Franny Moyle (35 page)

Oblivious to the double life her husband was now leading, after Florence Constance headed for Rome. On 19 February she got up at the crack of dawn and attended Jubilee Mass at St Peter's. ‘The enthusiasm of thousands of people waving hats and handkerchiefs in that enormous building while the beautiful “Papa” was carried through the nave and round the Tribune, she explained to Georgina. ‘I was glad to have the dear old man's blessing.'

‘Oscar writes to me every day & must be written to every day,' Constance also stated, adding later that ‘Oscar has quite made up his mind to spend next winter in Florence.'
²⁰
Although a regular exchange of letters with one another had gone on during their periods of separation across the two previous years, now that Oscar's life was becoming so geared around Bosie Douglas, Constance's revelation that she and Oscar were still writing regularly seems surprising. Many accounts of Oscar's life have failed to recognise how much his wife remained in his thoughts. The fact is, however, that in the spring of 1893, Oscar was still torn between Bosie and Constance.

Although enthralled by him, Oscar's relationship with Bosie was ambivalent. While he was hooked on Bosie, at another level Oscar understood how damaging the affair was. It was not just the money he was spending on Bosie and his circle, nor the danger that the ‘renters' they shared presented, but Bosie's personality was twisted and difficult. Demanding and hedonistic, greedy and selfish, Bosie Douglas also had tantrums that wore Oscar down. In fact, when Bosie left Babbacombe Cliff, Oscar said he was ‘determined never to speak to you again, or to allow you under any circumstances to be with me, so revolting had been the scene you had made the night before your departure'.
²¹

His letters to Constance were Oscar's last attempts to throw a lifeline back to his formerly stable family life. But it was one growing weaker and weaker. Oscar was increasingly under Bosie's power, and, although she clearly did not know it, every day Oscar was with Bosie diminished the bond between him and his wife. Despite the elder man's resolution to break with his young love and acolyte, he
was weak. Later Oscar would recall to Bosie that after the scene at Babbacombe ‘I consented to meet you, and of course I forgave you. On the way up to town you begged me to take you to the Savoy. That was indeed a visit fatal to me.'
²²

Returning from Devon at the beginning of March, Oscar took a suite at one of London's most expensive and prestigious hotels. He and Bosie had adjoining rooms. The renters continued to come and go. Constance was meanwhile beginning to make her way back from Rome. She stopped in Florence again, now with the express purpose of looking at apartments. She was quite certain that she and Oscar would be back there together the following September and October. Earnest and hungry for knowledge as ever, she made sure that, when not viewing rooms, she was continuing to see every splendour of Florentine art still available to her. She had with her Ruskin's guidebook
Mornings in Florence
and attempted as best she could to follow his recommendations.

‘I went with St C
²³
to Santa Croce yesterday,' she faithfully reported to their mutual friend, ‘not at sunrise as he thinks right, but armed with an opera glass and studied … the Giotto
St Francis
. When I come back to London I shall read nothing but Italian Art; nothing can exceed the vastness of my ignorance about it all.'
²⁴

Full of the joys of Renaissance art she may have been, but when Constance's feet touched British soil again on 21 March, she was mortified. Oscar was not waiting for her in Tite Street. He was staying at the Savoy with Bosie. The house in Tite Street, full of unopened post, felt as if it had been deserted. Whatever sweet nothings he had written to her while she was abroad, Oscar no longer seemed interested in seeing his wife now she had returned home.

Some of Oscar's friends began to feel disenchanted with him in the spring of 1893. Oscar and Bosie presented new behaviours that the old established circle of Wilde admirers – even the homosexual ones – found not only unpalatable but dangerous. John Gray, the original model and dedicatee of Dorian Gray, terminated his friendship with Wilde. And the man to whom Wilde dedicated
Salome
, Pierre Louys, also ended their relationship, not least because
he witnessed what he considered Oscar's shameful treatment of Constance.

After their stay at the Savoy, Oscar and Bosie moved on to the Albemarle Hotel, no doubt telling Constance that it was important to be close to the rehearsals for
A Woman of No Importance
, which were now under way at the Haymarket Theatre. Louys visited Oscar and Bosie in their hotel rooms. Constance came round to deliver some post to her husband. When she complained that he no longer came home, Oscar announced for all to hear that he no longer remembered his address. He did so without an ounce of guilt. Constance left in tears, and Louÿs was horrified.

A Woman of No Importance
opened in April. As the press reported, the opening night was conspicuously well attended, with ‘Mr Balfour … in a stage box, accompanied by Mr George Wyndham and the Countess Grosvenor, while in the corresponding box on the opposite side was Lord Battersea with Mr Alfred Rothschild'. The stalls were glittering with celebrities drawn from artistic and literary circles: ‘Lord Randolph Churchill and Lady Sarah Wilson, the Marquess and Marchioness of Granby, the Earl of Arran, M. Henry Rochefort, Mr and Mrs Chamberlain, Mr and Mrs Shaw Lefevre, Mr Alma Tadema, Miss Florence Terry, Mr Justin H. McCarthy, and Miss Jenoure, Mr Swinburne, and of course Mr Wm Wilde represented his brother.'
²⁵

Constance is not mentioned in the press as one of the celebrity attendees, but given that she and Oscar had attended a reception at the New Gallery just six days earlier, it seems unlikely that Constance would have missed the opening of her husband's second play, in spite of the recent personal difficulties between the two.

The audience applauded the play, but this time there were hoots and hisses at the author when, clad in a white waistcoat with lilies in his buttonhole, he came to bathe in their praise. It was not just Oscar's close friends who were noticing a change in his attitude and behaviour. The general public, it seems, had picked up on the rumours about his personal life, and his scandalous relationship with Bosie Douglas. As if in acknowledgement of this, the actor–manager
responsible for the production, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, announced, as he took his curtain call, that he was ‘proud to have been connected with such a work of art', a statement that raised applause, one imagines, from the large number of Oscar's invitees in the audience.

In spite of the souring of his public profile, Oscar suddenly found himself the recipient of £100 a week. This income could not have come at a better time for a family still generally outliving their means. But to Constance's dismay the much-needed income did not seem to improve matters. Rather than plough it back into family finances, Oscar was spending it on a new lavish lifestyle, on Bosie Douglas, on hotels and, unbeknown to her, on rent boys.

And so as the hot summer of 1893 got under way, Constance had lost any sway she had formerly held over her husband. Oscar was out of her control and totally captivated by Bosie. While Oscar had resisted Constance's former suggestions that they should buy a property out of town, at Bosie's suggestion he now took a year's lease on the property in Goring and began a pattern of spending that, with the rental, cost the Wildes some £3,000. As a result, not only was Constance snubbed, but the likelihood of the proposed autumn in Florence was also greatly diminished.

Although she and Cyril joined Bosie and Oscar in Goring in June, Constance and her son were an odd adjunct to the heady goings-on. Antics at the house were causing something of a stir in the village. One day the local vicar called to discover Oscar and Bosie wearing nothing but towels, larking on the lawn and turning a hosepipe on one another in the stifling heat. The new governess, Gertrude Simmons, whom Constance had employed to replace the French governess the boys had had at Babbacombe, also felt uncomfortable. One evening, during a firework display at a local regatta, she spotted Oscar with his arm around the boy employed to look after the boats.

‘I very much wish that Oscar had not taken the Cottage on the Thames for a year – things are dreadfully involved for me just now,' Constance moaned to Georgina.
²⁶
It was the first of many complaints she would now begin to share with several of her female friends. If Constance had been in denial about her husband up to this point, it
seems that the truth was now dawning on her. In August she visited Mrs Lathbury in Witley again and clearly confided some of her fears and troubles.

‘Mrs Lathbury has given me what I believe to be very good advice, and the advice that she always gives me, I shall try & follow it for 6 months and let you know the result,' Constance rather gnomically relayed to Georgina after the visit.
²⁷

Despite the year's lease that he had taken, by September Oscar had done with Goring. He “was exhausted by his three-month stint with Bosie and needed to escape. He fled to Dinard in Brittany, where he spent the end of August and the first week of September. ‘I required rest and freedom from the terrible strain of your companionship,' Oscar would later write to Bosie.
²⁸

Some accounts place Constance and the boys with Oscar in France. But in fact her letters suggest that she stayed in England, moving between London and Goring. After returning from Witley, she entertained guests at Goring in Oscar's absence, including her friend the painter Henriette Corkran. On 1 September she dashed to pick up Vyvyan in London and returned to Goring with him. Whereas Cyril and Governess Simmons had been resident in Goring for most of the holiday, Vyvyan had been with the Palmers again for the summer.

Constance's continuing habit of moving Vyvyan from pillar to post in this period begins to feel like the actions of a woman who was not only neurotic about her younger son's health but had in fact lost the capacity to cope with the responsibility of a second child. Vyvyan was ‘sweet and affectionate but so extraordinarily wilful and wayward that he gets more and more difficult to manage', Constance claimed.
²⁹

Vyvyan could not stay by the Thames in the current climate, Constance wrote to Georgina. After just a few days with his brother there began a new search for another household that could take on the youngest member of the Wilde family. Initially Constance wrote to the Burne-Joneses in Rottingdean to see if they would have him. When the reply came that there was no room immediately in their
household, he was dispatched to Brighton to stay with Constance's mother.

When Oscar returned from France, he settled up his bills in Goring and returned to London life. On 9 September or shortly thereafter Constance and Cyril also returned to London to greet Oscar, and, after a fortnight in Brighton, Vyvyan moved to nearby Rottingdean where, finally, room had become available for him in the Burne-Jones household.

Constance left town to settle Vyvyan in with the Burne-Joneses and stayed a few days there herself. Her marital problems were now being widely discussed and it's clear that the Burne-Joneses had their own advice to offer too. ‘I have taken Vyvyan to Rottingdean and Mrs Burne-Jones is going to look after him. As for Mr Burne-Jones I am quite in love with him! He sent his love to you and said that I was to tell you how I had last seen him – and this was wheeling his two grandchildren in their perambulators to save the nurse trouble,' Constance related to Georgina. ‘[H]e asked me if I had any religion to help me, and I said that no-one could get on without it. This family life is so beautiful, Mr & Mrs Burne-Jones, Margaret & the husband and babes!! There I am going off again into dreams of what might be, wrong and foolish of me.'
³⁰

By 28 September, Constance was on her way back to London but was dismayed that Oscar failed to meet her at the station, a courtesy that he had always extended to her in the past. In later years Bosie Douglas would ardently deny that his relationship with Oscar caused the deterioration of the Wilde marriage. He conceded that relations between the couple had become ‘distinctly strained', noting that Oscar was now ‘impatient' with Constance ‘and sometimes snubbed her, and he resented, and showed that he resented, the attitude of slight disapproval which she often adopted towards him'. With the most appalling lack of self-scrutiny, however, Bosie would claim that ‘to try and make out that this had anything whatever to do with me is simply dishonest and untruthful.'
³¹

There is no doubt that Oscar and Constance's marriage hit its lowest point to date during that summer of 1893. And regardless of
his inability to take responsibility for it, there is also no doubt that Bosie was largely the cause. And yet the sad truth is that Constance also helped exacerbate matters by allowing the chasm growing between her and her husband to widen. Her almost relentless absence from Tite Street at a time when everyone else around her could see Oscar courting very real danger is hard to explain, except perhaps in terms of her fleeing from a situation that she did not wish properly to confront. Constance was going out of her way now to avoid her husband. From Rottingdean she had attempted to negotiate a brief stay with Georgina in Babbacombe at the end of the month. If Georgina could not take her, she would have to return home to Tite Street, ‘but for reasons that I will explain when I see you I would rather not go there!'
³²

Constance wrote a short children's story at around this time, and perhaps in it there is some clue to the approach she took to her husband. Entitled ‘The Little Swallow', Constance's story was published in late 1892. It may have well been inspired by the pigeons that she often fed during her sojourns at Babbacombe, since it begins with an image of children ‘looking at the birds eating the crumbs that nurse has thrown out in the snow to them'.