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.”
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 int
o 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.
Prelude Page 2
