Franny Moyle (46 page)

Otho and his family joined Constance in the apartment in Sori that winter. But while Otho, Mary and the children were quick to explore the local countryside and its customs, Constance was housebound much of the time.

‘I want to go and see all the lovely little villages around here. They look so sweet with their pink houses with the green shutters and their gardens full of orange trees and palms and all the lovely pergola,' she told Georgina in early December. But the fact was Constance could barely move. ‘There is a large garden here, but I have not been into it yet,' she complained.
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Confined to her apartment, Constance had begun making new plans for the boys' education. She determined to return to Britain in the spring and bring the boys back with her. She had decided to send them to school in ‘Gt Berkhamsted to be under Mr Gowring first and then I hope with Dr Fry the headmaster'.
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It seems likely that this plan was forged with her friend Emily Thursfield, who lived in Great Berkhamsted. Constance was also good friends with Lady Lothian, who lived at Ashridge, just outside Great Berkhamsted. At the heart of her thinking seems to have been a notion that she could reintroduce her sons to their homeland under the protection of new identities, because since October 1895 Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan Wilde had ceased to exist. Constance had determined to change her and her sons' names, and she had chosen the same family name that Otho now used. One day in October the documentation had arrived that changed Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan Wilde to Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan Holland.

14

Madame Holland

J
UST BEFORE
C
HRISTMAS
1895 Madame Holland, as she was now known, checked into a clinic in the Italian town of Genoa. The clinic was the private concern of Signor Bossi, a gynaecologist who was more than amenable to dealing with some of the less savoury medical procedures that some Englishwomen could only have undertaken on the Continent.

Mme Holland was not the only person in the clinic concealing a former identity. One of her fellow patients, apparently delivering an illegitimate child, was

only 22 and is here evidently under an assumed name, she is the daughter of very rich people in London, she's more French than English and she doesn't want the nuns to know who she is. The Doctor posts all her letters for her and fetches those addressed to her … She told me that she would tell me her mother's name, but I don't want to know it and I think she is suspicious and thinks always that the Sisters want to find out her secret. She is very pretty and very young. She's operated, as she calls it yesterday and today she is very unwell.
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Constance had come to the clinic because Bossi had claimed that he was able to treat her mobility and the creeping paralysis in her right arm and legs. His treatment included an operation, followed by a month-long stay in his private clinic and complete bed rest. The indications are that the operation had a gynaecological aspect.

Constance was miserable that her stay in the clinic was over the Christmas period, but she was genuinely hopeful that the medical
procedures could improve her walking, which had been failing for so long. She took a photograph of Lady Mount-Temple into the clinic along with a little crucifix that Cyril had given her, and she quickly became friendly with the Dominican Sisters who provided the nursing care there. They wore white dresses and black veils, and one, Soeur Catherine (‘refreshingly quiet & serene and beautiful with a fair face and grey eyes that look straight at one without any arriere pensée'
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), became particularly close to Constance. Bossi was also charming to his latest patient. Although he told Constance that he normally charged up to 3,000 francs for the treatment he had given her, he had agreed to accept whatever fee she was able to muster in her reduced circumstances. Otho and Mary made a fuss of her as best they could. Otho sent her a book, which Constance considered far too expensive, and Mary sent her a blue blouse that Sister Catherine made Constance try on, even though Constance insisted it was far too beautiful for her.

By mid-January, Constance, confident that her dreadful aches and pains had been substantially improved, was full of plans to return home. She still intended to be staying around Great Berkhamsted in the spring and was considering spending the summer back at Babbacombe with Lady Mount-Temple.

But if there was a new optimism in Constance, there were also new worries. Although she had seriously begun to consider reconciliation with Oscar, this had depended entirely on his assurances that he would put his past life, and former associations, behind him. But now Constance could sense that many of Oscar's old friends were encouraging him down different paths. She was not alone in her fears.
Her
friends and allies were becoming nervous too, and retrenching back to their earlier position that divorce was, on balance, better than reconciliation.

‘I am again being urged to divorce Mr Wilde and I am as usual blown about by contrary winds,' she explained to Georgina.

Everyone who knows anything about him believes that he wants my wretched money and indeed it seems from his present actions as tho it
were so. Poor poor fellow, if it is so, it is he who suffers most throwing away affection and everything else. I cannot understand the greed for money that makes men cast everything else to the winds … And I don't know what I am to do if I divorce him now. It will be his own fault and that of his friends who are forcing on me a step in connection with money of which I do not approve. However time will show, and nothing else, what is going to happen!
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The ‘step in connection with money' to which Constance alludes was a matter arising from Oscar's bankruptcy. In September 1895 Bosie's father, keen to recoup his court costs, had forced bankruptcy on Oscar. Oscar, in his prison garb, had been dragged to the bankruptcy court, where his debts were noted as standing at £3,591, most of which had been incurred on behalf of Bosie. However, the hearing was adjourned because Oscar's lawyers suggested that his debts could well be covered by subscriptions by his friends.

One of the assets that had been placed in the hands of the Official Receiver was a life interest in Constance's private income. This annuity entitled Oscar to his wife's income if she were to predecease him. If Constance had divorced or been judicially separated from her husband, Oscar's claim on his wife's money would have been dealt with as part of those proceedings. But Constance's delay in this had created an interesting situation regarding the life interest. The Receiver now held this policy, and it was technically up for sale. Constance could both buy back the annuity herself and settle it on her children, or Oscar's friends could buy it for him, thus securing him an income if Constance were to die.

More Adey, an art historian, gallerist and close friend of Robbie Ross, had taken on the task of looking after Oscar's legal affairs and was determined that the policy should be Oscar's. The move chimed with those warnings George Lewis had offered Constance at the time of Oscar's trial: that eventually her husband would come after her for her money. After all that her husband's actions had put her through, this latest development was unwelcome, to say the least.

An opportunity to meet and discuss the matter face to face with Oscar presented itself in an unfortunate guise. In February a letter
arrived from Lily Wilde, Willie's wife. Lily had shown particular kindness to her disgraced in-law during and after the trial. She had proved considerate and thoughtful, and this letter was no exception. It contained the news that Lady Wilde had died on 3 February. She had never managed to communicate with Oscar since his incarceration, despite several attempts on her part.

Lily knew enough of Oscar's relationship with his mother to understand that news of her death would come as a particularly terrible blow. She knew that it would have to be broken to him very carefully.

‘I have written to Mr Haldane for leave to see O,' Constance responded to Lily. ‘I quite agree with you that it must be broken to him and I believe it will half kill him. Poor Oscar has been bitterly punished for breaking the laws of his country. I am not strong but I could bear the journey better if I thought that such a terrible thing would not be told to him roughly.'
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Despite her frail condition, for the second time in six months Constance travelled back to London to see her husband, who had now been moved to Reading gaol. Now using her new name, she was sufficiently courageous to stay at the Grosvenor Hotel, from where she wrote to Otho on 21 February.

I went to Reading on Wednesday and saw poor O, they say he's quite well, but he is an absolute wreck compared with what he was. On Wednesday I dined with the Macebrys and yesterday I saw the Lows, the Simons and the Burne-Jones who all asked after you. I cannot write now, I mean to write long letters but I seem to have lost all power. Mrs Christian's coming to see me this morning and I am lunching with the Millais. I'm dining with the Wilkes, your loving sister Constance.
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The letter is an interesting mix of tea and scandal, social parties arranged around a prison visit to a dishonoured husband. But it's also indicative of Constance's extraordinary ability to accommodate events, cope and move forward. Few people could have shown such mettle. For a woman once cripplingly shy, the brazenness of taking
rooms at one of London's most visible hotels and then pursuing an energetic social diary is testimony to the sheer bravery that Constance was able to display under circumstances that might have reduced others to total breakdown. She could take anything in her stride, from cup cakes to prison, from art exhibitions to bankruptcy. These were facets of her life that she now dealt with equally.

The meeting with Oscar had been everything that Constance had hoped. In return for her kindness to him, Oscar confessed much to Constance that he had failed to admit in the past. Crucially, he confessed his fears for his children. Considering the failure of Bosie's own mother as a parent, he wanted to be sure that Constance was properly equipped to deal with her own children.

‘I told her everything,' Oscar later revealed to Bosie in his confessional letter
De Profundis
.

I told her … the reason of the endless notes with ‘Private' on the envelope that used to come to Tite Street from your mother, so constantly that my wife used to laugh and say that we must be collaborating on a society novel … I told her that if she was frightened of facing the responsibility of the life of another, though her own child, she should get a guardian to help her.
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Oscar also made it clear to Constance that he absolutely approved of her acquiring the life interest so that it could be settled on the children and that he would not contest it. Constance consequently promised that, whatever happened, she would not leave Oscar penniless. On 10 March, Oscar wrote to his friend Robbie Ross confirming these wishes and asking his friends to act accordingly: ‘I feel that I have brought such unhappiness on her and such ruin on my children that I have no right to go against her wishes in anything.'
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On 29 February, Constance visited her solicitors at the offices in Victoria Street and made a new will. In it she made her whole estate over to her family friend and relative Adrian Hope, with the express wish that on her death he should realize her assets and invest them, and then hold everything in trust for the boys until they were
twenty-one. Hope was made her executor, and the will stated that it was Constance's ‘earnest wish and desire' that he should also be the boys' guardian and have sole control over them.

Reassured, Constance returned to Italy. The tenure of the apartment in Sori had come to an end, so she moved into rooms at the Hotel Eden in Nervi. She had found London very expensive and had returned with a heightened sense of the limits of her finances and the need for economy. Consequently, after a few days at the Eden she changed to the Hotel Nervi, which was substantially cheaper (‘I am very comfortable here and pay 26 francs, it would have been 36 at the Eden'
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).

At the end of March, Constance's plans for the boys to be schooled in England were suddenly dropped. It seems likely that attempts to enter Cyril and Vyvyan at Berkhamsted School had been politely declined. Despite her best attempts to protect herself and her boys, scandal continued to follow Constance around. She and the boys were in Nervi for the annual festival of flowers and joined the Ranee, who had taken a suite of rooms at her hotel for the occasion. On the day of the celebrations the hotel proprietor kept calling Constance ‘Mrs Wilde' rather than ‘Mrs Holland', a fact that became more embarrassing when Cyril pointed out his mother's new name. It was a small mistake. But there were greater potential embarrassments close by. Constance had heard Bosie was staying in Genoa, ‘so I don't feel much inclined to go over there', she told Otho.
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Since Oscar's conviction, Bosie had continued to proclaim his love and loyalty to the once celebrated Wilde. In fact, he was planning to dedicate a volume of poems to Oscar. Not only was this awkward for Constance, but Oscar also found it distasteful. A year in gaol had turned him against Bosie, whom he now referred to as ‘Douglas'. Oscar wrote to his friends begging them to acquire letters and jewellery from Oscar still in Bosie's possession. ‘The thought that they are in his hands is horrible to me, and though my unfortunate children will never of course bear my name, still they know whose sons they are and I must try and shield them from the possibility of any further revolting disclosure or scandal.'
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It was almost a year since Oscar's conviction, and although Constance had managed to keep her head above water, she was not without moments of despair. As her plans were forced to change yet again, she confessed to Georgina Mount-Temple that ‘Some nights here I have had visions of how near the sea was and of how “life's fitful fever” might be soon ended, but then there are the boys and they save me from anything too desperate!'
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