Raoul awoke with a stifled cry from a dream that he could not remember and lay awake, sweating, in the dark. There was blood — blood on his hand — and Christine’s face falling back, pallid and sunken—
No. He got a grip on himself. He was awake. It was just a dream, just another dream. Just one more of the little souvenirs that were a madman’s gift from the time before their wedding...
The bedclothes had inexplicably closed in on him. He flung out an arm towards the other side of the sheets, seeking the comfort of his wife’s cool shoulder, found only emptiness, and struck against the washstand with jolting force that brought him finally and most horribly awake.
The dream... had been real. Memory was flooding back now, racking him with shudders despite the sweat. Christine’s death... was real. It was the wakening, the moments when night after night he believed himself back beside her, believed for an instant that the whole thing was one more nightmare — it was dreaming that he was awake that was the most cruel deceit of all.
His hand ached dully where he had cracked it against the porcelain bowl. The lurching dark around him was a tiny shared cabin in the bowels of an Atlantic liner, its folding washstand barely an arm’s-length from his narrow bed. Overhead in the upper berth the old Jew Groscek snored lightly, his steady breathing catching briefly with a sigh as he settled deeper into the bedding, and then resuming its gentle rasp.
They’d exchanged maybe ten words in the course of the last three days; the old man had his own troubles, Raoul suspected, but he showed no inclination to confide, and by mutual agreement they had left one another alone. It was a reticence for which Raoul was grateful, in those moments when his thoughts gave him any peace at all.
There was no porthole, and the air down here was close and far too warm. A dim line of light around the door told Raoul that the night-bulbs were still burning in the passageway outside; it was too dark to be certain, but he guessed there were hours to go before dawn. The sounds of the ship around him — the sullen beat of the engines like the throbbing of a vein at his temples, the shifting groan of plates and frames against the waves — had a dull, muffled note that he knew too well. It was the sound of sleepless watches without the echo of feet or voices: the sounds of empty passages and rows of closed doors.
He rolled over with a groan in the unaccustomed, too-narrow berth, remembering against his will hot nights in Paris, with shutters flung wide and limbs sprawled beneath a single sheet across the broad plains of their bed. Remembered that summer four years back, when the city baked in the heat for week after week until the roofs began to shimmer, and Christine had tossed sleepless at his side. She hadn’t complained; but she had grown listless and pale, snappish and heavy-eyed, and they’d quarrelled over nothing and everything in outbursts that left her shaking and in tears.
Gustave had been six, and their marriage had already been on the rocks. He saw that now, with the clear, unforgiving vision that comes too late.
But he’d understood even then that something was wrong; had written to Tante Emilie in Lannion and had taken Christine with him, just the two of them for one last time. Gustave, thriving in the heat, had been left behind. He had his nurse and a houseful of servants — he could manage without his mother for a few short weeks, Raoul had insisted, and found a tame doctor to promise that Madame’s health might depend upon it.
It might even have been true. He didn’t know. Knew only that those weeks in Brittany, among the tall houses nestled above the winding Léguer, had been a shy courtship all over again.
The sun shone with the same force in Lannion among its hills, but the breezes of the West bore the scent of grass and enduring granite, and his aunt — ancient now, and withered, but with the same bright eye that had quelled a boy who had come home dripping with salt but unrepentant — made them welcome with all the kindness of those summers long ago. He’d watched the colour come back into Christine’s cheeks, and re-learned the curve of her waist within his arm and the weight of her head against his shoulder as they walked the steep streets together through jostling market crowds or alone in the soft dusk. He’d sat with her in the window of their airy room at sunset, as the birds called overhead and the mists gathered by the river below and the scent of her hair was full of warm promise.
Together, one day, they’d walked the six miles through the lanes down to the sands at Trestraou, and swung, hot and thirsty, down the final hill through a rash of new-built villas to the sea. The great sweep of sand was no longer as empty as it had been when they were children, and Parisian fashions and laughter fluttered along the sea-front: but the waves and the sky stretched out as widely as ever, and Christine, greatly daring, had shed stockings and boots and run down to quench aching toes in the ripples at the water’s edge. Raoul, struggling with knotted laces, had called after her, laughing.
And they’d traded kisses at last with tiny waves about their feet, washed by cool water like the ebb and flow of her mouth against his, hesitant and melting all at once. There had been onlookers on the shore. But for those few brief weeks of summer, none of that had seemed to matter any more.
He’d lain awake at Tante Emilie’s that night with her weight clasped close against his heart, listening to the distant owls call and feeling the light stir of her breath against his breast as she slept.
Christine; Christine... Tangled sheets and sweat-dampened curls—
Raoul rolled over again with a catch in his breath, and lay sleepless in the dark, staring blindly upward.
The heat had broken at last that year with great clouds mounting over Brest, towering piles drifting inward over the coast to fill the night with thunder. They’d gone back to Paris — a Paris washed clean, silver-grey city beneath autumn skies — back to Gustave, grown shy and a little distant, so that Christine, remorseful, devoted herself to him more than ever... and in a while, as the threads of their lives resumed, it had seemed no more than a dream.
Save for Anne.
Anne, who had come waltzing into their lives after those weeks at Lannion, to Christine’s initial consternation and Raoul’s surprised, fierce delight. Sainte-Anne, whose innocence and laughter were all that Christine’s once had been... and whose eyes had met his, in that clear bright spring, with a shock of knowledge and wonder that still left him shaken to the bone. He had not known that such things could be. Christine had Gustave, after all... and it was not the same.
Nothing had been quite the same since Anne had come. And nothing, now, would be the same ever again.
His wife had not been his, after all, he told himself brutally, listening to old Groscek’s steady sleep up above. If he had failed her, and failed her, and failed her again... she had betrayed him, hadn’t she? Betrayed him with an intimacy that hurt bitterly even now. He could have cast her off, if he had known.
But he would not. He knew that too, with a desperate, aching certainty that tore him apart.
Nothing — not Anne’s existence, not even Gustave’s — could change what Christine meant to him, even when they hurt each other the most. If she had come to him on their wedding day, if she had trusted him... she could have had his name, his life, his shelter for her child, whatever she had done.
If she had told him the truth. It came down to that, didn’t it? For she had lied, lied as only women could lie, with loving words and gentleness and evasions that were all a lovesick fool could desire...
Christine... No. He would not believe that. He could not believe that. He had flung one arm uselessly across his eyes; he turned again into the pillow, the linen clammy against his cheek. The covers were twisted about him now, ensnaring and binding like coils of rope—
Him. It had been him. Using her fear, using her compassion. He, Raoul, had seen them together, hadn’t he? Seen the power his rival held over her, heard the allure and beauty of that voice. Christine was not to be won through power or possession... but pity, now — a broken creature, ruined by love...
He remembered against his will tears of his own, woken from nightmare against the soft silk of her shoulder. Remembered her young body entwining his for comfort, gathering, soothing: remembered passion that had shaken both of them in the joining that had followed.
That was how it must have been, he told himself fiercely. She’d been an innocent. She’d given herself, allowed liberties... she hadn’t known what she was doing. And the blame — the blame lay in the man who’d trapped her with weeping deceit, the man whose power she’d feared and fled when she thought him strong, whose weakness alone could have caught her unaware...
If he told himself that often enough, he might even come to think it true. Raoul bit his lip, desperate for honesty in the dark. Easy to make a monster and bray childish defiance, is it not, monsieur le Vicomte? Easy to cast her as a puppet, the woman you love: to deny her will and her choice and her consent...
Around his neck the thin chain galled in reminder, bearing her wedding ring — his ring.
The Phantom had slipped it from her finger in silence, that face still racked with unspeakable grieving, and held it out, and Raoul had taken it back without a word, in a gesture that both of them knew set her free. She belonged to no man; and the chains, now, were his.
He’d stood there for hours out on the pier that night, after they’d taken Gustave away, after Meg — poor damaged Meg, as much a victim as any of the rest — had brought the doctors and the stretcher and every kind of help she could find, and broken down in wild sobbing when there was nothing to be done. The police had come, taken a bribe, and gone.
Carny folk... dime a dozen. The words were alien, but the echo of dismissal in the tone was all too familiar: ‘Raoul and the soubrette’... and the little snigger that went with it. All her talent, all her heartbreak — nothing more than a cheap stage stunt gone wrong.
The alternative was sensation, he knew that, and the cheap Press swarming like blow-flies to a carcase. Adultery, illegitimacy, aristocracy: melodrama no scandal-sheet could resist.
And so he’d turned his back, dry-eyed and hopeless, and jerked out the few banal lies that had been required. Stood there while the murky water welled and sucked below and behind him the cover-up began, with a practised ease that suggested this was not, after all, the first time...
Mr. Y had friends in high places, it seemed. Or perhaps in low places.
They’d been very efficient, Fleck, Gangle and Squelch. They’d taken care of their master and of the child and of all the flotsam left behind... and they would have taken care of the Vicomte de Chagny if he had allowed it. There had been kindness in the plucking hands of the little freak-woman, and understanding in her voice, and he had believed for a moment that he might break down at last — but he had not wept for Christine, not on that night or any night. It seemed he could not.
So he’d ignored Fleck and her urgings, and she’d left him alone. Alone to stand there on the pier when all the rest had gone, as the lights of Coney Island flickered out one by one towards the dawn, with Christine’s wedding ring clutched in his hand hard enough to brand him to the bone.
He’d thought of dropping it into the water, to lie among the crabs and the weed and the fish that nibbled at dead men’s toes. He’d thought, more than once that night, of the few short steps that would have taken him over the edge in turn — not in expiation, for nothing could do that, but in the simple surcease of oblivion.
But he had turned from the sea instead at first light, and gone back stiff and aching to the room they’d shared, and stripped off his coat to lie down, with the mechanical movements of exhaustion. It was then for the first time that he’d seen the blood on his hand where he’d held her; blood, dark and matted, on the fine cloth of his sleeve. Christine’s life, in a stiffening stain...
He’d doubled over, found the pot under the bed with moments to spare, and thrown up.
The rest was a blur. He’d woken at some point in cramped misery upon the bed with the ring still clenched against his palm. At some point, in the days that followed, he’d bought the cheap American chain that held it now like the chafe of a scapular against his throat.
“Think of it, Raoul, a secret engagement—” Another chain, another ring, nestling in warm shadow where decency could not see; her voice had been laughing, a little breathless, with an undertone of fear he had never truly understood until it had been too late. He’d promised her love, light and safety — but of all those, only love had been his to give.
Raoul lay awake now in the endless night, and slid up one hand to grip that slim discarded band — the closed loop of their marriage — in penance and unthinking defiance.
He’d taken back the ring and signed all the papers set before him, concerning Christine, concerning Gustave. His name was still needed, for a final few days. The rest of him was not.
Those moments had begun as necessary negotiation and ended as purgatory and confessional both, a strange fellowship of grief and hate held together by the thread of the Phantom’s voice. He had not wanted to hear — he thought the other man had not wanted to speak. But the need had been stronger than either of them.
He knew himself despised in remorseless detail — on that at least they were agreed — for what he had squandered. Knew now how bitterly he was envied: for youth, for hope, for an unmarred face... for Christine. For the years of Christine which he had not deserved.
And now she was a hollow shell who belonged to neither of them. Love... love was not an opera. Love was not gambled or deserved. Love was a life lived together. Love was given, and Christine had given it for all her years without counting the cost.
There should have been so many more years... The ring was tight in his hand, and he needed a drink — needed the oblivion he had learnt to crave. But if he once fell down that slope now he did not think he would ever come up again.
He had turned away from the easy road that night on the pier. He was still loved — still wanted. He had to believe that, and come safely home. Christine would have wanted it. And Anne... Anne would never understand.
Raoul closed weary eyes and waited yet again for the dawn.
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