All the Rules Rearranged, Chapter 5

[igenlode]

This was originally planned to be the end of the preceding chapter; but not only did the 'pier' scene overrun, it rapidly became obvious that the characters had an awful lot to sort out that wasn't appropriate to Gustave's presence. Also, having all been through the wringer by this stage, they were worn out.

The result was that the ending didn't come out at all the way I had originally anticipated, and a couple of completely new settings come into the story to accommodate the 'delayed matter'...

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Chapter 5: The Seagull

Christine buried her face in Gustave’s hair again, nuzzling the warm small-boy scent of him and enveloping him in a tight embrace until he began at last to wriggle and pull away. She was still shaking with reaction.

She’d believed the Phantom fully capable of taking her son from her and keeping them apart to hold her to his will; but he would never have harmed him. Not the child he had so ardently believed to be his own — the boy in whose quick mind and talent he had seen an unmarred reflection of what he might have been. If she’d had any doubt of that, the man’s horror and distress when the boy was found missing from backstage had made it clear: Mr Y would never hurt Gustave, she was certain of it, even in heartbreak or despair.

Harm to Raoul... was a very different matter.

And so in those first few bewildered moments it had been Raoul’s life she feared for, cut short at the hands of some trap or over-zealous lackey when he’d plunged out after their son in the grip of blind misery and the desperate need to act. She’d been afraid for Gustave at the first when the boy had failed to return, and again when she understood that he was truly missing. But he’d wandered off before, caught up in the flush of some unforeseen interest or following a trail that no adult could make out: as a mother her worry was acute enough but tempered by the pangs of experience.

She had not truly panicked to begin with. Not until frenzied inquisition had brought to light Meg Giry’s hand in the whole affair, and a tumult of insecurity and rage at which Christine, horrified, had never guessed. Not until Meg’s mother, herself on the point of breakdown, had flung accusations that betrayed all too clearly the direction of poor Meg’s heart, as Christine’s presence stole everything from her that she had wanted or might have had. Not until the loaded gun that had been called for, against Christine’s protests, had turned up missing, with Meg Giry as the last to have entered the high Aerie without its Master’s knowledge...

She had been afraid then, most terribly afraid. Concerned for Meg, yes, who had been so dear a friend in their years on the stage, but more so for Raoul, who was unarmed and unprepared — and above all and most desperately for Gustave, a little boy who knew nothing of madness or death, and had neither a man’s strength or resource to resist.

She’d brought him here. She’d introduced him to Mr Y, she’d led Madame Giry unknowingly into that disastrous belief, and she’d encouraged him to explore in Phantasma. If harm had come to Gustave in America it would have shattered her world beyond mending... but she knew it would have been herself she held to blame.

Her life of barely an hour ago seemed a tiny, coloured, tranquil thing, a distant scene from a magic-lantern show. The Vicomtesse de Chagny had thought herself buffeted by tides of emotion too strong for any woman to endure twice in a lifetime; but she’d been certain of her past and held on stubbornly towards a known future, however bleak or grey. Gustave had sung in her dressing-room and they’d laughed together and made plans — oh, she’d thought herself beleaguered and unhappy, but, looking back, that bright certainty stood out as the last foothold on the edge of a toppling gulf.

One song. The last hurdle. The last taste of joy and applause — she’d longed for it; how could she not? — and then release back into familiar, well-worn life, where the struggles were mundane and dangerous secrets could be buried along with the memory of shame-filled desires.

Only... it had all been false, all of it, the song that was no song but a wager on her soul and the secret she had feared and hidden so long. Everything had come tumbling down, and left her tossed as wildly on the seas of fear and rage as that innocent under the Opera so many years ago. They had veered from one crisis to another with no time to choose a course, until growing frantic worry for Gustave had driven everything else out of her mind, and now all she could do was cling to her son and convince herself again and again that he was safe and this was real.

But Gustave, impatient with being babied, was eager to retell the whole encounter in the most hair-raising terms. Christine held him close and expressed gratifying excitement in all the appropriate places, giving silent thanks for the blessed resilience of childhood.

“—And then she held me over the edge and I couldn’t breathe—”

“Darling, are you sure you’re not—”

Gustave, busy re-imagining himself as the hero of a glorious adventure, bestowed a look of pity upon his mother of the variety appropriate to apprehensive females. “You can kiss me again if you really need to,” he offered generously, turning up his face for the embrace in question, and Christine pressed her warm cheek against his and felt the small arms come round her neck.

“I won’t cry any more, I promise, darling. I want to hear your story, and how you got back safe and sound...”

And if the smile she gave him was a little watery for all that, it was more than enough encouragement for Gustave to launch back into a highly-coloured account in which his own bravery was equalled only by the breathtaking heroics of the rescue party. If Raoul had longed to be a knight in shining armour, he’d found a fitting location on the fertile plains of the boy’s imagination. Years rolled away, and she glanced up to share a moment’s laughter at Gustave’s more improbable flights of fancy, remembering the joint stories of their childhood.

“Raoul—” Laughter died as she saw him, hesitant at the entrance to the pier; they knew each other far too well for him ever to be a fairytale prince in her eyes, but the handsome young man in the opera box was a dear illusion returned now to memory. Battered, bruised and dishevelled, unsure of his welcome or if he should approach, for an aching moment he seemed the echo of an older Gustave. Her son would look just so after some schoolboy scuffle — coat ripped, honour defended, and consequences belatedly to be faced — and the elusive ghost of that likeness between them caught her unawares.

She held out her hands, remembering too late all that lay unspoken between them. “Raoul, please...”

He came; slowly, but he came, and she wrapped her hands in his, conscious of broad knuckles and the square male strength of them. Men were so helpless to face the real problems of their lives... She stooped to drop a rueful kiss across their joined fingers on impulse, and felt him flinch.

Her grip tightened, and she looked up into her husband’s averted face. “To hear Gustave talk, anyone would think you’d been fighting off half the hosts of hell single-handed.”

She’d hoped for a smile. But Raoul’s gaze, when he turned to her at last, showed only a bone-deep weariness as irresolute as her own.

“I talked to her, that was all.” For a moment he seemed on the verge of adding more; but the words ebbed away into a little distant shrug, and he retrieved his hands gently from her clasp.

Christine’s throat constricted. “You saved his life — and Meg’s too. You’re not going to deny that, I hope: and at any rate you might let me thank you for it!”

She had at least startled him. A flush darkened across his cheeks, and he felt with a quick nervous movement for his watch, glancing down.

“I brought him back so that you could choose... Miss Daaé.” He shut the watch-case, slipping it back into his pocket with a painful finality. “If I travel light and make haste, I could still be aboard the ‘Atlantic Queen’ as she passes the pier-head tonight... Christine, if that’s what you want, I can set you free — free from my moods, my ruinous dealings, my neglect; you know better than I how often I’ve failed you these last few years and how little we have left of the happiness I promised. If after all that you know, all you’ve seen, it’s him you want”—one hand strayed upwards, she thought unconsciously, to cradle his own throat—“then soar free... But don’t let anything force you, not ever again. Not Gustave’s fate, or mine, or his: choose for yourself, Christine, just once, and I’ll go. Whatever you ask. It’s all I have left to give.”

A small, shocked silence was Gustave, pressed close against her side: she could have shaken her husband, or wept, or both.

“Raoul, no—” Of all the moments on all the days to choose to be stupidly honourable, when they were all tired and off-balance, and words had been spoken already that should never have been said or heard... “Listen. No-one is going on a boat alone. Gustave is exhausted: so are you. So am I. We’re going to find a hotel room— a lodging-house— anywhere decent that will take us in for the night—”

“Our luggage...” Raoul, strung up to breaking point, was utterly confused, and she laid a hand in appeal on the breast of his coat.

“We’ll send for it, dear. In the morning — sooner, if we can. Please... there are things I should have told you, too many, but— I can’t go back to Phantasma. Not those rooms. Not tonight.”

Not to those rooms with the shadow of ten years’ passion murmuring in the dark, bereaved and empty, where every mirror held unseen ghosts and music whispered in from the balcony and above her bed. Not with that heartbreak still haunting her heels like an echo of the long, swift steps that had led her here tonight in a renunciation of their own.

She looked round; but he had gone, as he had said he would. She did not know if she would ever see him again — if he would ever find peace from the fires that consumed him in the guise of her face and her voice. She had done such harm, to him and through him to the others he touched; even to Raoul, her poor angry Raoul who measured himself against a taunting shade and fell short of his own imaginings. And yet she had meant none of it, and she did not know what else she could have done.

If only — if only she had never gone back to the Opera that night... And yet, remembering that broken shape in the dark and the disbelieving joy that had woken between them at his clutch, she could not wish even those forbidden moments unmade.

Not even after all the rage and pain of these last few days. She looked back at Raoul, and saw him get a grip on himself, shaking his head as if to clear the cobwebs, and return her a hesitant smile that slid a little lopsided. “A hotel. In New York. Well, that should be possible.”

Gustave, beside her, tugged at the sleeve of Raoul’s coat for reassurance. His father reached down almost without looking, and the boy tucked a confiding hand into his. Watching that mutual enveloping grasp, Christine felt something unacknowledged ease within her. Perhaps — the thought stole in quietly — perhaps America had saved them after all.

---

It had taken all Raoul’s English and most of the contents of his note-case to get them a room in a decent quarter after dark and without luggage, even after she’d done her best to brush down his coat and clean him up. Between her gaudy stage costume and his stained and battered appearance, Christine thought ruefully, they must have looked like refugees from some saloon brawl, with Gustave a child snatched from the bosom of his family to be trailed through the streets by such a thoroughly disreputable pair of foreigners... But it was Gustave’s respectable clothing and polite little bow that had softened the heart of Lila Morrison on that final doorstep, and secured them this refuge in a room threadbare with fierce cleanliness above the passing rumble of the street.

Kneeling by the little truckle-bed — Mrs Morrison had unbent enough to offer them a second room, but at Gustave’s look of panic-stricken appeal even Raoul had not demurred at keeping him with them — Christine tucked the sheets more firmly round the child and kissed him again gently. The long lashes did not stir.

“He’s asleep.” She got up with a sigh and began to straighten the covers on the bed where the trundle had been pulled out from under it. Raoul had made no move to do so. He still sat on the side of the bed in his shirt-sleeves, staring unseeing at a print of Cape Cod on the wall where a single seagull soared in eternal frozen motion. He looked broken-down and lost and alone.

Christine turned up the gas-jet a little — it had been hard enough to get Gustave to sleep with the novelty of being put to bed in his undershirt, but they really could not continue to sit in the dark — and crossed the room to sink down beside him on the edge of the mattress, setting both arms about his waist and leaning into him for comfort. After a moment his arm came hesitantly round her.

She buried her face in his waistcoat, conscious of a button pressing beneath her cheek. His heart beat steadily against her, and she could feel the soft rise of his breathing; the whole rushing miracle of blood and muscle and human life that every day was taken so much for granted. He could have been lying cold at this moment — Gustave could have been drifting face-down beneath the pier, with the tide plucking at him like seaweed...

A shiver ran through her, and Raoul’s hold tightened. “You should get under the covers. That gown isn’t fit to sit around in—”

Christine shook her head mutely without looking up, conscious of his voice as a set of warm vibrations. He carried the faint scent of lavender on his linen, and a familiar trace of cedar from the wardrobe, and of bran where his dress-clothes had been brushed out; beneath that was the reality of stale fear and haste, and beneath that again the reassurance that was Raoul, just Raoul, and all the depths of home.

She wrapped her arms around him more closely until all she could see of the room was the blur of his shirtfront. It was easier this way — when she couldn’t see his face.

“There are things I need to tell you, Raoul. And I need to do it now, before it gets any harder, and while I still have the courage...”

A long silence. She was not sure if it was the sound of his heart that had grown louder, or her own pulse.

“I don’t think... either of us knows the other any more.” It was barely a breath, but he had grown very still. “Go... on.”

She swallowed a ridiculous urge to lie; to spare him and to shield the pain of that other. But if there was ever to be trust between them again it would have to be her doing as much as his.

“Do you remember that musical box they gave Gustave — that tinny novelty thing? Well, it played another tune...”

Once started, the words spilled out in a tumbling stream. She told him the whole without comment or excuse and almost without hesitation, even as he had told her of his own dealings that last night with the Phantom, and shadows gathered in the corners of the room and whispered beneath the hissing dance of the gas-jet on the wall.

Raoul drew another long breath when it was over. “And... that was all?”

It was the question any husband had the right to ask — the question no wife could ask, though it had been so long now, between them, that she had wondered — but the implication still drove a flush into her cheeks. “Tears... passion... promises... but yes, that was all.”

It seemed so little now, set out in the open. So shockingly, tragically little for a storm that had swept over her life and sent others to wreck all around.

She pulled free and sat up at last, searching for answers in his face. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you — it seems so foolish — but I... I couldn’t. He’d trusted me, and you would have...” She faltered. “You were—”

“I was drunk out of my— out of what little sense I had left.” Raoul’s voice was thick with bitterness. “Why not say it? I spent last night drunk, and the night before, and if I weren’t here with you tonight—”

But the hard, pinched look eased a little before her stricken face. “No. No, I wouldn’t... I’m sorry, Christine, I— I just —”

He broke off, the hand that had been around her shoulder clenched tight on his knee. “He tried to hand you over to me — did you know that? — arrogant to the last... It was when I gave Meg Giry into his keeping. He threw some sneer or other in my face and as good as told me to take you — as if it were that night all over again, and his mercy thrust down my throat—”

“It wasn’t meant like that.” Too much bitterness in that yielding; too much bitter pain in the hearing of it, Christine thought, reaching out to him almost helplessly. “Please don’t— don’t hate him so...”

“As if there were no other choice for you but to be handed off between us. You deserved — deserve — the chance for something better—” And there was all the old anguish in that.

“Don’t hate yourself so,” she whispered again, setting a hand on his arm. But she did not think he heard her.

“Why would you want me back? I can’t woo you with music; my trust, my folly, brought us close to ruin, and I let it destroy our lives... while you nursed a dream that disowned my son!”

He cut himself off abruptly with a glance for Gustave, who had stirred at the raised voice, flinching. Her husband’s eyes met hers again, and fell. Her hand still rested on his sleeve; but it might as well have been a block of wood beneath her touch. “When I saw you stand at his side in silence as he claimed Gustave... what was I to think, Christine? You trusted and shielded him. You defend him to me still. How was I— am I to believe it was me you wanted?”

Do you think him worthy of you, Christine? Do you think even he believes that? But that was never and had never been the question...

“When I thought you’d gone—” She caught her breath, remembering. “Raoul, you saved Gustave tonight. You found the warmth and the words to reach down to Meg’s despair and bring her to reason—”

“I didn’t have to reach down to anywhere,” Raoul said quietly, and she could hear nothing but exhaustion in his tone. “We were both there already, that was all. And it’s hard... to come back.”