research in Amiens was considerably more difficult and demanded knowledge of Latin, medieval French, and a great deal of patience. It was prompted by intellectual fashion rather than a spirit of unquenchable historical enquiry. Several important discoveries had recently been made about the singer-composers of the fifteenth century, in particular work on Ockeghem, Busnois and, of course, Josquin, and primary research had made a comeback, replacing fashionable theorising that had for a while occupied centre stage. Andrew had little time for the arcane posturing of poststructuralism, which he deemed to be about as useful as sticking a model of Chartres Cathedral in a wind tunnel to test its aerodynamic properties. In his opinion, such theoretical agendas were shrill, repetitious, incomprehensible and ultimately self-defeating. If you were going to deconstruct music and make the author explode in a cloud of critical smoke, then what was there left to talk about? So he had welcomed the revival of first-hand research and decided that he should do some himself. The trouble was that he didn’t know how to do it or where to begin.

  That hole in his education raised the spectre of ridicule by his peers. He couldn’t exactly go to, say, Leeman Perkins at Columbia and ask him how you got to read through the records of Chapter meetings at the Cathedral of St Gatien at Tours. Besides which, Perkins had already done it. And he couldn’t ring up, say, Craig Wright at Yale and ask him on which shelf he could find the documents that described Dufay’s order for wine, made when Ockeghem had stayed with him.

  The second problem was choosing the focus of his enquiries. The obvious place was Tours, but he’d heard that a young French researcher had spent five years working on the archives there under the sponsorship of the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Université François-Rabelais, Tours) – a typically long-winded and typically French soubriquet, thought Andrew. He had picked the composer Jean Mouton and spent his time in Amiens in much the same way as he’d submitted his vague application for research funding, ticking a series of boxes whilst framing a loose and hopeful description of his project’s aims. That Amiens had no Ockeghemian connections was a good thing; it showed that he was moving beyond his narrow realm of specialisation. And focusing on a composer from a slightly later generation was a logical progression. He’d always liked Mouton’s music and would base his research around the period when he had been master of the choirboys in 1500. Some three years after Ockeghem’s death, he knew the immediate historical background and thus
saved himself time and effort. And, he discovered, Amiens had good rail links to Paris, so, if the place turned out to be a dump, he could easily return to France’s political and cultural capital.

  And so, in September of 1996, Andrew had arrived at the Gare d’Amiens and headed directly to the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the centre of the city. It was a hot day so he hadn’t wasted any time pondering the lopsided towers, the elaborately sculpted portals or the polychromatic façade, plunging instead into the interior’s welcoming chill. He was early for his meeting with the archivist at the West Door and, although architecture was not his real interest, he’d sat down on a chair at the back of the building to take in its shape and proportions. It was a classic Gothic design – the Nave, the Crossing with the Transept, the Choir, and then the Apse, beyond it the Ambulatory – the ceiling sweeping high overhead, the eye guided there by the numerous columns that ranged towards the east end. Tourists were speaking in low voices, the sound of their steps bouncing off the stone floors up into the vaulted arena. To Andrew, such buildings always suggested spaceships, huge vehicles that would carry the faithful upwards to heaven, and in many ways that’s exactly what they were, but the uncertainties of human faith were of no interest to him. The sentiments of aspiration and glorification expressed in the architecture, from the shape of the cross described by the Nave and Transept to its leaping vertical articulation, were secondary to his narrow enquiry: the music and its realisation. He didn’t notice the intricate inlaid black-and-white tiling in the floor and the daunting maze traced at the centre of the Nave.

  The librarian, an elderly stooped man, barrel-chested and wheezy, was right on time. He shook Andrew’s hand, immediately launching into an enthusiastic and detailed description of the building. Andrew’s heart sank. All he wanted to do was to get his hands on the Cathedral records and establish his own private, leisurely routine. The careful, loving narrative woven by the archivist held no interest for him, and he offered occasional grunts, not so much as an acknowledgement of the procession of interesting facts but more to indicate polite disinterest. The closer they got to the area where the choir would have sung, the more disappointed Andrew became. Instead of stories of the singers and composers, he was regaled with an account of the fire that had destroyed the first cathedral and the subsequent rebuilding in the thirteenth century. At one point, when the old man mentioned the archives, he looked up – but again it was only the historical context that was being sketched, in this case another fire that had destroyed Cathedral records in 1218. Fire, the archivist had said, chuckling: it’s as if God was trying to tell us something. When he had finally suggested that his visitor might now want to see the Chapter records, Andrew quickly agreed, but he was further detained when his host, looking upward to the Rose Window in the South Transept, declared that no one should come to Amiens Cathedral without learning its most valuable lesson. There, in the intricate circular design of the stained glass, was a palimpsest of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and medieval European mythology. Described in the image of the wheel, an idea common to all of those cultures, were meditations on the universal themes of fate and fortune. One could not rely on anything, the old man intoned: life was a constant movement from success to failure and back again; what went around came around. Andrew mechanically traced the patterns that the old man outlined with his index finger whilst privately fuming at the delay in his schedule. His ears pricked up only when mention was made of Boethius, a major figure in medieval musical theory, before he realised that the archivist had begun a lengthy exposition on the role of Fortune in The Consolation of Philosophy. He switched off again. The old man must have finally sensed his impatience; quite suddenly he announced that he would not show the young musicologist the exterior of the South Transept, before adding that Andrew should not leave Amiens without studying it. There are two sides to every story, the librarian remarked cryptically, and what was shown in the Christian images within the Cathedral was challenged by the exterior design. Andrew nodded eagerly but he could tell from the barely disguised exasperated sigh that the old man had finally understood that Andrew had no interest in the superstitious and irrational medieval mind.

  Amiens Cathedral maintained its own archive, unlike almost all other French départements where the task of storing valuable, historical documents was the province of regional government. Andrew was shown to a small room and was solemnly advised of the special dispensation that he had been granted, along with its associated responsibilities. At long last, he was left on his own to begin combing the annualised minutes of the Chapter meetings.

  Over what remained of that day and the next, he patiently drew up a list of common abbreviations used for payments and quantities, but without a medieval French-English dictionary to hand he stumbled frequently. The handwriting, perhaps neat enough at the time, was haphazard, and for the first few hours all but indecipherable. The mystique of history that the ancient books initially offered soon faded. The white gloves that he was required to wear to protect the parchment became an annoying second skin, and the increasing carelessness with which he handled the heavy books told its own story of his dwindling commitment to the project. At first he obeyed the archivist’s instructions and carefully turned over each page with both hands, but soon he began flipping them over as he would a reference book in a library, causing the books to creak and crack in protest like an arthritic great-uncle.

  Only the hope of discovering a reference to Mouton, or perhaps the name of a composer who till now had no known associations with Amiens, sustained him in his dull hunt through the records. There were precious few of the former and none of the latter, and he was forced to conclude that the records held no valuable secrets. Having read several articles by other academics that cited amusing infringements of proper behaviour in church, he’d expected more. There was nothing new here, nothing that hadn’t been more engagingly and wittily described in similar accounts of behaviour in the Sistine Chapel, and the Cathedrals of Notre Dame in Paris and Cambrai.

  And so, on the third day, Andrew sought new diversions outside the archive to relieve himself from the repetitious tedium. The only part of the building that excited him was the Choir, where the lectern, around which the singers would have gathered, still stood. In his mind’s eye he saw Mouton himself indicating the tempo of one of his compositions, a robed choir with arms draped around each other, the boys jostling for a view of the music. The archivist spotted Andrew deep in contemplation and came over and asked him if everything was all right. He replied rather too quickly that everything was fine; he was just taking a break. Guilt for abandoning his task was an unwelcome new sensation and he vowed to stay in the library for the whole of the afternoon rather than leaving around four as he had done the previous day.

  His research had begun to feel like homework, something expected of him by others, rather than the vacation pursuit he had envisaged. Everyone else – the tourists, the shopkeepers, Karen and John at home – were out enjoying the sunshine whilst he was detained inside until he’d learned his lesson. Later that day, the archivist poked his head around the door of the library and asked hopefully whether Andrew had any questions. Andrew had looked up quickly. Every day the old man had offered to help and every day Andrew had nothing to ask. Panicked, he offered the only thing that had piqued his interest that morning, an inscription on the inside front cover of one of the bound books: ‘Qui te furetur, cum Juda dampnificetur’.

  Without a Latin dictionary, his translation was only approximate and, prompted by his own mood as much as anything, he had decided that it was a warning to the reader not to feel frustrated. He had thought that furetur derived from furor, meaning anger, and had assumed that anyone becoming annoyed or displeased with these records would be damned. Furetur, the old man explained, came from the Latin verb meaning ‘to steal’. The inscription was a common curse written in books of all kinds in the medieval period, which, by virtue of their rarity and labour-intensive production, were very valuable. It was known
as the Judas curse, added the old man; anyone stealing the book would be damned like the thief Judas Iscariot. There was nothing new under the sun, thought Andrew. As a child, he’d methodically written in all his books: ‘If this book should ever roam, box its ears and send it home, to: Andrew Eiger’.

  Encouraged by Andrew’s question, the archivist lingered, clearly expecting a greater challenge than this simple translation until it became obvious that Andrew had nothing more to offer. Abruptly, he turned on his heel and left.

  Chained once more to the dull archives, Andrew developed a new diversion that allowed him to remain at his desk in an attitude of work: an investigation into the construction of the books themselves. They were leather-bound and fitted with heavy metal clasps and locks, the keys kept on a special key ring with which he’d been entrusted. The leather of the binding was carefully hand-stitched, as regular as the machine stitching on his shoes and more secure, the covers and spines embossed with gold lettering which now, half a millennium later, had flaked off in places. The pages were made from vellum – prepared sheepskin; once they were soft and flexible but now they were stiff. The binding was fixed by some sort of resin, discoloured by age, and redundant given the strength of the stitching. Despite the solid construction, in some instances the cover had come loose, revealing a tongue of leather that folded over the lip of the spine into the space between it and the pages. Here Andrew could see the structure of the book itself, the dark, yellowed glue and the stitching that held all the pages together, and then the spine itself, an inner layer of vellum, which filled the empty space to provide reinforcement and lent the spine its fat, plush appearance. In some cases this extra padding had disappeared as though time had wasted its bulk, and those books fell open rather too easily. It got Andrew thinking. Vellum was a valuable material, and in the medieval period everything was recycled. Maybe the stuffing in the spine contained something mundane or even something interesting? Shopping lists, rough drafts of the chapter records, a love letter perhaps? And maybe such treasures had been discovered and removed by an historian who’d been here before?