“Go and find Gustave — tell the stage manager not to disturb me. I need some time...”
The Vicomte de Chagny closed the door of his wife’s dressing-room behind him with the strangest sensation that he was floating on air. The shakiness of reaction was setting in — he was trembling like an adolescent, and his stomach felt as if he had just jumped a hedge only to find a ditch beyond — but between the memory of promises given and kisses returned he could scarcely feel his feet touch the ground. And I’ll do it, Christine, I swear: every word of it. We’ll get away from here, begin again as it should have been...
He had not known until this morning how much he had feared to lose her. How little his own nursed grievances, his self-justification, were worth, when that yawning possibility opened before him like a gulf. From the height of the moment’s euphoria, he could almost spare a scrap of pity for that other — for him, whose delusions and scheming had led only to this clear bright salvation for Raoul’s own life...
To his unaccustomed eye, the activity backstage here at Phantasma seemed oddly disorganised compared to the regimented rush of the great opera houses, with their ranks of serried hemp on the walls as ordered as the teams of stage-hands amid the apparent chaos. In this world, catwalks sprawled instead of backdrops suspended above, and great trunk cables fed a maze of conduits and electrical trickery all around; he was familiar enough with the demands of a quick-change between acts to recognise the undercurrent of urgency that ran through the handful of shirt-sleeved workers moving as if at random to reconfigure the stage, but it was beyond him to identify any hierarchy among them. In Paris or Vienna, he could have carried out his errand within moments. Here, after staring round like a fool for what felt like an eternity, he was reduced to calling out.
“Stage manager!” He moderated his tone with a conscious grip on his temper as the nearest stage-hands turned to stare at him with identical egalitarian American hostility, and addressed the closest. “Excuse me, but can you direct me to the stage manager?”
The man shifted a wad of tobacco — or gum — to the other side of his cheek and chewed briefly before obliging with an answer, in a brogue so thick that it momentarily puzzled Raoul’s ear. “Pieczinski — stage left.”
He masticated again, observing the Vicomte with slow-moving malice, and Raoul took considerable satisfaction in confounding his evident expectations by striding off without hesitation in the direction specified.
The big Pole bending over down in the prompt corner straightened at his approach, and Raoul gave him the courtesy of a nod. “Madame de — my wife, Miss Daaé — is not to be disturbed, if you please. She needs a little privacy just now.”
Pieczinski tugged absently at an earlobe that was already grimed with dust. “Sure thing — we already got that from the boss.” He grinned, very white in the dust-smeared jaw. “You’re the Vee-compte, right? The husband? He says you’re looking for the kid...”
“He says?” Raoul’s rosy mood, already tarnished, abruptly ebbed further. That damnable eavesdropping manipulator — he’d been listening to every word in Christine’s dressing-room. Of course he had. Peeping on at every embrace... well, much pleasure might he have had of that! Raoul’s jaw tightened. It was all he was getting... from either of them.
“Sure... the kid — the boy?” Pieczinski pointed, obligingly, to a small figure engrossed in the flies above them.
Go and find Gustave — I need some time...
She hadn’t said — she hadn’t actually said, in so many words, that she was coming with him, a small, remorselessly literal part of his mind had begun to point out, even as he went through the motions of thanking Pieczinski... crossing the stage... approaching his son... She hadn’t said it, though he’d begged it of her: if you love me, as I love you.
But the memory of those kisses welled up to speak for that, the vivid sensation of her answering mouth so sweet and vital under his own that the ghost of it caught his breath away and he halted, almost without thought. Not the dutiful kiss of their parting ritual every night, nor the passionless acquiescence with which she’d submitted to increasingly drunken attempts to win a response... just now she’d met his hesitant embrace with a shy ardour of her own that broke off in protest before returning to cling again, her lips exploring tentatively, gently against his, until a vast aching wave of tenderness had broken over him and it had been all he could do to let her go.
And her kisses had been for him — for him, Raoul de Chagny, not for the faceless husband to whom she must consent but for the man she had chosen; the kisses of the girl who’d laughed wholeheartedly up at him on that rooftop so long ago.
His heart beat a little faster even now, remembering it. So why — why, looking back, did that same niggling part of his mind paint those moments with the lingering taste of farewell?
“Father?” Gustave’s hand was hesitant on his arm — the touch of a child who’d been shouted at too often for ‘interrupting’ — and for once Raoul managed to bite back the angry response that went with being startled. It had become a train of thought that he had just as soon lose in any case.
“Father, is Mother coming? Is it time?”
“Yes, she’ll be coming soon, and then we can all go home.” Raoul managed a smile for his son, and saw the child’s face break into that fleeting delight that was so like Christine’s.
He’d never been able to see anything of himself in Gustave at all; the child was his mother’s boy through and through, for all his de Chagny blood, and Raoul had never questioned it. Resented it, on occasion, yes — he could admit that now, shamefaced — but he’d never wondered at just how little his son and he had in common.
He’d never doubted Christine... That vicious insinuation rose up in memory again and he could feel anger swell even at the thought of it. Such a strange child... so talented... As if that were a justification to cast a slur on his wife’s marriage bed! They’d been a pair of inexperienced children, yes; but if heart or body had strayed elsewhere in those first, shy encounters, if the girl who’d bloomed to womanhood in his arms had been anything other than the sweetest of innocents, than she had been an actress of the first water and he an easy, infatuated dupe...
With an indrawn breath he caught Gustave by the shoulders and pulled him closer in the half-light under the catwalks, searching out every line of that half-formed face for some sign of his own stamp: some proof of what had to be true. The boy came willingly into his father’s grasp, a little puzzled at the intensity of that scrutiny but returning an open, affectionate gaze — this had to be the most attention he’d had from his father since they’d left France, Raoul realised with an inward wince — but there was no trace of Chagny in him. Not his grandfather’s long nose and chin that cropped up again and again in the portraits back to François 1er; not the fair colouring that had come into the family in Raoul’s father’s time; not the familiar line of brows and eyes that greeted Raoul every day in the mirror and was, so far as he’d ever been able to tell, all his own.
And there was no trace either — he fought back the revulsion of the thought, forced himself to scour the boy’s face for that memory — no trace either of the face of that other who had haunted his nightmares for years, and whose eyes had burned only this morning into his. No. Eyes, hair, delicate features and that precocious obsession for music... Gustave de Chagny was every inch his mother’s child.
How fortunate... for Christine.
That thought slid in like a knife of betrayal before he knew it for what it was and rejected it utterly. Doubt your wife.. doubt your son... That mountebank trickster: that was his game. That was just what he wanted — what he did, messing with your mind, distorting every thought until it became as foul and twisted as his own.
And Gustave... Gustave hadn’t a false bone in his body. Raoul tightened his grip on the boy’s shoulders in a moment’s pride: felt the slight body stand arrow-straight and braced beneath his grasp, as the child’s own gaze responded to the warmth that showed in his eyes. Gustave had no trace of that cunning and deception; every thought chased across his face like an open book. Try as he might — and he was no more a prodigy of innocence than any other small boy — the child was the most hopeless of liars. It was an incompetence that had driven Raoul to fury in the past: if the boy was going to pass off an open fib, he might at least have the grace not to insult his father’s intelligence with his efforts. But now the knowledge brought a sudden fierce leap of pleasure. There was nothing — nothing of that demon’s get in Gustave.
He gave the boy’s shoulder a final pat and let him go, conscious for the first time in years of the inadequacy of the connection between them. What would bring a ten-year-old pleasure? If they were only at home, he could have bought Gustave a pony... But the mental image of his son cantering eagerly down the drive on the back of a pretty little cob ebbed in the face of reality; Gustave took more interest in steam-engines than horses, and more interest in music than either. And he had a piano already; even if they could have afforded it, Raoul drew the line at presenting the child with his own symphony orchestra.
The sheer incongruity of that thought brought him the saving grace of realisation in time; one could not bribe fatherhood... He bent down on a sudden recollection. “Gustave... do you remember that toy you were trying to show me when we first arrived? I saw it on the dresser in your room... do you think we could have a look at it together some time? I’m afraid you’ll have to explain it to me; I don’t really understand how these things work.”
The dawning smile he got in return was a reward in itself. But the boy’s eyes fell for a moment.
“Father...” A small hand found its way into his. “Do you think we could... could we go round Coney Island together?”
All the vulgar, forbidden delights that Christine would never approve: the Tattooed Lady, the Tunnel of Terror, the barrel that flung you off your feet and the spinning wheel that tumbled the girls’ skirts around their knees; the ghoulish melodrama of the True-Life Murders of Manhattan, the gawping pinheads and the armless man, hot-dogs eaten with greasy fingers, the calliope and the high-kicking showgirls in their spangles... America writ large, in all its tawdry fecundity and glamour: to a child, pure magic.
About to repudiate the idea, Raoul remembered the day when he was nine, and the gypsies had come to town: the fire-eaters, the caged animals and the wild dancing. He’d run off after dark to see the fair, and his sisters had been horrified. The modern Coney Island held no more appeal for him than that village fair had to the older girls, but to see it through Gustave’s eyes, a boy and his father together, offered a strange pang of promise.
“I’m sorry...” And he meant it. “I can’t, Gustave. We’re going home tonight, as soon as we can. I’ve got the tickets: everything’s packed up. We’re just waiting for your mother.”
...Waiting for her to come — or waiting for her to sing? Disquiet had begun to eat at him. I need some time... Christine, how much time?
Gustave was tugging on his hand, eyes wide for the activity all around them. A pair of stage-hands thrust past with barely a word of warning, passing the tail of a trailing rope from one to the other. Costumed dancing-girls could be glimpsed in the wings, jostling into light wrappers to cover their outfits on the way back to the dressing-rooms, and a hulking giant in a loincloth briefly blocked the light as Gustave drew in a long, awestruck breath.
“Then please can I look around some more backstage before the performance starts? Just for a few minutes...”
Raoul hesitated, conscious for the first time that the boy had been entrusted to his care; that Christine had made him a gift of that trust... But the look of pleading in the face turned up to his was more than he could refuse a second time.
“All right... but stay within sight, Gustave. And if anything goes wrong — if there’s an accident — come and find me at once, do you understand? I’ll be there, I promise...”
But as his son’s face lit up, the boy turning to dart out into the midst of the men and machinery on every side, Raoul found himself putting out a hand to halt him momentarily on an impulse he barely understood. “Gustave, I —”
He’d brushed off the child so often as a nuisance; there were no words between them now for what he wished he could say. “I —”
But the boy’s eyes — Christine’s eyes — were quick with understanding. “Father, it’s all right. I know. You look with your heart, that’s all...”
Raoul’s jaw had dropped.
“I do what?” Confusion and suspicion brought that out on a familiar rising snarl, and he cursed himself at his son’s flinch and retreat. “Gustave, I’m not angry. I just...”
“You look with your heart.” Gustave sounded a little uncertain about it himself. “That’s what Mother told me... I think...”
He looked down at his boots, scuffling one foot in the dust on the floor. “I asked if you loved me — and she said...”
The small brown head rubbed mutely against his father’s sleeve in token of words unspoken; and it was easy, somehow, to stoop and feel the child’s arms up about his neck as his own embrace tightened around the boy.
Then Gustave had wriggled free and was off, and Raoul found himself alone in the shadows beside the stage, half-galled and half-grateful at the knowledge of his wife’s intercession with their son.
Oh, Christine... still trying to mend my bridges for me. God knows you’ve had small thanks for it, over the years... I’ve made you a poor enough husband, haven’t I? And yet I’ve loved you — I always loved you. Did you know that, I wonder? Or did you only tell it to yourself with a brave face, as you told Gustave... because it ought to have been true?
| Contents | Continue |
