Franny Moyle (50 page)

As Christmas approached, Constance prepared to spend the festive season. She received some gifts from London, including books from Arthur Humphreys. If she and Humphreys had ever had a future together, Oscar's disgrace and her subsequent flight had made a relationship that was already clandestine impossible to pursue. Humphreys, however, was meticulous in sending both Constance and the boys all the books they wanted, and his letters to her remained deeply affectionate. In the one he wrote to her that Christmas, Constance was overcome by this continuing affection. His words, ‘I confess made me ashamed', she admitted. ‘However it is much better to be thought too well of; then one has an ideal to live up to!'
²⁰

In addition to Arthur Humphreys' gifts, Constance also had a photograph of a kitten from Lady Mount-Temple, and a photograph of a painting by Arnold Böcklin from the Blackers. Cyril arrived from Germany on 22 December, although Vyvyan stayed at his school.

In January, Constance bought a silver photograph frame that would serve as a late Christmas present to her from Vyvyan. In February she visited him in Monaco, staying in the Hotel Bristol. Finally she saw Vyvyan as a success story. He was ‘very happy, as clever as he can be, very sure of himself as always, and mad about stamps', she reported back to Otho. ‘He is also mad about coins,' she added.
²¹

In this quiet life Oscar remained a spectre who haunted Constance. Her feelings towards him shifted between affection and pain. In January she heard from Adrian Hope that Oscar and Bosie had separated. ‘But I have not the ghost of an idea where he is and I can't imagine how he is living,' she told Otho.
²²
Then in February 1898, three months after their terrible letters to one another,
Constance saw a copy of the
Ballad of Reading Gaol
, which Oscar had just had published. This extraordinary poem, the tale of a murderer who has committed a
crime passionnel
and subsequently walked to the gallows, reduced her to tears.

Constance could no longer bear not knowing what had become of her former husband. She had been told that Oscar was in Paris and urged Carlos Blacker find out more. ‘He has, as you know, behaved exceedingly badly both to myself and my children,' she explained,

and all possibility of our living together has come to an end, but I am interested in him, as is my way with anyone that I have once known. Have you seen his new poem, and would you like a copy, as if so I will send you one? His publisher lately sent me a copy which I conclude came from him. Can you find this out for me and if you do see him tell him that I think the Ballad exquisite, and I hope that the great success it has had in London at all events will urge him on to write more.
²³

Constance's best intentions, however, caused more trouble for her. The man she had once loved so dearly no longer existed. Instead, a husk of the great man responded to her inquiries with demands, as she revealed to Blacker:

The result of your writing to O is that he has written to me more or less demanding money as of right. Fortunately for him hearing that he was in great straits, I had yesterday or rather the day before sent him £40 through Robbie Ross. He says that I owe him £78 and hopes I will send it. I know that he is in great poverty, but I don't care to be written to as though it were my fault. He says that he loved too much and that that is better than hate! This is true abstractedly, but his was an unnatural love, a madness that I think is worse than hate. I have no hatred for him, but I confess that I am afraid of him.
²⁴

In March, Blacker visited Oscar in Paris and found a sad and devastated figure. Two of the last letters between Blacker and Constance reveal the pathetic level to which Oscar's relations with his wife were finally reduced.

14 Villa Elvira

18.3.98

Dear Mr Blacker

… your account of Oscar is a very sad one. Still I am glad he is in Paris, for I know that he does require intellectual stimulus always. He would have been bored to death with family life, though he does not seem at present to realize this.
²⁵
What could either the children or I have given him? Vyvyan, though clever, is a baby, and Cyril, thank heaven, goes in as at his age he should, for sports … Have you see Arthur Symons' review of the
Ballad
in the last
Saturday Review?
I think it I excellent and the best that has appeared and I would like to know what you think of it when you have seen it. Also I would be most grateful to you if you would send me the
Mercure de France
when it appears as I don't know how to get hold of it. Also I wonder if you could get hold of for me a copy of the French translation
of Dorian Gray?
I had one, but lent it, and like most things one lends, one rarely sees them again!
²⁶

15 Villa Elvira

20.3.98

Dear Mr Blacker

I did send £40 to Mr Ross but he would not … send more than £10 at a time to him. I enclose your letters that I have had from Robbie which at any rate are truthful which I know that Oscar is not. The actual sum that I owe him, if you call it owing, is at the rate of j£i2.io a month £62.10 and not £80. This is counting from the month of November when I stopped giving him his allowance to the end of this present month. I have said that I would give him
£10
a month so at the most I owe him little more than £20! By his own account to me he received £30 from Smithers and he seems to have had money since. Also he has had £10 of mine which he more than ignores in his letter to you, for he says that he has had nothing from me. Oscar is so pathetic and such a born actor, and I am hardened when I am away from him. No words will describe my horror of that BEAST for I will call him nothing else AD. Fancy Robbie receiving abusive letters from him and you know perfectly well that they are sent with Oscar's knowledge and consent. I do not wish him dead, but considering how he used to go on about Willie's extravagance and
about his cruelty in forcing his mother to give him money, I think he might leave his wife and children alone. I beg that you will not let him know that you have seen these letters, only I wish you to realise that he knew perfectly well that he was forfeiting his income, small as it was, in going back to Lord A, and that it was absurd of him to say now that I acted without his knowledge. He owes I am certain more than j£6o in Paris, and if I pay money now he will think that he can write to me at any time for more. I have absolutely no one to fall back upon, and will not get into debt for anyone. The boys' expenses will go on increasing until they are grown up and settled, and I
will
educate them and give them what they reasonably require. As Oscar will not bargain or be anything but exceedingly extravagant why should I do with my own money what is utterly foreign to my nature … But Oscar has no pride. When he had this disastrous law-suit he borrowed £50 from me, £50 from my cousin and £ioo from my aunt. The £50 I repaid my cousin, the £100 never has been and I suppose never will be repaid. I was left penniless and borrowed £150 from Burne-Jones, and have never borrowed a penny since. I still owe money in London which I am trying to pay, but all these things are nothing to Oscar as long as someone supports him! … You will say in the face of this why did I ask you to go and see him in Paris? Well, I thought you would have nothing to do with his money affairs, and I strongly advise you to leave them alone … I was silly enough to think that you would merely give him the intellectual stimulus he needed. I don't know what name he is living under in Paris. Is it his own or the name he took when he left England? If he was fixed anywhere, I could make an arrangement to pay 10 francs a day for his board to the hotel, not to him for I know that he would never pay it. In the winter I paid at the hotel here 9 francs a day. Of course the good hotels are about 18 francs but I knew I could not afford that and did not go to them. He ought to go to a ‘pension' and live a great deal cheaper than this, for you see it only leaves him around 12 francs a month.
²⁷

These letters, a sad mix of love, pride, infuriation and practical housekeeping, are the tragic remnants of a relationship. For all this, they remain extraordinary in the residual love and concern that even now they display.

Quite why Constance continued to show pride in her husband's work, in spite of his condemnation of her, and quite why she continued to provide for him are difficult questions. Before the terrible events that led to Constance's exile, she had written a very revelatory letter to Lady Mount-Temple that perhaps offers some explanation. Back in September 1893 Constance had urged Georgina not to ‘trouble about me. I cannot say my
small
troubles, but in a way one's life troubles are easier to take up and bear than the small ones which are so trying. My motto for many years has been “Qui patitur vincit” – He conquers who endures – and so I will endure and fight my battle and try to take up my cross.'
²⁸

‘Qui Patitur Vincit' had, of course, been Constance's name of choice as a member of the Golden Dawn, and it remained her motto subsequently. Oscar constantly wrote in his fairy tales poignant stories of sacrifice. In ‘The Happy Prince' he told the story of the bird which gives its heart to the statue of the Prince and, having carried out the Prince's wishes for the love of him, dies at his feet. In ‘The Nightingale and the Rose', Oscar imagined a nightingale that bleeds to death to give a young lover a red rose for his sweetheart, and whose sacrifice to love goes unnoticed.

If he had had the appropriate perspective, sitting in his cafés in Paris in 1898, Oscar might had recognized that the themes he chose in those fairy tales were those by which Constance lived her life. That Oscar, so wrapped up in the consequences of his allowing his own life to become a work of fiction, could not see that his wife had become a poem to love and constancy, is perhaps the real tragedy at the heart of this story.

In April 1898, Georgina Mount-Temple wrote to Constance. It was, after all, Easter time, a time that in the past they had always spent together. But some days later, to her surprise, her letter was returned in another. She must have sensed instantly why. The black border around the writing paper instantly warned of the tragedy that would be recounted within its pages. It was a letter from Otho. Constance, who had turned forty that January, was dead.

Unbeknown to her friends and family, Constance had returned to
Signor Bossi's clinic in early April to have another operation. Before she booked herself in, she wrote to Vyvyan. ‘Try not to be hard on your father,' she wrote. ‘Remember that he is your father and he loves you. All his troubles arose from the hatred of a son for his father, and whatever he has done he has suffered bitterly for.'
²⁹

Then on Saturday 2 April she underwent another operation. Details are murky. Anecdotally the operation was on her spine, relieving pressure on nerves there that was causing her creeping paralysis. However, Otho had referred to his sister's tumours, and the fact that Bossi was a gynaecologist suggests perhaps that the growths were uterine. Constance had gone into the clinic with her Italian maid, Maria Segre. On her arrival, and with writing now so painful for her, Constance dictated a post card in Italian to Maria for Otho, informing him of her whereabouts. He received it on Tuesday 5 April. But to his horror, the very next day he received a telegram with a far more urgent message: T want to see you at once. I am very ill. Will pay journey & hotel.'
³⁰

In the final hours of her life Constance had summoned both her brother and the Ranee, but neither got to her bedside in time. Otho made his way from Switzerland in a day, arriving on Thursday the 7th at seven in the evening. He ‘was told at the door quite cheerfully by a young sister of mercy that she was dead. I have never had such a shock.'
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After the operation, the creeping paralysis she was suffering, rather than being redressed, accelerated. Constance's heart just stopped.
³²

‘It has all been so dreadful,' Otho informed Lady Mount-Temple,

for there seems to be no doubt that Constance was never warned of the danger she ran; she told almost no one that she was going, not one of her family knew it, and to the two friends in Nervi to whom she either wrote or named it she spoke of it as a mere nothing which would soon be over. I will not say what I think of the doctors who were responsible – the head one as soon as he was telephoned to that she was dead went right away from Genoa: his assistant read me from a telegram that he was in Savona, and said he wd be absent for three or four days: last night the British consul's clerk was informed that he
is in Spain and will not be back till Friday next. Needless to say I wait here until I have seen him. Of the friends around her not one was allowed to realize her danger; the Ranee only divined it the evening before, and the one person who was beside her when she died – of those who knew her I mean, was her devoted Italian maid, Maria Segre. Everyone who knew her is indignant with the doctors.

‘You knew Constance thoroughly,' Otho continued,

and you know how good she has always been to me; and when there are only two, just brother and sister, part of oneself is dead when she dies. And Constance to whom I always gave many years of life over mine, and whom so many loved and esteemed & would have done anything in the world to help. But of all of them you were spiritually the nearest and I dread to think of the shock I am causing to your heart.
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Constance was buried at four o'clock on the afternoon of 9 April in the Protestant section of Genoa's Campo Santo cemetery, which lies outside the city, in the foothills of the surrounding mountains. Otho, who had to make arrangements hurriedly, chose a plain cross inlaid with ivy leaves. Her association with the once famous Oscar Wilde was not alluded to. Rather, it was noted simply that she was ‘Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd QC.