Henry did not say anything.

‘In this time,’ Sturges went on, ‘he has also been to Algeria, if you can imagine, and news of some of his activities there has filtered back. It seems that neither he nor Douglas was shy in making himself known to the local tribes, and the excitement must have been unsettling for Wilde and, indeed, for the tribes, if for no one else.’

‘I can imagine,’ Henry said.

‘And when he returned, he was homeless, he has lived in hotels. And also, he has no money.’

‘That is not the case,’ Henry said. ‘I have calculated his income from the theatre. It is very high.’

‘Bosie has spent it for him,’ Sturges replied, ‘and he had debts to match. I believe that he has not enough money to pay his hotel bill and the manager has captured his belongings, such as they are.’

‘That does not prevent him from going to France,’ Henry said. ‘He can acquire some belongings there, perhaps even make significant improvements to them.’

‘He has lost his moorings, lost his judgement,’ Sturges said. ‘He is incapable of making a decision. The success and the love and the hotel rooms have been too much for him. Also, he believes that it will be a blow for Ireland but I can make nothing of that.’

ONCE THE TRIAL was over, it was clear to Gosse that Wilde, if he did not flee, would be arrested. As each hour went by, since the police knew where he was, his being charged with indecency and worse was more and more likely, with witnesses appearing from the sewers of London, Gosse said.

‘There is a list, as I told you, and there is great fear in the city and a great determination on the government’s side, I am told with some authority, that rampant indecency will be stamped out. I fear there will be other arrests. I have heard names. It is rather shocking.’

Henry studied Gosse and paid attention to his tone. Suddenly, his old friend had become a rabid supporter of the stamping out of indecency. He wished there were someone French in the room to calm Gosse down, his friend having joined forces, apparently, with the English public in one of their moments of self-righteousness. He wanted to warn him that this would not help his prose style.

‘Perhaps a period of solitary confinement will help Wilde,’ Henry said. ‘But not the martyrdom. One would wish that on no one.’

‘Apparently, the Cabinet has discussed the list,’ Gosse went on. ‘The police, it seems, have already questioned people and many have been advised to cross the channel. And I believe that many are crossing as we speak.’

‘Yes,’ Henry said, ‘and besides the moral climate I think they will find the diet rather better over there too.’

‘It is unclear who is under suspicion, but there are many rumours and suggestions,’ Gosse continued.

Henry noticed Gosse watching him.

‘It is advised, I think, that anyone who has been, as it were, compromised should arrange to travel as soon as possible. London is a large city and much can go on here quietly and secretly, but now the secrecy has been shattered.’

Henry stood up and went to the bookcase between the windows and studied the books.

‘I wondered if you, if perhaps…’ Gosse began.

‘No.’ Henry turned sharply. ‘You do not wonder. There is nothing to wonder about.’

‘Well that is a relief, if I may say so,’ Gosse said quietly, standing up.

‘Is that what you came here to ask?’ Henry kept his eyes fixed on Gosse, his gaze direct and hostile enough to prevent any reply.

STURGES CONTINUED to visit in the period leading up to Wilde’s trial, when Wilde was in custody and all possibility of going to France had faded.

‘His mother, I am told, is jubilant,’ Sturges said. ‘She believes he has delivered a great blow against the Empire.’

‘It is difficult to imagine him having a mother,’ Henry said.

Henry asked his two visitors and anybody else whom he saw in these weeks if they knew anything about Wilde’s two golden children whose very name was disgraced for ever. It was Gosse who came with the news.

‘Although he is bankrupt, his wife is not. She has her own money and has moved to Switzerland, as far as I know. And she has changed her name and that of her sons. They no longer bear their father’s name.’

‘Did she know about her husband before the trial?’ Henry asked.

‘No, I understand that she did not. It has been an enormous shock to her.’

‘And what do the boys know?’

‘I cannot tell you that. I have not heard,’ Gosse said.

For days he thought about them, watchful, beautiful creatures in a country where they could not understand a word of the language, their very names obliterated, their father responsible for some dark, nameless crime. He thought of them in some turreted Swiss apartment house in high rooms with a view of the lake, their nurse refusing to explain why they had come all this way, why there was so much silence, why their mother kept apart from them and then suddenly came close to them as though they were in danger. He thought of how little they would need to say to each other about the demons that were around them, their new name, their great isolation, the upheaval which had resulted in their spending days alone together in those cold rooms, as though waiting for a catastrophe to unfold, their father a ghostly memory, standing smiling at them on the bare half-lit landing as they climbed the staircase, beckoning in the shadows.

WHEN WILDE had been sentenced and the scandal surrounding London ’s dark underworld had died down, Henry’s relationship with Edmund Gosse returned to what it had been, as Gosse himself underwent a restoration of his old self. Immediately after Wilde was imprisoned, Gosse ceased to sound like a member of the House of Lords.

One afternoon, as they sat in Henry’s study drinking tea, an old subject of theirs, which had been much on Henry’s mind, arose. The subject was John Addington Symonds, a friend and correspondent of Gosse, who had died two years earlier. Of all the people, Henry said, who would have been fascinated by every moment of the Wilde case, surely JAS, as he called him, would have been the most intrigued. It would almost have made him come back to England.

‘He would have loathed Wilde, of course,’ Gosse said, ‘the vulgarity and the filth.’

‘Yes,’ Henry said patiently, ‘but he would have been captured by what came into the open.’

Symonds had lived mainly in Italy and had written with great, perhaps too great sensuousness about the landscape and the art and the architecture. He became a connoisseur of Italian light and colour, but he also became an expert on another more dangerous matter, what he called a problem in Greek ethics, the love between two men.

Ten years earlier, Henry and Gosse had discussed Symonds as avidly as they discussed Wilde during the trial. This was when Gosse moved less freely among the powerful, and there had been a tacit understanding between them that these preoccupations of Symonds mattered to both of them personally, an understanding which had lessened as the years passed.

Throughout the 1880s Symonds, writing from Italy, made no secret of his own leanings. He wrote explicit letters to all his friends and many who were not his friends. He sent his book on the matter to those in England whom he thought might initiate a debate. Many who received the book were infuriated and embarrassed. Symonds wanted it brought into the light, discussed openly, and this, Henry remarked to Gosse at the time, was a sign of how long he had been out of England, how many years he had been basking in Italian sunshine. Gosse was interested in public life and wished to discuss the implications of what Symonds was saying for legislation or public attitudes. Henry, on the other hand, became fascinated by Symonds. By this time Henry had received several letters from Symonds about Italy, and had by chance, several years before, sat beside Symonds’s wife at dinner. He remembered her as mostly silent, quite dull, and he failed to recollect, when he became interested in her case, a single word she had said.