The Prince's Boy (19 page)

‘Please accept this, dear Elisabeta, and please wear it.’

She unwrapped the necklace and stared at it, aghast.

‘It is very beautiful, Dinu. These are genuine pearls. This isn’t costume jewellery. Where did you buy it?’

Her question inspired me to tell the biggest lie I had ever told.

‘It was given to me by my mother.’ I was shocked by what I had said, but continued without shame. ‘On her deathbed.’

‘Was it a gift from Cezar Grigorescu ? If it was, I do not think I wish to have it.’

Oh, the necessary, fiendish nature of deception. ‘Her parents gave it to her on her wedding day.’

‘Then I shall accept it happily, my dear sweet stepbrother. Put it round my neck.’

I did so, and felt neither dear nor sweet. I had defamed Elena’s spirit by pretending that this token of a rich man’s lust for a pretty footman had once belonged to her. It had been a fixture in Albert’s Vatican Library, that room for reflection on all matters carnal and snobbish. If those pearls had had ears, they would have hopped and skipped at the sounds coming from the cubicles. On Wednesday afternoons, when Safarov had reduced the wealthy industrialist to a contentedly blood-stained wreck, they would have become balletic. This vision of improbably lively, dancing pearls was with me as I adorned my stepsister with the surprising present Albert had elected to give me – a present in no way comparable to that of Honoré or R
ã
zvan, which I had received from him, at the cost of a hundred francs, to my lasting gratitude on that woozy afternoon in May 1927.

‘Come and see Amalia. She has days when she knows who I am and days when she doesn’t. She may not recognize you, Dinu. Sometimes she mistakes Ciprian for a tradesman or a delivery boy. Her body is resilient but her mind is unstable.’

She was sitting in an armchair by her bed wearing a dress that Leon Becker, who had been slaughtered in an abattoir in 1941, made for her from a design by Coco Chanel. It hung loosely on her, where once her generous frame had filled it. She was emaciated now but strangely lovely to my eyes, in that simple outfit she had worn on the hateful evening when Eduard and my treacherous father had railed against the perniciousness of the Jewish race.

‘Do you know who I am, Amalia?’

‘Should I know who you are?’

‘I am your stepson Dinu. I am not as pretty as I was when you dressed me in velvet.’

‘Were you a pretty boy then?’

‘You said I was. You told me often enough I was.’

‘Are you the one I dressed in velvet?’

‘Yes, I am. Yes, I was.’

‘Why did I do that?’

‘You know the reason, not me.’

‘Do I?’

I took her hand and pressed it. I kissed it, in the Romanian fashion.

‘I married your father for his money. Why else would I have married him?’

She sounded sepulchral. She sounded as if she were stating the truth from inside a tomb.

‘He must have charmed you,’ I said, in my father’s defence. ‘He must have had some appeal for you.’

‘I needed a roof over my head. I needed a home for my daughter, and he needed a mascot.’

‘I have seen Rudolf Peterson, Amalia. He has been resident in London for a long time.’

‘Who?’

‘Rudolf Peterson, the great Romanian tenor. I see him at concert halls with a young man who people say is his nephew.’

‘Rudi?’

‘He looks very fragile.’

I remembered a conversation I’d had with the still alluring Amalia in September 1935, on the eve of my return to Paris.

‘Have you read yesterday’s
Figaro
?’

‘Not yet, Dinu. Is there something in it that will interest me?’

‘Yes, there is.’

It interested her as much as it stimulated me. In the interview with a music critic, the ‘shining star of operetta’, as he was labelled, to his considerable distaste, asserted that he would not be singing in Romania, Austria and Germany. There was a foul stench emanating from certain parts of Europe and he had no desire to inhale it. The critic had interrupted with the reminder that he, M. Peterson, was not Jewish, which crass observation had inspired the singer to laughter, and when he had done laughing to say: ‘I am not a Jew, but the circumstance of my birth does not prevent me being concerned and compassionate. “Some of my best friends are Jewish” is a cliché that has particular resonance for me. The air in London, despite the November fog and the poverty and a few fools in black shirts, is more congenial to my sensitive nostrils.’

‘There speaks the man who has broken a dozen hearts, including mine,’ Amalia had commented.

It was ironical, was it not, that Elisabeta should be in love with a man named V
ã
duva, the Romanian word for ‘widow’? Her own romance with Rudi or Rudolf – he was Rudi in the bedroom and Rudolf on the stage – had happened when he was appearing as Danilo in
The Merry Widow
.

‘My poor daughter has not been the merriest of widows. M. V
ã
duva saw to that,’ she said, again sepulchrally.

‘Be quiet, Mam
ã
. Talk to Dinu about other things.’

I knew from what Ciprian had told me in London that Amalia, Elisabeta and the little V
ã
duva had lived in Basle throughout the war. When money became scarce, Elisabeta had given piano lessons to the children of the rich. Of Cezar’s whereabouts they had known nothing and knew nothing still.

‘Do you want to make your peace with him?’ Amalia asked, staring at me.

I hesitated.

‘Yes, I do, if only for my mother’s sake. My mother would rest contented if I made peace with him.’

Her eyes lost their dullness. They glittered as she said: ‘Are you telling me your sainted mother isn’t happy among her angels and cherubs? She ought to be. She damned well ought to be. She was spared years of his meanness and cynicism. She made the great escape from him. I wish I had. I live in fear that he will find me. Elena is beyond his reach, because if he is dead he is sure to be in hell.’

‘Stop it, Mam
ã
. You are upsetting Dinu.’

‘No, no,’ I protested. ‘I sympathize with what your mother says.’

‘How is the prince’s boy? Is he being kind to you?’

‘He died, Mam
ã
.’

‘Did he? How thoughtless of him. So Dinu is a widow as well?’

‘I am, Amalia. I have been widowed, in a manner of speaking, for thirty years.’

‘You looked so ravishing in velvet, my love. I was tempted to eat you up. Come and live with us. We could be such a happy family – you, me, Elisabeta and Ciprian.’

‘I should like that,’ I said. I was speaking the truth. I should have liked to live with them, impossible though the prospect was.

‘It will not be for a long time, Dinu. I am dying, my sweet.’

‘You are not dying,’ said Ciprian. Those were the only words he spoke.

I knew, beyond all doubt, that she would outlive me. I had weeks to live. In her eyes, my paleness was that of the Dinu she had cosseted and cooed over in another time, in another country. She was not to know that it was now the pallor of impending death.

I might have said as much to her, but nodded and smiled instead. I was Elena’s son, and could not be honest with her. I elected to stay silent.

I kissed her cheeks and hands. I said
au revoir
. I had work to do in London. I hoped to see her later in the year, I heard myself lying.

We have words at our command but it is often wise not to voice them. Silence was my parting gift to Amalia, my second mother, my witty sharer of precious secrets.

I entered the churchyard, anemones in hand, to search for R
ã
zvan’s grave. I anticipated that it would be difficult to find after thirty years. Many others had been buried here since that bleak afternoon in March 1937. Perhaps the gravestone had gone, or perhaps it was blackened beyond recognition, his name and dates of birth and death obliterated or covered up with rampantly growing ivy. I expected weeds and that curious damp decay one senses and smells in neglected cemeteries. The weeds and ivy were there in abundance, but nowhere near R
ã
zvan’s resting place. The white marble I had chosen was as white as I remembered it. Someone had washed, or even polished it regularly. And someone had planted a fern behind it. And someone had left fresh tulips in an elegant blue vase on the well-trimmed grass that was his plot. Someone had been attentive to him for all the time since his death, it seemed. I became no one as I stared at a display of loving neatness and order that bewildered and hurt me.

I had been jealous of the prince and R
ã
zvan’s clients in 1927, when I was nineteen and overflowing with unconsidered love. I was jealous again now, insanely so, of a someone I had neither the will nor the energy to track down. Who was he? He had not been in the hospital during R
ã
zvan’s final illness, for mine was a constant vigil. Who was he? Who in hell was he?

I had not eaten for hours, but there was bile inside me and out it came. I besmirched his grave with a hideous, blood-flecked yellowness that was, in those few anguished moments, all that was left in me of love. My lungs ached and my legs were signalling that they were on the verge of collapsing beneath me.

I made sure there was nobody else in the graveyard before I surrendered myself to the long-abandoned luxury of weeping.

‘I warned you,’ she chided me in Marylebone. ‘You will die without his love.’

I invited R
ã
zv
ã
nel to disagree with her, but he said nothing.

It distressed me to think they had stopped arguing. I had found their bickering oddly comforting. I had been consoled by their possessiveness on those nights in wartime London when the blackout had made the darkness darker. Seventeen years of death divided them, and I had lived in all that time with their concern for me.

‘Did you hear what I said to you?’

‘I did, Mam
ã
.’

‘If you confess your sins,
mon petit
, I will speak to you as I spoke to you when you were my beautiful, God-fearing son.’

‘Will you?’

‘You have my promise, Dinicu.’

She had taken her name for me back from R
ã
zvan. I wanted it to be his only.

‘I am sick of being called beautiful,’ I declared, not just to Elena, not just to R
ã
zvan, not just to Albert Le Cuziat, and not just to Amalia and Elisabeta. I begged the whole wide world to rescue me from its curse.

The whole wide world, unsurprisingly, did not respond to my request.

‘Are you a virgin, Jean-Pierre?’

I said nothing, as before.

‘That means yes.’

‘Yes.’

‘There is no someone, Dinu. There never was, and never will be, a someone. How could you doubt me? You should be ashamed for being so jealous.’

‘I am, R
ã
zv
ã
nel, I am.’

‘The monster is leading you astray again, you fool,’ shrieked my mother.

‘He wants to be led astray. It was his one great wish. I gratified that wish.’

‘You fiend.’

‘You saint.’

They were back in their loving business, I realized soon after waking. I could die now in some contentment, before hostilities were ended and a truce was called.

I am sitting on Mme Proust’s chaise longue as I wait to learn from Albert Le Cuziat if the man I know cannot be called Honoré will be free to explore Jean-Pierre again. It is a sunlit day in Paris, much like the day it is in London forty years later. I am both here and there. I am the man who gave himself to the prince’s boy and the nervous youth who will hear in an hour’s time that R
ã
zvan has fallen in love with Dinu. Perhaps it is the shot of pain-killing morphine that allows my past and my present to intermingle so happily.

R
ã
zvan wanted to write a memoir with the title The Prince’s Boy, telling the story of the rich man who cared for him like the most beneficent of fathers for a few enchanted, surprising years. Here is The Prince’s Boy once more, written by one who met his lifetime’s lover in unromantic surroundings – not by a tennis court or at a party but in a cubicle in a brothel near rue l’Arcade.

I am bequeathing this collection of memories and reflections to Ciprian V
ã
duva, another fatherless son. I hope he will be enlightened by what he reads.

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my abiding gratitude to the doctors and nurses in the Cardiac Unit at Hammersmith Hospital, London, and to thank the Committee of the Royal Literary Fund for their continuing support. Dr Kamal Winayak and his four assistants – Pauline, Irene, Sue and Irma – at the Ashchurch Medical Centre offered support of a different, but necessary, kind. Michael Fishwick, Deborah Rogers, Anna Simpson, Mohsen Shah and the irrepressible Bill Payne have been especially helpful. My thanks to the heroic Bill Pashley, that model of fortitude, and to the considerate Raúl Sánchez Pérez. I offer my respects to the brave, good-humoured Romanians I have been fortunate to know – the wonderful Antoaneta Ralian, still translating in her ninth decade, is their representative here. I could not have written this book without the encouragement of Jeremy Trevathan, the best of best friends.