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 Rãzvan’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 Rãzvan’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 Rãzvan’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 Rãzvan’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 Rãzvãnel 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, Mamã.’
‘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 Rãzvan. I wanted it to be his only.
‘I am sick of being called beautiful,’ I declared, not just to Elena, not just to Rãzvan, 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, Rãzvãnel, 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 Rãzvan 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.
Rãzvan 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 Vãduva, 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.
By the Same Author
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Sugar Cane
Kitty and Virgil
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Chapman’s Odyssey
Also available by Paul Bailey
Chapman’s Odyssey
‘A wonderfully elegant novel’ The Times
‘I love this beautiful book’ Ali Smith
Harry Chapman is not well, and he doesn’t like hospitals. Furthermore, Dr Pereira’s wonder drug is causing some strange side effects: he can hear more than the usual quotient of voices. First, it is his mother, acerbic and disappointed in him as ever, but then more and more voices add their differing notes and stories to the chorus, squabbling, cajoling and commenting. Friends from childhood, lovers, characters from novels and poetry, Virginia Woolf and a man who wants to sell him T. S. Eliot’s teeth.
Written with a gentle, effortless generosity, full of delicate observation, Chapman’s Odyssey is the work of a master; a superbly rendered act of storytelling and ventriloquism that is both witty and deeply moving.
‘An immensely enjoyable read: sprightly, finely rendered, vivid, economical and true’ Independent
‘Not only is the writing quality the same as in Bailey’s earlier novels and memoirs, but so is much of the content ... Quietly powerful and often touching’ Spectator
‘Beautifully written and constructed with great craft’ Tom Sutcliffe, Independent
‘Bailey’s books are understated, mysterious, quietly beautiful accounts of English life ... A masterpiece’ ***** Roger Lewis, Sunday Express
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First published in Great Britain 2014
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