In Regret, Always (ch4)

[igenlode]

Ironically, although this final chapter is narrated from Christine's point of view it's really Gustave's backstory, just as the previous chapter was as much Christine's backstory as Raoul's...

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Ch 4: Mort pour la France

Paris in the autumn was as busy as ever. The leaves on the trees were dusty as the streets and beginning to turn brown, and the sun through the windows of the tramcar struck hot on Christine’s cheek as it had not done all summer — or perhaps, she thought, adjusting her blue uniform cloak, perhaps it had, and she had not been in any condition to notice it.

She descended from the tram at the corner of the boulevard Mont-St-Fleury with a nod to the lady conductress — the war had changed many things — and began to walk rather slowly towards the little café further down. In the pocket of her dress, behind the red cross sewn at her breast, lay the letter that had brought her here, dragging at her steps like a weight from which she had believed herself cut free. She was tired: too tired to feel anything, she told herself, with a bone-deep weariness born of long nights of strain and endless exhausting days of labour over shattered bodies in improvised wards behind the lines.

There was nothing romantic in nursing; Raoul had been right — poor Raoul! But that reflex jolt of memory was nothing more than a dull echo now.

It was a week ago that the news had reached her, on a grey morning when she had been numbed to all else but the aching need for sleep. For two days and nights they’d been dealing with a rush of casualties from the clearing-stations, and there had been little time for more than a snatched doze for anyone. She’d stood there in the matron’s office, stupid with fatigue, smoothing out the crumpled sheet of paper over and over again before she even registered that it was a letter from her son... or the meaning of that brief formal note.

Madame, I write to inform you that my father, Raoul de Chagny, has been reported killed in action—

A man had died under her hands not half an hour before, a burly Picard brought in with half his jaw ripped away. She’d stared down at those words from Gustave and seen just one more death in a long interminable parade.

“Bad news, I suppose?” Madame Gualtier behind the matron’s desk had been brusque but sympathetic; she’d seen it all before. “I can let you have a couple of days’ leave, but with this latest push we’re run off our feet—”

“There’s no rush, Madame,” Christine had said quietly. The postmark had been ten days old. “Whenever it’s convenient.”

She’d gone back to her quarters with the letter clasped in her hand and fallen asleep for a few blessed hours, and woken to find it still there, in the half-waking dream that her life had become. Poor Raoul, she had thought briefly, when she remembered. And then she had returned to the work where, for the moment, she was most desperately needed, and when she remembered again it had been with a little less of a jolt each time.

Now that Madame Gualtier could spare her, she had her promised leave of absence: two days ‘permission’ in which to return to Paris and attend to the other half of Gustave’s brief message. To this meeting with the son she had lost eight years ago, who had written that letter in a stranger’s hand, and who had been brought up, no doubt, to believe that she had left him and their life of debt to live with a rich man in America...

Without knowing it, she had begun to walk even slower. Down a side-street she could hear children’s voices raised in shrill excitement, and the sound of simulated gunfire. Christine glanced round sharply and caught sight of a miniature stretcher-party advancing, the chief casualty wriggling with vast importance under his blanket and borne up by two acolytes in improvised uniform. A little girl with a blue tablecloth tied round her shoulders over her pinafore was bending anxiously over him, a handkerchief tucked into the back of her hat in imitation of a nurse’s veil.

She looked up, caught sight of Christine in her white dress and cap, and gave her a beaming smile. For the child’s sake Christine forced a smile in return, and quickened her step to leave the street-games behind.

Died for his country... It was the official phrase of condolence. The formula deployed by all the newspapers to honour the glorious dead. Perhaps, she thought, among men of Raoul’s caste it might even have been true. Easier in any case to talk of a swift noble sacrifice than the reality of ruined flesh and rotting wounds, and all the indignities wrought by swift-moving metal when it smashed a man’s life from his bones. Easier not to think of a body one had known in all its vulnerable intimacy: the dusting of firm-springing hairs along her husband’s forearm as he rolled up shirtsleeves in the heat, the little hollow place at the back of his neck as he bent to sponge his shoulders, the faded scar from childhood above his knee... She shut those memories away as she had done with the years at Coney Island. It was over. Done with, for good or for ill. She would not remember the boy she had played with, or the young man who’d set love above life itself... or the husband she’d failed to save, who’d gambled away everything he valued until, in the end, he’d gambled her affections away. She would remember only that she had a son — a son of two fathers, a son of neither — and that in a few minutes’ time she would be face to face with him once more.

The tables outside the café were crowded, and Christine’s heart sank. She was not even sure she would know Gustave when she saw him. Closer now, and closer; what would she do if he was not there? But her feet carried her inexorably on until at last she was hesitating at the edge of the awning, wondering what she should say. Then a young man in black gloves rose to his feet and came towards her, and she saw the crepe mourning band on his sleeve and knew before ever he spoke.

“Madame.” Gustave was taking her hand a little awkwardly, with a boy’s stiff bow. “Mother... There’s a back room inside; shall we go in?”

So they were to have a degree of privacy together, at least. She was grateful for that.

Christine followed in his wake as he threaded a way for them through the tables with a neat dexterity she remembered in him as a child. A quick word to the proprietress, majestic of bosom and demeanour behind her counter indoors, and they were ushered into a little back-parlour where the dining-table lay awaiting the cloth and silverware of the evening, and an array of plates was piled neatly on the buffet by the wall. The woman lingered until Gustave slipped a few coins from his pocket into an expectant hand; then she closed the door, not without a parting glance bright with curiosity.

There was a moment of strained silence. Since Gustave showed no signs of drawing out a chair for her, Christine took one herself, stripping off her gloves and laying them down on the table with composure. The boy, flushing, did the same.

He was slim and dark, with a pallor that bore no hint of Raoul’s warm blood from the Midi, and his hair, trimmed short and slicked down firmly for this meeting, gave evidence of an untamable wave that vividly echoed her own. He had been a beautiful child; he would turn heads as a man, she thought, searching with a pang in those half-formed features for traces of ugliness made right. For the strong line of temple and ear no longer marred, and a broad brow unmasked and unmarked by arrogance.

The resemblance to herself was very strong. So strong that it must at times have seemed hard to bear.

“I got your telegram, Mother.” The quick colour had ebbed in his face, leaving his strained pallor more obvious than ever. He would be alone in that house now as never before — alone with his grief and the weight of the title and all it entailed, too old to be comforted as a child and too young to take on the manhood suddenly thrust upon him. Christine laid her hand impulsively over his, and felt him tense up as if to pull away. She held on.

“I’m sorry. I would have wired sooner, but your letter took days to find me, and then I had no time to compose a reply.” She released his hand. He had set his hat down on the table, and rather than meet his eyes she found herself studying the black band it bore.

“And in any case...” She drew breath; came out with it resolutely anyway. “There would have been no place for me at that funeral.”

A divorced wife did not make a show of mourning in the family chapel, in front of the empty coffin of a man lost amid the mud and shells of Champagne far away. In due course there would be another plaque on the wall, with her own name — as beloved wife and mother — discreetly omitted from the record of that long line. And to the de Chagny family and all their acquaintance it would be as if she had never existed at all.

Gustave said nothing. But they both knew it was true.

“They said...” He was looking down at his hands on the table. There was an ink-stain across one finger. It made him seem more of a schoolboy than ever. “They said... he was shot in that first advance. When you were in the hospital, you didn’t— I don’t suppose you—”

“I heard nothing. Nothing at all.” Christine’s voice tightened. “No tales of heroism from wounded comrades, no last-minute reconciliation at the dying man’s pillow — that would be too much of a coincidence even for some tale in the illustrated papers. Reality isn’t that convenient, Gustave. Hundreds of men passed through my hands in that hospital, and not one of them knew me, or spoke any word of your father.”

It had slipped out through old habit before she knew what she was saying. Now it lay there in the air between them in mute accusation.

“Only he wasn’t, was he?” Gustave’s words were quiet, but very deliberate. “Thanks to you.”

He looked up, his dark gaze level and for the first time shockingly self-possessed. “The law is very convenient, isn’t it? He acknowledged me at birth; that made me his heir beyond any possibility of disinheritance, whatever question might later arise. You’d duped him into giving his name to your byblow, which meant you’d bestowed me safely, whatever might happen to you if and when the truth should come out. The truth: that I’m the son of a moment’s weakness with a monster to whom I owe nothing at all!”

If he meant to hurt her, he had succeeded. Tears stung the back of her throat, sudden, unwanted. “Is that what he told you about me? Is that how he spoke of me, then, for all these years?”

“Spoke of you?” Her son’s eyes beneath their dark smudged brows were steady on hers. But they were unmoving and a little too bright. “Oh no, Mother, it was your own letters that told me that. We never spoke of you. We never spoke of you — even when your absence hurt the most.”

He stood up abruptly, using his young height to tower over her, and the ghost of anger swirled about his shoulders like a black cloak.

“Do you have any idea what it was like to learn the meaning of the word ‘adulteress’ at the unforgiving hands of your schoolfellows, at the age of ten? To come home in tears to a silent house, and the helpless pain of a father who himself faced the same sneers, day in, day out? I was eleven years old before I discovered that other people’s newspapers didn’t have holes in where stories of your exploits had been cut out — and saw for the first time what he’d tried to shield me from.

“You know, I was foolish enough to believe in ghosts and magic, and all the stories you used to tell. I used to dream that you were under an enchantment, imprisoned behind the sorcerer’s walls, and that if only a shining prince could ride across the ocean and awaken your heart, you’d remember all about us and come back and be my mother again.”

His young face was twisted in mockery at his own folly, and without thinking Christine reached up to him as if to comfort that long-lost child. “Oh, Gustave...”

But he drew back from her in a gesture that was all Raoul, and turned aside.

“Only my father was no shining prince.” The words were a whispered acknowledgement. “He was a drowning man struggling for both our sakes to keep his head above the water... and I didn’t understand why he could not or would not fight to save you. There’d be a little draught like a hand along my cheek when no-one was by, or a whisk of skirts up ahead in an empty corridor, and I was sure it was a sign your spirit was out there somewhere, trying to come home.”

He dropped back heavily into his chair, head bent as if studying the grain of the table in front of him, like a schoolboy who will not meet his teacher’s eye. His voice was very low.

“Your suite of rooms was shut up and no-one ever went inside. Only... sometimes, when the house was quiet and everyone was asleep, I would lie awake and think I heard footsteps moving there behind that locked door, and the sound of weeping, very low and far away. I was a child missing his mother. I knew for certain it was you.” One finger was tracing a pattern on the table-top, over and over again. “It wasn’t until later on, when I was older, that it dawned on me who it was I’d really heard... In the spring when I was twelve, I took the key from his desk drawer. I’d been daring myself to do it for a long time, but I still remember the feeling of guilt as I crept upstairs, and the weight of it burning a hole in my jacket pocket.

“I don’t know what I thought I’d find in there; I was too old by then to believe I’d somehow be able to reach you in any way, but all the same I had to know. I couldn’t go on pretending that you’d never existed — that I’d never watched you dressing your hair for parties in front of the mirror, or curled up with you on the day-bed to read stories or tell tales. So I turned the key in the lock.

“I thought it would creak and groan, but I used both hands and it went round easily, as if you’d never been away. I crept inside before anyone could come past and catch me, ashamed of myself but knowing I couldn’t turn back. I’d spent too long nerving myself up to do this. Father was busy with callers for once downstairs, and it might be ages before I got such a good chance again. I shut the door behind me, and stood there with my back to it, hardly able to breathe.

“Nothing had changed. It was like waking up in a memory I thought I’d forgotten, as if at any minute I might turn my head and you’d be there, reaching down to set straight the tumbled brush on the dressing-table or the scarf abandoned across the back of a chair... Only everything was faded and old, and there were dust-motes dancing in the sunlight through the open shutters. Your portrait was there, the one that used to hang downstairs. Father never spoke about it, and I’d never known where it had gone; but it was shut away in your rooms, as beautiful as ever, gazing down from the wall with that little dawning smile like a Madonna in a shrine.”

He hesitated. “You could see where he’d tried to keep the room clean, with clumsy care. And... and there were fresh flowers in the vase beside your bed.”

Oh God, Raoul... Something tightened inside her, half-anger, half-pain, in a place she’d thought long since numb. She hadn’t asked for this; hadn’t wanted it... But she choked back that moment of hurt — not for her own sake, but for Gustave’s; the boy had broken off, but he looked haunted — and said only, quietly, “Go on.”

“I— I suppose I was in a sort of daze. Everything was so quiet and still, but there was a feeling of someone looking over my shoulder the whole time, and it wasn’t just that I knew I shouldn’t be in there. I wandered round picking things up and putting them down again, trying not to leave any trace, with a whispering unhappiness somewhere just out of earshot in the corners of the room. When I pulled open your handkerchief drawer there was the faintest lingering hint of lavender, and I wondered”—he swallowed—“I wondered if your clothes were still in the wardrobe.

“I used to hide in there, when I was small. Do you remember? I used to bury my face in your dresses hanging there, and pull the skirts about my shoulders, and pretend you couldn’t see me. And the scent of it would be all round me like a drifting embrace, great wafts of lavender, and of silk, and of you. It was dark, and safe... until you came to reach in and catch me, a little boy squealing and laughing beneath his mother’s arm. I’d almost forgotten...

“Only now I was the one outside, alone in your bedroom, and you were gone, and whatever was left in there would only be an empty husk of what I was looking for — what I couldn’t find. It was stupid. I told myself that. But like a sleepwalker I still went forwards, remembering... reaching out to run my hands through those long-forgotten gowns, as the wardrobe door swang back and the sunlight came streaming in.”

He shivered, sharply. “Only there are other things that find a home shut away in the dust and dark. The cloth clung and fell away beneath my grasp like the winding sheet from a corpse, writhing with worms, and I screamed. A great cloud of moths blundered up blindly from the ruin, fluttering and clinging, and to a twelve-year-old child it was as if you’d been eaten up and come back as a swarm of hungry ghosts. I beat at them with my hands and they kept crawling and quivering on my jacket, and they wouldn’t come off. And I couldn’t stop screaming. Not until Father came.”

For a moment, she too could see it: the barren exquisite room, stale with the air of a faded past, the half-grown boy strung up to hysteria-pitch — and the tall figure framed in the doorway. She bit her lip, guessing at the shadow in Gustave’s face.

“Did he... punish you?”

“What? No!” Her son’s head jerked up again with an unfeigned shock that let her know just how very wide of the mark she had been. “He took back the key and got me out of there and calmed down. He must have seen I was crying like some child still in short-coats, but he never brought it up against me afterwards, or breathed a word of blame. Not even that night, when I dreamed of you stumbling dead from that wardrobe in a decayed dress, and woke up screaming again.”

His eyes were dark with something that might have been shame or defiance, and she could find no words. She put out a hand; drew back when he looked at her without moving.

“My father wrapped me in a blanket,” Gustave said steadily, “and sat with me all night in front of the study fire, held in his arms so that he could keep the dreams away. No man should have to play such a part, not for a growing boy — but he nursed me through those hours as close as any mother, and said in the morning only that the fault was his, and that it should never have happened. After breakfast, by silent assent, we stripped your rooms bare and made a great bonfire in the courtyard to burn it all. No more memories. No more shrines. No more reaching out after a time that was gone.

“He had to be mother and father to me both for all those years, as best as he knew how. You think he spoke ill of you; how could he, when he never spoke of you at all? And then you dare try to tell me I was not his son, when I was all he had and he was all I had — and in our lives there was an echoing agony of silence between us where you should have been!”

And yet his very words betrayed him, Christine thought, hurting for her son and his steadfast allegiance. Stubbornness, perhaps, he had learnt from the Vicomte. But that winged gift of phrase was one she knew all too well, and it had not come to him from Raoul...

“Were there no... stepmothers, then, to fill that place for you in all those years?” she said instead, with a certain hesitation, and saw his face harden against her into sudden, cynical adulthood.

“Oh, really, Mother, fishing for scandal? Don’t you think that’s unworthy, even for you? Now, would it be the state of my welfare as a boy that concerns you, I wonder... or that of my father’s bed?”

The ugly words drove colour up into her cheeks with a truth she had not wanted to acknowledge, even to herself, and she caught her breath, letting outrage fuel anger. “Gustave—”

“No, he wasn’t bringing women home, if that’s what you want to know. As for the rest... that’s none of my business. Or yours — least of all yours!”

And that was the outside of enough.

“Listen to me, Gustave. You will not speak to me that way, or to any woman, do you hear? None of this was of my choosing; none of it was by my desire. Raoul took you with him because the law gave him the right, and your father — your true father, the man you hate but whose blood you bear — came after you because he wished to please me. But he was angry, and unskilled with children, and it all went wrong... I never wanted you frightened or injured, and I never wanted Raoul harmed as he was, whatever he may have tried to make you believe. I didn’t feel hate for him and it was not I who decided to abandon our marriage. No-one told me that if I sang one song as I was contracted to do, then my husband would take it into his head to rip my life apart, and claim it was all for the best and done for my sake. No-one asked me if I wanted to be handed off to another man and left behind to make a life for myself as best I could, as a fallen woman in America.

“Those years I spent on Coney Island were one part heaven and one part hell, and the more of the one, the more of the other. I didn’t ask for any of it. For the sin of your birth you have the right to judge me if you wish, but for nothing else. And until the day that you too have fallen in love, my son, you will kindly keep your moralising to yourself!”

The icy tone in that last whiplash phrase was one that she had learned in Phantasma; she saw the boy’s face grow pale then flush up in response, and knew a bitter pang for the vanished years that had made strangers of them both.

“And if I do get a girl,” Gustave said softly, in a voice that shook, “have you asked yourself what kind of heritage I have to offer her? A name to which I have no right. A title I bear by fraud. And a blood-taint of madness and horror. Will our daughters be grotesques, do you think? Will sons of my getting fall prey to murderous rage? What kind of monster am I, Mother? How can I ask any woman to live with the chance of that?”

It was the whisper of unspoken sleepless nights, of a boy facing new fears on the verge of manhood, and anger ebbed as quickly as it had come. And hadn’t she faced that same shamefaced dread every time she had yielded, these past few years? Gustave’s birth had cost her dearly enough; but if she had set their happiness above her art, if she had had the courage to conceive a child with Raoul, at least it would not have brought with it a fresh chance of horrors masked or overt growing within her womb...

The image rose up before her suddenly of the children they might have known — curly-headed daughters, sturdy laughing boys — and shared pain drew a cry from her straight from the heart. “Oh, my dear—”

She held out her arms on impulse; a moment later she had the tall young strength of him wrapped tightly within her embrace.

Her son. Her only son. Her Gustave.

“Forgive me, Mother — I never meant to bring you here to quarrel—” It was murmured into her shoulder in a swift boyish yielding that was all Raoul, and her eyes stung with new memories unseen.

He had slipped off his chair to kneel beside her; she ran a hand gently down his cheek and set him aside so she could rise to her feet, waiting for him to do likewise.

“You said you had a letter for me, I think?” She tried for a businesslike tone, and saw him swallow and do likewise.

“My father. He left me a note with some... some personal words, and this.”

He drew out a sealed envelope from within his jacket, a little crumpled, and held it out. She could see a single word scrawled across the front, hasty and a little irregular. Nothing else. Just Christine.

She’d expected it, of course. It was the errand that had prompted the brief exchange of cables between them to make this appointment, in response to those few curt words at the end of the notification Gustave had sent: a letter to be given directly into your hand at his request...

She’d come with reluctance, but a certain need to know. But now that Raoul’s words were within reach, a wave of rejection rose in the back of her throat.

What use — what earthly use could it be? Hadn’t they done each other enough harm, and hurt each other enough? And wasn’t it just like Raoul, after all, to insist on having the last word from beyond the grave?

If it had not been Gustave standing there, she might have swung round abruptly and walked out, leaving the unwanted legacy for the messenger to do with as he would. Instead, she took the envelope from his outstretched hand with a shrinking she tried not to betray, and turned away to the window, as if to find a better light.

There was a shabby grey courtyard beyond, with linen flapping on a line. Christine gazed out over it, unseeing, while her fingers broke open the flap and pulled out the page within. There had been another letter, once, left behind at Phantasma, and nothing she had thought she’d known had ever been the same again.

My dearest wife—

She’d burnt it. It hadn’t helped. There were words one could not un-read, or forget.

He thought he could buy us both, body and soul. He was right.

Oh Raoul, you fool, why did you do it? Why did you ever do it?

With something like a sob she unfolded the page, and turned it over.

~o~

My dearest—

Perhaps you will never read these words. I am selfish enough to hope not. I want to believe that there is still a chance to make things right. But if you are reading them then I will never see you again... and perhaps that is just as well.

There were times, too many times, when I lashed out to hurt you in order to ease my own pain, and that is an ugly thing to learn of oneself and have to admit. But it was only ever an impulse born of the moment and as swiftly gone. I never wished that your life should be damaged and twisted with mine as it has been.

For a long time I blamed it all on him, but that was not true, was it? For me it has always been only you, but for you it was harder. He hurt you so much I could never understand how he claimed to love you, until I came to do the same...

I see you in every young couple on the street, all those lovers who stroll as we did with her head upon his shoulder, and as they pass I feel the empty ghost within my arm where his entwines around her waist. That stone where you stumbled the first time we walked together — I see it every time I cross the street at that spot, and I think of you. I see you in every turn of the head and every singing line of poetry from your son, Gustave. In my life everything reminds me of you, and yet you are nowhere in it... and perhaps that makes it no very great loss, after all.

There is no glory in death in this war. I know your courage will have taken you to the front lines whatever I might say; if you are reading this, then by now you will know. Will have seen sights no woman should see and no man should be asked to witness. And yet it makes the conflicts in our lives seem so small in comparison.

If we both come through this, then we will be different people. I pray to God that we do, that these words I write now will be burnt and that we can start again. But if not... I don’t want to grieve you, Christine. Just let me love you a little. Now, when it makes no difference.

Yours, in regret,

Always.

Raoul

~o~

Christine stared down at the final words, feeling something contract painfully within her. Her eyes swam for a moment in hot protest.

“He had no right—” The cry was torn out of her unthinking. “No right—”

He had no right to make her care like this. No right to make it hurt all over again, when she had thought herself numb. No right to go away and leave her—

Somehow the paper had crumpled in her hands. She found herself straightening it out with infinite pains, smoothing each crease as she had when coaxing away a frown. But her touch could not reach him; not now, not ever.

“What fools we were, the two of us.” She shut her eyes; felt the silent tears spill over. “Romantic idiots — oh God, Raoul...”

Gustave was at her elbow, a warm presence of soap and pomade and dusty black that made her heart ache within her all over again. She looked up to find her son watching her across all the years that they had lost, with the eyes of a kind, concerned stranger. For a moment she had never felt more desperately alone.

She managed a smile of reassurance, more for Raoul’s memory than for Gustave. He was painfully young, and himself grieving; his lip trembled a little. “Oh, Mother”—it was a sudden outburst—“what are we to do?”

The past was an aching void, and there was nothing to be done. Another tear slid downwards. She paid it no heed.

The war had taken Raoul. It was taking the flower of France. Boys barely a year older than Gustave were being called prematurely to the colours; if the attacks failed again and again, if the Germans clung on until next summer, it would be her son, too, marching off to the training camps. Marching off to be made ready for the merciless machine of mud and disease and suffering...

Raoul was free of that, at least, she told herself, clutching for comfort. Nothing could hurt him now; neither fear nor hunger nor despair. He was free of the war, and of her, and all the dark shadow of the years between.

Only he had not wanted to die. That knowledge broke over her again in a fresh helpless wave. He had clung desperately to the hope of life and that fragile thread between them in which she had no longer believed. The one that plucked now at her heart until she could not bear it.

But it must be borne. Christine located her handkerchief; dried her face defiantly, and mopped at her nose like any schoolgirl. Gustave put an awkward arm around her, and she let her head rest on his shoulder, more weary than she could ever express.

He had his own gift, she remembered. Not music, but one as winged and potent, that could make beauty out of folly and evil and pain.

“We carry on.” It came out muffled, almost whispered against his coat, and his other arm came to hold her close. “There’s nothing else to do. And whatever happens, Gustave — whatever becomes of either of us — you must keep on writing. Some day I’ll need you to find the words for me. For the war; for everything. Let there be something worth having out of all this, something that will live on. It’s what your father would have wanted.”

Both of them, she thought, the words catching unspoken in her throat. They would have wanted it for him... both of them.