Mr James had died suddenly: Elspeth telephoned to my college with the news, and a few days later I made my way to Battersea to attend the funeral. Having important work in the laboratory to see to in the morning, I caught the 1 p.m. train from Oxford, and, after changing at Reading, found myself on a platform of Clapham Junction.
My thoughts were melancholy. I had loved my guardian, perhaps not quite as boys should love their fathers, but with an amused admiration. His devotion to Ruskinian ideals had increased with time: as a member of the Utopian St George’s Guild he argued for the redistribution of wealth, the establishment of smokeless zones, and an end to modern warfare, among other things. Elspeth had supported him in these endeavours, becoming ever more buxom as her interest in cookery grew (she made cakes for Ruskin’s teashop in Marylebone, which sold tea in small packets for the poorest customers): she planned to write a revolutionary vegetarian recipe book as a direct challenge to Mrs Beeton’s tome which encouraged the daily consumption of red meat and food cooked in lard. That she could not have children was her greatest regret, but this meant that both Mr James and I received from her ever more solicitous attention. I felt apprehensive of her state of mind, now that she was deprived of her invalid husband.
The day was exceptionally bleak. February is the most dismal month in Britain, and as I gazed out of the carriage window at the frozen fields between Oxford and Reading, I could see nothing of beauty which might lighten the gloom. It occurred to me that my guardian had died exactly twenty-five years to the day after the inaugural lecture at the Sheldonian Theatre, which he considered to have exerted such a profound influence over his life. To my shame, this had been the last time we had gone out together to a public function, for once I had gone up to Oxford to read Ornithology I had found myself increasingly absorbed, if not ingested, by the University, and thus reluctant to leave its safe environs. Because I visited their Battersea home so seldom, Mr James and Elspeth (I never could think of her as Mrs James) had made monthly visits by train to see me in my rooms, Elspeth always bringing some delicious edible item which at the same time contrived to be conducive to my health. Over the twenty-five years, as I grew more reclusive, their visits had been almost my only contact with a society that was not directly connected with my experimental work.
I say ‘almost’ as there was one other person whom I allowed into my rooms, with great joy, whenever he visited his Alma Mater. Though his life lay in London, Oscar regularly returned to his circle of friends in Oxford – more especially after his fateful meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas. (This beautiful and unmanageable creature spent four fruitless years at Magdalen.) Oscar made it his business – I will not say ‘duty’ – to spend no less than half an hour with me at some stage of his visits, crammed as they were with exotic dinner parties and social events of a demanding nature. In the safe and shadowy confines of my bachelor rooms he would collapse into my most comfortable armchair and rest. With me alone was he able to speak simply, without recourse to the glittering aphorisms that were endlessly expected of him, and in plain language, all the more moving for its lack of ornament, would he express to me the very depths of his feelings and heights of his aspirations. This was not the Oscar Wilde known to the rest of the world: the secrets of his heart which he shared with me were imparted to no other man or woman, and they will go with me to the grave. For I was his ‘cousin’, by however devious a route, and into the vessel of his cousin’s heart could he pour his pain, knowing that no word of what he said would ever escape from that fail-safe receptacle. In his presence I too was able to express the anxieties of academic life which I so assiduously hid from my colleagues, who believed I had succeeded in excising the entire range of emotions experienced by all other human beings.
The last time I saw Oscar before his arrest, he had found it impossible to remain seated in the comfortable chair, so great was his agitation. I knew only too well of the details of his sublime love for Alfred Douglas, a love which had long ago transcended the physical, but I recognised also the symptoms of self-surrender, where a man has handed over his life entirely to the loved one, as if in a hypnotic trance. Why else would he pursue this pointless libel case, other than to obey the loved one’s wishes: to collude with the son’s ravenous craving to destroy his father? I knew of Oscar’s illegal meetings with boys in hotel bedrooms: his ‘feasting with panthers’. I feared that these episodes would be revealed at the trial: Oscar declared there was no means of establishing they had happened. I remember him so clearly now, standing at my study window, staring into the geometry of white roses and yew hedges of the Fellows’ Garden, and remarking: ‘Do you remember, Francis, that morning twenty years ago when we strolled round Magdalen’s narrow bird-haunted walks, do you remember I told you that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the world and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul?’
I replied that I did, and that the walk in question had occurred during the week that the meadow was purple with snake’s head fritillary.
Oscar looked at me affectionately. His face had indeed grown unpleasantly fleshy (’a great white caterpillar’, a mutual friend of ours had fondly called him), but his smile was as sweet and as heart-warming as ever, in spite of the blackened, protruding teeth. ‘Ah, the fritillaries, coz: we never did resolve our argument. I declared that they were native to Magdalen, but you insisted that some incumbent from Ducklington had transplanted the bulbs a mere hundred years ago. I cannot bring myself to believe that the fritillaries of Magdalen Meadow have not waved their purple shawls for as long as Magdalen itself has stood: surely they cannot be colonists from a village near Witney!’ His smile suffused his teasing words.
‘I can still only say that the Ducklington fritillaries are entirely indigenous. I cannot say that with certainty about the Magdalen colony.’
Oscar grew nostalgic. ‘I once made a buttonhole of lilac and mulberry fritillary bells in the spring – the only flower I know which Nature has imbued with checks. I considered ordering an entire suit of the fritillary pattern to be woven in tweed, to go with it. Instead I wore it with that very loud yellow-and-black chequered jacket, do you remember?’
‘You were wearing it when I first met you. In the Botanic Gardens’ greenhouse. You attracted the butterflies.’
‘And you were dropping insects into the green jaws of carnivorous plants. I watched them writhe in the plants’ transparent stomachs. You told me that the Venus’s flytrap could count to three. Or was it two?’
‘What are you going to do about this trial, Oscar? I fear you have been ill-advised.’
He turned back to the window. ‘At first I confined myself exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sunlit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. I was determined to know nothing of failure, disgrace, sorrow, despair; remorse that makes one walk on thorns, anguish that chooses sackcloth for its raiment. And now I am forced to taste each of them in turn.’
‘Do I detect the influence of Rome? You would not suit sackcloth, Oscar.’
He ignored my feeble jibe. His voice was caterpillar soft. ‘You know that I have deliberately gone to the very depths in the search for new sensation. Will you ever understand how desire can become a malady, or a madness, or both? I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop.’
‘No, no, you are wrong!’ I interrupted. ‘We would not hear ourselves speak if everyone shouted their secret sins from the housetops! Think again, Oscar, for all our sakes!’
He gathered his hat, stick, coat. ‘Goodbye, dear coz. I will keep you informed of my sojourn in the outer rings of hell.’
I was to see him only once more.