All the Rules Rearranged, Chapter 7

[igenlode]

I've been going backwards and forwards on whether Meg Giry is actually 'in love with' the Phantom or not (especially since I'm using the original London production canon here, after which we were assured that her interest is purely professional, though this frankly isn't what it looks like at all...) In the end I've largely left this part of the story in its state of confusion, since if there is one thing for certain in canon it is that the Phantom is not in love with Meg.

I never really thought much about the consistency of Meg's backstory before starting this chapter (not least because I was proceeding on the initial assumption that this dialogue would be seen from the Phantom's point of view!), so I've leaned quite heavily on aceofgallifrey's analysis, though I haven't swallowed this lock, stock and barrel because it's based on hyper-interpretation of the 2004 movie version in which Meg's role is considerably embroidered...

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Chapter 7: Notes from Underground

Meg Giry had been the one on her way up out of the chorus, before any of this had ever started. She had been the one people noticed: the bright one, the quick one, the girl with the spark that said Look at me. She’d been the one who’d been featured in the minor rôles — serving-maids and confidantes, pageboys and peasant dancers, tiny parts all of them, but she’d been there on the programme with her name in print, she’d been there on the stage with her clear voice and her vivid grace and she’d made an impression.

She’d been the one with initiative and ambition, the one who was going places: her mother’s daughter. And it hadn’t been fair, because dreamy, quiet Christine Daaé had talent of her own that no-one ever saw. Christine could have done just as well as Meg if anyone had given her the chance. But if it had been left up to Christine, no-one would ever have looked twice.

So when Carlotta, the diva of those days, had let loose her temperament one time too many and stormed off the stage before the start of the production, Meg had followed the impulse of a moment — as so often in her life — and spoken up on her friend’s behalf: “Christine Daaé could do it, sir.” She’d known Christine was good; she’d heard her practising for her new teacher. She hadn’t had the faintest idea Christine was that good...

Oh, Meg could have sung that aria, but she would have sounded like any of the other chorus girls: underdeveloped, inadequate beside the power and technique that poured from the throat of a prima donna like Carlotta. She’d wanted the managers to hear Christine’s potential, how much she’d learnt and how much she’d improved. She hadn’t expected her mother’s endorsement. And she certainly hadn’t expected her friend, her fellow-dancer, to open her mouth, draw a deep breath, and sound... glorious.

People had looked twice at Christine Daaé after that, all right. The Vicomte de Chagny had come bursting into her life with all the subtlety and enthusiasm of a wolfhound puppy, the management had catapulted her into leading rôles — Meg had tried hard, very hard and mostly successfully, not to hear the backstage gossip that connected those two events — and the Phantom of the Opera had slipped out from behind Mother’s secretive hints into terrifying and ultimately all too vulnerable flesh-and-blood existence.

People had loved, married, died. Fortunes and lives had been ruined. Her own world had been devastated and utterly changed... all because of one generous, impulsive, unthinking act so very long ago.

It was stupid to think like that, Meg knew. Worse, it was foolish — and if there was one thing the Ooh-la-la Girl could not afford, no matter what the punters thought, it was to be foolish. Her friend and the young de Chagny had been little Raoul and Christine together long before he’d heard her again on the opera stage, and it was the unseen Opera Ghost, of course, who’d been that new tutor from the first... and it would all have happened anyway sooner or later, whatever Meg Giry had done.

But she’d been jealous; she could admit that now. How could she help but be jealous, just a little, when her orphaned almost-sister was blossoming out from a shy mouse to a star almost overnight, with all the attention and the rôles that Meg had planned for herself some day?

Not yet, though. She hadn’t been ready yet, she couldn’t have done what Christine had done, and she’d been honest enough with herself to admit it. And by the end, as she came to understand day by day the fatal web in which Christine was trapped, she had long since ceased to envy her friend at all.

She’d wondered, though — of course she’d wondered, at first with a shiver of fascinated terror, and in after years with a confused longing that she had never dared examine — about her own solo in Don Juan Triumphant. How would it have been to have come on stage a matter of minutes later? To have danced and spun and sparkled in allure not before poor plump good-natured Ubaldo Piangi as the Don, but all unknowing in the presence of the Phantom himself?

She’d liked Piangi. So had Christine, she knew; so had everyone else in the company. He’d let Carlotta treat him like a lapdog, but there wasn’t an ounce of harm in him, and he’d deserved better of her than hankerings after his murderer, a man who’d brushed him out of life like an old cloak dropped in the mud to bridge the way to the other side. But the guilty frisson of possibility remained.

She’d done as Mother said. She’d stayed in the safety of the crowd and let the young Vicomte go down after her friend into danger alone. And when it was all over — when, bravery bolstered by safety in numbers, they’d burst into the rooms beyond the lake and found no trace of the Phantom save one betraying mask; when the wedding of Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny, to Miss Christine Daaé of the Opera Populaire had been openly announced in the teeth of all scandal, with the young man flushed and glad and the girl shy and beautiful within the shelter of his arm — when it was all over she’d obeyed Mother once more, and left Christine with no more than a note of well-wishing to seek wedded bliss in circles within which little Meg Giry would never be able to move.

She’d packed up the few bags they possessed, paid off their lodgings, and left the portals of the Opera barred behind her to the bailiffs and the sensation-seekers, along with the future she’d once dreamed of. Following Mother’s directions, she’d travelled to Calais with Madame Giry’s latest charity case, a shivering, heavily-cloaked fugitive who’d shrunk beneath his mufflers from Meg’s curiosity and the sympathy of their fellow-passengers alike. She’d suspected the shadow of the guillotine on his trail; but Mother knew best.

And it wasn’t until she saw the shabby freighter in the docks, and Mother sent her on board openly while she smuggled that shrinking figure down below, that Meg understood they were leaving France for his sake — perhaps forever. She’d known then that it must be important. But they were two days out of port before she discovered just why.

She’d slipped down into the hold with a meagre plate of food saved out of her own portion for their unseen guest, and found him huddled in a nest of sacking and crying out in fever. She’d lifted the crude bandaging across his face to touch his forehead... and seen again the unveiled horror that had glared across the stage as Christine found that last mute gesture of defiance.

She’d dropped the plate and screamed — not at the sight but at the memory, at the knowledge she was trapped down below in that tiny space with the spectre whose insane laughter had echoed as the chandelier came hurtling down — and the hoarse wakening scream that had broken from the man’s throat in answer had been the most terrible sound of betrayal she had ever heard. It had haunted her for hours afterwards as she sobbed in her cabin, refusing even her mother’s help as she understood at last what had been risked in one final act of pity, and just what Mother had done.

Fear can turn to love... Meg had mocked at herself bitterly over the years since. Had she really been so horror-struck that night — she, the fearless, the impulsive, who had always leapt before she looked and seldom counted the cost? How long had it been before she realised that the reign of the Phantom of the Opera had been broken indeed, with all its power and its mocking cruelty, and left behind only the drained and listless shell of a man twisted beyond all hope of acceptance? How many weeks had it taken, after all, before she came to share her mother’s fierce protective grasp over the genius that might have been, and to idolise the talent that still flickered unquenchable within that shattered mind?

Genius without English, in America, could not pay the bills. Father O’Meary at the nearest church had found them lodgings with an old woman from Quebec, whose thick Canadian accent was almost as incomprehensible as the sharp Yankee patois of the streets all around. Mother had scrubbed floors. Meg had washed crocks down in the basement of a fine hotel with an assortment of other immigrants until her feet ached and her fingers softened and split. And he — he had roamed skeletal and aimless in the cold shadows like a lost soul until the hour that the lodging-house door opened and he could find refuge once more in the two narrow rooms that they all shared.

He said nothing, but he learned the language faster than any of them. One night he had come home, poured out dollars on the table, and announced harshly that he had found employment. ‘Coney Island’ had meant nothing to Meg, not then; and though she had woken to hear her mother weeping softly that night, she had not understood why.

It was money that they desperately needed — for warm clothes against the New York winter, for better food, for a little heat when coal was so dear — and Meg had accepted without question that he brought in more income than the two women could. But from that day onwards he had begun to shrink from them again behind a frozen white mask of withdrawal more impenetrable by far than the crude cloth vizor he wore out on the streets; and it was weeks before she glimpsed a poster, caricatured but unmistakable, and learned the truth.

He had sold himself to a sideshow among the freaks and the fakes. He, who had hidden all his life from the jeers of the crowd, bared his deformity for hours each day behind canvas alongside the mermaids and the midgets, the Bird-Woman and the Two-Headed Girl, for a trooping succession of sightseers to gawp and point at in delicious dread. “See Mister Y, the Living Corpse — Twenty Dollars Guaranteed if Not Absolutely Genuine!”

Meg had gone to see it once, appalled yet drawn to know. The mermaid had flashed a glimpse of bare breasts to distract from her tawdry fish-skin, and the bearded lady had combed out the soft growth that fringed her jaw and hidden a yawn behind a sip of porter; and then he had seen her, all drenched in green light as he was to heighten his horror, and the shame and fury in that gaze of recognition had sent her stumbling through the canvas flaps out into the raucous midway to hide her face among the crowd.

She knew now why he came back at night and scrawled out long jagged howls of music, only to pitch them from the window. Why he tore across and across into ribbons any that Mother tried to hoard. And... knowing that he was selling his body each day for money made it easier to start selling hers for him.

They were quick transactions, after all. Only a few minutes of discomfort in the dark. She had her privacy when she sold herself as he could not have his; she was always very careful, kept herself clean. She hid her earnings from her mother, and when she judged she had enough, offered them to the owner of the sideshow with a sweetener in kind — she could offer that unflinching now — when her scullery-English failed her in the task of persuasion.

It was not money enough, of course, to release the prime exhibit from his contract. But from that day Mr Y was allowed to display his death’s-head gape in a battered dress-suit rather than a few scraps of winding-cloth to preserve his dignity, and they were able to start saving in earnest towards the dreams that began at last to resurface.

Mother must have known, Meg thought now with unforgiving clarity. If not in that first year, then later, when she sent Meg and her ‘sweet smile’ off to see the politicians or grease a loan, and when she offered to introduce legislators and union bosses into her daughter’s dressing-room once Meg started dancing again. Surely she hadn’t thought a little “ooh-la-la” and a glimpse of Paris was all they were after, those greased-back men with their hard eyes and their grating jowls?

But if she had known, then she hadn’t let herself see. Just as Meg herself had refused for years to see the truth — that no matter how hard she worked and how hard she tried, how essential she made herself and now much she needed his esteem, she would never be more to the man who had become her master than a vaudeville act taken for granted; a reminder perhaps of humiliations he would rather forget.

All the same, there were other humiliations it seemed he’d been only too eager to remember, and it had hurt... She’d loved Christine in their Paris days, truly she had, and it had been like a breath of air out of that unspoilt girlhood to see her so unexpectedly again; but the reality of it had lashed back on her all too painfully in return.

Christine had everything: fame, a title, a son. Christine had taken the career Meg might have had back then, and any chance of a future with the man she worked for now. Christine had his tears, his promises, his music — the opportunity her mother had so blindly promised her: ‘The Master is writing again!’ When he had brought Christine onto Coney Island to steal her from her marriage and claim back her voice and her son for himself, there had been no thought of Meg Giry in his mind, no more than there had been at the start of the season when Phantasma had rung to the sound of applause and all the world had roared Meg’s name again and again... save for him.

He’d forgotten her, forgotten his own opening night, for dreams of a woman he’d driven away. But then when had it ever been different? Everything she’d wanted and what little she’d had in the last ten years had been the second-hand leavings of Christine.

Even the Vicomte’s arms around her on the pier a few hours back, Meg thought now with bitter humour from out of the peace she’d found, stretching her toes closer to the fire and pulling the blanket that covered her up under her chin. Oh, she hadn’t wanted his attentions, far from it — but she’d had more than enough experience over the years to tell the difference between a man who was being a perfect gentleman and one whose awareness was simply elsewhere. His wife’s name had hung between them on that dark brink, as much in his mind as in hers; to hear it acknowledged had been the last straw that sent her forward into the warmth of his hold in place of the cold numbness the ocean promised. If the torment of Christine’s love had sent him down into danger once, then it had sent him also out there tonight — and in that irony lay her salvation.

But it was not Raoul de Chagny who had carried her here. She had been too far gone to know anything much, but she had roused once to see the familiar sharp curve of a half-mask bent over her in concern, and sunk back into oblivion in those hard arms on a single disbelieving thought: he noticed me.

He had come, then. She had not dreamed it when she thought she saw him at the pier’s entrance with her... but it was not Christine who had been borne back in his clasp, and it was not Christine who had woken again to find herself in unfamiliar rooms beside a roaring fire with him kneeling beside her.

“Meg. Little Meg.” The words she had longed to hear, even if it was acknowledgement and not pity that ought to have lain behind them. But pity, from him, was rare and precious enough to break her heart. “Meg... tell me, if you can.”

She would never have told him any of it, if she had been in her right mind. If she’d had any pride left where he was concerned. But his gentleness sent her over the brink, and she poured out all the shame and the longings and the despair as if it had been the story of someone else and not the two of them at all, as if the telling itself could somehow wash her clean and make her truly little Meg Giry again, and she’d seen him turn aside to grieve. For her.

She’d heard Mother’s raised voice earlier outside the room and shrunk back beneath her blanket, conscious of her own actions and their consequences in a way that had never crossed her mind with him. He had done worse, after all, in his time; so much worse... But the Master had sent her mother away with all the cold arrogance at his command, and locked the door. Perhaps she should have been afraid — there had been fear as well as fury in Mother’s demands — but she felt only a deep gratitude.

She didn’t want to see her mother again, not now. Maybe not ever. She didn’t know.

She’d done as Mother said. She’d played out the older woman’s ambitions without question all her life; she’d followed where the Master led and done what she could, in hopes of the rewards that Mother always saw just around the corner.

She’d obeyed to the brink of disaster. And then Mother had told her — had as good as flung it in her face — that it had all been for nothing. She’d hated Christine then with all the unthinking passion that her mother had taught her to vent, and she’d taken Christine’s child, the adulterous, sinful child that Christine, who had everything, had chosen to conceal, and gone to make an end.

His child; his gun; his pier. His Meg.

But her mother had been wrong. Christine had not sung. Gustave was not the child they’d thought him — broken words from the man in front of her had warned her of that. And he had not been altogether blind... not after all.

She did not want to see her mother. She was not that Meg Giry any more.

He did not love her, of course. She was not foolish enough to expect that. But he had brought her here to a deep chair in this warm room — part of Phantasma still, she thought, by the pattern of the fire-irons and the weave of the rug, but it was not a part she recognised — and had tucked a blanket around her in front of the fire and poured hot sweet coffee down her throat with all the ruthless solicitude of a physician when she found that she was trembling and could not stop.

It had been what she needed. And when what she needed was to cry, he had not denied her that either, though he had been almost painfully at a loss. They must have been quite a sight, she thought now, glancing with affection at his bent head: the sobbing showgirl and her masked employer whose ruthless tongue was more apt to cause tears than to comfort them. But then comfort might have undone her altogether.

He had stayed by her side and taken her hand awkwardly as she wept. And when she was done he had made that one simple request, and she had told him. Told him everything.

It seemed little enough in return for her to sit here quietly late into the night and listen for his sake to the pain that poured out of him now, even if his words too often hurt her — even if she was not always sure he remembered as he spoke that it was she, Meg Giry, who was there. What mattered was that someone should know, she understood that now; that there should be someone in the world who cared enough to witness, and not to judge. If she could be of any service to him at all, it would be in this hour when he needed her.

So she pulled the blanket up close despite the heat and watched his face as he stared down into the fire, and tried to hug to herself the knowledge that he trusted her enough to speak as he did, and forget that it was of another woman that he spoke. For it was to Christine that his outpouring returned, again and again and again.