Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders (15 page)

‘I did
not care for the softness of his handshake,’ I said.

‘But
you noticed the ring?’

‘Yes,’
I said, ‘I noticed the ring.’

It was well after eleven
o’clock when finally we left All Saints that night. It took time to draw Oscar
from his audience. The Anglican ladies of Rome had greeted him in silence, but
having seen him and heard him and felt the charm of his personality, they were
now reluctant to let him go until they had held his hand in theirs and implored
him to take tea with them or play whist with them or open their forthcoming
bazaar.

‘Being
adored is such a nuisance,’ he declared as we untangled him from the final knot
of female admirers. ‘Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They
worship us and are always asking us to do something for them.’

‘We all
need to be needed,’ said Axel Munthe. ‘We need that more than anything.’

‘I need
a nightcap,’ said Oscar. ‘I need that more than anything.’

We were
among the last to leave the church. As we departed, the Reverend Martin English
and his sister were effusive in their thanks.

English
shook Oscar warmly by the hand: ‘You transformed what would have been the
dreariest of fund-raisers into a memorable theatrical event, Mr Wilde. I am
grateful.’

His
sister held out her hands to Munthe and to me:

‘You
doctors saved the evening — saved it! We would have been lost without you. We
are so in your debt.’

While
Oscar and Munthe stepped out into the street, I lingered for a moment in the
church vestibule.

‘Will
you read me your story very soon?’ Catherine English asked — and she kissed me
gently on the cheek as she bade me farewell.

The
white moon was full and Oscar stood on the pavement gazing up at it, his
vigour magically restored. ‘It’s time for cigarettes and brandy, gentlemen,
don’t you agree?’

I felt
that it was time for bed and shut-eye, but Oscar’s sudden exuberance was not to
be gainsaid.

‘If you
have the cigarettes,’ volunteered Axel Munthe, ‘I have the brandy. Come!’

Amused
by Oscar’s unashamed appetite for pleasure, the Swedish doctor marched us along
the deserted Via del Babuino to his house by the Spanish Steps. As he put his
latchkey to the door, he whispered, ‘Please be very quiet as we climb the
stairs. We must not disturb the neighbours.’

‘Will
your companion be about?’ asked Oscar.

‘I hope
not,’ said Munthe. ‘We have had enough excitement for one evening.’ He picked
up the oil lamp that stood on the hallway table and checked his pocket watch.
‘It’s late, long past her bedtime. She’ll be asleep, I trust.’

‘Ah,’
exclaimed Oscar, ‘your companion is a lady? I had assumed otherwise …’

Munthe
seemed unperturbed by Oscar’s impertinence. He laughed softly. ‘She is no lady,
I assure you. You’ll meet her soon enough — but not tonight, I hope. She’s
quite a handful.’

‘Italian?’
Oscar persisted.

‘Egyptian,’
said Munthe.

Happily,
Oscar now seemed lost for words. He said nothing further until we were
ensconced in low leather chairs around the empty fireplace in Dr Munthe’s
study. As our host poured us generous glasses of Italian brandy, Oscar drew
languorously on his first cigarette of the night. He threw back his head and,
closing his eyes, murmured, ‘A woman’s life revolves in curves of emotion. It is
upon lines of intellect that a man’s life progresses. Is that not your experience,
Doctor?’

‘Let me
reflect on that for a moment,’ said Munthe quietly, moving about the room and
turning up the oil lamps that stood on his desk and mantelpiece.

‘That’s
rather deep for this time of night, Oscar,’ I observed.

My
friend tilted his head towards me and opened one eye. ‘I am trying to raise my
game, Arthur — in keeping with the surroundings. Keats died in the room next
door, remember. His ghost may be listening.’

‘Let us
raise our glasses to Keats’s memory,’ said Axel Munthe. ‘Your reading of his
poem was clearly the making of tonight’s event.’

‘It was
a
recitation,
my dear Doctor, not a reading. I have “The Eve of St
Agnes” by heart — all forty-two stanzas.’

‘The
Anglican ladies were much taken with it, clearly.’

‘It’s a
tale of virginity dramatically lost and of love ecstatically found. I thought
it might hold their attention.’

I
laughed. ‘It brought the old priest to his knees quickly enough.’

Oscar
sat up abruptly. ‘The old priest!’ he exclaimed. ‘I forgot him altogether. How
is he, poor old man?’

‘Recovered,’
said Munthe. ‘I shall see him tomorrow. He will live a while longer.’

‘What
was it? His heart?’

‘I
think he was simply overwhelmed,’ said Munthe. ‘The nave was very crowded. He’d
been standing a long while.’

‘I
thought I saw him throw his glass to the ground. For a moment I feared it was
something I had said. I watched him fall, but I decided it was best not to stop
the recitation. The congregation as a whole appeared not to notice the
commotion.’

‘You
held them in your thrall,’ said Munthe.

‘And I
carried on because I saw you all rush forward to the rescue. I even noticed
James Rennell Rodd springing from the shadows at the critical moment.’

‘He’s
the rising man at the British Embassy here,’ said Munthe.

‘I can
believe it,’ said Oscar.

‘He
lives across the piazza,’ continued Munthe.

‘Ah,’
said Oscar, sitting back in the leather chair once more and drawing on his
cigarette. ‘I thought I caught sight of him in the street yesterday — wearing a
straw hat.’

‘Do you
know the man?’ I asked.

Oscar
smiled at me, widened his eyes and picked a trace of tobacco off his lower lip.
‘Do I know James Rennell Rodd? Yes, Arthur, I know him well. I know him very
well indeed. Did he not mention it?’

‘No,’ I
lied.

‘I am
surprised,’ said Oscar, gazing at me steadily.

‘We
were very preoccupied with the old priest. He was still unconscious.’

‘Of
course,’ answered Oscar, turning his eyes towards his brandy glass and
contemplating it. ‘Rennell Rodd and I were close friends once upon a time —
none closer. We are enemies now. I know because he wrote to tell me so. He has
the soul of a bureaucrat. He must put everything in writing. Our “falling-out”,
as he termed it, is official and destined to be lifelong. Friends, of course,
do make the best enemies. They know what they’re about.’

‘What
caused this “falling-out”?’ asked Munthe.

‘We
were at Oxford together. I won the Newdigate prize for poetry and, two years
later, Rennell Rodd won it also. We revelled in one another’s success. And when
it came to our final examinations and I secured a First, it was expected by one
and all that Rennell Rodd would do the same. Alas, it was not to be. Rennell
Rodd got a Second. He tried too hard. It’s his besetting sin.’

‘Is
that it?’ I asked.

‘It’s
enough, isn’t it?’ He laughed and took a swig of brandy. ‘But you are right,
Arthur. There was more to it than that. About ten years ago, I did young
Rennell Rodd a kindness — at his behest. I wrote the foreword to his first book
of poems. There are some men who can never forgive a kindness done to them.
Obligation turns to enmity.’ My friend sat up once more, holding the lighted butt
of his cigarette in the air. ‘Do you have a dead man’s hand that I might use as
an ashtray, Doctor?’

Munthe
picked up from his desk what appeared to be a large, black mummified hand, its
fingers stiffly erect. He passed it to Oscar.

‘It’s
surprisingly light,’ said Oscar, cupping the hand in his own. He looked at
Munthe and smiled. ‘Is this, by any chance, the severed hand of the unfortunate
workman who fell to his death from the rafters of All Saints?’

‘It
is,’ replied Munthe, lightly. ‘I was called to the scene at the time of the
accident. I found the hand at the foot of the pulpit. I knew the poor man would
have no further use for it, so I kept it — as a souvenir.’

‘And
you embalmed it?’ said Oscar, examining the hand more closely.

‘Yes,’
said Munthe. ‘Your cigarette can’t harm it now.’

l0

The sacristy

O
n
the morning of the next day I sent a telegram to my wife, Touie, and allowed
Oscar to take me to Keats’s tailor in the Via del Corso. I asked for something not
too Italian’. Oscar and the tailor assured me they would have something
‘che
va bene’
ready by lunchtime.

In the
afternoon, at three o’clock, Munthe joined us at the Hôtel de Russie. The
Swedish doctor was dressed precisely as he had been the night before, but his
beard appeared freshly trimmed and his thick, round spectacles gleamed in the
sunlight. He carried with him a small, somewhat battered, black leather medical
bag. Together, by carriage, from the door of the hotel, the three of us
proceeded to the Vatican. As we crossed the Piazza del Popolo the over-familiar
urchin boys once again ran after our
carrozza.
As they called up to us,
waving and laughing, I looked away. Oscar turned towards them, smiled and threw
them some change.

‘Don’t
encourage them, unless you want to,’ said Axel Munthe. ‘They’re notorious. Rome
is full of feral children — waifs and strays who sleep outside the city walls
and eke out a living by preying on kind-hearted tourists — but those two stand
out from the crowd. I know them.

They
hunt as a pair and once they’ve latched on to you, they won’t let you go.’

The sun
was high; the air was dry; there was no breeze; the streets were dusty.
Self-conscious as I felt at my appearance, I was grateful to be wearing the
light linen suit that Oscar had chosen for me.

‘And
the straw hat becomes you, Arthur,’ said my friend, teasingly. ‘We’ll make a
Roman of you yet.‘

Door to
door, the journey took less than half an hour. As we crossed the blue-brown
river Tiber, Oscar looked down at a ragged knot of beggars sheltering from the
sun beneath the abutment of the bridge.

‘The
evolution of man is slow,’ he said. ‘The injustice of man is great.’ As we
turned into the tree-lined Borgo Santo Spirito and caught our first glimpse of
the mighty basilica of St Peter’s ahead of us, Oscar declared, ‘From
Constantine’s foundations and Caligula’s obelisk to Bernini’s façade and
Michelangelo’s dome, all beautiful things, I find, belong to the same age.’

As
names, allusions and sententious turns of phrase tumbled out of him, I listened
— intrigued, amused, impressed, but also conscious that my friend’s manner (and
his learning) might well infuriate those who did not realise how essentially
good-hearted he was.

The
Piazza San Pietro was crowded with pedestrians: pilgrims, priests, friars,
nuns, beggars, tourists, street-vendors, young men in boaters, old women in
veils. Boldly, instructed by Munthe, our driver steered our carriage through
the crowd, across the square itself, past the flower-sellers and
rosary-pedlars, past the fountains, past a colossal, newly erected statue of St
Paul, to a gate at the right-hand end of a colonnade of Doric columns. As the
carriage pulled up before the gate, four or five members of the papal Swiss
Guard, helmets gleaming, halberdiers in hand, stepped briskly forward. They
looked resplendent in their red, blue and yellow striped uniforms, but not
welcoming.