Prelude

by William Coles

  After Bristol, I travelled the world for a couple of years, and then became a journalist. I well remembered my father’s outraged reaction to The Sun newspaper on that Fourth of June. So I set out to become a ‘Red Top’ reporter. But not even that could annoy him. It hardly registered a flicker. For my relationship with both my parents had bumped, had jinked off the rails, and was now set on a new course.

  They’d thought I was going to die after my accident. And when I lived, it was as if every day was a bonus. My father learned to kiss me on the cheek when he greeted me; my stepmother learned to unbend.

  And for me, it was as if a ton of expectation had been lifted from my shoulders. I was left to roam wherever I pleased.

  I found new girlfriends and new love, and discovered to my utter amazement that it was more than possible to relive love’s first careless rapture.

  Girlfriends, many, many wonderful girlfriends, and every one of them has taught me so much about myself and about life. One day, I may yet get round to telling some of their stories.

  But, no matter how much I loved them, the one thing I never wanted to know about was their pasts. I was like a schoolboy who’d been caught smoking, and who was then made to puff his way through an entire box of cigars—for my experience with India’s chest of secrets was the most profound aversion therapy.

  Of course, I still had a part of me which was that infamous, jealous, screaming horror that longed to know everything about my girlfriends’ past loves. But that was now so tightly-shackled, locked away in the dungeons of my mind, that it couldn’t move a muscle without receiving a savage kick to the ribs.

  I know that it is not how the psychiatrists would recommend that you deal with your baser emotions. They would tell you to talk it out, to work it through until you are spent, to understand reasons and motives. Only then, they’d say, can you properly move on.

  That is one way, but it is not my way. Not for me weeks of intensive therapy. No—like many better men before me, the matter of my own jealousy is so unpleasant that I prefer to duck the issue altogether.

  I used specifically to instruct girlfriends that I did not wish to know anything—not one jot—about their pasts. As for their old love-letters and their photos, you could have waved them all in front of my face and I would have ignored them. My aversion therapy had been so severe that even if I had found an open diary on the kitchen table, I would have left the house rather than read a word.

  Every time I felt even the smallest stab of jealousy, it reminded me of my own ugliness and my terrible loss.

  India.

  I still think it the most beautiful name in the English language.

  After I’d received that short note from her, I tried once more to get in touch. I even sent a letter care of the letting agents who had rented her flat in Eton.

  I went through the motions, chased up every last avenue that I could think of. Though I knew in my heart that we were done, that our little ship on which we had briefly placed such high hopes had sunk without trace.

  I never heard anything more of her.

  But.

  There is one thing more left to tell.

  GRADUALLY MY MEMORIES of India dulled—as did my piano-playing skills. Eton found me a new teacher for my final year, but I’ve not had a lesson since I left the school.

  For over two years, I couldn’t play or even listen to The Well-Tempered Clavier. Just a couple of bars would be enough to set me off.

  But new girlfriends came into my life and I started to remember the rapture of the music. Listening was always a bittersweet experience, always awash with memories of India. I tried to play some of the simplest preludes. But after a three-year lay-off from the keyboard, I was back floundering in the shallows and the miseries of Grade 1.

  Eventually, The Well-Tempered Clavier became a memory, a rather awkward memory. I still liked the music but, whenever I heard it, I could not but be reminded of my own repellent nature. It’s funny, but the things that haunt me now are never the slights and snubs of other people; rather, the memories that make me shudder are the hideous things that I have done to my friends and to my loved ones.

  I married once and we had a son. It ended horribly; again, one day I may tell the tale.

  I married again. My second wife is a good woman, a special woman. She cares for me and puts up with my little foibles and the fact that my emotions are kept wrapped in their own icy citadel. We get on well. It is amicable, comfortable. We understand each other.

  Of course there is none of the soaring passion that there was with India. But I do not think any couple on earth could sustain that level of passion for more than a few months.

  We have three daughters, three adorable daughters. They’re the cement that keeps us together. Splitting up is not even an option. There are not, perhaps, as many highs as I might like, but there are also none of those depressing lows when the rows and arguments seem to roll on from one day to the next.

  It is a strong, workable marriage. We tell each other that we love each other.

  And India—India, like The Well-Tempered Clavier, has become nothing more than a blissful, if occasionally painful, memory. Although, like the music, if I dwell on her for too long, she still has the ability to make me cry.

  A MONTH BACK, we were in Edinburgh for the festival, three weeks of cultural mayhem with something to tempt even the most jaded palates. I still like the Fringe, the crazy comics and the mime artists, but as I get older I take fewer risks. I prefer to go for the safe and the steady rather than risk an hour’s boredom with something new.

  So, instead of bearding the stand-ups or venturing to see the latest gritty drama, I took my wife to one of the late-night concerts at the Usher Hall.

  Andras Schiff was playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. They are slightly similar to some of The Well-Tempered Clavier fugues, but I think they’re more highly evolved. I like the variations. Most importantly, I can listen to them without crying.

  The Usher Hall is a classic round concert hall—Scotland’s version of the Royal Albert Hall. The concert was a sell-out, not a seat left in the house. We arrived, just as we always do, a few moments before the lights went down. There was no time for a drink. It was wet, which was making my bad knee throb.

  My favourite part of the Goldberg’s is the Aria at the beginning. It’s Bach at his tranquil best, and you’ve got it all to look forward to again at the end, when the Aria is repeated.

  I took time to settle down. I stared at Schiff. I could feel the pack of people sitting shoulder to shoulder, smell the moist hum of wet coats. My mind wandered from this to that.

  By these days, I was not thinking of India quite so much. She was just my golden Goddess. Whenever I thought of her I mentally genuflected. In my mind she had been returned to her rightful pedestal.

  But the Goldberg’s, being so similar to The Well-Tempered Clavier, had pricked at my memory. I started to remember the times we’d had—not that awful fight at the end, but the good times. That day when I’d first seen India outside the School Hall, a moment cast in amber. Laughing with each other in the Eton practice room till the tears dripped onto the grand piano. The way she’d snatched my hand at Judy’s Passage and bundled me into the elderflower bush. A rainy afternoon on the Long Walk and a day that I will never forget. Love in the fields and in the spinneys of Eton. And love, too, sandwiched up against the dustbins of a Windsor hotel.

  One of the happiest months of my life.

  Had she abused me? Pish and tush. She might, just possibly, have abused her position as a music teacher.

  But it wasn’t just about the sex.

  She’d loved me; I knew it. Maybe it was just circumstance, me being in the right place at the right time. Maybe I’d caught her at a moment of maximum vulnerability during her divorce. And, just maybe, it could have been because, for one single term, we both shared an incredible passion for The Well-Tempered Clavier.

  Who knows why it started, what made it tick.

&n
bsp; Lick up the honey stranger, and ask no questions.

  As I stared through Schiff, I started to wonder what had happened to India after she’d left Eton. Had she received any of my letters? Had she quit the country to join VSO?

  One final thing: had she ever known how many tears I’d shed for her, how I’d begged for her forgiveness?

  Schiff was on the Aria for the final time. I gazed at the Usher Hall’s domed ceiling and stretched back.

  During the previous two decades, I had seen India many times over. Chance meetings at the train station, the street, or the airport. But always, when I looked for a second, a third time, I would see that it was nearly her, but not quite.

  But this time, as I leaned my head back and turned from left to right, I really did see her.

  It was as if a pin had been thrust into the back of my neck. I convulsed.

  Out of nowhere, my heart was drilling and I was feeling just like that sweaty teenager who had first stepped into India’s music room. I thought it was her. I was sure it was her.

  It wasn’t just the frame of brown hair, but the way she was sitting—exactly as she’d used to sit when I played The Well-Tempered Clavier.

  As discreetly as I could, I took another look. She was in the row behind me, about ten seats along.

  I turned to the side and stared, not being able to tear my eyes away.

  I had envisaged India’s face so many times over the years, had got my hopes up so many times. But this really was her; I knew it, from her hair to her clothes, still the same elegant pastels that she’d always loved. Even her hands, clasped in her lap, were a giveaway.

  The lights were low, but she looked breathtaking.

  My palms were clammy with sweat.

  Should I go up to her at the end? Greet her? Would she be pleased to see me?

  I snatched one more look over my shoulder. She was leaning now towards the man next to her. He was whispering into her ear. She threw her head back and laughed, and as she did so I had a good look at him too. Well-built, I could see, youngish with a full head of hair.

  What to do, what to do?

  The Goldberg’s had come to an end and we were applauding, cheering as well, because the more we cheered, the better the chance of an encore. Schiff came on again, went off, and I am clapping with demented frenzy. I don’t know what else to do.

  A lull in the applause and I take another look behind. It’s India, without a doubt. With the auditorium lights up, I can see her in all her glory, and it’s as if that same woman whom I loved twenty-five years ago has been transported to the Usher Hall; although her hair is shorter, she has not aged a single day.

  I don’t care what my wife thinks I’m doing. I just have to look again.

  India was still talking to the man next to her.

  Just a little dart of jealousy? Of course. For India was with another man and it should have been me by her side.

  Her sixth-sense must have told her she was being watched.

  She was talking to her partner but she suddenly broke off and looked at me, looked directly at me, and my world shattered into a billion pieces.

  She was as serene as I had ever seen her. For a moment her fingers strayed to her lips.

  Then she waved. Just a simple wave. But it was not a wave of hello. There was an air of finality about it, as if after twenty-five years she had at last been given the opportunity to say goodbye.

  The man looked at me too, looked me square in the eye. A lean face with a snub nose, thin lips, and hooded eyelids that drooped over slightly bulging hazel eyes.

  I had to turn away.

  Schiff was back on stage to play the encore.

  And I was undone.

  The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Prelude 17 in A-flat Major. It was my first love, the first prelude that India had ever played me. Instantly, I was back in that small music room with lime-green walls and a scuffed upright Steinway.

  My shoulders heaved. I buried my face into my hands. The tears streamed through my fingers.

  My wife leaned over, touched my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  The pain was in my heart and in my head, but the hurt was physical.

  Although it wasn’t just the music, that ethereal clavier music that Bach had written more than 280 years ago.

  I had also recognised the man beside India, that tall man with the thin lips and the lean face; the man who, two decades ago, I had once used to see in the mirror.

  I wept and cursed myself for a fool.

  But my tears were not just for the son I’d never known.

  There had been one thing more.

  I had seen something else.

  As she had waved, I had recognised that watch, that classic Heuer that I had given to India on her birthday all those years ago.

  She was wearing it still, an ever-present reminder of her lost love.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I HESITATE FROM turning this into a teary-eyed Oscar speech, but there are a number of people I need to thank.

  Ever since I embarked on this novel-writing venture— some years ago, I can tell you—I have had a coterie of stalwart cheer-leaders. These are the ones I would especially like to thank:

  My brother Toby, Charlie Bain, Jerv and Angela Cottam, James Cripps, Mike Hamill, Sebastian Hamilton, Jeremy Hitchen, Tim Maguire, Charlie Ottley, Giles Pilbrow, Mark Pilbrow and, a rose among all these thorny men, Louise Robinson.

  I am much indebted to the heroic efforts of my agents Jenny Brown and Darin Jewell, as well as my editor Tom Chalmers, who were all formative in getting this book into print.

  Although this book is a novel, I do share at least one trait with its hero—in that I truly was one of Eton’s most indolent loafers. So my thanks to my two tutors Michael Meredith and Nick Welsh, outstanding English teachers the pair of them. I hope this book brings them some small amusement to see how, despite my tabloid wanderings, a few kernels from their lessons may actually have taken root.

  To my parents, Bob and Sarah (who will doubtless cringe when they read this, so I’ll keep it short), I say a special thanks—not least for their perpetual bullishness.

  My two boys, Dexter and Geordie, will one day, I hope, realise how they have been an unending source of good cheer to me.

  And lastly, merci mille fois to Margot—a great wife and, as it happens, a great friend also.