CHAPTER FOUR
ONE EVENING AS HE RODE along in a rattling four-wheeler to go to dinner, an idea came to him for a story whose drama would reside in the peculiar and intense affection between an orphaned brother and sister. He did not immediately have a picture of the pair nor imagine anything about their direct circumstances. What came to him was vague and scarcely distinct enough to write in his notebook. The brother and sister were involved in a union of sympathy and tenderness which meant that they could read each other’s feelings and impulses. They did not control each other, however; rather, they understood each other too well. Fatally well, he thought, and wrote that in his notebook without any idea of a plot or an incident which could illustrate it. Maybe it was too much, but the idea of a fused self stayed with him. Two beings with one sensibility, one imagination, vibrating with the same nerves, the same suffering. Two lives, but close to one experience. Both of them, for example, acutely aware of their parents’ passing, the irrevocable loss involved haunting both of them with an almost paralysing pathos.
Often, ideas came like this, casually, without warning; often, they occurred to him at moments when he was busy with other things. This new idea for a story about a brother and sister developed with a sort of urgency, as something that he barely needed to write down. He would not forget it. It stayed fresh and clear in his imagination. Slowly and mysteriously, it began to fuse with the ghost story told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and slowly he began to see something fixed and exact as though the processes of imagination themselves were as a ghost, becoming more and more corporeal. He saw the brother and sister, lonely and abandoned somewhere, banished siblings in a loveless old house, both of them operating with one mind, one soul, equal in their suffering and unpreparedness for the great ordeal which was to come their way.
Once it became more solid, the emerging story and all its ramifications and possibilities lifted him out of the gloom of his failure. He grew determined that he would become more hardworking now. He took up his pen again – the pen of all his unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. It was now, he believed, that he would do the work of his life. He was ready to begin again, to return to the old high art of fiction with ambitions now too deep and pure for any utterance.
In the idleness of the afternoon sometimes he let his gaze wander through his notebooks again. One day he almost smiled to himself when he saw a few lines, which had seemed so promising less than three years earlier that he had allowed them to fill his workday and his dreams alike, the very lines which were the cause of the months of lethargy and pain and disappointment through which he now was emerging. He forced himself to read them to the end:
Situation of that once-upon-a-time member of an old Venetian family (I forget which), who had become a monk, and who was taken almost forcibly out of the monastry and brought back into the world to keep his family from becoming extinct. He was the last – it was absolutely necessary for him to marry. Adapt this somehow or other to today.
His eye moved quickly to the list of names, ghost names taken from obituaries and death notices, names for characters and places, names which could lie inert in his notebooks or could still be used; he could spend day after day giving life to them. Beague Vena (Xtian name) – Doreen (ditto) – Passmore – Trafford – Norval – Lancelot – Vyner – Bygrave – Husson – Domville. Those last eight letters had been placed on the page in all innocence. He had no memory now of where the name had come from, nor indeed the exact provenance of any of the names which came before it. Nor had he any real idea why that name had been used, and the others, left there, had not. The note and the name seemed distant now, and it appeared extraordinary to him that his play had arisen from such unpromising beginnings and, once it was replaced by a new play by Oscar Wilde, had suffered an equally unpromising end.
HIS PARENTS dying, he thought, had brought with it a strange relief. It was the sense that it could not happen again, his mother’s body could lie in repose only once, she could be consigned to the earth on only one occasion. And that occasion, in all its black brutal sorrow, had passed. With his parents dead and Alice gone, he had believed that nothing could touch him. Thus his failure in the theatre remained a shock, something whose intensity and sharpness he had never thought he would have to deal with again. It was, he had to admit, close to grief, even though he knew that such an admission was a kind of blasphemy.
He knew that he would suffer no further indignity at the hands of theatre audiences; he would devote himself, as he had pledged, to the silent art of fiction. If only he could work now, his days could be perfect, full of the delight of solitude and the pleasure wrought from finished pages.
Not long after his return from Ireland, as he settled himself into a routine of reading and letter writing and the creation of domestic order, his young friend Jonathan Sturges came with news, and he was soon followed by Edmund Gosse with the same news. It concerned Oscar Wilde.
Wilde had been much on Henry’s mind over the previous months. His two plays were still running at the Haymarket and the St James’s. Henry had no difficulty adding up the money Wilde had been making. He wrote to William about it, noting one of the new phenomena of London life, the inescapable Oscar Wilde, suddenly successful rather than preposterous, suddenly industrious and serious rather than someone busy wasting his time and that of others.
Both Sturges and Gosse offered information, however, which Henry did not pass on to William nor indeed to anyone else. Both his friends enjoyed knowing and telling fresh news and he allowed each to feel that he was the first, partly because he was not sure that he wanted either of them to know that the antics of Oscar Wilde were matters much discussed under his roof.
Even before he went to Ireland, Henry had heard that Wilde had abandoned all due discretion. He was doing as he pleased in London and telling whomsoever he pleased about it. He was everywhere, flaunting his money, his new success and fame, and flaunting also the son of the Marquess of Queensberry, a boy as deeply unpleasant as his father, in Gosse’s opinion, but rather better-looking, Sturges allowed himself to admit.
Henry presumed that what was relayed to him by his two visitors was known to all. He knew that Wilde’s relationship with Queensberry’s son was common knowledge, but both Sturges and Gosse appeared to feel that they and a mere few others knew the details, and the details, they insisted, were so appalling they could scarcely be whispered. Henry watched them calmly and ordered tea for them and listened carefully to their delicate phrasing of matters which were not, to say the least, very delicate. Boys from the street, Gosse called them, but Sturges amused him more by mentioning, sotto voce, young men whose abode was not very fixed.
‘He orders them as you would a cab,’ Gosse finally made himself clear.
‘For payment?’ Henry asked innocently.
As Gosse nodded gravely, Henry was tempted to smile, but he too remained grave.
It did not strike him as odd or shocking; everything about Wilde, from the moment Henry had first seen him, even when he had met him in Washington in the house of Clover Adams, suggested deep levels and layers of hiddenness. Had Gosse or Sturges told him that Wilde went out every night dressed as a clergyman’s wife to give alms to the poor, it would not have surprised him. He remembered something vague being told to him about Wilde’s parents, his mother’s madness or her revolutionary spirit, or both, and his father’s philandering or perhaps, indeed, his revolutionary spirit. Ireland, he supposed, was too small for someone like Wilde, yet he had always carried a threat of Ireland with him. Even London could not contain him with two plays and many rumours all running at the same time.