Prelude (13 page)

My arm may be still, but the rest of my body has started to shake. Cramps in my legs, fire in my belly, and the hairs on my neck prickle like a pin-cushion. I am fascinated. Ensnared. Even in my most outrageous dreams, I had never thought to imagine she would be staring into my eyes and kissing my arm.

She kisses the sleeve of my shirt. I dare myself to think how it may end. For now her unblinking eyes are just inches from mine, drawing me in. I can’t see her lips, but I can feel them. Pecking at my shirt. Her breath is warm on my neck, her chin light on my shoulder.

That lily-of-the-valley, how can I ever forget it? For me the scent could never be anything other than India.

I am a statue, not moving an arm, a leg, a finger, even an eyelid.

But underneath, I am a raging, pulsating cauldron of emotion and desire. Total turmoil masked by a stoic veneer.

A car goes past, a sigh of wind. Ever more slowly, India kisses my neck, her lips lingering longer. A kiss on my jaw. On my cheek. The silk caress of her cheek against mine. I haven’t moved, can’t move, but I am quivering at the hope, the desire, of what might happen next. My thumping heart feels as if it will shatter with the strain.

A kiss on my cheek, just an inch from my lips. She pulls back ever so slightly, looks me in the eyes, so close that I can feel her long black eyelashes.

India.

Kisses.

Me.

And nothing will ever be the same again.

The lightest touch of an angel’s wing.

I have been touched by God.

India draws back once more, smiling as she gazes at me. Her fingers lock through mine, holding my hand tight. My hip rests lightly against her thigh.

A slight lean forward, she kisses me again, not on my lips, but on the other side of my mouth. All the while, those eyes, those black tarns, never leave my gaze for a moment.

And kisses me on the lips once more, still so soft, but India holds it a fraction longer.

She brings her other hand up, and with her long pianist’s fingers strokes my cheek. I move my head to the rhythm of her hand.

It is as if her kiss has released me, for it is my turn. As delicately as India herself, I kiss the inside of her wrist. Draw back.

And kiss her on the lips. No open mouths, no darting tongues. A reverential kiss and for the first time her eyes close, as if she has come home.

Without a word needing to be said, we break off and enfold our arms round each other. Not knotted, but firm enough for trust. I stroke her hair.

I am bound in the moment. Not marvelling at what has occurred, not amazed at my luck that India is still in my arms.

No, I had given myself up to my senses—to the cocoon of scent that surrounded us, the warmth of India’s chest pressed against mine, the texture of her hair at my fingertips, and the tenderness with which she strokes my neck.

Still holding me fast, she kisses me on the ear, whispers, “Thank you.”

I rub my cheek against hers. My voice is hoarse with excitement. “It is I who should thank you.”

India strokes my cheek, little soft dabs on my skin. There are so many things to say, the whys and wherefores, and how longs and how manys, but there is nothing that cannot wait, because now she has kissed me again and, for the first time in my life, it is a kiss that feels natural. Right. In the correct order of things. Just perfect.

One kiss, another and another, harder, more urgent, more insistent, and I can feel her lips start to melt beneath my own, parting fraction by fraction. She leads the way, but is doing everything at such a leisurely pace that it feels as if we have all day to pleasure each other. There is no coarse stab of a tongue, just this total awareness that her lips are pressed open against mine.

I am in her hands, am taking my cue from her.

We are both holding back, both waiting to see who will be the first to break, to move from lips to tongue.

Heady desire. I am alive for the sense of her lips.

How brutish those past kisses with Estelle seem—gross, open-mouthed snogging, when all I had wanted to do was bury my tongue into a girl’s mouth.

For now I am receiving my first proper lesson in how to kiss, learning that kisses, like every other act of love, are always sweeter when savoured slowly.

My eyes are closed; I have given myself up to India’s kisses. Nose-to-nose, lip-to-lip, then, with all the delicacy of a mouse emerging from its hole, I can feel the light touch of tongue.

As delicately as if I were coaxing a butterfly onto my finger, I dab my tongue. The lightest of touches.

Her tongue glides against mine, almost lazy, not a full charge, but with artful patience.

Wherever India goes, I follow. She touches my teeth, lets her tongue slip between my lips and I don’t know how long it’s taken, how many minutes have ticked by, but she’s now kissing me with wanton abandon, her lips moving firm against my own, working her mouth against mine.

What a kiss; what a woman; what a day.

I lose track of time. That first kiss lasted so long that even my mind stops. My life is India’s lips and India’s mouth.

I never want it to end, aware that if it did stop India might come to her senses and realise she was kissing a seventeen-year-old schoolboy.

But when she does eventually stop, she crushes me to her breast, and slowly my senses return. To realise that I was sit- ting in the brush of an elderflower tree, that the shadows were lengthening, and that in my arms was my beautiful piano teacher.

One more time I look at her face and gaze into her eyes, just to confirm that the unthinkable, the unbelievable, has happened. But yes, yes, it really is her, it is India in my arms.

“Hello,” she says, and it is as if she has spoken to me for the first time, as if our relationship has started afresh. Which in a way it had. For we were no longer teacher and pupil; it felt like we were lovers embarking on our maiden voyage, with the wind set fair and not a smut of cloud on the horizon.

“Hello.” I hugged her again. I had never known a hug to feel so good. I saw those lips once more and could not stop myself from kissing them. I still could not bring myself to believe such things were permissible.

“Happy?”

I laugh at the thought. “Right here, right now, with you underneath this elderberry?” I say. “I have never been so happy in my entire life. You?”

“I think I’m happy too.” She traced her fingers along my jaw-line. “Shall we go somewhere else?”

“Some leafy bower?” I echo her earlier words.

I’m rewarded with a peck on my lips. “You leave first.”

AS I STOOD up, I had a last regretful look at our den and at India, still sitting on the leaves and gazing at me like a beautiful nymph.

After the shade of the bush, the sunlight was dazzling. I squinted in both directions and the road was clear. I called India out and she emerged like a delicate fawn. In the Master’s Field, she brushed off the worst of the twigs and leaves, and we walked—walked, but did not touch, walked with a gap of three or four feet between us. If we had been more sensible and more alert to Eton’s thousand eyes, we would not have been seen within a hundred yards of each other. At the time though, we were feckless and so dazed with love that we didn’t recognise the need for discretion, had not even contemplated the thought that the mere sight of the pair of us walking together would be enough to launch a score of rumours and a flurry of speculation. No—we were oblivious to it all, incapable of thinking about anything but our doughty ship that we had just launched onto the high seas.

But although we couldn’t touch as we walked, we could still talk. There were so many things that I longed to ask her. When had it all started? Why me? Why now? Would it last? Could it last? When could I see her again? Could I see her again? Could she kiss me again? Please? Hundreds and hundreds of questions, but, even then, with even my first true love, I knew that some things were left best unasked; that sometimes there is not the need to have every question answered in full; and that, more often than not in life, ignorance is bliss.

Wise beyond my years. It showed an awareness of the delicacies and the pulse of a relationship. Sometimes, I was quite capable of being sage and practical. If only I could have been like that all of the time.

But of course I was still a schoolboy—and schoolboy emotions are nothing if not volatile, the one moment climbing the dizzy peaks of love and the next terrified at how far you have to fall.

Well as it happened, I did fall—and am quite possibly still falling.

But don’t think for a moment that I would have missed that climb. India took me to the extremes of love and rage, and jealousy and sorrow, and they were in every respect the emotional high-points of my life.

We found a weeping ash tree far from Eton’s playing fields. India slipped off her knapsack, sat down and patted the rug next to her in invitation.

I sat and, not daring to believe my luck would hold, I slipped my arm round her waist.

It had been twenty minutes since we’d kissed and I longed for more. I leaned over; she leaned up to kiss me. And she kissed me—again. And once more, as powerfully as the first time, I was overwhelmed by India’s beauty.

Without a word, India started rummaging in her knapsack, and as she did so she was humming to herself, humming the courtly Ninth Prelude in E-Major.

She was wooing me with Bach, her head gliding to the beat as she found her thermos. Her movements, like everything else in her life, spoke of controlled efficiency. She was as relaxed as if she were at the keyboard. She unscrewed the thermos top, poured and passed me the glass.

“Here’s to us,” she said. Ice-cold lemonade, homemade, astringent and razoring the back of my throat.

I sipped three times and passed the glass back to India. “And here’s to you.”

She drank and lay back on the rug, stretching out her arm to take my hand. I had never seen her looking so beautiful. Her white dress stark against the tartan rug, her hair in a billowing brown halo about her head, and her face lit by shafts of dying sunlight.

We could have talked, but instead we gazed unblinking into each other’s eyes. I leaned over and kissed her.

I hate to admit it now, but I think that time under the weeping ash was the high-water mark of our relationship— when everything was new and fresh, when our potential was limitless, and when my heart and mind had not yet been soured by demons.

We kissed and hugged, and the sun was now low on the horizon, peeking through the treetops. I checked my watch. My heart lurched.

We had been together for three hours. I’d missed Absence.

“I’ve got to go.” I climbed to my knees.

She just smiled. “It’s been a wonderful afternoon.”

“I want to . . .” I didn’t know what to say. “Thank you for everything. Thank you for the lemonade. Thank you for you.” I was standing up now, though still holding her hand.

“It is I who should be thanking you.”

She was using my words on me.

“Do you want to come too?”

“I’ll stay a while.”

I knelt and kissed her fingers. As I left, I looked round one last time. She was still sitting there, in black silhouette against the sky, and, as she waved, her diamond ring glinted in the dying embers of the day.

BOOK 2

PRELUDE 3,

C-sharp Major

A BLISSFUL MOMENT the next morning when I was aware that something incredible had happened, but could not remember precisely what. It filled me with an expectant glow, as if something extraordinary was right around the corner.

Then it came to me, the whole flood of memories washing through my system, over and over again, and they all boiled down to the fact that I was in love with India, had spent the whole of the previous afternoon kissing her. I had kissed India. We had kissed for three hours, and hugged each other, and held each other’s hands. She’d stroked my face, caressed my hair, kissed my arm, my hand, my face, my lips.

I could not keep it to myself.

At Eton, it had become second-nature to keep my feelings hidden, my secrets hugged tight. But this was different, it wasn’t a weakness, this was something I wanted to bellow to the world: I was in love.

I found Jeremy in his room after breakfast.

He was at his burry reading
The Times
and continued reading even after I’d sat in his armchair.

“Doesn’t look like you’ll be fighting in the Falklands,” he said.

“Plenty of other battles.” I gazed at the ceiling, dreaming of my love.

“Indeed there will be. Plenty of other places to die your hero’s death.” Eventually he looked up and examined me curiously for a few seconds. “Something’s happened to you. You don’t even want to talk about the end of the war.”

“Something has.” I was still staring up at the ceiling. “I’m in love.”

“Anyone I know?”

“My music teacher.”

“India James.” Even the sound of her name caused my stomach to spasm. “I thought you’d been in love with her for weeks.”

“I have. But now I’m not just in love; now I really love her.”

Jeremy’s eyes were still on the paper. He turned another page and, as casually as only he knew how, asked: “What’s new?”

I steeled myself. But I had to tell him, had to share my joy with someone. “No loose tongues, you promise?”

“Of course.”

He pushed his glasses back up his nose and for the first time gave me his full attention.

“I’m going to trust you on this one,” I said. “Do you know why I was late for Absence yesterday?”

“Yet more piano practice?”

“No,” I said. “India kissed me.”

He took it well. The only indication Jeremy gave that he’d heard me was that his elbows were now on the desktop and his hands clasped underneath his chin.

“And what I want to know is—was it a one-off, or will there be more?” I was suddenly enthusiastic, longing to voice my hopes and fears. I leaned forward, hitching up my trousers. “We were kissing for hours—hours and hours. But will she wake up this morning and be wondering what the hell she was doing, or will she be as smitten as me?”

Jeremy nodded, encouraging me to tell all.

“It just came out of nowhere. I met her in the street. One moment we were talking in Judy’s Passage, the next we were hiding from Savage in a bush, and . . .” I broke off. The astonishing memory of what had happened was still not even close to sinking in yet. “. . . she kissed me.”

Finally he spoke. “You and India James?” he said. “
Fouquet
in Le Touquet!
”

“For yesterday, yes. But what about today, tomorrow, next week?”

Jeremy shrugged. “Send her flowers? Write her a letter?

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” I was dry-washing my hands. “I don’t know if it would be too pushy. I don’t want to force the pace.”

“So you sit back and wait for India to call the shots?”

I gnawed at a dag on my thumbnail, trying to work out the best plan. “But I don’t want to be too passive either.”

“Maybe she’ll be as nervous as you. Maybe she’s sitting there at the breakfast table right now, also wondering if it was a flash in the pan.”

“Maybe.”

It was possible, but it didn’t sound very likely. It was hard to imagine India as anything other than my unobtainable piano-teacher. She certainly couldn’t be in this swamp of indecision, or so I thought.

“You could always write her a letter, an affectionate letter that says, in an easy, roundabout way, that you’re not averse to seeing her again.”

“Yes!” I would write her a letter—not over the top, not risqué. But affectionate and leaving the door wide open for more. “Brilliant.”

I was already up, raring to put pen to paper.

Jeremy shook his head from side to side. “You and India James? That’s the weirdest thing I’ve heard in a long time.”

“That’s exactly what I thought.” I now had my hand at the door.

“You’re not going to blab this to anyone else, are you?” he asked.

“Oh no.”

“Because some people are not nearly as discreet as me . . .”

How right he was.

I returned to my room and immediately started writing. It wasn’t more than three sentences long, but it needed seven drafts before I felt that every word and every nuance struck the right tone. Cheery, loving, affectionate; telling her that if she wanted more I was available. But not over-eager, not cloying, not suffocatingly close.

I found her address from the Fixtures and decorated the envelope with a picture of a stave of music. The first prelude in C-Major, the first piece that I had ever learned for her.

I was still not sure whether it was the right thing to do. I thought I was being far too forward.

Maybe it was exactly what was needed.

Maybe it was just what she was hoping for.

Back and forth, back and forth, torn by indecision, and, before I could torture myself any more, I’d dashed the 150 yards down the road and popped it in the postbox.

The very moment that I heard the envelope fall to the bottom, I regretted it. It was being far too pushy. What could she see in me? I was a seventeen-year-old schoolboy. For God’s sake, I was one of her pupils.

Any agony of indecison, not knowing if I had done the right thing. For the rest of the day, I was at turns jubilant and cringing that I had been so forward as to write to her.

It was lunacy. The more I thought of it, the more I’d convinced myself. With an angel like India, you needed to be cool, take it slow, give her enough space and freedom to find her own way.

By the afternoon, I had all but persuaded myself that through that letter alone I had blown it.

It makes me laugh to think of it now, but I had even started writing India a second letter in which I asked her to kindly disregard my first note.

I didn’t send it, but I came very close to going to the Music Schools, not to kiss her, or to touch her, but to talk and to know that it had not all been some fantastic chimera of my imagination.

I restrained myself.

I had sent her one warm, courteous letter and that would have to suffice. If it didn’t hit the mark, then our fledgling romance was never destined to get off the ground in the first place.

Or so I thought when I was not torturing myself over my own stupidity. A letter? How could I have been so ignorant, so obtuse, as to send her a letter?

If it was bad that night, it was even worse the next day.

When would I see her again? Would I have to wait till our next lesson on Monday? Would India pretend nothing had happened? Would she ignore my letter? Greet me with a cool “Hello”, and say not a word of our kisses?

Of course, I allowed myself to dream too, to hope that it might come to something, that we had embarked on the most extraordinary romance and that there would be more kisses and more caresses.

But these were the occasional breaths of fresh air that kept me going as I swam through a sea of despondency.

The bulk of my imaginings were that India was in the very act of terminating our relationship; that she’d already applied for a transfer within the Music Schools. Oh, to have kissed her, to have had this glimpse of paradise, and then to have had it snatched away.

I couldn’t eat, couldn’t think straight, couldn’t concentrate for one single minute on any class or any conversation.

Saturday rolled on, and still I had not heard a word.

I decided that very afternoon I would scour the Music Schools and hunt her down. If only to call her bluff, because even knowing the worst would be better than being in this terrible limbo. Or so I convinced myself for a couple of minutes. And then I would shy away from the very thought of going to the Schools; no, I would go swimming, read, let India dictate the run of play.

I’d wait till the Monday, would turn up to my piano lesson and, unless India alluded to our kiss and our Thursday afternoon, the subject would never pass my lips. A clinical, practical solution.

But sometimes you’ve got to go with your heart.

And that—praise God and all his angels—is what India did.

We don’t have it anymore in Britain but, twenty-five years back, there was the great luxury of a second post. Two bites of the cherry, one at breakfast and one at lunch, just to find out if anyone thought enough of you to write.

And she had.

I have India’s letter here in front of me now, matching cream paper and envelope, black pen, and handwriting so elegant that it is almost copperplate. The moment I first saw it sitting in my pigeonhole, I knew it was from her.

And my favourite thing of all about it is not the letter itself, but a little drawing on the back of the envelope of two people sitting underneath a tree. Because when I saw that picture I knew instantly that it was all going to be ok—that, far from being finished, we were a ‘Go’.

That picture meant that I didn’t have to tear the letter open then and there; I allowed myself the luxury of reading it in my room.

And this is what she wrote:

Dear Kim,

I’m still having to pinch myself.

I was wondering if you might like to come over for tea on
Sunday. Any time after three.

Much love, I xxxxx

Five kisses, I counted them, and after I had read and reread her letter, I hugged it tight to my heart and felt this enormous explosion of relief, total and utter relief. She wanted me. She wanted me.

The next day after lunch, I contented myself with a wash, a shave, and the smartest clothes in my wardrobe. A shower might have prompted unnecessary questions.

For already I was getting canny, had realised that a spray of aftershave might have piqued the other boys’ interests.

I left the Timbralls at 2.45 p.m. wearing my standard garb for a hot weekend afternoon, just jeans, T-shirt and music book. Your regulation Etonian off for a normal practice session at the Music Schools.

Only this time, instead of turning right at Keate’s Lane, I continued straight down the High Street, past the last of the boy’s houses, until gradually the college had stopped and I had entered Eton’s civilian world. Instead of school shops, I was walking past pubs, cornershops and tearooms. Dreaming of greeting India at her door, of her warm in my arms.

I was all but on her doorstep when I realised that I had no gift. I jogged back to the florists for flowers. Roses, red, red roses. Roses for my love. A cliché, I know, but, apart from being made to buy flowers for my stepmother, I had never bought flowers for anyone before.

Within fifty yards I’d realised my foolishness. I was horrified at myself. A schoolboy with red roses in his hand? Could I have made it any more obvious? Even the most ignorant dullard could not have missed the inference.

That first time I was relatively lucky. A few cars passed me by, but there was hardly a boy in sight. Over the next few weeks though, when I was to make an almost daily pilgrimage to India’s door, I was to be much more circumspect.

But that was because, over the next few weeks, I was to have much, much more to lose.

I hurried on down the street, trying to mask the flowers with my arms while I checked left and right for boys.

India lived in one of the little cul-de-sacs off the High Street, not far from the Windsor Bridge. Many times I’d walked past her road but had never realised that this was the home of my love.

Gravel scrunching underfoot. Flowers in precise herbaceous borders. And there at the end was number 16, with a clear varnished oak door and a brass knocker. Parsley, thyme and sage growing in pots by the porch.