Prelude (19 page)

That night she had it on the ring-finger of her right hand and, as I lay in the crook of her arm, it was winking in the candlelight, daring me, goading me on.

I didn’t ask her outright.

But I brought the subject up. Even though I knew it would torture me, I had to ask. I couldn’t help myself.

“Nice ring,” I said. Sly. Devious. Probing.

She stared at the diamond, splaying her fingers out to catch the light. She was on the very cusp of telling me.

I willed her on.

I urged her to stop.

“I don’t know why I still wear it.” She sighed. “Sometimes it’s hard to let go.”

The blood was draining from my cheeks. Was this it? Was she going to tell me everything? Was I about to learn that my golden Goddess had feet of clay?

“Do you like it?” she said, but then she answered her own question. “No, I know you don’t want to know.”

I cocked my head. I said nothing although I hated it, of course I did, because it would become a daily reminder that India had once loved a man other than myself.

She knew all this without a word being said. “You’re right,” she continued. “It’s time to move on.”

She worked the diamond off her finger and tossed it onto the bedside table.

“Look,” she said, and held up her long, bare fingers. “A fresh start.”

We kissed and I gazed at her hands.

All I could see was not bare fingers, but the indent from where her diamond ring had once been.

I couldn’t even rejoice that the ring was off and that I wouldn’t have it thrust in my face every day because, jealous twisted teenager that I was, every time I looked at India’s manicured fingers, all I could think was that once that diamond had been there.

And here is a tip if you ever have the misfortune to bring a jealous lover into your life.

Don’t ever pander to them, because all you will be doing is stoking the fires. Cave in once, twice, and they begin to believe that they’re in the right, that they’re being reasonable.

So India had thoughtfully caved in on this one. She had taken off her diamond ring because she thought it might make me happy.

It did nothing of the sort.

For a few hours, I had a guilty glow. I knew I had won a very minor battle. But, before the cock had even crowed thrice in the morning, I was thirsting for more information. I wanted to know who had given her the diamond, why she had worn it so long.

But another side of me was also horrified at my petty victory. For I had walked into the stagnant swamp of my own jealousy and the more I floundered, the more it sucked me down.

PRELUDE 17,

A-flat Major

BREAKING BACK INTO the Timbralls was just as formidable as I had feared.

At 4.30 a.m., I had given India a final birthday kiss and, as the first glimmers of sunlight were pinking in the east, I was racing back over South Meadow and onto Keate’s Lane. I should have felt uplifted, exhilarated. But I was disgusted with myself. I felt soiled by that whole repugnant business with the diamond ring.

I loved India and only India, and somehow I would learn to embrace her past because that was what had turned her into the joy of my life.

There and then I made a vow.

Whatever the provocation, whatever the circumstances, I was never going to quiz India about her past loves.

If she wanted to tell me about them, then I would listen quietly and with sympathy. She had been hurt, I knew that. If talking was going to help her get over the past, then I would hear her out.

But as for doing any of my own digging and as for grilling India about those photos, from that time forth, I would never speak a word.

In a way, I managed to keep that vow.

But, like a weasel-tongued lawyer, I was to stick to the words of my promise but not its spirit.

I LEFT THE bike tucked by a pillar in Cannon Yard and gave General Peel’s cannon another slap for luck.

Some puffs of smoke were trailing out of the Timbralls’ chimneys as the boilers fired up, but the house was still asleep.

I examined the smooth brick wall that separates the Timbralls from New Schools Yard. There was not even a hint of a handhold.

I decided to do what I had seen the Eton Rifles do when they were out practising on the assault course; I ran at the wall full-tilt, kicked my foot into the bricks and stretched up to get a hand over the coping stone.

Not even close.

Worse, the sound of my kick against the wall echoed across the yard in a dull, flat boom.

I tried it again. I ran faster, strained to kick higher.

I was still nowhere near and, to my fevered ears, the sound of the kick was like a discharge from that old Sebastopol cannon.

All thought of India had melted from my mind. Trapped outside my own house? How I could I have been so stupid?

I was petrified.

It was now past 5 a.m. and cars were already out on the Slough Road, which runs directly next to the Timbralls.

I walked to the back of the house and onto Sixpenny. But the walls there were, if anything, more insuperable, higher and topped with razor-wire. There was worse to come. Already there were a couple of lights on in the Timbralls. The house was rousing itself for the start of a new day.

I tore back to New Schools Yard and sat down by the railings to take stock. I just had to think. How could this be happening to me?

I studied the wall. It seemed insurmountable. But when I looked to the side, I felt a thrill of joy as I realised the main gate might serve as a stepladder.

How I would come to love that hefty black gate, with its steel bars so conveniently placed for a boy in desperate need of a ladder.

I was up the gate in under twenty seconds. My earlier gloom dissolved in a surge of adrenalin. Of course it was going to work out all right. The result had never been in doubt.

I trotted along the top of the wall, as carefree as a tightrope walker, and was soon darting up the fire-escape and into the house. I was meticulous in covering my tracks, clearing off all the gaffer tape before slotting the fire-door back home.

I was hauling off my clothes even before I was back in my room. I sat on my bed grinning to myself.

I’d spent the night with my love and had got clean away with it, and, as I slipped between the sheets, I knew that my night-times at Eton would never be the same again. For if India was in her home and willing to see me, then every night I would go to her. I would not get sloppy, but would be every bit as vigilant and wary as I had been that first night.

Sometimes, though, it doesn’t matter how vigilant you are. For it’s not your mistakes or blunders that find you out, just the natural order of events. Things happen; inconceivable things that would have seemed so unlikely that they would never even have raised a blip on the radar.

SO THAT SUNDAY, I saw India after lunch and hand-in-hand we walked the fields. I gazed admiringly at my Heuer that was on her wrist. I think I almost preferred it to seeing her Cartier on mine, for it was my mark and stamp and signified that she was mine.

I took my leave of her at 6.30 p.m. in time for Absence, but the birthday celebrations continued that night when again I crept to her door. We would eventually learn to sleep with each other but, in those early days, when everything was so fresh, we would spend our time making love, talking and playing the piano. For night after night after night.

I would try to steal a cat-nap when I could, but I was having to get by on barely three hours sleep a day. Worse, I was still on Tardy Book and was having to report into the School Office at 6.30 a.m. every morning.

Did I ever want to have an early night instead? Just skip an evening with India and curl up in my Timbralls bed for a refreshing twelve hours?

It would have been like choosing a Big Mac over Lobster Thermidor, opting for the safe and the pedestrian over the wild, mesmerising passion that I shared with India. Nothing, least of all lack of sleep, was going to stop me from seeing her.

But even by the middle of the week, those long, long nights of love-making were starting to take their toll. My skin had the lusty glow that comes from sex outside, but my eyes were red-rimmed with haggard bags that sagged to my cheekbones. I was bone-shatteringly tired, and it was all too obvious both to my peers and to my teachers.

I was in an English division, still gazing at Angela, staring at her but looking right through her, and the tide of words was rolling over me in a never-ending stream. My ears were as impermeable as rock, not a word could register.

At first I was just thinking of India, revelling in my memories of her. Soon enough though, my reveries had turned to dreams, and I was far away from that dry-as-dust Caxton classroom. We were flying over Eton, free as larks and buoyed by our love. We were naked, holding hands, and were swooping through the school buildings with all the elegance of swifts—up, up, skirting round Lupton’s twin towers and the chapel turrets.

I didn’t know how we were flying, but instinctively I knew that the moment I looked down, the moment I started to doubt, I would plummet out of the sky.

We were swooping over Chambers now, watching the black morass of penguined-boys outside the School Hall, stuck in their privileged rut. And I, with my soul-mate, was free of them all.

One by one the boys started to look up. A wall of noise came up to us, but not the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of circus-crowd amazement, but a wave of laughter. They were laughing at us, laughing at our nakedness, and our love. India and I were so very different from them that all they could think to do was mock us.

I stared and I began to doubt. Maybe our love couldn’t keep us up; maybe we did look ridiculous without our clothes; maybe it would be much easier just to don my black suit and blend back into the Eton morass.

And out of the sky I tumbled, heel-over-head, seeing first the upturned mouths of the braying boys and then a last glimpse of my love. India was still gliding above me but her face was a picture of spectral horror, her mouth locked into a never-ending scream.

I hurtled headfirst into a wall of manic, savage, laughter— and that, as you may have realised, was the sound of my classmates laughing at me in my English division.

I came to with a start, my head jerking back and my eyes wide open. Instantly, I knew I was the butt of a classroom joke. Every boy in the room was jabbering, even McArdle was smirking. Although when I glanced at Angela—and for this I will always be grateful—she had a gentle smile on her face, not of mockery, but of tender sympathy.

I was lambasted.

“Ah Kim,” McArdle said, strutting round his desk like a well-heeled barrister at court. “Sorry to have disturbed your nap.”

And you know what? Something snapped. For four years, I’d been soaking it all up, accepting that abuse was all part of the Eton turf.

Suddenly I didn’t feel like playing this craven game any more.

“That’s all right,” I replied, like the churl I was.

McArdle paused mid-stride, turned to look at me. “Care to tell us what you were dreaming about?”

“Not especially, Sir.”

The laughter died. The boys scented a tussle.

“Or is it so very tedious to hear us talk about
Othello
?”

“It’s nothing personal, Sir.”

The tide had turned and the class was on my side now, tittering for me.

“You mean your tiredness is a general malaise?” McArdle tugged at his beard. “Well, you’d better have a ticket then. Talk it through with your tutors, just to see if there’s anything they can do to help.”

“Fair enough.”

Inside, my heart sank. A ticket to be signed by both my housemaster and my personal tutor—yet another means by which Eton stamps its heel on her unruly charges.

At the end of the division, McArdle filled out the yellow slip. He wrote my name and under it, ‘Falling asleep in class’.

“Have it back by tomorrow.”

“My pleasure.”

He scrutinised me for a moment from behind his desk, before adding one more word to the ticket: ‘Insolence’.

The ticket dangled from McArdle’s fingers. Again that surge of bravado. “I think I prefer the word ‘Cheek’.”

McArdle handed me the ticket in silence. Just as I was supposed to be, I was numb as I left the room.

It made the surprise that was awaiting me outside all the more disarming. For there standing on the pavement was Angela in her tartan mini-skirt and skin-tight navy jumper.

I rolled my eyes and raised my arm. Angela, fly as anything, high-fived me and we laughed at the crazy school we inhabited.

My metamorphosis over the previous two weeks must have been remarkable to behold. For now that I had India in my life, I had an inner ring of confidence that meant I could talk to girls without being turned into a tongue-tied fool.

Angela and I walked companionably down Judy’s Passage, her shoulder occasionally tapping against mine.

“What were you dreaming about?” she asked.

“I was flying,” I said. “I was flying over Eton.”

“With anyone in particular?”

“Would it make any difference?”

“Well, you know what Freud said about flying in your dreams?”

“What did he say?”

“You’ll have to look it up.”

“Like when I next go to the library?”

“I’ve never once seen you in the library.” She cuffed me lightly on the arm.

We’d arrived at the end of Judy’s Passage, and there on the other side of the road was the dusty elderberry bush under which I had first found love with India. I looked at it and almost felt guilty for being there alone with Angela.

“You’ll let me know if you ever go flying with me?”

“Be sure of it.”

I had only just come from India’s arms and I would be seeing her again that night. But already here I was, allowing myself to flirt with Angela. Although it wasn’t as if I’d actually done anything with her. I had been faithful to India in word and deed, though not, perhaps, in thought.

I know that this—among many other things—does not show me in the best of lights. I could have skipped telling you the incident completely. But I would be doing you a disservice because what we are observing is not just my frailty but that of every schoolboy. It is not pleasant; it is not savoury. But welcome to the world of the single-sex school, where all relationships with the opposite sex are to be cultivated. Industriously.

That very afternoon I went to the school library, and Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams
duly confirmed my suspicions. Flying dreams are nothing more than ‘sexual intercourse’; not so very surprising when you consider that Freud’s entire oeuvre revolved around sex.

What was surprising though was how Angela had alluded to my dream in such a risqué manner. Let her know when I flew with her? It was a come-on if ever I’d heard one.