Prelude

by William Coles

  Jeremy, it was no surprise, was also a Scally; then there was Gervase Street, plump and unloved, with sadly the worst acne of any boy at Eton; and Richard Glynn, a sprite, phenomenally gifted at languages and art.

  And then there was Archie.

  “See that headline in today’s Sun?” Archie asked. He was wiry, with a pug-dog face and a yapping brisk voice that tended to grate. “‘Stick it up your Junta!’”

  Richard poured some water for the five of us. “Hilarious.”

  “Two fingers to the peaceniks.” Archie wafted his head to the side as an aproned maid placed a plate of stew in front of him. “Bloody Argies.”

  “But if we had a peace deal, we might not have a war,” Richard replied.

  “If we have a peace deal, the Argies will have pissed all over us.” Archie planted an elbow on the table and shovelled the stew onto his fork. “Wimpy!”

  “Nothing like a bit of jingoism to get the country going.” Richard leaned to the side for the maid. “Thank you.”

  “It’s not jingoism, it’s common sense,” Archie said. “Thatcher didn’t have any option.”

  “Should certainly see her through the next election, if that’s what you mean,” Richard responded.

  “What’s the Falklands got to do with a General Election? It’s a point of principle.” He crossed his eyes, let his mouth go slack. “Duhhhh!”

  Richard tapped his fingers together. For a moment he was about to say something but thought better of it. Instead, with a little shake of his head, he tackled the stew.

  “It’s principle, see?” Archie ploughed on.

  Richard buttered some bread, absorbed by the sight of his sliced white.

  “Don’t you have principles?” Archie said, straining forward over the table. The veins were popping out at the side of his neck. “Run up the white flag, why don’t you?”

  Richard looked almost like an artist as he precisely spread the butter, working it all the way to the crust.

  “Stop being such an oik, Archie,” Jeremy said, putting an end to the conversation.

  “Me?” Archie replied. “What, me?”

  Jeremy raised his eyebrows at me. For a second his eyelids fluttered, no doubt trying to stifle the urge to hurl his food in Archie’s face.

  Archie spooned up more stew. “All I’m trying to do is have a civilised conversation about the biggest story of the year. Don’t you get it? Dontcha?”

  “Thank you for explaining that,” Jeremy said. He took a pristine white handkerchief from his pocket and patted his lips before turning to me. “I have always thought it our great good fortune that, when we came to Eton, we ended up in the same house as Archie.”

  “We are blessed,” I said.

  “He is the daily grit in our lives that helps create the pearl.”

  “Grit being the operative word.”

  “Or maybe he is the mortar that helps bind our happy band together. He is our common link.”

  “Cheers Archie.” Jeremy raised his glass. “We’d all be going crazy without you.”

  Archie watched us, eyes twitching from left to right, not sure how he’d been sidelined.

  Jeremy scrutinised me and for the first time noticed the dizzy, goof smile on my face. I’d been miles away.

  “Something’s happened to you this morning,” Jeremy said quietly. “You look rather happy.”

  I could only smirk, hugging my glorious memories close; for to have said anything about India at lunch would have been to have announced it over the public address system.

  I raised my finger to my lips. “Later,” I whispered.

  ALL ETON’S BOYS have separate rooms, and mine, on the top floor of the Timbralls, had one of the best views in the school, overlooking Sixpenny and in the distance another tranche of playing fields, Mesopotamia.

  The room was a good size for a seventeen-year-old, with a shabby sofa, armchair, bookshelves and desk, or burry as it was known at Eton. On the walls were a few posters of my fantasy girls: two of Blondie with her pouting strawberry lips, one of Cheryl Tiegs, and another of Farrah Fawcett. I also had a poster of a large white Labrador. Before women came into my life, dogs had been my first love.

  I kicked off my shoes, hung up my tailcoat and lay down on the bed to give myself a few moments of beautiful reverie. Over and over again, I was re-running what had occurred in the Music Schools. I was trying to digest the huge wealth of raw unedited material that had showered my senses. Different pictures of India kept flashing into my head.

  I was distracted by the rumbling sound of a boy-call. It started off very low and went up at the end, “BoooyyyUppp”, like a farmer calling his cattle.

  For a second my limbs stiffened. It was an involuntary twitch, a hangover from the days when I too had been a fag, running errand after errand for the senior boys, the members of the library.

  The boy-calls were as good a way as any to knock any hint of preciousness out of the new boys’ heads. If ever a Librarian needed a job doing, he would stand at the top of the stairs and bellow “BoooyyyUppp”.

  Out the fags would come, tumbling from their rooms in various states of undress, all elbows and knees as they tried to gouge their way to the front. They’d stampede up the stairs to line-up outside the library, and the last boy in the queue would be fagged off, or despatched halfway across the school to wherever the Librarian thought fit to send him.

  Boy-calls, were an incessant part of Eton life, like the deafening jumbo jets that rumbled overhead. You learned to ignore the calls, but God they were barbaric.

  Jeremy knocked at the door. He came in—as all boys do—without waiting for an answer and flopped down at my burry, his tailcoat scrunching underneath him. He was remarkably cavalier about the general state of his uniform and would think nothing of going out with stained trousers, rumpled tails and shirts begrimed with three-days worth of sweat. Though it wasn’t as if any of the fairer sex were ever going to be near us. Not in a million years.

  Hands behind his head, back of the chair leaned against the wall, and with his feet propped on my burry, Jeremy looked like a London club-man at ease.

  “Is it me,” he said, “or are the boy-calls getting louder?”

  “I think Savage is using a loud-hailer.”

  “All the better to hear him with.” Jeremy began unbuttoning his waistcoat and, when that was done, he started on his shirt. “Tell all then. What’s happened?”

  The smile stretched across my face. It was only the best thing ever to have happened to me.

  But, even at this early stage, I knew that the information had to be protected.

  “This is a secret,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “No, this is a genuine secret,” I said. “Promise you won’t tell a soul.”

  “Of course,” he said—and I trusted him; and thank God I did. But more of that later.

  “Well . . .” I delicately toyed with the bomb in my hands, wondering how to deploy it with maximum effect. “Do you remember the woman in white we saw outside School Hall last Friday?”

  “Comely,” he said. “Delectable.”

  “You’re right,” I continued, staring at the ceiling to dream of her face. “I met her today.”

  “You have all the luck.” He took off his round wire-rim glasses, breathed on them and then polished with the hem of his shirt.

  I laid out my cards one by one. “We shook hands; she introduced herself. It was very formal.”

  “So what’s her name?”

  “India James.”

  He looked out of the window, but said nothing, giving me my head.

  “She played the piano for me.” I templed my fingers before delivering the coup de grace. “She’s going to see me again next week.”

  “She’s your new piano teacher?”

  “Correct.”

  He laughed, clapping his hands to his face. “Fouquet in Le Touquet!”

  “Lucked out.” I coolly blew on my cupped fingernails before buffing
them on my waistcoat.

  Jeremy chuckled to himself as he absorbed the news. “Savage will be green as beans when he finds out.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. “An added bonus. Bet he wished he’d taken up the piano rather than his lousy guitar. He’ll be gutted.”

  And so, with all the precision of a clairvoyant, I had unwittingly spelled out the precise turn of events over the next two months.

  How different my life might have been if it had not been for Charles Savage-Leng. But maybe, even without Savage’s help, I had always been destined to be with India—and always destined to part.

  Jeremy stretched to turn the desk-light on, and off, and on and off, and on and off, and will she and won’t she, until the light bulb started to flicker and spark. “Well, it will certainly get you practising, won’t it? We won’t be able to keep you off the piano.”

  And he was right about that too.

  THE TIMBRALLS HAD a piano in the dining room. It was nothing fancy but adequate to lead the way for the hymns at evening prayers.

  During the previous four years, I’d practised about twice a week, putting in at best a half-hour session before the next day’s lesson.

  But that Monday afternoon, my head still spinning with a jumble of snap-shots of India, I played for a full two hours. I’d never done anything like it in my life.

  I started with a few scales and arpeggios, four octaves each, just to limber up. My fingers had by now stopped trembling.

  Only then did I allow myself to look at the sheet music. India’s music, which she had held in her own hands, and which she had owned since childhood.

  All afternoon I’d been twitching to have a look. But I’d saved it up, delaying the moment, knowing the wait would make it all the sweeter.

  First I studied the cover, in red and black Gothic script, which showed that the music was a classic. J.S.Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Prelude 1, C Major. Underneath were the words from Bach’s original folio:

  ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier,

  Or

  Preludes and fugues in all tones and semitones,

  in the major as well as the minor modes,

  for the benefit and use

  of musical youth desirous of knowledge

  as well as those who are already advanced in this study.

  For their especial diversion, composed and prepared by

  Johann Sebastian Bach,

  currently Ducal Chapelmaster in Anhalt Cothen

  and Director of Chamber Music,

  in the year 1722.’

  In the top right corner, written in faded pencil, was her name. India James. I touched the lettering, imagining how she’d been as a ten-year-old.

  I turned to the first page. The music was strewn with pencil jottings and several hand-written numbers under the notes. These numbers would have helped India learn the correct fingering—and now, just over a decade later, they’d be showing me the way. Note for note, India and I would be learning the First Prelude together.

  On the next two pages were some more pencilled numbers and, at the end, just the one word ‘Knock-out!’ I liked that.

  The back-page had no music, but a short history of Bach and The Well-Tempered Clavier.

  I devoured it, can still remember it almost verbatim. I was sharing a musical Communion with India.

  There are several theories about why Bach wrote his two books of Preludes and Fugues. Some say it’s an encyclopedic compilation of every possible type of fugue. Others believe it’s Bach’s celebration of the better-tuned claviers that were just being introduced in the early 18th Century.

  As for the word Fugue, it derives from the Latin ‘fugo’, which means ‘flee’ or ‘chase’, and, when you listen to the pieces, that’s what they often sound like, one hand imitating the other, hunting it down.

  Only when I had committed every detail to memory did I start to study the music itself. The notes were well-spaced, which made them easier to read and, better still, it was in the key of C Major. No black notes.

  To explain, piano pieces come in 24 different keys, and these keys vary in difficulty. One of the most difficult is B Minor, which has five flats. The easiest by far is C Major, with not a single sharp or flat in the entire octave. For mediocre players like myself, finding that a piece is in C Major is like seeing a bright-green ‘Go’ light; it means all the sharps and flats will be flagged up along the way and there will be no hidden bogeys.

  That isn’t to say that a piece in C Major can’t be wretchedly complicated, though when I started to study the First Prelude it didn’t look too difficult. I hesitate to use the word easy, but it was eminently do-able.

  For that and that reason alone, it remains one of my favourite preludes in The Well-Tempered Clavier; in fact, second only to Prelude 17, the first piece that India played for me.

  The First Prelude was also a delightful introduction to Bach. It was a piece of music that I could tackle with a fair degree of confidence. Only later would I discover that The Well-Tempered Clavier contains many, many fugues and preludes that would tax even a concert pianist.

  And the melody of that first prelude?

  It was sublime. Today you can hear it on any number of radio adverts; Schubert used the tune for his Ave Maria.

  Just like it says on the cover it is, above all, an even, well-tempered piece, each note carrying the same weight and each bar just slightly different from the one before it. Of all the pieces that I’ve ever known by heart, it remains the only one that I can still play from memory.

  The normal routine when you start to learn a piece is to begin with the right hand (usually with the melody), then practise the left hand (with the beat), and only then do you put the two together.

  But, like everything else in my life, I am incapable of any such discipline; always I dive in with both hands together, a bundle of impatience, optimistically expecting that everything will work out just fine.

  The surprising thing was that, on this occasion, it did. Maybe India’s spirit was standing over me as I plonked away in the Timbralls dining room, but, right from the start, the First Prelude was sounding quite similar to how I imagine Johann Sebastian would have first intended. There were admittedly a few fluffed notes but, although I was only going at half-speed, I found I could keep up a steady rhythm.

  The great beauty of the Prelude for an amateur is that, until the final chord, the right hand and the left hand never have to play a note at the same time. Above all, it’s a very tranquil piece.

  Within thirty minutes, I was smitten. I loved its simplicity.

  I was also aware of its intimate connection with India. Like me, she’d started her Well-Tempered career on the First Prelude. She’d have used the same fingering to play the same notes, would have practised the same teasingly tricky bars over and over again, and would have spent a good hour honing the splendid ending.

  At times, I was so absorbed with the music that I would forget all about India.

  Then something would gun my memory and I would savour the marvellous, the monstrous, events of that afternoon. There were some things, like my greasy hands and my foetid tailcoat, which made me cringe. But for the most part I basked in my memories, sunning myself with the recollection of dappled arms flowing over the keyboard.

  Supper, homework, bed at 10.30 p.m. and, when I clicked the light off, I allowed myself for the first time to dream. To fantasize.

  But they were chaste thoughts with nothing overtly sexual. With clothes staying on and hands remaining dormant in laps.

  Nothing could ever come of it I reminded myself—I would never be anything more to India than another of her gawky pupils.

  But, nevertheless, with lips pursed together I blew her a kiss.

  THE MORNING ALARM rang at 7 a.m. and, the moment I woke, I was aware there was something different about the day, that something golden had come into my life. Then I remembered; I remembered India, and in an instant I was skimming through all my memories on
ce more, which were just as fresh as the moment they were first minted.

  There was no time for dawdling. In the summer, Eton likes to give its boys a flying start to the day with a division that starts at 7.30 a.m. I had my routine down pat. To have a lightning shave, brush my teeth and don my uniform took fifteen minutes.

  The starched collar can be a beast for the junior boys when they still haven’t got the hang of popping the gold stud through the tight eyelet. But after four years I could do it blindfolded, and could slot home the short stumpy white tie in two seconds flat. The first time I wore a starched collar, it almost felt like a shackle. Its edge chafed against my skin and the front stud pressed tight into my neck.

  But, like everything else at Eton, you get used to it, and are even left bemused when a gaggle of tourists start hosing you down with their cameras. After just a short while at the school, both the boys and the masters forget what an extraordinary spectacle they present to the rest of the world.

  I grab the books and file that I need for the first division, and shrug on my waistcoat and tailcoat in one, doing up the buttons single-handed as I trot down the corridor. To us, the tailcoats were nothing more nor less than a school uniform. Eton’s schoolboys had been strapped into this weird garb when they’d gone into mourning at the death of King George III and, so the story goes, some 160 years later they were still mourning the death of Farmer George. I suppose we should have counted our blessings—at least we no longer had to wear top hats.

  Cufflinks are also inserted while on the hoof and when I’ve hit the hall there’s time for one quick swill of tea before I’m out of the front door.

  Boys have to look the part when they’re out of the house, otherwise monsters like Savage take great pleasure in fining them, or administering any number of tedious punishments. Shoes need to be polished black and laces tied; waistcoats must be buttoned, except for the last button which must remain undone (a hang-over from George IV, Georgie Porgie, who was apparently so fat that he couldn’t fully do up his waistcoat); the tailcoat has a button, but this is merely for show and must never be used; cuffs must be cuffed; ties correctly tied; socks in keeping with the general assemblage; and hair kempt, well-groomed, undyed, and neither too short, too long, or too outré. It goes without saying that all senior boys had to shave.