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 B
radford 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.’
We spent very little time at the Belle Tout Lighthouse. There was no need. Happily, the lighthouse keeper’s manner was as benign as his appearance was malevolent. He was a jolly fellow, evidently eager to please, and he answered my questions—and Wat’s—with an old-fashioned deferential courtesy that was quite disarming. Alas, he was not familiar with Bradford Pearse—by name, sight or reputation. Yes, he had been on duty through the night and he always kept ‘a weather eye ‘out for ‘goings-on’ on the peak of Beachy Head— but no, he hadn’t noticed anything untoward in the past twenty-four hours and neither had either of his men. He’d observed no strangers on the cliff-top by day and no unexpected traffic, lights or lanterns during the night. Suicides were all too common, he regretted to tell us, and the bodies of the poor unfortunates did not always reappear. When they did it was not necessarily on the next tide, but sometimes days and occasionally weeks later, and, due to the currents, often a mile or more along the coast. He regretted the sad occasion of our visit, was sorry we did not have time to stay for some refreshment and hoped our paths would cross again in happier circumstances.
As we drove away from the lighthouse keeper, and he stood, crooked but contented, waving to us with his withered hand, Wat said, ‘What an extraordinary individual—I want to paint his portrait.’ I said to our young driver, ‘I like your uncle very much.’ Oscar said nothing.
On our way to Eastbourne railway station, we stopped briefly at the Devonshire Park Theatre and left a message for Mr Standen Triggs informing him that, sadly, it now seemed certain that the services of Mr Bradford Pearse’s understudy would indeed be required. We stopped briefly also at the police station in Grove Road where the sergeant on duty took a cursory note of what we had to tell him, but did so reluctantly and only because Oscar insisted that he should. The sergeant, a God-fearing family man with a ruddy complexion and a black walrus moustache, did not care for Oscar’s manner, did not like theatrical folk and had no sympathy for the suicidally inclined. ‘Suicide’s a criminal offence,’ he reminded us. ‘If we find the man, we’ll charge him. Good day, gents.’
Eventually, at around one o clock, Oscar, Wat and I, in our compact pony-and-trap, trundled into the forecourt of Eastbourne railway station. As our young driver helped him climb from the carriage, Oscar presented the boy with half a crown. ‘You’ve looked after us well, young man. Thank you. May I ask your name?’
‘Brian,’ said the boy, touching his cap in recognition of Oscar’s munificence. ‘Brian Fletcher.’
‘Oh,’ said Oscar, solemnly. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. You’ll need to change it when you take to the stage professionally. You can’t be called Brian in London, I’m afraid.’
The boy looked puzzled. Wat intervened. ‘Pay no attention to Mr Wilde, Brian,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Brian’s a fine name.’
‘Fiddlesticks!’ said Oscar. ‘Name me an artist called Brian! Name me a composer called Brian! Name me the lowliest spear-carrier in Irving’s company who boasts the name of Brian! You cannot! Brian is not a name that rides on clouds of glory. If this boy is to be an actor, he has to give up his pony-and-cart and change his name!’
‘But why should he want to be an actor?’ asked an exasperated Wat Sickert, shaking his head. ‘He’s happy as he is.’
‘Only the dead are happy as they are, Wat,’ said Oscar. ‘This lad is already an amateur actor of note. Am I not correct, Brian?’
The boy blushed and nodded.
‘Indeed, he is a budding Shakespearean. If I’m not mistaken, he has recently scored something of a sensation in the Eastbour
ne Vagabonds’ acclaimed production of Twelfth Night.’
‘Did you see it, sir?’ asked the boy, looking at Oscar, amazed.
‘No’ said Oscar, dolefully. ‘Would that I had. I saw Mr Irving and Miss Terry in the play at the Lyceum. Not a success.’
Wat Sickert was now standing face to face with Oscar, hands on hips, head thrown back in scornful disbelief. ‘How is this possible, Oscar? If you have not met the boy before, how on earth did you know that he has appeared in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night?’
Oscar was not looking Sickert in the eye. He was gazing over his shoulder, towards the station cab rank.
‘Come, Oscar,’ said Sickert. ‘Explain yourself.’
Oscar looked at Wat and smiled. ‘The boy was familiar with the word “consanguineous”—and proud to be. It’s a word that features prominently in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, but not, I imagine, in the daily discourse of the average East Sussex stable lad … I jumped to a happy conclusion, that’s all— prompted no doubt by my seeing a poster advertising the Eastbourne Vagabonds’ production of the play displayed in the foyer of the Devonshire Park Theatre.’
I laughed. ‘How did you know that the Eastbourne Vagabonds’ production had been “acclaimed”, Oscar?’ I asked.
‘All amateur productions are acclaimed, Robert. That is the rule.’ He turned back to the boy who was now standing wide-eyed and open-mouthed between us. ‘Brian,’ he declared, ‘I have solved your dilemma. In future, you are to have two names—one for the town, one for the country. In Eastbourne, while you are an amateur actor, you may continue to call yourself Brian. But when you come to London and turn professional, you will need another Christian name—something, if I may say so, with a more romantic ring to it …’ From inside his coat pocket, he produced his silver cigarette case and began to tap it against his chin thoughtfully. ‘What would you say to the name “Sebastian”, Brian? Does “Sebastian” appeal to you?’
The boy laughed nervously. ‘I don’t believe this,’ he muttered. ‘Sebastian—it’s the part I played in the play.’
Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death Page 13