Prelude

by William Coles

  And when I took my leave, even at the very moment that I was kissing India goodbye, my eyes were raking over the noticeboard, staring at the notes and letters. In the corner, there was a photo of India with a man. I was ghoulishly riveted. He was tall, had his arm slung round India’s waist. A rival? An ex? I couldn’t bare to think, didn’t even want to go there.

  Oh, but I would, I would.

  Somehow, I could contrive to spoil almost anything.

  So as I walked down the stairs, I was not dwelling on my memories, was not rejoicing in the fact I’d be seeing India for a piano lesson the next day. No, I was not thinking of what was to come. I was thinking of the past, her past, and what had happened in the days before she even knew of my existence.

  Pitiful. Only hours into our relationship, I was ripping away at India’s private veils.

  So many couples these days believe they should keep nothing from their partners. They want to know everything about each other. Demand to know every secret. Accept nothing but total candour.

  But I, I who have learned from bitter experience, believe that you should know just what your partner wants to tell you, for many secrets are best left unsaid.

  PRELUDE 5,

  D Major

  THAT SUNDAY EVENING, I didn’t try to read or work. After supper, all I had been able to do was flop on my bed and stare at the ceiling.

  Little memories would occasionally come back to me, things that I hadn’t perhaps caught the first time round. The way that my guts had been so tangled in knots that I couldn’t swallow a mouthful of shortbread. The trace of her tongue along my neck, her saliva growing cold on my skin. The warmth of her lips on my ear before she nipped my lobe. And the caress of my cheek as we said goodbye, her fingers rasping as they went against the grain of my short stubble. Those were the things that I was savouring. And as for my incipient jealousy, what of that? It had, for the moment, been tucked back into its box. I hadn’t even begun to come down from the high of my afternoon with India at her home.

  Then, a knock at the door and Frankie walked in, still wearing stick-ups and a white bowtie.

  “Evening Kim,” he said. “Can I take a seat?”

  “Be my guest.” I gestured to the sofa. I was already standing up, moving to my burry. I never liked to talk to him while I was lying on my bed. It left me at a disadvantage.

  “Almost a shame about the war, isn’t it?” he said.

  “We’ll be getting withdrawal symptoms, Sir.”

  “I hope not.” He forced a chuckle. “So what have you been up to Kim?” He was good-natured, avuncular; deadly. You could never tell whether his questions were genuine or whether he was fencing for information. Maybe it was just my guilty conscience.

  “Bit of music, Sir.”

  “Still on The Well-Tempered Clavier?” He cocked an ankle over his knee. “My grandmother used to play it for us. It’s charming.”

  “Yes.” My antennae were quivering, could scent danger.

  “Must say your piano teacher must be very impressed. All that practice you’re putting in.” He’d leaned back now, hands clasped round his knee.

  “I suppose so, Sir.”

  “It’s Miss James, isn’t it?”

  Then I knew he was shamming.

  “That’s right.”

  “Good for you.” A very slight raise of his left eyebrow, which could have meant whatever I took it to mean. “Yes, very good for you.”

  I could have said something anodyne. But I didn’t. I stared at the cuticles on my fingers, careful not to display even a tremor of emotion.

  The lull stretched on and on before Frankie spoke again. “I’m more than happy, Kim, to turn a blind eye to almost any of my boys’ extra-curricular activities. Just so long as they are not actively thrust in my face.”

  “Yes, Sir?”

  “So, I wish you well with your piano practice. But in future I would recommend a little more discretion if you’re going to get into the habit of buying bouquets of red roses.”

  “Yes, Sir?” Not even a trace of inflexion in my voice. By God he had me though. Already, in under three days, we had been found out. I had to press my nails tight into the palms of my hands to stop my knees from shaking.

  “I saw you when I was driving down the High Street. You looked so guilty I thought you’d stolen the school’s Gutenberg Bible.”

  “Oh, yes, Sir.” My brain was humming with excuses, denials, anything to mask the truth. “Bought them for a classmate.”

  “And whom might that be?”

  “Angela Evans.”

  “Her birthday, I presume.”

  “Nothing like that,” I replied. “I just fancy her.” In a way this was true. For a moment Frankie was floored. But then he was back, grinding away.

  “And where does Angela live?”

  “I don’t know. I met her in a café.”

  Not a bad recovery. Almost plausible.

  But Frankie revealed nothing. Not a thing. All I could feel was this minute appraisal as he studied my face. Again, that deadly raised eyebrow.

  He levered himself out of the low-slung sofa. “Well, the best of luck Kim,” he said. “You’re going to need it.”

  A warning shot. I could hear the whistle as it whipped over my bows.

  THE NEXT DAY, Monday, I was due for a piano lesson at noon. Just the thought of it had me skittering with anticipation. Every division was a wash-out.

  Time seemed to arbitrarily expand and contract. In the hour before I was due to see her, every second was an aeon.

  But for the last ten minutes, when I was set and on my way, I was on autopilot. It was as if one moment I’d left the Timbralls and the very next I’d arrived at the Music Schools, with my entire journey boiled down to one solitary second.

  As I walked up the staircase in the Schools, I was still uncertain about my reception. I couldn’t believe that my luck would hold, that India wouldn’t have snapped out of her enchantment and that I wouldn’t be cast back into the wilderness. That is how I was before every one of my meetings with India, even if we’d just spoken on the phone five minutes earlier. Always with heart in mouth, half-expecting to be shown the door. I perpetually felt unworthy of her love; I could never understand what she saw in me.

  Having said that, even if she’d explained it to the last detail, it would never have been enough. Even though she would come to love me, she never explained why. I flatter myself that I may indeed have had certain unique qualities, but there at Eton, among more than a thousand boys, many of them far more prepossessing than myself?

  I could never work it out.

  Though perhaps I do myself a disservice. I had certainly shown her compassion and tenderness, as well as a total and utter dedication to my piano practice. Who knows? Maybe it really was all down to The Well-Tempered Clavier, which made me stand out from the other boys like a shining beacon.

  Lick up the honey stranger, and ask no questions.

  I licked it up.

  In the end, though, I could not refrain from asking the questions. They were the scabs in my life that had to be picked.

  WHEN I KNOCKED on the door of Room 17 at noon, India was playing the piano. The smile on her face was of a woman in love.

  She stretched and clasped my hand, and before I had said a word was pulling me down to kiss her.

  “I’ve been like the Princess and the Pea,” she said, throwing her arm round my neck.

  “Tossing and turning?”

  “Did you put something in my bed?”

  “Did I?” I scratched the side of my mouth, pretended to think. “Maybe I did. I think I might have had it too, though.”

  We sat on the piano stool, clutching at each other as if we hadn’t been together in weeks.

  “I’m so happy when I’m with you.” She hugged me tight, kissed me again, then sighed and broke away to sit on that shabby old armchair. She leaned forward, suddenly earnest. “We’re going to have to take care.”

  “I know.”
>
  “People are looking into this practice room all the time.” She swept back her hair. All I wanted to do in that moment was kiss her again.

  “So . . .” She paused, as if readying herself for a pre-prepared speech. “So I think that when we’re here in the Music Schools, I should teach you music.”

  I nodded and wondered if this was it.

  But instead of a bullet, she offered up a rosebud.

  “That isn’t to say that I wouldn’t love to be holding you, but . . .”

  “We can’t be caught.”

  “Yes.” She was relieved, as if she’d been expecting a standup row.

  I was already up to speed. If we were spotted, if word got out, India would have been dismissed. I would almost certainly be expelled. And our little craft would be holed beneath the waterline.

  “Something more subtle than red roses?” I said.

  India nodded. “They were beautiful though.”

  “Meeting away from your home?”

  “I’m so glad you understand.” She clicked her tongue, smiling with relief. “I thought this conversation might be difficult. But of course it isn’t. Everything’s easy when I’m with you.”

  “It is?”

  She grinned in acknowledgement—and, you know, maybe that was why she fell in love with me. I didn’t have the emotional baggage that comes with age and experience. I was just a schoolboy, eager to take her hand, willing to learn.

  So, for the next forty-five minutes, we reverted back to our old relationship, I the pupil and she my teacher. Once she stood behind me to point out a bar of the notes and I could feel her legs pressed against my back. But we were both models of restraint, did not kiss, did not paw, and, although my fingers itched to touch her, they remained glued to the keyboard.

  Even the conversation was seemly, straightforward. I was there to learn the piano, and, since we could not kiss, we did what we always did. She taught me how to love The Well-Tempered Clavier.

  “I think we’re done,” India said at length. She was standing by the window. My Goddess. I came to love those last piano lessons. For India’s beauty—like everything else in my life—was always more beguiling when it was off limits.

  “Thank you,” I said. I stood up, not sure whether to risk a kiss.

  “I was wondering . . .” She played with the hem of her skirt. “If you might be free tomorrow afternoon?”

  “For you, anything.”

  “Shall we go for a walk?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Maybe outside Eton?”

  “Windsor Park?”

  She came over from the window, kissed me. “There’s nothing I’d like more.”

  We arranged to meet by Windsor Castle at 2.30 p.m., and the next day after lunch I was flying upstairs the very moment that Frankie had left the dining room.

  It was the first really wet day that I remember that summer. The cricket matches, tennis and athletics meets were off, and it was raining too hard even for the sculls to get out on the Thames.

  But nothing short of a monsoon would have prevented me from seeing India.

  In those days, it’s now hard to believe, Etonians had to dress up even to go into Windsor. If they weren’t in tails, they had to wear half-change of jacket and tie, just to ensure they stood out like Belisha beacons from the local town boys.

  I wore a thick black donkey jacket and kept off the worst of the rain with my black Eton-issue umbrella. The rain slanted in hard, spraying the bottom of my coat. I stopped off at Rowland’s, the school tuck shop, to buy India a box of chocolates.

  There was not a boy or a master to be seen.

  I’d thought she might not be there, that it might have been too wet for her, or too cold, and there was always the possibility that overnight she might have fallen out of love with me.

  But there she was, standing underneath her umbrella, a lone figure next to Queen Victoria’s slick-wet statue at the Castle entrance.

  She was well-wrapped, with jumper, boots, her creamy Mac and a cashmere hat that was snug around her head, and, as she saw me toiling up the hill towards her, the smile on her face just grew bigger and bigger. When I finally threw my arms round her, she was openly laughing. We kissed, we hugged, and, at that moment, if any wretched Etonians had been out there in the rain to see us then they could have watched and be damned.

  “Let me take that rug,” I said.

  As our fingers touched, we could not resist ourselves; there in the rain we clung to each other in open-mouthed ecstasy.

  “I wondered if you’d come,” she said.

  “How could I not?”

  She sighed contentedly. We had our arms set round each other as we strolled down the hill to the George IV gateway. “I hope you’ll always think so well of me.”

  “Don’t ever doubt it.”

  “I won’t.”

  She looked up and kissed me. But did I detect something in her eye? That she’d been hurt, that she knew only too well how such promises are cheap, and that, above all, love is only for the moment, for who knows what tomorrow will bring?

  We walked to the park and onto the Long Walk, which is straight as a die and undulates from Windsor Castle. At the other end is the Copper Horse, or Copper Cow as it is known at Eton, a vast copper horse with a paunchy George III atop. We had the whole three-mile walk to ourselves.

  We could not walk even thirty yards without stopping to kiss each other. We might say a few words, but then there would be that slight tug at the waist, we would catch each other’s hungry eyes, and the next moment we were swept up in a tide of kisses.

  No matter how far we walked, it seemed that we were never any closer to the Copper Cow. We’d been out an hour and George III on his granite plinth was still nothing but a black blip on the slate-grey horizon.

  Again we stopped, kissed.

  “Is it time for tea?” she said.

  “Chocolates too.”

  Without another word, we stepped off the tarmac and over to the nearby horse chestnuts, where the grass was long and the wet branches hung heavy over the ground. We found a tree that was dense with leaves, the grass oiled but not wet, and, like two lovers preparing for bed, we spread out the rug and smoothed its edges.

  India took off her knapsack and slid into the warm folds of my coat to lie on top of me. Underneath that chestnut tree, the sky grey with rain, every cell of my body was vibrating with love. I longed to declare it. But I didn’t, for fear that she might think me too pushy, too young, too inexperienced.

  She had her elbows tucked in underneath my arms, her head inches above mine.

  “You seem too good to be true.” She gazed into my eyes. “Sometimes I thought I’d never find happiness again.”

  It was like the last string had been cut, as if the door to her heart was now wide open, for suddenly we were kissing crazily, madly, and I’d rolled on top of her. Her hands were soft against my skin, slipping under my shirt, her ankles locked round my knees, and when we broke off she was panting, her face flushed and wet with perspiration.

  “I want you,” she said.

  I kissed her, felt her hips rise up to meet me.

  “I want to make love with you,” she said.

  I gazed at her, quizzical, not daring to believe.

  “Please?” she asked.

  How incredible it all now seems, that India, my first love, should so politely have asked for me, as if, even for a moment, I could ever have had a doubt.

  But I had none, knew that to make love then and there, beside the rain-spattered Long Walk, was what I wanted more than anything else in the world.

  How it all comes back to me. Kissing as if our lives depended on it, feasting my eyes on her face, her lips, and all the while thinking that this was it, my time had come, that for the first time in my life everything was on offer. Oh, to have the prospect of making love with India. I can hardly begin to describe it.

  Some of my peers were in such a tearing hurry to lose their virginities that
they would have been happy with any girl on earth. Would probably have paid for the pleasure.

  I had not gone down that route. But still . . . the very idea that I should be about to make love with India, the Queen of all my fantasies, that she should want it, should be urging me on, should desire it as much as I did myself?

  Beyond my wildest, wildest dreams.

  WE WERE A writhing mass of wet boots, steaming jumpers and slippery coats, her hands all over my back, my chest, curling up round my neck, and, from nowhere, I don’t know how, her bra is unclipped and her shirt is open over her taut stomach. I stop kissing her and lift my head back to gaze at the wonder that lies beneath me. Her breasts smooth and perfectly contoured, her skirt riding up almost to her waist to reveal tanned legs and a hint of white lace underwear.

  I look; I devour her with my eyes. She is so beautiful that I am choking with desire, can barely swallow. It is still raining, the thunder crackles overhead, but now India, my love, my sweet, is sitting up, and, as I pull off her jumper, her blouse, she is unbuttoning my shirt, lips roving over my chest. For a moment we kiss, her mouth hungry against mine, and then she is tugging at my belt. It’s frenzied, delirious passion; we are desperate for each other. One by one the rivet buttons on my trousers are unpopped and along with my boxers are pulled to my knees. From this wild, reckless abandon, there is a breathless pause. She looks me in the eye, so beautiful, and moves down, touches me with those long, manicured fingers. The most exquisite sensation of my life. Happening in front of my very eyes.

  “Stop,” I say quickly, my fingers entwining in her hair.

  She does. I am on the very brink. I rock back on my knees trying to steady myself.

  As we kneel we kiss, and I unbuckle her belt, letting my fingers work their way round the top of her skirt. Buttons are magically released, zippers undone, and, with a last kiss, she stands up. Her skirt glides in a shimmer of white to the ground.

  There, underneath a dripping chestnut tree, with the rain raging all about us, India stands all but naked before me. I kneel at her feet, a pilgrim at prayer, while in front of me is my golden Goddess.