A quick glance around us confirmed that, while some people had chosen to stand by the railing, others had brought cushions and blankets of their own. No wonder Ellery liked it here—it was its own secret world.
After a moment or two, I lay down beside her and rested my head against her shoulder. Considering we were about to spend an hour or more on a stone floor, it was pretty comfortable, and I could still see through the gaps in the railing—mainly the arches on the other side of the gallery, which shone faintly gold, and the strange disks hanging from the ceiling.
“It’s like an alien planetscape,” I said, pointing.
“They’re for the acoustics. Apparently, there used to be an echo, so they put those up in the sixties.”
It made sense. Giant floating ceiling mushrooms: the solution you’d come up with if you were high on LSD and sexual liberation.
Various noises floated up to us: the jingle-thonks of an orchestra getting ready and the rustle-creaks of an audience settling down. The lights slowly began to dim.
“Hang on.” Ellery thrust a bundle of papers at me. “I brought you a libretto.”
“You wha—”
And then a deep voice broke across the darkness: Once upon a time, where did this happen? Was it outside or within? Once upon a time, there was an old story. But what does it mean, my lords and fine ladies? The song begins and you watch me, watching you, the curtain of your eyelids raised. But where is the stage? Is it outside or within us, my lords and fine ladies?
The music crept through the words, twisted round them like ivy. A gathering sense of foreboding, sobbed softly over cello strings. Then clarinets…violins…and, oh, I was there. In a dark castle, where the walls wept, and the air tasted of blood. It turned out only the prologue was in English and the rest was…um…something else? But Ellery was right, I didn’t need the libretto. Not when I had two voices and a whole orchestra to tell me a too-familiar fairy tale of love and pain.
Despite being up in the gallery, I didn’t feel far away from the music at all. I felt surrounded by it. Suffused by it. Like I’d taken emotional heroin and nothing I would experience from this moment forward could ever be so pure a hit. It was perfect, it was overwhelming, it was ridiculously fucking numinous.
The bit in the middle, when Judith opened the fifth door to reveal Bluebeard’s kingdom, and the orchestra just…exploded—as if the music itself was light—and the mezzo-soprano hit a note I had no idea human beings were capable of producing, I honestly thought my heart would burst. And, afterward, when the sixth door revealed a lake of tears, I started crying too, almost without realizing I was.
I liked it, is what I’m saying.
And, when it was over, and Judith had taken her place among the other wives, and everything was dark again, there was this moment of absolute silence.
Followed by a storm of stamping. And then rapturous applause.
I lay back and tried to remember how to do ordinary things like breathing and thinking and functioning.
Ellery still had her eyes closed, one arm flung above her head. There was something oddly abandoned about the pose. Not exactly sexual because, God knows, I didn’t want to think of Caspian’s sister like that. But content maybe?
“Well?” she asked.
I gave a shaky laugh. Because there was only one answer really. “It was so good I nearly peed my pants.”
“Come on.” She grabbed my hand. “Let’s get out of here before we get Debussied. Can’t stand that syrupy shit.”
* * *
I was slightly dazed as I followed Ellery out of the Royal Albert Hall and into the lingering warmth of the night. We wandered silently between the pale white mansions and red-brick towers of Kensington, letting the memory of the music linger.
Next time I paid attention to my surroundings, we were on the Old Brompton Road. This was the closest Kensington got to having a commercial district, but it was still Kensington so that meant incredibly posh flats, boutiques that sold nothing anybody would reasonably want to buy, upmarket restaurants, unnecessarily large branches of Pret A Manger, and somewhere in the middle of it all the pub where Private Eye was founded.
Ellery grabbed my hand and pulled me into a late-opening gelato parlor so dinky that I would probably have walked straight past it if I’d been on my own. The sight of the long counter, with the different ice cream flavors all fluffed up like perfect little clouds, and as bright as birds of paradise, made me legit squeak.
It earned me a dubious look from Ellery. “You okay?”
“OMG”—I flailed like a Disney princess about to go to the ball—“yes yes yes.”
“Because you look like you’re about to die.”
“I have died. And I’ve gone to heaven.”
Ellery was still mid facepalm as I hustled her over to the menu.
“What’s best?” I asked, jumping up and down. “What do you recommend?”
