It was the night that changed the pattern of all our lives for ever. The night that began the end of my marriage, and gave me back the best of friends and a great career. The last night I saw Raoul drunk and the first night we arrived in New York.
And it began worse than any night I’d ever known.
The hotel room should have been a refuge after the cacophony of the docks; after the ride in the horseless carriage, with an atmosphere you could have cut with a knife and Raoul’s arm tightening round my waist at every lurch in a hold about as comforting as a steel bar. Gustave, of course, had been everywhere, climbing on and off the seats with a fearless energy for all things new and exciting that took no account of adult nerves.
“Christine, for God’s sake—” Raoul’s own grip had been white on the edge of his seat — “can’t you keep your son still?”
If he’d registered my wince at that, he’d misread it... I hoped. ‘Your son’: Gustave had always been ‘your son’ when he’d irritated Raoul — which, these days, was all too often — or simply ‘the boy’. Never ‘our son’; never the proud ‘my boy’. And the more Raoul withdrew from Gustave’s constant demands, the more the oblivious cuckoo in the nest clamoured for attention.
But it was just a turn of phrase, the same that I’d heard from peasants in my childhood: “And what hast thy son done now, wife of mine?” The truth about his heir was one hard piece of knowledge, at least, that I could spare him.
I’d been unhappy about the horseless carriage too; but wives were expected to be nervous about such things. Raoul’s pride had taken too many batterings over the last few months — the last ten years, if I was honest — for him to admit to any further humiliation. Especially after the docks.
It had been a rough crossing, and we’d all been ill. Gustave had been the worst hit, but the little ball of misery who’d sobbed in my arms for the first morning had found his sea-legs the next day with the resilience of the very young; it had been three days before I’d ventured to a deckchair on the promenade deck alongside other whey-faced wives, with stewards fussing round us with piles of rugs and mackintoshes against the spray. Fresh air had helped, but even on the last day, when Gustave and I had waltzed laughing across the dining-room together hand in hand, weaving as lurching a path to our table as any inebriate, there had been notably fewer passengers at meal-times than on the night we’d left port. Raoul, furious at his own weakness, had been wretchedly ill all the way across; and if it wasn’t the first time he’d had intimate acquaintance with the inside of a basin on waking, it was an ironically bitter humiliation to be suffering the morning after without achieving the oblivion of the night before.
The steward who had suggested brandy had done none of us a service. And the steward who’d mentioned in Gustave’s hearing with the best of intentions that Monsieur le Vicomte would feel much better if only he could bring himself to expose his sufferings on deck — well, perhaps in a servant’s deferential phrasing the wise saw might have had the intended effect, but in a ten-year-old’s blithe repetition it must have seemed like the last straw.
If only Raoul had let me comfort him as I had Gustave, some good might have come of it; but on that first day I had been too busy with the child, and once my own mal-de-mer had passed, Raoul’s misery had progressed beyond anything but bitterness at the idea of wet cloths, soothing words or an unavailing hand on the brow. All I could do was pretend, as so often before, that my husband had no need of me and shield him from the knowledge of dependence — and spend the time, as so often before, with Gustave.
The sunny-tempered boy I’d married was being eaten alive by the knowledge of his own failures... but there was nothing, nothing I could do until he could bring himself to ask his wife for help. And for Raoul, who’d tried so hard to be the hero, that final yielding of his pride was going to come too late... for all of us.
After events at the Opéra, we’d had a summer of scandalous notoriety and intrusive questions; Raoul had shielded me then, cutting off the Press with a few curt words and sending closed carriages whenever I wanted to venture out. I’d learned to deal with newspapermen as any stage performer must, but this had been different, a prurient invasion of areas of my life that no-one save those of us who had been there could understand. It had been years before I’d learned to smile sweetly and evade interest: years of dogged protection on Raoul’s part before public fascination with the case faded.
America, it seemed, had discovered a whole new field of interest in our personal affairs; and Raoul’s family name, that had carried so much weight with editors in Paris, counted for nothing here. Less than nothing: a title, to the great American public, meant exoticism and decadence, a glimpse of Europe and Society and everything they’d gone beyond in the Land of the Free. On the New York docks, I was no longer Madame de Chagny: whether we liked it or not, he was Mr Christine Daaé, trophy husband of a celebrity face, and Gustave was the son of a famous mother. Four hundred years of history meant nothing to the gutter press at all.
We’d walked straight into a fresh storm of flash-powder and publicity with only a few hours of calm water in between. And when Raoul had tried to defend my privacy and my art, he’d been met by jeers and muck-raking. Bad enough that we’d been bought in by some dollar millionaire to be paraded before the public like Jenny Lind by the three-ring circus king; to have those debts flung in his face as common gossip was a humiliation that no amount of money could buy off, and it looked likely to be only the start.
But he’d given them reason enough to take against him, and I could just imagine the column inches that would make gleeful work of our little disembarkation incident. This stay in America looked set to be a nightmare for all of us; and if Raoul’s rapidly disintegrating temper had anything to do with it, this hotel room of ours would be the scene for the first weary act of what was to follow.
He’d poured himself another drink. I bit my tongue. It would be for his nerves, or his headaches, or to wash away the taste of those teeming masses — there was always a reason... save that none of that had mattered ten years ago, when we married, and the demons he tried to escape were no longer in the dark beneath the Opera House. They rode at his shoulder now, whispering accusation. And the drink that dulled the voices only fed the desperation behind them.
“We should go!” Every seething resentment had boiled over, and he’d brushed off Gustave’s attempts at distraction without so much as an acknowledgement. “We should just pack and go, and never mind about the debts — who’d have thought we’d come to this? What did you think you were doing, selling yourself as a sideshow act to a man who sends freaks to ferry us round town?”
It hurt all the more because it was unfair and he knew it. We’d had no choice... and it was for his sake that I’d had to do it. But in the knife-edge negotiation around Raoul’s unhappiness that our marriage had become, we didn’t speak of the source of those debts; the select clubs where the stakes were too high, and the older men whose profession it was to prey on the pride of youths desperate to prove their manhood and too ashamed to admit they’d been drawn in beyond their means. He’d been a pigeon ripe for the plucking. One more throw, one more spin of the wheel, Vicomte, and the luck will change... Only it hadn’t. He’d been played for a fool; but some things were too hard to admit, even when the demands started coming nearer and nearer home. Even when they reached your wife.
He’d needed to win too badly by that point to be able to stop. He hadn’t needed any horror of mine to tell him that what he was doing was ruinous; but I’d been too naïve, then, to understand. There had been scenes, quarrels, tears. He’d had a run of luck — a short one — and paid off the worst of it. And then it had all begun again.
We didn’t talk, now, of why we needed the money. It was just another constant burden in the background of our lives. Another failure for the man who should have been providing for his wife.
I could have lived in debt, if that had been all. I could have lived in poverty, with rough hands and coarse skirts, with a husband who loved me and our growing son. But I couldn’t live much longer with this unspoken edge of inadequacy in the air between us. And he couldn’t — or wouldn’t — let me help.
All I could do, as so often before, was try to calm him down, try to paper over the situation and pretend that everything would somehow come right, when we both knew it would take far more than that. Those early quarrels had been too dreadful. I couldn’t bear to go through that again... and so I soothed, and pretended, and sometimes, just sometimes, we could make believe together that nothing was wrong.
“Don’t you patronise me!” The wounds of the dockside were too raw for that rosy fiction to hold tonight. “It’s your fault we came here—”
And if he had only believed that, it might at least have helped: but we both knew the truth, and nothing I could say could spare him the laceration of that self-knowledge. It was going to be like this every waking minute, and the price for both of us was too high.
“Let’s go, then. Let’s leave tonight, Raoul, if it makes you feel better—” Abruptly, I was on the verge of tears, brought on by too many years of struggle. “We’ll leave this whole place, leave the whole thing behind... oh please, let’s just get out of here and go!”
Whatever Raoul had expected, it hadn’t been that. It had been a long time since I’d seen him so frankly taken aback.
“Fine. We’ll do it.” He frowned, as if trying to focus. “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say all night.”
It was the first honest thing I’d said all night; the first unguarded wish I’d let myself make in so, so long... I sank down on the bench of the piano I’d been playing earlier, propping both elbows with a discord on the keyboard of the tinny hotel instrument, and let my head fall between my hands. The music of the aria I’d been trying to rehearse was still open there, and the notes swam before my eyes. All those hours already, spent trying for absolute, impossible perfection to justify the terrifying size of that fee... it was all part of the same nightmare, and I didn’t care at that moment if I never sang it again. If I never performed it at all.
“I’m so tired...” I looked up at him — the flushed face, the incipient scowl, the husband I scarcely any longer knew — and closed my eyes like a child hoping for a miracle. “Oh Raoul — take me home.”
I’ll never know, now, if the soft touch that brushed my forehead was really the kiss I wanted to believe it. I kept my eyes closed, and told myself that it was.
Maybe it could have been that easy all along. Maybe all I needed to have done was to have asked him more often for the things that he could do, rather than both of us straining after a chimera he couldn’t provide. But all I could think — sitting there with my eyes shut and listening while Raoul arranged it all — was how wonderful it was, just for once, to have no responsibilities whatsoever. To have someone else haranguing the hotel staff to carry down the trunks they’d only just brought up, ordering a carriage brought round, scribbling cables to the shipping office; to have an over-excited Gustave firmly quelled and sent to oversee the packing of his own things, with the threat-cum-promise of a parental visitation to follow (poor neglected Gustave, he must have been over the moon at the attention); to be picked up at last and carried down to the hotel lobby with my head jolting on my husband’s shoulder, a gesture that was not romantic in the least but a blessedly practical expedient.
There was some kind of delay at the hotel desk — I think they would have kept us if they dared — but Raoul blustered a way through and got us out of there at the cost of every dollar we could find. And then it was just the long ride through traffic with an increasingly sleepy Gustave curled up between us, quiet for once; Raoul’s face in the flicker of lights through the window was taut and set, but it was alert again. Whatever his thoughts, he said nothing, and I didn’t ask.
We were running away, but it felt more like victory. And if there is a Providence that watches over sea-crossings, then that entity at least must have seen fit to approve — for we all had our sea-legs at last for the seven-day crossing on the shabby Norwegian steamer that took us homeward, and Raoul watched with me over the rail as the Baltic came in sight.
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