My favourite piece to play on the piano in the Music Room was something called ‘Plaisir d’amour’. It was more or less respectable — call it semi-classical. I think it was a proper piece of old-fashioned court music, re-hashed for the folk craze then in full swing. Joan Baez seems the right name in this context. I think she was the guilty party.
Once, though, while I was playing ‘Plaisir d’amour’ on that piano, a choir of little matrons formed up behind me, three of them, and started crooning, ‘’cos I can’t … help … Falling in Love, with, You …’ It’s the same tune, or near enough. I think it was re-vamped (re-re-vamped, really) and given new words for an Elvis Presley film. Hearing the joy in those little matrons’ voices made me want to give it all I had, and so I played the tune again from the top, somehow managing to ignore the pounce of pain in my back.
The Wrigley was an altogether superior item to the E&J, in terms of speed and reliability, but it had one major draw-back. You could easily swing the foot-plates of the E&J to one side, so as to have access to the piano pedals. The Wrigley was a much sturdier piece of equipment, without being highly strung. It could move at a hell of a lick, though the reflexes of the staff were disappointingly swift and I hadn’t yet scored any direct hits. They all took evasive action, as if they’d taken a special course in wheelchair avoidance. If I’d managed an impact, the effect would have been considerable, for just the same reason that the Wrigley hampered me so much at the keyboard. Its foot-plates were rigid. There was no possibility of approaching the piano’s controls. At a posher school, of course, I might have had a crack at a grand piano. Everyone knows grands have more leg-room.
Quite apart from its effect on any listeners I might have, ‘Plaisir d’amour’ could put me into a trance. Luckily for me, the bass part didn’t play chords all at once. They were broken up in triplets, and since the tempo was slow I could strike them one by one without straining my left hand. Then my right, for all its inadequacies, could float the tune on top. When the sustaining pedal was down, everything blended into a coloured pattern you could almost see. Without Roger Stott (or some other stand-in) to hold that pedal down, it was a futile exercise. The level of beauty did a nose-dive. I might just as well have been a chicken pecking at the notes. The Wrigley brought any number of improvements to my life, but it blighted my little career as a pianist.
I’d already noticed that Luke always seemed to turn up when I started playing ‘Plaisir d’amour’. If he was the genie of the school, then that tune was the rubbing which called him out of his magic lamp. I dare say that comparison came to me because we had done Ali Baba and the Forty Wheelchair Thieves as our school play one year.
He had wanted to learn to play ‘Plaisir d’amour’ himself, so I reversed my wheelchair out, to let his in, but I couldn’t seem to teach him and after a while he asked me to start playing again. The Sunday after our mystical moment by the serving hatch, I was playing the piano in the Music Room and mourning the decline in my performing skills.
Plaisir d’amour
I started playing ‘Plaisir d’amour’ without even knowing I was doing it. Before I had finished the first verse Luke was sitting beside me. He put a gentle hand on my shoulder and said I should stop playing. He could see that I was in pain. This was a side of him I hadn’t seen before.
I explained the draw-back of the chair, and how it was cheating us both of the sounds we wanted to hear. He thought for a moment and then said, ‘Do you think you could manœuvre yourself so you’re sitting on my lap? I know my chair doesn’t have arms, but I promise to hold you safe.’
I was a bit doubtful, but I was also flooded with memories of sitting on laps as a little boy, and how sad I was when the doctor said I wasn’t allowed to do it any more. I looked at those wonderful legs in their black trousers with the permanent crease, and I found myself saying, ‘Well, we won’t know if it works unless we try it, will we? I must admit, it would be a relief to be able to play without getting back-ache.’ It wasn’t every day I got the chance to be the Sit-Upon Boy.
Luke positioned his chair in front of the piano and put the brake on. I moved mine clear of the piano and locked the wheels in position. I was thrilled and frightened by the prospect of transferring onto his lap, but the fear soon left me. I didn’t have to totter more than a few inches before I felt his strong arms holding me.
His lap was on a gradient and I realised that with luck I would be able to adjust my sitting height by which part of it I sat on. I came down carefully at about the mid-point of his thighs. It was a perfect piece of upholstery, positively the Rolls-Royce of laps, but when he moved forward I still couldn’t get my foot to wedge the sustaining pedal properly.
‘I think if you could pull me up and back about another inch, Luke,’ I said, ‘I’ll be as snug as a bug in a rug.’ This had been one of Gillie Walker’s favourite expressions, and of course I was using childish language to camouflage an adult yearning. He put his arms round me and pulled me back onto his lap a little more. This position was higher, and this quadrant of his lap a lot softer, but still I couldn’t address the pedal properly. Now I asked if he could move the whole chair backwards and then forwards again so I could have another go. He released the brakes and slowly slid the Chair — Luke — John complex backwards before surging softly forward again. The position we reached was almost ideal. My foot had been too far from the pedal, then too near it, but it just dropped down perfectly. The sustaining pedal was on and I could feel that my bum ended where Groin Hillock began.
‘I need to be just a little higher,’ I said. ‘Any chance you can pull me back just another half-inch?’ Luke pulled me further onto his lap and then every part found its place. Luke’s unique heat-generating crotch exerted gentle pressure beneath me.
‘Now just play,’ he said in my ear. ‘I’ve been wanting to hear it like this for a long time.’
Snakes’ tongues sampling the breeze
And so had I. My left hand went into the rhythm of the 1-2-3, and as the little waltz started its lilt, Luke’s wonderful hand came over to my crotch and gave gentle squeezes in time to the tune. The sun shone through the windows and the notes were properly sustained for the first time.
The tune went round again, but already it sounded different. I thanked God that I had rejected my new grey corduroys in favour of some old black flannels, even though their crease couldn’t compare with Luke’s. Their Velcro would yield at a touch, almost at a thought. Velcro is tantric. After a few more refrains, I seemed to hear lower notes in the waltz, a sort of basso profundo oom-pah-pah as I felt his cock swelling a little more into the crease of my bum. Sonorities and sensations changed places, as if the piano had turned into a vast theatre organ. I marvelled that as Luke’s member rocked in place, it kept such perfect time with the bass notes under my fingers. The tune spiralled onwards by itself. I lost all idea of being responsible for it. In fact I stopped playing — ‘I’ stopped playing — but those fingers kept on striking the correct piano notes, and the right foot maintained its engagement with the sustain pedal.
When I say ‘he squeezed my crotch’, ‘he stroked my balls’, all that is defective description. Luke’s hand was like an Eastern musician, who would think it rather unsophisticated to play a note directly. When I struck the A above middle C on the keyboard, I produced a note approximating to 440 hertz, the imprecision due only to the tuning of the instrument. Luke’s hand was doing something altogether more artful, withholding a note till I could think of nothing else. It would be clumsy, misleading, far too bald, to say simply ‘he touched me’ in this place or that.