Time Will Tell

by Donald Greig

  ‘Er, your knees are digging into Peter’s back,’ Emma said in a low voice. ‘It’s really uncomfortable for him. Could you move slightly?’

  ‘Oh. Sorry,’ he stage-whispered back. Facing forwards, he found that the only way he could avoid pressing his legs into the seat in front was to sit sideways, like a nineteenth-century Victorian woman on horseback, and now he found himself facing Emma and Oliver. To make it clear that he was not trying to engage them in conversation, he shut his eyes, then felt something brush against his thigh. He looked up to see one of the singers stepping over his legs to get to the front of the bus.

  ‘He’s entertaining, I’ll give him that,’ said Ollie quietly to Emma.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, a smile in her voice.

  Charlie had abandoned his slumber, emerging stunned and blinking like an animal coming out of hibernation, and he joined Marco in his double seat at the front of the bus.

  ‘Va bene?’ said Marco, making room for his colleague and looking up from his Michelin guide.

  ‘What’re we going to visit, then?’ croaked Charlie.

  ‘I just checked out the restaurant Em mentioned. Doesn’t tell us much, I’m afraid, but it’s certainly close to the Cathedral. We don’t have to make a special visit to St Gatien seeing as we’re singing in it, but maybe we should visit the Basilique St Martin? It’s where Ockeghem worked, after all.’

  Hearing the name of the composer, Andrew turned towards the conversation.

  ‘Used to work there,’ he corrected. ‘The real Basilica of St Martin was destroyed in the sixteenth century. Nothing’s left of where Ockeghem worked apart from the remains of two towers.’

  ‘Spoilsport,’ said Marco.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me who did it. It was the Huguenots,’ snapped Andrew, tiredness rendering him even more incapable than usual of discerning anything other than a literal meaning.

  ‘Marco’s just joking, Andrew,’ said Emma, laying her hand lightly on his wrist. ‘Have you got a map there, Marco? Perhaps Andrew could show me where the conference centre is?’

  When he was conducting his research in Paris, Andrew had visited Tours regularly, a simple-enough round-trip by train, and he was familiar with the topography of the city. Taking the map from Marco, he unfolded it and traced the outline of medieval Tours, a simple east-west orientation, as opposed to the north-south direction of the modern city. To the west lay the Abbey of St Martin, where Ockeghem had worked and lived, and to the east lay the Cathedral of St Gatien. In the fifteenth century the two landmarks had been linked by main roads which still existed today: the Grande Rue – now the Rue du Commerce – and the Rue de la Scellerie. To the west, close by St Gatien, lay the Chateau de Tours, a fortress that had housed the retinue of the Valois Kings. The Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance lay fittingly adjacent to the site of the original St Martin and the current Basilica. Everything was within walking distance.

  ‘Did Ockeghem not work at the Cathedral then?’ Charlie asked Andrew. With his love of history, the tenor was slightly disappointed to learn that the venue for the concert was not the actual place where Ockeghem had sung.

  ‘Well, he probably did,’ said Andrew, trying to appear more knowledgeable than he was about the subject. ‘Busnois certainly worked there. Famously he was involved in a fight, or at least he beat someone up.’

  Marco and Charlie laughed, and Peter turned in his seat to smile at Andrew, a gesture that indicated the previous awkwardness was forgiven.

  ‘But you have to remember that this is a small town, really,’ Andrew continued, ‘or at least there are only a few people who can sing well. And, given that Ockeghem’s one of the best around, you have to think that he might have sung now and then at the Cathedral.’

  ‘He needed the money, like we all do,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Oh, I doubt that. I read through his will once and it’s clear that he was a rich man. He wouldn’t have moonlighted in the Cathedral for the money, but I assume there must have been big occasions which he attended, and he might have sung at them as well.’

  Andrew was aware that he’d engaged his audience and was pleased. He guessed that, over the years, they must all have sung in religious, choral institutions and their fascination arose from a recognition of the same loose arrangements between the members of one church that still obtained today.

  He pressed on. ‘He was, after all, much more than a musician. Very much the older statesman, in fact. He served the various Kings of France – Charles VII, Louis XI, Charles VIII – and the position of Treasurer wasn’t just a benefice: it was a real job. Like you have, in addition to your singing.’

  He was immediately aware that he had said something inappropriate. The small encouraging nods had stopped, the phatic ums and ahs suddenly ceased. Without knowing it, he’d insulted all of them by suggesting that singing was an idle, amateur pursuit that needed to be supplemented by some other form of income, that what they did was not a ‘real’ job. Emma felt Ollie stir next to her and pre-empted the full force of his annoyance by explaining to Andrew the full context of his unintentional insult. It was an assumption often made by rich sponsors and donors to singers at post-concert receptions, voiced in condescending tones of well-intentioned sympathy in a world wherein artistic endeavour was subordinate to market forces. At such moments the assumption of amateurism reminded the singers that, even in the twentieth century, art existed only because of suffrage, and the monetary status of the questioner often underlined their reliance on patronage.

  ‘We’re all pros, you know,’ she said. ‘Everyone here makes their living entirely by performing.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Andrew said quickly. ‘I didn’t mean to … I know you’re all professionals who sing all the time…’ He looked around the bus anxiously, aware that he’d lost some of the credibility he had briefly enjoyed.

  ‘I’m tired,’ he mumbled into his lap by way of apology.

  Charlie and Marco had returned to the Michelin guide and Emma, in an attempt to interrupt the awkward silence, asked them if there was anything else worth viewing.

  ‘The Place Plumereau is meant to be quite interesting. If you like inauthentic medieval things, that is,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s an area in the City which they’ve tried to make as much like medieval Tours as they can – tall, half-gabled houses, that kind of stuff. Full of bars as well, so Allie should be happy.’

  ‘Well, if it’s got booze, then we can get authentically pissed,’ said Ollie.

  ‘And it would be authentic to throw up the next morning,’ added Charlie, though, as he said it, he worried that he might thereby encourage Craig’s travel sickness.

  Andrew laughed with the others, keen to rejoin the group conversation and to demonstrate that he too understood the particular resonance of the word ‘authenticity’, which was one of the watchwords of early-music debates.

  Suddenly Susan screamed, ‘Eiffel Tower! Eiffel Tower!’

  Everyone followed her pointing finger. Somehow neither arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport nor driving around the Boulevard Péripherique had quite convinced the travellers that they were in France, or certainly not in the way that the vista across the urban landscape now did. The sight of Sacré-Coeur and, beyond it, the arrogant Eiffel Tower, was proof that they were indeed in the modern capital of France, and finally on their way to its former political centre. Each of them – even Allie, who maintained an air of disinterest as though ashamed to display any enthusiasm – experienced the nostalgic sense of excitement they’d felt as children on holiday when the sea finally came into view.

  Emma clutched Ollie’s hand and he squeezed back. They smiled at each other and she angled herself away from Andrew Eiger’s twisted frame to discourage any earnest discussions about anything fifteenth century that would disturb her mood. She snuggled into Ollie’s body for warmth and comfort and closed her eyes.

  Ollie lifted his arm and put it proprietarily around her, a gesture that he hoped sent a mess
age to the American musicologist. The possessive urge sprang not from any sense of rivalry for Emma’s affections – the guy was a wimp and not Emma’s type – but from a developing resentment of the call on her time and attention that the planned collaboration had already entailed. He had no idea what the mooted project was, nor had he spoken to Emma about it, which meant that it was either so vague as to be not worth talking about or a private residency for Emma alone which would thus not involve Ollie and the others. It would not be the first time. Only recently Emma had turned down an overture from her old university to teach there for a term, a commitment which, had she accepted, would have meant Beyond Compère could not have worked for at least a month. And there had been enough informal overtures from academics in America for Ollie to know that a post awaited her, should she express any interest. If Emma moved overseas the group really would be over. And it would probably be the end of them as a couple.

  In the fifteenth century, the 130-mile journey from Paris to Tours was a three-day journey on horseback over level ground through the forests of central France with overnight stops at hospices or monasteries. A more scenic and more comfortable, if slower, route would have been three days by horse-drawn wagon south to Orleans and thence to Tours by river barge, a leisurely week-long trip along the Loire. The minibus sped along the Autoroute du Sud, the A10, from the new capital of France to the old one, a predictable band of tarmac the vibrations from which eventually lulled all of the passengers to sleep.

  When they pulled up in front of the Hotel de l’Univers, a grand edifice built in the nineteenth century to accommodate travellers arriving at the new train station, Andrew was still asleep and it took both Peter shaking him and Emma calling his name to rouse him. His glasses had slipped to the end of his nose and he was blinking, an image which reminded Emma of Mole in The Wind in the Willows. He fell rather than walked out of the bus, his briefcase clamped under his arm.

  By the time he had re-arranged his clothes, the others were in the hotel lobby collecting their keys. Evidently Andrew had no plan and seemed to have decided that his fate lay in Emma’s hands.

  ‘What shall I do?’ he asked.

  She knew Andrew was staying at a smaller hotel near St Martin and, not being required to be at the conference till four, she wanted the time to herself to get a bath and to freshen up.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you,’ she replied, bouncing the question back. ‘Personally, I would check in to my hotel room.’

  ‘I’ll go and check into my hotel room,’ he echoed, taking her suggestion as an instruction. ‘What then?’

  He looked sad and forlorn standing there, a lost little boy, but she could see her precious time slipping away. How did his wife put up with him?

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, hearing the slight irritation in her voice. ‘Register at the conference?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding as though she might not have heard him. ‘Where am I?’

  In the end Emma had to take him into the lobby to find a street map, at which point Andrew seemed to snap back to full consciousness. He would, he said, prefer to get something to eat and maybe a coffee to waken him. He also needed to find a pharmacy; he’d hurt his hand on the flight the previous day and had some kind of infection. He opened his clenched right hand gingerly to reveal two holes that looked as if they’d been punched into the palm of his hand with a hammer and nail, as though he was trying to create his very own stigmata. From the smallest wound oozed a fresh trail of blood and what looked like pus, the sight of which made Emma gasp. The second seemed at least to have closed over, but it was swollen and looked as if something had burrowed beneath the skin and was now trying to get out. Grateful that Andrew had not shaken her hand, she urged him to find a pharmacie (‘They’re much better than in the UK or the US,’ she commented) and, lest he had decided in the interim that their new friendship warranted physical contact, she stepped back and waved goodbye.

  CHAPTER 12

  Emma’s hotel room was accessed through a small, redundant annex that would keep the noise of the echoey corridor to a minimum. The tall, heavy door opened to reveal a large double bed, an ancient wardrobe, and French windows with a small balcony. She stepped out into the cold, clear air and shielded her eyes against the sun that cast deep shadows across the pavement. Here, three floors above the broad tree-lined streets, she could glimpse through the leaves and branches various shops and banks, and off to her left she could see the beaux arts-style Hôtel de Ville.

  Below her, Marco and Charlie emerged from the hotel, consulted a map, and then headed off, presumably in the direction of St Martin. She had little time to herself and quickly unpacked, a familiar and comforting routine in an otherwise pressurised day. She hung her peacock-blue dress on a hanger and draped the coral-pink silk scarf that she thought went so well with it around the neckline. This was her lecture outfit, a careful balance of sobriety and flamboyance that fitted the tone of her paper. Checking that the net curtains over the windows were drawn, she stepped out of her clothes. The bathroom was warm, the radiator set to its highest level, and she surveyed the toiletries laid out on the shelf over the basin. This was always the acid test for her; the state of the mattress and the number of hangers were important, but it was the freebies that really mattered. She was impressed. At first sight she thought the selection was random until she realised that careful thought lay behind each choice: the hand-soap and the soap on the bidet were Roger & Gallet – lavender, which reminded her of her grandma; the bath gel – which she tipped into the running bathwater – and the shampoo were from a local manufacturer; and the bath soap was a chunky Provençale-style, olive-coloured cube. That gave the hotel a five-star rating in her book and she regretted they weren’t staying there two nights so she could use it all.

  It took her half an hour to bathe and dress and she left the hotel with only twenty minutes to find the conference. The concierge didn’t know the exact location but he provided her with rough directions that took her along the main shopping street. She would have loved to have stopped at the various clothes shops which promised the relaxed elegance that French women seemed to effect so effortlessly. She didn’t have the height or the sinuous grace of the mannequins or the photographic models in the shop windows, but she was happy to dream. The patisserie and wine shops taken for granted by the French provoked within her a guileless enthusiasm and, when she turned off the main Rue Nationale and towards the conference venue down a road empty of shops and people, she had to suppress an urge to skip. This was her first time in Tours and, in the fading light, the cobbles and soft grey stone of the smaller streets felt familiar, reminding her of similar wanderings through the towns of northern France where the idea for Beyond Compère had first formed.

  The Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance looked like a dilapidated house. In front of the large eighteenth-century building was a gravel courtyard. There, huddled around an incongruous, rusting Renault 4, were a gaggle of smokers sporting the regulation academic uniform of jacket, tie and plastic name-tag. She knew some of them and recognised others but pre-empted any conversation by heading straight for the main door with her head down. Inside the house it felt cramped, an unlikely venue for an international conference, but the delegates were hand-picked, the numbers small. To her right was a small office with a long table attended by two women and a man to whom she introduced herself.

  ‘Ah, oui, Mademoiselle Mitchell. Nous avons votre carte d’identité et un petit pacquet pour vous.’

  She took the badge and, not wanting to make any holes in her dress with the safety pin, held it in her hand. In the envelope she found a running order of the conference, together with fliers for publishing houses, and a local map. She was asking the administrator where the lecture theatre was when the musicologist assigned to chair the session, Daniel Huibert, interrupted.

  ‘Emma Mitchell!’ he said, an announcement for the benefit of anyone within hailing distance. He grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her
enthusiastically on both cheeks. He was olive-skinned, effortlessly handsome and impossibly French, even down to the faint whiff of garlic and the almost manicured stubble that had scraped Emma’s cheek and left it tingling. Or maybe that was her blushing, she thought, resisting the temptation to put her hand to her face in a pre-Raphaelite pose of innocence. His suit was beautifully cut, as was his dark hair, and the slight dimples in his chin and fine lines around his bright eyes completed the picture of a successful and confident man. Emma was surprised to find herself checking his right hand, where a band of gold confirmed his marital status, and even more surprised to find that she felt slightly disappointed. Thankfully, he seemed not to have noticed this last look, speaking quickly to one of the women behind the desk whilst he held Emma’s upper arm and steered her gently away from the table.

  ‘Zis way,’ he said. ‘And your flight was all right? From London to Paris, yes?’ The accent seemed slightly overdone, even with his nod towards the English pronunciation of Paris.

  ‘Yes,’ she said as they walked beneath the fluorescent lights along a carpeted corridor. ‘Everything’s okay. A long journey, though. We had to come from Newcastle.’

  Daniel sighed sympathetically and Emma suppressed a smile; Newcastle didn’t figure much in the field of Renaissance studies, and certainly not in French renaissance musical studies, and she guessed he had no idea where the city was. He pushed open a double door to their left and guided her into a lecture theatre. Like the rest of the Centre d’Études, its original design as a private house was striking and, aside from the projector and screen, little attempt had been made to disguise the room’s former use for family dining.