Prelude

by William Coles

  I called India up at teatime, knowing she would be back home by then.

  “What happened?” she said. “I’ve been so worried.”

  “Well, I’m still here.” I was cocky.

  “What did you do?”

  “Jeremy pretended he’d had a fit. I’d tended him as the rest of the boys fled the house.”

  “Quick thinking,” she laughed. “I was terrified for you.”

  “You’re my lucky charm.”

  “You’re so sweet.”

  “Though it might be stretching it to come over tonight. I can scent a spot-check.”

  “What a shame,” she said. “It’s my favourite time of the day when you come to see me.”

  “So can I see you tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Ahh,” she said, and, as she said it, I felt my stomach curdle. “I’ve got to go to London again.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “But what about teatime? You could come round.”

  “I could be there, all tucked up and waiting for you.”

  “I’d love that,” she said. “And I love you.”

  “And I you.” I blew her a farewell kiss.

  IT WAS FORTUNATE that I didn’t visit India that night for, just as I had expected, Frankie did indeed make a little routine check on my bedroom. It must have been about 2 a.m. when I woke to hear a click at my door. I could sense a thin beam of torchlight scouring over my face before the door shut fast.

  I smiled at my own perspicacity.

  It seemed as if I was out-thinking them at every turn.

  BUT I WAS not.

  For although I might have deceived Frankie, there was one person who had not fallen for any of my moonshine.

  It was such a minor blunder. But it had enabled Savage to perceive everything.

  He knew it all—knew that I was seeing India and knew too that I was sneaking to her arms at night.

  I’m not sure if he had spotted India that day in Windsor as he’d chased us through the streets, though it might have been a pointer. It’s possible, even, that Archie tipped him off about my midnight excursions.

  But, either way, it was the fire-drill that finally did for me.

  I can picture the scene that night: the fire bells ringing and Savage bawling for every one to quit the house. He rams home the bar on the fire-door—and discovers that the door is already open. He looks more closely; he wonders. And there, at top and bottom, are those two tell-tale pieces of gaffer tape that could only ever have meant one thing: one of his boys was off and away and enjoying the raptures of love in the outside world.

  Savage could have passed on his suspicions to Frankie, though much good it would have done him. As long as I stuck to my denials, they were never going to break me.

  But why should Savage have bothered informing my tutor when he could dish out his own personal revenge?

  For, along with everything else, Savage knew my little routines, had observed how, just a minute before Absence, I would furiously pedal through New Schools Yard. And that is the inherent problem with routines, for once your enemies have found them out, they can use them against you.

  Yes, my time of reckoning had come—the day when Savage would pay me back for that thump in the library, and for nothing more than sheer spite, and when the fates would finally bloody my nose for daring to find love at Eton.

  PRELUDE 1,

  C Major

  THAT TUESDAY STARTED well enough. There was only one hurdle left, my Economics Trial, which I was due to sit the next day.

  I was doing my best to chug my way through the dreary textbooks. All I had to do was retain the information in my head for twenty-four hours and reproduce it on the page in a great torrent of verbose knowledge.

  Some of it might have stuck. I don’t know. I might even have passed the Trial.

  It is all rather immaterial now, for I never sat the exam.

  THROUGHOUT LUNCH I had an uneasy tension; I knew, oh yes I knew exactly, what was about to happen.

  One side of me, of course, wanted nothing more than to buy India a bunch of flowers and some chocolates. I would let myself into her flat, would put the flowers in a vase. I might play the piano for a bit, might leaf through some of her books, and when she came through the door, all sleek and groomed in her grey suit, I would be gleaming with my own virtue.

  That was one way of looking at it, that I’d be going into India’s flat with the sole object of being there for her when she returned from London.

  That was what my heart wanted.

  But my head? Even before I had stepped through the door, my head had other designs altogether. Didn’t I just know it? As I let myself into her flat, I felt like a burglar come to ransack her home.

  It was 3 p.m. I went through the motions.

  I trimmed the roses—white, I remember—and put them in a vase on the piano. I made myself a cup of tea. I played a tune, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  I started to potter around. It’s what you do when you’re in your lover’s home and you have the place to yourself for the first time.

  I had a look at the books in her spare room. Medical textbooks, music books, novels, biographies. Some I’d read, some I hadn’t.

  That cork noticeboard by the front door. A picture of India with a man. I pulled it off but there was nothing on the back.

  To the bathroom and to the kitchen, for a quick poke through the cupboards. A peek upstairs at the bedroom and shower room.

  Up until now, my behaviour had—just—been within reasonable bounds. I had been inquisitive, certainly. But I hadn’t overstepped the mark.

  But, as I walked round India’s flat, inhaling her smell, a wild mist descended over me. All thought of love had gone out of the window. For all I wanted to do was dig—find out everything about her. I was like a reformed alcoholic who gets that first whiff of booze and then drains every bottle in sight.

  She had secrets and she had kept them from me—deliberately kept them from me because she knew that I had a jealous heart. But I would find them out, would winkle out every last one of them. I was as thorough as any detective.

  First the drawers of her desk in the spare room. Then a sweep under the bed, the mattress and the wardrobe shelves. A look in the kitchen above the cupboards.

  I delayed it to the very last. I had searched the entire apartment from top to bottom and had found not a single thing to compromise my lover.

  But I was only playing with myself, stretching out the search to breaking point.

  For I had known for several days where India stored her secrets.

  Where else but under the piano, underneath her music books, her Bach, her Partitas and her Well-Tempered Clavier?

  I stretched for the chest and hauled it out from underneath India’s baby grand. I was detached, like a vet who has the task of putting down a much-loved family pet. It was not going to be pleasant, but it was a job that had to be done.

  I placed all of the music books onto the piano, alongside the vase of roses, and for a moment I stared at the box. It was an old seafarer’s chest, made of gnarled oak and latticed with black iron. There was a handle at each end and a clasp in front. But no lock.

  I think at that stage I was so in the thrall of the terrifying rage coursing through my veins that, even if there had been a lock, I’d have wrenched it off with a crowbar. Yes, I was now livid with anger. I was insanely jealous of India’s lurid past and furious with myself at my own lack of self-restraint. And there was guilt too, for I knew exactly what I was about to do, and I knew there could never be any turning back.

  I was about to attack my golden Goddess with a sledgehammer, was going to knock her clay feet from underneath her until I had razed her to the ground.

  It was the most awful thing I have ever done in my life.

  I gritted my teeth, I flicked the latch and I opened India’s past.

  And there it all was, exactly as I knew it would be and exactly as I had feared.

  My heart was beating
wildly. At first all I could do was look and stare. A packet of letters, tied up with a pink ribbon; and, tucked into the corner, photo albums, thick leather photo albums, piled one on top of the other; some ethnic jewellery lying loose over the letters; some sheet music; a lock of black hair tied-up with some white cotton; and, filling nearly half of the chest, India’s files, lots of files, labelled and in line abreast.

  But it wasn’t yet too late. It wasn’t too late for me to slam the chest shut and replace the music on top of the lid. I could have skulked from her flat and returned when it was safe—when my love had returned, when the temptation was out of sight and when the madness had lifted.

  It was already far, far too late, for I was no more capable of leaving India’s chest of secrets than I would have been of playing The Well-Tempered Clavier Books I and II complete. To leave would have been a physical impossibility. It would have gone against my very nature.

  So, with my heart turned to flint, I allowed myself a first jealous sip. It was a love letter, dated five years back and postmarked from Bristol. Inside, there were no torrid details of trysts beneath the Clifton Suspension Bridge, or walks in the Botanic Gardens. But I saw that it was from ‘Malcolm’ and it was signed ‘with much love’.

  I scanned the letter and tossed it to the side. Not for me the discreet look in India’s chest and then the pretence that I knew nothing. For in that moment I was not just outraged but physically repulsed at the thought that my love could have had boyfriends before me, and I was determined to have it out with her. Blow by blow, we would sort it out once and for all.

  I read letter after letter, all of them from Malcolm. He was another Bristol medic and in his own way seemed perfectly amenable. They weren’t explicitly raunchy, but every word was a twist of the knife in my guts. They seemed to have started during India’s first year at Bristol and spanned at least three years. There was hardly even an intimation of sex. They were just loving, affectionate letters. But my vivid imagination, churning at warp speed, could more than fill in the details.

  I was coming towards the end of the letters and picked up another crisp white envelope with Malcolm’s now familiar scrawl in black ink. This one was from just a couple of years before, with a London postmark.

  I scanned it fast and the three words at the end blazed out at me as if they had been written in blood. Just three words and, the moment I read them, I felt queasy with nausea.

  For with those three words, the edifice of my beautiful golden Goddess had finally come tumbling to earth and she lay at my feet in a pile of rubble and dust.

  My eyes were watering as I read them again, realising their full import. Not the words ‘I love you’, but something far more devastating.

  They were Malcolm’s fond farewell. The three words: ‘Your loving husband’.

  My hands were shaking with rage. The bitch! The bloody bitch! Married to someone else and she hadn’t even thought fit to tell me? She’d used me like some toy-boy lover, while between times she must have tripped back to London to see her husband. I was apoplectic. Then and there I tore the letter to shreds and hurled it across the room.

  I was so crazy with rage that I could hardly read the other letters, but they were more of the same—Malcolm eulogizing about his wonderful wife, telling her how she’d made him the happiest man in the world.

  I’ll bet she had, with all her houri bedroom tricks and her insatiable lust.

  Photo albums next, and there, if ever I needed it, was the proof of India’s infidelity right in front of my eyes. Pictures of a schoolgirl India, winning prizes, clinching teenage loves. Pictures too of her parents and friends, but those were passed over in a moment, because the only thing that I wanted were photos of her with men and, specifically, with her husband.

  And there he was. I knew it was him—from the look of love in her face and the way that they were entwined about each other in the bedroom. Malcolm had finally arrived on the scene and the next two albums were devoted to India and him, their holidays and their parties. He had glasses, was about six-foot tall and had wispy receding hair. He was by no means a hunk and all I could think was that she’d cuckolded me for this gangling geek?

  Pictures of the diamond ring too—on India’s left hand—as they celebrated their engagement. She was wearing a little black dress, her hair in a short bob. She looked years younger.

  I knew they were coming, but it was still a shock when I found them—an album full of wedding pictures, recording the happiest day of her life down to the last piece of confetti. Pictures of India having her hair done, wearing a simple white silk dress as her father led her up the aisle, cutting the cake and kissing her new husband with a look of starry-eyed love. There were honeymoon snaps too, a week in Istanbul from the look of things, with India and Malcolm forever holding hands, clutching at each other’s waists, and the smiles never once leaving their faces.

  I threw the album across the room with all my might and, as it ricocheted off the wall, its spine cracked. The pages fluttered to the floor.

  I picked up the lock of hair, the pieces of gaudy jewellery, and with one sweep they were hammered into the side of the piano. The sheet music—more Bach, I noticed—went the same way.

  A small ring-box was at the bottom of the trunk. I opened it—and there was the diamond ring, the diamond that she had so devotedly taken off for me, but which she had tucked away into her box of secrets. How it mocked me as it sparkled.

  I’d seen enough, more than enough, and the righteous, vindictive rage was swelling up in me like an unstoppable tide, sweeping away all before it.

  For now that I knew the worst—knew that my India was married—I’d started to think and to piece things together.

  Of course she hadn’t needed any contraception. She’d been on the pill for years, ever since she’d first started seeing Malcolm.

  Of course she was a dynamo in the bedroom. Malcolm had taught her every trick in the Kama Sutra.

  But then I started to think back, started to remember little details from the previous two months. And gradually I completed my picture.

  It seemed so obvious. For she hadn’t just been cuckold- ing me with Malcolm, but with Savage too. I remembered that day when we’d kissed for the first time, how she’d been so eager to run away from Savage. And only a few days after that she’d sprinted through the streets of Windsor in order to keep the two of us apart. And then, the killer blow: Savage in Tap, openly bragging about how he’d bedded India. At the time, I’d foolishly dismissed it as nothing more than Savage’s idle boasting, but now . . . now I could see it all with crystal clarity. She’d bedded Savage and, after she had tired of him, she had taken up with me instead.

  I was crying with rage, the tears pouring down my cheeks and dripping over India’s chest of secrets. But yet the pity of it. Oh, the pity of it.

  I squatted there amid the torn-up letters and the scattered photos, and I howled for myself and for my shattered love. I’d been abused and India had treated my love with a vileness that defied comprehension.

  Eventually the tears dried, but I was so choked with self-pity that I didn’t hear the clink of the front door, or the quiet step on the stairs.

  And in she came.

  She was wearing her grey suit and white blouse and, like me, was red-rimmed with tears.

  India stood on the doorstep. Agape.

  I must have looked like a mad thing, like a wild animal in its soiled nest, with her box open and her letters, her photos, and all her intimate secrets strewn all about me.

  She looked round the room, saw the pictures and the scattered baubles, took it all in, before finally staring down at me. She shook her head and burst into tears, her breath coming in racked sobs. She clutched her hands to her face and sank to the floor.

  My heart, my ice-cold heart, did instinctively go out to her a little. But then I remembered that it was I who had been spurned, who had been treated so abominably. And well she might start crying in front of me, but out of nothing m
ore than guilty shame at having been found out.

  She cried and she cried, slumped on the floor, her whole body heaving. I quashed every instinct to go to her. I squatted there like a troll in its own filth and watched and waited. I had nothing to say, for now I knew everything. But I would bide my time, would give her as long as she wanted, see if she had anything to say for herself.

  And when the sobbing had stopped and she had caught her breath, she finally spoke. “I’m sorry.”

  She’d apologised. And her apology only strengthened my resolve. I had nothing to be ashamed of. I might have gone through her private papers, but all I had done was expose her infidelity. I might have done wrong. But it was a gnat-bite compared to the outrage that she had inflicted on me.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

  At length I spoke. “You’re married.”

  She could only shake her head dumbly from side-to-side.

  “I’ve seen the pictures of you and ‘Malcolm’. Read his letters. Seen the two of you together on your wedding day.”

  “It’s not like that,” she said. Softly.

  Oh, I could be quite the lawyer when I turned my mind to it; four years at Eton had taught me more than enough about sarcasm and a savage tongue. She’d opened the floodgates, and out it all poured.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “So, it’s not like that then? Maybe you were just married to Malcolm at weekends, leaving you free to sleep with me or Savage or whichever other boy took your fancy?”

  “Savage?” She was horrified.

  “I know everything. He was openly boasting about the two of you.”

  “But . . .” She was twisting her handkerchief into knots. “But there’s never been anything with Savage.”

  I laughed, laughed at my own folly. “Three weeks back I wondered what you were doing about contraception. I wondered how you just happened to be on the pill.” I flicked at some of the torn letters at my feet. “I thought that maybe you were just a good-time girl who was always prepared, always ready for any eventuality. But the one thing I never imagined was that you were actually married.”