Christine comes to see him, and she's not in the mood for talking, something far away in her eyes, and he knows she's not long home from the past.
She makes tea for them both, and smiles at him as she passes his mug to him, then she goes to the television and fiddles with the DVD player. He can work it himself, well enough, but mostly he has it for her. Through the years all his old videotapes have migrated onto the discs thanks to different Christines — mostly future ones, come back to see him. Mostly they're recordings of Sorelli, all the films she was in that were released onto tape. And Christine, through her technical skills, found more of them on the internet, and put them on discs for him.
It always feels a little strange, watching the interviews now that she's gone. But Christine likes them, so he doesn't mind, but it feels, sometimes, like watching the most intangible of ghosts.
(He has a whole collection of Noël, too, and it's not as strange with him but sometimes it does catch him just a little off guard. He's never told her that, in case it would keep her from watching them, and just because it catches him a little strange doesn't mean it should affect her.)
This time it's a film she goes for, one of the ones she found on some website. Two strikes to midnight, 1947. One of Sorelli's first proper feature films and it strikes him that she was so very young in it, playing an actress in an entanglement with a director, her hair so dark and curled, that proud angle of her head.
Sorelli as she was, seventy years ago. God but it's unsettling to think of it like that.
Seventy years.
Christine settles on the couch beside him, the brush of her hand shaking him out of his thoughts, and he squeezes that hand gently.
"What made you choose this one?" his voice is soft under the starting music, and she leans her head against his shoulder.
"I was just back there."
He smiles to himself, and sits back, ready to see his oldest friend again, as she once was.
(Both of them will be asleep by the end of it, together on the couch, but he'll wake first, her head heavy against his shoulder, and he won't want to wake her, not when she needs the sleep, so he'll sit there as long as it takes, watching the television returned to the silent starting screen, the angle of Sorelli's face and her dark lipstick in the black and white, and he won't think very much at all, except how fortunate he is to have Christine in his life, how fortunate he's been to know her.)
(He wouldn't give up a minute of knowing her for anything in the world.)
(After she wakes, she helps him to the kitchen, his bones stiff, and insists on making tea for him even when he says he's fine. When Erik arrives, it lightens his heart to see them together, to see the mischief in Erik's face as he says, "I knew I'd find you here, Mrs Ansborough," and she swats him and answers, "Call it a lucky guess, Mr Daaé," and the teasing of them makes Raoul smile to himself.)
(This dear pair. How much duller would his life be without them?)
In 1986, they made a documentary about Philippe, and about his death.
Someone had found newsreels that had him in them, two of them, one with Sorelli. And it was those newsreels that gave the BBC the notion that there should be something made, especially after the controversy over the film that he and Sorelli had stopped. They asked Sorelli if she'd be involved in it, and if she could persuade him to go to London to give an interview, and she agreed to be involved but only on the grounds that they came to Dublin, and did it properly, with footage of Glasnevin and Dublin Bay, and interview him in his own office.
He agreed, on condition that they bring the newsreel clips with them and show him Philippe.
Philippe in 1936, freshly back from one of his trips to Paris. Tall, and thin, laughing in black and white, turning a grin on the camera, and Raoul's heart caught in his chest, the tears prickling his eyes, to have his brother brought back to him across fifty years, just as he remembered him.
As if he could reach out, and touch him. As if that smile could be turned to him. That laugh an echo in his head.
He swallowed against the lump in his throat, and Sorelli squeezed his hand tight. The next clip was the one with her, her arm linked with Philippe's as they left a theatre in London. She was starring as Kay in Time and the Conways, her performance garnering any number of impressed reviews, and in the clip Philippe smiles down at her, and she glances coyly at the camera, and waves. She has just the slightest limp, from the tuberculosis setting into her leg, and two months later she was in hospital, with that leg in a cage.
(He's watched that clip so many times in all the years since, both clips. And when he closes his eyes, he can see them as clear as day.)
He squeezed her hand as the clip ended, and her gaze met his, and he nodded.
They interviewed him in his office, a photo of he and Philippe on his desk, facing the camera. And they asked him about Philippe, about what he was like, and growing up with him, and of course they asked him about the day he died, and the investigation, but after all the years, after writing about it and talking about it so many times, he was ready for those questions, and his voice was steady, his gaze firm as he spoke about it.
He and Sorelli shared a drink afterwards, when they had gone, and for the first time in years they slept in the same bed. It was easier, that night, for both of them.
The documentary was an excellent production, well-received in both Ireland and Britain, and the letters came to him from all over the country, condolences, words of supports, comments about how well he came across, and how touched these correspondents had been by the story of what had happened.
He kept them all, and replied to each of them.
The one that affected him the most came from London.
Came from Darius.
Before he ever opened the letter, before he turned the envelope over and saw the return address on the back, he knew the writing. His legs trembled as he made it to the kitchen, and sank into his chair.
Darius.
Darius.
Darius writing to him.
Thirteen years-
He swallowed hard, and opened the letter.
Darius' name at the bottom was enough to make his heart ache.
His eyes went back to the top, his throat tight, as he started to read.
It started with an apology. An apology for having left, and an apology for writing now.
When I saw you talking about Philippe, I knew I had to...
You always did care so much about him...one of the things I loved about you...
I know it's too much to ask, I know I have no right, but if we could maybe be friends...
I'm sorry.
(He put the letter away, and didn't look at it for three days, and didn't mention it to Sorelli. But when he was ready, when he had steadied enough that the thought of it didn't make his heart falter, he sat down and wrote a reply, and sent it.)
(Maybe he and Darius would never be able to be friends after what they had been to each other, maybe it would always be a dull ache in his chest, but writing to him felt as if they could, maybe, learn to move past that.)
It was November that year when Noël's book, Against the Tide, was published. He and Sorelli went together to the launch, and Noël insisted on autographing their copies. Raoul still has it, and two spare copies, but that autographed copy is the one he treasures most.
Christine will love it.
There was no future Christine at the launch, but when he and Sorelli made it home afterwards, she was waiting for them. They sat up late that night, reminiscing, and toasting Noël's good health, and as Christine, that Christine so much older than this Christine he has lived long enough to know in her own time, held that autographed copy, there was the faintest glimmer of a tear in her eye.
He thought, at the time, that it was because she had researched the Mother and Child affair, thought it was because she was remembering the time she spent a week with him in 1951 at the height of the crisis, thought it was because she had been through some of that time with them, but now, looking back, he thinks that was only part of it. Thinks, really, it was because holding that copy reminded her of him, now, in this time, that she had known so many years ago in what was her past, and still his future.
His present, now.
(He really does find it best not to think too much about the intricacies of time.)
It was Erik who asked him, once, why he didn't write his own book about Noël. There were so many things that Horgan left out of his biography, and fair enough that there wouldn't be space to say everything, but he could have said so much more, and it never felt right to Raoul that he didn't, which was why he wrote his articles, and his letters. But he never wrote his own book, and when Erik asked him, he squeezed his hand, and gave him a weak smile.
"They wouldn't believe me if I told them the half of it." Then he swallowed, and added, "Christine will do him wonderful justice."
Erik squeezed his fingers back, and nodded. "She will."
In the spring of 1987, when Noël was winning awards for Against the Tide, Sorelli won two lifetime achievement awards, for fifty years on stage and screen. The first one was awarded in Dublin, and he and Christine both went with her, and applauded louder than anyone as she received it.
The photo in the newspaper the next morning included the three of them, and now he looks at it and laughs to see a Christine who had come more than sixty years into the past on the front page with her own name printed for all to see.
L-R: Professor Raoul de Chagny, Sorelli Conway, and Ms Christine Daaé at…
A woman who technically didn't exist, and if anyone tried to follow up the name they'd come to a dead end. Any historian's nightmare, but it's always made him grin to see it just like it did that first morning.
(His own grin in the photograph is decidedly bright, under the influence of the champagne and wine, and the photo doesn't show Sorelli's arm linked with his, but the article does mention how he escorted her, which was nothing new by then, because he had been escorting her to these things for decades.)
The second award was in London, and of course he couldn't go to that one, but he did watch the broadcast on television, with Christine sitting beside him on the couch as they shared champagne and toasted Sorelli and her acceptance speech. Then the camera panned to her table, and there was another Christine sitting there, and for a moment both of them gaped at the screen, until the Christine with him snorted when the camera panned away again, and he almost choked with laughter on his champagne.
When Sorelli came home two days later, both Christines had returned to their own times, and when he told her about it she grinned and said it was clearly because she was irresistible.
(He swatted her arm, and she snorted and laughed.)
He's wondered whether or not to tell Christine about that. She'd love to hear it, that coincidence of time that had her in two places at once and both in the past, both something good, but he's decided not to. There are enough things that she's known about before they happened. Let her find this one when it does happen, in time, and she'll enjoy it all the more.