Franny Moyle (51 page)

The boys did not attend their mother's funeral. The news of her demise was broken to them by their respective schools. Their lives were now frozen in limbo while their guardian, Adrian Hope, thought about what would be best for their futures.

One month later Otho wrote a second letter to Babbacombe Cliff. Its contents were much to be expected. He brought Georgina up to date with news of the boys and provided a sense of the other letters he had received in memoriam of his sister. In the very final paragraph, before signing off, he noted almost casually that he had come across a friend of Oscar Wilde's who had told him that Oscar ‘had not given a hang for the death of his wife'.
³⁴

Otho had developed a profound dislike for Oscar for his treatment of his sister. This is why he perhaps chose to convey this about Oscar
to Constance's great friend rather than the response Oscar himself had sent him on hearing the news: ‘Am overwhelmed with grief. It is the most terrible tragedy.'
³⁵

The version of Oscar that Otho chose to share with Georgina is closest to that which history has adopted more generally with regard to Oscar's relationship with his wife. This version is, of course, incomplete. Oscar also wrote to Carlos Blacker after Constance's death and said, ‘I don't know what to do. If we had only met once, and kissed each other.'
³⁶
In this ambiguous sentence lies a far more appropriate sentiment from a man who some say should have never married.

By 7 April the press, once so infatuated with Constance, had got the story of her death. The brevity of the announcements of her death reflects the general distaste with which the whole Oscar business was still handled. ‘A Torquay telegram states Mrs Oscar Wilde died on Thursday week on the Riviera under distressing circumstances,'
Reynolds's
newspaper announced.
³⁷
Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper
had little more to add other than the context that ‘After recent events she retired with her two sons to the Continent.'
³⁸

Constance's circle of close friends and family were devastated by her death – none more so than the Napiers. The Hopes had the dreadful duty of breaking the news to them. ‘We received the telegram on Friday and went to the Napiers that afternoon,' Laura Hope related. ‘They had heard nothing whatsoever and had no idea Constance was ill – beyond the usual poor health she had had of late years, & were terribly shocked. Her last letters had been brighter – & full of a visit she hoped to have paid the Napiers in London shortly.'
³⁹

On 12 April, Constance's friends John and Jane Simon invited some of her London friends to their home in Kensington Square to remember her. Most of them felt that such a sorry end could have been avoided. Jane Simon insisted that Constance had been advised time and again in England that surgery was not appropriate for her condition. And Aunt Mary Napier had ‘been most urgent in advising her to avoid operations'.
⁴⁰

But Constance had wanted to be able to enjoy life with her sons.
She had made a brave and bold decision that she thought would benefit Cyril and Vyvyan. Such bravery was characteristic of her. Her relatives noted, however, that it was typical of a woman who would ‘go her own way, as is the case of the marriage which wrecked the happiness of her life'. In this regard the consensus among Constance's friends and family was that her death, despite her relative youth, was for the best. Many, like the Simons, felt that ‘death for her must have been the solution of almost intolerable misery'. At the end they ‘all felt that she was safe. Safe from him – safe from herself.'
⁴¹

A few years later one writer who had known Oscar and Constance rewrote the outcome of their story, offering a version of their tragedy that was more palatable to a judgemental society than the actual events. It was less that Constance had been saved by death than that Oscar should have saved her and the boys by killing himself. In her novel
The Rose of Life
, Mary Braddon's character Daniel Lester fraudulently embezzles from a friend. When his friend discovers his crime and threatens to reveal it, Lester faces prison and ruin. He considers flight but in the end chooses suicide, although the latter course is so carefully executed that the coroner returns a verdict of natural death. In this manner Lester is redeemed, for his actions have been taken for the sake of his wife. She has been spared the shame and ignominy that his incarceration would have visited on her.

Bosie Douglas also offered an assessment of the Wildes' tragic story, although he was as harsh in his judgement of Constance as most others were in theirs of Oscar. ‘As to his wife,' Bosie said, ‘he married her for love and if she had treated him properly and stuck to him after he had been in prison, as a really good wife would have done, he would have gone on loving her to the end of his life … Obviously she suffered a great deal and deserves every sympathy, but she fell woefully short of the height to which she might have risen.'
⁴²

These judgements passed upon Oscar and Constance by their society were brutal. For their children, however, death offered little comfort. Otho told Lady Mount-Temple: ‘Cyril has deeply felt the loss of his mother, I think there is no doubt of that, though boy like he was at a loss for words to express himself, and I believe her
memory will for a very long time have a hold on his mind, and perhaps for ever. At first he hardly realized very Ukely what it meant for him that his mother was gone, and he must have had many a pang as it slowly came home to him that he could not look forward any more to seeing her again.'
⁴³
Writing years after her passing, Vyvyan recalled: ‘My grief for my mother was very genuine and deep. I worshipped her, and all the weight of the world seemed to descend upon me after her death.'

Under the terms of Constance's will Oscar was restored his income of £150 a year. It was a provision that was in the end barely used, since he himself died within two years of his wife. On 25 February 1899, just months before his own demise, Oscar visited Constance's grave.

‘It was very tragic seeing her name carved on a tomb – her surname, my name not mentioned of course – just Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd QC,' Oscar wrote to Robbie Ross. ‘I brought some flowers. I was deeply affected – with a sense also of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise and life is a terrible thing.'
⁴⁴

Epilogue

A
FTER SEPARATING FROM
Bosie in Naples, Oscar based himself in Paris, where his life was coloured by meagre means and perpetual debt, although he continued to be supported by a small circle of devoted friends and well-wishers. He established himself first in rooms in the Hôtel de Nice in the rue des Beaux-Arts, and later in the Hôtel d'Alsace. Throughout he complained constantly of being penniless and unable to meet his bills. In addition, his health was poor, and the punishment for his crimes seemed unending. Even in Paris, Oscar suffered the humiliation of seeing former friends and colleagues shun him in public.

When not in Paris, much as his wife and children had done Oscar moved through Europe's fashionable resorts, taking people up on their offers of hospitality wherever possible. In the autumn of 1898 he travelled to the south of France at the recommendation of his friend Frank Harris, and then in the spring of 1899 he stayed in Switzerland with another well-wisher, Harold Mellor. It was
en route
to Mellor's that Oscar took a detour to Genoa, where he spent three days with a young Italian actor he met there, call Didaco. The primary purpose of his visit to the city, however, was to pay a visit to Constance's grave.

By May 1899, Oscar had tired of Switzerland and was in rooms above a restaurant in Santa Margherita, an Italian resort close to Nervi, where his wife and family had spent so much time in the previous years. Here he became bored and drank, and in the end Robbie Ross, perhaps the most devoted of all his friends, dashed out to return him to the French capital.

Throughout the course of 1898 and 1899 Oscar worked slowly on a number of literary projects.
The Importance of Being Earnest
and
An Ideal Husband
were both published during this time, and Oscar also entered an agreement with Frank Harris to collaborate on a play,
Mr and Mrs Daventry
, which eventually went into production at London's Royalty Theatre in November 1900.

But in the first year of the new century Oscar's health went into rapid decline. Early in the year he complained persistently of food poisoning and blood poisoning, and although he rallied sufficiently to visit Italy with Harold Mellor in the spring, during which time he took a trip to Rome and received a blessing from the Pope, on his return to Paris he was once more terribly unwell.

Although Oscar continued to see Bosie from time to time, the latter had made a return to London society – a privilege that would never again be extended to Oscar himself. Back home in England, Bosie may well have noted the sale of a group of artworks at Messrs Foster of Pall Mall. On 1 August 1900 eleven pictures came under the hammer, raising just over £60. These were Constance's pictures, being sold on behalf of her estate by Mr Hargrove. Three etchings of Venice by Whistler, which in early descriptions of Tite Street hung in the drawing room there, must have been removed by Constance from her former home before the bailiffs moved in. Each one sold spoke of a period in Constance's life. Hanging in the Villa Elvira, they must have served as a reminder of her past and the friends she continued to hold dear. In addition to Whistler's Venetian scenes there was an etching of a geisha by Mortimer Menpes, a portrait of Sarasate by Whistler, two pencil drawings by Edward Burne-Jones, a proof engraving and a photogravure by Watts (one, if not both, almost certainly of his portrait of Georgina Mount-Temple) and a photograph of Tennyson and his friends, by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron.

While these sad relics of a lost life went under the hammer in London, in Paris Oscar was spending more and more time confined to his small room in the Hôtel d'Alsace. He was having great trouble with his ear, almost certainly as the result of a fall he had had in prison that
had done permanent damage to it. By October the ear was terribly painful, and in the end Oscar agreed to have an operation on it, which was undertaken in his hotel room. Robbie Ross and Reginald Turner cared for him during this period. But despite their best efforts, within three weeks Oscar had developed a post-operative abscess in the ear and meningitis had set in. Although Robbie left Oscar's bedside on 12 November to visit his mother in the south of France, he returned at the end of the month, alerted by Reggie to the fact that Oscar's condition had become terminal. On 29 November 1900 Robbie fetched a Catholic priest, and Oscar was taken into that faith. The very next day he died. Bosie, summoned by Robbie, failed to reach Oscar's bedside in time. He did, however, take the place of chief mourner at the funeral, although it was Robbie Ross who was holding Oscar's hand as he passed away. Oscar was buried in the cemetery in Bagneux in a temporary concession. In 1909 his remains were removed to a permanent resting place in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Oscar never got to see his sons after Constance's death. The Lloyd and Napier family closed ranks around the boys. Although they had so often been separated by their parents, and had little in common in terms of interest and temperament, Cyril and Vyvyan found themselves united by the tragedy of their circumstances and specifically by Constance's premature demise. From that moment on, according to Vyvyan, they ‘walked along shoulder to shoulder'. After their school terms finished in the summer of 1898, they returned home to England and were brought up by Aunt Mary Napier and her daughter Lizzie. Although Adrian Hope was their appointed guardian, he adopted this role with a degree of distance.

Vyvyan, whose fascination with Catholicism continued, was sent to Stonyhurst College. Despite Constance's positive letter from the Admiralty in 1895, Cyril was denied a place in the navy and was instead sent to Radley College with a view to going into the army.

Having endured the death of their mother, the boys suffered a second trauma when news of Oscar's death broke. The Napiers had done their best to make his sons forget Oscar. Vyvyan claimed he had been told his father was already dead, and so when the school
rector delivered the news that in fact he was newly deceased, Vyvyan was utterly perplexed. Cyril, on the other hand, read about Oscar's death in the newspaper. On hearing that Robbie Ross had sent flowers on the boys' behalf to the funeral, Cyril sent a letter of thanks in which he noted the deep pain that Oscar had inflicted on his family, for which Cyril hoped his father was truly penitent.

Oscar's story informed Cyril's life. Determined to win back some respectability, he cast himself as a masculine hero keen to win sports trophies for his school. After Radley he went to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and then into the army, initially serving in India. There is some suggestion by his brother that he worked as a spy in the years leading up to the First World War. Cyril's German was perfect, a fact not lost on the authorities. In 1914 Cyril's regiment arrived in France. On 9 May 1915 he was shot dead by a German sniper during the Neuve-Chapelle offensive, just before the battle of Festubert.

Vyvyan also served in the army in the Fixst World War. As with his brother, the legacy of his years in exile had at least provided him with an unusual facility for languages. He served first as a second lieutenant in the Interpreters' Corps and later in the Royal Field Artillery. He was awarded an OBE thereafter. Before the war he studied law at Cambridge University, but he went on to become a translator and author.

When Adrian Hope succumbed to an early death in 1904, the main barrier to Oscar's friends reacquainting themselves with his sons was lifted. Robbie Ross made a point of befriending the boys, and Vyvyan attended Oscar's reburial in 1909. Despite becoming friendly with Robbie Ross and many others from Oscar's circle, and despite writing about being the son of Oscar Wilde, Vyvyan Holland never changed his name back to that of his Irish forebears. He had experimented with using the name Wilde just once, for about a month before the First World War when on a trip to Venice, and was so bothered by Italian reporters that he decided to never repeat the exercise. He died in 1967 aged eighty, leaving a son, Merlin, who has become an acknowledged Wilde scholar.