![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In Regret, Always (ch1)
I'm not sure this is as good as I thought it was when I started, but... well, I'm stuck with it now.
In Regret, Always
Eight years ago, Raoul left a letter for his wife, took Gustave, and set off to leave Coney Island. Now, as the clouds of war hang over France, the echoes of that night still haunt them all.
Ch1: The final wrong
It was still cold in this first spring of the war, despite the afternoon sun, and a bitter wind crept over the Paris rooftops and rattled the long shutters of the Hôtel de Chagny. There was a fire in the grate of the Vicomte’s study, as if to banish for a few final hours the memories of months of rain and freezing mud, and from the mantel above there came the sleepy ticking of the clock; but from time to time, as his pen paused for a moment in its steady travel across the page, the gusts outside seemed to hold the echo of great guns in Champagne and the Ardennes.
Raoul’s face held lines of strain now in addition to the bitter marks that belied his age, and the bright uniform of scarlet and sky-blue that had served France so well in parades and regimental balls had been discarded for the drab blue of this new way of fighting. Every so often, in an unconscious gesture, he would reach up to run two fingers round the inside of his collar. The uniform tunic was trim enough, but it had begun to hang a little loose on his frame, and there were hollows under his eyes that eight days’ leave had done nothing to redress.
The pen paused, dipped, moved wearily on. Brief replies, apologies, invitations declined; Raoul sighed, with a glance at the clock, folded another sheet, scrawled a hasty superscription, blotted it, and thrust the pile aside. One hand reached automatically for the decanter on the corner of the desk. It was empty.
Kept empty, on his orders. Raoul’s mouth twisted a little at his own expense. There was brandy downstairs. He could ring to have it brought up. But most days, second thoughts were enough.
With the ghosts of the past heavy about the white-and-gilt panelling, with the last of his leave ticking inexorably away into the knowledge of what lay ahead, he allowed himself to consider the possibility. Fought old battles all over again in grim, thankless silence, and set the empty decanter gently back onto its tray with a soft click of glass, breathing a little harder than before.
There had been a Boldini portrait over the mantelpiece once, an exquisite, delicate thing he’d had commissioned in the first year of his marriage. The artist had painted Christine in costume as Juliet, shown gazing wistfully from her balcony against a fanciful garden that was at one and the same time clearly a stage backdrop and a scene from a childhood fairy tale. Her lips had been a little parted, as if on the verge of speech, and Boldini had caught that fugitive wondering expression in her eyes. The likeness had been breathtakingly beautiful.
When he’d hung it there to gaze down on him from the wall, he’d still believed that shy look was a smile surprised by love. In the years that followed — as it had yielded on his wife’s face more and more often to a look of shuttered unhappiness — he’d come at last to understand the portrait’s gaze as one of silent accusation.
It was gone now; banished at first to her empty rooms, then gone with so much else of hers, in those years after Coney Island when he’d tried to staunch an open wound with memory and then to cauterise it with obliteration. It made no odds either way. A faint unfaded shadow still clung to the panelling like a ghost where the frame had hung, and that look of reproach still haunted his dreams.
Raoul straightened the glasses on the tray beside the decanter, slowly. Under one there was a dead spider, pathetic and dried. The room had stood unused for months, and there was a war on.
The shutters rattled again sharply against the wind outside, and he thrust back his chair as if to stand; then subsided, yielding the impulse to a tacit, unspoken defeat. Presently he drew up his seat closer to the desk once more, laid a fresh sheet of paper down on the blotter, dipped his pen and wiped it meticulously over and over against the rim of the inkwell, a tiny soft chinking sound against the glass. Embers shifted in the fire with a fall of ash, and Raoul reached up unthinking with his free hand to ease his collar, staring down. But whatever he saw, it was not the blank page in front of him.
Alone with Gustave in a hire-carriage, with the gates of Phantasma falling further and further behind them. Phantasma... the stage... Christine.
My dearest wife— my dearest—
Round and round in his head to the jostling beat of the horse’s hooves, words jolting together until they no longer make any sense.
Little Lotte, I beg you, forgive me—
She will have found that letter by now. Perhaps she is reading it at this minute, her hands touching the page where his had lingered for those few final instants before he left the room.
Left the room. Left Phantasma. Left her behind; kept his word. But it was not for that that he had done it.
For a moment he can see her face as she begins to understand, vivid distress ebbing to disillusionment and shock. Then his mind’s eye shows him that mocking white mask at her shoulder, insinuating, leaning close, and his hands clench at his sides.
Let him explain, then. Let her Angel of Music talk his way out of this one... if he can.
I beg you, forgive me—
A groan escapes him; he bites down on it, manages a smile for Gustave in the half-dusk. The carriage windows are grimy, and the boy’s face is a pale, averted oval in the corner, glimpsed in flickered profile as each street-lamp passes. He has fallen mercifully silent, pulling at a split in the squabs beside him where the seat upholstery is worn and frayed. The small fingers move convulsively, over and over again.
Raoul draws breath to reprimand him. Feels it catch in his throat, and reaches out to pull the boy suddenly, fiercely against him instead. Gustave buries his face in his father’s coat, clinging tightly in response, and Raoul holds him close, trying to stave off the agony of loss.
Just the two of them now. Christine — oh God, Christine.
He has told Gustave she will be coming soon. She’ll meet them on the ship... or maybe she’ll have to stay behind a few days, he doesn’t know for sure. She has to sing, you know, Gustave, it’s very important to her; evasions, half-truths, lies, he rehearsed them all on that endless walk from the dressing-room to find his son. Anything to forestall the tears and the explanations that will have to come.
The backs of his hands still smart from the marks of Meg Giry’s nails where he’d dragged the boy out of her grasp. She’d been taking Gustave out of the building when he found them, the child looking unhappy and hanging back; Raoul has no idea what she thought she was doing, but she’d flown at him incoherently, half-hysterical, telling him he had no rights to the boy— that everyone knew—
From all he could make out it was the same sick fantasy he’d heard last night from him. The same possessive jealousy; he’d seen the way Meg looked at his wife, seen the envy for Christine’s poise and position, and the family security a showgirl like her could never know.
He caught at her wrists and tore her loose as she clawed at him, and left her sobbing on the floor as if her heart would break. He isn’t proud of it. But he’d thought the Girys were his allies, she and her mother, thought they’d understood back there in Paris where the real threat was and where the route to sanity lay, and to meet them again in America working against his wife — courting the favours of their common enemy — was one more tawdry blow to the story he has been telling himself for so long. The myth of heroism, rescue, and the perfect marriage.
Raoul holds Gustave in the stale-smelling darkness of the hire-carriage, feeling the tremor in the boy’s desperate clutch, and imagines that ugly rumour running round Phantasma, slow-moving fury building helpless within him at the thought. Is that what they all see when they look at him, then? His wife — his shy, modest, strait-laced wife — writhing in libidinous lust beneath another man, overcome by sensuous pleasure... another token triumph for the Master of Phantasma? Isn’t it enough to have tricked her here and ensnared her free-will and her happiness in a cloud of illusion without smearing her name?
Only — the thought comes like a leaden balloon, puncturing all the self-righteous comfort of his anger — that’s exactly what he, Raoul, has just done. He has put her there. Pushed her into the Phantom’s bed. And if there are to be any further children —an old pain long denied— then they will be of the other man’s get.
He had made an unforgivable mistake and he is making his penance. One way or another, he chose this...
His own words, haunting him, are irrevocable now; a confession he cannot take back.
Now I must go, our choices are made—
He gave her everything, in those first years, he tells himself stubbornly. He wasn’t ashamed of her or her music — she was an artiste, a great performer, and he wanted the world to know it. He took her all round Europe, from England to the farthest reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and everywhere she sang she was showered with praise. And when their first child began to show he took her home and cherished her, wrapping her in every luxury that love could provide. He had watched her ripen and bloom, as a singer and as a woman. And when the baby was born — after two days of long hard labour that left her white and drained, and frightened him more than he cared to admit — he took the two of them down to Nice with a nursemaid to care for the child so that she could recover.
But after Gustave... things were never quite the same. He knew how much music meant to her; tried to comfort her when she fretted that since the baby she could no longer sing, that her voice had changed. Her body was her instrument, and a singer’s voice was a thing almost outside herself, he knew that, and never laughed at the care she took over wrapping her slender throat against a cold wind, or ordering up the lightest and most nourishing foods from the kitchen to keep the glow in her cheeks and the strength in her firm young flesh.
To Raoul, once the strain of the birth was over, her voice sounded as golden as ever. But he took her fears seriously, engaged a professor so that she could study again, and waited through the long months until she felt she was once more fit to perform. When she told him shyly she wanted no more children — not yet at least, not for a few years, not until she was ready to leave the stage — he gave her that, too, without a moment of dissent. They had Gustave, after all... and in those forty-eight hours of convulsive struggle, banished from her side while she fought pains that racked her without issue, he had understood all too clearly what he might have lost.
Only— it hurt to be treated as if he could not control himself. To see his wife start to stiffen and hold back from the most casual of caresses, as if he were some ravening drunken beast who would encroach upon the slightest encouragement. He’d married an artiste, yes, and he was proud of her; but he’d married a woman, a loving vital creature he could wrap in his arms to murmur nonsense into her hair, and all that was left to him was a doll held rigid by her own sense of honour.
“But... it’s not fair on you if I seem to suggest things,” she had protested in distress, the one time he tried to explain how he felt. And Raoul, his own face flaming, had not been able to find a way to make her understand that frustration was nothing when placed beside the everyday intimacy they had lost. That he would rather hold her close in the knowledge that was all he could have than be stranded in this polite alienated void.
He watched her learn to take delight in Gustave, covering the little boy with kisses. Knew that the two of them shared something from which he was utterly shut out.
Things at home grew strained and distant, and when his cousin Rodolphe de Sessaies invited him on a pleasure-party to Monte Carlo, it was Christine herself who encouraged him to go.
He’d always liked Rodolphe, he remembers now, and in the sunshine of the South and the company of the boy’s carefree young friends the world seemed a brighter place. Christine back in Paris seemed somehow closer to him than Christine near at hand but holding him remote; he forgot his unhappiness, remembered only that he loved her, and sent home a string of cheerful tongue-in-cheek letters poking fun at the sights of the town. With Rodolphe and the rest he took the air on the cliff-tops and mocked gently from a café table at the aging exquisites who paraded the boulevards in the fashions of their youth. He and the others inscribed their names and titles in the book at the casino, admired the adjoining opera hall — own cousin to the Opéra at Paris and resplendent in equal marble glories — gambled a little, laughed a lot, and caused a degree of general disturbance that won them frowns from gamesters in the inner rooms and indulgent smiles among certain dowagers of a sentimental habit.
On the final evening, amid shared hilarity, Raoul staked his pocket-watch against the pearl necklet of Rodolphe’s pretty partner at the tables, won, and carried off the trinket in his pocket to present to Christine on their return home. But it was the shy, sunburnt smile that went with it that sent Christine headlong into his arms.
Things were better between them after that, in some ways at least. When Rodolphe asked him again, he went without a second thought. And again.
Only his cousin’s friends were older now, the gaming more serious, and he began to lose, a little at first and then more heavily. He was a rich man, after all, richer than Rodolphe; he could afford to weather a run of bad luck. Or two.
When his cousin, uneasy now, tried to warn him off, Raoul took it badly. And when he discovered Rodolphe had been talking to Christine — with all the resulting tears, pleas, and unspoken recriminations — then that was the outside of enough. For both of them.
Raoul watches the lights of Coney Island flicker past, and remembers, in excruciating detail, the years that followed, and his own ruinous folly. Folly that has brought him here to this road, with the ashes of his marriage receding further and further behind him...
Gustave raises a pale face and asks, yet again: “Mother is coming soon, isn’t she? If she misses the boat, then she’ll come after us as quickly as she can, won’t she — once the Americans have heard her sing?”
“God knows if she’ll come at all.” Half-truth that is far too close to reality, drawn out of him on a wave of despair. “She’s got every right to hate me now...”
Gustave pulls away, confused, and Raoul curses himself for self-indulgent theatrics that have no place in the child’s hearing. Both his son and Christine have suffered enough from his own self-loathing; in all the bitter lessons of the last twenty-four hours, hasn’t he learnt anything at all?
“Of course Mother doesn’t hate you.” Gustave frowns up at his father, clearly bemused that such idiocy can exist, and draws himself up for a statement of the obvious. “You’re married.”
Which hurts, just now, on levels of which the owner of that innocently juvenile worldview has as yet no idea. Raoul chokes back an overwhelming desire, as so often before, to grab the boy and shake some sense into him until his teeth rattle; finds himself swallowing instead past a sudden thickness in his throat.
“You’re right, Gustave. Your mother never hated anyone... even when they deserved it.”
Not even that one who deserved it of her most — whom Raoul himself has hated, and who deserves it in more ways than she knows. Well, she will know now, Raoul tells himself painfully, know the worst of them both. He has told her everything, in that accursed letter. It’s the last thing he can do for her. And as so often before, it can only bring her pain.
The opera is done; the last notes have been played...
She will hate him now; for all those childish assurances, he can find no doubt of it. And if she does not, then she should.
—So now you know the truth. I could tell you I was too drunk to know what I was doing, Christine, but that would scarcely be an excuse... and in any case it would not be true. I was drunk enough to be reckless, that was all; mired deep in self-pity, as always, and angry at learning the truth behind ‘Phantasma’. If there was any time I should have made a parade of manhood, it was then on that afternoon, when it might have served some purpose at least: I should have raged and stormed and dragged you away from old friends who made it clear we were unwelcome, and a contract that signed us into his power.
But I was too weak to do anything but drown my sorrows. He thought he could buy us both, body and soul. He was right.
If he tries to tell you that I gambled our marriage away to clear my debts, it is not true. I swear it on the memory of all I meant to you once. It was pride, that was all: stupid drunken pride that staked love against your loyalty, and lost.
All those tender promises, all those vows to reform — how hollow they must ring to you now. I chanced everything on one last throw to prove that you were my possession and not his, that you would do what I said because your heart was still mine and you were my wife. And I betrayed that bond in the very act of seeking to test it.
You know better than any how little was left of our marriage before, and how much I have hurt you in these last few years. You have forgiven me so many times already— but this, I think, is beyond any woman’s forgiveness.
I gambled you away, Christine. I staked everything that was most sacred on a bet, one more bet I was sure I couldn’t lose...
I lose too often. You know that, even if I could never admit it. But it is not because I lost that I have to leave you now, for I would have fought him for you until my last dying breath. It is for the final wrong I did you in ever making the bet at all.
If he laid the snare, then I sprang headlong into it. He knows our hearts better than we know them ourselves... perhaps he can make you less unhappy than I. But if I had no right to take that wager, he had still less to propose it.
Be free and choose wisely. Forget me if you can. It is all I have left to give you, and I wish it could somehow be more.
Yours, in regret always,
Raoul.
Regret...
In the Hôtel de Chagny the clock ticked, steadily, and the Vicomte set down his pen with a catch in his breath. The ink on the nib was long since dry, and a trailing blot marred the opening words.
He’d thought he was doing the right thing for all of them; behaving honourably at last, back in a world where those old codes had still held sway. He’d truly believed it was all for the best... and he’d thought it would be that easy.