Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death (18 page)

Our
young driver—he was Mrs Fletcher’s nephew as it turned out—looked over his
shoulder at Oscar and laughed. He brought the pony-and-trap to a halt. ‘Rosie’s
come as far as she can,’ he said. ‘If you’re going to the peak, you’ll have to
walk from here.’

‘Walk?’
exclaimed Oscar, affecting an attack of the vapours. ‘If the horse cannot make
it with four legs, do you imagine that I shall be able to do so with half as
many?’

‘It’s
not far,’ said the boy, laughing once more, ‘You’re nearly there.’ His laughter
was kindly: it was clear that he found Oscar wonderfully droll. ‘Don’t worry.
I’ll wait here to take you down again.’

Wat
Sickert was standing up in the trap, shading his eyes with his hands, scanning
the horizon. ‘There’s no one here,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to be seen.
There’s no point in going further.’

Oscar,
breathing heavily, assisted by the young driver, was now clambering out of the
trap. ‘There’s every point,’ he wheezed. ‘On a clear day from the summit they
say you can see the Isle of Wight. In all probability Her Majesty is on the
veranda at Osborne House already waving in our direction. It would be most
ill-mannered, not to say unpatriotic, not to return her greeting.’

The boy
covered his face and sniggered in happy disbelief as he accepted Oscar’s
shilling. ‘Don’t be absurd, Oscar,’ snapped Sickert. ‘Must you forever be
facetious?’ he demanded angrily. ‘We’re here because Pearse has disappeared and
you are playing foolish games.’

‘You
know my rule, Wat,’ Oscar replied genially, coming round the back of the trap
and offering a hand to Sickert, who was now climbing down from the vehicle.
‘One should always be a little improbable—whatever the circumstances.’

‘This
is not a time for laughter,’ answered Sickert.

‘I
laugh that I may not weep,’ said Oscar quietly, turning towards the cliff-top.
‘Come, Wat,’ he went on, putting a hand on Sickert’s shoulder, ‘Let’s to the
peak. That’s what we came for. If Bradford Pearse has been here we need to know
it.’

In
silence, the three of us trudged the final five hundred yards to the highest,
furthermost point of Beachy Head. A cool breeze blew into our faces. The grass
beneath our feet was soft and wet. Above us seagulls swooped and screeched.

‘There!’
cried Oscar suddenly, pointing towards the cliff’s edge.

‘Where?’
shouted Wat, alarmed.

‘There!’
Oscar cried again. ‘At the summit, at the very edge. Do you not see it?’

I saw
it. For a moment I thought it was the body of a dead dog, half hidden in the
grass. Wat Sickert saw it too. Together, as one, we ran towards it, abruptly
stopping together, as one, as we came near the cliff’s edge. Over that edge, below
us—way, way below us—we could see the sea crashing towards the base of the
cliff, the spray rising up towards us. At a distance the vast and mighty wall
of chalk had indeed looked majestic; at close range, the reality of the sheer
drop inspired not awe but terror.

‘Take
care!’ cried Sickert, falling to his knees. ‘Get down.’

We must
have been five feet at least from the cliff’s edge—we were in no real
danger—but, suddenly, the brisk breeze that had cooled us as we climbed the
hill had become, at the summit, a jabbing wind that threatened to propel us
towards our doom. I dropped to the ground. For a moment, the earth seemed to
spin about me. I laid my face against the damp grass and breathed slowly. I
closed my eyes and recovered my equilibrium. When I opened them, I saw Sickert,
on his elbows and knees, inching his way forward towards the object at the
cliff’s edge. ‘Can you reach it?’ I called.

‘Yes,’
he answered, choking as he spoke. For a brief instant, I thought that he was
weeping, or whimpering in pain—but he was laughing. ‘What a sight I must seem
to the seagulls,’ he cried. ‘Oscar is quite right. One should always be a
little improbable.’ He was now alarmingly close to the precipice. If he had
rolled two feet to his left he would have fallen to a certain death. His right
arm was outstretched ahead of him. ‘I’m nearly there,’ he gasped.

‘What
is it?’ I called.

From
behind me, Oscar answered: ‘It’s Pearse’s travelling bag. It’s what we came
for.’ Still lying flat on my face, I turned my head and looked back. Oscar was
standing about fifteen feet away, watching us. He raised his hand and waved.
‘You’re good men,’ he called.

‘Got
it!’ cried Wat Sickert. With the fingertips of his right hand he held the very
edge of a black leather case—an old Gladstone bag, bulky and battered—and
slowly, inch by inch, manoeuvred it about in the grass until he could reach its
handle. I watched as he eased himself forward and, finally, grasped the handle
tight. ‘Yes!’ he cried triumphantly and, as he did so, he rolled over onto his
back holding the Gladstone bag in the air above him.

‘Bravo!’
cried Oscar.

‘My
God!’ cried Sickert in sudden terror as he realised that his right shoulder,
thigh and leg were poised at the very edge of the cliff-top. Propelled by I
know not what power, I stumbled to my feet and lunged towards him, grabbing
both his legs and pulling him violently away from the brink. I pulled until I
had yanked him several yards inland. Holding the bag fast in one arm and
clinging to me with the other, he pushed himself to his feet and, shaking and
laughing, together we staggered downhill.

‘My
heroes!’ cried Oscar, opening his arms wide to embrace us. We stood before him,
like schoolboys returned from a great adventure.

He took
the battered Gladstone bag from Wat Sickert and held it up before us. ‘Let us
examine the evidence. You risked your life for this.’

Sickert
shook his head and wiped his eyes and moustache with his hands. ‘Is it Pearse’s
bag?’ he asked, recovering his breath.

‘It
would appear to be,’ said Oscar. ‘Here are his initials: B .P.’ He ran his hand
across the leather. ‘It’s wet from the dew. It’s been here some hours.

‘Wat
pulled it through the grass,’ I said.

‘Yes.
But the bird droppings on it are dry— encrusted. The bag was left here last
night—or, if this morning, certainly before dawn. What does it contain? Very
little, I surmise. It’s remarkably light. And unlocked …’ With thumb and
forefinger he unfastened the lock. He bent forward and peered inside the bag.
‘As I thought, very little … No make-up tin; no hair brushes; no shaving
tackle … Just papers. Nothing but papers. We can examine them on the train.
Come, gentlemen—our charioteer awaits.’

‘Where
are we going’?’ asked Wat.

‘Back
to London. Our business here is done.’

Sickert
appeared bewildered. ‘But, Bradford—’ he protested. ‘We must search for his
body.’

‘We
will not find it,’ said Oscar, shutting the Gladstone bag and passing it to me
to carry. ‘If your unfortunate friend jumped off the cliff—or was pushed—the
tide will have washed his body away long ago. The tide went out at dawn. We’ll
report what we know to the police on our way to the station … they’ll alert
the coastguard. Come, let us go.’

‘Do you
think my friend is dead, Oscar?’ asked Wat seriously.

‘If he
fell from that cliff, he is. It is the highest chalk sea cliff in the land. It
has claimed a thousand lives and more. I know of no survivors.’

‘Has he
been murdered then?’

‘That
is possible,’ said Oscar, looking back towards the cliff’s edge. ‘There are no
signs of a struggle, but that does not signify. There are no boot-marks in the
grass, but all that tells us is that whoever was last here departed before the
arrival of the morning dew. Yes, it’s quite possible the poor man’s been
murdered.’

‘He
hadn’t an enemy in the world.’

Oscar
smiled. ‘Most murders are committed not by our enemies but by our friends.’

‘Could
he have taken his own life?’ I asked.

‘That
is possible also—more suicides are committed from this cliff-top than anywhere
else on the planet. Of course,’ he added, turning back in the direction of our
waiting pony-and-trap, ‘to take one’s own life at Beachy Head is a little
obvious. It smacks of what the French call a
cliché.
But as we saw from
last night’s melodrama, Bradford Pearse was not averse to the obvious. He was
not frightened of a
cliché.

Wat
Sickert winced and shook his head despairingly.

‘Life’s
a jest,’ said Oscar, ‘and death is a certainty. If it be not now, yet it will
come, Wat— that’s for sure. The readiness is all.’

Sickert
said nothing. We trudged down the hill towards the pathway.

‘Why
should he take his own life?’ I asked.

‘Perhaps
his “secret” overwhelmed him,’ said Oscar.

‘What
“secret”?’ asked Sickert, sharply. ‘I don’t believe he had a secret. I’ve known
him for years.

‘We all
have secrets, Wat. None of us is entirely as we seem. Beneath that bluff
exterior, behind that seafarer’s bushy beard, was there another Bradford
Pearse—a man you never knew? Remember what he wrote in his note to you? “Come
and see me if you can spare the time. I’m frightened to be honest with you.”‘

We had
reached the boy with the pony-and-cart. ‘Let us talk of other things,’ said Wat
as he and the young lad helped Oscar clamber aboard. I sat up front again, on
the driver’s seat, holding Bradford Pearse’s Gladstone bag on my knees. When he
joined me our young driver glanced at the bag enquiringly. ‘I think Mr Wilde
would like you to take us to the railway station,’ I said.

‘Righto,’
said the boy, picking up the reins and twitching them to set the pony on her
way.

As we
rumbled unsteadily down the hillside, Sickert shaded his eyes with his hands
once more and slowly looked about him, surveying the landscape from east to
west. ‘I want to fix this scene in my mind’s eye,’ he said. ‘I shall paint it
one day.’

Oscar
chuckled and reached for his cigarette case. ‘A landscape without figures, Wat?
Only grass and sea and sky? Is that really you? Nature is elbowing her way into
the charmed circle of art, I see. I’m not sure I like it.’

‘There
are plenty of shadows on the hillside, Oscar. You like those.’

‘But
nothing man-made?’

Wat
laughed and took the cigarette Oscar was proffering him. ‘To please you, my
friend, I’ll include the lighthouse.’

‘The
lighthouse?’ exclaimed Oscar. ‘Where?’

‘There,’
said Sickert, pointing to the west, ‘on the next headland.’

Oscar
leant forward and called up to the boy:

‘That
lighthouse—how far is it from here?’

‘Half a
mile, as the crow flies; two miles by road.’

‘Take
us there, if you’d be so kind,’ commanded Oscar. ‘And as swiftly as you’re
able. There’s an extra shilling in it for you. The lighthouse keeper may be
able to help us. Do you know him? Are you by any happy chance—‘ he paused— ‘
consanguineous?’

The boy
laughed. He turned round and looked Oscar in the eye and winked. ‘I know what
you mean, sir. And the answer’s “Yes, he is of my blood.” He’s my uncle. You’ll
like him.’

It was
Oscar’s turn to laugh. He slapped Sickert on the knee. ‘Tilly-vally! In London,
no self-respecting child knows who his father is. In the country, everyone’s
related.’

The
Belle Tout Lighthouse at Seven Sisters point—built, it turned out, by our young
driver’s great-grandfather in 1832 was an ugly structure, graceless, square and
squat, rough-hewn from stone.

It had
the forbidding look of a military conning tower. As we approached it, in the
building’s solitary window, up on what must have been the second floor, below
the lighthouse lamp itself, we saw the figure of a large man smoking a pipe.
‘Is that your uncle?’ asked Oscar.

The boy
squinted up at the edifice. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s not him. That must be one of
his men. You can’t miss my uncle. He’s a character.’

He was
indeed. He might, in fact, have been a character from one of the tales of the
Brothers Grimm—or even from one of the darker verses of Oscar’s poetic hero,
Edgar Allan Poe. He was diminutive in stature and in every respect misshapen.
His back was twisted; he walked with a limp; he had a club foot; he had a
withered hand; his skin was rough and warty; his brown bald head was a
patchwork quilt of hollows and carbuncles; he wore a black eye-patch over his
left eye. ‘He is grotesque,’ Oscar murmured as the man shuffled towards us.
‘Speak to him, Robert. I cannot.’

Oscar
Wilde’s obsession with ‘beauty’ bordered on the pathological. Famously, Max
Beerbohm said:

‘Oscar
may not have invented Beauty, but he was first to trot her round.’ But the
counterpoint to Oscar’s passion for what he held to be beautiful was his
revulsion towards what he conceived to be ugly. Ugliness to him was a sin, an
evil, the devil’s work—and he would not look upon it. Oscar was a man of great
sweetness and enormous generosity and yet he would cross the road to avoid the
sight of an ill-favoured beggar. He pitied the hapless ‘Phos girls’—those poor
creatures who worked in the Victoria Match Factory and lost their jaws and
fingers through tipping matchsticks into poisonous phosphorus hour upon hour,
day by day but when, once, one of them called at Tite Street in answer to the
Wildes’ advertisement for a scullery maid, Oscar presented her with a ten-pound
note on condition she never darkened his door again. He told me the sight of
the girl had made ‘his soul shrivel and his gorge rise.’