Page 73 of Prince of Masks
I hesitate my fingers over the keys. “I haven’t practiced them.”
Father leans his temple onto his fist. “Practice now.”
It’s not an order. Not spoken firmly, his gaze isn’t a sword swerved at me. It’s just family night in the drawing room.
These nights, I feel that they love me best.
I play. Poorly, uncertainly, but I work my way through a melancholic score in the book, not the creepy, thrilling melody I have dog-eared to practice, tomaster.
Mother won’t like that one.
She does enjoy this melody, enough that she asks me to play it again—and I do, twice more, until I let my fingers slip away from the keys and draw back from the piano.
Oliver turns his eased gaze to me, and I think fleetingly of the soothing shade of aloe vera for his eyes. “That is a new favourite of mine.”
Father—one hand on Mother’s sock-clad feet, the other lounged over the arm of the sofa—hums a soft sound of agreement.
Mother turns her face to me. “What is it?”
“Just a film score,” I say and drop into a plush, upholstered armchair. “One of the most famous film composers of all time, actually.”
There’s no answer, not from any of them.
The snobbery in my family runs deep, like so much does, as deep as our elite blood. And that bleeds out of ancestry, into the arts. They don’t quite consider film composers to be worthy of their own genius.
Films aren’t often encouraged at home.
There is a television in the rear living room, a small room at the back of the house, where the draught means that even blankets and thermals don’t soothe prickled flesh.
The room isn’t often used. But when it is, it’s for one of the DVDs on the shelf, a collection of classics, and each one of them directed by a witch.
In the days I wander London, I sometimes stop in at the pictures and watch a movie or two. I love them. But they have no solid place in my life.
I have no cell, two friends, few films. Just books that Mother might steal and destroy then blame it on a servant, and music.
Beyond films and books, my true escape is the piano.
“Now you have my mind on a film,” Oliver says, but his voice is distorted by a yawn rising through him. He shields his face and lets it ripple over him.
“That might be nice,” Mother agrees after a moment. “What film are you considering?”
I’m so sunken into the delightful armchair that, as I throw a glance at the mantel-clock and note that it’s not even eight o’clock yet, a flicker of surprise passes me.
Oliver suggests, “Cléo de 5 à 7.”
Mother’s agreement is blatant as she starts to scoot off the couch.
I wear a small smile the whole walk to the TV room, but that smile grows, tugs at the corners, when Mother orders us fresh popcorn (unsalted, for me) and fruit platters.
I am sick of fruit.
But I rug up with a blanket, and enjoy a cosy night with my family, watching one of our favourites.
It’s nights like these I think my family not so bad.
That maybe I’m one of theverylucky ones.
It won’t last.
