by Paul Bailey
Ion Rohrlich, my benefactor, asked me how my English was progressing. I knew it well enough, I said, to appreciate certain poems and stories.
‘But will you be confident speaking it?’
‘I hope to be.’
‘How soon? Weeks? Months?’
‘Months, I think.’
‘I should like you to accompany me to London. I have been offered a lectureship there. If you can give me your guarantee that your command of the language will be just a little commanding, I propose to recommend you as my invaluable research assistant.’
I could not imagine leaving Paris, and said so.
‘That is a pity. A polyglot Romanian is certain to find employment there. Besides, Avram would enjoy your company.’
‘But he never says anything, particularly to me.’
‘That is his way. He is fond of you.’
‘Fond?’
‘Precisely. If you join me in London, I will explain the nature of his fondness. It is not, I must insist, of the kind Rãzvan Popescu showed you. He is a subtle creature, my son.’
I wrote to Amalia, my far-from-wicked stepmother, to tell her I was considering moving to London. Ion was to join many distinguished writers and artists who were welcomed there and he had invited me to be his research assistant.
She replied with the information that the British were loathed in Bucharest, where once – during the reign of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie – they had been adornments to society. Cezar had entertained the ambassador in our house, if I recalled. Their reluctance to espouse Hitler and his appalling cohorts did not please either of the political parties, desperate to outdo each other in their condemnation of the wandering race. She would advise me to go with Professor Rohrlich as soon as possible. London was a channel away from the continent and therefore a place of greater safety at the present.
‘It is a matter of both deep sadness and optimistic happiness that Elisabeta is five months pregnant with the child the cruel George had planted in her,’ she remarked in an impassioned post scriptum. His words were more precious to him than the girl he said he loved and the baby he was aware they had conceived.
We travelled by ferry to England. There were forms to fill at Dover and questions to be answered and proof was required of my academic qualifications. In 1939, and throughout the war, Romanians were a suspect species. I was twice taken blindfolded to a house outside the capital where I was interrogated for hours. Then the last of the three miracles in my life – falling in love with Rãzvan; meeting and befriending Ion Rohrlich – occurred in 1941, when I was invited by the BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe to translate the broadcasts and propaganda that were coming out of Romania, France and Italy. As I sat, day after day, night after night, in the tiny studio, I hoped I was responsible for alerting the Allies to possible dangers and saving a few lives. I drank gallons of tea and ersatz, bottled coffee to keep myself awake and alert. I felt pride in acknowledging that I was responsibly employed. At my most fanciful, I thought of future generations being able to read Proust, thanks to my dedicated efforts.
Three
Rãzvan 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 Capºa; the love-lives of friends and enemies. My expressed enthusiasm for the poems of George Vãduva, who had caused her daughter such terrible anguish, inspired a riot of redness. Vãduva’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 bey
ond 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 Rãzvan 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 Rãzvan 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 Rãzvan 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 Rãzvan 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 Rãzvan’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 Dinuleþ.
‘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 Rãzvan’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 Rãzvan 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 Rãzvan 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.’
‘Was he as good as me in bed?’
‘You thought you were good in bed, did you?’
‘You know I was. You know so. I sent you crazy, crazy, crazy, Dinu.�
��
‘Yes, you did,’ I said, honestly.
‘So was he as good as Billy Hawkins?’
‘He was different. Please don’t ask me why. He was different.’
That was all I could say, and that had been more than enough already.
I have not seen Billy Hawkins again. There were times I craved his company – his sexual company, to be correct – and was tempted to phone him, but I desisted. He was an amiable young man, with whom I might have had a liaison, of a kind. It was the caveat ‘of a kind’ that prevented me opening what was left of my heart to him. He was too young for me, though he insisted that I was just the right age to keep him happy. I sensed, on the morning of December 21, that he had only his body to share with me. He lacked, pleasant as he was, what we Romanians know as sufletul: a soul. It was a word you only heard in churches in London, whereas Rãzvan and I, at our most contented, used it without embarrassment, often. I feared giving Billy the chance to prove to me that he possessed the depths of sadness and doubt that made the prince’s boy so abidingly attractive to me.
I’d poured him a second cup of coffee and watched him eat buttered toast topped with the Dundee marmalade I had first enjoyed with Amalia some thirty years before. It had been one of the many delicacies she had bought on the account my father kept at Dragomir.
‘We are breaking the law, Billy. We are criminals. We could be sent to prison,’ I said as we kissed goodbye.
‘I like living dangerously. It’s more fun that way.’
Then I thanked him for the night of bliss we had had together.
