Prelude

by William Coles

  India is talking now, barely a whisper. “Sometimes you need a hug just to remind yourself what you’ve been missing.” Slowly she draws back from me. Our arms are still loosely round each other and for the first time I see her face. Her mascara has run a little and her lipstick is smudged, but her dewy eyes are more beautiful than I have ever seen them.

  India gives a little laugh. “God, I must look a state.”

  All I can do is gaze at this absurdly beautiful woman in my arms.

  We gaze at each other, not wanting to break the look, and then, very deliberately, she leans forward and kisses me. Soft lips pressed firm against my mouth.

  The most magnificent thing ever to have happened to me. “Thank you,” she says. With that, she stands up, takes her attaché case from the top of the piano and with a waft of lily-of-the-valley leaves the room.

  I. Cannot. Believe it.

  I draw a delicate finger across my lower lip; a trace of her scarlet lipstick lingers on my nail.

  I’ve been pole-axed. Another experience that is so outside my remit that it will take days to make it believable.

  But digest it I did, and that one kiss was enough to fire a fund of new fantasies.

  It was like the dry seed of my desire had been watered and was now starting to shoot.

  I had questions too. Why had she been crying alone over her music? Had she seen so much unhappiness in her life?

  The answer was simple enough. She cried during the Ninth Prelude for the self-same reason that I feel tearful now when I hear Prelude 17.

  Memories, that’s all it was. Just a few notes can be more than enough to bring everything flooding back, as painful and as harrowing as when your heart was first broken.

  PRELUDE 18,

  G-sharp Minor

  MY DREAMS WERE of India, of Estelle, of Angela, and of my coiffeured bête noir, Savage.

  I hated him as I do hell-pains.

  Sometimes I just wished that fate could teach him a lesson by breaking a limb. At others, I was not so specific. I wished that the school could somehow be shot of him: expulsion, severe illness, death.

  In every way, Savage had come to be the bane of my life. The sniping was constant: unsettling jibes to his cronies whenever I was within hearing distance; little chores that he was only just within his rights to demand of me; occasional visits to my room, which were like being with a wild-cat, constantly fearful of what might happen next.

  But I soaked it up like the human sponge I am, soaked it all up without complaint, just as Eton teaches its boys to do.

  Life with Savage was unpleasant, but not unbearable. Besides, I’d only have another seven weeks of him and then he’d be out of my life and off to University to menace the men and charm the women there.

  Only seven weeks. It didn’t seem so long.

  As it was, seven weeks was all Savage needed to wreak the most vile havoc. And his motive was nothing other than old-fashioned spite. I had a daily pleasure in my life that made him ugly.

  Savage’s behaviour was foul, but that’s nothing strange at Eton—or any other school. Seniors will always pick on their juniors, for no other reason than that they can.

  But as I was soon to realise, it was more than just petty skirmishing. It was full-out war.

  SOMETIMES, INSTEAD OF going to the Music Schools in the afternoon, I liked to go to the school library, just adjacent to the School Hall. It had a handsome dome, giving a great sense of airiness and space, as well as thousands and thousands of books, many of them real treasures; a library that would not be out of place at most British universities.

  It also had more than just books, it had hundreds of records. Tuck yourself away in one of the little booths, put on your headphones, and you could be a million miles from Eton.

  That particular day I was listening, of course, to The Well-Tempered Clavier. The more I heard of it, the more I came to love it. The Fugues, in particular, were an acquired taste. I liked to get a couple of Bach biographies, so that I could learn about the man as I listened to his music. I can still remember all his details: born 1685, died 1750; two marriages; 200 cantatas, 350 chorales, the Brandenburgs, the Partitas, the English Suites, and a whole lot more. But most extraordinary of all was that Bach had twenty children, of whom half died before adulthood. Some men might have been destroyed by these infant deaths, but they only seemed to make Bach stronger. Week in, week out, he kept relentlessly churning out his music, the notes pouring out in a never-ending spring.

  Along with the biographies, naturally I had my newspapers. Every day I had to have my Falklands fix.

  Argentina had struck its first major blow. HMS Sheffield, a Type 42 Destroyer, had been hit amidships by an Exocet. The missile’s 363-pound warhead had detonated eight feet above the waterline and the blast had ripped open the watertight doors from their bulkheads. Twenty-one men had died, most of them trapped in the galley or the computer room.

  I inspected the grainy black-and-white newspaper pictures. Thick grey smoke was pouring out of the jagged hole in the side of the ship. One moment the crew had been sitting down for a cup of tea at 10 a.m. in the Sheffield galley, the next they were blown into oblivion. It was revelatory—that a multi-million pound ship had been knocked out by a ‘cheap’ £300,000 missile. It gave me the first inklings of the fallibility of modern technology.

  Was this what I wanted to be doing for the next twenty years? Putting my life on the line at the dubious say-so of the army’s political masters? How would I fare, I wondered, if I were ordered to war? And what if I didn’t believe it was a just cause?

  It’s much easier for a soldier if he never asks questions. If he can just receive his orders and, without a thought, act upon them. But I questioned everything.

  I worried at my thumbnail, chewing at the skin, barely even aware of the music. I was listening to the Prelude 18 in G-sharp Minor. It came to an end. My finger automatically drifted to the record arm for the play-back.

  I leaned back on my chair, hands behind my head, and stared up through the skylights. My thoughts drifted effortlessly from the Falklands to India.

  I savoured the memory of how she’d yoked herself to me in that practice room. Her moist eyes, the smudged mascara and . . . that kiss.

  I closed my eyes, wrapped up in my music and the magic of the memory, trying to recall the exact texture of her lips.

  I blew her a kiss through the skylight.

  I was not even aware that Savage was in the room, that for the past five minutes he had been sizing me up, waiting for his moment.

  I didn’t hear him creep up behind me, or see him as he caught a foot round the front legs of my chair.

  He gave it the smallest flick and my chair arced over backwards.

  The headphones were wrenched from their socket in a shriek of noise. My stomach heaved and I smacked onto the floor. It was brutal: the one moment dreaming of my love, the next flat on my back, legs in the air and staring up at Savage’s sour face.

  He settled himself in a chair in the adjacent booth. “Very painful,” he said. “Shouldn’t have been leaning back, should you?”

  All I could do was stare at him like a fish on the slab. I was winded and my head throbbed. I could feel the saliva dripping out of the side of my mouth.

  Savage rubbed his hands. Even though it was a half-day, he was still dolled up in all of his popper gaudiness—green silk waistcoat set off by a white rose in the lapel of his tailcoat. “What have you been listening to?” He flicked off the record arm and picked up the disc. “What a surprise. The Well-Tempered Clavier? I would never have guessed.”

  I didn’t get up, but lay there on my back, mentally hurling every form of abuse that I could think of.

  “I wonder who you were blowing kisses to? Or should that be ‘To whom you were blowing kisses?’” Savage stared at me, his eyes boring through to the back of my skull. “It wouldn’t by any chance be your music teacher, India James?”

  I closed my eyes. It was easier to think wit
hout looking at Savage. I had forgotten my little lie.

  Savage had crossed his legs. He was idly kicking my foot.

  “The pulchritudinous India James, whom you claim never to have heard of.”

  “India James? Is that my music teacher?”

  “You are such a dickhead.” He kicked me again, harder. “So, now we know why you’ve taken to practising the piano at all hours.”

  I unhitched my legs from the chair, rolled over onto all-fours and pulled myself up. “What are you talking about?”

  “Must be very pleasant to have piano lessons with Miss James. Such a lovely woman.” He tapped the record with his fingers, and all of a sudden hurled it at me like a Frisbee.

  I ducked but too late. It shattered as it caught me under the ear.

  Pain ballooned through my head. I dabbed at the side of my face and looked at the smear of blood on my fingers.

  Savage was still talking. “Breaking school property? They’ll have you barred from the library.” He was on the balls of his feet now. He pulled out another disc from the record-rack, juggled it in his hand, and slung it at me with all his strength. It ripped past and smashed into the oak panelling at the end of the room.

  Savage had this blithe insouciance as he selected the next record. He surveyed the cover, slipped it from its sleeve, and drilled it at me. “Smash up three records and that might warrant a fortnight’s rustication.”

  A fourth record caught me on the hip and a mad, crazy flush of anger washed through me. It was the first time in my life that I had ever been out of control. I rushed at him, arms swinging, teeth bared, demented with rage.

  It was my first proper fight. At prep school, I’d wrestled and grappled, but nothing like this. The truth was that I loathed fighting. I would have far preferred to have jousted with words than go through the loutish business of inflicting pain. But I was incensed.

  He was quick, so light on his feet that he was dancing like a featherweight. I’d gone from 0 to 60 in under three seconds, and was throwing a flurry of blows to his face, to his body. He batted them away.

  But mixed with my rage was a certain animal cunning and I struck the low blow that he’d never dreamed of. I hit him in the crotch as hard as I could, driving my fist home, and, when he doubled up, my knee exploded into his face. It caught him on the forehead. He was stricken, a mewling ball of animal agony on the floor, his immaculate tailcoat rucked up around his back.

  I was panting, sweat dripping off my face, blood trickling from under my ear. I pulled out a handkerchief to dab at the wound on my neck, then circumspectly picked up my books. Without a backward glance, I marched out of the library.

  My heart was drumming with excitement and abject terror. I’d just bested one of Eton’s most senior boys.

  I thought I was going to get expelled—was certain of it. Savage’s word against my own? Who would they believe?

  I went back to my room, cleaned myself up, and spent the rest of the afternoon expecting at any moment the heavy thump of my tutor’s tread on the stairs.

  I tortured myself. I could not envisage any other outcome than having the full weight of Eton’s disciplinary system unleashed upon me.

  For two or three days, I was a twitching bundle of anxiety. At every turn I imagined that I’d be put on the Bill and called up to see the Headman. But ever so gradually it dawned on me that nothing had happened. That nothing was going to happen. That, for some unfathomable reason, I had got away with striking a popper.

  I do not know what Savage did afterwards in the library. I can only presume that he cleaned up the debris, for I never heard a word about the smashed records.

  And, in the short-term, my mad fight with Savage did make for a more pleasant life at Eton. I no longer had to put up with Savage’s little social calls to my room. The sniping was less overt. I was still aware that he was often denigrating me to the other boys. But he knew now that I was a wild one; that I might just be capable of hurling myself at him again in a wild flurry of fists.

  In all my innocence, I actually imagined that Savage had found other fish to fry: that there were easier boys in the school to pick on.

  How unlikely is that?

  Now, of course, I can see that, like every other bully before him, Savage was saving up his revenge for a time when he could inflict maximum damage. Merely biding his time before delivering the knock-out blow.

  SOON ENOUGH I was back in my well-regulated schedule of divisions and rushed homework and, hour-upon-hour, in the Music Schools.

  How I adored her. If I had one single picture of her, I would include it in this book—but, as it is, I never thought to take a photo of India. When it finally happened, when we started courting, I thought we would last forever. I believed there would always be plenty of time for pictures. I could not have conceived there might be a time in my life when I would be without her.

  But then again I could never have conceived that our relationship would be snuffed out with such shocking abruptness.

  It is a Saturday afternoon, dreamily hot, and my shrine is one of the Music School’s grand pianos.

  I must be the only person who’s mad enough to feel the need to be in the schools to practise two bars of music. Two bars of music, twenty one notes with the right hand and a similar number for the left.

  I had found that the way to learn a difficult piece was to repeat the same bar over and over again until my fingers knew where to go, finding their place on the piano like well-trained pups. Sometimes, I would play a bar a hundred times over to master a tough piece of finger-work.

  This particular afternoon, I have set myself the task of learning just two bars from the G-sharp Minor Prelude, the same one that Savage had destroyed in the library. The G-minor key has five sharps, but on the plus side the prelude is slow.

  The right hand already knows what it’s doing and even the left hand is competent. But when I put the two together the difficulty factor grows exponentially. It’s like a complex version of that challenge of patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. My brain issues different orders for both left and right hand and somewhere along the way the commands get mangled in my nerve endings. Time and again my fingers can do nothing more than stutter over the notes, trembling with indecision.

  It is a seemingly endless round of repeating the right hand notes, the left hand notes, and then trying—and failing—to put them together.

  Any other time, it might have been dispiriting. But I am at prayer and, when you are truly at worship, you are not even aware of the minutes and hours as they tick by.

  My eyes are screwed up, a deep furrow on my brow as I try to make the fingering work better. Always with Bach it’s down to the fingering. If you don’t get that right from the start, you don’t stand a chance.

  I’m concentrating so hard that I don’t even notice the knock at the door. I look up and India is already in the practice room, is walking towards me with that knowing smile, and in her hands are two steaming mugs of coffee. I was in awe—as if the Virgin Mary had suddenly appeared in person from behind the altar.

  “Thought you could do with a break.” India skirts round the side of the grand piano and hands me a mug. “Are you white without?”

  “Thank you.” That is all I can say.

  “Cheers.” She slides light as gossamer into the armchair next to the piano.

  Her eyes lock onto mine and all I can do is drink. It is a taste explosion. In four years at Eton I had never drunk anything but powdered coffee straight from the jar. This was the real thing.

  “What have I been missing?” I say.

  It seems as if her face is forever on the verge of breaking into laughter. “Freshly ground coffee,” she says. “I made up a thermos.”

  I took another sip. “Fantastic.”

  “Do you know the best part?” She cups the mug between her manicured fingers. “It’s making the coffee in the morning. Pouring in the beans, grinding them up. The smell’s better than the taste. T
ry it some time.”

  “I will.”

  After the first rush, I am starting to come down. I take in India’s clothes. A long, white cotton dress, brown leather sandals, and hair that gleams in the afternoon light. Simple, devastating beauty, and all I can do is gawk and nurse my coffee.

  “Have you tried it black?”

  I wrinkle my nose in distaste.

  India leans over and stretches out her mug. For the most fleeting of moments I have a glimpse of her cleavage. Down my eyes dart and the image of pert breasts, tanned and cupped snug in a white lace bra, is freeze-framed in my memory.

  “Thank you.” I accept her mug. As I bring it to my mouth, I can see the slight trace of her lipstick on the rim. I place my own lips on the same spot and sip. The taste of the black coffee is a kick to the roof of my mouth—tart and acrid, like a shot of raw spirit.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever have it any other way again.”

  “Don’t go overboard like you did with The Well-Tempered Clavier.”

  All I can do is smile, for I am so smitten with this woman that my brain has stalled.

  I return her coffee cup. The electric thrill of her fingers. But something more than that—the dull throb of a warning bell. I look over to the door.

  “Somebody there?” she asks.

  “Don’t know.”

  But I do know. For an instant I have seen Savage standing at the window, glowering in impotent rage as he watched us drink coffee together.

  How he would come to hate me for it.

  “It wasn’t that tall popper?”

  “Don’t think so.” I try to sound smooth, easy.

  “Sometimes it feels like he’s stalking me.”

  India leans back, looking at me over the rim of her mug. There is nothing but silence, each of us alone with our thoughts, I wondering what’s on her mind, and she reading me like an open book.

  “I wanted to thank you,” she says. “You were very kind the other day.” She nods to herself, musing. “Brave, too.”

  “The least I could do.” I’m on autopilot, incapable of proper thought. On the surface, I appear to be having a normal conversation with the world’s most beautiful woman.