Franny Moyle (18 page)

The graceful form and appropriate action of Mrs Louise Jopling, who was Hecuba's tire woman were noticeable; Miss Hare's refined style and beautiful features drew attention to one of the Handmaidens; and Mrs Oscar Wilde's aesthetic poses and picturesque appearance were admired in the representative of the other. The performance was witnessed by an audience which included his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and many artistic and dramatic nobilities; and was well worth seeing for once, simply as a curiosity of archaeological research and conscientious reproduction of the Past.
¹⁴

This was the first and last time Constance took to the stage. If she had hoped that, like so many of Oscar's female friends, she might make her name treading the boards, she ultimately lacked either the talent or perhaps the genuine opportunity. With one child to manage, perhaps a stage career might have been conceivable, but with two children the notion of late nights and hard graft might have felt too much even for a woman as determined as Constance. For as Constance stood in King Priam's imaginary palace she almost certainly knew that her second child was already on its way. In May 1886, less than a year since the birth of Cyril, she was three months' pregnant.

The contrast between Constance's first and second pregnancies could not have been more profound. While the first was fired with a sense of excitement and adventure, the second was dull and
laborious. Oscar, who only a year earlier had been so accommodating of his wife's bouts of prenatal sickness and frailty, was now less sensitive to these unavoidable symptoms. The journalist and author Frank Harris, a friend of Wilde's, claimed that years later Oscar recounted to him how during this period his sexual attraction to Constance plummeted:

When I married, 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 the flower-like grace had all vanished; she became heavy, shapeless, deformed: she dragged herself around the house in uncouth misery with drawn blotched face and hideous body, sick at heart because of our love. It was dreadful. I tried to be kind to her; forced myself to touch and kiss her; but she was sick always, and – oh! I cannot recall it, it is all loathsome.
¹⁵

The accounts of the graceful Mrs Wilde as she appeared in
Helena of Troas
fail to match Oscar's alleged picture of his wife with child, but nevertheless, as her second pregnancy progressed, Constance and Oscar's marriage suffered. With the first flush of sexual infatuation greatly diminished by its consequences, they cheered themselves with the notion that they might have a girl, the perfect complement to the adorable Cyril. They even had a name ready for her: Isola. Oscar had had a sister called Isola whom he had adored but who died when she was just nine years old, the victim of childhood fever. Perhaps Oscar had hoped that with a baby daughter the loss of his sister might finally be eased, or even replaced.

Constance went into labour on a miserable November day. Charles de Lacy Lacy barely made it in time from his home in Grosvenor Street to Tite Street, the fog was so thick. But instead of delivering the little girl that everyone wanted so badly, another boy was born. Unlike Cyril, who had been robust and healthy, Vyvyan, as he was christened, was a less than ideal infant.
¹⁶
He was small and ailing from the start. Instead of the flourish of activity that attended the arrival of Cyril, there was less fascination with the second addition to their family. While the exact moment of Cyril's arrival had
been celebrated in the commission of horoscopes and a bout of letter-writing, no such activity seemed to attend Vyvyan's introduction to the world. In fact, Constance and Oscar didn't even register his birth for several weeks, and when they did, they could not remember the exact date of his birth other than it had occurred in the first week of November. The 3rd of that month was therefore registered without any certainty of accuracy.

Even the appointment of godparents hadn't gone quite according to plan. The Wildes asked the great critic John Ruskin if he would oblige. To have a figure of such high cultural esteem and social standing would have been a coup indeed for the newly arrived Vyvyan. But Ruskin wrote back and said he felt too old. So the services of the painter Mortimer Menpes were sought instead. Menpes was a great friend of Godwin and Whistler, with whom he shared a passion for things Japanese. Like Walter Harris, he had the spirit of an adventurer and explorer. Not long after Vyvyan was born, Menpes set off on a year-long tour of Japan, bringing back on his return not only a huge amount of artefacts but also an enormous collection of work he himself had produced in response to the country, which he subsequently exhibited.

Although Menpes, living close by in Fulham, probably proved to be a far more exciting and accessible godfather than Ruskin could ever have been, nevertheless things generally felt far less satisfactory than they had done a year earlier. The ideal frame within which Constance and Oscar had both envisaged their marriage and family life was changing.

When he grew up, Vyvyan acknowledged the fact that he was something of a disappointment. He adored Constance, he said, but noted that

I was always conscious of the fact that both my father and my mother really preferred my brother to myself; it seems to be an instinct in parents to prefer their first born … I was not as strong as my brother, and I had more than my fair share of childish complaints, which probably offended my father's aesthetic sense … And most of all, both my parents had hoped for a girl.
¹⁷

But it was not just the fact that their second child was a boy rather than a girl that was beginning to undermine the Wilde marriage. Vyvyan's arrival came at a time when, quite apart from everything else, Oscar had begun to feel a level of frustration with artistic marriage. While he had been on the road lecturing, the appeal of home and hearth was great. But once he was based in London, returning nightly to Tite Street, the novelty of domestic bliss quickly waned. He sensed that the venture he and Constance had so wholeheartedly and enthusiastically embarked on might not in fact be one that could fulfil him as he had originally hoped. He loved the company and companionship of his wife. But he also loved the attentions of young men. At a time when anything Greek was
à la mode
, Oscar was all too aware that Greek love, the attraction between men endorsed in Ancient Greek culture, was profoundly intriguing.

Ada Leverson told a tale about Oscar. According to Leverson, Wilde was an attentive, courteous and dedicated husband who, not long after he was married, took Constance shopping.

He waited for her outside Swan and Edgar's while she made some long and tedious purchases. As he stood there full of careless good spirits, on a cold sunny May morning, a curious, very young, but hard-eyed creature appeared, looked at him, gave a sort of laugh, and passed on. He felt he said ‘as if an icy hand had clutched his heart'. He had a sudden presentiment. He saw a vision of folly, misery and ruin.
¹⁸

Swan and Edgar's was a famous department store that faced Piccadilly Circus. Elegant and suave, it nevertheless looked out on to one of the most notorious pick-up spots in the whole of the capital. Oscar, who so loved observing all walks of life, and with his particular fascination for vice, must have enjoyed watching the ‘renters', or male prostitutes, who notoriously hung around this thoroughfare. That one of them could spot his predilection for young men almost before he himself had identified this sexual trait came as a shock.

That Oscar openly enjoyed the friendship of younger men was no secret, and this was an aspect of her husband that Constance was
in fact proud of. Years later, in 1892, she wrote to Georgina Mount-Temple full of pride at the fact that

Oscar had yesterday such a beautiful letter from the brother of a young man who has died lately in Australia. Beautiful to me I mean because it is so full of this boy's love for Oscar. I will write a copy of it and send it to you, I should like you to see how good O's influence is on young men, and the brother speaks of this young man as the
purest soul
he had ever known.
¹⁹

In the early days of their marriage Constance was even party to Oscar's cultivation of young men, just as she was very much a part of almost everything in Oscar's life. One of the first visitors to the newly decorated Tite Street was none other than Constance's friend Douglas Ainslie. The love-struck teenager who had got Constance into such trouble was now entering his twenties. Just days after they had moved into their new home he came to see it. To her delight Douglas Ainslie was showing decidedly Aesthetic tendencies.
²⁰

‘Douglas thinks our house the most charming he has ever been in,' Constance informed Otho, ‘and could hardly tear himself away last night.'
²¹
Not so long after Douglas Ainslie had been entertained in Tite Street, it was Oscar who was asking Harry Marillier, the Cambridge student who had contacted him about his performance of
Eumenides
, to join him and Constance in town. Marillier's visit invigorated Oscar. ‘I have never learned anything except from people younger than myself,' he declared, ‘and you are infinitely young.'
²²

In November 1885 Constance and Oscar both went to Cambridge to visit the young Harry as well as other established friends they had there, including the poet Oscar Browning. On their return both the Wildes wrote thank-you notes to their hosts. Constance's notes to both were plain, polite and to the point: she returned a letter from their mutual friend Walter Harris to Browning, and in her note to Marillier she reminded him to come and see them again in London. Oscar, by contrast, found himself deeply moved by the youthful
idealism he saw among Marillier and his student friends. For him, being in the company of young people was like being in a dream full of ‘bright young faces, and grey misty quadrangles'. He found himself intoxicated by the enthusiasm of these young men.

Constance Lloyd by Louis Desanges, 1882.

The artist had painted the Prince of Wales just a few years earlier.

John Horatio Lloyd, Constance's grandfather who lived in Lancaster Gate. Wealthy and well connected, he invented the Lloyd's Bond: a type of investment bond on which the development of the railway system became particularly dependent.

Horace Lloyd, Constance's father. Part of the Prince of Wales's social set, he could ‘have taken on any expert in one of the three games, chess and billiards and whist, and beaten him in two out of three'.