Phantom of the Opera fan-fiction by Igenlode Wordsmith
Sometimes, Raoul’s children remind him of himself and Christine. But mostly they are very much themselves. And a long walk on a hot day is not entirely to everyone’s taste...
I set down the empty picnic-basket with a sigh, and wipe my brow. The sun beats down on the white road, and even the stone parapet of the bridge is warm when I turn to lean on it. It has been a long, hot summer, and corn and grapes alike are heavy for the harvest; the stream below us barely fills the centre arch of the old bridge, and a wide expanse of pebbles extends to either side as I look down, remembering winter floods that seem almost inconceivable on a cloudless August afternoon. A welcome cool breath comes up from the water, but so does a dancing cloud of midges, busy courting with the single-minded fascination of a provincial youth smitten by his first passion.
The memory is ruefully romantic. The darting invasion is not. I straighten up rather hastily, surreptitiously easing the band of my hat where the heat has begun to prickle. Sylvaine, beside me — her own hat dangling by its strings down her back in a manner that would be the despair of her governess, if that good lady were here — has slipped in under my arm to lean against the rough stones and tuck her smooth head beneath my chin, butting upwards in a mute gesture of affection that dates back between us from the days when she was a wilful three-year-old climbing upright on my knee.
She is fourteen now, and nearly as tall as her mother; in a year or two she will have outgrown gawkish limbs and gauche manners, pinned up neatly plaited hair into a softly-styled mass, and blossomed out into a self-possessed young lady who can twist callow suitors around her finger the way she currently manages her elderly aunts. I am half-dreading the prospect, half-eager to see my daughter leave behind her duckling days and launch into the world as a dazzling swan.
She takes after Christine in everything but her mother’s beauty, as the aunts have so often lamented when they thought they were out of my hearing. The lament is unkind, but even I have to admit that it’s true. In so many ways Sylvaine is the image of her mother at fourteen, with a likeness that sometimes prompts a reminiscent smile for Christine and myself to share; but her chin is a little too long for beauty, her brows a little too thickly knit, her jaw a little too square. In middle age, with her angles ripened and softened and lines of laughter round her eyes, men may call her “a handsome creature”. Set amid the frills of adolescence, she will always be indefinably plain.
Still, it is not just the fond father speaking when I prophesy firmly that Sylvaine will break hearts. Already, when she chooses, she can charm the birds off the trees and draw every eye in the room with the vivid flame of her laughter. No insipid pink-and-white creature with flaxen china-doll curls will ever outshine the dancing come-hither commands of a jolie-laide like our daughter.
When she chooses. At the moment she shows no sign of such an inclination, bestowing upon me instead a look of most unladylike triumph over the failings of the other sex, as her brothers straggle down the hill in our wake.
Twelve-year-old Patrice nurses his upturned hat solicitously before him, a sunburnt scientist bringing home his latest specimens, to be destined for the drawers of his museum. Nine-year-old Félix is dragging his feet and visibly lagging behind, his earlier enthusiasm for the expedition long gone with the torpor of the afternoon. And Baby Victoire — whom we really must stop calling ‘Baby’, especially if Christine’s quietly-confided tidings prove true once more — has plumped herself down on a stone up by the turning of the road, with a wail that carries all the way down to the advance-party on the bridge.
“Shoelace again,” Sylvaine diagnoses with an air of weary scorn, and pirouettes across the dusty stones of the bridge to jump up to sit on the other parapet, swinging her own neatly-buttoned boots and fanning herself with her hat. I doff my own crisp straw headgear for a minute under the guise of waving to the boys, blinking under the sudden hammer-blow of sun. Perhaps it had really been too hot a day for a picnic after all. But the distant hills had looked so inviting from the baking gravel of the parterre, and the children had clamoured so hard for Christine’s suggestion of packing up a cold luncheon and setting off that instant that it was only at the last minute that I’d managed to consider the practicalities.
Wiping my brow, I replace my boater and squint from beneath the shade of its brim beyond the bridge to see how those arrangements are coming along. Down the far side of the valley the vineyards open out onto the broader vale beyond and the curves of the great river. A distant plume of white marks the breakneck dash of an express along the main line, too far away for its chattering progress to echo even belatedly to our ears.
Closer at hand, a flash of reflection glints back from the harness-brass of a labouring team on the valley-road, three dappled grey backs yoked to a single vast tree-trunk trussed by chains. Old Baudry’s big Percherons lean into the harness with a will and no more than the occasional toss of a head beneath the goad of a persistent fly, and a slow drift of dust behind them from the lumbering load. It’s a scene that can scarcely have changed since the Crusades, and for a moment this ancient land of ours seems to cradle me close from beneath the soil, as so often before.
Then modernity comes shrieking back, in the shape of square, sandy-haired Patrice coming cantering down the last stretch of hill to show off his latest discovery to his sister.
“A dead frog.” Sylvaine peers into the proffered hat with distaste unmixed with any feminine shrinking. “How like a boy. Are you going to dissect it, or pin it out to dry like your bat?”
This last was an unkind jab, since her brother’s prized dead bat with its pathetic fingered wings had developed a nasty case of mould over the winter, and been confiscated to his great dismay by Christine.
“At least I didn’t waste twenty minutes on the way down cooing over some farmyard pussycats.” The two glare at each other, hackles ruffled, while I smile at the memory of the tumbling kittens. We’d made the halt for the sake of a flagging Félix, if truth be told, but it was Baby Victoire who had been most enchanted, reaching out with fascination despite her mother’s restraining grasp as the dusty bodies with their stiff little flags of tails stalked and pounced among the straw-bales. Remembering Christine’s wistful look and the little girl’s delight, I wonder if I ought to have slipped a few sous into the farmer’s hand and smuggled a wriggling tabby present home in my pocket to take up residence in the kitchens; but Tante Raymonde’s wheezing, yapping little Bichette would not take kindly to it, and my widowed sisters have enough to put up with as it is.
It is not that the children don’t mean well, or that all parties are not very fond of each other. But when two fragile greying ladies share a home — even one like ours — with a bevy of noisily growing offspring, conflicts are inevitable from time to time. And for Raymonde, there is the bittersweet reminder of the three she herself lost in that heartbreaking summer of the scarlet fever, so very long ago.
We light candles for those three little souls every Sunday. But if I am honest, for the children it is no more than a ritual chance to squabble over whose taper burns the best, and for myself chiefly a question of a genuflection to unthinking habit. I was eight years old, after all, and Phyllide and her brothers are blurred memories long since overlaid by the odour of sanctity. It is only Christine who stays behind, sometimes, to pray, with the quiet pity of one who has herself carried life beneath her heart — and lost a child unborn.
It was a grief to us both, of course, when she miscarried in the sixth month while Félix was small. But my concern was more for Christine’s distress than for an infant I had not yet known, and in the year that followed, when she withdrew from me and from our children, it was my sister Aline who was a mother to us all and Raymonde who helped me at last to reach Christine in that frozen place and to bring her back.
We owe a great deal to my sisters, all of us. And now that mesdames les tantes are growing old and set in their ways, it seems little enough in repayment to forgo the impulsive acquisition of a kitten from the countryside.
But there is no shadow today on Christine’s smile as she comes down the last of the hill towards me, with Baby Victoire — shoelace now lovingly re-tied — trotting hand-in-hand at her side. And it’s hard for me to hold back a smile of my own at the sight of Félix escorting them both with a little courtly air, his own fatigue having quite evidently escaped his mind.
My eyes meet Christine’s over the heads of our offspring, and I see there the same mixture of amusement and pride. Some wounds are beyond healing and some lives are scarred beyond repair, but our story, praise God, has not been among that number. From every parting and every sorrow has come only a new beginning, from our childhood days to this. And our own children are the best of us both.
“Come on then, little one.” Sturdy and graceful in her loose-waisted country gown, Christine stoops — despite my protests — to the little girl, and lifts her up as they come to the bridge, balancing her easily on the parapet. I hold out my hands and Victoire tiptoes towards me in the old game we’ve played with all the children, placing her feet with as much concentration as if she were advancing along a real tightrope, while Christine keeps a firm grasp on the back of her dress. Patrice, sitting astride the broad top of the parapet opposite, kicks his heels idly and cheers her on.
“Done it!” The child flings herself into my arms in a final hazardous lunge, all curls and creased cotton and carefree excited kisses, and I wrap her close, conscious — as the boys are not — of the seven-metre drop to the pebbled stream below. But the compact little body is soon wriggling in my hold, and I set her down and glance back again up the side of the valley towards home. From this angle one can only catch a glimpse of the farthest turret over the shoulder of the hill, blue-grey tiles bleached pale in the sun. And close below that mark, a crease in the hillside betrays a smudge of dust where the road runs up towards the skyline.
Christine has followed my gaze. “Raoul, is that—”
She breaks off, as the vehicle comes clearly into view for a moment and reins in so that the distant driver can rise in his seat and wave. I pull out a handkerchief to brandish in return and watch the wheels crawl back into motion, the pony’s bright coat flickering in and out of shadow as he begins the cautious descent.
I turn back to Christine and return her smile. “I asked Hippolyte to meet us with the governess-cart and give the younger ones a lift home. I knew Victoire would be too tired to make it all the way, and if Félix—”
“I’m not too tired,” comes the indignant interruption; and indeed, with the perversity of her age, the little girl is bouncing on her toes. She reconsiders a moment later with a stricken look, clearly torn. “But Mama, I do want to ride with the pony...”
“Of course you shall,” Christine reassures her. “And I think it was a wonderful idea of Papa’s.”
She reaches up to kiss my cheek, and I step back to sweep her a lavish eighteenth-century bow in acknowledgement, drawing a delighted giggle from Sylvaine. “How about you, Félix?”
With his crop of dark curls and his fine-boned features, he is a strikingly attractive child; but he has always been more delicate than the other two, and it is hard on his pride to be always left behind with a much smaller sister. He thinks about it for a minute or two, while Patrice and Sylvaine bicker amiably over the likely age and sex of the specimen frog, and the little two-wheeled vehicle comes closer and closer, swinging round the last of the steep bends onto the gentle slope of the valley road. Cheerful, snub-nosed Hippolyte is driving in his shirt-sleeves with a loose handkerchief around his neck, and the bay pony has a spray of leaves tucked into his bridle to ward off flies.
“I’m going to stay and look after Mama,” Félix announces with determination, and tucks his hand into her arm with the proprietary air of the Medici prince he — in his more civilised moods — so resembles. He offers, nobly, “I’ll carry Baby if you like.”
“Victoire,” Christine corrects automatically. “That’s very kind of you, darling”—she is careful not to allow the faintest quiver of laughter into her voice—“but perhaps you could help by carrying the picnic-basket instead?”
So it is as a reduced but intrepid party of three that we set out to breast the steep hill-brow that is our shortest route home: Sylvaine, Patrice and a doggedly pursuing Raoul, as the younger generation race off in mutual unacknowledged competition. Sylvaine is older and longer of limb; Patrice, yet to reach the years of his manhood’s growth, is still determined not to be outdone by any mere sister, and between them they contrive to convince me that I have grown thoroughly staid and unadventurous, if not with one foot positively in the grave. Did Christine and I ever run that wild? The long habit of honesty and certain cherished memories compel me to admit privately that we did.
If truth be told, I began this ascent a long way behind the others... and for the best of reasons. I smile again at the memory of my wife’s warm weight as I boost her up the step into the high-wheeled carriage, with the pony standing patiently — an assistance of which she has no real need, but in which we both take great enjoyment.
As if on cue the governess-cart comes into view in the valley below, some way on from where we parted; heavily-laden, they are bowling sedately along now on the lower road, Hippolyte having clearly decided to avoid a second ascent, and I hear excited speculation from Patrice, further up the track, as to our chances of beating them home.
Above me, silhouetted against the skyline, Sylvaine clings with one hand to a sapling and leans out to wave, with the shrill whistle that is her proudest accomplishment and Tante Raymonde’s despair. On the road below, heads turn. Félix points, and then they are all waving back, Victoire attempting to climb to her feet in her enthusiasm. Christine restrains her, face alight with laughter, and when I glance back up briefly, Sylvaine against the bright sky is laughing too. For an instant the likeness between them catches at my heart, and past and present and future promise are all somehow one; the terraced earth around me holds me warm and vital in its arms, and here at the centre of all things joy burns intense enough to touch.
Then the moment slips away from understanding like a revelation eluding my grasp. With the voices of the children calling around me like swallows I know only that we can love, and be most truly beloved in return — and that on this August day I count myself among the most fortunate men alive.
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