We had to spend three days in Christiania, in the end. It was not Coney Island, of course, but Gustave still thought it was wonderful. He'd never seen anything like Norway before... and in those few brief days I felt my own distant childhood coming back. The little farm girl awoke again within the brittle, worldly shell of the Parisienne I had become; this was not the country or the people I'd known, in those days before we left Sweden, but the peasants who came in to sell their wares were not so very different, and I could have sung for joy at the memory of those great Scandinavian skies.
Raoul had told me once that my eyes were as dreamy as the waters of my Northern lakes, and that my blushes were the colour of mountain strawberries. Poor boy, he'd never been much of a poet: we were both very young, and I'm afraid I laughed. It had been a long time since I'd thought of myself as Swedish, and even then I could remember only a few scraps of my mother tongue — but it meant more to me than I'd expected to find myself back in the North again.
And then our journey home was all arranged, and we came back to Paris, to the musty smell of a shut-up house — strange, how houses seem to pine and dwindle when their owners are away — and a pile of correspondence on the tray. Two cablegrams had arrived from America since we left. I gave them to Gustave to burn unopened in the drawing-room fire, watching the little fragments glow and crumble to dust with a sensation of release.
Most of the missives that had come were for Raoul: demands for payment, I think. I expected to see them join my own in the flames, and before we had gone to America there would have been no doubt about it. But he took them instead into the study and shut himself away with them for several days, so that Gustave and I saw him only briefly at mealtimes. It was not as if we had ever seen much of him, these last few years; we were quite used to spending time together, just we two, and it was easy to slip back into the old unthinking ways. But it was odd to have Raoul at home with us again — to catch his heavy, impatient step on the stairs as I was dressing and the scrape of cinders in the study grate, to hear another body moving about the house in the hours when we were accustomed to be alone, and to come in from the park with Gustave to the sound of my husband's pen scratching at long, laborious intervals behind the closed door.
He went through a good deal of brandy in those hours, I believe; but perhaps he needed it. At any rate, he seemed very pale and serious when we did glimpse each other. Or perhaps it was only that, to my shame, I had grown accustomed to see him flushed with drink, or temper, or — more often than not — both.
But the days went by, and no further letters came. And one afternoon little Maître Tollot, whom I had always liked, paid my husband a call, and stayed on after their business was done to take a glass of wine with the two of us.
Raoul played host civilly enough, but his mind was clearly elsewhere. The little lawyer, who had known him since boyhood, shot a few keen glances in the direction of us both from time to time, but seemed happy enough otherwise to chatter away on his own at his usual nineteen to the dozen, and I let the cheerful stream wash over me thankfully. It was pleasant to laugh again, and exchange adult small-talk, and shake our heads over the state of the world and the shocking decadence to which the arts had descended. Only it would have been nice to know why, in unguarded moments, I had caught the old notary looking sorry for me.
Raoul waved me back into my seat when the old gentleman rose to go. "Wait here for me, dear" —a glance at Maître Tollot— "I'll just see our friend out. I won't be a moment."
So I sat quietly alone, listening to the faint burr of male voices and the sound of the door, and watching the sunlight dance across the faded roses on the walls through the boughs of the creeper outside. If anyone had asked me in that final moment whether my life was a contented one, I suppose I would have said yes.
~o~
Then Raoul blew back in with a noisy tread and dropped down into the upright chair he'd pulled up for Maître Tollot, clapping the door shut behind him. He leaned forward, both hands on his knees.
"Christine..." It was a voice I hadn't heard from him for a long time; one uncertain of its response.
Gustave. My heart turned over in pure panic, and he must have seen it on my face. He caught one of my hands in his own as if in reassurance.
"Christine, I — I want to offer you a separation."
Separation? I stared at him: every familiar line of his face, his shoulders. He was my husband. He was — he'd been — my childhood friend. We'd taken the nuptial Mass together. We'd united our goods and our bodies in the sight of the world and of God, and what we actually thought and felt about one another now was a question that had never even crossed my mind.
"But we — I thought—"
"You thought things had been better between us lately," Raoul finished, and I nodded.
He sighed. "Yes, they've been better because you haven't been walking round me on eggshells all the time, driving us both up the wall by trying to pretend there's nothing wrong! You can't spend the rest of your life cringing at my moods, Christine, and I can't spend the rest of my life failing to live up to your hopes. The only thing I can rescue you from right now is myself — and my debts."
His hand tightened around mine. "You know there's more owing than we can possibly pay. The next few months are going to be very bad... and there's no reason why everything you earn should disappear into the same black hole as the little I have left. With what they offered you for that last season at the Opéra, you could have had a smart apartment all to yourself, instead of a husband like a millstone round your neck and this house that eats money—"
A jerk of his head indicated the shabby rug, the worn slits in the ancient upholstery, the telltale bulge in the plasterwork of the moulded ceiling. I looked back at him, trying to see beyond the husband whose presence in my future I'd always taken absolutely for granted.
We'd been through the storm: we'd come to quieter waters, and had time to remember ourselves. We'd wanted only the best for each other, at the first. I'd tried so hard to fill the part I thought I should play... but it had made neither of us happy. And now this... Was he — could he be serious? Could he be right?
The little shock of surprise at that last idea told me all I needed to know about the true state of my faith in Raoul's judgment, and I felt my cheeks growing pink with that knowledge. I looked down hastily, at our joined hands. "You mean... we would live apart?"
"You'd still be my wife in the eyes of the Church." Raoul got up, and came to sit on the arm of my chair, stroking my fingers gently. "We won't give Paris that much scandal... But no-one will be surprised if we — we just admit what's been obvious for some time. And with a legal separation they won't be able to touch anything you own. You and Gustave will be able to live anywhere you want: Venice, Vienna, Milan—"
"You want me to take Gustave? Abroad?" Another stab of guilt and panic. He'd never been close to the boy, but... Gustave was the heir to his name and title. Unless Tollot — unless Tollot had somehow, impossibly, found out? Unless that was the reason—
I looked up into Raoul's face, all of a sudden terrified what I might see there, and felt guiltier than ever at the tentative query that answered. "Abroad, yes... if you can. If you don't mind, that is. Other children can be very cruel — and my name isn't going to be one that either of you will want to be associated with for a while."
His words were quiet, almost matter-of-fact, but I could guess at the whirlwind of ostracism and scorn that lay within them: at the twin pillory of indigence and contempt for a man who defaulted on a debt of honour. My heart twisted. "Raoul, I can't leave you alone to face—"
"Yes, you can." Raoul dropped my hand and put his arm round my shoulders, giving a little impatient shake. "Can't you see it'll be a hundred times worse to face with a wife and son caught up in the whole thing alongside me? It would be the act of a true friend to take him somewhere safely out of reach... can't we even be friends, Christine, or is that too much to ask?"
Tenderness in our marriage was something I could no longer cope with; but the hint of frustration and bad temper had a blessedly familiar ring to it. I laughed, and leaned my head against his shoulder. "Friends, then... But you will write? Gustave will miss you, you know."
He'd wanted to know just the other day why his father never played with him any more, and I hadn't known what to say: it was going to be even harder to keep up the fiction of a father who loved him when all he could see was Raoul sending him away. Boys needed fathers, and for Gustave, neglected or not, Raoul was all he'd ever had.
Raoul growled something under his breath. "Is it that important to the boy? I wouldn't know what to say..."
"You'll find him much easier to talk to as he grows up," I promised, hoping fervently that it was true. At least once Gustave had learned to talk a little less, and listen a little more... and the same, perhaps, for Raoul. It was one trait they had disastrously in common. "And he'll be head of the family some day — I can't teach him that."
"If my high-and-mighty cousins are too proud to visit the son of an opera-singer now, they're scarcely going to welcome him as the son of a man who's brought our whole name into disrepute," Raoul said bluntly, releasing me and standing up. He walked over to the mantelpiece and stood with his back turned, poking in a desultory way at the fire-irons. "Anyhow, by the time he inherits in fifty years or so, I doubt anyone's going to be listening to anything any of us have to say..."
But whether he had intended it or not, he had comforted me at least about leaving him. Talk about Gustave's long-distant inheritance meant that he, Raoul, wasn't planning to do anything... noble or rash.
I sighed. "I'm sorry — it's just that you've had time to think over this whole idea, and I haven't, yet. It's all very new to me."
I must have been paler than I'd realised, for he turned and looked at me with a frown. "Here, you'd better have another glass of wine."
He poured with a somewhat lavish hand, and I managed half of it. Somewhat to my surprise, Raoul left the half-full glass untouched.
"One other thing..." He was turning the stopper of the decanter round and round with great concentration, not meeting my eye. "You'd still be my wife, but I want you to know that I don't — I don't expect—"
A tide of dull red had mounted up beyond his ears as he flushed like a schoolboy. "If you wanted to take a lover, I'd — I'd quite understand."
It was years since we'd been man and wife in that sense, and it had been the last thing on my mind; taken by surprise, I almost laughed out loud, but managed to hold it back at the last minute. Poor Raoul, he was embarrassed enough already — and maybe he had his own case in mind. Men had needs, I knew, and if he'd been elsewhere, it was the only part of his life in the last few years he'd ever succeeded in being discreet about.
So I managed a blush of my own in assent and smiled back at him as he stole an awkward glance in my direction. "That's settled, then... And if we need to concoct some insulting or threatening letters to exchange for the benefit of a legal fiction, I've got some opera libretti you can use to come up with ideas — if I can borrow your Voltaire."
It was Raoul's turn to be surprised into laughter, a peal of pure boyish delight. He caught me by both hands and tugged me to my feet, swirling me round into his arms. "Oh Christine, you really are a wife in a million..."
He sobered a little, lifting my face to his. "Are you sure this is what you want?"
I'd spent years trying to guess what he needed to hear. Too often, I'd got it wrong.
"Yes, dear," I said hesitantly, and knew I'd hurt him again in the flinching instant before I understood why.
"No more eggshells — not between friends... Tell me truly, is this what you want?"
His eyes were the most honest and direct I'd known them in a long time, and it seemed an age since I'd seen him stand so straight, waiting for my answer. It was as if a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders in the last half-hour, and from mine too. We'd been pulling each other out of shape, he and I; we'd never meant our love to bring out the worst in one another, but somehow it had happened all the same.
I could see in him now the ghost of the man our marriage had nearly destroyed. He was someone I could treasure... as a friend.
"Please, Raoul." I looked up into his face, letting him see the truth of what I was asking. "Kiss me — and set me free."
And the warm comfort of that last embrace told me it had been taken in precisely the spirit in which it was intended.
| Back | Contents | Continue |
