Prelude

Prelude

William Coles

Language: English

Pages: 156

ISBN: B01FEPC3PU

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Seventeen-year-old Kim is a student at one of Britain's most extraordinary institutions, Eton College - crammed with over a thousand boys and not a girl in sight. His head is full of the Falklands War and a possible army career, until the day he hears his new piano teacher, India, a beautiful but pained young woman, playing a prelude from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Kim's life will never be the same again. An intensely passionate affair develops between him and his twenty-three-year-old teacher, and he wallows in the wild and unaccustomed thrill of first love. Twenty-five years on, Kim recalls that heady summer and how their fledgling relationship was so brutally snuffed out - finished off by his enemies, by the constraints of Eton, and by his own withering jealousy. Prelude is the bittersweet story of a life-changing love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

check, a magnificent purple waistcoat with black trim, immaculately laundered white shirt with a starched wing-collar, or stick-ups, and a perfectly symmetrical white bowtie. The edges of his tailcoat were piped with black braid, while in his buttonhole was a gorgeous gardenia. He was the gilded butterfly to my black-and-white moth. He still hadn’t said a word. He just sat there with his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat pockets and stared at the ceiling. His middle-fingers tapped against his

home. I lived for those moments. For unlike my actual lessons, they were in the lap of the gods. It was their very spontaneity that made them all the more thrilling. One moment practising a prelude, focused on my music, and the next she’s walking through the door. She would be pleased to see me, but I think also that she delighted in the fact she had introduced me to The Well-Tempered Clavier. It was the private thrill of the matchmaker who brings two lovers together. Seeing India, even for a

outdoor pool. I remember it distinctly—I was wearing faded jeans, a white T-shirt and some Green Flash plimsolls. Under my arm, my sheet music, towel and trunks. I was taking a different route from my usual one, going via Judy’s Passage, one of Eton’s main walkways. I’ve just crossed the Eton Wick Road and was just about to turn into the high-walled gloom of the passage. And suddenly from the other direction appears India. “Hello you,” she says. She looks exquisite in another of her white

grey with rain, every cell of my body was vibrating with love. I longed to declare it. But I didn’t, for fear that she might think me too pushy, too young, too inexperienced. She had her elbows tucked in underneath my arms, her head inches above mine. “You seem too good to be true.” She gazed into my eyes. “Sometimes I thought I’d never find happiness again.” It was like the last string had been cut, as if the door to her heart was now wide open, for suddenly we were kissing crazily, madly,

the same time. Above all, it’s a very tranquil piece. Within thirty minutes, I was smitten. I loved its simplicity. I was also aware of its intimate connection with India. Like me, she’d started her Well-Tempered career on the First Prelude. She’d have used the same fingering to play the same notes, would have practised the same teasingly tricky bars over and over again, and would have spent a good hour honing the splendid ending. At times, I was so absorbed with the music that I would forget

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