The Prince's Boy (17 page)

R
ã
zvan is an inescapable presence, even now, some thirty years after his death. I converse with him every day. I use the word ‘converse’ deliberately, for I frequently hear his voice in the mornings and afternoons when I am explaining the rudiments of Romanian grammar or lecturing on my much-invaded country’s bloody history to the students who have enrolled for the two courses I teach in the school of Eastern European Studies at the university. He sometimes, but not too often, corrects my mistakes. I catch him chastising me for my confident ignorance. Such is the lasting nature of our love.

What an old-fashioned, romantic creature I remain in my sixth, and final, decade. I sit in my small apartment in Marylebone, my home throughout the war against Germany, and marvel that I escaped the bomb that fell on a nearby block of flats, killing most of its occupants. I helped save a mother and child, pulling them from the rubble. I remember the woman telling me that I did not look English. Was I going to kill her? No, no, I insisted, I wasn’t. I kissed her dust-covered hand, in the manner of my countrymen, and said I was proud to be in England, fighting – in my own limited way – the enemy that occupied France and had taken possession of the land of my birth. She continued to be suspicious of her rescuer until a fire fighter with a sharp London accent thanked me for being so brave and responsible. He called me his mate, and that one, almost affectionately spoken word caused her to cast aside her doubts. She expressed her gratitude, gruffly. I replied, I think, that I was only doing what a fellow human being should. Then I became embarrassed and said goodnight and walked away.

I suppose that woman, whose name I never learned, was in her rights to be wary of a foreigner. She was not alone in her wariness. I am writing this coda to my solitary book in May 1967, the year in which the doctors predict I shall die. I continue to find it absurd that, under English law, I was expected to report to a local police station at a fixed time every week to establish the fact that I was still resident in the capital and obeying the laws of the land. Because of this order, which I never ceased to honour, I formed unlikely friendships with the officers on duty, chief among whom was with the jovial Sergeant Alec Wilkins.

‘How many state secrets has the Romanian spy passed on to the Soviets since our last chinwag?’ he would ask as he poured strong tea into mugs and offered me two of his treasured ginger biscuits. This was our Friday afternoon ritual, with the exception of the day of Christ’s fleeting descent into hell, for several years. After our meetings were officially brought to an end in 1959, I continued to see Alec as usual for the chinwag we enjoyed so much. He wondered if the Romanian spies had a word for ‘chinwag’. I answered that there were two – the Turkish
tacla
and the Greek
taifas
, which means ‘prattle’. Neither, I said, was as humorous as ‘chinwag’, with its picture of two chins wagging like the tails of cats and dogs in the excitement that the exchange of gossip provides.

Then Alec retired with his wife Elsie to a cottage he had bought in his native Yorkshire and my chinwagging days were over. Whisky replaced tea when we said our goodbyes.

‘The next time you send a message to that Khrushchev bloke, tell him to watch out for Sergeant Wilkins, won’t you?’

‘I will, Alec, rest assured. I will scare the pants off him.’

I knew, and did not know, what was happening in my beleaguered country. My knowledge was confined to the propaganda I was paid to translate. Romania had forsaken her decadent past in the name of equality. The peasants were the new aristocrats in a society in which everyone belonged, as of natural right, to an aristocracy of human endeavour. It sounded like paradise, but I guessed it wasn’t. One of the most enduring clichés came to mind: it was all ‘too good to be true’.

I lived alone in a city that had just begun to restore itself to its former liveliness after years of essential austerity. There were fewer waste grounds now – those bleak reminders of where German bombs had fallen. The rationing of food and clothing was ended. The last of my ration books, with a few coupons intact, was wedged between Proust and Eminescu on the cramped shelf by my bed. It was a part of my life, as they were.

A letter I had written to Amalia in 1944 was returned to me twelve years later in an envelope indicative of state disapproval. Several harmless sentences had been underlined in red ink, for reasons only the official who had done so understood. They dealt with trivial matters – what was being performed at the Opera House, if anything; the menu at Cap
º
a; the love-lives of friends and enemies. My expressed enthusiasm for the poems of George V
ã
duva, who had caused her daughter such terrible anguish, inspired a riot of redness. V
ã
duva’s delicate verses, blithely unconcerned with politics and power, had offended the fascist status quo and now they were upsetting the Soviets, it seemed. To write about trees, gardens, flowers, the burgeoning of love, the threat of imminent despair, was the act of a deeply irresponsible poet, however safely dead. The logic of the malignly powerful is beyond the logic of the ordinary citizen. It functions in its own absurd universe.

My dear and trusted Ion Rohrlich died, with quiet grace, five years ago. I was at his bedside, along with Avram and his wife. He invited us to plant last kisses on him, which we did. At his secular funeral, several actors and scholars he had influenced and befriended read from
The Tempest
and
Cymbeline
and
Venus and Adonis
. What need of the mischievous and undoubting Bible, when there was Shakespeare to remind us of our transience, our joys, our hopelessness, the fragile concerns of our fragile lives? He offers us nothing more than the certainty of our own uncertainties, and that is surely enough to contemplate. This was Ion’s own eulogy, delivered by the greatest Hamlet of his day, who often dined alone, as I did, at Chez Victor in Soho, with its gingham tablecloths, its hanging clusters of onion and garlic, and waiters who spoke English with Parisian accents. I could picture R
ã
zvan beside me on the banquette, our fingers entwined as in the old days at Café Larivière.

Time is against me now, and though I doubt that many people will read this account of my life with, and without, the prince’s boy, I must record some recent events that merit my attention, if no one else’s. Oh, how pompous I sound. Permit me, whoever you are, to be tiresomely chronological. On the twentieth of December, 1964, to be precise, and I am always that, I was celebrating the end of term and the beginning of the Christmas holidays in a pub in Bloomsbury. Antal, Nicolas, Corina and I had eaten fish and chips wrapped in the pages of newspapers, and there we were drinking beer underneath a photograph of a mournful Virginia Woolf. Everyone in the saloon bar that evening was on the happy verge of drunkenness.

‘There is a young man staring at you, Dinu. He can’t keep his eyes off you,’ said the ever-observant Corina, with whom I would be celebrating the birth of Christ in five days’ time, along with her English husband and their three children. ‘He is very handsome, my dear. He looks serious. I am surprised you haven’t noticed him.’

I returned the stranger’s stare. He smiled. I wanted to return his smile, but his resemblance, his startling resemblance to R
ã
zvan Popescu prevented me. There were the same dark eyes, the same beard, the same delicacy in the otherwise strong face. There was something close to the beauty of R
ã
zvan within my appreciative gaze.

I turned away from that beauty, deliberately, and chatted with Antal, Nicolas and Corina about the clever and decidedly not-so-clever students we had been teaching.

‘He is certainly persistent,’ said Antal, who had fled from Hungary in 1956, after the Russian intervention in Budapest. ‘You have made a definite conquest.’

‘I am too old for conquests. I am content with my uneventful existence. I have had all I want and more of love.’

We laughed, I remember. I had persuaded them that I was a dedicated, if not desiccated, bachelor these days.

‘You are still handsome,’ Corina assured me. ‘You are still, as the English say, a
catch
.’

‘I have no intention of being caught.’

‘You have bewitched him,’ said Nicolas. ‘He is either mad or beguiled.’

‘Mad, I should say, definitely mad.’

‘He is not going to tolerate you saying no for an answer, Dinu.’

‘I shan’t give him the opportunity to ask the question.’

I parted from my friends, kissing each of them on both cheeks, and walked none too steadily in the direction of my flat. I heard footsteps behind me and was not surprised when the man who reminded me of R
ã
zvan was at my side.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

‘My name is William. I am Bill or Billy to people who know me well.’

‘Are you?’

‘You don’t look English.’

‘That’s because I’m not.’

‘What are you then?’

‘A human being, I think, of the male gender.’

I stopped. I looked at him.

‘What do you want, William, Bill or Billy?’

‘You.’

His voice sounded nothing like R
ã
zvan’s, of course, even as he spoke with my lover’s directness.

‘I have abandoned physical love, William. Allow me to retire to my cubbyhole alone.’

‘I refuse to allow you to escape from my clutches,’ he said, smiling. He went on to say that his was a reckless nature. It was his custom, right or wrong, to throw himself in at the deep end. That’s what he was doing now, because that was what he wanted. I was not to send him away unhappy.

Unhappy? I was amused by his cavalier use of the word. Had he known unhappiness, the all-consuming demon that blights everything that was once carefree or humdrum? Perhaps he had. I had learned, from Ion Rohrlich among others, that determined jauntiness in certain souls often camouflages misery. This William, Bill or Billy might be one of them.

‘I am Dinu Grigorescu. I am Romanian by birth, French by choice, and English by accident.’

I was cheerfully drunk. It was in a mood of drunken cheerfulness that I invited the stranger to come home with me. If this was the act of a madman, then so be it, I reasoned.

I lit the gas fire in my sitting room. It spluttered, as it always did, before it coughed its reluctant way into flame.

‘I would advise you to keep your coat on until the room warms up.’

‘I’m not cold.’

‘You should be. What do I call you?’

‘Let’s settle for Billy.’

I was Dinu for him – not Dinicu; not Dinule
þ
.

‘May I offer you whisky or red wine?’

‘No beer?’

‘No beer.’

‘I’ve never had wine.’

‘Try some.’

‘I want you first. I really and truly want you first.’

What happened next confounds my memory still. We kissed; we embraced; we undressed in a frenzy. I was no longer Dinu Grigorescu, the prince’s boy’s boy, but someone quite other. I could not recognize myself in the excited flurry. I was flesh and blood and little else.

There had been no time for navigation, I thought as I lay beside him after our passion had abated – no time at all.

‘I needed that, Dinu.’

I was tempted to say ‘So did I’, but couldn’t. What had happened was an unexpected gift, a Christmas present of a distinctly unusual kind.

‘I should like to stay with you till morning.’

I brought him a glass of claret, which he clearly didn’t enjoy drinking. He pulled a disgusted face.

‘Give me some water, will you?’

Billy Hawkins, from London’s Clapton, was an invader rather than an explorer or navigator. I smiled at the silly conceit that he was an Attila compared with R
ã
zvan’s Marco Polo. I was happy enough to be conquered, though it was impossible to imagine Billy as a lasting lover. I didn’t want a lasting lover, anyway.

‘You are beautiful.’ It was Billy speaking.

‘Not any more, I fear. I am fifty-six. How old are you?’

‘Twenty-seven. I am attracted – deeply attracted, in case you hadn’t noticed – to mature men.’

I doubted, I very much doubted, I said, that I was mature. I neglected to add that there were times when I seemed to be perpetually youthful. I was the skinny boy in Paris, in the summer of 1927, with his improbable literary ambitions, whose affections my mother and R
ã
zvan continued to fight over, with no one the winner, in the dreamful darkness of Marylebone.

I made coffee for my unlikely-looking Attila, who had dropped his conqueror’s manner in favour of something more feminine, more vulnerable.

‘Who is that man in the photograph?’

‘He is R
ã
zvan Popescu. He was, and is, my lover. He died before the war.’

‘He looks a bit like me.’

‘Yes, Billy, he does look a bit like you. And there the resemblance ends.’