She wears a diamond ring on the ring-finger of her right-hand. I stare at the fat solitaire and wonder what it means. Left hand, I know, would mean that she’s engaged. But right-hand means what? Does she have a lover, a boyfriend? Did she buy it herself? Or maybe—hopefully—it’s an heirloom.
The diamond sparkles in the sunlight as her hands ease over the keyboard.
How it would come to torment me.
But in a moment all thoughts of the diamond are forgotten because India is standing up and patting the seat for me.
“I think you should try the Second Prelude,” she says. “See how you do with the right hand.”
The seat is still warm. Before playing a note, I study the piece. The key of C Minor has three flats. I play the scale; I dive in.
With just the right hand, it’s not too hard. Just one note at a time and with a steady beat that puts me in mind of a ticking clock. I’m going slowly but until the last few bars there aren’t many wrong notes.
“Very good,” she says, and I tingle as she moves behind me. “Let’s try it together.”
I gape in bewilderment. In all my years of the piano, never have I done anything like this before.
She laughs at my ignorance. “Budge up.”
And, as I move to the side of the piano stool, the air is being sucked from the room. India is sitting inches away from me, her white skirt in stunning contrast to my black trousers.
I can feel the warmth pulsating through her blouse and, as for her scent, it seems to engulf me. I am so aware of her proximity that my skin is on a hair-trigger. Just the slightest touch of her hair on my coat sends a pulse of electricity through my body.
“Ready?” she says. And always that smile, which I’m seeing up close for the first time.
It is all I can do to keep up with her, concentrating savagely on the music, not wanting to put a finger wrong, yet somehow trying to block off the rest of my senses, and the fact that sitting next to this woman, this Goddess, is about to short-circuit my brain.
The Second Prelude is a simile for my entire life for, despite the turbulent emotions that are raging in my heart, my fingers and my mind must always remain focused— disciplined, above all, well-tempered. The music has an uneasy tension about it, both hands mirroring each other but going in opposite directions. It matches my wildly beating heart.
Then comes what will always be my favourite bar of music: the fifteenth bar of the Second Prelude of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Not many people have an actual favourite bar.
But this, without question, is mine.
The bar’s melody is pleasant enough, though for preference I think I prefer the one before it. However, the beauty of the fifteenth bar is that, for the briefest of notes, both right and left hand overlap.
We are already slightly turned in towards each other and the tips of our fingers touch, the flap of a butterfly’s wing. An explosion wrings through my body. I’ve been scalded, so unexpected that my hand leaps off the keyboard. I lose my place on the sheet, grind to a halt.
India is enjoying herself. But whether it is me or the music I have no idea. “From the beginning of the line,” she says, but now I am forewarned and this time I luxuriate in the gentle touch of her fingertips against my skin.
Some more missed notes, but I’m keeping up with the beat, and our hands are rattling through the ending. Although I can’t believe what I’m doing—sitting on a chair with India—I rivet my eyes to the music.
We finish and she claps her hands. “Well done. Let’s try it again. Give it some pedal between the phrases.”
My skin has turned into one giant nerve-ending. It is as if my other senses, of taste and smell and peripheral sight, have all had to shut down for fear of overloading my poor brain.
My world is now solely made up of the sound of the Second Prelude, the sight of the notes stabbing at me in black-and-white, and the prickle of my skin as it yearns to be touched.
It happens again, another sensory explosion. But this time not where I expected. My body is turned in towards the middle of the piano, left foot on the right pedal. India has a foot on the other pedal. Our knees kiss. My body has become one vast erogenous zone. Even her lightest touch saturates my nerve-endings.
I can think of nothing else but the notes, my fingers and my left knee. I’m ready for it now; I’m willing her to dab at the soft pedal again. Towards the end, as both hands start to race against each other, she does so and, even through the fabric of my trousers and her skirt, I fancy I can feel her body heat.
My body is liquefying beside her. But I can’t help myself. It is far and away the most erotic thing ever to have happened to me.
“Good technique,” she says, swinging her legs away from me to stand by the window. “Somewhere along the way you’ve had a great teacher.”
“Thank you.” I blush again. Everything she does, everything she says, sparks a volcanic reaction in me. For a moment I wonder if she’s aware of this—aware that her slightest touch turns me to jelly, and that just the sound of her voice sends a shiver down my spine.
But, I don’t think she is conscious of it. She is so genuine, so good-natured, that not for a moment has she considered that the touch of her knee is like a cattle-prod to my senses. I don’t believe she has any conception that I would do anything for her, that she only has to ask and I would happily give up my head, heart and soul.
Her bare arm rests along the windowsill. “Do you think you’ll be able to keep up your phenomenal practice rate?”
I blush, but for once I am able to chuckle. I think it is the first time that I have ever laughed in her presence. “Maybe. When my thumb’s healed.”
“I so envy you Kim,” she sighs. “I hope you never lose your passion.”
“Really?”
She laughs, but it is a world-weary laugh. As if a veil has been drawn aside, I suddenly glimpse the most unimaginable pain.
“Not that I’d want to discourage you from leaving your teens, but . . .”
The word hangs there. Even though her tone is light, I can’t say anything in reply.
She’s watching the clouds as she talks again. Her voice catches in her throat. Is she choking up? “Life gets more and more complicated.”
She’s almost talking to herself.
“Being a teenager is much underestimated.” She turns around, her eyes sparkling moist. “Shall I tell you the best thing of all about being young? It’s being able to indulge your passions.”
She comes over to the piano and picks up The Well-Tempered Clavier. “If you want to spend all day playing Bach preludes you can do just that.”
I finally find my voice. “And you can’t?”
“In theory, yes.” She flicks through the book, staring at the notes. “But the older you get, the less time you have for your passions. And if that’s the case at twenty-three, then how’s it going to be when I’m forty?”
It is the first time we’ve ever had a conversation that did not bear directly on music. “Is twenty-three so much older than seventeen?”
“You’re probably right,” she says. “But just as there are young seventeens and old seventeens, so there are young twenty-threes and old twenty-threes.”
“And you are?”
She slides into the armchair. “I am most definitely an old twenty-three.” Her fingertips tap against her chin. “Unhappiness is not conducive to ageing well.”
I’d like to reach out, to help her. But what she’s been through is so way beyond my own experience, that all I can do is nod and listen.
India seems to shrink in the chair, bowed by her memories. “My own fault. I don’t know if that makes it any easier.”
Her face and torso are side on, but her eyes blaze right at me.
She is on the point of telling me more, but then she catches herself, remembers that she’s a piano-teacher talking to her pupil, remembers that she is paid to talk about music and nothing more.
The moment passes, and ou
t of the face of that lost, haunted woman, re-emerges the India that I had met at our first lesson, serene and untroubled.
She looks at her watch, a silver Cartier. “You’ll be late for lunch if you don’t hurry.”
“Thank you,” I say, and what I mean is thank you for everything; thank you for coming into my life.
“A pleasure.”
Outside India’s room, Room 17, I have to stand against the wall. My legs are about to buckle beneath me. I lean back and wave after wave of emotion crashes over me. Never before had I realised how draining it can be to sit with the one you adore.
As I walked back to The Timbralls, I felt almost punch-drunk. Though what lingered was not what she’d told me, but the sight of her sitting there on that dirty armchair.
I’d wished I’d been more sympathetic, that I’d been capable of saying the right words.
But I’d had not the slightest inkling of how to react. Eton had taught me so many things. Empathy was not one of them.
I tried to guess at the unhappiness that had come into her life. I wondered if India had suffered a bereavement, a set-back, or an illness. But as it turned out, I was wrong on all counts.
For in my innocence, I had forgotten the most common and the most obvious cause of all human misery.
It was heartache, pure and simple.
And soon enough I would have my fill of it.
But there is one thing that I am still only beginning to appreciate about heartache, and it is this: that time will indeed cure it. But every so often something catches you on the raw and the pain will be as sharp as if your heart has been freshly snapped in two.
For me, it feels as if twenty-five years back I’d undergone a serious operation, and that somehow the scalpel was left in my guts. For although the stitches are long gone and the scar has faded to nothing but a white slash, I only have to press against my old wound and I can feel the keen knife-edge of the scalpel, just as sharp and just as unforgiving as it was all those years ago.
PRELUDE 22,
B Flat Minor
WHAT A YEAR 1982 was for news.
Though perhaps I’m biased. It was the year that I started buying four newspapers a day and, if you truly immerse yourself in a subject, then you can become fascinated by almost anything.
I had become so dedicated to the Falklands that I was quite capable of reading the identical story in The Sun, Mail, Guardian and Times. But the Falklands aside, that summer term of 1982 was still an extraordinary time for news. Just off the top of my head, there was Prince William’s birth, John McEnroe at his foul-mouthed best at Wimbledon, the World Cup, and the IRA blowing up the Household Cavalry in Hyde Park.
One night, I was indulging in two of my favourite pastimes: listening to the chart round-up on the radio while at the same time gobbling up the newspapers’ analysis of the Falklands. It seemed that Argentina had yet to score a single hit and Britain was already gearing up for a full-scale invasion. Meanwhile, in the States, Ronald Reagan had promised support and ‘Materiel’. I loved that word and liked to say it out loud: “Materiel!” It smacked of high-tech bombs, heavy-duty guns and exotic weapons of mass destruction.
The only other news was that a total exclusion zone had come into force around the Falklands.
What that meant, I did not know. But Sap was about to tell me all about it.
Sap’s real name was Anthony Parrish, but he was known as Sap—short for Sapper, an army engineer.
Sap was not one of my natural friends, but we got on well enough because he was the only other boy in my year who was also apparently destined for an army career. But while I shilly-shallied, he had as good as signed up. He already carried himself like an officer, shoulders squared to attention and hair trimmed every fortnight.
Sap’s face was flushed with excitement when he barged into my room. “Have you heard?” he said. “It’s bloody incredible.”
“We’ve dropped the bomb on Buenos Aires?”
“We’ve sunk a boat. A heavy cruiser, the General Belgrano.” He was so excited that he couldn’t sit down. “She was in the exclusion zone. One of our subs torpedoed her and down she went.”
“Jesus!” I said. “How many on board?”
“Hundreds,” Sap replied. “Two torpedoes and bang, that was it.”
Before I could say any more, Frankie had come in, stinking of cigars and red wine.
He gave us a sloppy salute, a Brigadier greeting two subalterns in the mess. “Hoped I’d find you two,” he said. He was still in his grey suit, stick-ups and clumping black shoes. “Well, the General Belgrano, eh? What do you make of it?”
“Fantastic hit, Sir,” Sap said.
“About time too,” Frankie commented. “Mind if I take a seat?”
I gestured to the sofa and Frankie sat while Sap perched on the end of the bed.
“Must be the first ship we’ve torpedoed since the Second World War,” Frankie mused. “It’s what you live for, isn’t it boys? You put in years of training and then finally you get a chance to put it all into practice. Lucky sods.”
“Did you ever fire a shot in anger, Sir?” Sap asked.
Frankie shrugged. “Never. Never got the chance. One quiet year in Northern Ireland, and for the rest of it just a tour of Germany and a stint in London.”
“Bad luck,” Sap said.
“That’s what happens if you sign up for a short-term commission. Hopefully you two will fare better.”
“We can only hope,” Sap replied.
I just sat at my burry, watching the pair of them. In my mind’s eye I was still picturing the Belgrano as it slipped beneath the sea. The oily waves in flames, and the men freezing to death in the Atlantic before choking down that last breath of seawater.
“Did you know there’s at least one Old Etonian out with the task force?” Frankie said. “Must be about 42, a year or so younger than me. I knew him very slightly when he was here. Herbert Jones was his name, though I think they just call him ‘H’ now. He’s a Lieutenant Colonel too.” He stroked the back of his hand, musing. “He stuck with it.”
“Who’s he with?” Sap asked.
“Two Para. Red beret and all the other trappings. Quiet chap, didn’t talk much. But God he must have been tough.” Frankie slapped his thighs and got up. He gave one final wistful shake of his head. “What a man. Well, good luck to the fellow.”
Over the next few days, more details of the Belgrano came out. She’d been hit by two Mk 8 torpedoes, the first on the port bow and second on the stern. The ship’s power and communications systems had been knocked out and over 200 men trapped inside. The captain of the British submarine Conqueror had watched through his periscope as the Belgrano crew scrambled into the yellow life-rafts. By the time the rescue was complete, some 368 of the crew were dead.
The British newspapers were like cockerels on a dung-heap. ‘Gotcha!’ blared The Sun. The broadsheets called it a stunning blow to the Argentinian Navy.
But I couldn’t get the picture of the drowning sailors out of my head. None of the crew had been equipped with anti-flash protection: many had been terribly burned.
This, I was beginning to see, was the true face of modern war. Not a glorious death in the face of the enemy, but being roasted alive after a sneak attack by an unseen foe.
Was it really for me? What would my father think?
THE SQUIRREL BITE on my thumb got better. I still have the scar to this day, a white fleck at the base of my knuckle. I was back at the piano within five days and practising The Well-Tempered Clavier with all the fervour of a cult fanatic.
Divinity, English and Economics were all put on permanent hold as I devoted every spare moment to the piano. Homework was knocked out in half-an-hour, and course textbooks left untouched and unloved. And of Othello—the man whose fatal flaw I was set to so spectacularly mimic—the only times when I learned anything new were in McArdle’s English classes, during the brief moments when I could drag my attention away from Angela and her mini-skirte
d legs.
To my delight, I mastered my first love, Prelude 17, in two weeks. If I attempted it now, it would take me months and months but, for that term, I would think nothing of putting in four hours at a stretch, practising a bar over and over again until my fingers had been drilled like army recruits.
How I came to love Johann Sebastian. All day his work danced through my head. For years, I had thought his music was starchy, but after my full-body immersion into The Well-Tempered Clavier I began to appreciate his diversity.
Looking back, it’s possible that my reaction to Bach was almost Pavlovian, that I automatically began to associate his music with my Goddess. And it is true that the moment I heard The Well-Tempered Clavier, I instinctively thought of her. But does that matter? Do you have to know the why and wherefores? Do you have to analyse cause and effect? Or can you just accept that your emotions are valid without feeling the need to analyse their origins?
I enjoyed the practice. But it was, as I’ve said, a means to an end, and that end was my piano lessons.
They never matched the intimacy of that second lesson, that time when our fingers had brushed against each other. But, with time, I was beginning to relax in her company; was starting, even, to revel being in her presence. Compared to that stuttering wretch of the first two weeks, I was blossoming.
I loved to look at her, of course. I could have spent hours on end just gazing at her face.
But she had a real knack with words, could make me laugh out loud. She had a delightful irony that would catch me clear in the solar plexus.
My favourite times of all were not when I was gazing at her face, nor when we talked. No, my happiest moments were when I was trying out a prelude for the first time, the two of us side-by-side on the music stool, my right hand and her left hand working together in imperfect harmony.
As we played, there might be an occasional touch— shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow, knee-to-knee. These moments could be guaranteed to send a shiver of excitement washing through me.
But what I came to like best was the magical alchemy by which the two of us created a piece of music together. Two hands and two hearts, both bringing Bach back to life. It was much more intimate than the neat virtue of playing a piece solo.
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