The Sugar Planter's Daughter by Sharon Maas Page A

never knew I’d be good in the kitchen!’
    There she was again, fishing for compliments, and of course Mama took the bait this time.
    â€˜Yes – Winnie was always more of a dreamer, a musician. Do you still play, Winnie?’
    Winnie’s face fell. ‘No, Mama. In fact I left my violin here – we don’t really have room for it at George’s place. But anyway, I’m so busy.’
    â€˜Well, you shouldn’t let your talent go to waste. We’ll have to do something about that one of these days – I’d love to play a duet with you again.’
    And so the conversation turned to music, of which I know nothing. There it was again, the favouritism. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t have a musical bone in my body, and that Winnie and Mama could get so carried away by Beethoven and all those boring German composers. Mozart of course was Austrian, and it didn’t help that Mama came from Salzburg, his birthplace. I supposed we would all be subjected to after-dinner symphonies from now on.
    Mama and Winnie, of course, had always been avid musicians. I remembered well those days when we were children, how the two of them would play duets: Mama at the piano, Winnie with her violin. I had stifled my yawns and survived those evenings. But now they were beyond eager to play again, and, it turned out, Clarence had learned to play the cello, and he was a musical aficionado, and he could keep up with the tedious talk. They did try to engage George in the conversation – apparently he played the banjo, and had a nice singing voice – but Mama and Winnie and Clarence, of course, played at a higher musical level than George and, with their talk of Mozart and Bach and concertos and symphonies and chamber music and major and minor keys and so on, soon left him behind.
    I wondered how George would take to this side of Winnie. Of course, as a darkie he lacked that culture, that refinement of taste, and that was one thing he and I might have in common. Mama always used to say I wore armour over my heart because I didn’t appreciate the subtleties of good music. But it just came down to taste, and music was just one way for Mama to dismiss me as a philistine and prefer Winnie. And now I didn’t have Papa, for whom I could do no wrong.
    It was clear that not even Clarence would stand up for me. Now the three of them launched into a deep discussion about Russian composers and all I could do was wrinkle my nose to show my boredom. Again I glanced at George; he was pretending to follow the musical conversation and show deep interest in the nuances of Tchaikovsky, but I would have bet anything that he was just as uninterested as I was. I managed to catch his gaze, and rolled my eyes. He understood my meaning immediately, because the ghost of a smile touched his lips and though he looked away again I knew I had found an accomplice of sorts.
    Covertly, I inspected him, and I had to admit he was not a bad-looking fellow. He was tall and rangy, and had a certain awkward charm and grace of movement, though at the moment he was struggling with the cutlery. His eyes were fixed on Winnie, who was secretly showing him which knives and forks to use – I wondered if she had tried to cue him with the soup and he had missed it. Now he was almost dainty in the way he cut his meat and pushed it on to his fork. He had a long neck, slightly prominent cheekbones and a high forehead, and mossy black hair clipped close to his head like a cap, curving around his face in what the Germans called Geheimratsecken – a word that literally and rather poetically means ‘secret councillor corners’ but translates to the rather mundane ‘receding hairline’ – his high forehead going deep into his skull on the left and the right, giving him an air of intellectuality. I did remember him saying he had once won a scholarship to Queen’s College, the best boys’ school in the