All boys live in two worlds. One bewilders; full of rules, limitations, punishment, hygiene. Boundaries. The other world is a boundary; the muddy patch at the edge of the playing field, fights of vicious brevity, the exhilaration of naked flame. Both worlds are small and stratified by age; the inhabitants all know each other, one way or the other.
In one of his worlds, Charles was a junior and expendable piece in his family’s campaign for respectability. Charles’s mother had begun the project had begun long before he was born, and she continued it to her deathbed, by which time the notion had fallen into disuse.
Respectability meant, Charles would learn, a number of things. It meant standing up straight in the queue, for one, and that there were some boys at school whom he wasn’t allowed to befriend. At night, when the sirens went, Charles and his family sat in a small iron hut at the bottom of the garden, instead of going down to the Tube station with the others.
The women who ran Charles’s life knew that worth was not measured in anything so base as currency, but in respect, decorum and reputation. Furthermore, they knew that any family who had the above qualities paid due respect to the Arts, and especially to music. So, every Thursday evening, Charles went straight from school to Mr. Walgrave’s small stained bachelor apartment, where he learnt about scales, arpeggios and Mozart.
One such Thursday, Charles’s mother and Mr. Walgrave were downstairs, talking ostensibly about payment but mostly about the war. Charles ignored grownup discourse of this kind; he and his friends knew, in their hearts, that war was adventure and heroism and as such was to be encouraged; grownups managed to make it sound as dull as old bread. So Charles sat at the piano, reprising the day’s lessons with the diligence of one who knew no better, when he sensed he was being watched. He craned around in his stool, and saw a boy outside the window, looking at Charles as if he were something wonderful.
He was golden, or that’s how it seemed. He wasn’t golden-skinned, nor was he exactly golden-haired. He didn’t glow from within. But it was as if the light that shone on that boy came from a different sun, some majestical orb burning brighter and more beautifully than our own. The rest of the world shared an indifferent spring day in Kilburn, but that boy lived in midsummer.
Charles felt silly, and self-conscious. He grinned and pressed a key, and as the note rang out, the boy outside the window grinned back at him, and seemed to laugh. Charles replied with an easy peal of laughter, then turned back to the piano guiltily as his mother’s reprimand rang up through the floorboards. Time to go home. He stood, and turned back to the window to say goodbye to his new friend. The window was empty, looking out onto the usual prospect of rooftops and attic casements.
A long time passed before Charles considered anything odd about this.
***
One week went by.
Charles had another piano lesson. He wondered idly whether he’d see the boy again that evening.
He lifted himself onto the piano stool, peered hopefully at the Mendelssohn in front of him, and began to play.
Up to that point, Charles had been a conscientious student; he had learnt what Mr. Walgrave had considered fitting for a boy of that age (ten) and aptitude (modest). He had learnt no more than he had been taught and had made some progress.
Tonight, though, it was different. Mendelssohn’s original piece was recognizably in there, true, but Charles picked it up and moved with it, varying the theme, now tender laced with melancholy, now mournful but with an undercurrent of hope. It was music that seemed to speak to the listener, that seemed to take the disparate plinking notes of a lived life and sweep them up into something grand, something with purpose. Sitting in that room, and listening to that music, Mr. Walgrave felt that he was being told something, and that it made sense. That everything would make sense, if only Charles would keep playing the music.
He played for three minutes and forty seconds. The silence that followed his playing lasted a full ten minutes, in which Mr. Walgrave searched for speech and Charles grew steadily pinker, wondering if he’d done something wrong.
“How… how did you do that?” Mr. Walgrave eventually asked. Now that the music had stopped, he sounded unsteady. He had a feeling he was out of his depth.
Charles shrugged. “I just played,” he said. Then, nervously, “Was it all right?”
Mr. Walgrave laughed hollowly, then saw the anxiety that filled the boy’s face. “Yes. It was definitely… all right. Definitely.” He sighed. “I think your mother and I must speak.”
They spoke. The conversation went on well into the night behind a closed door, whilst Charles sat at the kitchen table with a jug of squash and a book. He finished one, then the other; then, wearily realizing that the voices in the shuttered living room would likely continue all night, he took himself to bed, leaving the day’s wonder to be raked over by the voices in the living room.
The sudden appearance of a virtuoso is no easy thing for a family to adapt to. When that talent appears overnight, and makes grown men weep, things become even harder. Charles’s sudden mastery of the piano carried a whiff of the vulgarity that always attends the miraculous. He was shunted to a new piano teacher, a grander man altogether; lean and mahogany-faced with flamboyant waistcoats.
The new teacher’s name was Burton Lancaster
It happened that, some time before Charles’s encounter with the golden boy, a young man and a young lady had fallen in love. Though this is something that happens countless times every day, from Kensington to Karachi, this particular young man was a scion of the late Duke of Kent, and the lady one of those hopeful, slightly horsy young things who are released into the London season every year. And, as it was commonly known that the equine young lady’s family were great patrons of music, and as Mr Burton had connections with this tribe, it was a simple matter to suggest that Charles be presented at their wedding. This gave Mr Burton the audience that he felt Charles deserved, gave Charles’s family the chance to bask in reflected respectability and lent the wedding even greater lustre.
So Charles was snatched from his usual shirt and sweater to find sweat trickling down the back of a starched collar and tailcoat, waiting in the nave of St Martin-in-the-Fields on a baking June morning, whilst a grand piano was being manhandled into place. He was to play after the service, as the bride and groom signed the register. The interior of the church was bedecked with flowers of all descriptions; the gardens of Kent
He turned around. In the aisle before him there stood three figures; two tall, one short. And the strangest thing about those three was that, even on a glaring summer’s day, they seemed bathed in a still brighter glow. Charles looked back at the doorway, where the workmen still heaved at the piano, and sweated and swore, but their cries were less immediate now; diminished as if by a great distance or the passing of years. He turned back to the three golden figures. The two tall figures stepped back and slowly, reluctantly, the small figure turned away from them to face Charles.
The golden boy was pale, his eyes reddened, his cheeks streaked with tears. His hair was messed, and a dribble of heavenly mucus quavered on a thread from his chin. He had the awkward, graceless stance that Charles knew all too well from school; the look of one who had been Caught. Charles tried to arrange his features sympathetically; the boy just sniffed, horribly conscious of his wrongness. The boy looked back at the taller of the two figures. He did not speak; his people, Charles dimly realised, shared some communion of purpose next to which speech and language were hopelessly unrefined. However, Charles was a ten year old boy and, as such, there were some situations which he understood without instruction; the boy was pleading, wheedling. “Do I have to?” he was saying. And the relentless answer from the others: “Yes.”
What happened then was something Charles could never straighten out in his memory. The boy reached out to him, that was certain, and the electric blue streak of agony that screamed from his chest; he remembered that much. But some of the details sat uncomfortably and incongruous; the boy could not have slid his hand between Charles’s ribs and removed a silver key. That was impossible. And yet the memory of the boy’s questing fingers searching under Charles’s skin, brushing the pulsing red sac of his heart and closing in on their quarry, then pulling, tenacious like a dentist at a molar; it was there, impossibly vivid.
Whatever it was, the pain was real, and left Charles curled gasping on the church floor. The boy stood over him, remorseful, and put something (the silver key?) into his pocket. He gave Charles a last wan smile, and walked back to the other two figures. Charles picked himself up and started to follow him, but was distracted by a thundering discord from behind him; he turned to see that one final heave had hoisted the piano into place. When he turned back, the three figures were gone, and the light in the nave was the same as that illuminating the rest of London
Charles walked over to the piano, now that the sweating workmen had moved onto the next task of the day. It was Mr. Burton’s piano, the one he’d been using for over a month, and yet now the keyboard stretched out in front of Charles like an unmapped country. He touched a key experimentally, and a note rang out. It sounded unfamiliar, an intractable stranger to Charles. He ventured a chord, but only succeeded in creating a jarring cacophony that attracted a disapproving glance from one of the ladies who attended to the flowers. He realised then that there would be awkwardness at the wedding, and embarrassment. His mother and aunts would be distraught, words would be had and their dreams of respectability would become a little more remote. But that morning, perched on his stool on a carpet of pollen, Charles could only think of the boy who walked in sunshine, of the gift that he brought him, and of those who made him take it back.
