Prelude (3 page)

As I hang up my tails, she opens the window. Her slim figure is in silhouette against the green sward of fields behind, the sun shining through the fabric of her cotton dress. I can see the outline of her legs. It’s all far too much to take in.

We are seated again, though I don’t know how I found the piano stool. I begin to tell her about my musical career to date. I’m trying to be self-deprecating. I can feel her willing me on, but it’s all just a pile of beans; it’s nothing.

“Sounds great,” she says. I’m rewarded with another smile. “Is there anything you’d like to play?”

I leaf through my scraps of music and find a Mozart sonata that I know well. Only that morning I had played it from memory.

I sit at the bench and rest my fingers on the keys. Is she watching me? Are her eyes staring at the black fingermarks on my starched collar?

I begin to play but I can’t concentrate. I’m sitting alone in a room with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen—it is far too much for me to be able to play as well. I have lost all physical control of my fingers. They are so oily that they slip on the keyboard. My timing is shot to pieces. It’s horrible.

After a minute, I break down. My brain is simply powerless to move my fingers. I sit with shoulders slumped and hands dead in my lap.

There’s nothing to be done but have another go. It’s not as if I have anything to lose. “I’ll try it again.” I steel myself for another disaster. Before starting, I turn round to look at her.

But she is no longer in the armchair. Silent as a cat, she has moved to stand at the window, staring out over the fields. A perfect picture of beauty, framed by the lime-green paint of the music room walls. “Take your time,” she says.

A deep breath. I breathe in, breathe out, and then take my red polka-dot handkerchief to wipe my fingers. For a few seconds I’m able to focus on the piano and forget the goddess who is standing so close. I start to play. Badly and without emotion, like an ill-tuned machine, a score of missed notes along the way. At least I manage to complete this time.

I lift my fingers gently from the keys. My legs tremor with delayed shock against the piano-stool.

“Very nice,” she says. “You’ve got real potential.”

In seven years of piano-playing, nobody has ever said that to me before. I blush, the blood coursing into my cheeks and to the tips of my ears. “Thank you.”

“So where would you like to go this term?” she says, still standing by the window. “What would you like to do?”

I have not the faintest idea. What I wanted, more than anything else, was an ice-cold shower and time to think. Everything was happening so fast. I was hurtling pell-mell down a toboggan track.

I stare at my shoes and wish I’d bothered to clean them. “Well . . . ,” I reply. I look at her again, full in the face. I would do anything for this woman; I can deny her nothing. “I . . . I quite liked the piece you were playing earlier.”

“The Well-Tempered Clavier?”

I might have heard the name before though I can’t remember it.

“If that’s what it’s called.” I’m about to wipe my hands on my trousers, but again restrain myself.

“My favourite,” she says. “Let me play you some.”

And at this, she bends down by the side of the piano and picks up a leather music bag. It looks like a slim briefcase. There are no locks or hinges, just a flap that loops over the trim brown handles. She pulls out a half-inch thick volume,
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Books I and II complete.

She flicks through the pages. “Forty-eight preludes, forty-eight fugues,” she says. “They’re known as the forty-eight. Something for your every mood.”

“And that piece you were just playing?” I still found it difficult to look her in the face; I had the perpetual feeling that I was not worthy.

She claps her hands with delight. “I love that one,” she says, skimming the pages to Prelude 17 in A-flat Major, and then, I still cannot comprehend how, I am sitting in her armchair while she is seated at the piano. Playing
The Well-
Tempered Clavier
. For me.

I am spellbound, unable to move, barely able to catch a full breath. It is quite the loveliest music I have ever heard.

The prelude sounds like a babbling brook that ripples and spumes down the side of a mountain before slipping into a sheer, smooth lake. Mesmerising is the only word for it.

I am overwhelmed; not just by
The Well-Tempered Clavier,
but by the sight of India’s tanned back, the tresses of hair that curl around her shoulders, and her fingers dancing over the keys. She plays effortlessly. It seems like the easiest thing in the world.

All too soon, the prelude comes to an end. “I love that piece,” she says. Before I can reply, she is leafing through the music book. “Let me play you some more. Give you a proper taste of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
.”

The notes and trills cascade over my head, prelude after prelude, fugue after fugue. All for me. I can only sit back and marvel. This is so far beyond the realms of my previous experience that my brain seems to glow as it stretches to absorb every detail and every sensory trace that lands on my ears, my eyes and my nose. The wafts of lily-of-the-valley; the far-off whine of a lawn-mower; the soothing calm of lime-green walls; the sight of India absorbed in her music; and
The Well-Tempered Clavier
itself, which has now become so elevated it borders on the spiritual.

She turns on her seat, demure hands in her lap, and smiles with genuine contentment. I have to get a grip, blow my nose, do anything to get rid of the tear in the corner of my eye.

I clap very lightly. “I would so love to play like that.”

“Just practice,” she says. “Though I guess it helps if you love the music.”

By chance, she has a three-page copy of the First Prelude. “Something to get you started,” she says, passing it to me as I leave. “My father gave it to me when I was ten-years-old.”

She looks at the front cover.

“It still has all my old notes.”

What a day, what a day. I can remember saying a clumsy thank you before stumbling into the street and back out into the brilliant sunshine.

It was life-changing. In one hour, I had fallen in love thrice over: with a composer, a piece of music and a pianist who’d been touched by God.

PRELUDE 1,

C Major

FOR A GLIMPSE of Eton at its most formal, I will take you to lunch at the Timbralls.

At 1.10 p.m., the whole house had to be standing in silence by their chairs in the dining room. It was a handsome room with wide bow windows overlooking Frankie’s garden. When the hubbub had died down, Frankie would sweep through to the top table, his long gown flowing behind him. He would take his place by the window and say a simple grace,
“Benedictus benedicat.”

The fifty boys in the house were sat at five long tables, Frankie was with the seniors, while our Dame, Lucinda—the sole feminine influence in the house—sat with the juniors. I was always stuck with the rabble in the middle.

There were ten boys on my table, boys who through force of circumstance I had come to know better than my own brothers. We were all in the same year, had known each other from the age of thirteen, and had endured each other’s worst adolescent excesses. They were not necessarily my friends, but they were my most intimate acquaintances throughout my time at Eton.

I had other friends from other houses, but these nine Etonians were the boys with whom I had three meals a day, who helped me out with my extra work and who were my first port-of-call if I were looking for mischief or amusement. They were my allies and my messmates, the thorns in my side and the butts of my jokes. Some of them I liked, some of them I disliked, but there was rarely open war fare. For, like the Argentinian conscripts in the Falklands, we’d been signed-up for a five-year stretch, and we knew that life was generally more pleasant without too much fighting.

Our year was split down the middle between the Swats and the Scallywags. The Swats, keen to make the most of their Eton education, were fizzing with ambition. My more natural home, however, was with the Scallys.

Jeremy, it was no surprise, was also a Scally; then there was Gervase Street, plump and unloved, with sadly the worst acne of any boy at Eton; and Richard Glynn, a sprite, phenomenally gifted at languages and art.

And then there was Archie.

“See that headline in today’s
Sun
?” Archie asked. He was wiry, with a pug-dog face and a yapping brisk voice that tended to grate.
“‘Stick it up your Junta!’”

Richard poured some water for the five of us. “Hilarious.”

“Two fingers to the peaceniks.” Archie wafted his head to the side as an aproned maid placed a plate of stew in front of him. “Bloody Argies.”

“But if we had a peace deal, we might not have a war,” Richard replied.

“If we have a peace deal, the Argies will have pissed all over us.” Archie planted an elbow on the table and shovelled the stew onto his fork. “Wimpy!”

“Nothing like a bit of jingoism to get the country going.” Richard leaned to the side for the maid. “Thank you.”

“It’s not jingoism, it’s common sense,” Archie said. “Thatcher didn’t have any option.”

“Should certainly see her through the next election, if that’s what you mean,” Richard responded.

“What’s the Falklands got to do with a General Election? It’s a point of principle.” He crossed his eyes, let his mouth go slack. “Duhhhh!”

Richard tapped his fingers together. For a moment he was about to say something but thought better of it. Instead, with a little shake of his head, he tackled the stew.

“It’s principle, see?” Archie ploughed on.

Richard buttered some bread, absorbed by the sight of his sliced white.

“Don’t you have principles?” Archie said, straining forward over the table. The veins were popping out at the side of his neck. “Run up the white flag, why don’t you?”

Richard looked almost like an artist as he precisely spread the butter, working it all the way to the crust.

“Stop being such an oik, Archie,” Jeremy said, putting an end to the conversation.

“Me?” Archie replied. “What, me?”

Jeremy raised his eyebrows at me. For a second his eyelids fluttered, no doubt trying to stifle the urge to hurl his food in Archie’s face.

Archie spooned up more stew. “All I’m trying to do is have a civilised conversation about the biggest story of the year. Don’t you get it? Dontcha?”

“Thank you for explaining that,” Jeremy said. He took a pristine white handkerchief from his pocket and patted his lips before turning to me. “I have always thought it our great good fortune that, when we came to Eton, we ended up in the same house as Archie.”

“We are blessed,” I said.

“He is the daily grit in our lives that helps create the pearl.”

“Grit being the operative word.”

“Or maybe he is the mortar that helps bind our happy band together. He is our common link.”

“Cheers Archie.” Jeremy raised his glass. “We’d all be going crazy without you.”

Archie watched us, eyes twitching from left to right, not sure how he’d been sidelined.

Jeremy scrutinised me and for the first time noticed the dizzy, goof smile on my face. I’d been miles away.

“Something’s happened to you this morning,” Jeremy said quietly. “You look rather happy.”

I could only smirk, hugging my glorious memories close; for to have said anything about India at lunch would have been to have announced it over the public address system.

I raised my finger to my lips. “Later,” I whispered.

ALL ETON’S BOYS have separate rooms, and mine, on the top floor of the Timbralls, had one of the best views in the school, overlooking Sixpenny and in the distance another tranche of playing fields, Mesopotamia.

The room was a good size for a seventeen-year-old, with a shabby sofa, armchair, bookshelves and desk, or burry as it was known at Eton. On the walls were a few posters of my fantasy girls: two of Blondie with her pouting strawberry lips, one of Cheryl Tiegs, and another of Farrah Fawcett. I also had a poster of a large white Labrador. Before women came into my life, dogs had been my first love.

I kicked off my shoes, hung up my tailcoat and lay down on the bed to give myself a few moments of beautiful reverie. Over and over again, I was re-running what had occurred in the Music Schools. I was trying to digest the huge wealth of raw unedited material that had showered my senses. Different pictures of India kept flashing into my head.

I was distracted by the rumbling sound of a boy-call. It started off very low and went up at the end, “BoooyyyUppp”, like a farmer calling his cattle.

For a second my limbs stiffened. It was an involuntary twitch, a hangover from the days when I too had been a fag, running errand after errand for the senior boys, the members of the library.

The boy-calls were as good a way as any to knock any hint of preciousness out of the new boys’ heads. If ever a Librarian needed a job doing, he would stand at the top of the stairs and bellow “BoooyyyUppp”.

Out the fags would come, tumbling from their rooms in various states of undress, all elbows and knees as they tried to gouge their way to the front. They’d stampede up the stairs to line-up outside the library, and the last boy in the queue would be fagged off, or despatched halfway across the school to wherever the Librarian thought fit to send him.

Boy-calls, were an incessant part of Eton life, like the deafening jumbo jets that rumbled overhead. You learned to ignore the calls, but God they were barbaric.

Jeremy knocked at the door. He came in—as all boys do—without waiting for an answer and flopped down at my burry, his tailcoat scrunching underneath him. He was remarkably cavalier about the general state of his uniform and would think nothing of going out with stained trousers, rumpled tails and shirts begrimed with three-days worth of sweat. Though it wasn’t as if any of the fairer sex were ever going to be near us. Not in a million years.

Hands behind his head, back of the chair leaned against the wall, and with his feet propped on my burry, Jeremy looked like a London club-man at ease.

“Is it me,” he said, “or are the boy-calls getting louder?”

“I think Savage is using a loud-hailer.”

“All the better to hear him with.” Jeremy began unbuttoning his waistcoat and, when that was done, he started on his shirt. “Tell all then. What’s happened?”

The smile stretched across my face. It was only the best thing ever to have happened to me.

But, even at this early stage, I knew that the information had to be protected.

“This is a secret,” I said.

“Of course.”

“No, this is a genuine secret,” I said. “Promise you won’t tell a soul.”

“Of course,” he said—and I trusted him; and thank God I did. But more of that later.

“Well . . .” I delicately toyed with the bomb in my hands, wondering how to deploy it with maximum effect. “Do you remember the woman in white we saw outside School Hall last Friday?”

“Comely,” he said. “Delectable.”

“You’re right,” I continued, staring at the ceiling to dream of her face. “I met her today.”

“You have all the luck.” He took off his round wire-rim glasses, breathed on them and then polished with the hem of his shirt.

I laid out my cards one by one. “We shook hands; she introduced herself. It was very formal.”

“So what’s her name?”

“India James.”

He looked out of the window, but said nothing, giving me my head.

“She played the piano for me.” I templed my fingers before delivering the
coup de grace
. “She’s going to see me again next week.”

“She’s your new piano teacher?”

“Correct.”

He laughed, clapping his hands to his face.
“Fouquet in Le
Touquet!”

“Lucked out.” I coolly blew on my cupped fingernails before buffing them on my waistcoat.

Jeremy chuckled to himself as he absorbed the news. “Savage will be green as beans when he finds out.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. “An added bonus. Bet he wished he’d taken up the piano rather than his lousy guitar. He’ll be gutted.”

And so, with all the precision of a clairvoyant, I had unwittingly spelled out the precise turn of events over the next two months.

How different my life might have been if it had not been for Charles Savage-Leng. But maybe, even without Savage’s help, I had always been destined to be with India—and always destined to part.

Jeremy stretched to turn the desk-light on, and off, and on and off, and on and off, and will she and won’t she, until the light bulb started to flicker and spark. “Well, it will certainly get you practising, won’t it? We won’t be able to keep you off the piano.”

And he was right about that too.

THE TIMBRALLS HAD a piano in the dining room. It was nothing fancy but adequate to lead the way for the hymns at evening prayers.

During the previous four years, I’d practised about twice a week, putting in at best a half-hour session before the next day’s lesson.

But that Monday afternoon, my head still spinning with a jumble of snap-shots of India, I played for a full two hours. I’d never done anything like it in my life.

I started with a few scales and arpeggios, four octaves each, just to limber up. My fingers had by now stopped trembling.

Only then did I allow myself to look at the sheet music. India’s music, which she had held in her own hands, and which she had owned since childhood.