Franny Moyle (20 page)

Robbie Ross,
c
.1887, when he was the Wildes' lodger inTite Street. At around this time he and Oscar embarked on an affair.

No. 16 Tite Street
(right)
, which Oscar and Constance leased in 1884. In conjunction with architect Edward Godwin they converted the conventional new build into a‘House Beautiful'. The walls were painted white and polished; the floor covering kept pale and plain; internal dividing doors were replaced by curtains; and slim, sparse furniture contributed to a sense of space and calm.

Vyvyan Wilde in a Cossack costume aged about three.

Constance and Cyril photographed in 1889 when Cyril would have been about four. Cyril was the Wildes' favourite son, the mutual adoration between mother and child quite clear in this picture.

In December 1885, when he was lonely in a Glasgow hotel room, having delivered another lecture, Oscar wrote and made a terrible confession to Harry Marillier. In a letter written almost exactly a year after the one he wrote under comparable circumstances to Constance, one where he had imagined their lips kissing, now Oscar confessed to a Cambridge undergraduate that for him there was no longer ‘such thing as a romantic experience'.

Oscar revealed that for him

there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance – that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are mere shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or what we long someday to feel. So at least it feels to me. And strangely enough, what comes of this is a curious mixture of ardour and indifference. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the last! Only one thing remains fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still. Sometimes I think the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am sorry that it is so.

And much of this I fancy you yourself have felt: much also remains for you to feel. There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.
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It is a letter, perhaps in response to a question about romance and marriage, that admits that the infatuation he once held for his wife is passed, that in its place is a loyalty or affection that amounts to a ‘curious mixture of ardour and indifference'. The freedom and idealism of young single men reminded him of the compromise that marriage entails, and what pleasure might lie outside it.

There is unquestionably the possibility of interpreting Oscar's allusion to the land of strange flowers as homosexual code. To an extent the effusiveness of Wilde's language in his romantic letters to Marillier has to be mediated by context. Oscar was one of a number of Aesthetes who adopted excessively intimate language and gestures as part of the affectation of the time.

Nevertheless, the flirtation is palpable in the correspondence between Oscar and Marillier. Oscar was falling in love with the young man. Six months later another note to Harry seems to confirm both this and the fact that this love remained both tempting and unconsummated. ‘I had been thinking a great deal about you,' Oscar wrote to him. ‘There is at least this beautiful mystery in life, that at the moment it feels most complete it finds some secret sacred niche in its shrine empty and waiting. Then comes a time of exquisite expectancy.'
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Constance, accustomed to Oscar's affectations, saw nothing more in his liking of Harry Marillier than just that. She continued to encourage Oscar's young male friends, and he did not seek to conceal them from her. In fact, he continued to involve her in his socializing with them. The evangelistic enthusiasm her husband displayed in the recruiting of these apostles was, from her point of view, a positive thing. Within a month she was introducing these apostles to one another. In January she dropped Marillier a line inviting him to dine with her and Oscar at 7.30, noting ‘I have asked Douglas Ainslie also.'
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The boys were, after all, exactly the same age. It was perhaps on this occasion that Constance, Oscar and their young friends all drank ‘yellow wine from green glasses in Keats's honour'. It was certainly at this dinner that Constance showed off a set of moonstone jewels that the couple were particularly proud of.

The Wildes' generosity towards young men culminated in them taking in a seventeen-year-old boy, Robert Baldwin Ross, at around this time. Robbie Ross was a young Canadian who, since the death of his eminent father, had been brought up by his mother in Europe. On his mother's side there were distant Irish connections which may
have been the source of his introduction to Oscar and Constance. But Robbie's elder brother Alec, a founder and secretary of the Society of Authors, was also moving in London's literary circles and may have been the point of introduction. Whatever the connection, they were sufficiently friendly for Mrs Ross to ask if Robbie could lodge at Tite Street while she took a two-month sojourn on the Continent.

The stay must have proved a revelation for the young man, who had strong artistic leanings. Robbie was charming, intelligent and erudite. Both Constance and Oscar adored him, and in the fullness of time he would become one of Constance's closest male friends. One can imagine the Wildes indulging him with trips to galleries, talks and the theatre.

Robbie also proved a revelation to Oscar. Despite his young age, he was a practising homosexual. If Marillier had revealed to Oscar that there was an empty niche in his life, Robbie was the young man who actually filled it for Oscar. The two began a physical relationship.

Robbie shared Oscar's fascination with the underground world of vice and deviancy. Despite his youthfulness, he seemed to have been bold in his exploration of the opportunities there were for homosexual experiences in London at this time. During the day Robbie attended a crammer in Covent Garden that was intended to prepare him for entry to Cambridge. But at least some of his leisure time was, it seems, spent in cruising the public conveniences and alleys around Piccadilly in search of sexual encounters. Robbie was well known to the police. And this does add just a touch of credibility to a story told by Frank Harris that Oscar and Robbie had actually encountered one another in a public lavatory, where Robbie had importuned the older man.
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Robbie's introduction of Oscar to full homosexual sex could not have been worse timed. Although it was perhaps inevitable that Oscar would eventually explore this facet of his character, by doing so after 1885 he was committing a crime. In 1885 acts of gross indecency between males, even in private, were deemed criminal
thanks to a new clause in the Criminal Law Amendment Act passed in that year.

At some level Constance sensed Oscar's infidelity, although she misattributed the object of his affection. Before they married, Constance had sworn that she would never be jealous, but just two years into the marriage she had begun to have doubts and was becoming resentful. In his capacity now as a drama critic Oscar was often away from home. Constance suspected Oscar of having developed an infatuation for an actress whose performances she considered he was following with rather too much interest. There is an anecdote of a dinner party at which Constance made a cutting reference to Oscar's current infatuation. When asked what he had done over the last week, Oscar, who had in fact been reviewing the actress in question, offered a typically obfuscating response. He ‘had seen an exquisite Elizabethan country house, with emerald lawns, stately yew hedges, scented rose gardens cool lily ponds … and strutting peacocks'. Constance rather bitingly added: ‘And did she act well, Oscar?', her suspicion being that ‘The nearest he had got to a Tudor mansion that week was the Blank Hotel in Birmingchester, whither he had pursued the fair but frail leading lady.'
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Another event almost certainly contributed to Constance's insecurity around the time of Vyvyan's birth. Her brother became involved in another personal scandal that both alarmed and frightened Constance. Until this point in their lives Otho had pursued a series of choices that had closely mirrored Constance's own. He had married within days of his sister, and she thought that he had, like her, married for love. Now, just like Constance and Oscar, Otho and Nellie had had two sons. Otho Junior and Fabian Lloyd were born within months of their cousins Cyril and Vyvyan. But in 1887 Constance received an extraordinary piece of news regarding Otho. He was leaving his wife for another woman.

Otho's second child, Fabian, was born in May 1887. Within just two months of what should have been this happy occasion, Otho deserted Nellie and moved in with someone else. To make matters worse, this woman, Mary Winter, was a close friend of Nellie's
whom she had befriended while at finishing school in Lausanne.
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And it was in this Swiss city that Otho and Mary were now temporarily living together.

‘What fatality has overtaken you? Will you not write and tell me how this all is,' Constance wrote desperately to her brother in July.

If you care to write privately I will show your letter to no one, not even Oscar. I cannot think that you realise in counting the cost, what a burden you have thrown on poor little Nellie. She writes so very sweetly and kindly but she is such a child quite unfit to take charge of two children, two boys, entirely by herself with no father's care. I imagined that you had such an intensely strong feeling of the duties of parents that you would not have so deserted the little ones. Is it forever, or is there no chance that you will some day return to her? Do tell me. You have always been so dear to me that I cannot bear to think that you will not write to me now.
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While Otho's marriage fell apart, Oscar and Constance patched up the frictions that had emerged between them around the time of Vyvyan's birth. It would be a mistake to see Oscar's early frustrations and his affair with Robbie Ross as marking the end of his marriage in all but name. It would also be a mistake to think that Oscar would see his enjoyment of homosexual sex as being in conflict with his marriage. He managed to reconcile his different appetites and aspirations. Whatever distractions Oscar was finding, unlike his brother-in-law, he did have a strong sense of parental and marital duty. He also continued to love his wife.

Nevertheless, the sexual aspect of their relationship never properly recovered after the birth of their second child. Oscar's new sexual preference for men no doubt informed this, but there may have been post-natal medical issues on Constance's side that were also a contributing factor. Constance seems to have accepted the diminished physical passion in her marriage, reassured that at least the emotional and social bond between her and Oscar remained. She had a husband who was committed and affectionate, which was more than Nellie now had. Constance acknowledged as much somewhat pointedly
when she wrote to Otho and told him that ‘Oscar and I are very happy together now.'
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