The Prince's Boy

by Paul Bailey

  They were in agreement again, and they cackled accordingly.

  Mme Laurette insisted that we share a French kiss before she stumbled into her cab. I duly obliged.

  Albert Le Cuziat said farewell. If I ever wanted to reconsider his offer of employment, I knew where to come.

  ‘Thank you, M. Albert.’

  ‘My felicitations and curses to Honoré.’

  These were the last words I heard them speak. He died two years later. Then Mme Laurette was strangled by a burglar she had surprised early in the morning attempting to open her safe.

  In Eforie, on our enchanted holiday, Rãzvan had surprised me with his craven fear of thunder and lightning. Whenever a storm was about to happen, usually after six or seven bakingly hot days, I would treat him as if he were my child, cuddling him in the darkest corner of our apartment, until the rumbling noises and terrifying flickers of light abated. He shivered and sometimes wept in my arms.

  I discovered, now that I was living by his side for weeks and months that would soon grow into years, that Rãzvan was afraid of other things as well. A spider making its dainty, silent way out of a plughole in the kitchen sink caused him to tremble in a manner I found laughable.

  ‘Kill it,’ he shouted.

  ‘It isn’t a tarantula, Rãzvan. It won’t harm you.’

  ‘It scares me.’

  I coaxed the insect on to a sheet of white paper and deposited it on the windowsill, leaving it to fend for itself. I shut the window, to ensure that it wouldn’t return to alarm my beloved.

  ‘Calm yourself.’

  I could cope with thunderstorms and spiders, but I was to find myself angry with him on those occasions, increasing in number, when he expressed his wish to die. He would quote Eminescu’s phrase dor de moarte, ‘longing for death’, as if it were his one remaining hope.

  ‘You are insulting and degrading me when you are feeling mawkish. You are aware, are you not, that we are united in love and that if you achieve your ambition and attain your precious gift then I shall be desolated? You are aware, perhaps?’

  ‘You will be a happier man without me.’

  Ah, here was marriage at last. The overture had sounded on the marital strife we had been confident would never be ours. We were not mismatched, like the couples in so many of the novels and stories we treasured. We were not promiscuous. We had employed our right hands throughout our long separations. We were intended for each other from the moment we met in Albert Le Cuziat’s Den of Disrepute.

  ‘I will not be a happier man without you. You know as much, if you know anything. Please, please stop.’

  I wanted the overture to end abruptly, in mid-flow, and to my gratification it did.

  ‘I am sorry, my sweet. There are times, God help me, when I think only of myself, and this was one of them.’

  There were to be many more such times. I became a wearily unhappy Cassandra, predicting when the next morose outpouring would come. Accomplished sage that I was, I often stopped him seconds in advance of the words I anticipated.

  ‘Rãzvan, I beg you, do not give me your longing-for-death aria again. I am sick of it, my dearest. It bores me.’

  However melancholic he was, however dissatisfied I was with his perpetual gloom, we still used those terms of endearment which had once come so naturally and speedily to our lips. They were lifeboats for us in 1936, when Rãzvan’s despair first asserted itself as a constant in our household. I was still his Dinicu or Dinuleþ, he my Rãzvãnel.

  But thunderstorms and spiders were minuscule concerns, as nothing almost, when compared with his dread of illness and the necessity of consulting a doctor and – terror of all terrors – being confined in a hospital ward amongst the sick and dying. He, who had held and stroked and kissed his mother’s hand on her deathbed, as he related to me, could not countenance even the idea of Rãzvan Popescu succumbing to anything more than a mild headache or a stomach in temporary upheaval.

  ‘You look very tired, Rãzvãnel.’

  ‘Let me prove to you that I am not,’ he responded, pulling me into bed.

  We are, I thought, like old lovers now, stopping and starting, while he recaptured his breath, where once – nearly ten years ago – we had been gymnastic for magical nights on end. Perseverance had replaced exploration and navigation. He persevered while I held him to me, loving him as one who knows that he is going to lose – not too soon; in the very distant future, perhaps – the very object of all his earthly desires. I wiped the copious sweat from his face and chest and curled into him, as happy as I could be with a deeply unhappy man. It seemed enough to satisfy the two of us, for the moment.

  Amalia continued to write about everyday life in Bucharest with as much good humour as she could command. It lessened with each letter. I sensed there were shadows behind her comic observations. In fact, I knew there were, though she tried to hide or ignore them. The newspapers I wrote for kept me informed of the sinister events that were happening daily in the city of my birth. It had become the fashion to despise and denigrate Jews and my father was nothing if not fashionable. Amalia had loathed Eduard on first meeting and she rarely mentioned him, except to observe sarcastically that he had transferred his allegiance from the purity of Romanian blood to the sanctity of the Romanian soul. That, she conceded, was some kind of progress.

  I garnished the truth in my replies. It was as if Rãzvan and I were Orlando and Rosalind in a Parisian Forest of Arden. I was my usual bookish self, no longer the dandy she had tried to cultivate, and my lover was happy in his job at Les Deux Cygnes. A certain primness in my nature prevented me describing the meal I had relished in the bizarre company of Mme Laurette and M. Albert, even as I was aware that it would amuse her. I was a liberated spirit, but there were limitations.

  We celebrated the year’s end with Ion and Avram in Brasserie Lipp. Rãzvan, who was sober and apprehensive at the start of the dinner, soon became confident enough to speak seriously in Ion’s beguiling presence. I learned much that evening about Rãzvan’s past. He told Ion, in detail, of his two meetings with Proust – how the master had invited him to describe peasant life on the estate at Corcova, and that the novelist had listened to him with unfeigned interest, and that Proust had congratulated him on his, Rãzvan’s, knowledge of Gothic architecture. ‘You are, truly, the prince’s protégé,’ he had said, with the slightest of smiles.

  Rãzvan had befriended, briefly, the son of the composer Georges Bizet, but had decided that Jacques’s dangerous behaviour was too unsettling to live with. ‘He had a gun, which he either pointed at my head or at his own. Whose would it be? Was he contemplating suicide or murder, or both? In his rare moments of normality, he was charming and sophisticated, but the streak of madness in him eventually frightened me away.’

  Here, beyond the confining space of our apartment, was my intelligent, optimistic, even carefree lover, the Rãzvan from whom I had been estranged for months. Here he was, talking to someone he scarcely knew, with the excitement and enthusiasm that had been missing from his voice for all the time of our domestic estrangement. He sounded and looked revivified. I was momentarily jealous of Ion’s capacity to bring him back from the realms of the living dead. I envied the gift my friend possessed for finding warmth of feeling where there had been coldness and indifference. I no longer had that gift, it seemed, outside the bedroom walls.

  Avram, apart from expressing the traditional courtesies, said nothing all evening.

  The date is for ever with me. On the sixteenth of February 1937, Rãzvan woke up beside me, weeping. I asked him what was wrong.

  He had dreamt of his mother, seeing her before he was born, dancing to gypsy music with the man who might have been his father. They were sprightly, they were happy. It was a summer’s night. Behind them was the little church, where the two princes and their mother worshipped alongside their peasants. Was it Angela’s marriage to Ilie that was being celebrated? It certainly looked like a wedding feast. Then Prince E appeared, with his face unda
maged, younger even than Rãzvan had known him. Angela kissed his outstretched, gloved hand, and the man who might have been Rãzvan’s father bowed deeply to his master. It was how things used to be.

  ‘It sounds like a lovely dream. Why are you still weeping?’

  ‘The only father I have had was the prince, who killed himself out of vanity and boredom. That is my paternal inheritance.’

  Just weeks earlier, chatting with Ion Rohrlich, he had cast his demons aside. Now they were back again.

  ‘If my mother had not smacked me that day and if the prince had not stopped his carriage—’

  ‘You would not be the clever man you are.’

  ‘I have no wish to be clever any longer. I am worn out with being educated.’

  ‘This is nonsense, Rãzvãnel.’

  ‘You will never understand.’

  ‘I think you may be right,’ I answered. ‘I think you may very well be right.’

  He did not go to Les Deux Cygnes that morning. He preferred to stay at home with his Dinicu, the man he had accused of not understanding him. I was perplexed, although I refrained from saying so.

  I was at the typewriter for hours, working on a lengthy essay about contemporary Romanian poets, including George Vãduva, 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 Rãzvan 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 Rãzvan 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 Rãzvan 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 Rãzvan. Ion Rohrlich, who abominated all places of worship, including synagogues, stood beside me as the open coffin was brought in. Rãzvan’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 Rãzvan’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 Rãzvan 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 Brâncuºi drawing, a photograph of Rãzvan 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 Rãzvan. 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 Vãduva, 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 Rãzvãnel. No one else would charm me with the diminutives Dinicu and Dinuleþ 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 Rãzvan 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. Rãzvan 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. ‘Mamã, where are you?’ I called to her in anguish. Her dreadful, to me dreadful, silence persisted.