Prelude (2 page)

“Nothing since this morning,” Jeremy replies.

“South Georgia, eh? Until a week ago, I’d always thought that was in the Deep South.” Frankie signs the chits with a flourish. “Almost makes me wish I’d signed up for a full fifteen years.”

“The Eton Rifles must be a pretty good second though, Sir?” Jeremy says.

“Might have made Lieutenant-Colonel by now.”

“Brigadier at the least.”

Frankie laughs. “Quite so.”

“But it’s got to be more fun ordering us around, isn’t it Sir?” Jeremy continues.

“It might be,” Frankie says. “If you ever obeyed any of my orders.”

He chortles to himself as he tucks his pen away.

Then, as if by osmosis, a frisson ripples through the boys. Not a word is said, but we are aware of an alien presence.

A slight nudge at my elbow from Jeremy and, from looking at Frankie, I find that my gaze is drawn to the huge doors of the School Hall. The collective sigh is just audible.

I turn, I look, and I stare transfixed. All thoughts of Frankie, the Falklands, are erased from my mind.

A woman, a young woman in her early-twenties, has glided out of the hall. She stands for a moment on the steps, basking in the sunlight, smiling for the sheer joy of having the sun on her face, and all the while oblivious to the extraordinary reaction she is generating.

Even then, her teeth seem whiter than any teeth that I have ever seen before; lightly-tanned skin that sets off her scarlet lipstick to perfection and that wave of brown hair. She wears a creamy cotton skirt, white shirt and a cream jacket, and carries a small leather attaché case. A total vision of loveliness in a pool of murk.

It’s like a physical blow to the stomach. She’s winded me. She is the most perfect woman I have ever seen. Of all the fantasy girls that I had raked over in the glossy magazines and lusted after on screen, there is not a single one that could hold a candle to the woman standing in front of me.

I am devouring her with my eyes, searing every detail and every nuance into my memory banks so that, even if I never see her again, I will always be able to recall that one sublime moment.

She stands on the School Hall steps for just one second, two, and briefly surveys the scrum of schoolboys at her feet. With one click of her fingers she could have had us do anything she pleased.

However, she seemed to have this innocence; a lack of awareness of the effect she was having on the boys before her; a Queen Bee that imagines herself one of the drones.

She flicks her head back, hair streaming behind her, and flits down and disappears into a morass of blackness. I watch her path through the parting tailcoats.

I stare and I stare, wanting to snatch up every moment of this awesome being. When I’m finally quite certain she has gone, I turn back and become aware that other boys are starting to talk again.

Frankie raises an elliptical eyebrow. It means everything and nothing. Jeremy slips his arm through mine and we slope off. I am in a daze, unmasted and unmanned. But there is one sour spot in a moment of unalloyed joy.

Savage makes a point of coming over to us.

“Have a pound in my room by lock-up, the pair of you.”

“Are you fining us, Savage?” Jeremy says.

“Make it two pounds each.”

“On what grounds?”

“Having a stiffy in public,” Savage says. “School rules expressly forbid out-of-house erections.” He guffaws, the F-tits scattering as he strides through them.

I can think of nothing to say. Savage’s remarks seem so unsavoury, like a blunt scratch on a perfect record.

For at that time, the thought of sex together with this woman had not occurred to me. She was so unattainable that the very concept of sex had not registered on the horizon.

“Jerk,” Jeremy says, steering me through the boys. “What a total jerk.”

We have a couple more lessons, or divisions, before lunch— humdrum English and even more humdrum Economics—but not a word sinks in. My mind is on holiday, time and again running over the memory of that woman on the step, her smile and hair toss before she melts into the blackwash of tailcoats.

FOR THREE DAYS, I hugged the memory to myself. It was my talisman, my default mechanism. If ever I were daydreaming, up she would pop, standing there in the sunlight. (And Savage would crop up too; how I came to loathe him for besmirching my perfect memory.)

Nowadays I am more proactive. Nowadays, if I had suffered the
coup de foudre
that hit me outside the School Hall, I would have done something about it. Definitely. Anything at all, rather than just sit passively to await the turn of events. I would have discovered her name. I might have turned up for a few more 11 a.m. sessions at the Burning Bush. I might have engineered some kind of casual meeting.

There are many things that, older and wiser, I might have done to effect a meeting so we could have got onto first name terms. But back then, aged seventeen, the idea of actually doing anything about this woman and of getting to know her better . . . well, it was as absurd as the notion of me building a space rocket for a trip to the moon.

Absurd.

Ludicrous.

Beyond farcical.

But sometimes, you know, fate likes to lend a hand.

My life has been blessed in so many ways. The best education money can buy; great friends; extraordinary adventures; lucky breaks aplenty.

Yes, a lot of good stuff has come my way.

Some of these things I made happen and some were just down to good fortune. But what happened to me that Monday was the most outrageous, the most remarkable lucky break of my entire life. And it all stemmed from the fact that in those days I was a very modest piano player.

When I was aged ten, my grandmother had died and left me her piano. I’d started to have lessons, but I was not in any way, shape or form a natural piano-player.

By the time I was seventeen, I’d been having lessons for seven years and I had even notched up a Grade Five music exam. But, like all my other endeavours at Eton, my musical skills were outstandingly indifferent. The school was awash with scores of music scholars; I was not of their number. No, I was one of the musical flotsam that drifted on the surface of Eton’s music scene, botching away on one lesson a week.

That wasn’t to say I didn’t have a few party pieces, some tinkling little numbers with which to entertain the troops— Scott Joplin had always been a favourite and I knew about five of his rags off by heart; Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata, without the tricky bits; a brace of Chopin waltzes, along with smatterings of Schubert and Mozart. The selection was not exactly mind-blowing, but to the uninitiated (i.e. someone who had never played a note) they could come across as mildly impressive.

After Grade Five, I’d given up taking the exams but I was still plugging away with lessons. I have no idea why. Maybe because it was all part of my weekly school routine; or maybe because I didn’t totally object to the drudgery of practice; or just maybe because it had always been my destiny to be having piano lessons that particular summer.

Each week at Eton, I had a few free periods that were ostensibly for study. It was during these times that I had to arrange my piano lessons.

My first lesson of the term had been fixed for noon that Monday and I was edgy. Not because of my general lack of practice, but because I was due to meet my new teacher.

My teacher for the previous four years, Mr Bowen, had quit the school at short notice, and for the summer term I was to be foisted onto some other member of the music staff.

I didn’t know who was going to be teaching me but I did know that I was going to be put through my paces—scales, arpeggios, party pieces—so that the new teacher could size up the raw materials on offer.

Another epoch-making event in my life. Click my fingers and I am there.

My house is the Timbralls, though at Eton the houses are known not by their names but by the tutor’s initials—in my case ‘FF’, for Francis Frederickson. The house is just 200 yards from the School Hall and overlooks a great swathe of playing fields called Sixpenny—the fields, according to Wellington, where Waterloo was won. The Timbralls had only one claim to fame, that the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming, was there as a boy. The entire 007 collection is in the house library and I have read every one of the Bond books several times over.

The Music Schools are a good ten-minute walk away. Out of the house and into Cannon Yard, then past the captured Sebastopol cannon that a grateful old boy, General Peel, had given to the school in 1867. I gave it a lucky slap and made a wish. Past the Burning Bush and right at the lights onto Keate’s Lane, named after Dr Keate, the greatest flogger in Eton’s history. Keep heading straight and the Music Schools are just opposite the lower boys’ chapel. I have made that walk so many times I could still do it in my sleep.

It is another sunny day but now it is more than hot, it is scorching. Not a trace of wind in the air and the sweat seems to bubble off me. I walk past some builders who are dressed in shorts and T-shirts. The absurd juxtaposition of clothing is laughable—for like all the other boys I am wrapped in the worst conceivable clothes for a blazing summer’s day. But you get used to it, get used to sweating and stinking throughout the summer, just like you get used to all the other mild annoyances that are forced on you at school.

By the time I reach the music rooms, the sweat is dripping off me and my skin is marinating in an oily slick. I can feel my shirt wet under my thick black waistcoat and my cuffs grimy against my wrists.

The Music School is pleasantly cool and dark, a haven after the noon sun. High ceilings, lino floors and scuffed walls, though the smell is just as it is in all the school buildings: the teenage whiff of sweat and pulsing pheromones.

A look at the noticeboard to see who will be my piano-teacher for the term—a Mr James in Room 17.

Up the stairs, slicking my wet fringe off my forehead, and down a dark corridor on the top floor. On either side are a dozen boxy practice rooms with a piano in each. The doors all have a small window at head height, and as I walk I can hear snippets of music—a Beethoven piano sonata, a raucous guitar, some scraped scales on a violin.

Room 17 is at the end of the corridor on the left. I can hear a piano being played, being played with an extreme competence I will never possess. I can hear measured trills and a delicate touch.

I don’t know the music, but the style is familiar. It could be Bach. But it’s warm and much more graceful than the mathematical compositions I normally associate with Johann Sebastian. I am charmed.

For a moment I linger outside the room, slowly perspiring in the still air. The music comes to a gentle end and then there is silence.

I tap at the door and, without waiting for an answer, walk in.

I am dumbstruck.

It’s her, the woman from the School Hall three days ago, sitting at the piano not two yards in front of me. Hands lightly on her lap, she looks at me, looks me straight in the eye, and gives me quite the loveliest smile I have ever seen, starting at the edges and turning into a full 1,000-watt beam.

I hover in the doorway, my hands clutching at my cardboard file, and, although my brain is spinning at the speed of light, I can think of nothing sensible to say.

“You must be Kim.” She stands up, puts out her hand. “India James. Do call me India.”

India. I had never come across the name before. It is both exotic and lyrical. A name to match its owner.

I shuffle my cardboard file. My fingers are so sweaty that they feel greased. For a second, I think about wiping my hand on my trousers, but I stop myself. We shake hands briefly. The touch of her warm skin is electric. White heat.

“How do you do,” I say, as some semblance of formal etiquette kicks in. New sensations are still exploding in my brain; I take in her clothes, a flowing floral dress and dainty brown sandals; and the scent, a smell that I will forever associate with heaven on earth—lily-of-the-valley; and those hazel eyes with black as black eyelashes; and her moist scarlet lips; and that mane of brown hair which looks even more perfect than the first time I saw her.

I am all too aware of myself, of the stinking tailcoat that I’m wearing and my drenched shirt. I’m not fit to be in the same room as her.

She slips over to a grubby armchair in the corner of the room.

She’s still smiling; in fact, the smile has never left her lips, as if she’s delighted to see me. Can this possibly be happening? It feels like an out-of-body experience.

She gestures to the bench-like piano stool. At this stage, I still can’t bring myself to think of her even as India. She is far too exotic to be human and to have a name. She is just ‘She’—at that moment, without a doubt, the most astounding, the most extraordinary thing ever to enter my life.

I carefully place my tatty file onto the piano, take a seat, and look at her. All is silence, but inside my head a speeding express train is running at full tilt towards a bridgeless chasm; my brain is going through repeated galvanic convulsions, neurones are fizzing and sparking, and all I can do is look dumbly into her face, unable to say a word.

But I finally manage a smile, a shy, nervous smile that says: “Do with me what you will.”

India smoothes the pleats in her dress and I catch sight of her ankles. They are slim and tanned, criss-crossed with brown leather laces that loop into a bow.

She speaks again and for the first time I notice her voice. A melodic purr that caresses my ears. At that moment, all I want to do is look at and listen to her for the rest of my life.

“So Kim . . .” She’s said my name again. From her lips it sounds like the most beautiful name in the English language. “Tell me a bit about your music.”

Subconsciously I had started wiping the palms of my sweaty hands on my trousers. Disgusting. Abruptly I stop. I am aware of the sweat dripping off me. My tailcoat and waistcoat feel like a straitjacket.

“Would you . . .” I start. “Would you mind if I took off my coat?”

“Of course,” she says. “It’s stifling. I’ll open the window.”