Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death (3 page)

Bosie
despised his father and adored his mother. In Bosie’s eyes, Sybil Queensberry
could do no wrong. ‘My father has given me nothing,’ he said. ‘My mother has
given me everything, including my name.’ Lady Queensberry had called him
‘Boysie’ when he was a baby. Oscar called him ‘my own dear boy’ from the moment
they met, early in the summer of 1891. They became firm friends almost at once.
By the summer of 1892, they were near inseparable. Where Oscar went, Bosie came
too. I liked him. Constance liked him, also. Conan Doyle had his reservations.

As he
stood, posed, in the drawing-room doorway, with his head thrown to one side,
like a martyred saint upon a cross, Bosie looked straight towards Constance.
‘Mrs Wilde,’ he cried,
‘peccavi.
I have missed your party and I didn’t
want to miss it for the world. Will you forgive me?’ From behind his back he
produced a small bunch of primroses tied together with blue ribbon. He stepped
forward and presented them to her.

She
kissed him, as she might have done a child, and said, ‘What a sweet thought,
Bosie. Thank you. I’m glad you’re here. I’m sure Oscar was getting anxious.’

Bosie,
nodding to Edward Heron-Allen, went over to Oscar and Conan Doyle. I moved from
my station by the window to join them. ‘I apologise, Oscar,’ said the young
Adonis, furrowing his brow. ‘I’ve had a damnable afternoon. Arguing about money
with my father. He’s been through £400,000, you know, and won’t advance me
fifty. The man’s a monster. I’d like to murder him.’

Arthur
Conan Doyle raised an eyebrow and sucked on his moustache.

‘I mean
it,’ said Bosie seriously. ‘I’d like to murder him, in cold blood.’

‘Well,
you can’t, Bosie,’ said Oscar, ‘leastways, not tonight.’

‘Why
not?’ demanded Bosie petulantly.

‘It’s
Sunday, Bosie,’ said Oscar, ‘and a gentleman never murders his father on a
Sunday. You should know that. Did they teach you nothing at Winchester?
Besides, it’s the first Sunday in the month and we are going to dinner at the
Cadogan. You can’t have forgotten, surely?’

CHAPTER 2

THE SOCRATES CLUB

In the summer of 1892
Oscar was at the height of his fame and fortune.
Lady Windermere’s Fan,
his
first theatrical triumph, had opened at the St James’s Theatre in February. He
was the toast of the town and collecting royalties at the rate of £300 a week.
And yet I sensed he was not content.

We had
been friends for ten years. For a brief while, before his marriage and mine, we
had shared lodgings in Mayfair. We found each other’s society easy: we were
good companions. He was seven years my senior and indulged me as he might have
done a younger brother. He did not sit in judgement: he accepted me as I was.
When my first marriage began to unravel—I had not been as faithful to Marthe as
I should have been—Oscar did not reproach me, as my parents did. (As the world
at large did, too. Make no mistake, in those far-off days, if your marriage
failed, you were reckoned to have failed also.) Oscar simply said, ‘Poor
Robert!’ adding, ‘I’m not sure that any marriage should be expected to last
more than seven years.’ This was that same summer of 1892, when he and
Constance had been married for almost eight years.

‘But
you love Constance still, do you not?’ I asked, somewhat shocked. I was the
younger brother: the Wildes were lodestars in my firmament. ‘That has not
changed?’

‘No,
that has not changed,’ he said—but he said it with a melancholy diffidence.
‘She has changed, however. When I married her, Robert, my wife was a beautiful
girl, white and slim as a lily, with dancing eyes and gay, rippling laughter
like music. In a year or so, after our boys were born, the flowerlike grace
had vanished. She became heavy, shapeless, deformed.’

‘You do
not mean it, Oscar,’ I protested. Constance, in truth, was none of those
things. Constance was always lovely. But, inevitably, she was older than she
had been—she was now thirty-four—and Oscar equated age with decay. And, to her
husband at least, she was not as amusing as she once had seemed. ‘She never
speaks and I am always wondering what her thoughts are like,’ he said.

Oscar
sought to distract himself from this ‘domestic
ennui’
(as he termed it)
by filling every waking hour with a relentless round of work and play. He posed
as an idler, but he was never idle. By day, behind closed doors, seated at his
favourite desk (once the property of the great Thomas Carlyle), in a haze of
cigarette smoke, he read and wrote, hour upon hour. He had the gift Napoleon
most admired:
de fixer les objets longtemps sans être fatigué.
[‘To
concentrate on objectives at length, without wearying’.] He was one of the most
hardworking men I ever knew. He laboured industriously and he played
extravagantly. By night, he wined and dined and, then, he drank and ate some
more. And between dinner and supper, he took in plays, operas, ballets,
concerts and exhibitions. ‘What is it to be tonight, Robert? Henry Irving’s
Wolsey at the Lyceum or Marie Lloyd’s flannelette at the Bedford Music Hall?’
He saw everything; he knew everybody. And, of course, everybody wanted to know
him. Nobody, I believe, in late-Victorian society, had a wider circle of
acquaintance than Oscar Wilde. From Monday to Saturday his engagement diary was
full to overflowing. The one day in the week he found testing was Sunday.
‘Nothing happens on a Sunday,’ he complained. ‘Everything is closed. No one
goes out. Nobody entertains. Even God has to go to church. There’s nothing else
to do.’ That was why, early in 1892, he formed the Socrates Club.

The
club was named in honour of the great Greek philosopher. Conan Doyle had
suggested Diogenes, but Oscar said Diogenes was ‘a dull dog, a provincial,
without an epigram to his name’, whereas Socrates was ‘a citizen of the world’
with whom Oscar had a fellow-feeling. ‘Socrates was one of the wisest men who
ever lived,’ said Oscar, ‘but he claimed to know nothing except the fact of his
own ignorance. He’s a man to drink to on a Sunday evening, is he not?’

The
club was simply a supper club. It had no premises and only one purpose: to
divert its founder on the first Sunday of every month. There were just six
members: Oscar, Conan Doyle, Lord Alfred Douglas, myself, Bram Stoker and
Walter Sickert.

Bram
Stoker was Conan Doyle’s suggestion and Oscar welcomed it at once. Conan Doyle
was not at ease with all of Oscar’s associates, but he felt comfortable with
Abraham Stoker because, as he put it, Stoker was ‘sensible’ (Stoker was an
older man, in his mid-forties), Stoker was ‘sound’ (at university, Stoker had
been an athlete and, better still, a scientist). Stoker was also business
manager, secretary and friend to Henry Irving, the greatest, most celebrated,
actor of the age, and, as a young writer, it was Arthur Conan Doyle’s abiding
ambition to create a role for Henry Irving. Oscar was pleased to assist in
throwing Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker together. Oscar and Bram were fellow
Dubliners. ‘We go back a long way,’ said Oscar. ‘We know one another’s
secrets.’ In 1878, Bram had married Oscar’s first sweetheart, almond-eyed
Florence Balcombe.

Walter
Sickert, the artist, was another long-established friend. He was my age
(thirty-one), but Oscar had known him since he was a boy. As a young man Oscar
had holidayed with the Sickerts in Dieppe and though Wat, as a lad, had been
suspicious of Oscar, as the years passed and their intimacy grew, the artist
and the writer found that they had much in common. ‘We both hunger for
laughter, outrage and applause,’ said Sickert. He agreed to join the Socrates
Club on condition that he was not obliged to change for dinner and that smoking
would be permitted even before the Loyal Toast. When Conan Doyle tut-tutted at
this, Sickert pointed out that ‘Socrates’ was an anagram of ‘coarsest’ and won
the point. Conan Doyle and Sickert found they shared a passion for word-play
and Henry Irving. Before he became a full-time artist, Sickert had been a
part-time actor. Aged eighteen, he had joined Irving’s company as a utility
player, one of ‘the Lyceum young men’, as they were known. As well as carrying
a spear and swelling the crowd, he was given the occasional line to declaim.
‘Irving seemed to like me because I was young and fair-haired,’ he told Conan
Doyle. ‘I worshipped Irving because he was Irving and he noticed me.’

The
Socrates Club met in the private dining room on the ground floor of the
recently opened Cadogan Hotel, on the corner of Sloane Street and Pont Street,
a few minutes’ walk from Oscar’s house in Tite Street. The hotel had once been
the home of Oscar’s particular friend (and the Prince of Wales’s sometime
mistress), Lillie Langtry, and Mrs Langtry (who retained a suite at the hotel)
was occasionally to be seen in the hotel foyer, by the porter’s desk, wearing
one of her famous hats and engaging the notorious hotel parrot, the predictably
named Captain Flint, in brittle conversation. The parrot was a vile creature,
noisy and noisome. Why Mrs Langtry found him so fascinating none of us could
fathom. Why every man who ever met her was taken with ‘the Jersey Lillie’ was
not so difficult to comprehend. She was bewitching, and a survivor. Conan Doyle,
who was especially smitten, said she had ‘the face of the most beautiful of
women, and the mind of the most resolute of men.’

The
club ‘secretary’ was Alphonse Byrd, the resident night manager at the Cadogan,
a man in his mid-fifties, who was so thin and pale and bald that he looked like
a walking skeleton. His appearance was memorable, but, so far as I could tell,
he had no personality to speak of. He rarely uttered a word or looked one in
the eye, but Oscar liked him and found his faded appearance strangely
comforting. As a young man, Byrd had worked the halls as a conjuror and
illusionist, and failed. ‘There’s mildew in his soul,’ said Oscar. ‘Failure is
so much more interesting than success. I’d much rather read Napoleon’s
biography than Wellington’s, wouldn’t you?’

In
fairness to Byrd, as club secretary he did a first-class job. He was
responsible for the menus, the wines and the table setting and given the
relatively modest cost of the meal—half a crown per diner, all in—he did us
proud. Oscar insisted on six courses. As well as the customary soup, fish,
roast meats and desserts, Byrd laid on a selection of
hors d’oeuvres
invariably
including Russian caviar, Dutch herrings, prawns, lobster, pickled tunny,
smoked salmon and smoked ham—and both savoury and sweet, vegetable and fruit
entremets.
Each member of the Club was allowed to invite one guest to each
dinner—gentlemen only, or, by permission of the founder, certain actresses. Mrs
Langtry came twice, and Wat Sickert sometimes arrived late, bringing one of his
theatrical lady friends in tow.

On the
evening of 1 May 1892, Oscar’s dinner guest was Constance’s married admirer,
the young solicitor Edward Heron-Allen. Bosie’s guest was his eldest brother,
Lord Drumlanrig, then very much the ‘coming’ young man at Westminster, protégé
of Lord Rosebery, sometime Foreign Secretary and soon to be Foreign Secretary
again.

My
guest was also a scion of the aristocracy, though not one with either the
promise or the connections of Francis Drumlanrig. The Hon. the Reverend George
Daubeney, youngest son of the Earl of Bridgwater, was known, if at all, merely
as the man who abandoned his bride-to-be a week before the wedding day and paid
the price. I did not know Daubeney intimately, but I felt for him. I married Marthe
in haste when we were both too young. Had I left her in the lurch at the altar,
it would have saved us both much anguish in the years that followed.

Arthur
Conan Doyle’s guest that evening was his ‘delicate-minded’ friend, Willie
Hornung. According to Arthur, the young man was a journalist newly returned
from Australia, but Hornung’s slight frame, wan look, lank hair and
pince-nez
suggested a nervous country curate rather than a newshound fresh from the
Antipodes. ‘He’s a little shy,’ said Arthur. ‘I shall speak to him in a little
voice,’ replied Oscar, in a whisper.

Walter
Sickert and Bram Stoker each brought an actor as his guest. Sickert came with
Bradford Pearse, a barrel-chested boomer of the old school, a big man with a
naval beard and a ruddy face, who seemed much older than his years (he was not
yet forty). Sickert and Pearse had first met as juniors in Irving’s company and
Pearse’s claim to fame was that he had understudied Irving in the Scottish play
and had even ‘gone on’ for the great man once at the Lyceum… the Lyceum,
Sunderland.

Charles
Brookfield, Bram Stoker’s invitee that evening, had never understudied anyone
in his life. He was, I imagine, a leading man from the cradle, enviably blessed
with doting parents, admiring older sisters and not a nuance of self-doubt. He
was gifted—at Cambridge he was awarded the Winchester Reading Prize—and he was
versatile. He played in pantomime and Shakespeare: Ellen Terry rated him, so
did Herbert Beerbohm-Tree. He was blessed with energy, ambition, an undeniable
presence and what we now call matinée idol looks. Humour and humility, however,
were not his long suits. I did not warm to him. I don’t believe Oscar much
liked him either. I think, bizarrely, Brookfield considered himself, in some
way, as Oscar’s rival. He was a writer as well as an actor. He arrived at the
Cadogan Hotel that evening full of news of his latest enterprise: a play he had
written called
The Poet and the Puppets.