Time Will Tell (7 page)

Having been asked by the
Guardian
to write a piece on the touring life of musicians, Emma had recently read Freud's analysis on group psychology, hoping to find something with which to anchor her first paragraph. She'd been amused to discover there the contention that one of the characteristics of communal behaviour was that mental ability was reduced to the person of the lowest intelligence. Looking around the table now, it was difficult to say who could lay claim to the dubious prize, for each had different strengths. Allie and Ollie would have nominated Susan, though her skills as a linguist argued otherwise. Others might deem Allie's silence as evidence of ignorance, but his chosen reading was Nietzsche and T.S. Eliot and, had he not married so young, he would have done a Ph.D. on Auden. Neither of the tenors – Marco or Charlie – had gone to university, instead attending music college where they had respectively specialised in Italian madrigals and German lieder. Marco, born of an Italian mother, was bilingual and well versed in Renaissance architecture; Charlie was drawn to the Gothic cathedrals of Northern Europe. For both, travel represented a chance to indulge their passion and many a tour saw them organising cultural excursions for anyone who expressed an interest. Peter and Craig, the altos, had both studied music at Oxbridge colleges – Peter at King's College, Cambridge and Craig at Christ Church, Oxford – examples of perhaps the most common template for English choral singers. On the face of it, they were the most erudite, though Emma thought them in many ways the least motivated, as if the map laid out for them from the time they were choirboys – at Westminster Abbey and St Paul's respectively – had led to premature success and left them directionless after graduation. Certainly they contributed least in rehearsals to debates on the meaning of text and musical interpretation. Susan and Claire were chalk and cheese in many ways, Susan the glamour puss to Claire's plain appearance. They had been mistaken on more than one occasion for a lesbian couple, which made Susan blush and Claire angry. Claire, the oldest in the group, was happily married and the most domestically oriented of the group, mother to a boy of eleven and a girl of seven. At university she had studied biology and played for the hockey team, and her naturally competitive instincts were now exclusively channelled into her children. It was wise, the members of the group had learned, to ask after them; otherwise Claire could become morose and withdrawn, sometimes sitting on her own, looking at photos and crying. Given the opportunity, pictures would be produced, even photocopied school reports, and her mood would instantly brighten.

Emma felt that Freud should have focused more upon the ritualised social behaviour of eating and drinking. If there was any surrender of individual standards to the lowest group denominator then it was probably manifest in culinary expectations, here represented by Allie for whom food was, more often than not, merely an accompaniment to drink. He was chomping on a piece of fried bread loaded with mushrooms and tomato ketchup, gesturing to Claire, who was playing ‘mother', to fill his mug with teak-coloured tea. Emma was struck by the contradiction: in twelve hours' time he would open that same mouth and out would come a resonant, rounded, controlled, intimate expression of faith that would combine with the voices of his fellow breakfasters and create a moment of sheer sonic beauty. And then, half an hour after the concert had ended, he'd have one of his trademark roll-ups in one hand and a glass of beer in the other. Touring life, thought Emma, was an endless roller-coaster of descents from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again, from the dull demands of travel to the realms of high art: one minute they were careering down an escalator to catch a flight, the next pondering the mindset of an arcane fifteenth-century composer; breakfast was egg and chips in England, and dinner would be chased down with fine champagne in France.

Allie was mopping his plate with a piece of toast when Marco arrived. The tenor had skipped breakfast on account of his hangover and now had considerably more colour in his cheeks and a smile on his face. He was waving a copy of
The Gramophone
above his head like a newspaper seller.

‘Read all about it,' he cried.

‘Feeling a bit better, then?' asked Charlie.

‘Getting there,' his colleague replied.

‘What's it like?' Susan asked eagerly. The soprano was intent on sharing her excitement with others who hadn't, like herself and Emma, already seen the review of the new album in galley proofs. ‘Read it. Read it,' she instructed, clapping her hands.

Marco read the review out loud, occasionally interrupted by one-liners and the odd cheer when obvious praise was offered.

‘He could have mentioned us by name.' Craig looked up from his cricket magazine.

‘You know him?' asked Susan.

‘Sang together at Oxford a few times. Nice guy. American.'

‘Reviewers never mention singers.' Allie winked at Emma. ‘Only conductors.'

Emma stood up and took a small bow to show that she'd taken no offence. ‘I mentioned everyone by name, but they don't always print these things,' she said – but already the subject had moved on.

‘What's his problem with new repertoire?' Marco asked, passing the magazine around the group so each of them could read the review. Porter had begun the piece by saying that there was no new music here, something that, out of context, sounded like a criticism of the group rather than an observation about music history.

‘We should write a new piece,' said Marco.

‘Yeah. Peter. You studied music,' said Ollie. ‘Can't you knock out a quick mass in the style of Ockeghem? We'd clean up.'

The idea gathered momentum, with several suggestions of unlikely tunes upon which the mass could be based, The Bee Gees'
Staying Alive
being the clear winner. Emma remembered her meeting with Andrew that night. Might the young musicologist have made a real discovery? Repertoire was still coming to light in odd places, dropping out of neglected books in Tallinn, such as the recent ‘new' motet by Dunstable, and not so long ago someone had found a manuscript of a composition by Tallis which had been used by a Renaissance plasterer to fill a hole in a wall. If Andrew Eiger had inadvertently stumbled across something like that, then she wanted herself and the group to be involved. But she was dreaming. In all likelihood, he probably only had some new pet theory about the structure of a
chanson
, something arcane that thrilled him but which was no more than a cosmetic detail to a modern audience. Musical archaeology was a laborious process with few Eureka moments.

‘Oh, hang on,' said Marco. ‘There's an interview. With Em.'

‘Oh, don't read that out,' said Emma.

It was always embarrassing to see her life reduced to a few words, the struggle and hard work compressed into a single sentence, foresight attributed to her where the reality was a series of unplanned accidents and coincidences. Fortunately the bill arrived at that point, prompting the usual debates about who owed what.

Emma managed to retrieve the magazine from Marco and skimmed it as she and Ollie walked together to the gate. There were two pictures of her and one of the current group, a posed photograph with fixed smiles and polished shoes, far from the shambling image they presented that morning. The same gap between the public image and the private reality struck her again with the photos they had taken of her. Backlit in the bay window of her house, she looked unnecessarily earnest, more an intellectual than a performer. The cameraman had caught her leaning forward, a crease of worry etched into her forehead, the reason being that the interviewer had just spilled his tea rather than, as the image suggested, that she was struggling to explain something to someone less erudite than herself.

The history of the group and its development was dealt with in two paragraphs; ironic, she thought, because in many ways Beyond Compère's transition from stage play to concert group was the story of two romances. She had originally conceived the theatrical production with Paul, whom she thought of as her first ‘serious' boyfriend. They were both post-graduates at Nottingham University; she had just begun an M.A. researching early Italian opera, whilst he was in the second year of his Ph.D. on Loyset Compère. The soundtrack of their life was fifteenth-century music and inevitably she came to learn a lot about the little-known French composer. That November they had set off in Paul's battered Citroën Dyane for a two-week journey around Northern France to visit the key towns of Compère's life: St Quentin, Douai, St Omer, Cambrai. While Paul scoured the archives, transcribing church records and searching for elusive leads, Emma wandered through the narrow, chilly streets. The townscape seemed to be perpetually blanketed in damp mist, and her own image of the composer emerged as if from the cold November fog itself. Each evening over dinner, Paul would share some new biographical detail and a new idea would form in Emma's imagination. On their final evening in St Quentin, she outlined her vision: a theatrical production which told the story of the composer, Loyset Compère, using a simple set, tableaux and commentary, with music by the singer-composer and his contemporaries. The style would be boldly eclectic, ranging from detailed re-enactments of events in musical history to surreal sequences that explained the past using modern references. Already she could see key scenes perfectly crystallised: Dufay hawking CDs on a market stall outside Cambrai Cathedral; the Pope as a disc jockey introducing Josquin in the Sistine Chapel; Compère, the priest with a girl in every town. It would, she declared, be the first early-music musical. Paul, an historian through and through, had little time for such theatrical conjecture, but, amused and impressed, he agreed to act as consultant. Over the next few months, she developed a script and workshopped it, before staging three performances at the university. Its immediate success encouraged her to take the company to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for a short run, a heady three-week period during which her love-life crashed and burned.

In retrospect she realised that she had failed to heed the warning signs, enervated and distracted as she was by the demands of the show and the critical acclaim. She also realised that she'd lost interest in her own research and in academia generally, the more exciting path of ‘directing real plays with real people in the real world' having opened up before her. That was the unfortunate line with which she had expressed her misgivings to Paul, whose sole aim was to be a scholar. From then on their dissimilarities seemed to inform every aspect of their lives, even the smallest details such as the different ways they peeled the potatoes or made the bed; every instance of disagreement amplified their incompatibility and presaged their separation.

As consultant, Paul's input was confined mainly to the development period, though that hadn't prevented him from expressing his opinions in rehearsals. He seemed to enjoy the interaction with the cast and his role as advisor, sitting in the stalls with his notebook, offering the occasional comment in a tone of long-suffering tolerance that suggested his personal vision was a more authentic version of the past. At times his observations were valuable, but increasingly his comments seemed to Emma to be self-serving, presented to display his knowledge, smacking of the same kind of pedantry that so dominated early-music performance at the time. And, given that the show consistently used contemporary reference and made obvious play on anachronism, such criticisms struck Emma as not just unhelpful but also unsupportive. At first he had dismissed the idea of accompanying the production to Edinburgh, so she was surprised when he announced that he wanted to come along. When, in the second week of its run, a West End impresario contacted her and requested a meeting, naturally she asked Paul to attend. He refused brusquely, saying that ambition was rather vulgar. Emma was confused. He'd often said that he wanted Compère to be recognised as a great composer and, given that few people had even heard of him, surely the opportunity to reach a larger audience was something he would want?

That evening, Emma was made an offer she couldn't refuse: the chance to stage
Beyond Compère
in London with a professional cast. Rather than accept immediately, she had explained that she needed to talk it over with the man with whom she had devised the show; she would give the impresario her answer tomorrow. But she'd already decided. Paul could call her ambitious if he wanted, but it was too good an opportunity to miss. She would, though, try to get his blessing.

Returning to the rented six-bedroom house that the cast had taken for the run, she was surprised to hear voices upstairs. The others had planned to see a comedy show that evening and it was still too early for them to be back. When she reached the top of the stairs, a bedroom door opened, that of one of the actresses, and out stepped Paul in his underwear, his clothes held in one hand, the other waving goodbye to the bedroom's occupant. He didn't even see Emma, who stood frozen on the penultimate step. When she walked into their bedroom he was feigning sleep.

There was nothing to be said. The quiet carping from the stalls, Paul's late-in-the-day decision to come to Edinburgh, finally made sense. Emma packed a few things in a bag and booked herself into a hotel. The next morning she rang the impresario and, three weeks later, was running auditions in London. Reluctantly, she had informed the amateurs that their involvement in the project was over and glimpsed for the first time the degree of single-mindedness that professional life entailed. Splitting up with Paul was more straightforward. Limply devoid of any moral authority, he soon abandoned a half-hearted demand of payment for his consultancy, though she continued to credit him in the programme, a recognition which she knew did no harm to his standing in academic circles. For the professional replacements she drew on London-based singers, both from opera and from the world of early music. A successful run at the Almeida in London led to performances in Hamburg, Paris and off-Broadway.