The Prince's Boy (15 page)

‘Oh, Dinu, just listen to the old deceiver. He and I have lived so long in our profitable world of make-believe that we tend to forget what kind of love-scarred wrecks we were before we ventured into business. Those early heartbreaks inspired us to replace unrequited affection with the comfort money brings.’

‘Did I hear you say the dread word “profitable”, Laurette? If it had not been for the industrialist and his Wednesday persecutions, I would have had to close down the
Bains
a decade ago. I am tempted to weep at the thought of the thousands upon thousands of francs I have counted out to the police when they have threatened to arrest me. You have not suffered that particular ignominy, I believe.’

‘I am pleased to tell you that I have not. Many of my regular visitors are upholders of the law. The considerate hostess who is Mme Laurette favours them with a special discount in recognition of their service to the community.’

‘Ah, the saintly Laurette. You charge the policemen less and keep your profits rising by asking the bankers and politicians to pay more.’

‘You are being fanciful, Albert.’

‘And you would have been burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages, alongside the Maid of Orléans.’

Their cackling was louder and more raucous. They looked at each other benevolently as they laughed.

Encouraged by the excessive amount of wine I had drunk, I invited Mme Laurette to describe the nature of M. Gérard’s, or Cousin Eduard’s, peculiar tastes, which caused Louise to need two or three days of recuperation.

She slapped the back of my hand. ‘Impertinent child, I have been indiscreet enough for one day. You cannot expect me to answer such a bold question. Your cousin’s tastes are not peculiar at all. I speak to you as an expert. M. Gérard is simply a little too energetic. In the interests of discretion, I cannot – and shall not – reveal more.’

‘I apologize, Madame, for my brashness.’

‘That is graceful of you.’

It transpired that Mme Laurette always drank Veuve Clicquot at the beginning and end of her ‘excursions’, as she deemed her rare visits to expensive restaurants. We returned to champagne for our desserts. Albert Le Cuziat looked sober, but his friend confessed that she was seeing both of us double. There were two jaded Alberts and a pair of blissful young men.

‘Since our Havens of Happiness are closed today, we have every excuse to enjoy some freedom from duty.’

‘We are of one mind, Albert, even though I am looking at two of you. I am sure we will be playing to full houses, to use a theatrical expression, tomorrow.’

‘Shall I propose a toast, Laurette?’

‘Please do.’

‘To frustrated men.’

‘Let us clink and drink to that.’

So the three of us raised and clinked our glasses to the frustrated men who visited the two houses of costly sin. I had been of their number once, I reminded myself.

Mme Laurette paid the bill, as Albert had anticipated.

‘My friend is the meanest, most miserly, person in the entire world, Dinu. I think I should die if I ever saw him bring out his wallet and leave a few francs on the table. He loved his mother and she loved him and that is the best thing anyone could say regarding Albert Le Cuziat.’

‘You hurt me, Laurette. You wound me.’

‘Hurt you? Wound you, you old beast? You are beyond hurting and wounding.’

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, R
ã
zvan 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 R
ã
zvan 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, R
ã
zvan. 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.

‘R
ã
zvan, 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 R
ã
zvan’s despair first asserted itself as a constant in our household. I was still his Dinicu or Dinule
þ
, he my R
ã
zv
ã
nel.

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 R
ã
zvan Popescu succumbing to anything more than a mild headache or a stomach in temporary upheaval.

‘You look very tired, R
ã
zv
ã
nel.’

‘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 R
ã
zvan 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. R
ã
zvan, 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 R
ã
zvan’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, R
ã
zvan’s, knowledge of Gothic architecture. ‘You are, truly, the prince’s protégé,’ he had said, with the slightest of smiles.

R
ã
zvan 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 R
ã
zvan 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, R
ã
zvan 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 undamaged, younger even than R
ã
zvan had known him. Angela kissed his outstretched, gloved hand, and the man who might have been R
ã
zvan’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, R
ã
zv
ã
nel.’

‘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.