2007 - Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (5 page)

“‘And’ what?” he countered.

“Your reasons,” I said, “what were they?”

He leant towards me and smiled. “Have you ever met a policeman, Robert?”

I thought for a moment. “I’m not sure that I have,” I said.

“Well, Robert, the more blessed is your state. Policemen are not as we are, Robert. We are poets. We consider the lilies. We wear silk slippers. The language we speak, the world we inhabit, the company we keep: all these are foreign to your run-of-the-mill Metropolitan police officer. He lives his life in prose, and hobnail boots, and anything that is not utterly prosaic—anything that smacks even slightly of the poetic; anything unpredictable, original, unorthodox—will alarm him, will make him suspicious…My intended business at 23 Cowley Street was wholly honourable, but I know that some of what goes on at that address tends towards the colourful. I was not certain that your everyday English bobby would entirely understand. Perhaps Arthur’s Inspector Fraser will be different.”

“You think by involving the police you run a risk?”

“A risk of being misunderstood—that is all. But, as I told our charming waiter, I am in a mood to live dangerously. Besides, I do not think there is any alternative if we are to achieve justice for Billy Wood.”

“And why is that so important to you, Oscar?” He looked at me sharply. “What do you mean, Robert?”

“You said yourself Billy Wood was just a street urchin—”

Suddenly he banged the table with alarming ferocity. I blanched. Diners at nearby tables turned towards us. “Is it only ‘gentlemen’ who are to receive justice?” he barked. “Is not the meanest street urchin entitled to justice as much as the grandest duke? You amaze me, Robert.”

“You misunderstand me, Oscar,” I protested. “I trust I do, Robert,” he said, more calmly, as the waiter laid our potted shrimps before us. “I trust I do, for it behoves us, Robert, you and I—who have so much—to do all we can for those, like Billy Wood, who have so little. We must be friends to the friendless, Robert. If we, poets who want for nothing, are not to care for the Billy Woods of this world, who will?”

The waiter proffered Oscar a basket of crisp toast. Oscar looked up at him and smiled.

“Thank you, Tito,” he said. He looked towards me and, for a moment, placed his hand on mine. His moods were so mercurial. “You are looking wan, Robert.” He smiled. “Pallor is attractive in an undergraduate of twenty, but unbecoming in a married man of thirty. I am glad I brought you here. We must put some colour in your cheeks. It is evident you need feeding; you are not eating properly.”

“I cannot afford to,” I said, happy now to change the subject. “I received another uncivil communication from Foxton this morning.”

“Foxton?” Oscar raised an eyebrow.

“My estranged wife’s solicitor. If I am to secure this divorce, it will cost me every penny I possess.”

“Forget the divorce, Robert.”

“Would that I could,” I said, plaintively, “but Marthe is determined upon it. There is no turning back. And, besides, until I am divorced from Marthe, I cannot marry Kaitlyn.”

“Why marry Kaitlyn?” he asked, skewering a buttery shrimp with his fork. “She will only go the way of Charlotte, and Laura, and Anna, and that charming little Polish girl to whom you introduced me—the dancer—what was her name?”

“Anelia,” I said, wistfully. “I loved her.”

“Of course you did, Robert—at the time.” He popped the shrimp into his mouth. “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.”

“You mock me, Oscar,” I said.

“No, Robert,” he replied, suddenly in earnest, “I envy you. Yours is a life of romance—and romance lives by repetition. Each time that one loves is the only time that one has ever loved. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. You have the secret of life, Robert. I envy you.”

“And you have Constance, Oscar. I envy you.”

“Yes,” said Oscar, glancing towards the sommelier who was now hovering with our wine. “I have Constance and in her I am blessed. Life is a stormy sea. My wife is my harbour of refuge. And ‘86 is the only year for Riesling.”

The wine was certainly outstanding and Oscar Wilde was indeed blessed in Constance Lloyd. She was his truest friend and staunchest ally. The world should know that even in his darkest hours—throughout his term of trial, during his imprisonment and beyond, even unto her untimely death, twenty months before his own—his wife did not fail him. Constance Lloyd loved Oscar Wilde for better, for worse, in sickness and in health. She was ever faithful to her marriage vows.

And Oscar loved Constance: I know that to be true. At the time of his engagement, in November 1883, before I had met her, when I was living mainly in Paris, he wrote to me (I have the letter still), describing her ‘matchless beauty’. He called her his ‘violet-eyed little Artemis’ and spoke of her ‘slender, graceful figure’, of ‘the great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop’, and of her ‘wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop singing to listen to her’.

Oscar loved Constance. (It bears repeating.) They were married in London, at St James’s Church in Paddington, on 19 May 1884. On the same day they travelled by boat and train to Paris for their honeymoon. On the morning following their wedding night I called on them at the Hotel Wagram on the rue de Rivoli to offer my congratulations. I found them on one of the upper floors of the hotel, in a small suite of rooms overlooking the Tuileries gardens. Constance was no longer a child—she was then twenty-six—but she had about her still the bloom of adolescence and, on that morning, the glow of love awakened.

“Is she not exquisite?” asked Oscar.

“She is perfection,” I replied.

I remember we left her to rest and took a stroll together along the rue de Rivoli towards the Marche St Honore where Oscar stopped and rifled a flower-stall of all its loveliest blossoms and sent them, with a word of love on his card, to the bride whom he had quitted but a moment before. I recall, too, how eager he was to tell me of the delights of their love-making and how I stopped him, saying, “No, Oscar,
ça, c’est sacré
—you must not speak of that to me.”

That day the three of us then lunched together and, all at once, I understood completely why Oscar had fallen so deeply in love with his little Artemis. She was beautiful, but she was well educated, widely read and wonderfully intelligent, too. And she had known sorrow. Her father—whom she adored—had died when she was sixteen and her relationship with her mother had been strained. She had the pretty look of a girl, but the wisdom of a woman. She spoke French and Italian fluently—and was learning German to please Oscar. She flattered me by asking after my work and she made me jealous by telling me that her entire life was now dedicated to pleasing her husband. “I will hold him fast with chains of love and devotion so that he shall never leave me or love anyone else,” she said.

After we had dined, we drove out in an open fiacre—it was a perfect
apres-midi d’ete
—and, as we were turning into the Place de la Concorde, all of a sudden I said, “Would you mind, Oscar, if I threw my stick away?”

He said, “Don’t be absurd, Robert. It will cause a scene. Why do you want to throw it away?”

I answered, “It is a swordstick and, I don’t know how it is, but for the last minute I have had a wild desire to pull out the blade and run it through you. I think it’s because you look too happy.”

Constance laughed and took the stick from my hand. “I shall keep this,” she said, “I shall keep this always.”

At John Simpson’s Grand Divan Tavern, over the potted shrimps, we raised our glasses of Mr Simpson’s finest Riesling to ‘Mrs Oscar Wilde’. “Bless her,” said Oscar.

“Amen to that,” said I.

Over our roast meats, we raised our glasses of Burgundy (a glorious Gevrey-Chambertin, 1884) to ‘Mrs Arthur Conan Doyle’. “May she enjoy many happy returns of the day,” said Oscar.

“Indeed,”said I.

For a moment I hoped that the mention of Arthur’s wife might lead our conversation naturally back to the drama of the morning’s events, but it did not. And I knew better than to attempt to steer my friend along a conversational course that was not of his choosing. One of the rules of friendship with Oscar Wilde was that he set the rules.

That afternoon at Simpson’s, as he ate and drank—and drank some more, and pondered out loud whether or not we might allow ourselves dessert
and
savoury
and
Stilton (with wines to match)—he talked of many things: if not of murder, nor of shoes and ships and sealing wax, certainly of cabbage (Simpson’s one culinary failing) and of kings (Oscar was much taken with the news of the accession of Alexander as the ‘boy king’ of Serbia). What was remarkable about Oscar’s conversation, always, was its scope and unpredictability. At that luncheon, in rapid succession, he spoke of love and literature, of William Morris’s dream of a socialist commonwealth, of Chabrier’s opera,
Le Roi malgre lui
, of his fondness for daisies, of his horror of Bayswater (and the colour magenta), and of the thirteen-storey Tacoma Building in Chicago, the world’s first ‘skyscraper’. “Pity the Americans, Robert,” he said. “As their buildings rise, their morals will fall—you can depend upon it.”

I always laughed in Oscar’s company, but I did not always feel at ease. I was always happy to be with him, yet I was often apprehensive. His mood—like his conversation—was unpredictable. He was aware of his own temperamental changeability and recognised that it did not make him the easiest companion. “I am a fellow o’ the strangest mind i’ the world,” he would say. “Forgive me.”

At three o’clock that afternoon, Simpson’s clock struck the hour and, suddenly, out of the blue, Oscar put down his spoon and fork and pushed his plate away.

“What are we doing here, Robert? What madness is this? A young friend of mine has been murdered, his throat cut from ear to ear. Now his body is missing— and I am at lunch! I talk of justice while gorging myself on
tarte aux poires au chocolat courant
. I am a disgrace—and a coward. I did not go to the police yesterday because I was fearful…Now that I am half drunk I have the courage.” He pulled his napkin from his waistcoat, threw it on the table and got to his feet. “Come, Robert, we must make our way to Scotland Yard without delay.” He steadied himself with a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll get the bill. We’ll hail a cab in the street. We must do now what we should have done three hours ago. We must meet this Inspector Fraser, whatever the consequences. We must throw the dice, however they may fall.”

Fraser of the Yard

T
hrough my friendship with Oscar Wilde, I encountered many remarkable men. None, I think, made a more profound impact upon my life than Aidan Edmund Fettes Fraser.

On the day that Oscar and I first met him, 1 September 1889, Fraser had just turned thirty-two. Despite his hooded, sunken eyes, he looked much younger than his years. He was clean-shaven, with clear-cut features, all proportionate, a complexion as white as chalk and a high forehead as smooth as alabaster. He wore his dark, near-black hair swept back, without a parting, and a touch longer than was the fashion. He was, by any account, extraordinarily striking: tall, slim, athletic, angular. He put Oscar in mind of Rossetti’s painting,
Dante Drawing an Angel on the Anniversary of Beatrice’s Death
. (It was one of Oscar’s favourite pictures; almost any handsome, pale-faced youth reminded him of Rossetti’s Dante!) In his appearance, Aidan Fraser put me more in mind of my notion of Conan Doyle’s creation, Sherlock Holmes.

Fraser was now a Metropolitan Police Inspector—the youngest of the twenty-two inspectors in ‘the Met’—but he had been born a gentleman. According to Conan Doyle, who knew him and his family well, Fraser’s late father had inherited a banana plantation in the West Indies and his great-uncle (Fraser’s father’s mother’s brother) had been the noted Scottish entrepreneur and philanthropist, Sir William Fettes, whose benefaction had made possible the founding of Fettes College, in Edinburgh, in 1870. When the school opened, Aidan Fraser had been among its first pupils. Apparently, he was an exemplary student: courteous, conscientious, achieving—captain of cricket, captain of rugby and, in due course (and to none of his contemporaries’ surprise or resentment), captain of school.

It was only after Fettes that an element of the unexpected was introduced to Fraser’s curriculum vitae. He might have gone, as a scholar, to Balliol College, Oxford, to read law. Instead, he chose to stay closer to home and study natural sciences at the University of Edinburgh. There it was that he met Arthur Conan Doyle, two years his junior (though Doyle was always taken for the older of the two), and the pair became ‘best friends’, for three years near-inseparable, boon companions.

According to Doyle, their friendship was founded on a mutual admiration for the controversial writings of Professor Thomas Huxley (the biologist known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’) and fostered (less controversially) over many hours on the golf links. Huxley is credited with coining the term ‘agnostic’, and Fraser and Conan Doyle—to the dismay of the traditional true-believers in both their families—became outspoken and enthusiastic champions of ‘agnosticism’. Quite as alarming to his family was Aidan Fraser’s startling announcement, which he made shortly after his twenty-first birthday, at which he had come of age and, as his late father’s only son, inherited a fortune in excess of forty thousand pounds. Upon graduation, he said, he proposed not to follow in the Fraser and Fettes tradition of a career in commerce, but, instead, to leave Edinburgh, go to London and join the recently formed Criminal Investigations Department of the Metropolitan Police.

Fraser claimed that he had been drawn to the CID both by its reassuring address (Great Scotland Yard) and by the prospect of doing ‘something real, something useful in life’, applying to police work the philosophy he had learnt from Professor Huxley. “Science,” said Huxley, famously, “is nothing but trained and organised common sense.”