A deleted development

[igenlode]

I wrote this today, but I don't think I shall use it; as with the business of Raoul's father, it's just turning into far too much explanation, and is leading the chapter into places that will be hard to get out of. (It's pretty weird to have Lisotte telling Hertha all this childhood stuff as a rationale for being annoyed with Raoul, anyway; I may need to tone down/tweak the preliminary passage.) I think it's sufficient to have Raoul's hypochondriac mother whisk him away from Montpellier, leaving Christine with the feeling that she is somehow to blame -- we don't need the whole complicated story of the lost letter. They were children, and Hertha's feelings are complicated enough to navigate as it is.

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So she had come home and buried her face in Lisotte's bosom, and poured out the whole. [Cut from this point] Clutched in one hand, grimy and very much crumpled, she had retained a small scrap of paper. It had been slipped to her by a porter on the platform at Montpellier station, with a conspiratorial wink and the hint that a young gentleman had given him half a franc to do so. He had gone away disappointed, for Christine had only a few centimes in the bottom of her pocket. And the mesage itself, written in evident haste in a schoolboy hand, bore only a single scrawled address, a great estate in Meridional country, and the appeal 'Please write'.

"She did, of course." Lisotte folded her arms. "Straight away. She was never a great hand at spelling, I'll grant you that. But she laboured over that letter, and it was enough to break your heart to see her waiting and watching, all those weeks that followed, getting quieter all the while as there was never a word. Young master Raoul was in my black books then, I can tell you, and for a long time afterwards. He should have let her be, and not led her on with notes and addresses. She thought she'd said something wrong, put herself forward as she shouldn't..."

I could see just how it had been; the shy girl sending off her innocuous epistle into the blue, uncertain of its reception, convincing herself an answer would come by the next post, and the next. Convincing herself, in the end, that silence meant she had been judged and found wanting. And I could see that other child, too, waiting in a great lonely house full of illness and age for any reply to a last-minute appeal he must have believed had gone astray. Waiting... until the memories of that summer had become little more than a lost fairy-tale of a girl with flying plaits who could sing like a bird, and a great violinist, tired and ill, trying over music in the quiet of his room; until the magic that clung there still had itself become a thing that must be put away before he could take up the duties of a man. Before he could marry me.

I was certain, certain as I could be, that Raoul had never seen that letter. Perhaps Christine's spelling had betrayed her, or the haste with which he had scribbled down that address. But all too clearly in my mind's eye I could picture the old Vicomtesse regarding, with distaste, the badly-written missive directed to her son and removing it quietly from the stack of post. She had seen fit to approve of me; of my manners and of my money. She had not approved at all of Christine.

The current version:

So she had come home and buried her face in Lisotte's bosom, and poured out the whole. And Raoul... Raoul, I thought, had borne the memories of that summer carried close for year upon year, until they faded to little more than a lost fairy-tale, and the magic that clung there still had become the last thing that must be put away before he took up the duties of a man. Before he could marry me.

(In earlier chapters we have already come across Hertha's sense of worry that Raoul has somehow 'lost his dream' in coming down to earth and marrying her; this scene was supposed to be the point at which she finally pinpoints that, which is one reason why all the letter business is a distraction. The other issue is that I need to navigate the dialogue round to a position where she can point out that all this stuff is completely irrelevant to their current situation, and demand what exactly it is that Lisotte wants from her?... which, frankly, I don't quite know myself, as the backstory was more important than the rehearsal scene :-( )