The chorus girls had gone now, clattering and shrieking their way to their next change, and the corridor from the dressing-rooms was dark and quiet: too quiet. Where was she? And where — suspicion flared instantly, full-grown from the first, as he glanced round for the flicker of a mask — where was he?
Not here. Out front, then: surveying the ticket take, overseeing the seating, greeting the customers? Raoul didn’t think so, oh no.
That creature — that creature who’d leered and taunted him, driven him to that unspeakable gamble — had been watching Christine’s dressing-room, and maybe he’d enjoyed the view; but he’d been watching and waiting.
And if I go there now, Christine? If I go to call for you in coat and gloves and rattle at the door... will I find it locked? And will I hear a voice — that voice — inside? Oh God, Christine — angel—
It was like a nightmare. A nightmare in which the phantoms of the past sprang up again and again on every side, hydra-headed, and everything he’d thought secure could drop away from underneath him.
He’d made the winning throw: he’d rolled, and nicked the main. But the game had been changed. And when the cards were on the table and the stakes were down — the dealer plays last...
Oh, why had he taken that bet, why — why? He’d needed no goading, for all his bravado of anger; he knew well enough at heart that he’d leapt at the chance, sore and afraid, and drunken enough to be desperate to prove he was neither... Just as he’d plunged at Monte Carlo, when Spezzioni sat there cool and mocking behind the bank, and asked — insinuated — if the Vicomte was sure, quite sure. He’d never been more sure of anything in that moment than the need to prove the man wrong, wife and home and sanity all cast aside: and where had that madness brought him but here, into the new domain of his oldest enemy... with his whole life on the table in another rigged game.
He’d let his rival set the terms, and been played for the drink-sodden sot he was: the man who could gamble his wife in a New York bar for the sake of his own pride.
Raoul groaned. “Our Christine shall choose tonight”... Yes, let her choose! Let it be over, this trickery and torment — let her see the worst of me and take me or leave me as I deserve. But let it be an open fight...
For him to lose, Christine had only to continue as agreed: to play the good artiste, the loving mother, the loyal wife. To sing — as she thought — to save her son and husband from indebtedness and shame. To keep the show on the stage at all costs. For him to win... she must first overturn everything on his bare word: all those qualities that made her Christine.
And now that fiend was laying down his cards in her dressing-room and making his play, in those same hypnotic tones that had lured her worthless husband out of what judgement he’d ever had. And he, Raoul, that husband, had nothing to set in the balance save love — the love that had failed her so often before.
The knowledge of what he had done half-choked him. He should have told her. Should have told her the truth of that choice, however much shame it drew; should have told her what she risked and what he had brought about. Not to win that accursed bet, but in the cause of honesty alone, if they were ever to live with one another again...
Only... in the name of that gamble itself, there was no way he honourably could. He’d knelt there at her feet, begging for her future and for his — with his tongue as thoroughly tied by his own act as if the noose had been around his neck.
She walks — you leave together. She sings — you leave alone. Criminal, stupid, wrong as it was, he’d given his word to let it all ride on Christine’s free choice: to sing or not to sing. And on that choice only.
To tell her the truth and skew that choice was to renege on the bet. A debt of honour was not, could not be negotiable. Gentlemen must play and pay... The Vicomte de Chagny was all too horribly, belatedly aware that his opponent was no gentleman.
He couldn’t take much more of this. Time was running out—
Tension unwound abruptly into unthinking action, urgent strides; he didn’t even realise he’d moved until he collided, hard, with another body in the half-blind darkness of the first steps beyond the stage.
He caught hold of the woman to steady her, shifting a grip that proved over-intimate with an instinctive apology, and then found himself fumbling for an English equivalent: “ah — forgive me—”
He broke off again, looking more closely at her in the semi-dark. “Miss Giry... Meg?”
Meg Giry had a cotton wrapper clutched around her, but the grease paint stood out on her strained white face, and she was still in her stage costume, a grotesque echo of their last meeting. She’d blown in then like a breath of fresh air to the depths of his stale self-hatred, face and hair damp with salt and scraped clean. He remembered, dimly, through the fog of drink, that she had left again on the verge of tears. The intervening hours, it seemed, had been no kinder on her than on Raoul himself.
If less had hung on it, he might have spared her more than that moment’s attention — she looked ill — but he had no thought left for anything but Christine. He caught her arm.
“Where is he? Where is... he?”
“The Master? How would I know?” Recognition came slowly, and the flatness of her voice woke to a moment’s shared pain as her gaze met his at last. “Where do you think — where do you think, Monsieur le Vicomte?”
Raoul fell back a step, feeling his own face drain as white as hers. But the relentless words ran on.
“I told you — I told you to take her away, for your sake, for her sake, for all of us. You and your blind pride... do you think you can fight him? Do you think anyone can fight him? He will take her, and he will take her son — and leave us with nothing. And I, Meg Giry, who’d have given anything to stand where she stands tonight — I—”
“Miss Giry!” Raoul cleared his throat. For a wonder, she had stopped. “Miss Giry, I have the tickets; I have everything arranged. I’m just waiting for her now. And if there is anything, anything, at all you can do—”
“Waiting?” Her paint-rimmed eyes were huge in the dark. “Waiting — while he pours that voice of his into her very soul? You’ll wait a long time, Vicomte!”
And it was out at last, hanging in the air between them: the spectre that Christine might never leave at all.
He’d thrust one hand into the breast of his coat to pull out the tickets. The thin card crumpled in his grip, and he forced his fingers to open, slowly, watching their tremor.
If she sings, you lose tonight:— I won’t lose! He’d flung that back, never allowed himself even to contemplate the future that lay behind that impossibility.
She sings, you leave — alone.
The heavy print of the shipping line smudged in front of his eyes as his hand shook. A thin, almost painless slice welled dark across the side of his thumb, beading blood. Raoul watched the dark line blur and thicken to a halt, seeing instead silent, empty rooms, the fading ghost of perfume in the hall, a box of opera programmes yellowed and stale...
Voices drifted across from above the stage: electricians, patching up some fault before the full flood of light. Half-unthinking, Raoul turned back, checking for Gustave.
Gustave. Who was in his care.
You leave — alone.
He closed his eyes, facing the unthinkable. Opened them again. “Miss Giry... are you in a hurry? Are you going out?”
For a moment she barely seemed to hear him; he set his hand on her arm as she shook her head.
“Meg — we knew each other a little, once, in Paris... and you were a good friend to Christine. Yesterday you brought Gustave back to the hotel. I wonder.... if you could do me one last favour again.”
The eyes that met his were dull and without spark, as if her outburst had left only numbness behind. “Perhaps. If I can.”
Raoul swallowed, steadying his voice. “I may — I may have to leave. Could you take care of Gustave for me? Make sure he gets back to his mother safely after the performance? His English isn’t very good when he is... upset, and he knows you.... You’ll find him stage right, in the wings. Tell him I sent you.”
Meg Giry stared at him, pulling free from his grasp. “Take... Gustave?”
“It’s only a precaution, of course.” He managed a smile, weaving shreds of confidence together to cover that yawning abyss. She’s giving him a fair hearing, that’s all. When he’s finished, she’ll come out on the stage; she’ll find me, and we’ll go. He turned the smile up a notch, aiming it in Meg’s direction. “I’m sure his mother and I will be along to collect him any minute now...”
Meg laughed, a single peal of almost hysterical mirth that brought her to sudden, vivid life: for the first time he could see the traces of the Ooh-La-La Girl who had captivated Coney Island. “You want me to take Christine’s child? Yes, Vicomte, of course.”
She glanced down at herself, the stage wrapper over the tawdry suit. “Let me just change, and I’ll be there. I’ll take him. I’ll keep him right beside me every minute until it’s all over.” She laughed again. “After all, I have nowhere to go tonight.”
And like quicksilver she slipped through his fingers as he tried to look into her face, and whirled around and off.
For a few seconds, taken aback, Raoul almost went after her. But the first of the big lights came on overhead with an audible hum, casting bright-edged shadows across the stage, and the final checks were being called between the crew; and a tall flicker of white in the wings opposite set his pulse racing.
He turned back between the girders towards that phantom glimpse, drawn irresistibly. Was it—? Yes. That towering dandified arrogance would have been unmistakable, even without the affectation of the mask that hid physical deformity. But there were other deformities that could not be hidden... and he was alone. Raoul had not known until that moment how much he’d dreaded — expected — to see Christine swept along to the stage under that smooth escort.
Hope that had been all but extinguished soared abruptly. She had heard that other out, then, listened to his wiles — and had not made her choice. It was not yet over; there was still a chance.
Would she sing... or would they flee once more together? Perhaps even she did not know. Raoul caught his breath. Please, Christine...
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