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mind into a sexier key, like, say, F-sharp. (Sorry! An unworthy pun. But I mean! – the Schumann pieces were called Romances . That’s one reason I picked them.) But no. ‘I’m okay if you are,’ said he, and took to tootling again.
    His concentration was infuriating, his tenacity exhausting, his absorption in his playing – well, there’s the rub, you see.
    When I told Izumi about it afterwards, she said, ‘Hito-o-norowara, ana-futatsu.’
    ‘O yes?’
    ‘Means: When you put curse on another, two graves will wait in cemetery.’
    ‘Well, thanks!’
    But she just laughed in her Japanese way, hand over mouth, and said, ‘You set trap for him, and he trapped you. Isn’t that right?’
    And it was. I can even tell you the moment it happened.
    There we were, after two hours of o-no! and no-no! , getting on nicely-nicely-thank-you, when suddenly the clouds parted in the sky, the setting sun came swanning in through the french windows and picked out like a spotlight the thin length of Will, in his floppy white T-shirt and sloppy light-blue jeans, his music propped against a pile of books on top of the piano, his fine long fingers dancing a jig on the black rod of his oboe, his succulent lips embracing the reed, his cheeks forming peculiar curves and crevices as he puffed and sucked, his deep hazel eyes focused through his glasses intently on the score, the whole of him, body, mind and soul, totally absorbed, totally engaged, all of his self completely at one with what he was doing. And:
    He was so unbearably beautiful, so adorable, so completely himself, I couldn’t take my longing eyes off him and as a result lost my place, tripped over the keys, stumbled to a stop, and fell passionately in love.
    Love me do
    How scornful I’d always been of ‘soppy romance’, of saying it with flowers, of candlelit dinners, of whispered lovey-dove, of moonlight mush, of secret swapping of amorous tokens, of all things valentine. She speaks, O speak again, bright angel! All that Romeo and Juliet stuff. Yuk yuk, puke puke, excuse me while I slash my jeans with a Stanley knife. I knew girls were supposed to like it, but I didn’t. Or perhaps I only pretended that I didn’t. As a kind of protection? What you can’t have you pretend you don’t want. What you long for the most, you scorn the most.
    But there I was, in a moment, in a flash, suffused withsymptoms of seduction: flushes of hot sweats, dizziness of the brain, yearnings of the lips, hastings of the heart, pricklings of the breasts, churnings in the belly, weakness in the knees, wobbles in the legs, tinglings in the inner thighs, liquid fire gorging my vag, heaving of sighs. And afterwards: sudden loss of appetite, inability to sleep or to concentrate on anything other than the object of desire, imagination breeding fantasies of what might be, could be, was wished for, and an insatiable need to wallow in the very poetry that had so far received only my disdain: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? If thou must love me, let it be for naught Except for love’s sake only, My true love hath my heart and I have his, How I do love thee, Let me count the ways …
    What’s more, I couldn’t keep news of my in-loveness to myself. I just had to tell someone. Not Doris. Not yet. I didn’t want adult advice, didn’t want help, especially didn’t want an I-told-you-so look in her eyes. There’s nothing more irritating than being told you’re doing precisely what you said you’d never do and were told you certainly would. Older people – relatives and friends at least – should have the decency to pretend they never ever thought such a thing.
    I told Izumi. She was glad, as a best friend should be, and envious too, which pleased me. She was without a boyfriend at the time. She was generally agreed to be the most beautiful girl in our year. But she found most Western males too aggressive, too harsh and loud, too in-your-face, as, she said, Japanese women often do. Also