Franny Moyle (40 page)

Carlos Blacker and his wife Carrie, Cyril, Vyvyan and an unidentified boy, almost certainly the Blackers' son.

Constance, aged thirty-nine, photographed in Heidelberg, 1897. She put the boys into school in this German town where her friend Lady Brooke was also educating one of her sons.

Cyril
(left)
andVyvyan photographed in Heidelberg, 1896. Constance sent Oscar a copy of these photographs on his release from gaol in 1897. ‘I have heard from my wife,' he wrote that May to Robbie Ross, ‘she sends me photographs of the boys – such lovely little fellows in Eton collars.'

Oscar and Bosie in Naples, 1897.

Constance's sitting room in the Villa Elvira, near Nervi. Her treasured photographs are displayed on the mantelpiece.

Constance's letters refer to her making cushions for the villa. The picture on the right may be a print of Watts's portrait of Lady Mount-Temple, also mentioned in the letters.

Constance's grave in the cemetery in Genoa.

The line that she was the ‘Wife of Oscar Wilde' was added later by Otho's family.

His sons were not the only boys that Oscar was taking out in boats or swimming with. Despite attempts to keep Bosie away from Worthing, the young lord managed to inveigle his way into the holiday. To Constance's horror he joined Oscar. Together they courted local young men: Percy, Alfonso and Stephen flirted with the couple, and swam and drank with them.

While they were at Worthing, a scandal hit the headlines. A police raid at a club in Fitzroy Street had led to the arrest of Alfred Taylor – the man who had been procuring for Wilde. And now Taylor and one of his lovers, Charlie Mason, wrote to Wilde asking for his help. In the past Wilde had paid off blackmailers and bailed out many a young man. But now, for the first time perhaps, Oscar, already £40 overdrawn at the bank, found he was too strapped for cash to oblige.

If, by Oscar's own admission, Constance had always been gracious to Bosie, at Worthing she was fractious and annoyed by his presence. Bosie became a bone of contention, a fact that Bosie himself reported in a letter to their mutual friend Robbie Ross.
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Her irritation must have been aggravated further by the fact that, rather than being able to escape temporarily from the burdens of celebrity, Bosie and Oscar, once together, began to attract attention in Worthing, creating much excitement among the locals. Perhaps unaware that the two men were not permanently joined at the hip, in early September, long after Bosie's return to London, Oscar and Bosie were invited to patronize a local concert, a patronage that was used to advertise the event with, according to Oscar, ‘our names … placarded all over the town'. When Oscar took his son Cyril in Bosie's place, he faced a packed hall and was greeted with loud applause. ‘Cyril was considered to be you,'
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Oscar jested – a joke that Constance could scarcely have approved of under the circumstances.

Arthur Humphreys, meanwhile, was holidaying in Florence with his wife. But he wrote to Constance from the city she adored. With a new sense of confidence that Humphreys had brought, Constance now not only looked forward to new adventures of the heart but also to more creative and literary ones too. Once
Oscariana
was out of the way at the end of the summer, she wanted to start on another entrepreneurial literary project. She wanted to revive the literary project based around letters that she had proposed to Otho two years earlier. Oscar had helped her strengthen the plot. He suggested that the story should be based around two people discovering that they have committed to marry the wrong person, a theme somewhat pertinent to the Wilde household.

‘I'm still thinking of that book that I suggested our writing of letters and Oscar has now given me a suggestion for a plot,' Constance wrote to Otho from Worthing.

It only needs to be a rather flimsy plot. A man and a woman, each engaged to a friend of the other's, write to congratulate one another, they have never met. These two first letters should cross each other, then each should write again, being rather interested in the other, perhaps describing where they are staying. You could describe Pisa, I Worthing and so we should gradually fall a little in love with each other and should at last suggest breaking off our engagements and marrying one another.

We are supposed never to have met and suggest a meeting place, then the last two letters should also cross each other, each saying to the other that he or she has made it up and is going to be married and hoping that the other will not mind so much. I think that a charming little book might be written in this way. Do tell me that you will try and let us write our first letters on I October, when the children will be gone and I shall have time. Write on one side of the paper and I should suggest that you, having much more wit than I, should write more humorous letters and that I should write very serious ones about books that I had read. These are to be imaginary books, not real ones and I think that we should each miss the point of the other's letters. Do let us try. We can both of us write letters
about the only thing that we can do and we might make some money.
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Constance and the boys left Worthing on 4 September. Speranza was unwell and had been summoning her daughter-in-law. Constance was not just a regular companion for Oscar's mother but also did many chores for her, such as collecting her pension and sorting out disputes with servants. Oscar and Constance were growing concerned about the manner in which Willie Wilde seemed to be extracting money from the old woman. His marriage to the American Mrs Leslie had broken down, and by 1894 he was not only divorced but now married again to a former Miss Lily Lees.

Scribbled in the back pages of his own copy of a biography of Wilde, Constance's brother Otho made some comments about his sister years after the event: ‘She was constantly short of money it is true, partly from Oscar's habit of expecting her (not I fancy himself) to pay off his mother's and brother's debts when the bailiffs were in their house in Oakley Street,' Otho notes rather bitterly.
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And whether she sought it directly, Constance was certainly in receipt of handouts from friends such as Georgina, Lady Mount-Temple, to pass on to Speranza.

Oscar stayed on in Worthing while the family returned to London. He was well out of the way, for in September matters deteriorated when he became the subject of national ridicule with the release of a novel,
The Green Carnation
. The book, published anonymously, was a barely concealed satirical portrait of Oscar and Bosie, characterizing them as Esme Amarinth and Lord Reggie Hastings respectively. A caustic portrayal of the couple, the implication that they were not only practising homosexuals but also held unhealthy interests in young boys was clearly legible between the lines. To Oscar's and Constance's horror, the book was a huge success.

Oscar carried on his affair with Bosie regardless of the book, staying with him in the Grand Hotel in Brighton in October. Constance
meanwhile continued to see as much of Arthur Humphreys as she could. When she visited the London Library, just off Piccadilly, she made sure she popped into Hatchard's to see him. They were both members of the Society for Psychical Research and also used its regular meetings as another opportunity to see one another. ‘Are you coming to the PRS
[sic]
meeting on Friday?' Constance asked Arthur on 22 October. But their love affair was not without issues. The fact of their respective marriages aside, they held different political opinions and were finding themselves prone to fighting. They held radically different views on the cause of unemployment among the lower classes, for example – a point of difference that Constance found irksome.

‘We must not talk of subjects we do not agree upon,' Constance warned Arthur.

You have a very strong nature and perhaps it is natural that you should have no sympathy with the unfortunate of the world. I have had a long talk with the carpenter down here who has done all that work for us for the past ten years, and he spoke to me with grief of cases he had known of thoroughly competent citizens who were utterly unable to get work … It is a subject I feel most deeply on, and that is not serious to you.
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