Prelude (6 page)

She had taken it in her usual stoic fashion and, instead of cursing her ill-luck, had thanked her lucky stars that she hadn’t been killed outright.

She did have one regret though; she couldn’t get out to exercise her King Charles Spaniel, Rufus.

So for a few months, I and a couple of other boys had been helping Lucinda with the dog-walking. Of a weekend, and sometimes during the week, I’d pop over to her private quarters and take Rufus out for an hour.

That Saturday after lunch, I went up to her suite of rooms. Her lounge was a shrine to her lost suitors—the hundreds of Etonians who had courted and attempted to beguile her for five years at a stretch, and who had then departed Eton, never to write or speak to her again. Every wall was plastered with mementoes and pictures from Lucinda’s thirty years at the school. Thirty years of house photos, scores of individual boys’ pictures, or leavers, and a vast selection of caps, scarves, plaques, cricket bats, oars and rugby balls.

Rufus was already raring to go, dog-lead in his mouth, tail thumping the floor. Lucinda had her crutches next to her and was easing herself into her armchair.

“It’s the dog-walker-in-chief,” she said. Lucinda had neat, greying hair and when her face relaxed it fell naturally into a smile. She nosed through a box of chocolates and selected a truffle before handing them to me. “Take a couple.”

“Thank you, Ma’am,” I replied. Lucinda was always addressed as ‘Ma’am’, as if we were talking to the Queen.

I took a caramel for myself and fed a praline to Rufus.

Lucinda slipped off her shoes and put her feet up onto the leather
pouffe
.

“Much better.” She sighed and wriggled into the cushions. “Do you know that until my accident, Kim, I never knew you liked dogs.”

“We’ve always had Labs at home.” I scratched Rufus under the ear. “When Mum died, Dad went off the deep end. At one stage we had five in the house.”

“Five?” Lucinda was incredulous. “That might be too much even for me.”

“If they saw a cat, they could tug you off your feet.”

“I’m sure.” Her fingers trailed over the chocolates before she plumped for a chocolate liqueur.

“Twice a day I had to take them out, otherwise they made the house look like a midden.”

“So that’s why you like dog-walking so much.”

“Beats cricket.” I attached Rufus’s lead.

“Most things do, dear,” she said, picking up her pen and cracking open her
Daily Mail
to the crossword page. “Take a few more chocolates before you go.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.”

I took Rufus to Agar’s Plough. He was yapping as if he’d spent the last six months in quarantine.

I let him off the lead and he sniffed round a bramble bush, lying flat on the ground, paws outstretched, peering intently through the leaves. There were a few games of cricket going on. How pleasant it was to be there with Rufus rather than wasting the afternoon chasing balls for other boys.

Suddenly Rufus snarled and lunged, darting into the edge of the bush. I couldn’t make out what he had in his mouth but his head shook violently from side-to-side.

“Rufus! Rufus!” I looked more closely. At first I’d thought it was a rat, but then I saw it was a grey squirrel. It made a shrill, keening shriek.

Rufus champed down harder on the squirrel’s neck. I grabbed the dog by his choke collar and tried to prise open his jaws, digging my fingertips into his nostrils.

Rufus flicked his head and let go. The squirrel flailed in the air and sank its teeth into my thumb. One short, savage nip, before it was on the ground and scurrying to the nearest oak.

My thumb was thick with blood. The first thought to go through my head was, ‘Christ, that’s going to hurt.’

The next moment the pain kicked in, lancing through my hand—so excruciating, it couldn't have been much worse if I'd had an amputation.

I bound up the wound with my handkerchief, whimpering with the pain. I couldn’t believe such a small bite could create such a seismic throb. Rufus meekly tailed behind as I stumbled back to the Timbralls.

Lucinda only needed one look. She gave me a chocolate liqueur to steady my nerves, then, her leg causing her to hobble with pain herself, drove me to the school sanatorium where they sewed me up and gave me a tetanus jab.

By the evening, my thumb had swollen to the size of a fat sausage. So long as I didn’t touch it, the pain was a steady dull throb. However, the moment it was pressed in any way, it was as if a blowtorch was scorching over my knuckles.

It meant that for the next couple of days any sort of piano-playing—at least with my left hand—was out of the question.

That said, it certainly wasn’t going to stop me from attending my second piano lesson.

I had been looking forward to it so much that I could hardly eat. The anticipation was so intense that it made me feel queasy—although I didn’t know what I’d be able to accomplish with one hand out of action.

That Monday morning, my bathroom regime reached a new peak. I showered, shampooed, gelled, shaved, moisturised and layered on enough anti-perspirant to see me through a desert.

How I wished that I could have been a popper so I could have worn an eye-popping waistcoat and sweet-scented flower. I’d have been happy, even, just to have been a ‘school officer’, which would have allowed me to wear a bowtie.

But I made the best of what I had. My black lace-ups would have done justice to an army officer, my suit Bible black, and my shirt dazzling in its whiteness.

“Very nice,” Jeremy said, as I prepared to leave for the Music Schools. “Shame about the thumb.”

“It is.” I’d applied a fresh white bandage that morning.

“How are you going to play?”

“With difficulty.”

I blew him a kiss.

I LEAVE WITH time to spare and as I amble down Keate’s Lane I feel like a young swain on a first date. My skin is prickly, hyper-sensitive, and the blood is surging through my veins. I’ve never felt so excited, so alive. All at the prospect of a piano lesson.

But what a teacher.

I’m not sweating when I enter the Music Schools, but I’m as skittish as a young colt and would have jumped at my own shadow.

The walk up the stairs has all the solemnity of a pilgrimage and now I am there on the top floor, walking towards my beauty. Already I can hear her playing a prelude.

Three deep breaths, I knock on the door and I’m in. Even though I am fully prepared for the shock, the sight of her still whips the air from my lungs. She is simply that striking. My longing eyes suck her up. If anything, the last week has made her more beautiful. The scent of lily-of-the-valley has already hit me.

She looks up and for a moment pinches her lower lip as she notices my thumb. “What’s happened to you then?”

“I was . . .” I cough. “I was bitten by a squirrel.”

“A squirrel?”

“I was trying to rescue it from a dog.”

“Ahh.” She nods her understanding. “I once tried to break-up two dogs in a fight. You know what happened? I got bitten too. You’re better off using your feet.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Well, I’ve got a present to cheer you up Kim.” She stretches up to her attaché case on the piano. Even when her fingers grip the handle, she has all the grace of a ballerina.

“Thank you.”

And out she brings Bach’s complete
The Well-Tempered
Clavier
,
Books I and II
, and, for a moment, it feels as if she has given me the golden key to her heart, for with this book I will court her.

“You must be note perfect with the First Prelude by now,” she says. “I’ve heard you practising.”

“I’m sorry I won’t be able to play it for you today.”

“Well, which one do you fancy next? Let me play you a couple.”

And so she did, a prelude, a fugue, and then another prelude: Prelude 2 in C Minor.

Like many of Bach’s preludes, it seems at first to be an almost mathematical exercise. It takes time to appreciate the tempestuous emotions running beneath its rock facade.

I gaze at India, dazzled by her back, her hair, her dancing fingers. And although I’d thought that I knew her face and hands so well, I notice something new.

She wears a diamond ring on the ring-finger of her right-hand. I stare at the fat solitaire and wonder what it means. Left hand, I know, would mean that she’s engaged. But right-hand means what? Does she have a lover, a boyfriend? Did she buy it herself? Or maybe—hopefully—it’s an heirloom.

The diamond sparkles in the sunlight as her hands ease over the keyboard.

How it would come to torment me.

But in a moment all thoughts of the diamond are forgotten because India is standing up and patting the seat for me.

“I think you should try the Second Prelude,” she says. “See how you do with the right hand.”

The seat is still warm. Before playing a note, I study the piece. The key of C Minor has three flats. I play the scale; I dive in.

With just the right hand, it’s not too hard. Just one note at a time and with a steady beat that puts me in mind of a ticking clock. I’m going slowly but until the last few bars there aren’t many wrong notes.

“Very good,” she says, and I tingle as she moves behind me. “Let’s try it together.”

I gape in bewilderment. In all my years of the piano, never have I done anything like this before.

She laughs at my ignorance. “Budge up.”

And, as I move to the side of the piano stool, the air is being sucked from the room. India is sitting inches away from me, her white skirt in stunning contrast to my black trousers.

I can feel the warmth pulsating through her blouse and, as for her scent, it seems to engulf me. I am so aware of her proximity that my skin is on a hair-trigger. Just the slightest touch of her hair on my coat sends a pulse of electricity through my body.

“Ready?” she says. And always that smile, which I’m seeing up close for the first time.

It is all I can do to keep up with her, concentrating savagely on the music, not wanting to put a finger wrong, yet somehow trying to block off the rest of my senses, and the fact that sitting next to this woman, this Goddess, is about to short-circuit my brain.

The Second Prelude is a simile for my entire life for, despite the turbulent emotions that are raging in my heart, my fingers and my mind must always remain focused— disciplined, above all, well-tempered. The music has an uneasy tension about it, both hands mirroring each other but going in opposite directions. It matches my wildly beating heart.

Then comes what will always be my favourite bar of music: the fifteenth bar of the Second Prelude of
The Well-Tempered
Clavier
.

Not many people have an actual favourite bar.

But this, without question, is mine.

The bar’s melody is pleasant enough, though for preference I think I prefer the one before it. However, the beauty of the fifteenth bar is that, for the briefest of notes, both right and left hand overlap.

We are already slightly turned in towards each other and the tips of our fingers touch, the flap of a butterfly’s wing. An explosion wrings through my body. I’ve been scalded, so unexpected that my hand leaps off the keyboard. I lose my place on the sheet, grind to a halt.

India is enjoying herself. But whether it is me or the music I have no idea. “From the beginning of the line,” she says, but now I am forewarned and this time I luxuriate in the gentle touch of her fingertips against my skin.

Some more missed notes, but I’m keeping up with the beat, and our hands are rattling through the ending. Although I can’t believe what I’m doing—sitting on a chair with India—I rivet my eyes to the music.

We finish and she claps her hands. “Well done. Let’s try it again. Give it some pedal between the phrases.”

My skin has turned into one giant nerve-ending. It is as if my other senses, of taste and smell and peripheral sight, have all had to shut down for fear of overloading my poor brain.

My world is now solely made up of the sound of the Second Prelude, the sight of the notes stabbing at me in black-and-white, and the prickle of my skin as it yearns to be touched.

It happens again, another sensory explosion. But this time not where I expected. My body is turned in towards the middle of the piano, left foot on the right pedal. India has a foot on the other pedal. Our knees kiss. My body has become one vast erogenous zone. Even her lightest touch saturates my nerve-endings.

I can think of nothing else but the notes, my fingers and my left knee. I’m ready for it now; I’m willing her to dab at the soft pedal again. Towards the end, as both hands start to race against each other, she does so and, even through the fabric of my trousers and her skirt, I fancy I can feel her body heat.

My body is liquefying beside her. But I can’t help myself. It is far and away the most erotic thing ever to have happened to me.

“Good technique,” she says, swinging her legs away from me to stand by the window. “Somewhere along the way you’ve had a great teacher.”

“Thank you.” I blush again. Everything she does, everything she says, sparks a volcanic reaction in me. For a moment I wonder if she’s aware of this—aware that her slightest touch turns me to jelly, and that just the sound of her voice sends a shiver down my spine.

But, I don’t think she is conscious of it. She is so genuine, so good-natured, that not for a moment has she considered that the touch of her knee is like a cattle-prod to my senses. I don’t believe she has any conception that I would do anything for her, that she only has to ask and I would happily give up my head, heart and soul.

Her bare arm rests along the windowsill. “Do you think you’ll be able to keep up your phenomenal practice rate?”

I blush, but for once I am able to chuckle. I think it is the first time that I have ever laughed in her presence. “Maybe. When my thumb’s healed.”

“I so envy you Kim,” she sighs. “I hope you never lose your passion.”

“Really?”

She laughs, but it is a world-weary laugh. As if a veil has been drawn aside, I suddenly glimpse the most unimaginable pain.

“Not that I’d want to discourage you from leaving your teens, but . . .”