by Franny Moyle
On 25 August, Constance left her husband to his writing and headed over to Hunstanton to see her children. When she arrived, she was disappointed to find them looking paler than she had hoped. Vyvyan was left in Cambridgeshire, and Cyril brought back to Cromer for some good Norfolk air. When mother and child returned to the farmhouse, they discovered that Oscar was so enjoying the rural idyll that he had decided to extend their stay there until 17 September. His morning “writing was going well, and he felt he could finish the play.
‘We go lovely drives all thro’ the bracken and heather – scarcely any gorse – and Oscar thinks of Herrick’s line “a green thought in a green shade”. He says he must have been thinking of a place just like this when it was written,’ Constance informed Georgina in one of many happy letters written across these weeks. She also revealed that Oscar had come across a new pastime. ‘I am afraid Oscar is going to become bitten with golf mania. He played his first game on the links here yesterday and has joined for a fortnight.’40
On the last day in August Oscar’s friend Arthur Clifton joined the party. He had married that summer, and he and his brand-new bride joined the Wildes as part of their honeymoon. And then, a day later, Constance received another telegram informing her that another of Oscar’s friends was on his way for a visit.
‘Having got all our rooms quite full yesterday a telegram comes from Lord Alfred Douglas asking to be put up for a night! I don’t believe that even you have to contrive to put 7 people into 6 rooms. However, fortunately he put it off till to-day, and I think we can manage.’41
The day after Bosie arrived, Constance had to return Cyril to Hunstanton. When she got back to Cromer, she discovered that, far from staying for just a day, Bosie had installed himself for the duration. She didn’t mind too much. The daily golf sessions Oscar began enjoying with Bosie were a source of amusement for her rather than concern. ‘I am becoming what I am told the wives of golfers are called a “golf-widow”,’ she quite happily related to Georgina.
Before everyone went their separate ways, Constance arranged to commemorate these happy days. ‘We are all going to be photographed in a group here tomorrow and if they are successful you shall have a copy.’ She then headed for Babbacombe Cliff to see Georgina, while the rest of the party broke up. Oscar wanted a week alone at the farmhouse to finish his writing.
Some of the photographs from this session still exist. In one, Oscar, looking slim and handsome, stands with his arm on Cyril, while Constance looks down at a book placed on a small garden table. It is an image of contentment and calm. But for Constance, at least, this was her last happy summer holiday with her husband. In Cromer, Constance knew that, in spite of his myriad distractions, her husband remained at some level loyally devoted to her. It was, however, a situation that was about to change. Bosie Douglas would make sure of that.
The moment Constance and the Cliftons left Felbrigg, Bosie conspired to stay. Determined to place himself at the centre of all aspects of Oscar’s life, Bosie suddenly became too ill to travel. This would be an illness that would conveniently place him and Oscar alone together for a whole week.
Constance was quite oblivious to Bosie’s manipulations. ‘I am so sorry to hear about Lord Alfred,’ she wrote to Oscar from Babbacombe, ‘and wish I was at Cromer to look after him. If you think I could be any good, do telegraph to me, because I can still get over to you.’42
Such a telegraph, of course, never came.
11
A dark bitter forest
THE SUMMER OF 1893 was peculiarly hot. The signs of an imminent heatwave began to emerge in the spring. In April residents of Coventry sweltered in 26.7° sunshine, while Cambridge reached an astonishing 28.9°, record temperatures for the time of year that remain still unbroken today. Between 4 March and 15 May not a drop of rain fell on Mile End in the East End of London, still the longest recorded run of consecutive dry days in the UK. By June local papers and magazines were celebrating the potential bounty that such a shift in the climate might produce for the nation’s gardeners, naturalists and foragers. Butterfly enthusiasts would have more luck than usual if they took their nets out, since some varieties, such as the Duke of Burgundy, with its golden spots and white-tipped wings, were exceptionally producing second broods in the warm weather. There was almost certain to be a bumper crop of early mushrooms, the Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times announced to its readers – just as long as some heavy rains came to break the heat. And such downpours were indeed delivered as the summer reached its peak. In August, Preston in Lancashire saw the heaviest shower ever noted, when 32 mm of rain fell in just five minutes.
London’s fashionable men responded to the heat by discarding the customary waistcoats that were worn in the summer months in favour of a new craze for colourful bandanas or cummerbunds. Women, meanwhile, could take to the beach in the swimming suits that were now available for them, with their long knickerbocker legs and tabard tops. By October that year these were publicized further in the hit musical A Gaiety Girl, in which the female chorus was clad entirely in bathing attire.
But the heat had its tragic consequences too. Businesses began to suffer, not least the West End theatres. After calls by the public for the installation of electric fans to cool the insufferably hot auditoria, twenty-three venues eventually just closed. Far more serious than loss of business was loss of life. London’s mortality rates increased significantly over the previous year. And there were sad accidents too – none more awful, perhaps, than the tale of young Emil Goth. This eleven-year-old boy took tickets at the Jubilee Public Baths in Betts Street in London’s East End. That August the baths were swamped by hot working men who wanted to cool off, and the newspapers reported that consequently the officials supervising the bathing establishment were ‘taxed to their utmost’ – so taxed indeed that they failed to notice that on closure of the baths one day an exhausted Emil removed his own hot, sweaty clothes and jumped into the pool. He was unaware that the large, nine-inch drain had just been opened to empty the pool. The huge amount of water pouring into the drain took Emil with it, sucking him down into the great underwater pipe, where his tiny body lodged in its bend. He had drowned long before anyone was able to extricate him.
Since June, Oscar had been renting a cottage at Goring-on-Thames, a very picturesque riverside village between Reading and Oxford. Although better than broiling in London, even at Goring there was no escape from the heatwave. ‘It is so fearfully hot that I can do nothing at all not even think,’ Constance wrote to Georgina Mount-Temple.1
For Constance, the holiday in Goring could not have been more different from the modest stay in Cromer of the previous year, with its country drives and golfing expeditions. The stifling temperatures meant that she and Oscar were limited in the activities they could pursue. Tennis was out of the question, and croquet was just about all they could cope with. Constance described herself as being ‘cross and horrid’, not least because of the terrible Old Testament thunderstorms that were keeping her awake at night. ‘The heat is so great here, and last night God’s thunder-angels woke me and I had visions of his Splendour in the lightning flashes,’ she told Georgina.2
Storms were catching the holidaymakers out during the day too. One day when Arthur Clifton’s family visited, Constance and Clifton’s wife, Marjorie, went boating, only to be caught in a downpour. The two women had got ‘drenched to the skin, a lake was formed in the boat and pools of water in which ducks might have swum on our laps’, Constance related.
The cottage was close to the home of the comic actor and author George Grossmith and his wife, who became regular visitors with their children. They would join in the croquet tournaments and on two occasions at least participated in evening ‘theatricals’. But the local Grossmith family were far from being the only guests. Most of the other guests were there at the invitation of Bosie Douglas. He was playing host at Goring, and as a result there came a constant stream of his friends, whom he was indulging with the utmost e
xtravagance.
Bosie’s bacchanalian court was kept supplied with champagne and luxury foods ordered and delivered from London’s finest food halls, again at Bosie’s behest. The bills for these decadent indulgences were, however, being paid out of the Wilde coffers, newly replenished after a change in fortune. Lady Windermere’s Fan had proved a financial triumph for Oscar. It is estimated that he had probably received £3,000 in royalties. In early 1892 Constance had also come into a legacy when Aunt Emily finally expired in St Leonards, leaving her £3,000. And then a year later her other aunt, Carrie Kirkes, died, leaving a further bequest of £5,500.
The sense of abandon extended beyond those who were guests at Goring. Unlike the relatively simple holiday in Cromer, where Constance had arranged just one cook to attend to their needs, eight servants had been engaged for Goring. Although in the past Oscar had always left the appointment of servants to Constance, this time it was Bosie who had chosen the staff for Goring. Harold Kimberley, the butler, had once served Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Walter Grainger was a young man Bosie had got to know in Oxford, who had been invited down to become the underbutler. These, along with the parlour maids and cooks, proved a riotous crew. With the strange, stifling, oppressive and intermittently stormy weather, nature merely contributed to the equally stifling and stormy atmosphere within the cottage itself. Everyone was tense. Sometimes the staff would get drunk on the left-over champagne. ‘More scenes in the house here,’ Constance confided to Lady Mount-Temple, ‘and I shall not be sorry to leave, for they worry me. All such excellent servants and yet they cannot get on together.’3
It was not just the servants who were being badly behaved at Goring. After his years of courteous devotion to his wife, Oscar had suddenly changed. Apparently, for the first time ever he was being rude to her in public. And after his years of telling her his plans and proposed movements, now he was declining to inform her of his whereabouts.
‘I cannot make out whether it is my fault or Oscar’s that he is so cold to me and so nice to others,’ Constance wrote in despair to Georgina, adding, ‘He is gone to Birmingham to see his play acted there tonight. His butler knows his other plans and I know nothing. Darling, what am I to do?’4 Later she informed Georgina that ‘Oscar is, I believe, up in London and returns to Goring tomorrow but now I am going to be mother to my children and leave my wife-hood to brood in darkness until sunshine comes again.’5
The simple fact was that Constance was no longer the heart of the Wilde household. She was no longer the cathedral of her husband’s devotion, nor was she any longer considered a calm harbour of refuge for him. During the course of a year she had been usurped. Since their holiday in Cromer just a year earlier, Oscar had effectively entered into a new marriage, with Bosie Douglas. The fact he had not bothered to tell his wife of this extraordinary shift in his affairs was only just beginning to dawn on the woman who had always chosen to see the best in the man she married. In less than twelve months she had lost her husband. Although she scarcely comprehended it, the likelihood of the ‘sunshine’ returning any time soon was remote.
Things had really begun to change soon after Cromer. This holiday had persuaded Constance that being away from London was a good thing, both for her and for Oscar. She began to look for a country retreat for them. In October 1892 Constance attempted, but failed, to raise a £3,000 mortgage in order to buy a country house of her own. Although this was after her legacy from Aunt Emily, one can only assume that a substantial amount of those monies had gone on paying existing debts. Constance had been helping Speranza financially, and she was also repaying debts to Otho, whose own precarious financial situation left him little choice but to call them in. Otho’s business affairs were crashing.
‘I wonder if you have heard there has been another call on the Leasehold Investment,’ Constance informed her brother that October. ‘Your secretary has told Mr Hargrove that they intend to call up every penny and then the shares will be lost. I’m fiercely afraid that this means swallowing up all your profits, Mr H says that you should have evaded your last call so they might not find out your address.’6
Otho did, in fact, finally heed the family solicitor’s advice. Within months he had dropped his family surname in favour of his middle name, Holland. Constance meanwhile worked with Hargrove to get what fortune he had left settled on Mary, his second wife. Thus, living in Switzerland under an assumed name, Otho Lloyd Holland, as he now was, began a long evasion of his creditors.
Throughout the autumn of 1892 the chasm between Oscar and Constance widened. Their social circles became more and more different. Through Lady Mount-Temple, Constance reignited her passion for Pre-Raphaelitism. She began associating with the now aged painters who still survived from this group. So while Oscar was exploring the company of a group of younger men to whom he was now extravagantly offering silver cigarette cases as tokens of his love and affection, Constance was forming friendships with more elderly people, for whom she had a real sympathy.
In her letters Constance talks about visiting Little Holland House throughout 1892. This was the Kensington home of the painter George Frederic Watts, a great friend of Georgina’s. Constance found herself acting as a messenger and courier between the seventy-fiveyear-old Watts and her similarly aged friend. She took the painter some ‘spirit drawings’ from Georgina, and by return reported back to Georgina on the state of Watts’s health. That August he was ‘suffering from eczema in the foot that was mosquito-bitten the other day’.
Watts had painted Georgina Mount-Temple, and Constance now found herself in his home looking at the photograph of the original that Watts kept. ‘Your face was there in the gallery,’ Constance assured Georgina. It was no doubt in good company since Watts had also famously painted the poet laureate Alfred Tennyson, whose memorial service Constance would dutifully attend at St Paul’s Cathedral in October 1892.
Another person with whom Constance socialized at Little Holland House was Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, the son of the Pre-Raphaelite photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. They spent an afternoon looking through an album of photographs together. Many Victorian photographs were staged, presenting moments from literary or biblical narratives. One such in Henry Cameron’s collection, a depiction of the Prodigal Son, haunted Constance. She thought it ‘the most touching and the most exquisite, abandonment of grief and misery, and … abandonment of love given and received’.7
Cameron and Constance had known each other for some time, certainly since 1889, when he had photographed Cyril wrapping his arms around his mother’s neck with tender abandon, and had also taken a portrait of Oscar. It may well have been Constance’s friendship with Cameron that inspired Constance herself to take up photography during the forthcoming year, but not before she returned to him with another commission. On her return to London from Cromer she took Cyril to have his solo portrait taken by Cameron. Vyvyan, it seems, was once again excluded from this experience.
Despite her disappointment in not securing a country retreat of her own, Constance’s desire to get away from London remained, and so in November she rented Babbacombe Cliff from Georgina Mount-Temple, with a view to staying there for three months, until 17 February. After a very cold journey Constance and Cyril arrived at the clifftop house on 17 November 1892.
‘My own darling,’ she wrote to Georgina, ‘I arrive at this sad sweet house … it seems more wonderful than ever to me that you should have let me have it … I had to part from husband and brother today and mother last night, so do not scold me if I seem sad.’ The next day she continued, ‘Bab is looking very well after much rain … I intend hiring a piano that the drawing room may look as it did with you, and I am going to try to teach Cyril to sing … and now I am going to meet Vyvyan. The air is so lovely and soft here, that I think he will be cured almost immediately … Cyril sends you feather from pigeons.’8
While she waited for Oscar to join her, Constance passed her time reading Dante’s Inferno and making the hous
e ready. She filled the rooms with branches of bayleaves that the gardener, Mr Hearne, had cut from the garden. The boys were boisterous. Cyril managed to run into Mrs Hearne, the housekeeper, and cut his face under the eye.
Every day Constance and the boys expected Oscar, and every day his arrival was delayed. Originally due to join his family at the end of November, he eventually turned up on 3 December after a brief trip to Paris. He came armed with tin soldiers for the children.
Within two days snow had descended on the house and its gardens, and Oscar was wrapped up in bed. He was ill and in retreat at the doctor’s behest. His high living was reaping consequences. His nerves were in tatters, and one presumes he was suffering the effects of his massive appetite for alcohol and cigarettes. Lack of sleep was almost certainly also a contributing factor, since Oscar had fallen into the habit of staying up into the early hours.
‘I fear darling, that exile from London comes nearer & nearer,’ Constance informed Georgina, ‘and Oscar has been so ill last week that again the doctor says he must not live in London.’9 One wonders whether this advice was given as part of a wider concern for the company the patient was now all too noticeably keeping in the metropolis.
For a while the family settled into a routine of domestic bliss. Mr Hearne, who was also the local coast guard, agreed to take Cyril round the coast. Constance visited the Turkish baths to soothe her aching arms and legs. Oscar fed the pigeons, ‘who are so cheeky now that they come flying if the window is opened to see whether it rains. They sit in rows along the branches of the fir trees now and look so pretty.’10 And he began to tell his wife and children stories.
‘Oscar has found a book that interests him of supernatural stories – he told me last night a story that I think would interest you. It happened to a cousin of his, Mrs Walker, one of Father Maturin’s sisters, an entirely unimaginative person,’ Constance related to Georgina. The Maturins and Wildes were related on Oscar’s mother’s side. Charles Maturin was a relative of Speranza. He had made his name earlier in the century as an author and playwright. Oscar was an admirer of his novel Melmoth the Wanderer. ‘Father Maturin’ was the novelist’s grandson, a controversial High-Church figure with papist leanings.