The Prince's Boy (16 page)

I was at the typewriter for hours, working on a lengthy essay about contemporary Romanian poets, including George V
ã
duva, to whom I was now strangely related. He had married Elisabeta, my stepmother’s daughter, yet his poems continued to be melancholic, even mournful. They were spare and allusive and completely unfashionable in a culture that was demanding absolutes of its artists.

Then R
ã
zvan surprised me by kissing the back of my neck and whispering his apologies. There was something dark inside him, he said, that he was unable to fathom. It came of its own sinister accord. He hoped it would pass.

There was nothing left for us to navigate, apart from our cherished memories of navigation.

In September of that same year, he stopped speaking French. The Romanian he gabbled instead was barely literate, the very language of his early childhood. It was as if he were in another, alien world.

The doctor I had summoned, the doctor he would have resisted had he been capable of resisting him, said that R
ã
zvan had suffered a stroke. It was a miracle M. Popescu was speaking at all, even if it was – to his ears – gibberish. There were, he suspected, other complications. The patient had to be removed to hospital immediately. A hospital? That was the one building R
ã
zvan dreaded entering – it represented hopelessness; it was a place, once entered, you never escaped from. He had remembered a phrase from a recent American film – ‘The last chance saloon’ – and that was what a hospital meant to him. A last chance was a last chance, and beyond that there was nothing.

I sat by his bedside for unaccountable days and nights. Whenever he spoke it was childish babble, peasant babble, unadorned with correct grammar. It was the language he had inherited before the prince had chosen to make him his surrogate son. It was the language, at the last, of infancy.

He rose in the bed, looked at me for an unseeing second, called out to Angela, fell back and died.

I sent a telegram to Mircea, Bogdan and Irina, care of the B— estate at Corcova, informing them of their brother’s sudden, unexpected death.

The funeral service was held in that same, scented Orthodox church near the Bastille I had visited in 1927, racked with senseless guilt over the pleasure I had shared with Honoré, soon to be R
ã
zvan. Ion Rohrlich, who abominated all places of worship, including synagogues, stood beside me as the open coffin was brought in. R
ã
zvan’s fellow waiters and barmen from
Les Deux Cygnes
were there, and the concierge from rue de Dunkerque, and so was my former landlady, Mlle Simone, who cried softly throughout the ceremony. I was far beyond tears myself, looking down on the man I loved, and would continue loving. I kissed his forehead and his eyelids and put my fingers to the parched lips that had once been moist. I bade him
au revoir
.

Then the coffin was closed. After the burial, the mourners repaired to
Les Deux Cygnes
where – spurred on by R
ã
zvan’s friends – I drank myself into a stupor.

I received the reply to my telegram eight weeks later. It read DO NOT SEND BODY and was signed by D. Irimia, whoever he or she was.

Prince E’s solicitor, who had been entrusted with the management of R
ã
zvan Popescu’s money and property, had persuaded my lover to write a will. The lease of the apartment would end six months after his death, but the remainder of his dowry had been left to me. It consisted of several thousand francs and the Brâncu
º
i drawing, a photograph of R
ã
zvan with the prince and Marcel Proust and some letters and postcards. It was more than enough for me.

I was to be the recipient of a truly surprising gift. One morning the concierge handed me a parcel that had been delivered by a bald gentleman whom she described as having a ‘disturbing smile’. I thanked her, went up to the apartment I would soon be leaving, and opened it. I took out a black box, pulled back the lid and discovered, wrapped in the softest tissue paper imaginable, a pearl necklace. Beneath it was a letter, in Albert Le Cuziat’s elegant handwriting.

My dear Monsieur or Domnule Dinu Grigorescu.

The enclosed necklace came into my possession in 1897, when I was the prettiest sixteen-year-old in Paris. It was bestowed upon me by no less a personage than Prince Constantin Radziwill, who promoted me to the rank of First Footman after stealing me from another Polish prince who was neither as wealthy nor as renowned.

There were eleven subordinate footmen below me, all of whom had been presented with pearls by their appreciative and discerning master. This is not ersatz jewellery, not common paste, but the genuine, very costly, thing.

Allow me to be both brazen and flippant. You have been widowed, alas, and since it is the custom for the widow to wear black, which I presume you are doing, what better to offset the gloom than a row of gleaming pearls? The esteemed Coco Chanel herself maintains that a pearl necklace should only be worn with a simple black dress–designed by Coco, naturally. Am I offending you? I do hope not.

After Prince Constantin discarded me, I was employed as a footman by another prince, a countess, a count and a duke. I have moved and functioned in the highest circles. I did not flaunt Prince R’s gift, because I knew by so doing that I would only inspire envy.

I shall be deeply offended, or as deeply offended as it is possible for Le Cuziat to be, if you reject this exceptional offering. My sobriquet for the industrialist who hero-worshipped the brutal Safarov in his curious fashion was
GOD’S GIFT ON A RAINY DAY.
Look at this necklace, picture a rainy day, and remember Albert Le Cuziat gratefully in what might be the dark times to come. I have myriad aches and pains as I approach senility.

Post Scriptum: Should you tire occasionally of your literary activities, there is a vacancy here at Les Bains for you.

Post Post Scriptum:
Pectus Excavatum
is proving himself to be indispensable. M. Jacobs’s appetite for everything below the sunken chest remains insatiable. Louis does not confine his activities to Wednesday afternoons, as the Russian did. He has a taste for expensive chocolates, but that is his only failing. God bless him.

Amalia, for all her skittishness, or perhaps because of it, had understood the depth of my love for R
ã
zvan. I had telephoned her on the evening of the funeral, an hour or so before I became completely drunk, and all she had said was ‘My sweet’ or ‘My sweet one’ or ‘My dearest of stepsons’. She had blown me a telephonic kiss.

And now, in March 1938, she sent me the grimmest of grim news. Our King, Carol the Second, was enamoured of the Nazis, and Hitler was his hero. His alleged Jewish mistress, who had changed her name to Lupescu and with whom he had eloped in the 1920s, leaving his eight-year-old son Michael to occupy the throne, was living in a luxurious villa, mere yards away from the palace. Her presence there and her obvious disdain for the Romanian people had strengthened their already strong hatred of the Jews. Romania was in turmoil.

There was something worse she had to impart. George V
ã
duva, the young poet whose work I had championed, had taken his life. The devastated Elisabeta – a widow now both in name and in fact – had discovered him hanging from a stairwell. There was no suicide note to explain – in some small measure, at least – why he had chosen to obliterate himself.

Cezar had remarked at dinner that it was the custom for poets to do such things, and Eduard – my once solicitous cousin – had laughed at this, adding that he found the man’s stuff incomprehensible and out of touch with the spirit of the times.

Amalia had underlined the phrase ‘the spirit of the times’ with ten bold exclamation marks to accompany it.

My half-life had begun; my new and lasting half-life. I was a half-person without R
ã
zv
ã
nel. No one else would charm me with the diminutives Dinicu and Dinule
þ
ever again. I would allow no one to do so.

I had moved back into Mlle Simone’s ivory tower, where I had once tried to be a well-fed and watered bohemian. I wrote feverishly now. I accepted every commission I was offered. I sometimes assumed an expertise I did not possess, as is often the way with journalists.

Some of the books I read and reviewed were concerned with doomed or discontented lovers, but they gave me no solace, and I was glad of that. I once observed, in a gleeful mood, that the sorrowful couple deserved the deaths the author had ordained for them. They were too angelic to survive in the melodramatic world of his severely limited imagination. As I typed those disapproving words, I realized that there is nothing quite as satisfying as sarcasm to counter unhappiness.

I visited the little cemetery regularly, bearing fresh flowers, including the anemones – purple, red and white – of which he was especially fond. I talked – under my breath if there were other mourners present; out loud, if I was the only person near the white marble gravestone that bore his name and dates.

In dreams, to which I seemed more than ever prone, I had to call a truce between my beloved R
ã
zvan and my adored mother. They fought over me, the agitated pair, declaring that I was his and I was hers, and raising their vanished voices in a perpetual squabble. R
ã
zvan was invariably the more reasonable, talking lightly of our navigations and explorations, enraging Elena with each affectionate word. ‘You are speaking to me from hell,’ she admonished him, and when he riposted: ‘And where are you?’ she was silent. I waited for her to respond. ‘Mam
ã
, where are you?’ I called to her in anguish. Her dreadful, to me dreadful, silence persisted.

Ion Rohrlich, my benefactor, asked me how my English was progressing. I knew it well enough, I said, to appreciate certain poems and stories.

‘But will you be confident speaking it?’

‘I hope to be.’

‘How soon? Weeks? Months?’

‘Months, I think.’

‘I should like you to accompany me to London. I have been offered a lectureship there. If you can give me your guarantee that your command of the language will be just a little commanding, I propose to recommend you as my invaluable research assistant.’

I could not imagine leaving Paris, and said so.

‘That is a pity. A polyglot Romanian is certain to find employment there. Besides, Avram would enjoy your company.’

‘But he never says anything, particularly to me.’

‘That is his way. He is fond of you.’

‘Fond?’

‘Precisely. If you join me in London, I will explain the nature of his fondness. It is not, I must insist, of the kind R
ã
zvan Popescu showed you. He is a subtle creature, my son.’

I wrote to Amalia, my far-from-wicked stepmother, to tell her I was considering moving to London. Ion was to join many distinguished writers and artists who were welcomed there and he had invited me to be his research assistant.

She replied with the information that the British were loathed in Bucharest, where once – during the reign of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie – they had been adornments to society. Cezar had entertained the ambassador in our house, if I recalled. Their reluctance to espouse Hitler and his appalling cohorts did not please either of the political parties, desperate to outdo each other in their condemnation of the wandering race. She would advise me to go with Professor Rohrlich as soon as possible. London was a channel away from the continent and therefore a place of greater safety at the present.

‘It is a matter of both deep sadness and optimistic happiness that Elisabeta is five months pregnant with the child the cruel George had planted in her,’ she remarked in an impassioned post scriptum. His words were more precious to him than the girl he said he loved and the baby he was aware they had conceived.

We travelled by ferry to England. There were forms to fill at Dover and questions to be answered and proof was required of my academic qualifications. In 1939, and throughout the war, Romanians were a suspect species. I was twice taken blindfolded to a house outside the capital where I was interrogated for hours. Then the last of the three miracles in my life – falling in love with R
ã
zvan; meeting and befriending Ion Rohrlich – occurred in 1941, when I was invited by the BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe to translate the broadcasts and propaganda that were coming out of Romania, France and Italy. As I sat, day after day, night after night, in the tiny studio, I hoped I was responsible for alerting the Allies to possible dangers and saving a few lives. I drank gallons of tea and ersatz, bottled coffee to keep myself awake and alert. I felt pride in acknowledging that I was responsibly employed. At my most fanciful, I thought of future generations being able to read Proust, thanks to my dedicated efforts.

Three