Prelude (20 page)

Well, I was not going to take up Angela’s offer. I had India in my life, I had sex three or four times a day and I was deliriously in love.

No—what I did was what I believe every other boy on earth does when they’re in the midst of a grand love affair, and when they get that first tentative sniff that another girl might be interested.

They may not act, but they store it up, file it into the pending tray. Not, of course, that the grand love affair isn’t going to last forever, but, just on the off chance, just in case . . .

Trust in God, but tie up your camel. An old Arab proverb and I’ve always liked it because it so pithily expresses a schoolboy’s instinctive fallback position when it comes to his dealings with women.

AFTER LUNCH, I joined the queue to Frankie’s study, a dozen boys all in various states of nervousness. We were each waiting for Frankie’s signature. Some of us had rips, which were sloppy pieces of homework that had been literally ripped at the top; some of us had show-ups and needed a tutorly pat on the back; some had chits that needed signing; and some, like me, had tickets and would be called upon to explain our misbehaviour.

Frankie’s face was always a wax mask when you entered his study, for he never knew whether in the next minute he would be delivering the carrot or the stick.

Except with me, for with me he always had on his face a look of weary resignation.

Frankie’s study was lined from floor-to-ceiling with books and there was a large window that overlooked the Slough Road. He had a sofa and armchairs, but for this meeting we adopted the formal positions of Eton combat, Frankie at his antique walnut desk while I stood, hands square behind my back.

“Falling asleep in class?” He screwed up his nose, as if at a noxious smell. “Insolence?”

Silence. The tick of the clock and the sound of boys noisy in the library outside.

“What would you like to say?”

A bluebottle worked its way across the window behind Frankie’s head. “I fell asleep in class.”

“I see.” He signed the ticket. “I see.”

He looked up and cocked an eye at me. “So, what’s been keeping you up?”

“Revision, Sir. Can’t sleep.”

Frankie ‘hmm-hmmed’ to himself and handed back the ticket. “Insolence too?”

“Slipped out, Sir.”

“Going to get you into a lot of trouble one of these days, Kim.”

As I left, he drummed his fingertips on the desk, wondering if there was anything to be done with his unbiddable pupil. Was that the moment when Frankie had that first kernel of an idea to lay a trap for me? It may well have been.

But, even without the aid of my insolent tongue, I was more than capable of landing myself into any number of hairbreadth ’scapes and disastrous chances.

For, along with our countryside sex and our midnight assignations, that very afternoon India and I were strolling right through the heart of Windsor. Not hand-in-hand, or with our arms tight round each other’s waists, but at a school like Eton it is enough—more than enough—for a boy to be seen walking with a young woman for the grapevine to start humming.

We had exercised some caution. We were off the usual schoolboy track and keeping our eyes open as we admired the Georgian houses.

We were laughing at any foolish thing that came into our heads. I’d found a Tabby cat and had bent down to scratch him behind the ear.

“My dad’s got a tabby,” I said. The cat arched its back as my hand streamed over the length of his body.

India was catching some sun, leaning against the railings, her hands outstretched. It was a beautiful day and she was wearing a short skirt, T-shirt and sunglasses. My watch glinted fetchingly on her wrist. To look at her then, she could have been aged anything from fifteen to thirty.

“I like cats,” she said dreamily. “It’s only the control freaks who can’t stand them.”

“What about dogs?”

“Love them too.” Her hair was falling back in a brown spangled waterfall over the railings. “One day, when we have our house in the country, we’ll have a whole menagerie.”

I looked up at her, silhouetted by the sun. I didn’t know if she was joking. But she had voiced my exact thoughts. Already I had started dreaming of our intertwined lives: that we would live together, travel together, have children, make music, and have the most magical sex until death us do part.

But to have her say it like that? I didn’t know whether she was playing with me. I looked at India one more time. I could have said something. Instead, I busied myself with the cat.

India looked down at me and stroked my hair.

“Would you like that?”

She was serious—had taken off her sunglasses.

“More than anything.” I held her hand and kissed her wrist, and for one golden moment we were two credulous fools, synchronising our idyllic futures together.

It’s funny how life never works out like that. You can have your plans, your dreams and your glorious future together mapped out. Yet fate still comes along anyway and, with haughty disregard, sets you off on a different path entirely.

One golden moment when we both dreamed the same dream.

India held her hand against my cheek. “I love you to distraction.” Even as she said it, she glanced uneasily across the road.

“No!” she said. “That boy Savage is coming.”

We ran like hares, arms pumping, our breath whistling through our teeth.

India rounded the corner first and, as I followed, I looked behind—and that was what undid us. For it was only then that Savage recognised me.

I was tearing after India still, hard on her heels. We jinked round lampposts and parking meters, turned another corner, though when I looked back I could see Savage effortlessly cruising behind us.

“Jesus!” I said. Already I was imagining what might happen if we were caught. India grabbed my hand and was dragging me down a murky cul-de-sac, a back route to one of the Windsor hotels.

I tried a fire-door but it was locked. We had to hide. India squeezed into a two-foot gap between the industrial-sized bins and I followed.

My lungs were in flames. I tried to catch my breath without making a sound. All I wanted was a rasping lungful of air but I didn’t dare breathe.

India had her back against the wall and was peeking behind the bins. “He’s standing at the top,” she said, her hand tense on mine. “Looking this way and that. Thinking about coming down here. Yes?” Her fingers clenched. “No.”

India was chuckling as she kissed me.

“Close.” I looked around, taking in our surroundings. We were in a dingy side road, with four storeys of buildings on either side and just a smear of grey skyline. Vegetables were rotting on the cobbles and there was a stinking haze of decayed food.

“Very close,” India replied and kissed me again.

It was as if India and I were on a permanent sexual hair-trigger. We could make love once, twice, and then might be contentedly sipping tea together. But just the slightest word, or look, or touch, was the only spark that was needed to start another blaze in our tinder-dry desire.

She quickly had her hands up my shirt, was pressing herself tight against me. “I hope you’re thinking what I’m thinking.”

“I just might be.”

“I’m so glad to hear that.” Already, as she kissed me, she was tugging at my belt and easing at my fly-buttons.

I was hauling at her skirt, my fingers warm on her buttocks, pulling aside the knicker elastic.

With her arms set round my neck, she gripped her knees over my hips, and there, in among the trade waste and kitchen cast-offs, we made love against the wall.

“Beautiful,” India whispered in my ear. “So beautiful.”

Although our love-making had started out of nowhere, we were taking our time. Not for us the one-minute coupling. No, it may sound sappy but our sex had become the highest expression of our love for each other. It was just as they always say—or at least certainly ought to say: ‘Sex, even when it’s sandwiched between two industrial-sized rubbish bins, blasts into outer space when you’re in love.’

“Oh my darling,” India said, rocking her hips against me. She took my ear entirely in her mouth. “I’m so close.”

The next moment she let out a little laugh. “There’s somebody coming,” she said. “It’s one of the cooks.”

I could hear him, a young man from the sound of it, whistling
Under Pressure
by Queen and David Bowie.

She didn’t break stride, gently coasting up to the brink.

“Darling,” she said, looking over my shoulder. “He’s coming right over to the bin. I can’t . . .” Her knees squeezed tight at my waist. “. . . stop.”

And, to the amazement of that genial kitchen-porter, India peaked as he off-loaded another bucket of slops into the bin.

I could not see him, but there was a tell-tale pause in the whistling.

India kissed me and nuzzled into my shoulders. “I love you,” she said.

She always said that when our love-making had ended.

“Did he see us?”

She laughed again as she eased her feet down to the cobbles. “He winked at me.”

“Good for him.”

The first and indeed only time that India and I were definitely caught in
flagrante delictu
. I hope we made the man’s day.

An hour later we were taking our leave of each other when India fished into her handbag. “I’ve bought you a present,” she said, handing me a small box that was wrapped with love hearts.

I gazed at it, gave it a shake. Something rattled inside. “What could it be?”

“The key to my heart?”

“I’d better open it then.”

It was not quite the key to her heart. It was the key to her home, small and golden with a brown leather fob in the shape of a love-heart.

“Thank you.” I kissed her. “So you won’t have to come downstairs at midnight for me?”

“That’s right.” She kissed me back, nibbling my lower lip. “Let yourself in any time you like.”

Oh, indeed I would. But for that little golden key, how different my life might have been.

For you know the story of Duke Bluebeard? He welcomes his new bride to his castle and tells her that she may go wherever she pleases—save for the one room with the locked door. But of course she goes there. She has to go there. And, in it, she finds all of the wracked and tortured bodies of Bluebeard’s previous wives.

I too was Bluebeard’s bride. For I had been given the key to my love’s castle and the only thing stopping me from unearthing her secrets, her skeletons, was my own self-restraint.

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 fears 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!”