Prelude (5 page)

Like almost every other straight seventeen-year-old boy in the country, I was obsessed with the idea of women in general and girls in particular. I could effortlessly transfer my allegiance from one to the other and back again without a moment’s hesitation. My brain was like a fat bumblebee, buzzing from one flower to the next in a perpetual quest for more honey.

Besides, India—stunning, elegant India—could never be anything other than an idle fantasy. Estelle, for her part, almost qualified as a girlfriend. We had kissed. She appeared to be eager for more.

That was the realistic view but there were also certain practicalities to be taken into account, the main one being that Estelle was stuck miles away at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Although her letters might offer me some crumbs of comfort, she was out-of-sight, and therefore usually out-of-mind. Conversely, it was India who was on my doorstep; it was India who, day in, day out, would be stalking through my dreams, plucking at my heart-strings, and firing my soul.

THAT MORNING I had a Divinity class, and, like the earlier Economics lesson, it resonated. It made sense. Or more accurately, I made it make sense for the peculiar world that I lived in.

Not that I appreciated it then, but the schoolroom where I was taught Divinity has a quite staggering history. It sounds unbelievable to think of it now, but it really is the world’s oldest schoolroom. It is called Lower School and it is in the very heart of the college, just adjoining the schoolyard. Thick wooden beams, long black desks and benches, and two rows of oak pillars, all of it more than five centuries old. Outside, through the small diamond windows, you can just make out the statue of Eton’s founder, Henry VI, and, behind him, the enormous buttresses of the upper chapel where the game of Fives was invented.

Lower School came in the colours of black, brown and grey, and the desks were thick with carved graffiti and the names of generation after generation of other bored Etonians. I remember the dust, how it spangled in the stagnant air.

Nowadays, the sheer weight of the room’s history seems magnificent. I would love to be back there, back in that dusty, dark room with the ghosts of Wellington, Shelley, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.

But back then—as with so much of Eton’s incrediblehistory— the fact that I was being taught Divinity in the world’s oldest classroom barely even registered. At the time, I was far too pre-occupied with India and Estelle.

There were about five boys in the class and our teacher that day was one of Eton’s resident priests, Giles Swann. Our subject: St Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Now, as it happens, the entire Reformation and the breakaway from the Catholic Church stemmed from St. Paul’s epistles. In particular, there was one sixteen-word text in
Romans
that turned more than a thousand years of Christian theology on its head.

The words themselves seem bland in the extreme. But when Martin Luther first re-interpreted them, they sparked off an explosion that was felt—and continues to be felt— throughout the Christian world.

This is what St. Paul wrote: ‘That through faith alone you shall be justified in the eyes of our Lord Jesus Christ’. Nowadays it is known as ‘justification by faith’ and for millions of Christians it meant they could abandon the Catholics’ predilection for sin and confession. Luther had discovered a much simpler route to Heaven—that since we are all unworthy, faith alone was enough to merit God’s love.

The moment of Martin Luther’s revelation is known as his ‘Tower Experience’. He suffered from chronic constipation and while he was on the lavatory would pore through his Bible. It was here, in the tower, where he had his revelation with
Romans
5. (Catholics, naturally, say that Luther mistook the moment of physical release for a numinous experience.)

My Tower Experience came in Lower School. My Epiphany was equally blinding.

When I made the connection, it was like a thousand flashbulbs exploding in my head at the same time—Justification through practice.

I, too, was unworthy. But, through practice alone, I could earn India’s favour.

Through practice, I could win her esteem.

It sounds crazy. But in that moment it chimed.

The way forward had been revealed to me, and it was to be down the serene path of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
.

Then and there I made a commitment.

I was going to practise till my knuckles ached and my fingertips were red-raw.

And, for a short while, I did.

ONE OF THE great joys of Eton in the summer is the huge expanse of afternoons the boys have to themselves. For four days a week, they have a clear five hours to swim, to play games, to do whatever whim took them. The hijinks only ended when they had to be back in their houses at 7 p.m. in time for roll-call, or Absence.

The junior boys had a number of formal sports sessions laid on, cricket for the dry bobs and rowing for the wet bobs. But I had never taken to team sports. I preferred tennis, or a quick round on Eton’s nine-hole golf course. Or, ideally, I preferred frittering my afternoons away in a haze of wanton idleness.

That afternoon I chose to spend in the Music Schools. Partly, I suppose, because there was an ever-so-slight chance that I might catch a glimpse of India. But there also happened to be a couple of practice rooms that had Steinway grand pianos, the genuine article, tuned to perfection. Arrive soon after lunch and even a rank amateur like myself could get to play on a Steinway.

SINCE THERE ARE no more lessons, I’ve changed into jeans and T-shirt. It’s spitting with rain. In my hands, clutched tight to my chest, is my file of music and my Holy Grail, the First Prelude. I treat the building with all the reverence of a temple, for it is here that I have come to worship my Goddess. There is not a soul about, not a sound to be heard, and I have my pick of the practice rooms.

It’s been a long time since I’ve played a grand piano. The room is double the size of the other practice rooms, but still comes in the Music School’s ubiquitous lime-green. Despite the rain, I open all the windows.

I lift the polished black lid and caress the keys, which once were white but are now yellowing with age. It’s a beauty. When I start my scales, the sound fills the room with an explosion of music, so loud that you’d hear it across the street.

From memory, I play that same wretched Mozart sonata that I messed up the previous day. It’s note perfect—of course it is, because there is nobody listening to me. I try the sonata again, faster, and my fingers rattle out the trills and the tearing scales.

I’m warmed up, fingers loose and arms relaxed. I place the First Prelude on the stand. My fingers flex and hover over the keys, middle-finger of my left hand ready to strike the first note, middle C. I start slowly, sticking religiously to India’s fingering. The ending goes awry, so I try it five more times before I have it perfected. Then I’m away, playing the First Prelude for the first time in its entirety. I dab at the damper pedal; it sounds better if you let the notes run into each other.

It is more beautiful, by far, than anything I could have hoped for.

And then from nowhere, a sudden distinct prickling at the back of my neck. I am not alone.

A light knock at the door, the handle turns, and my heart lurches into my throat. It’s her, India, looking lovelier than ever. The reaction is every bit as severe as it was yesterday when first I met her. I’m paralysed.

India is not just smiling, she is openly laughing. As she walks into the room, she is clapping. All I can do is stare like a drooling village idiot—but how else could I react when I am being lauded like this?

She stands at the end of the piano, fingertips light on the lid, and looks at me with this dancing smile on her lips. Her hair is glistening from the rain. I’m melting inside, my heart and brains turning to mush.

“You play much better without me,” she says, and again starts laughing.

It’s yesterday all over again. India has rendered me into an inarticulate, grunting oaf. “Well . . . thanks.”

“You must have been practising for hours.”

There are so many things I could say, but all I can do is stare at my knees. “Er . . . yeah.”

She walks round the piano and looks at the music on the stand. She’s standing not three feet from me. I can smell her lily-of-the-valley. Lift my arm and I could touch her.

She looks at the First Prelude. “Strange to see this in front of you,” she says. “No one’s ever played this sheet music but me.”

“I love it,” I say. A bit crass, a little clunky.

Out of the side of my eye, I can see she’s wearing brown trousers, a cream shirt and a lightweight creamy mac, speckled with rain and cinched at the waist.

She’s gliding back to the door now. “Better get that order in for the complete
Well-Tempered Clavier
,” she says, hand on the door-handle. “Wouldn’t want you twiddling your thumbs next Monday.”

Now that she’s almost gone, I can feel myself relaxing. It’s as if she needs a four-yard exclusion zone around her—any closer and I start to burn up inside. “Thank you,” I say, and a question occurs to me. “How did you know I was here?”

She laughs again. How I came to love that laugh. It lit up her eyes and made her hair dance.

“I could hear you out on the street,” she says. “It was lovely.”

And with a wave she is gone and I sit there in stupefied silence, my mind reeling from the onslaught of the previous five minutes. I chew my thumbnail, still not comprehending what exactly has happened. My Goddess not only heard me on the street, but found me out, praised me, laughed with me.

And there had been one other thing that she’d done when she was in the room.

Just a small thing, hardly anything at all, but even at the age of seventeen I was aware that her action was maybe, just maybe, charged with a bat squeak of sexual chemistry.

As she’d stood at the piano, she had frouffed up her hair, sweeping it from one side to the other. It wasn’t a come-on. It definitely wasn’t flirting. But it would have been described by an anthropologist as a ‘preening gesture’. These are not necessarily sexual, but, like my favourite key in C Major, they are a green light for ‘Go’. It is usually a woman saying without a word that she would not mind seeing more of you.

PRELUDE 2,

C Minor

WHEN I WROTE that there were 1,238 boys in the school and not a girl in sight, I was not being strictly accurate.

There were two girls at Eton: both masters’ daughters, both in my year and both, by yet another outstanding piece of good fortune, in my English class.

Angela was my personal favourite, with her short tartan dresses and boyish Eton crop. She had a long fringe of brown hair that she used as camouflage so she could surreptitiously inspect the twenty or so boys in the room. I knew this because the class was sat in a horse-shoe shape around Anthony McArdle’s desk and for two terms I had been sitting directly opposite her. We rarely spoke, as there were many other boys in the class who were more overtly desperate for her attention. But occasionally we would catch each other’s eye, at which I would always be the first to avert my besotted gaze.

As for Marie, she was a blonde, an enthusiastic darling with wavy hair. She, too, had realised there was much to be gained from wearing mini-skirts and sheer stockings. Although Marie and I talked much more than ever I spoke with Angela, she always sat two seats to the side of me, which meant I never had the opportunity to survey her body in the same minute way that I could with Angela.

Before Estelle, and long before India, Angela had been my real-life fantasy girl of choice.

As the beak droned on about Gerard Manley Hopkins (‘No worse there is none, pitched past pitch of grief . . .’), Shelley (‘Hail to thee blithe spirit, bird thou never wert . . .’), and Byron, (‘The Assyrians came down like a wolf on the fold, their helmets all gleaming . . .’), I would while away my time by caressing Angela’s hand and peppering her cheeks with kisses—at least in my imagination. If Marie had sat opposite me, I’m sure I would have been doing the same for her too. But, as it was, it was Angela who was in my line of sight and it was Angela to whom, a thousand times over, I had mentally plighted my troth.

McArdle’s English classes were actually much more lighthearted and convivial than most. There was a bit of banter and a lot of clowning, largely for the benefit of Angela and Marie. But banter had never really been my forte at Eton.

Now I can clown and joke with the best of them, repartee my speciality. At Eton, however, it is difficult to shine. Boys quickly become content with their own mediocrity and then, after they’ve left, come to the delightful realisation that life is so much easier when they’re not having to compete against more than a thousand cocksure charmers.

As I’ve already mentioned, that summer we were studying Shakespeare’s
Othello
. We’d read the play over the weekend, and now McArdle was taking a backseat to let the boys do the talking.

Just to recap, the story is of Othello the Moor, a senior commander in Venice who has just married the beautiful Desdemona. But Othello has a lieutenant, Iago, who at every moment is breathing bile and spite into his ear. Somehow, Iago persuades Othello that he’s been cuckolded. Othello is consumed by jealousy, ‘the green-eyed monster that mocks the meat it feeds upon’, and, finally convinced of Desdemona’s infidelity, he smothers her with a pillow.

But when we talked of the play that morning, the feeling was that the plot was unbelievable. How could this brilliant man, this leader, be duped into believing that Desdemona had had an affair?

To and fro the argument went, the scholars, or tugs, holding forth with their brilliance. Their words rolled over my head as I gazed in a trance at Angela. I could stare at her for minutes on end, feasting on her girlish loveliness.

She must have known how long I’d been gazing at her, for suddenly she tilted her head up and gave me the most perfect wink. I can still picture it exactly. Mascaraed eyelash flashing down and up. Blink and you would have missed it.

My father had once winked at me across the table during a dinner in the Officers’ Mess. But it was the first time I’d ever had one from a girl, not to mention a girl I had spent so long fantasising over. Such a small thing, but it was like she had fired a broadside right at me. I could only stare at my desk as the beetroot blush suffused my cheeks.

Not that Angela and I had exchanged more than twenty words in the previous six months, but that wink had suddenly rocketed my fantasies into a whole new orbit.

I longed for her to do it again.

I was too nervous to look.

While these Tectonic Plates were shifting against each other, McArdle had started to speak. He’d given us our head for fifteen minutes and was now having his say.

After the shock of the wink, it took time for his words to register. “Jealousy is a strange beast—it makes you do strange things. I don’t know if any of you have ever suffered from it.” He was walking around now, and he shrugged. “Maybe you have. Just like the Bard says, it eats you up. Even the most rational, sane people can’t think straight.”

McArdle stopped pacing and perched himself at the front of his desk. He played with the tip of his Don Juan beard, musing for a moment. “I suppose it’s another of those raw emotions like love. You only truly understand jealousy once you’ve experienced it.” He gave a little sigh and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “I know you’re sceptical. But it can consume everything in its path.”

He twitched, aware of the morbid tone, and flashed his palms up to us. “Guess you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

I was gazing at Angela again and at this moment she imperceptibly raised her eyebrows and tipped her head to me. I looked to the side and back again. But her meaning, for whatever reason, seemed quite clear to me: ‘That’s you.’

At the time, McArdle’s words meant nothing. But how they would come back to haunt me.

For it was just as he said.

Jealousy is as powerful a motivator as love, possibly more so. It can make you do things, awful things, for which you will forever despise yourself.

And, for a short period, it can even make you believe that the sweetest orchid is nothing but a noxious weed that must be trampled underfoot.

FOR THE REST of the week, I practised the piano as if my life depended on it. I was putting in a minimum of three hours a day, either at the Music Schools or on the piano in the house dining room, and I was just ripping through scales, chromatic scales and the rest. For the first time ever, I could play a B-flat Minor arpeggio without a wrong note. As for some of the easier scales, like D Major and G Major, I could play them with my eyes closed. I was in uncharted territory.

Non-musicians might imagine that scales are nothing but a chore, that it’s the music which is the fun. Well, up until a week before, that had also been my opinion. But times had changed and I had taken to scales with a religious zeal. They are the bedrock of any good piano technique. But more than that, I believed scales were the path to India.

I’d hoped to see her again while I was practising in the Music Schools.

But instead of India, it was my
bête noir
that walked through the door.

It was Friday afternoon and I was yet again playing the First Prelude in one of the rooms. I now knew the piece so well that I could play most of it from memory. But, even on its fiftieth time of playing, the prelude made me glow, as if by playing it I was somehow in touch with India.

Suddenly there was a smart rap at the door, not a gentle knock, and in barged not my love but Savage, guitar-case under his arm. He oozed behind me and slumped into the armchair. Without a word, he stretched out his legs and placed his feet on the bottom rung of my chair.

It was unnerving. I felt like a rabbit locked into the Svengali-stare of a cobra.

At seventeen, a year’s age difference is an ocean. But more than that, Savage was in the rowing VIII and my house captain.

And one thing more, he was a popper.

Pop, or the Eton Society as it is formally known, is the powerhouse of the school’s discipline. To describe a popper as a mere prefect would be like describing the college’s extraordinary tailcoats as just another school uniform.

The poppers were viewed as Gods. The society was self-electing and its members were invariably the most popular boys in the school: the sports stars, the intelligentsia, the ladies’ men and the all-round good-guys.

The poppers had many perks: their own set of rooms; the right to grow a beard; the ability, just by their mere presence, to create starry-eyed awe in a junior boy.

And, most important of all, they had the world’s most beautiful prefect uniform. Bar none.

Since leaving Eton, I have often thought that the only time a man can truly shine in his clothes is at a smart wedding, when he can deck himself out in tails, fancy waistcoat, button-hole and all. Well, that is what the poppers wore every day of the week, and carried it off with great style and panache.

So that day in the music room, while I was tricked out in Eton’s standard black-white ensemble, this is what Savage was wearing: spit-polished black winklepickers with toes so sharp that they ended in a stiletto point, black silk socks, sponge-bag trousers with black-and-white hound’s tooth check, a magnificent purple waistcoat with black trim, immaculately laundered white shirt with a starched wing-collar, or stick-ups, and a perfectly symmetrical white bowtie. The edges of his tailcoat were piped with black braid, while in his buttonhole was a gorgeous gardenia.

He was the gilded butterfly to my black-and-white moth.

He still hadn’t said a word. He just sat there with his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat pockets and stared at the ceiling. His middle-fingers tapped against his hips.

“Why don’t you play for me Kim?”

It was the first time he’d ever used my first name.

“What would you like me to play?”

He stared at me glassily, as if he’d suddenly been made aware of my presence. “Why don’t we try that little piece that you have been practising so assiduously this past week?”

I started to play, but Savage’s presence turned the prelude into a dirge.

“That’s enough, thank you,” Savage said, his voice silky. “Tell me Kim, do you know of a woman called India James?”

“India who?” I didn’t turn a hair.

“India James. She is a new piano teacher here.”

“I thought you played the guitar.”

He ignored me. “All this week, Kim, I have been wondering why, at all hours, I find you practising here.”

I shrugged. “I like the piano.”

Savage stood up, and as he walked past he cuffed me round the ear with his guitar case.

“Jesus!”

“Sorry about that.” He lingered in the doorway. “So, who is your piano teacher?”

I rubbed the back of my head, working my fingers into the scalp. “Charlie Massey.”

The door slammed shut. I was left to dwell on my lack of perception. For while I had spent the past week paying homage to India at the piano keyboard, it had not occurred to me that she would also be featuring in the fantasies of hundreds of other Etonians. Idiot. There wouldn’t be a boy in the school that didn’t already know of her; know of her, and, like Savage, wish that they knew her better.

I’VE ALWAYS LOVED dogs. They only ever live for the moment, don’t give a damn about what happened an hour ago, let alone yesterday.

This is the direct opposite of me. I am perpetually wondering about the past, fingering over the details, wondering about how my life might have changed for the better—or the worse—if just one small thing had been different.

What if, for the sake of example, instead of liking dogs I’d had a distinct aversion to them? For then I might not have become a dog-walker, and might not have injured my hand, and might not have shared a piano-stool, and might not have stolen a kiss . . .

I would so love to have a glimpse of all those parallel universes, just to find out whether the minute occurrences really do make a difference; or whether, right from the moment we are born, our destinies are already fixed like the constellations in the night-sky.

Hopeless. Spend years fretting over it, and you’ll still be none the wiser.

But as it happened, I did like dogs . . .

The Dame, Lucinda, had broken her leg in the spring. Her little Renault had been hit by a drunk driver and she’d been in hospital for weeks.