by Donald Greig
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 with
in 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.
She dreamed of full-length curtains that smouldered and then puffed into flame. She tried to beat out the fire but the heat was too fierce. Suddenly all that remained were charred curtain rings swinging from a blackened rail and sun was streaming through a sooty window, a bleached landscape beyond. And then the sun became an electric light shining in her eyes. Claire was bending over her, shaking her by the shoulder and trying to wake her, the phone ringing uselessly. At first Emma couldn’t grasp what was happening or where she was. She was aware only of how floppy her body felt and the sense that something dreadful had happened. Only when Claire started hurriedly putting her few remaining belongings in her case did Emma realise that she’d overslept and a brittle memory of the previous evening locked into place like a door swinging wide on its hinges. She threw cold water on her face, brushed her teeth and dressed quickly.
‘Aren’t you going to bring that?’ asked Claire, looking towards the desk where the hat that Ollie had bought lay.
Emma hesitated for a moment. ‘No.’
When she stepped onto the bus, she was greeted with a quiet ‘morning’ and reassurances that they hadn’t been waiting long. Ollie was seated on the back row staring out of the window. Everyone knew.
It was only when they reached the outskirts of Paris that she remembered the Ockeghem manuscript.
‘Did you put the manuscript in my luggage?’ she asked Claire.
‘Where was it?’ asked Claire.
‘On the desk.’
‘Under the hat?’
Emma rang the hotel from her mobile phone and the desk clerk assured her he would get housekeeping to check the room. When she rang back half an hour later she was told that they had found a hat and could send it on to her. The papers? They had found no papers.
No matter: Andrew Eiger had a copy at home. It would be embarrassing to let him know she’d lost it within a few hours of him surrendering it to her care, but nothing more serious than that. The fifteenth century and Tours were a long way away and Emma had more important things on her mind.
♦ ♦ ♦
Andrew took a cab home from the airport. After three days of academic skirmishing, he’d been glad to climb aboard a mercifully empty plane, order a lunchtime drink and flick through the various handouts and notes he’d accrued. Everything he’d learned at the conference had added to his certainty of Ockeghem’s authorship of the manuscript. Papers which investigated his musical style, small hitherto unknown biographical details including further information on Geoffroy Chiron who, it seemed, was a friend to Ockeghem as well as a colleague, and other circumstantial details left little doubt that Ockeghem’s Miserere mei was Andrew’s ticket to a starry future.
Karen and John were out when he arrived home, perhaps at the supermarket buying dinner. A note on the kitchen table would doubtless tell him when he could expect them. There was something different about the house and at first he put it down to the fact that he’d been away for a few days. It was undoubtedly tidier than usual, but it wasn’t usually his presence that added to the domestic chaos but John’s toys, which he managed to scatter everywhere, each room stamped with his presence with plastic bricks and toy cars. Karen had obviously been hard at work, preparing for Andrew’s homecoming. He should have got her a present, but it was too late now.
The shredder stood on the table, a piece of paper protruding from it. He presumed that it had been broken, probably by John, and that Karen had placed it there in the hope that he could somehow draw on an innate male reserve and mend it. He’d buy another; he could afford it. He picked up the note.
‘I’m at my mother’s,’ it began – reason enough for concern – but Andrew read on blithely, failing to recognise the drift of Karen’s message. Only when he reached the part about there being ‘many reasons’ for her action did he begin to understand the stillness in the house. And when his eyes skated over the remaining words, desperately seeking purchase in any hint of their imminent return, he began to realise that the focus of his wife’s resentment and criticism was here, destroyed in the shredder, the title still visible like a swimmer treading water, struggling to resist the forces that pulled it downward to the depths:
Miserere mei, Deus.
Have mercy on me, O God.
Only when the letter from the archivist in Amiens arrived four days later and he learned that the original manuscript had been destroye
d would Andrew understand the true meaning of those words.
CHAPTER 20
The Memoirs of Geoffroy Chiron: Livre VII ed. Francis Porter
Martius 19, 1524
It will not be long now. I have reached the final chapter of the life of Johannes Ockeghem and my own end draws near. My son has assured me that he will arrive soon and I trust that the Lord will deliver him to me:
In te, Domine, speravi, non confundar in æternum: in iustítia tua libera me, et eripe me.
[In thee, O Lord, have I hoped, let me never be confounded: deliver me in thy justice.]
Jehan was not well. For someone of such great age (the second oldest man in Tours) he was a man of great physical fortitude, but his mental faculties were not strong. Already he had relinquished much of the daily control of the Treasury to me, though he would still spend at least two hours each day signing the necessary documents, attending meetings, and dictating letters at St Martin. And, of course, he still sang in the choir, his voice not as loud as it used to be, though just as steady and assured.
He had always possessed an extraordinary memory. All singers could, of course, recite the psalms and the chants by heart, and he had no need of missals or tonaries. Jehan, though, could also recite poetry, and had intimate knowledge of the writings of Aquinas, Aristotle, Guido and Boethius, and many of the ancients. His house was furnished with several books, yet he never consulted them; he could remember all the information contained therein. The signs of his decline, he admitted to me, were obvious to him well before they became apparent to others; he would forget people’s names and where he had put things; he would walk into a room and forget why he had gone there. I suggested to him that this was common and that often I experienced exactly the same thing. He agreed that perhaps his examples described the natural infirmity of age, though he ventured that forgetting a whole day was perhaps not so common. He was also concerned that, although when asked he could still recite, say, Psalm 119 in its entirety, he could not necessarily remember that Psalm 119 was the longest psalm. And in order to begin the recitation of the psalm someone had to provide him with the first line. He knew that he had lost the ability to retrieve objects from his memorial store, though, once he located them, he knew them as if they were old friends.