Franny Moyle (38 page)

Arthur Humphreys, who was the general manager of Hatchard's at the time, agreed to take on
Oscariana
and to oversee the publication. Meanwhile, Oscar, who had turned down similar proposals in the past, was clearly only too happy to give his blessing to anything that at once kept his wife occupied and brought in more cash.

Humphreys and Constance began work together. It's worth remembering just how beautiful Constance was at this time. She is rarely mentioned in the press or in memoirs without being noted as particularly pretty. Her tendency to coyness and her deep sonorous voice had already proved massively attractive to a number of men, both before and since her marriage. Humphreys, like several before him, quickly fell under her spell.

The timing of Humphreys' interest in Constance is crucial. She had rebutted advances in the past quite easily. But in the early summer of 1894 Constance was perhaps as unhappy as she had ever been. The interest that Humphreys expressed in Constance, otherwise neglected, must have reminded her of that interest that the young Oscar Wilde once had in the shy and much ignored Miss Lloyd. Moreover, she had not had a sexual relationship since the birth of Vyvyan in 1886. Constance fell madly in love.

In June, after one session working on the book, Constance and Humphreys began to talk about their respective marriages. Clearly the dissatisfaction with Oscar that she had shared with her female friends was now recounted to a man. And he in return revealed his own unhappy marriage. Constance wrote to him afterwards.

Dear Mr Humphreys

I feel as though I must write you one line to emphatically repeat my remark that you are an ideal husband, indeed I think you are not far short of being an ideal man! Forgive me if this seems in any way rude. You know that I am a hero-worshipper down to the tips of my fingers, and somewhere near the head of my list I now put you!

It must have seemed horribly inquisitive of me to ask you so many questions, but I am not inquisitive, as you will see for yourself when you know me better, and I cannot explain what made me ask – certainly not any outside influence! But I liked you & was interested in you, & I saw that you were good. And it is rarely that I come across a man that has that written in his face. And so I stepped past the limits perhaps of good taste in the wish to be your friend and to have you for my friend. I spoke to you very openly about myself, & I confess that I should not like you to repeat what I said about my childhood; I am afraid it was wrong to speak as bitterly as I did. But if we are to be friends as I hope we may be, you must trust me. Indeed I can be trusted, as I believe that you can be. I am the most truthful person in the world, also I am intuitive.
¹⁹

The last line suggests that Constance is feeling towards an affair. She instinctively senses a mutual attraction. She reassures Humphreys that
she will be discreet. These signals were clearly responded to and acted on. After the last few years of misery Constance had found someone who loved and respected her once more. By August she was writing to ‘My darling Arthur' and explaining:

I am going to write you a line while you are smoking your cigarette to tell you how much I love you, and how dear and delightful you have been to me today. I have been happy, and I do love you dear Arthur. Nothing in my life has ever made me so happy as this love of yours to me has done, and I trust you, and will trust you through everything. You have been a great dear all the time quite perfect to me, and dear to the children, and nice to Oscar too, and so I love you, and I love you just because you
are
, and because you have come into my life to fill it all with love and make it rich.
²⁰

At the beginning of August Constance secured a house in the seaside resort of Worthing from her friend Miss Henrietta Lord, the educational reformer, translator of Ibsen and Christian Scientist. Miss Lord's means were comparatively modest, and she had made her home available while she was away in the spa town of Matlock seeking a remedy for rheumatic gout. It offered a holiday in stark contrast to the high life Oscar had been leading in London. But then it was exactly Oscar's entertaining at the Savoy and Café Royal that had forced Constance's hand in choosing the property. They were overdrawn again, and a budget holiday that cost 10 guineas a week was all they could afford if they wanted to spend the summer together by the sea.
²¹

As the house was not even properly equipped, Constance had to take all her own linen and kitchen equipment from London in order to cater for her household, which at that time included a new Swiss governess, who had replaced Miss Simmons, a cook, a maid and Arthur the butler. The latter – so young that Constance described him as a ‘page boy' – was tasked with taking the children to the beach and sailing, alongside his normal duties.

Her first guest at her holiday home arrived on 7 August. When Constance was barely installed, a young minister, Mr Lilley, called on
her in Worthing. Lilley was a preacher whose name begins to feature quite heavily in Constance's correspondence in 1894 onwards, and it seems that there was a passionate friendship developing between them.

Lilley was an associate of the high-profile Revd Eyton, the rector of Holy Trinity Church in Upper Chelsea. Eyton and Lilley, like Constance, were signed-up members of the Christian Social Union, an organization that sought to find ways of applying ‘the principles of Christianity to the social and economic difficulties of the present time'. Both men were radical and reforming. Constance's recent trips to do good in Paradise Walk had been encouraged not just by Georgina but also by the rousing sermons of the rector, who proposed engaging in the ‘toss and tumble of this common life'. He warned his congregation that they must be prepared to be ‘bothered by human unreasonableness, and saddened by human distress'. His protégé Lilley saw Christianity as a force for wider political change. In his lecture on ‘Democracy and Government' he saw God at work in the new, emerging democratic landscape, the champion and saviour of the working man who was at last finding his voice.
²²

Constance was deeply impressed by the young, politically active Lilley, and were it not for the evidence of the love letters between Constance and Arthur Humphreys, it would be tempting to speculate that Constance and Lilley's friendship was verging on something more intimate. But it was Arthur Humphreys, who came and spent a Saturday night in Worthing a few days later, with whom Constance ‘walked about and enjoyed the air and the sea', as she revealed to Georgina Mount-Temple on 11 August, adding:

I have been so busy with collecting passages from Oscar's books for ‘Oscariana' that I have been obliged to neglect everything else including you my Darling … But it has to be, if possible, in Mr Humphreys' hands before he goes abroad next Saturday. I think I have collected all the passages, but now they must be put in order which, I am afraid, I shall find the most difficult part.
²³

Before Humphreys left, he gave Cyril some money, with which the boy bought a little tortoiseshell fish, for which he wrote a thank-you note.

Oscar, it seems, was well aware of Constance's new-found love for the manager of Hatchard's. In fact, while at Worthing he began to sketch out a play, provisionally entitled
Constance
, with a plot that told of a marriage which, having run into difficulties, sees the husband and wife both seek solace in extramarital affairs. He sketched the plot out in a letter to the actor–manager George Alexander.
²⁴
In
Constance
the plot centres on a man of rank and fashion who has become bored with his wife. The husband holds a house party full of his more outré,
fin-de-sièck
friends, and warns his wife that she must not be prudish but allow Gerald Lancing to flirt with her.

At the party all the guests are horrid to the wife, with the exception of Lancing, who is ‘nice and sweet and friendly'. The husband makes love in a dark drawing room to one of the female guests, unaware that his wife is also in the room. When the guest's husband begins to bang on the door, the husband is astonished that his own wife safeguards her deceitful husband by presenting herself and saying the three of them were ‘trying an absurd experiment in thought reading'.

This gesture of selfless love reignites the passion the husband once had for his wife. But such passion comes too late. Gerald Lancing's flirtations have borne fruit. She has fallen in love with the man her husband encouraged her to entertain. In fact, she is carrying his unborn child. Gerald and the wife go away together. The husband kills himself.

It is enormously tempting to see Oscar as a combination of the husband and the friends who are horrid to the wife. Lancing, of course, is the kind Humphreys. It is also tempting to consider the outcome of his proposed play as a suggestion that at some level Oscar was jealous of Humphreys, regretful of his recent behaviour towards her, and sad that he had lost his wife to another man. Certainly his letters to Humphreys regarding
Oscariana are
perfunctory and cool.
His reaction to the first proofs of
Oscariana
was also extremely negative. ‘The book is, as it stands, so bad, so disappointing, that I am writing a set of new aphorisms, and will have to alter much of the printed matter,' Oscar wrote later. ‘The plays are particularly badly done. Long passages are quoted where a single aphorism should have been extracted.'
²⁵

But what is also fascinating about the play that Oscar sketched out to George Alexander is the tragic ending that he chose for it, because it suggests that he knew now that his and Constance's life had become so complex that any outcome other than a tragic one was highly unlikely.

Oscar joined Constance in Worthing after suffering yet another humiliation at the hands of Queensberry, as he described in a letter to Bosie. Queensberry was ‘on the rampage again – been to the Café Royal to enquire for us, with threats etc.'
²⁶

Worthing, for all its inconveniences, offered some respite from persecution at the hands of the Marquess. Away from the influences of London, Oscar became momentarily a typical husband and father again. He and Constance pored over Miss Lord's books. Constance was delighted to find
Middlemarch
, which she determined to read once she finished the light seaside reading she had brought with her – Anthony Hope's
The Prisoner of Zenda
. Oscar meanwhile discovered a little book called I
Woke
. Constance, writing to Georgina, inquired whether her friend knew it. ‘Oscar has been reading it and is much interested in it.'
²⁷

When he wasn't working on what would become
The Importance of Being Earnest
, Oscar was dedicated to his sons. They had an aquarium with them, into which the finds from the day's fishing and rock pooling would be proudly deposited. Oscar swam with the boys and, relieving Arthur from his maritime duties, delighted in taking them out in fishing boats with the local fishermen.

‘Cyril went out with his father in a boat this afternoon, and this evening bought 150 prawns and two lobsters,' Constance relayed to her brother in a letter. She added details of a subsequent conversation with her husband that must have taken on a different hue in retro
spect. ‘I instantly said that I should like to go prawning with him one afternoon. After he had gone, Oscar explained to me the costume that the fishermen wear when they go prawning, which is indeed like the Emperor's New Clothes, so I think differently now about going!'
²⁸

Lord and Lady Mount-Temple. Constance became very close to Georgina, Lady Mount-Temple in 1890. Georgina, by then widowed, had a house in Chelsea close to Tite Street, and Constance soon became a regular visitor.

Babbacombe Cliff, Georgina Mount-Temple's seaside home near Torquay, photographed by Vyvyan Wilde,
c
. 1904. The house, full of Pre-Raphaelite art, held a kind of magic for Constance.