The year I turned 13, I met Miss Camille Honeyghan, the woman I considered the Great Love of my Life.
I had just advanced to third form at St Francis High School for Boys and like most chaps my age, had begun showing an interest in sports. I was considering trying out for some team sport or other, at which I could perhaps make my mark. I was, by no means, a particularly gifted athlete, but I feared the dreaded label of ‘sissy’ given to boys like me who were considered brainy. I decided, along with my mates Rat and Chino, I would go out for the school’s junior soccer team.
This idea, however, was met with strong resistance from my mother and my maternal grandmother whose house we lived in at the time. Rough-and-tumble contact sports were dangerous, my mother told me. My grandmother piped in, revealing their plans to steer me along a course of gentility and culture. It was decided: I was to be privately tutored in piano in the afternoons after school.
By one Miss Honeyghan.
I was mortified. I couldn’t play soccer, and to add insult to injury, I had to spend my evenings playing piano with some old spinster woman. They might as well have dressed me up in a tutu and left me to open ridicule in plain view of my friends.
On the evening of my first piano lesson, I dragged myself along the broad tree-lined street that led to the music teacher’s sprawling, ancient ivy-covered house, a few blocks away from my home. It was early autumn; the leaves of the trees in the yards had begun to yellow and fall, and the evenings were becoming cool.
I endured the arduous forty-five-minute wait alongside a little girl with blond pigtails who inspected me curiously from behind thick, Coca Cola bottle lenses, and an older boy with greasy hair who was afflicted with extreme flatulence. We were seated inside a sitting room, dazzling white with light from a bank of open windows. Fluttery white lace curtains billowed upward, bringing to me the smell of sachets of lavender tucked away in dresser drawers in bedrooms around the house, as the sound of disembodied piano scales, which sounded painfully like tiny animals being strangled, filtered in from the next room.
Finally, the mutilation ceased, and suddenly, materialising in the doorway before me, were the best pair of legs I’d ever seen, showing from beneath a short, gauzy summer dress.
I’m not sure if it did, but I think my mouth fell open. Miss Camille Honeyghan was no blue-haired biddy I had supposed her to be. Standing before me was a young woman — I took her to be not that much older than I; easily 23 or 24. “You’re my new student, aren’t you?” she asked, tilting her lovely head of auburn curls.
I was speechless. She was beautiful with skin the shade of the outside of a perfect honey-glazed Christmas ham. Her large round eyes were a smoky grey and made me think of city streets slicked with rain in the night. When she smiled at me, I felt myself blush. I knew with every certainty that she was the woman who would become my wife. Right there and then I devoted myself to becoming the best student she had ever had and making her fall deeply in love with me.

*
The hazy days of autumn finally rumbled by, to become replaced by ones marked by a frosty nip in the air. My feelings for Miss Honeyghan intensified. Up until that point, girls had always been a mystery to me. Now, whenever she came and stood directly behind me, positioning my fingers carefully over the keyboard so that the fruity smell of her perfume delicately floated up from her bosom to tickle my nostrils, I made an interesting discovery about myself. I wasn’t nearly as sickened by the opposite sex as I had previously thought.
It dawned on me that I should make my feelings known, reveal my intentions toward her. I seized the opportunity one Saturday morning when my mother and grandmother were both gone to the grocer’s. Bundling up in a light jacket and gloves, my wool hat firmly covering my ears, I slipped quietly into the crisp mid-morning air to see her. A picture of her with her golden hoop earrings glinting through the obstreperous clamour of curls around her ears appeared like a gleam in my eye. Not once did it ever occur to me that perhaps she had a personal life outside of teaching the piano to inept children such as myself and that I might be intruding on her privacy.
I rehearsed my speech in my head as I set out to keep my date with destiny. I know I am young in age, but as long as we have love, we have everything. I love you, Miss Honeyghan, and I hope you feel the same way about me.
When I neared her house, I could hear a piano playing. It was a lovely melody. I had become bold with determination. I hastened up the wide front steps. I was about to lift the brass knocker when paroxysms of mirthful laughter erupted from behind the closed door. My hand froze mid-air. Did I detect the rumble of a man’s laughter commingling with her high-pitched tinkle?
I was sinking in mysterious fluids as an inexplicable feeling of dread washed over me. I waded over to a window at the side of the house and peered inside. The only light in the room, usually brilliant with golden sunshine, obtained from a tiny patch of sunlight entering from the half-drawn curtains and illuminated the spot in a far corner where the old piano stood. Two people were seated on the stool — completely naked. Miss Honeyghan’s hand was around the waist of a man whose fingers flicked gaily over the keyboards. I could not see his face, but I noticed his skin was the colour of coffee grounds.

*
I was a college graduate when next I saw Miss Honeyghan again. I had just returned from a job interview at Sterns, Sterns and Mulligan, one of the most prestigious law firms in Oxham.
It was late spring, and the agreeable weather made everything luminous and cheery. I was mushed up together with an enthusiastic herd of sunworshippers on the piazza of an outdoor café and sipping ice-tea and nibbling on a triangular wedge of corned beef-on-rye. I looked up and there before me, on the other side of the street, was Miss Honeyghan. She was staring into a shop window, her beautiful head, its fraying topknot still dutifully in place, tilted in deep concentration. When a moist wind whipped up, the clingy fabric of her dress moulded itself to her rounder, more perfect figure. She was still as desirable as she had been 10 years before.
I saw her in profile, but the rich deep gold blush of her skin had been indelibly stencilled on my mind. With a thrilling start I realised that I still yearned for her, more passionately now that I had become a man.
An innate sense of melodrama began urging me toward what I thought might be kismet. I was now of an age where an affair between two consenting adults such as us would no longer be inconceivable. So hurriedly I settled the bill, snatched up my briefcase and bounded across the street.
She was still inspecting that article in the shop window as I neared her, the scent of her perfume calling back to mind a simpler time. Then, slowly she turned her head — not in my direction though — and hurriedly I walked on by, not a hair’s breadth away from her on that shiny sidewalk there in that curious trembling spring air.
I had been hurt by her once before. Life had taught me that lost love was rarely ever rekindled. The future now beckoned. By this time, I was seeing the girl who would eventually become my wife. The treasured memories, the invaluable lesson Miss Honeyghan taught me in the appreciation of a woman’s rare beauty would forever be locked within me and remain untarnished and forever a part of the indestructible past.