Time Will Tell (17 page)

‘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 mathematical 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?

Except that he would do no such thing, despite the ecstasy bubbling through his body. It was too precious, too perfect, too personal for him to share with anyone. And, of course, the glory would be his and on his terms. It would have to wait.

Inspired, he began searching for further symmetries, just as Schut had with the Eiger/Ohio example. His own paper was no longer important, and Emma's, which now and then raised the odd laugh, had become merely background noise. He stared at Schut's diagram for a while then wrote it out again on a blank piece of paper. It was an approach he had taken to the notational code, staring blankly at the symbols, hoping that somehow their meaning might speak to him. Idly he began pairing numbers, and adding them together. After a few minutes, he'd revealed further symmetries: