Time Will Tell

by Donald Greig

  Andrew Eiger was seated at a table facing her, his hand wrapped in something white which, as she approached, she realised was a bandage.

  ‘Ah, Monsieur Eiger. Enchanté. Je suis Daniel Huibert, résident de séance. Votre voyage s’est il bien passé? Et votre main? Vous vous êtes blessé?’ asked Daniel, pointing to Andrew’s bandaged hand. Why he had chosen to address her in English, and Andrew in French, Emma wasn’t sure, though she guessed he was testing Andrew, a touch of Gallic competition over the only female in the room. Andrew was unperturbed and explained in perfect French that he had hurt his hand and a local pharmacy had helped him.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he added in English to Emma.

  ‘So you have met before?’ asked Daniel, observing the exchange. Emma explained how they’d given Andrew a lift, whilst Andrew buried his head in his papers and began taking notes, almost as though Emma was issuing him with dictation.

  Daniel was confirming the order of events when, right on cue, the third speaker, Étienne Baraud, dressed in a white linen shirt despite it being winter, ambled towards them, placing sheaves of paper at the ends of each row. He introduced himself in a strong accent and gave them copies of his handouts which were headed by a picture of a tree, the signs of Gents’ and Ladies’ toilets, an image of a Moebius strip and an optical diagram. Emma was glad she would be at the rehearsal when his paper began.

  She had sent an advance copy of their new Ockeghem CD to Daniel and it was playing as the room slowly filled with the delegates, amongst whom she spotted several familiar faces. She exchanged a wave or a smile with some as she flipped through her lecture one last time. Daniel was deep in conversation with the final speaker and had placed her on his right where, seated next to Andrew, she observed the American, head down, writing out numbers and letters like a private game of Countdown.

  ‘How is it?’ she asked, nodding towards his hand. ‘What did they say?’

  Andrew looked up, pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Oh. Not bad.’ He waved his bandaged hand and twiddled his fingers, then winced and rested it on the table, palm upwards, fingers curled protectively over his palm. ‘They gave me strong painkillers and antibiotics and wrapped it in a dressing. They told me to keep it dry and said I should let the air get to it tonight. Oh, and I should really get a tetanus shot and maybe a rabies one as well, but I told them I’d injured myself on an aeroplane, not been bitten by a bat.’

  Emma laughed. She hadn’t expected wit from him, let alone droll humour.

  ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I have to leave halfway through your paper to get to our rehearsal, so I think it might be better if I left before you begin? Otherwise people might think I’m walking out on you. I could get Daniel to explain that. I’d love to read the paper though, so perhaps you could let me have a copy?’

  Andrew didn’t mind at all. It was only the meeting tonight that really mattered and, in any case, he was currently distracted by his new calculations. The numbers and the letters on the sheet of A4 in front of him were beginning to take shape remarkably quickly.

  He’d only told Emma part of what had occurred between leaving her at her hotel and meeting her again here. After the pharmacy and rather than checking in to his hotel, he’d picked up a baguette and grabbed a quick espresso in a café, then he’d registered at the Centre d’Études. One of the staff had wheeled his luggage away to an office, and behind him the conference attendees had spilled out into the hall from the early-afternoon session. The smokers were first, heading straight for the front door to pollute the fresh air – a few Brits, a couple of Americans and a hefty Dutch contingent that Andrew knew only by reputation. The rest had gathered around a table where coffee was set out, and Andrew had slunk behind a portable notice-board. He wanted to hear a few of the papers and get a sense of the direction in which the critical wind was blowing before he spoke to anyone.

  When he was sure he wouldn’t be seen, he quit his temporary shelter and moved towards the lecture theatre. Expecting it to be empty, he pushed hard on the door and sent a tall, bespectacled man reeling backwards. He apologised, but the lanky academic shook his head and told him there was no need. Besides, he added, looking at Andrew’s bandaged hand, he was the injured party.

  ‘Dirk Schut,’ the man had announced, holding out his hand, and then he laughed. ‘But of course, you cannot shake hands. Domkop! Me. I’m the fool. Not you.’ He had quickly stooped to look at Andrew’s name-tag. ‘Eiger. Ohio! Excellent. That’s … twenty-one and twenty-two makes forty-three … and then fourteen and eight is … twenty-two and twenty-one! Wonderful symmetry! Congratulations!’

  Andrew, who had witnessed his fair share of intellectual eccentricity, had no idea what the man was talking about. What were these numbers and what did they have to do with him?

  I’m sorry, I get excited by names,’ explained Dirk. ‘It’s a new area of research for me and I’ve got one of those brains, you know. I’m not mad, don’t worry. I’m giving a paper on it tomorrow.’

  A bell rang dimly in the recesses of Andrew’s brain. From his conference schedule he remembered that someone was talking about numerology. He didn’t know much about it other than the fact that gematria, as it was known, came from the Hebrew belief that each letter had a numerical value that lent to each word a particular property. He had never dabbled in the study himself, content to share a general disdain for a subject that, to many people’s minds, failed basic tests of consistency. For a start, there was the alphabet you used and the numbers to which they equated; some systems leapt in units of ten after the letter K had been reached. And any biblical text had been translated from Aramaic, Hebrew or Greek into Latin and thence to modern languages, each transition subject to the translator’s poetic and stylistic bent.

  He had a vague memory that Schut was using numerology as a methodological tool to establish the real spelling of Ockeghem’s name, a perennial conundrum recast in an interesting new light, though it was, in his view, a dull and ultimately redundant exercise. Ockeghem was particularly rich in variations – Obeghem, Ockeghem, Oquagan, Okegem – in all forty-nine different spellings and still counting, the consequence of local pronunciation and mis-transcriptions in a predominantly oral culture where the spelling of a name was relatively unimportant.

  He wanted to sit down and get his lecture in order, but the Dutchman was not to be deterred. He pulled out a notebook from his pocket and a small piece of paper with yellowed edges.

  ‘I call it my crib sheet,’ he said, showing Andrew a list of the letters of the alphabet, next to which were numbers.

  ‘So you see, it’s a very simple principle. Each letter has a number value, except I and J, and U and V – they’re the same. So, A is one, B is two, and so on. So: the cipher of Eiger – that’s lovely. E – five; I – nine; G – seven; E – again, five; R – seventeen. And you can see the symmetry already. The first three letters add up to twenty-one and the last two add up to twenty-two. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. But this is why I got excited; you get a mirror image with the cipher of Ohio.’

  He jotted something down in his notebook and showed it to Andrew:

  ‘Do you see?’ he said triumphantly. ‘Twenty-one and twenty-two are perfectly mirrored in your name. It’s beautiful!’

  Andrew adopted the standard academic defensive stance when confronted with a new idea: impressed, but sceptical. His name, after all, was not Eiger Ohio and the significant design seemed to be the result of inspired coincidence and Dirk’s quirky methodology. That was the problem with this numerology stuff, he’d always thought; it seemed somehow random, a case of throwing numbers up into the air and seeing what patterns could be found when they fell. It was different with music, where arithmetic was often the conscious basis for aesthetic form; when Dufay was commissioned to write a piece for the consecration of Brunelleschi’s famous dome in 1436, he had clearly used the proportions of Florence Cathedral as the guide for the musical plan. Complex mathema
tical schemes certainly informed medieval music, but numerology and ciphers of composers’ names were considerably more conjectural.

  ‘I give you my handout,’ said Dirk, digging into a large canvas shopping bag and withdrawing a sheaf of papers. ‘You can have a look at it and we must talk tomorrow.’

  It amounted to four pages of A4, stapled together, covered in a confusion of numbers and letters, pictures and diagrams. Running down the sides of the first page were two alphabets, one English and one Latin, and their mooted numerical equivalents.

  ‘Seventy,’ said Dirk as he headed for the door.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Seventy. It’s the value of “Goodbye”,’ said the Dutchman over his shoulder as the door closed behind him.

  For all his doubts, Andrew’s interest had been piqued. The numerology angle was one he hadn’t considered. Might the value of Ockeghem’s name somehow tie the motet to the composer?

  Using Schut’s handout as a reference for the numerical equivalences, Andrew had spent the next fifteen minutes pondering the various spellings of Ockeghem’s name, and that was how Emma and the director of the conference had found him, doodling with letters and numbers. He’d not met Daniel Huibert before and the Frenchman struck him as too good-looking to be an academic, someone who’d probably got where he was through a mixture of good fortune and charm, the latter being very much in evidence whenever he addressed Emma. Clearly she was the star turn and, as a woman, was of particular interest.

  Daniel was now delivering his prelude to the assembled delegates, his agenda, Andrew felt, crudely evident by announcing the panellists in reverse order to maximise the anticipation of presenting a ‘proper’ musician into their academic midst. Étienne Baraud, the third speaker, was obviously some kind of post-structuralist acolyte, with a background in semiotics and arcane French psychoanalysis. It was a school of critical thought which Andrew believed had no place in medieval studies; whenever he came across references to Lacan or Derrida in footnotes, he expected that the accompanying text would be full of woolly prose, obscure puns and sweeping generalisations. He wondered if he, like Emma, could leave before the paper.

  Daniel, after a sly dig at the barren cultural wasteland of the American Midwest, traced Andrew’s brief career. He mentioned the title of his Ph.D. and described him as young – an epithet that was either laudatory or condescending, Andrew couldn’t decide which. The pause that followed was entirely for dramatic effect and showed scant respect for Andrew and his fellow French panellist. Daniel sighed, glanced almost coyly at Emma, and then looked up at his audience.

  ‘Emma Mitchell,’ he began, and for an instant Andrew wondered if he was going to leave it there, as if merely the mention of Emma’s name was charged with such mystical significance that no further clarification was necessary. Then Daniel, who had introduced the first two panellists in English, lapsed into French, but no ordinary French. This was the language of Mallarmé and Baudelaire: Emma was not only talented, she was also responsible for embracing the fifteenth century and delivering it to the wider audience without, at any point, betraying the essence of the music or compromising the key values of truth to history and intellectual rigour – the key themes, he noted severely, of this very conference. As he bestowed upon Emma each section of his encomium, he looked down at her and then out to his audience with an expression that suggested that they, as mere academics, could never hope to emulate her contribution. He said she was beautiful, immediately qualifying his description as a reference to her contribution to early-music performance, before likening her success to a flower bursting from the fecund soil of England’s intellectual tradition. Judging from the looks on some of the delegates’ faces, Andrew was not the only one who, when Daniel uttered the phrase ‘de bon goût’, wondered if the chairman of the session was commending Emma for her good taste or, as seemed more likely given the slight flush in the Frenchman’s cheeks, thought her ‘tasty’. Unaware of the awkwardness that was spreading through the audience, there followed an extended, overtly sexual metaphor about intellectual probing that led to a cul-de-sac, which left Daniel – mercifully, as far as Andrew was concerned – lost for words. As if emerging from an erotic daydream, Daniel picked up his notes, read the title of Emma’s paper and abruptly reminded the audience that the concert that night would be at 20.30 (Andrew always had problem with the European twenty-four hour clock and momentarily thought that meant ten-thirty), and that no one – no one, he repeated – should miss it. And with that, like a game show contestant, he applauded his own speech. The delegates had no choice but join in, though Andrew noted that a few people leant over to colleagues and made what he assumed were caustic asides under the convenient cover of the clapping.

  Throughout, Emma suffered Daniel’s inflated tribute with an embarrassed smile and the occasional laconic glance at her audience to distance herself from the laboured eulogy and to mask her concern about the consequent expectations. She found herself reminded of the fawning fan who had pressed her for her signature the previous night in Newcastle. The Chairman’s lubricious turn as Master of Ceremonies seemed designed to ignite desire in the male delegates and, once again, Emma’s gender had been artificially and artlessly foregrounded, thus drawing attention away from her real abilities. Academics and performers, it seemed, were separated in much the same way as men and women were, the latter adored and venerated. There were some, she thought to herself bleakly, for whom the best paper she could deliver would be one where she remained silent and looked pretty.

  ‘I thank Daniel,’ she began, ad-libbing, and not entirely certain where or how far she was going, ‘for that … for that flattery. We are in France, of course, so I can only say that, as a woman, such praise is, well, de rigueur.’ There was a polite laugh from the audience.

  ‘But we’re here to talk about Ockeghem, a man of course, and a man of the cloth who did not consort with women. I expect that he would have had less favourable words to say about an Eve like myself, and in many ways, of course, condemnation of women is simply the reverse side of praise; both, in different ways, treat women as an object. I would just ask you to set aside any claims I might have to being a performer – and indeed set aside my gender – and invite you to consider what I have to say to you today with the same detachment that you would accord a fellow-academic. That would be true flattery.’

  She hadn’t meant to be so cutting and was surprised at her own eloquence. When she’d started talking she thought she would just précis her paper and apologise for reading it, but, once she’d begun, her anger had gathered and focused. The sentences had unrolled rhythmically, guided by some internal logic that found its way only rarely into her speech, and by the time she’d reached her conclusion Daniel was clearing his throat and busying himself with his papers.

  Anne Frewing and Jenny Riddsdale, both of Emma’s age, were in the front row, the one a tough New Yorker and the other a blunt Yorkshirewoman. Emma had shared bottles of chardonnay with them at a conference two years before and set the world to rights, a moment of sisterhood in a male-dominated arena that had ended with Jenny asking, ‘When shall we three meet again?’ Emma very much hoped it would be later so she could ask them if they thought she should apologise, but, judging from their broad smiles and folded arms, she could tell they approved.

  Andrew, meanwhile, had lost interest. Almost as soon as Daniel had begun his over-the-top introduction, a diagram on Dirk Schut’s handout had leapt out at him, a macaronic version of Ockeghem’s name that combined the Latin with the accepted French variant: Johannes Ockeghem. An academic in the 1930s had suggested that the composer had deliberately adopted this spelling so as to render its numerological equivalent more symmetrical, more – to use a word better suited to both music and the medieval period – harmonious.

  Beneath the letters Schut had traced out the respective values:

  Whether or not the proposal was valid, the resultant values of the names struck Andrew as somehow elegant. What was it about
them? Eighty-one? Sixty-four? And then he realised they were perfect squares. The value of Johannes was 81; 9×9: the value of Ockeghem was 64; 8×8. For a moment he was pleased with himself, but almost immediately his pleasure gave way to disappointment. All he’d discovered was that the numbers were squares, which proved nothing in itself; it was merely an observation, something he might raise at the end of Schut’s paper to pick him out from the crowd, but no more. ‘Do you think there’s anything significant in the fact that they’re both squares?’ he would ask, and there would be a murmur amongst the other delegates as they considered this small aperçu. 9 and 9; 8 and 8. And then Andrew had felt his body go hot and just as suddenly cold again; a shiver had ripped through him as if he’d been wired to the mains. 9 and 9, and 8 and 8? That was the very layout of the parts in the thirty-four-part Miserere mei: nine discantus parts; nine contratenor parts; eight tenor parts; eight bassus parts. 9 and 9, and 8 and 8?

  My God, he thought, that’s it! It has to be!

  The motet was by Ockeghem; his signature was here in the arrangement of the voice parts. Andrew looked up. In front of him was an audience of Ockeghem scholars, all of them listening to Emma talking, which, because the blood was pumping so loudly in his ears, he could no longer hear. He should stand up right now and tell them! Tell them all! He’d interrupt Emma and, as an apology, announce that Beyond Compère would be giving the first performance of Ockeghem’s Miserere mei, a thirty-four-part motet, sometime in the near future. Look, he would say: here’s the proof: the circumstantial evidence of Chiron and his letter; the stylistic similarities including the use of the canon at a fourth; and the numerological solution that was staring him in the face. And what better place and time to announce it? Here, in Tours, Ockeghem’s home town, on the five-hundredth anniversary of his death, in front of the group of people who would immediately appreciate the true impact of his discovery?