Prelude (23 page)

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 more 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.”

“Kim,” she said, and when she looked at me I could see the tears dripping down her cheeks. “I love you. I love only you.”

I was standing up now. I’d said my piece. There was nothing more to be gained by staying. “Funny way of showing it.”

“You’re right. I was married.” Those vile words caught in her mouth. “I’d wanted to tell you. But it had never felt right. I . . .”

I stalked past her and stood at the door.

She looked up at me. “I didn’t know how you’d take it. I thought it might change everything between us.”

I laughed in disbelief. “You thought it might change everything if I knew you were married? Well, maybe it just might!”

Her fingers, those long tapering fingers, strayed to several of the wedding pictures on the floor. She picked them up and stared at them. “We split up a year ago.” One-by-one the pictures fell from her hand. “He found someone else and he broke my heart. And then I found you.” She looked up at me. “And you made me believe in love again.”

She blinked back the tears, and, as she sat there in front of me, with her hands in her lap, I felt the cold, raw power of the executioner at the block.

“I can never trust you again.”

The tears fell wet down her neck. “We divorced today,” she said. A trace of a smile wavering at the edge of her lips. “And I thought that I was free to be yours. Even if you did want to join the army.”

She was pleading with me, imploring me to stay, to hold her. She shuffled towards me on her knees.

And with one sharp, scything blow, I severed our love by the neck. “India, you are free to be with whomever you want.” My hand rested on the door-handle. “But it’s not going to be me.”

I slammed the door shut behind me. India’s sobs were still ringing in my ears as I stormed down the stairs.

I rode back to the Timbralls with this icy, icy rage clinging to me like a cloak. Oh, I had such malice in my heart that at that moment I was capable of any sort of infamy.

I looked at my watch—her watch—and nearly stopped then and there to toss it into the bushes. I dully registered that Absence was in five minutes, but it made no odds anymore. I didn’t care what happened at Eton or with India. As far as I was concerned they could all, all of them, go to hell in a hand-basket.

I was pedalling with psychotic fury, hurtling down the High Street, my feet relentlessly grinding, taking out my anger and my hurt on the bicycle.

Cuckolded by my first love? I seethed with impotent rage. I never wanted to see or hear from her again. I would excise every trace of her memory from my mind.

And as for my searching through her private papers? Compared to India’s scheming lies, that had been nothing but a minor transgression.

I did vaguely register that she’d said she’d got divorced that day, and also that she’d denied sleeping with Savage. But my jealousy had turned me into a white-hot supernova, exuding wave after pulsating wave of anger.

I streaked through the traffic lights, past the Burning Bush. The wheels keening faster and faster beneath me, fizzling with sympathetic rage.

THE SEBASTOPOL CANNON ahead of me. Instinctively, I stretch out my hand to slap its broad, black flank. Only one hand on the handlebars.

Up the little ramp to go through the archway into New Schools Yard.

From behind a pillar, I catch a blur of movement, a glimpse of Savage’s bestial face as he thrusts forward.

He stabs a cricket bat into my front spokes. In an instant everything stops and I am flying, flying through the air, pitched heel-over-head. In a whirl I see the arch, the Timbralls, the sky, the cannon, the Satanic glee etched into Savage’s face, and the tiles, the solid scuffed tiles of the New Schools archway, coming closer, ever closer, until with a flat thud I crash to the ground. Even as I’m losing consciousness I can hear the crack of brittle ribs being snapped in two and the sickening wrench of bones being wrung from their sockets.

THE SOUND OF my parents’ quiet voices filtered through to me as I gradually regained consciousness.

I could tell I was in a bed.

For a while I lay there, trying to piece together what had happened.

I opened my eyes.

It was the first time I had ever seen my stepmother cry. She saw my eyes flicker. Immediately, her voice was turned into a hoarse cough and she was by my side, holding my hand. Even my father choked up. Both of them were on either side of me, with the tears pouring down Edie’s cheeks.

After two weeks, I was back from the dead.

Two weeks? I couldn’t believe it.

They told me what had happened. A master had found me out cold in a pool of my own blood in the New Schools Yard. I’d have died if they hadn’t got me to Slough hospital in under fifteen minutes.

Blood transfusions and hour upon hour of surgery to my head, my shoulders, my ribs and my shattered knee.

They’d put me on drips and, as my muscles had atrophied by the minute, they wondered if I would ever come round, or if I would spend the rest of my days in a coma.

I never told them that it was Savage who’d nearly killed me.

I suppose in part it was because I thought I’d deserved it.

My subconscious had been working overtime, digesting everything that had happened with India and me. Some coma victims can’t recall what happened before they were knocked out. But I could remember it all, from those last distraught minutes with India through to that exact moment when I had seen Savage thrusting a cricket bat through the front spokes.

From the moment I woke up, I realised that I had behaved hatefully. I knew that India had been true to me, that she loved me and only me. And so it followed that everything else was nothing but the product of my own jealousy. Of course she was estranged from her husband—because she loved me. Of course she had not slept with Savage—because she loved me.

India loved me and only me and so long as I clasped that one fact to my bosom, then everything else would slot into place.

And I understood too why she’d kept her secret from me. I’d been exuding jealousy from every pore. If she’d told me everything, it would without doubt have been an unpleasant, fraught conversation; I would have behaved badly; our fledgling relationship would have been blighted.

When you can accurately predict your lover’s rage, is it any wonder that sometimes you shirk from telling them the whole truth?

India hadn’t lied to me. But she had held things back.

It had been for the best. I could see that.

And to anyone who’s wondering whether they should furnish their partner with all the tawdry details of their past, I offer but one piece of advice: seal your lips. Keep it close to your heart. For lovers are sensitive plants and they can be choked with too much information just as a flower can be stifled by too much fertilizer.

I’m sure that, in time, India would have told me all. But there at Eton, when we had only just embarked on our voyage together?

She was wiser by far to keep it to herself.

So, as I lay on that bed, with my head and shoulders swathed in bandages, I was contrite. India had said she was sorry—but it was not her that needed to ask for forgiveness. It was me who should have been begging on my knees.

And as for my jealousy, my wild, seething jealousy, it had disappeared like water seeping into the desert from a cracked bottle. So she’d had boyfriends before, had been married before, had made love before? I relished it all, welcomed all the previous men in her life, for they were the people who had made her what she was today. Who gave a jot for the past, when all that mattered was the moment and our love together?

My parents were so pleased to see me come out of the coma. I’d never seen them so happy.

Edie was laughing nervously as she spoke, all the while having to pinch herself that I was up and alive, and that she wasn’t sitting next to my corpse.

It was the first time that I can ever remember my father stroking my hand. Tentative, like a young man courting his first love.

As my parents watched over their little nestling, the doctors came and inspected me. I started to take in my surroundings. A small white room with a television. On the shelf and by the window were dozens of cards.

I asked for them to be brought over. Edie swept them all up.

“Shall I read them out?” she asked.

“It’s ok,” I replied, and she placed them by my side on the bed. My arms were so weak it was a strain to lift each one.

I was touched. Cards from all my teachers, including some from the beaks who hadn’t taught me in years, cards from my housemates and from my classmates too. All of them with that deft touch which says we hope you pull through—but please don’t hold it against us if you do.

Even a card from my parents. ‘Kim, get well soon. Lots of love, Mummy and D.’ Three kisses too. The tears stabbed at my eyes. I tried to blink them back.

The number of cards left to read were dwindling and my fingers started to twitch with impatience. I’d scan one, see who it was from, and instantly go onto the next.

For there was only one card I wanted to find.

As the last one fell from my fingertips I knew it was not there.

“What kind friends you have,” Edie said.

“Yes,” I replied. I could have dissembled, but I was boiling up to know about India’s card. “Have there been any other letters? Any phone calls?”

My parents looked at each other, shrugged.

“I think everything’s there,” my father said.

“Has anyone come to visit?”

Edie perked up at that. “One girl came here twice to see you.”

ANGELA VISITED THE next day, just after I’d finished eating soup and bread. She was wearing another mini-skirt, though a white one this time as it was the summer holidays, and a pink T-shirt. She kissed me on the cheek and sat by the side of the bed.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

“Thought you’d seen the last of me?”

“I did,” and as she spoke all trace of jocularity was gone and she was wiping the tears from her eyes. “I did.”

“Thank you for coming,” I said.

She smiled through her tears. “I didn’t think anyone else from school would come to see you.”

“You were right,” I replied. I could have small-talked, but I was too anxious. “Have you been here before?”

“A couple of times.”

My brain convulsed, for it seemed that fate was yet again having a joke at my expense. It was slowly dawning on me that India had not written, had not visited; that she might not even be aware of my accident.

“How sweet of you,” I said, but already I was scheming. “I wondered . . . I wondered if you might be able to pop in on my music teacher. Just tell her what’s happened. She had some music for me. She might not have heard . . .” I trailed off. It sounded lame.

I don’t think Angela scented anything out of the ordinary. She took India’s name and address, and promised to let her know.

She came back the next day, and, while the news was not a disaster, I did get that deadly prickle which so often presages a shipwreck. It’s not much, just the slightest tingle, but it’s the sinking feeling in your guts when you know you’re on the verge of catastrophe.

“There was no one there,” Angela said. “The downstairs neighbours said she moved out last week. The flat’s up for rent.”

I took the news without a tremor.

So India had gone. But I would track her down and beg her forgiveness.

It took me another two weeks to get out of hospital, and from my parents’ home I sent India letters to wherever they might reach her. I sent them care of Eton College, care of Bristol University, and even care of London’s various medical schools on the off-chance that she might have been continuing her degree.