Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death (40 page)

‘I’m
glad to hear it,’ I said, suddenly shaking my friend warmly by the hand.
‘That’s as it should be, Oscar. And tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow
is the thirteenth,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow is another day.’

‘Shall
we take breakfast?’ I asked.

‘No,
not tomorrow,’ he said, waving his swordstick towards a passing cab. ‘Tomorrow,
Robert, I shall be spending the day in Eastbourne. I shall be taking the early
train. And you, Robert, if you would be so kind, if you can spare the time,
will be spending the day in Tite Street. Mr Heron-Allen will not trouble you.
Mrs Heron-Allen is back in town, so Mr Heron-Allen, also, is returning to the
bosom of his family … Tomorrow, Robert, I need you to be Constance’s guardian
angel. Go to Tite Street tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, Robert. And, until I
send you word, do not let my wife out of your sight.’

The
seating plan

for
the Socrates Club dinner at

the
Cadogan Hotel on Friday 13 May 1892

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH

In south-west London,
Friday 13 May 1892 was as Sunday 1 May had been: a crisp, cold day, though the
sun shone clear and bright. I did as Oscar had asked. I arrived at 16 Tite
Street, Chelsea, at a minute before ten o’clock. Arthur the butler seemed to
have been expecting me, but Constance did not. When Arthur showed me into the
first-floor drawing room I found Mrs Wilde seated at the table by the window,
reading a book.

She
looked up and, as she saw me, she cried out:

‘Robert!
What a lovely surprise! You’ve just missed Oscar. He’s gone to Eastbourne. You
will stay and visit with me instead? I am so happy to see you. Edward’s wife
has come home. He’s returned to his nest. I’ve no one to play with. I’m all
alone.’

She
closed her book. She got to her feet and ran towards me and kissed me lightly
on the mouth. She thought nothing of it, I am certain: it was just her way. I
held her in my arms. I felt the warmth of her body against mine. I revelled in
the softness of her touch. Oscar had told me, not long before—one night, at the
Albemarle Club, when we had drunk two bottles of champagne that he could no
longer love his wife as a husband should. ‘I don’t blame her, poor creature—I
blame nature,’ he said. ‘Nature is disgusting. It takes beauty and it defiles
it. It defaces the ivory-white body we have adored with the vile cicatrices of
maternity. It is loathsome. It befouls the altar of the soul.’

I had
known Constance for eight years, since the time of her engagement to Oscar,
and, to me, her allure had increased, not diminished, across the years. She was
now thirty-four and her figure was a touch fuller than it had been in the days
of her virginity, but time and motherhood had given her a bloom—a radiance—that
she had lacked as a girl. When I first met her, her natural loveliness was
masked by her natural reticence. She was pretty, but she was so shy she was
almost gauche. Now she was beautiful and, though still sometimes awkward among
strangers, as a rule she had a composure—an unassuming self-confidence—that I
found utterly compelling. Oscar was my dearest friend: being with him was
always exhilarating, but, to be candid, it was not always comfortable. In
Oscar’s company I was often on edge: in Constance’s company I was always at
ease.

When I
released her from my arms, she did not move away from me. She looked up into my
eyes and smiled. I wanted to kiss her again. Instead, I glanced towards the
table by the window and said, ‘What are you reading?’

She
blushed. ‘My own book, I am ashamed to say!’ She broke from me and, laughing, covered
her face with her hands. ‘I have been reading my own stories, Robert!’

‘Is
this your new book?’ I asked, moving with her to the table. ‘I loved your first
book, as you know.’

‘They
were children’s fairy stories, Robert,’ she teased. ‘You can’t have “loved”
them!’

‘I
did,’ I insisted. ‘What is the new book called?’

She
picked up the slender volume, bound in blue leather, and passed it to me.
‘A
Long Time Ago,’
she said. ‘More fairy stories. Oscar has been most
complimentary about them.’

‘I
shall be, too!’ I declared. ‘Read me one, will you, Constance?’ I pressed the
book into her hands. ‘Read them all to me!’

‘You
are ridiculous, Robert,’ she said, but she did as I asked.

We sat
together all morning, side by side, at the table in the front window of Tite
Street. The stories were delightful, as charming and fantastical as Oscar’s own
fairy tales, but not quite so melancholy, nor so baroque in their phrasing.
Each time Constance finished one of the tales, I pressed her to start another.
Each time she protested; each time she acquiesced. And while she read, turning
the pages of the book with her right hand, I held her left hand in mine. Now
and then, as she read, she lifted her eyes from the page and smiled at me.
Once, when I had laid the back of her hand flat against the table and was
slowly caressing her palm with the tips of my fingers, she asked: ‘What are you
doing, Robert?’

‘I am
studying the lines on your hand,’ I said. ‘I want to know what the future holds
for you.’

She
closed her fingers over mine. ‘Do not look too close,’ she said. ‘Even Mrs
Robinson will not tell me all that she sees hidden in my hand.’

At a
little after twelve noon, Gertrude Simmonds, the boys’ governess, knocked on
the drawing-room door. She was holding little Vyvyan Wilde by the hand. She had
come to ask if Mrs Wilde wanted to join her sons for luncheon and to enquire
whether or not I would also be of the party.

‘Oh,
yes,’ cried Constance getting to her feet and going to the door, ‘Mr Sherard
certainly wants to see the boys.’

As
Constance was talking to the governess, and kissing her young son, I stood
looking out of the window onto Tite Street. On the pavement opposite, standing
beneath a lamp-post, looking up at the house, I recognised two familiar
figures: Antipholus, the black boy from Astley’s Circus, and his sister,
Bertha. He was holding his sister’s hand and she was holding the wooden hoop
that George Daubeney had given her. When they saw me staring down at them,
Antipholus raised his arm and gave me a friendly wave. I raised my arm and
waved back.

‘Who
are you waving to?’ asked Constance.

‘Nobody,’
I lied, turning towards her. ‘Somebody I thought I recognised,’ I added, ‘but I
was mistaken.’ When I turned back to the window, Antipholus and Bertha were
gone.

We
lunched with the boys in the nursery. They were delightful children,
well-mannered and wise beyond their years. When Cyril said, ‘Papa is teaching
us Latin, but it’s all Greek to me,’ and I laughed, Cyril added proudly:
‘That’s my own joke, you know—it isn’t one of Papa’s.’ When we had eaten, we
left the boys to take their afternoon rest and returned to the drawing room.

Over
coffee, Constance told me how much she loved Oscar and what a perfect husband
and father she found him to be.

When I
said, ‘I fear he neglects you sometimes,’ she protested.

‘Never!
We are always in his thoughts—always. I expect a telegram to arrive from
Eastbourne any minute now. He sends me loving messages wherever he goes.’

‘What’s
he doing in Eastbourne?’ I asked. ‘Do you know?’

‘It
will be some literary matter, I expect,’ she said sweetly, ‘or Bosie suddenly
needing a breath of sea air. Oscar needs more stimulus than we can supply here.
I understand that.’ She smiled at me. ‘I don’t resent it. I am married to Oscar
Wilde, the cleverest man in Europe. And one of the kindest. I count my
blessings, Robert.’

A
silence fell between us. I glanced towards the window.

‘Before
lunch,’ she said, ‘when you waved to someone in the street, was it a young
black boy and a little girl?’

I
looked down into my coffee cup and murmured that it was.

‘They
are often there,’ said Constance. ‘I believe Oscar sends them to watch over me.’

That
afternoon in Tite Street gave me something that none of my three marriages has
afforded me—a taste of domestic contentment. Constance and I played
piquet;
we
took afternoon tea (with Mrs Ryan’s best scones and home-made plum jam and
thick, buttercup-yellow Cornish cream); together we helped Gertrude Simmonds
bath the boys and I read them one of Constance’s fairy tales as their bedtime
treat. At six o’clock, Arthur lit a small fire in the drawing-room grate and
Constance and I stood in front of it and raised a glass of sherry wine to one
another. It was all so uncomplicated and easy, so comfortable and comforting.
It was what, I realised, I most wanted for my life.

As the
clock on the mantelpiece struck seven, we heard the sound of hooves and
rattling wheels in the street. Constance ran towards the window.

‘That’ll
be Oscar,’ she cried.

We
looked down as a hansom cab drew up outside the front door. We expected
somebody to step out, but nobody did. Instead, a boy suddenly jumped down from
the driver’s seat. It was Nat, the freckle-faced page-boy from the Cadogan
Hotel. He was holding an envelope.

A
moment later, Arthur entered the drawing room bearing the envelope on a small
silver salver. ‘It’s for Mr Sherard, Ma’am.’

‘It’s
from Oscar,’ I said. I tore open the envelope and read the note:

All is well—and we are ready. Come to the Cadogan
now. Come as you are and come at once. Do not delay. Constance will be quite
safe. Antipholus is on guard and the police are apprised. Tell my wife nothing—except
that her husband loves her and will be home by just after midnight.

I
folded the note and slipped it into my jacket pocket. ‘I must go,’ I said.

‘Oscar
calls?’ she asked. ‘Oscar summons?’

‘Yes.’

She
asked nothing more—not where he was or with whom or why.

‘He
says he’ll be home just after midnight,’ I added.

‘Oh
good,’ she said, walking with me to the door, linking her arm with mine. ‘I’m
glad of that. Give him my love. I am so grateful to him for sending you to me
today.’ She held her shining face up to mine. ‘It has been lovely, has it not?’

‘It has
been perfect,’ I said and I kissed her on the lips.

Twenty minutes later, when
I arrived at the private dining room of the Cadogan Hotel, to my amazement, I
found the room
en fête.
Laughter, loud conversation and the sound of
clinking glasses filled the warm and smoky air. ‘Everyone seems very jolly,’ I
remarked to Walter Sickert, whom I found standing alone by the door nursing a
large whisky and soda.

‘Very
jolly,’ he repeated. ‘You’ve heard of the condemned man who ate a hearty meal?
I think the principle’s the same. They’re all here and they all seem to be in
riotously
good form. Have a cigar!’ He offered me one of his favourite Manilas. I
took it, remembering to put it in my mouth the wrong way round.

‘Are we
celebrating something?’

‘We
are,’ he said, striking a match and holding it for me. ‘That picture I hoped to
sell I sold it! No more one-man exhibitions and gallery shows for me. I no
longer believe in vomiting your whole past, present and future in a lump into a
dealer’s room for three weeks—the virginity of the pictures gone … No, like a
cunning mother, I now marry my daughters one by one, quietly, some well, some
badly. This one—well! Have another cigar—for later.’ He pushed a second Manila
into my breast pocket.

Wat was
clearly already drunk. It was barely half past seven and yet I sensed that he
was not alone. The mood in the room appeared to border on the hysterical. To
the right of us I caught side of the Hon. the Reverend George Daubeney, his
face flushed with wine, his right hand resting on Willie Hornung’s head,
apparently offering the lad some kind of absolution. Just in front of us stood
Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker, booming at one another.

‘News
of the giant rat of Sumatra,’ cried Arthur. ‘That is a tale for which the world
is not yet prepared!’

‘Tell
it, man,’ thundered Bram, beating the doctor on the shoulder with a clenched
fist. ‘Tell it—and
terrify
your public. That’s what they want. That’s
what I plan to do with my vampires.’