by Oscar Wilde
“Ah! We must be here,” Helen said. She was eager to get out into the open air with Dorian, and then to cozy up to a bottle of gin. But no—she heard Edgar whip the horse.
“No,” she said with a sigh, for the solemnity was infectious. “We actually aren’t there yet.”
There was a brief whinny from the horse, then the galloping speed resumed.
CHAPTER V
At half past twelve a week later, Rosemary Hall turned in the direction of Berkeley Square to call on her father, Edmund Hall, a genial if somewhat rough-mannered old widower whom the outside world called selfish because it derived no particular benefit from him, but who was considered generous by Society as he fed the people who amused him. He was a retired diplomat, and was now dedicated to pursuing the aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing. He had two large townhouses, but preferred to live in chambers, as it was less trouble, and took most of his meals at the club. He loathed American influences and was convinced that England was going to the dogs. His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.
When Rosemary entered the room, she found her father sitting in a rough shooting coat, smoking a pipe, and grumbling over a newspaper.
“Rosemary!” he cried, and stood with outstretched arms.
“Father!” Rosemary ran to him and fell into his bearish embrace.
“What brings you out so early? I thought you artist types never got up until noon and weren’t visible until two.”
Rosemary laughed and held him tightly. “Father, I just stopped by to show you something. And then I have to go deliver it elsewhere. And I may never see it again!”
She flew out of his grasp and ran to the door where she’d propped the painting. She was behaving erratically, this she knew—talking fast, unable to stay focused, in a frenzied toss-up between laughter and tears. It had been days since she had any sleep, ever since Dorian vanished with Helen. She hadn’t heard from either of them.
Last night had been the worst of all, though. Not even the sordid dream had come to whisk her into oblivion. Exhaustion wracked her body, and she felt feverish. She had prayed—reciting not just her nightly prayers but new ones altogether. She prayed to be cleansed of her desire so that she could be returned to a mind of purity. She apologized to God for lusting. Yet a part of her didn’t feel sorry. A part of her was lying to her Lord. An horrific thought struck her: Is Dorian Gray now my Lord?
No, of course not, she told herself. She was just acting hysterical and needed to calm down. She took a long bath and drank an herbal tea laced with laudanum that Helen had given her. The tea put her in a stupor that reduced her anxieties. The volume of her thoughts decreased. Consciousness lazed in a dull, sprawling babble. But every time she nodded off, the memory of Helen’s cackling broke through and the image of Dorian looking at Helen with such intrigue, such inspiration, lightning-bolted through her mind, shedding a cruel light on all her loneliness therein.
Questions swarmed her. What had happened after they left? What was happening at that moment? Were they still together? Was he in love with Helen? Helen always talked about her husband’s indiscretions, but Rosemary knew that Helen entertained many of her own. Would she use and discard Dorian the way she did her other lovers? Or would she fall in love with him, too?
By the time dawn seeped in and the chirping of birds livened the trees, Rosemary was still wide awake with dread. She tried to pass the time with painting, returning to an old landscape piece she’d abandoned when she met Dorian. Nothing had ever felt so hideously boring, and in a nervous fit she splattered a half-bucket of red paint on it—the bloodiest shade in her collection. The only painting she’d ever connected with, she was now tragically convinced, was the painting of Dorian. He was her love, her life. Now that Helen had taken him away from her, she could no longer hide from the truth. So she set to framing the painting, using her favorite silver frame that had been a gift from her father. She would then wrap it up and deliver it to Dorian and be done with it and, oh, possibly him, forever.
But she needed her father to see the gorgeous work she created. She needed just another moment in its fantasy, and a final approval.
When she unveiled it for her father, he was visibly moved, his eyes wide with wonder.
“Rosemary, my dear!” he cried. “This is magnificent!”
“Yes, yes, I know. Isn’t he? He’s so wonderful, father. But I won’t see him again. No, I can’t. Do you like the way the light is caught in his eyes? Have you ever seen eyes so mysterious? They’re gray, but so many shades of gray. Like stone. The way the light does that—it took hours for me to make it right, but that’s just how he looks. Oh, father! I’m getting rid of it forever, and I just wanted you to see it before it is gone.”
Her father nodded as she spoke, trying to follow her, his furry white eyebrows knitted in confusion. She went on and on until she was breathless, then collapsed into the nearest chair.
“Darling,” said her father. He came over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re very fatigued. Why don’t you take a nap?”
“I can’t sleep,” she said, clutching his hand. She peered up at him, her cried-out eyes brimming once again.
“And I hear Georges Petit wants to feature you in a show this fall,” said her father. Oh, yes, thought Rosemary. George Petit. Once that meant something to her.
“This painting of yours will be the crowning glory of the collection!” said her father. He patted her shoulder, then, sensing her pain, tilted her chin up in his palm, his expression radiating the fatherly love she so trusted.
“Such blue eyes,” he said, his tone pensive and somewhat forlorn. “Such an angelic face. So much like your mother’s when I met her, when she held you in her arms. Oh! I am sorry you couldn’t have known her the way I did—though, well, one can’t really say I knew her that well.”
“Oh, father, it is not at all your fault,” said Rosemary, beginning to tear up. She felt deeply for her father. How did one go on after losing their soul mate? Ah, to experience a love like theirs! Even if it must end too soon.
Her father took a deep, restorative breath and blinked away his tears. It was an overwhelming joy to see her father behave so humanly, and Rosemary’s suffering seemed to lose all importance. She found renewed purpose in comforting him.
“God took her and made her an angel, father,” she said. “He took her when she was too young, yes, but now she will always be young. Who wants to grow old and decay? We do it because we must. But no matter what, her love for you will go on, just as it goes on for me. It is a great tragedy that she had to leave us, but she didn’t want to. I feel her presence always. You must feel it, too.” She waved a hand toward the garden. “Especially now with the poppies in bloom! Just like her favorite flower, she was beautiful, but short-lived.”
Her father drew a strand of chestnut hair from her cheek. The long night’s tossing and turning had left her disheveled. Hairpins stuck out of her bun at random, and the bun itself was a mess. She’d been too manic that morning to be bothered with adjusting it.
“Rosemary, my sweet child,” said her father, petting her cheek and looking into her eyes. Tears swelled to the brink of his eyelids but did not cross over. “I have waited so long to tell you something.”
Rosemary’s heart leapt in fear. “Father,” she stood to face him closely. “Father, what is it? Your stomach? The bloat?!” she cried, bringing a hand to his sizable belly. “Have your symptoms returned? That look on your face! Father, you must tell me these things at once. No more secrets!”
Defeat shadowed his face, followed by a sad smile.
“No, Rosemary, no more secrets. Please sit down again.”
Rosemary hesitated but obeyed and waited. Her frenzy was now past the point of thoughts. She was hanging onto sanity now, clawing at it with her soul, about to slip. . . .
“Tell me,” she said.
Her father turned away and began to pace around her. Rosemary clutched her hands, ready f
or prayer.
“Your mother didn’t die when you were a child,” he said.
“What?” asked Rosemary. The sanity she was digging into for support quaked with earthly disregard.
“Well,” he debated with himself. “Technically, she did die when you were a child. But not in that house. Not in that so-called deathbed you sleep in so that you may feel closer to her spirit. In truth, she quite detested that bed— at least she did in the nighttime, given that I was always in it then.”
“Father, what are you saying?!”
“I’m saying your mother left me—she left you, Rosemary—she ran off with a destitute degenerate, an American! She paid his way with her Shelby property. Your Uncle Kelso turned the other cheek.” He shook his bald, shining head. “Rosemary, your mother abandoned us.”
Rosemary was too stunned to respond immediately. Rage, hurt, resentment, and shame seared through her. And the questions—so many questions—one sprouting off the other, all piling up in her heart like dead leaves, for what was the use in answering them now? The damage was done.
“You lied to me,” she said, her voice strange and otherworldly, as though she was her own ghost.
“Rosemary, I only wanted to protect you.”
“You lied to me!” Rosemary repeated. She stood up and shouted in her father’s face. “You lied to me, lied to me! Every-thing I’ve ever known was a lie!”
“Please,” he begged, beginning to weep. “I love you. Your mother loved you. For a while. I mean, I’m sure she never stopped loving you, she just found someone that she loved more than me. They had a son, Rosemary. You have a half-brother.”
“Ah!” Rosemary cried, her hands were balled up in fists at her side. She needed something to hit. Her father would be an ideal target, but she couldn’t stand being in the same room with him any longer. She had to get out.
The painting. The painting and Dorian. That was all she had left in this world, and by God, they must save her. She ran to the painting and sloppily wrapped it back up, then started for an exit. As she was turning the latch, she turned back to look at her father. He had dropped into the chair she’d been seated in, head in his hands. He was weeping softly and muttering incoherently to himself.
Would this be the last time she ever saw him? Right now, she thought—if she had any control over it—yes.
“Take care of yourself, father,” she said.
He lifted his head from his hands. His face was red and bulbous, wet with tears and the runny nose that always comes so crudely with the territory.
“I only told you because—that painting, it’s so remarkable, Rosemary!” he cried. “You’re truly an adult with that work. It’s foolish of me to continue covering your eyes from the truth. I respect you too much.”
The words she’d so long waited to hear from him went straight through her. Years of yearning for him to believe in her—not just because he was inclined to as her father, but because, as a man of intelligence, he was genuinely impressed—now felt like a waste of time. What did his support matter if he was not honest with her? Financially speaking, it was her mother’s money that got her by. She didn’t need her father for that. When she left, she shut the door so quietly it was as if it had been closed all along. Like I was never there, she thought, like I never even existed.
CHAPTER VI
A volatile summer storm was heading for London. The sky was ashen, with low clouds and a rumbling thunder in the distance. Soon it would pour, and Rosemary, having done such a haphazard job of wrapping the painting, was risking it getting water damage. Still, she took her time. A couple of young men offered to help her, for the painting was visibly heavy and Rosemary tipped precariously under its awkward weight, looking like a girl who may faint. She caught her reflection in the painting’s shiny frame and scarcely recognized the deathly looking girl with the chalky complexion and the dark half-moons under the eyes.
She’d been to Dorian Gray’s home once before, but it was in secret. Not even he had known that she was there. It was early in their friendship, the night she first had the dream, where her subconscious took reign and her body lunged beyond her control. In the dream, Dorian was on top of her, but he had only his shirt off, and her hands grazed the smooth mounds of muscle. She still had her knickers on but his hand was reached down them, playing its way finger by finger down, down, down. His forefinger traced the folds of her vagina and circled around her clitoris for a stretch of time that was Paradise and Hell at once. When he finally touched her there, the climax was immediate and seized every muscle in her body. It was when she was about to explode that she woke up and, dazed, realized she was furiously rubbing herself against the mattress. As soon as she thought to stop herself, she exploded, muffling her hard-earned cry of release into the pillow.
Never before had she known such a dream, and certainly she hadn’t ever found herself relating to her bed in such a way. Too shaken to fall back asleep, she waited for dawn, then hailed a hansom and rode to Dorian’s house. She emerged from the cab but was intent on not being seen. She lurked outside the gate, touching the gold poppies, feeling that in doing so she might collect some sacred essence of Dorian. Just knowing she was close to him was all she needed. The sky had been pure opal, and the roofs of the houses glistened like silver against it. The peace in knowing he was sleeping just yards away was the greatest she could remember.
This time, she didn’t bother with hailing a hansom. That would be too reasonable a choice, and this was a day for spitting in the face of reason. It was a day for walking too far, for carrying too much, for being too alone when the rain began to fall.
Exhausted and beaten down by betrayal (and chances were she would hear of more betrayal regarding her oh-so-dear friend—really, like a sister—Helen!), Rosemary couldn’t think straight. The facts she’d just learned from her father fled before her mind like frightened forest things. Around them swirled hallucinatory horrors: Helen’s chilling laughter, Dorian’s gray eyes aglow with intrigue as he listened to Helen’s depraved teachings, the toxic smoke floating from Helen’s languid exhalations.
It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon when she arrived at Dorian’s home. She did not knock right away, but loitered on the doorstep, looking for signs of life— and finding none in the blank close-shuttered windows and their staring blinds. Clutched by the anxious thought that he could be in bed with Helen, she set the painting down and pounded on the door. An elderly valet opened the door at once as if he’d been waiting for her.
“Yes?” he said, taking in her disheveled appearance with-out a flicker of surprise in his sunken old eyes.
“Ahem,” Rosemary became self-conscious and straightened herself as best she could. Oh my, she thought. What am I wearing? She had an ample collection of dresses, but chose a most ragged one so old and ill-fitting that she used it only when painting. It was flecked with the myriad colors of sunsets and oceans and alabaster moons—and the gray soul of Dorian’s eyes.
“Good afternoon, Sir,” she said, submitting a bow of her head as she was unable to curtsey with the ungainly painting in her arms. “I am here to see Mr. Gray.”
The sunken eyes registered her with a heavy blink.
“Mr. Gray did not say he was expecting anyone,” replied the valet.
There was a dagger of lightning and then a slam of thunder that made Rosemary jump.
“Yes, I’m afraid we didn’t settle on an exact time,” said Rosemary.
The rain began.
The valet looked at the wrapped painting in her hands and then at the growling sky, seemingly unimpressed with both. Rosemary huddled closer to the door for shelter, hoping she could inspire some empathy in the man.
“Please,” she said. “May I just step inside for a moment?”
She mustered a chatter of her teeth, though it was quite warm out.
The valet seemed to consider, then at last he backed away from the door, leaving her just enough room to slip in with the painting.
“You may wait here while I see if Mr. Gray is available,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Rosemary, entering. “I have a painting here for Mr. Gray and I know he would be devastated if it were soaked.”
“Yes, you chose a fine day for delivery,” he muttered. He took the portrait from her and set it carefully against the wall.
Rosemary found herself in a somewhat somber hall with richly lacquered wood and high ceilings at the back of which was a spiral wainscot staircase. A pelt of wind slammed the door behind her, causing her to jump yet again. A magnificent chandelier made a mild stir above. Rosemary had long tried to picture what Dorian’s home was like, and it came as no surprise that it was large and impeccably maintained. But there was a gloom and imperious silence she’d not anticipated. Something about it felt unlived in, unloved in, even. Dorian Gray, the charismatic youth of such astonishing beauty and grace was . . . lonely? Unfathomable! Yet the sense of isolation was present everywhere Rosemary looked. Even the valet, with his eyes like worn, sapless wood, was a kind of loneliness personified.
“You may wait here,” said the valet. He grunted and headed up the stairs, looking down on her throughout his ascent.
Rosemary wondered what to do with herself in the huge hall. There was a chill present that she hadn’t noticed outside, and she had gotten wet in the sudden downpour. She hugged herself and stood by a bare coat rack, the least valuable looking thing in the room.
It was not long before she heard the slow steps of the valet plodding down the stairs.
“Mr. Gray is having his breakfast in his private dining room,” he said, pointing listlessly up the stairs. “To your right,” he said. “And then the first door on your left. It is open.” He then promptly forgot all about her, disappearing behind a pair of doors leading out to a back patio.
Peculiar. Who had a dining room on the second floor? And who took breakfast so late in the day? It occurred to Rosemary that Dorian may have some quirks to his personality. It was a refreshing idea, and the first time she’d ever considered him to be anything but perfect. Newly inspired, she left the painting where it was and went up the stairs. The only nervousness she felt was that of excitement. She had missed Dorian.