The Prince's Boy (8 page)

‘Because his failure to tell you something so important makes no sense to me.’

‘He must have a reason for keeping his son in the dark. The word ‘‘failure’’ is not in Cezar Grigorescu’s lexicon. He is a man accustomed to making decisions.’

‘Of course he is.’

I ended our mysterious conversation by stating the truth. I was tired to exhaustion after a long train journey on which I had been deprived of sleep. I needed a hot bath and a few hours’ rest before dinner.

‘I shall see you at dinner, I assume?’

‘Yes, Dinu.’

‘Au revoir
, then.’

‘
A bientôt.’

Where could I hide the photograph of R
ã
zvan? That was my first thought as I walked into the room I had been absent from all summer. Then I wondered if there was any reason why I should conceal it. He was the friend I had made in Paris, who had turned out to be the ideal companion and guide to the city for the uninformed and guileless Dinu Grigorescu. I had no cause to be secretive about this man in his late thirties, handsome as he was, captured smiling at the camera by a street photographer on the Champs-Elysées. No one was to know, unless I told them, that he was my deflowerer, my consummate and passionate lover, my precious R
ã
zv
ã
nel.

I would have the snapshot enlarged and framed.

I slept. It was the sleep of death, with my mother at its centre.

‘Welcome home,’ she said, rising from her grave. ‘It is good to have you back in the bosom of the family.’

‘Mam
ã
.’

‘So you have remembered me, you forgetful boy?’

‘Yes, Mam
ã
.’

‘Your thoughts are all of that wretched man who has stolen your heart. Where are your prayers for me? Where are my Dinu’s tears?’

‘I have been too busy living for myself. Forgive me, I beg of you.’

‘You did not even stop to look at my portrait at the top of the staircase. You walked straight past it. You have never been so circumspect before.’

‘You are wrong, my darling mother. I saw your dark eyes and hair and the pearl choker and the blue silk gown you wore for the artist who painted you in 1908, the year you gave birth to me. Of course I stopped and looked at you.’

I heard what I said to her and believed it. There was no reason for me not to.

She laughed as she had never laughed in life. It was the cackle of a witch or a woman who had been painfully hurt and maligned. She did not sound remotely like Elena Grigorescu.

I told her she was frightening me. I screamed at her to stop.

I awoke to find my father at the foot of the bed.

‘Are you emerging from a bad dream, Dinu?’

‘Yes, Tat
ã
, I think I am.’

‘Have you been eating an excess of cheese? Dr St
ã
nescu is of the opinion that Brie and Camembert provoke the dormant imagination to the wildest of fantasies. You must be more careful with your diet.’

I promised him I would be more careful, now that I was away from the culinary temptations of Paris.

‘You may dress casually for dinner, my son. No members of the royal family or government ministers will be present. It is going to be a modest affair.’

Then he was gone, with the name ‘Elisabeta’ on my lips, waiting to be voiced.

Ah, that ‘modest affair’. My lawyer father had a sly way with words. There was nothing remotely modest about the event that was staged for my homecoming that late September evening in the dining room at Carmen Sylva 4. The encounter with Elisabeta should have alerted my dull brain to what was coming, but I was exhausted after the journey and thinking only, and selfishly, of R
ã
zvan. It did not surprise me when I learned, later, that she had become my stepsister.

‘I had hoped, Dinu, that I would have had the privilege of introducing you to Elisabeta’s mother first, but it was not to be. Once she is in communion with her perfumes and soaps and lotions, it is difficult to extricate her. When she emerges, Dinu, you can rest assured that my new wife – your new mother – will smell like Helen of Troy or some such divine being.’

‘Your new wife? My new mother?’

‘Yes, Dinu. I married Amalia while you were living a luxurious
vie de Bohème
in Paris. You look taken aback, which is understandable, but are you not pleased for me?’

I could not, and would not, say I was. I observed, instead: ‘I have not met her. I have no idea what kind of woman she is.’

‘She is totally unlike our treasured Elena, Dinu, in every conceivable way. She has energy and wit and – this I know to my cost – a refined taste for beautiful clothes. The houses of Worth and Chanel would collapse without her custom.’

‘Is she younger than you?’

‘You asked that question disapprovingly. She is younger, yes, by five years.’

‘Her husband, her first husband, is dead?’

‘And her second.’

Before I could give expression to the consternation I felt, he said, with one of his rare smiles: ‘She didn’t murder them, if that is what is in your mind. This is the real world, Dinu, not some lurid novel.’

I had not considered that my still unseen stepmother might be a murderer, but the words ‘lurid novel’ gave me cause to wonder. I had never suspected the austere Cezar Grigorescu of being attracted to fiction, especially of the lurid kind.

‘Ah, there she is, my darling Amalia.’

And there indeed she was, the Helen of Troy I hated on sight. Her every word, her every gesture, seemed intent on eradicating my mother’s goodness and modesty.

‘You are the prettiest boy in the world,’ she declared. ‘You are ravishing.’

‘I am honoured to meet you,’ I replied. ‘My father has kept you a secret from me.’

‘You must not blame me for the deception, Dinu. I pleaded with Cezar to be open and honest with you. Believe me, I did.’

‘I believe you.’

She kissed me. I did not draw back in revulsion, much though I wanted to. The prettiest boy in the world – she had obviously travelled extensively – guessed on the instant that Amalia Grigorescu was a fabricator, a dealer in charm. I could be such a dealer too, I thought, as she led me by the hand into the dining-room my mother had graced throughout my childhood.

‘You will tell me all about your Parisian adventures, won’t you, Dinu?’

Yes, of course I will, Amalia, in abundant detail. I will reveal to you how, half-drunk and in a frenzy of lust, I made my unsteady way to Albert Le Cuziat’s baths. I will inform you, with complete exactitude – for you would expect nothing less – how Honoré, soon to be identified as R
ã
zvan, conquered the heart (the appropriate cliché of turgid fiction) of the pretty Romanian boy who had rechristened himself Jean-Pierre. I promise, Amalia, that you will be agog as I re-explore in words the explorations that Honoré and Jean-Pierre embarked upon that summer day, and how R
ã
zvan and Dinu became sexual Marco Polos as their mutual desire refused to wane. All this, and more, I will pass on to you as we take tea or coffee in the delicate Grigorescu china that was my mother’s pride, for it was she who designed it.

‘You have turned very thoughtful, Dinu.’

‘I was thinking of how I should address you.’

‘Ah, that is problematical, isn’t it? I am not your mother, and ‘‘stepmother’’ smacks too much of the Brothers Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I am of the belief that we should be very, very modern and that you should call me Amalia, providing that you pronounce my name without the passionate emphasis your father, my utterly divine Cezar, puts on it.’

‘That presents no difficulty, Amalia.’

There were four guests at table, each of them invited by my father to share his delight in Amalia’s wit and beauty. I have forgotten them – a lack of recall I attribute to the fact that they never appeared at the house near Ci
º
migiu again. I do remember Amalia as a shining presence and that the Château Talbot we drank with the lamb Denisa had cooked in the slow-roasted Romanian tradition was of a sublime mellowness.

My dream-or-nightmare mother had told me the truth. Her portrait was no longer at the top of the central staircase. It had been replaced by a landscape painting of a view of fields in Transylvania over which a lone stork hovered.

Gheorghe handed me a letter with a Paris postmark. I laid it beside my breakfast plate and went on eating.

‘May I have the stamps, Master Dinu, when you have finished with the envelope?’

‘You may have them now. Are the Lindbergh stamps collectors’ items?’

‘They soon will be.’

There was a message from my lover inside, written on the flimsiest paper.

‘Here you are, Gheorghe. I shall read this in my study.’

I slid the message into a pocket of my dressing-gown and went upstairs. I dreaded its contents, suspecting a farewell note that would have cost my practical, sensible lover great anguish to write. I shaved and bathed before I dared to look at it.

My dear friend – I miss your amusing company – Paris is the duller without you – You must send me the news of your homecoming, which I await with interest – I have plans to visit our country as soon as I can – I am still working at Les Deux Cygnes – How is your appetite? Mine is not healthy – I had a dream last night in which I was an EXPLORER, can you believe? – The autumn is almost over and I fear a cold and lonely winter – I send you my respectful greetings – R.P.

My loving correspondent, whose affection for his beloved Dinu I detected between the dashes, had penned these cryptic lines with my father and his prying servants in mind. There was some deciphering to do – the loss of appetite; the word EXPLORER used to dramatic effect; his fear of a ‘cold and lonely winter’. Could Cezar Grigorescu, the keenest legal intelligence in Romania, see that ‘appetite’ was not confined to the need for food, that the boastful EXPLORER was not a Columbus or Marco Polo, and that R.P.’s fears of coldness and loneliness were different in quality from those he shared with thousands of others at the chilly close of every year?

I wrote R
ã
zvan an immoderate, unguarded reply, which I took to the Central Post Office. I had it registered, to ensure that my words of love and lust were not delivered elsewhere, or lost completely. They were meant to speed to him alone, with the accuracy of Diana’s arrow.

‘It seems that you weren’t appreciative of the expensive parting gift I arranged for you in Paris.’

‘Which expensive parting gift was that, Tat
ã
?’

‘Your question is impudent, Dinu. There are not many young men who can afford to visit Mme Laurette’s establishment. I gave you the precious opportunity to assert your manhood with a beautiful young woman of experience and charm. It was my best intention to spare you the bloody horrors of the virginal wedding-bed. Why didn’t you fuck her?’

‘I had no wish to.’

‘Why was that? What was wrong with this Sonia?’

‘There was nothing wrong with her. There was nothing wrong with her at all.’

‘I am bewildered, Dinu.’

‘I had no desire to go where others had gone before me,’ I said, hearing the disgust in my voice. I continued: ‘I could not rise to the occasion.’

My father smiled.

‘It’s an old joke, but a good one, Dinu. Shall we try the experiment again, here in Bucharest?’

‘I should prefer that we didn’t,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’

‘As you wish. I am not pleased with the idea that you will go through life your mother’s son.’

‘What type of son is that?’

‘A prig. A holier-than-thou plaster saint. A man who is almost too good to live.’

The word ‘good’ was apropos, for Elena Grigorescu believed in the healing powers of goodness, as she often counselled me. But she was averse to priggishness, to moral superiority in any form, as my blinkered father ought to have been aware.

‘Believe me, Tat
ã
, I am not too good. I very much want to live a moderately wicked life.’

‘Moderately wicked?’ What was I saying? I did not consider my love for R
ã
zvan wicked, whatever the world thought. That world, I understood, included Cezar Grigorescu. Perhaps I was ‘moderately wicked’ in the ways most people are – obsessed with themselves and their own needs; intolerant and envious; thoughtless and inconsiderate in their dealings with others. These were some of the everyday sins my mother had warned me not to commit.

‘I hope and trust, Dinu, that you are not set upon disappointing me totally.’

I assured him, as best I could, that he would be proud of me one day. It was my devoutest wish.

We embraced, after a manly fashion, and I was struck, I recall, by the smell of his sickly-sweet cologne. Did it captivate Amalia as much as it nauseated me?