And I had none of it.
PRELUDE 19,
A Major
IT WAS THE night-time jaunts that were my undoing.
I could get away with it for one night, maybe two nights, a week. But there were too many imponderables. Even if every nightly escapade had been planned to the last detail, there were always far too many things that were out of my control. My Economics master, forever banging on about supply and demand, would have deemed that there were too many ‘variables’.
There was one night when I was flying back from India’s at five in the morning, hurtling like a black wraith down Keate’s Lane. To any master with any perspicacity, I could have looked like nothing other than what I was: a schoolboy on the run.
A car was coming the other way and I was locked in its headlights. I flew past, not stopping at the traffic lights by College Chapel for already I had heard the dink of brakes and the revved three-point turn in the middle of the road.
A thrill of terror washed through my body as I realised I was being chased. It felt like I was cycling for my very life.
The car was just yards behind me as I raced past the Burning Bush. I skidded round the corner and pedalled at full tilt down Judy’s Passage, laughing with demented glee as the headlights gazed forlornly after me.
I took a wide loop round the school, over the parade ground, the fives courts, and onto Sixpenny before dumping the bike behind some trees.
Yes, I’d got away with it, just as it was my destiny to do, for my love affair with India was not going to be snipped short by an Eton beak on the prowl.
My luck was to hold for a little while yet.
But I would have a few scares on the way.
IT WAS FRIDAY, nearly midnight, and I had not seen India since I’d left her arms that morning.
I let myself in with my golden key and with light steps walked up to her flat. There was a single candle burning on the piano, but from India’s bedroom upstairs I could see a fiery haze of light.
I savoured the moment and the prospect that awaited me.
“Hello,” I called softly and walked up the oak staircase to my love.
She was lying on top of the bedclothes, wearing the scantiest of cream silk negligees and reading Walt Whitman. As she saw me, her face lit up, as if just the sight of me could make her day.
We kissed, we made love, roaming wild over each other’s bodies.
But it is not the love-making that I wish to detail, it is what happened afterwards, because this is where the rot set in.
It was, I suppose, our first row. Not the full-scale, screaming glut of swear words that I came to endure in later years with other partners. But it was our first bust-up. Unpleasant and unkind. And it would directly lead to the most panicky, gut-churning hour of my entire life.
We were naked, lying in each other’s arms, blissed out on love.
But I could tell she was distracted. She wasn’t really there; those walnut eyes had glazed and her thoughts were miles away.
“What’s up?” I said.
She sighed and kissed me. I loved that about her. Her automatic response to anything was always to kiss me. “I won’t be around on Tuesday afternoon,” she said. “I’ve got to go to London.”
“Oh yes?”
“Got some things I have to sort out.” She said it lightly, too lightly, the last two words catching in her throat.
I was cool, casual, relaxed—just as I always am when my heart starts to quicken and I sense danger. “Anything you want to talk about?”
“Ohh,” she sighed. “Just trying to sort out my future.”
I tickled her and rolled onto her. “And do I feature?”
She squealed. “Of course you feature. But I’m going to be out of a job in three weeks.”
I was staggered. “What?”
“They only ever got me in for the summer term,” she said. Careful. Studied.
“But . . .”
“I should have told you sooner,” she continued. “But I didn’t know how.”
In that moment, all the ivory towers of my future, the dreams that I had so painstakingly constructed, started to crumble. I had genuinely assumed that India would be teaching at Eton for the next year—marking time at the school so that we could be together every night.
“Oh.” My veins were icing up. Everything seemed to stop. All the emotion, all the love, seemed to have been frozen down to one single focus-point—that India would be leaving me at the end of the term.
She was talking again, faster. “That isn’t to say that I don’t love you any less, or that I don’t want to be with you. It’s just . . .” She trailed off. “. . . I can’t put my whole life on hold here at Eton.”
“Can’t put your life on hold for me?”
“Oh Kim,” she said and kissed me. “Teaching here at Eton was only a stop-gap while I got my life back together.”
Her life back together?
The words struck a jarring discord in my jealous heart.
“Really?” I spoke softly now. Trying to coax her on. Coax it out of her. “Has your life fallen apart?”
“Until you came along.” She gazed at the wall. “You are the light burning for me at the end of the tunnel.”
“Are you out of it yet?”
“Nearly. Very nearly,” she said. The pause hung over us like a black cloud, as she twisted the sheet in her fingers and weighed up whether to tell me, calculating whether I could take it.
And do you know what she concluded? She thought that I, a callow, jealous schoolboy, was still not nearly ready to know.
How right she was.
She swallowed, stifling back her secret, and, at that moment, I instinctively knew that she was withholding something from me. But would I go there? Would I quiz her?
I couldn’t. I remembered my vow never to ask India a single question about her past life.
“Before you came along I’d been thinking about VSO,” she said. “But now I’m toying with trying to be a doctor again.”
“In London?”
“If they’ll have me.” She rolled on top of me. “I don’t know why I haven’t asked you this before. What are your plans when you leave?”
“I had been thinking . . .” I paused, ran it through in my head. “I’d been thinking about the army.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. “The army?”
“It’s in the blood.” I knew it sounded weak.
“The army?” She was deadpan. “I’d never have guessed.”
“That’s what I’m thinking of, yeah.”
“Get to travel the world,” she said. “Sexy uniforms.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“An army officer?” she mused. “So, it could have been you out in the Falklands?”
“Suppose so.”
She never raised a single doubt, a single query, and that, in itself, set off a host of demons in my mind. Would I really be joining up for myself or for my father? Did India even care, or was I just a stop-gap lover?
The conversation was so light, so effortless—and so unnatural. Both of us were just playing at being the carefree lover, for although my words were easy, my brain was going into meltdown. My love was leaving me, was going to London. We would have one of those old-fashioned relationships where we wrote, talked on the phone and met at weekends, until that inevitable day when someone fresh came along to take her fancy.
“Let’s go on holiday this summer,” she said. “Why not Greece?”
“Great.”
It was the first time that I had ever physically shunned India. She wanted to make love, to get everything back onto an even keel, but I was dead down there. I still went through the motions, told her that I loved her, that I was tired. Already my open heart was turning into an icy citadel. Already I was fearing the worst for when she went to London.
We did eventually make love that night. It would have been impossible to resist her. Down she’d gone beneath the covers. All my jealous fea
rs and rages were expunged in that moment. It was my first—and probably my most joyous—introduction to the art of kissing and making up. What a wonderful thing it is, to be able to row and then to come together, seemingly stronger and more united than ever you were before.
We thrashed from side to side, heaving and clawing onto each other, desperate for love. We knocked pillows to the floor, knocked over the light, the table, and only then, only when we were done with each other and had proved our love, did we fall asleep in each other’s arms.
IT WAS THE sunlight that woke me. Just a little sunbeam worming through the white blinds and raking across my eyelids.
I sat bolt upright, stared at the bright sunshine rippling into the room, and felt a hollow queasiness in the pit of my stomach.
India was still asleep, her arms fast round my waist.
I looked on the floor at the upturned lamp, the now-broken alarm clock and India’s Walt Whitman poems. I stretched over to pick up my watch.
It was gone 7.30 a.m.
And I was in a chasm of trouble.
I was already late for the Saturday Economics division, which would almost certainly lead to another spell on Tardy Book. But, as I stared out of the window, I realised with incredible clarity that I was trapped in India’s flat and there was no way out.
I couldn’t get back to the Timbralls.
Eton would be up and awake and her boys and masters out strolling the streets, all of them in their shiny uniforms and with ears and eyes alert and twitching. And as for me, all I had were my trainers, my sweatshirt, hat and bike. I was stuck.
I tried to tick off the possibilities. Biking back to the Timbralls would have been suicide. Even if I’d made it back to the house, there was no way that I could have returned to my room. My tutor, the Dame, the senior boys—there were any number of people who could have spotted me out of uniform and drawn their own conclusions.
I thought about getting a taxi to the Timbralls, or borrowing a pair of India’s shorts and pretending I’d been out for a run.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I was stuck like a cat up a burning tree. Either I stayed put, ensuring I was roasted alive, or I jumped to a certain death.
India was waking up. She looked at me dreamily, such love in her eyes. “Mmm,” she said. “That feels good.”
She caught the worry in my face. “What’s happened?”
“I’ve overslept,” I said. “I can’t get back.”
She was up now, checked the time and looked out of the patio door.
“You need some tails,” she said.
“I do.”
“Why don’t I go down to Tom Brown as soon as they open and buy you some?”
I stared at her miserably. Because I didn’t just need tails, I needed a shirt, collar, tie, studs, black shoes, black socks. She’d need to go to about four different shops, and meanwhile time would be ticking by and I would be missing lesson after lesson.
Another nightmarish scenario occurred to me. I remembered the Timbralls’ fire-door, with its bolts secured by bits of gaffer tape. The tape was good enough to pass muster in the middle of the night. But in the full light of day?
I squeezed the bridge of my nose. I was in one hell of a hole.
It seemed that I only had one chance and I’d be lucky to get even that.
I did what preparations I could. I shaved, washed and brushed my teeth. After that, there was nothing for it but to wait—wait patiently and watch the minutes tick by.
India made me some tea and toast, but I was so nervous I couldn’t speak, let alone drink or eat. No, all I could do was watch the minutes glide by, and try to maintain a mask of stony indifference as the waves of cold terror lapped at my feet.
India was an angel. She didn’t talk, but stood behind me and massaged my tense shoulders.
Finally, eventually, the minute hand ticked round to 8.30 a.m. It was my only shot.
I called the house-phone at the Timbralls. The boys would be at breakfast and, with luck, so would my saviour.
The phone was picked up after five rings. It was one of the fags.
“The Timbralls,” he said, in his piping cut-glass voice.
“Good morning,” I said, putting on a patrician voice. “This is Jeremy Raikes’ uncle. May I speak to him?”
“I’ll see if I can find him.”
I waited an age. The boy must have scoured the house— upstairs to Jeremy’s room and back down to the dining room.
Two full minutes he was gone.
I then heard something that took me a moment to recognise. To my horror, I realised I was listening to the sound of a bellowed boy call, “BoooyUppp!”
Even over the phone, I could hear the drum of the fags’ feet as they tore up the stairs. Any thought of my phone call and Jeremy Raikes’ uncle would have been erased from the fag’s mind.
I waited and I waited.
Over the phone came the sounds of Timbralls life: shouts of boys mobbing in the hall, a whistle as a boy sauntered off to chapel, the thud of books being thrown onto the floor.
And still nobody picked up the phone.
I hung up and tried again. And all I got was the same open line. I started screaming down the phone, hoping that someone might hear me. But there was nothing at all, no one to hear my shouts, just the sound of the Timbralls emptying into the morning.
Oh, I was dying a score of deaths. Minute after minute ticked by and I was helpless. How I cursed the Librarian who had given that particular boy call. I was so mad that then and there I could have yanked the phone from its socket.
India had dressed and she made me more tea, which I watched go stone-cold as I sat in a twitching spasm of impatience by the phone, waiting for someone to pick up.
My hopes lifted. I heard the door of the kiosk. Someone picked up the phone, before slamming it on the hook.
Immediately I dialled back. Now the phone was engaged. Some Timbralls’ boy having a morning chat with his girlfriend no doubt. I redialled and redialled and redialled, over and over again for minutes on end. I could think of nothing else but plugging in the Timbralls number. It was my only hope.
I finally got back through, and this time the phone was ringing out again and not one of the swine was answering. I was grinding my teeth with rage.
“Hello?”
It was Archie. My heart sank.
I tried to mask my voice. “May I speak to Jeremy please?”
“Who’s speaking?”
“His uncle.”
A pause. A deathly pause. “Is that you Kim?”
“It’s his uncle.”
“Why do you want Jeremy?” he persisted. “Where are you anyway?”
The sweat trailed down my arm. “Just get me Jeremy please.”
“Not until you stop putting on that stupid voice.”
“All right.” I spoke normally. “Now will you get him?”
“Gotcha! I knew it was you!” he shrieked. “What are you doing out of the house? Where are you calling from?”
“Please, please Archie, could you get me Jeremy.”
“Only if you tell me where you are.” He had me skewered.
“Archie, please, I don’t have much time.”
“Tell Uncle Archie!”
“I’m stuck in bloody Windsor, now get me Jeremy. Please!”
“Windsor?” Archie cooed. “What are you doing there?”
“Please?” I could gladly have throttled him.
“Will you tell all later?”
“Yes!”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
Finally he went. Another boy who knew about my night-time excursions. Another boy who might reveal my fatal secret.
I had to endure more time hanging on the phone, listening to every clump and bump of Timbralls life. By now I’d gnawed every one of my nails to the quick.
“Hello?”
“Jeremy, it’s me! It’s Kim! I need your help.”
“Where are you?”
&n
bsp; “At India’s. I’ve overslept. I’ve got no clothes.”
“Fouquet moi!”
I could hear my teeth as I ground them. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the past forty-five minutes.”
“What do you need? Tails, shirt, shoes, everything?”
“And my English books.” I told him the address.
“Be quick as I can.” He laughed. “Get the tea on.”
“Why?”
“So we can all have a nice chat.”
He must have raced down the High Street because within twenty minutes he was knocking at India’s door with a carrier-bag full of my clothes.
I’d hoped he would drop off my uniform and leave. But he was not going to pass up the chance of checking out my love-nest, and I immediately heard him walking up the stairs after India.
His face was wreathed with a huge smile, as though he knew he’d just saved my life and as a consequence could take any liberties with me that he pleased.
“Here you go.” He passed me the carrier-bag.
“Thank you.” Of the three of us, I was by far the most nervous.
“Would you like some tea?” India asked Jeremy.
“Love some.”
I changed upstairs while listening to the pair of them talking in the lounge.
“Lovely day,” Jeremy said. “And if I may, a quite lovely flat.”
“Thank you,” she said. “It was kind of you. I know that you’re a very dear friend of Kim’s.”
“Anything for Kim.”
On and on he went and, when I walked downstairs, I found Jeremy sprawled in one of the armchairs, his legs outstretched and a mug of tea on the armrest. India was sitting at the piano stool, a wry look of amusement on her face.
“Very smart,” said Jeremy as he appraised me. “I think you should lie in more often.”
I stifled the insult on my lips. “Thank you.”
Jeremy checked his watch. “We’ve already missed Chapel. We must away if we are going to make our next div.” He stood up. “Thank you so much for the tea.”
He waved goodbye to India and left me to my fond farewell.
Prelude Page 19
