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horrible.
    After a minute, I break down. My brain is simply powerless to move my fingers. I sit with shoulders slumped and hands dead in my lap.
    There’s nothing to be done but have another go. It’s not as if I have anything to lose. “I’ll try it again.” I steel myself for another disaster. Before starting, I turn round to look at her.
    But she is no longer in the armchair. Silent as a cat, she has moved to stand at the window, staring out over the fields. A perfect picture of beauty, framed by the lime-green paint of the music room walls. “Take your time,” she says.
    A deep breath. I breathe in, breathe out, and then take my red polka-dot handkerchief to wipe my fingers. For a few seconds I’m able to focus on the piano and forget the goddess who is standing so close. I start to play. Badly and without emotion, like an ill-tuned machine, a score of missed notes along the way. At least I manage to complete this time.
    I lift my fingers gently from the keys. My legs tremor with delayed shock against the piano-stool.
    “Very nice,” she says. “You’ve got real potential.”
    In seven years of piano-playing, nobody has ever said that to me before. I blush, the blood coursing into my cheeks and to the tips of my ears. “Thank you.”
    “So where would you like to go this term?” she says, still standing by the window. “What would you like to do?”
    I have not the faintest idea. What I wanted, more than anything else, was an ice-cold shower and time to think. Everything was happening so fast. I was hurtling pell-mell down a toboggan track.
    I stare at my shoes and wish I’d bothered to clean them. “Well . . . ,” I reply. I look at her again, full in the face. I would do anything for this woman; I can deny her nothing. “I . . . I quite liked the piece you were playing earlier.”
    “The Well-Tempered Clavier?”
    I might have heard the name before though I can’t remember it.
    “If that’s what it’s called.” I’m about to wipe my hands on my trousers, but again restrain myself.
    “My favourite,” she says. “Let me play you some.”
    And at this, she bends down by the side of the piano and picks up a leather music bag. It looks like a slim briefcase. There are no locks or hinges, just a flap that loops over the trim brown handles. She pulls out a half-inch thick volume, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Books I and II complete.
    She flicks through the pages. “Forty-eight preludes, forty-eight fugues,” she says. “They’re known as the forty-eight. Something for your every mood.”
    “And that piece you were just playing?” I still found it difficult to look her in the face; I had the perpetual feeling that I was not worthy.
    She claps her hands with delight. “I love that one,” she says, skimming the pages to Prelude 17 in A-flat Major, and then, I still cannot comprehend how, I am sitting in her armchair while she is seated at the piano. Playing The Well- Tempered Clavier . For me.
    I am spellbound, unable to move, barely able to catch a full breath. It is quite the loveliest music I have ever heard.
    The prelude sounds like a babbling brook that ripples and spumes down the side of a mountain before slipping into a sheer, smooth lake. Mesmerising is the only word for it.
    I am overwhelmed; not just by The Well-Tempered Clavier, but by the sight of India’s tanned back, the tresses of hair that curl around her shoulders, and her fingers dancing over the keys. She plays effortlessly. It seems like the easiest thing in the world.
    All too soon, the prelude comes to an end. “I love that piece,” she says. Before I can reply, she is leafing through the music book. “Let me play you some more. Give you a proper taste of The Well-Tempered Clavier .”
    The notes and trills cascade over my head, prelude after prelude, fugue after fugue. All for me. I can only sit back and marvel. This is so far beyond the realms of my previous experience that my brain seems to glow as it stretches to