The Wildes

by Louis Bayard

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of The Pale Blue Eye, Louis Bayard, comes Atonement meets The Paris Wife, a brilliantly original, profoundly empathetic story about Oscar Wilde's wife Constance and their two sons in the aftermath of the famous playwright's imprisonment for homosexuality, told against the backdrop of Victorian England and World War I.

In September of 1892, Oscar Wilde and his family retreated to the idyllic Norfolk countryside for a holiday. His wife, Constance, has every reason to be happy: two beautiful sons, a stellar reputation as an advocate for progressive causes, and a delightfully charming and affectionate husband and father, who is perhaps the most famous man in England. But as an assortment of houseguests arrive, including an aristocratic young wannabe poet named Lord Alfred Douglas, Constance gradually—and then all at once—comes to see that her husband's heart is elsewhere and that the growing intensity between the two men threatens the whole foundation of their lives.

The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts revolves around that fateful summer: what happened, and what might have been. When it was exposed, Oscar's affair with Lord Alfred Douglas—Bosie, as he was known—led to Wilde's imprisonment for homosexuality, and the financial and emotional ruin of his family. In Act Two, Bayard reveals Constance and their sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, in exile, forced to sell their possessions, leave England, and hide their identities. Act Three, from the perspective of Cyril, brings readers into the French trenches of World War I, where Cyril must grapple with the kind of man he wants to become, while Act Four reveals Vyvyan in London, years after the war, searching for answers from those who knew his parents. And in a brilliant act of the imagination, Act Five brings the entire cast back together in a surprising, poignant, and tremendously satisfying tableau. 

With Louis Bayard's trademark sparkling dialogue, paired with his deep insight into the lives and longings of all his characters—and based on real events—The Wildes could almost have been created by Oscar Wilde himself: lightly told but with hidden depths, it is an entertaining and dramatic story about the human condition. 

Release date: September 17, 2024

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

“TELL ME IF I’ve met this one,” she says.

To her mind, it is no different in weight or import to anything else she might say. She is living in the before times—before scandal, gaol, exile—but how is she to know? Her eyes see only a late-summer morning and a wife and husband on holiday, engaged in a late-morning stroll. And, on every side of them, Norfolk, in the thick of its annual harvest. With an almost connoisseurial interest, she watches the wagons tottering from field to farm, the children taking shade in the hedgerows, the widows sifting through the holly and hawthorn and young oak for fallen wisps. Her own voice sounds no more substantive or pressing to her than the mechanical reapers and steam engines and, really, it is only the faintest pricking of curiosity that moves her to speak at all, and she is only half-listening for the reply.

“Tell me,” she says, “if I’ve met this one.”

“Well now,” answers Oscar, “I don’t know that I can unless I know which one you mean.”

“Oh,” she says, already inclined to leave it alone. “The chap who’s coming tomorrow.”

“Why, yes, my love, you met him last summer. His cousin Lionel Johnson brought him round, and the three of us had a delightful chat, and then, just as he was leaving, I said you should come meet my wife.”

“And you brought him upstairs?”

“Don’t I always?”

He does, always. She tasks herself once more with sorting through that stream of acolytes, the procession of narrow-chested young men, each younger than the last, each astonished by his privilege. The vast majority she will never see again, but she greets them in the opposite spirit. You must promise not to remain a stranger. Oscar so enjoys the company.…

“How was this one dressed?” she asks.

“Cream-coloured linen suit. Straw boater.”

“You have described nearly three-quarters of the male population under the age of twenty-two.”

“So I have.”

“Was he rather small-boned?”

“In relation to me, yes.”

“And flaxen?”

“Just so.”

They pass under the canopy of a chestnut. She can hear a stone curlew making rapier-like calls.

“I remember now,” she says. “His father is the Marquess of Queensbury.”

“Indeed.”

“Oh, dear, it makes no more sense now than it did then. Isn’t the Marquess this rather ferocious sportsman? Rude with animal health? Always riding about or striding about…”

“We’ve never met him, my dear.”

“Oh, but one pictures him all the same. Barking at groomsmen, wading into mud. Dressing his own stags, right there in the field. One can’t imagine the son doing any of that.”

“The son does other things, that is all.”

She gazes at him, a light slowly dawning.

“Another poet,” she says.

“Now, my dear.”

“Oh, Oscar, I don’t mind them as individuals, but as a category they’re—”

“What?”

“Well, pale and malnourished. I always want to send them away with a good beefsteak, only Cook would be cross. Wouldn’t it be rather more practical to bring home a young banker now and again?”

“Bankers require no help. Indeed, they are the reason that poets do.”

“All the same, a banker might put one on a budget and make one stick to it. See that there’s money left over for the servants at the end of the month. Practical things like that.”

“Well, now,” he answers, sliding his arm for the first time round her waist. “Is it practical you’re wanting, Mrs. Wilde? Sure, you don’t know the man you married.”

How curious that she still quickens to the brogue he discarded before they ever met but still puts on at will. To the feeling of his arm round her waist.

“And you can say for certain he’s coming tomorrow?” she asks.

“That’s what today’s wire said.”

“But yesterday’s wire said today.”

“We shall always have to go with the most recent intelligence, I fear.”

“I only hope he doesn’t drag too much luggage with him. It’s a farmhouse. It’s not even our farmhouse.”

“I should think he grasps the distinction between a castle and a farmhouse and between owning and renting. Even two years at Oxford can’t make a fellow a complete imbecile.”

“No,” she answers, smiling. “It takes four.”

She loves the light that flickers in him when she’s caught him off guard. Perhaps that is why she stops, the better to savor it. Savor him, too, so slim in his tropical-wool vest. How many pounds has he shed this summer?

“Naturally,” she says, “Lord Alfred must have his own room. And, as the Cliftons don’t seem disposed ever to leave, I think the best resort would be to move Cyril into my room.”

“He won’t object, surely.”

She doesn’t answer. From the dull certainty that Cyril will not object.

“I do worry,” she allows.

“What about?”

“You’ve been going such great guns with the play.” She reaches for the hand fastened round her waist. “Surely it’s because you’ve been so free of distraction.”

“Distraction? What do you call the Cliftons, for heaven’s sake, scudding like storm fronts from room to room? What do you call golf, for that matter?”

“Golf is the opposite of distraction. You get a nice walk, admit that, and your brain is humming the whole time without your knowing, and you come back and say, ‘Oh, yes, I’ve figured out how to get them from the terrace to the drawing room.’ Why, it’s practically a green sward of Muse, extending on every side.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “A sympathetic ear might do the same trick.”

She looks at him, then softly prises away his hand.

“Why, Mr. Wilde, I had no idea you were lacking for sympathy here.”

“Now, my dear. Sometimes a fellow just wants to bore somebody who’s not his wife. How do you think marriages survive, anyway?”

“You never bore me.”

“Because I tactfully inflict myself on others.”

It doesn’t hold up even to a second’s scrutiny. All these years, she has yet to find anybody bored by him.

“Very well,” she says, drawing his arm round her once more and advancing down the lane. “I just don’t want Mr. Beerbohm Tree to come chasing after us because some flaxen poet kept you up late with his jabbering.”

“Beerbohm Tree will get his four acts in three months’ time. No theatre manager can ask more.”

“And he’s staying only the two days?”

“Lord Alfred? On his word as a gentleman.”

“I have read enough of books and seen enough of plays, yours included, to know just how much a gentleman’s word stands for.”

“Books and plays are not truth, my love. They are exercises in sensation.”

So are gentlemen, she is about to say, but it sounds too like him. This is perhaps the essential difference between them. She must think out the meaning of whatever she’s about to say; he finds it at his leisure, as though it were simply dangling from a bough, waiting to be plucked. In a half-pique, she turns away, watches the Michaelmas geese and Christmas turkeys foraging in the new stubble.

“You seem rather put-out,” he says.

“Oh, it’s nothing to do with Lord Alfred. It’s just that we’ve been having such a lovely time. Even your mother, I think, hasn’t minded so much.”

“I’m not entirely sure she knows she’s left.”

“That’s it exactly. We’ve transplanted her. Transplanted London, too, but only the good bits. And perhaps the Cliftons will leave after all, and the rest of us shall stay on and…”

What? The target keeps moving. The lease is done after the second week. They might find another place nearby—Cromer has houses to be hired for a song—only Oscar would run screaming into the sea if he were kept too long from London, or else he would invite all of London to come to them, which London would. The Wildes have abandoned their usual coordinates. Perhaps this is why the sun beats a little more hotly on her shoulder, makes the handle of her parasol damp in her hand.

“You needn’t worry.” Oscar rests a hand lightly on her back. “From what little I know of Lord Alfred, he’ll keep to his room or else wander lonely as a cloud. If you pass him in the hall, throw him some beefsteak. Otherwise leave him be.”

“I shall be glad to.”

She reaches in a blind way for Oscar’s arm, leans her head toward his shoulder. Bees are making a holiday of their own in the miller’s garden. A bed of yellow primrose glimmers out from fruit bushes. In a propitiatory tone, she says:

“We are happy here, aren’t we? I don’t mean in an extravagant way.”

“Of course not; we’re English.”

“May the good Lord strike you dead!” she answers. “It’s Irish we are.” Then adds, after a pause: “Secret agents at the very least.”

His smile wells straight in her direction.

“I quite agree.”

“MUMMY!”

The seven-year-old boy she left an hour earlier is in exactly the same place she left him, hanging off one of Grove Farm’s fence stiles, peering into the foreshortened trunks of a coppice. In his three days here, Cyril Wilde has been in proximity to dogs, turkeys, chickens, ducks, geese, sheep, and cows—takes a special pleasure in overfeeding the pony that Mrs. Balls has left them—but, in a way characteristic of his linear sensibilities, has burrowed down to one animal, an otherwise unexceptional rabbit, plump from a summer’s diet of grass, but otherwise so identical to the other rabbits flying through the brushwood that it isn’t at all clear how he’s marked this one out.

Mark it he has, however, and has made it his sole aim to have this same rabbit eating out of his hand before another week. He has smuggled out carrots and turnips from Mrs. Balls’s root cellar. He has laid out trails of day-old bread chunks. This morning, the rabbit came within four yards, reared up on its hind legs, and regarded him in an agnostic fashion before bounding back to shelter. By now, in the light of midday, Cyril has emerged as a study in defeat, his cap and jacket long since sloughed off, the braces hanging loosely about his bony shoulders.

“No word from your friend?” calls Constance.

Cyril is silent.

“I say now,” says Oscar, “have you come up with a name for him?”

“Blackie.”

“Oh, but how marvelous. A more cripplingly conventional child might have opted for Cinnamon or Russet, owing to its colour, but you, my little genius, have opted for—perhaps it’s a more symbolic interpretation.…”

“The eyes,” says Cyril.

“Sorry?”

“He’s got black eyes.”

“So he does,” says Oscar, and says nothing more. Constance is quiet, too, for the same reason: All rabbits have black eyes. Yet what does that matter to a London boy taking his full draught of Nature?

“Dear boy,” says Oscar. “Do you think Blackie might spare you for an afternoon? I’m in frantic need of a caddy.”

Cyril sweeps his gaze one last time across the coppice.

“All right.”

“Now, you mustn’t laugh when you see the old man swing and miss. The miss never counts, or so I’ve been told. In fact, you might give the silly sport a go yourself. I’ve seen you swing a bat.”

Cyril nods.

“Splendid,” says Oscar. “We shall depart within the hour.”

He gives his Molucca walking stick a light twirl and executes a half-turn toward the house, then pauses and, in a voice not clearly meant for anyone, asks how to make the American heiress the voice of moral judgement without making her a prig. Constance waits to see if the question is rhetorical, then suggests chalking it up to her innocence. The heiress knows better because she knows no worse. Oscar points out that she’s rich, and wasn’t it Balzac who said that behind every great fortune is a great crime, and Constance says that the crime is not hers. The originating sin hasn’t yet touched her. She can see the world as a child. And she turns back to her child, their child, still on sentry, and then to Oscar, already striding toward his desk, and feels herself, in this unique moment, a kind of guest in both their worlds.

“Darling,” she says, resting a hand atop Cyril’s head. “A friend of Papa’s is coming tomorrow, and it appears we haven’t quite enough rooms, and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind—”

“Staying in your bed.”

The speed with which he meets her makes her blink.

“Oh, but only if it’s no trouble. Of course, the bed is quite large, and Mummy never sleeps very well, anyway, so you may thrash about all you like, and even cough a bit, and she won’t mind.”

“Where will Viv stay?” he asks.

“Vyvyan’s not here.”

“When he comes.”

There is no reproach in the voice—no hope, even, just resignation. Almost identical to the resignation in Vyvyan’s eyes when she delivered the news. Darling, I think it best if we left you here with the Wallaces, don’t you?

“Alas,” she says now, in a voice not entirely natural, “your brother is still quite unwell.”

“He wasn’t coughing any more than I was.”

“Oh, but he was, darling. Just a bit. I know because I…” Counted the individual coughs. “I simply felt that he looked a little ashen.”

“What’s ashen?”

“Pale.”

“He’d be less pale if he came here.”

“Well, darling, it’s the same sun there as here. The truth is that Vyvyan has never been as hardy a specimen as you. That is not his fault. That is not your fault.”

“So he’s to stay there.”

“For the time being, but we can always fetch him over.”

“Tomorrow, you mean?

“Well, not tomorrow. Pappa’s friend is coming, but the day after, perhaps, or the day after that.”

“He’s not coming, is he?”

The same note of resignation. How, she wonders, does any child acquire such perfect compliance with the state of what is? God knows she never learned it.

“Why don’t we think on it, darling?”

WHEN THEY CAME to Grove Farm a week ago, Mrs. Balls made a point of asking where the “old gentlewoman” should go. “I think,” said Constance, “you might put my mother-in-law in the room with the least exposure.”

“Are you quite sure, ma’am? There’s no sun or moonlight to go by; she might stumble.”

“She will not, I assure you. And as she keeps irregular hours, kindly leave her food just outside her door. She will claim it when she’s ready.”

Mrs. Balls, of course, has never attended one of Lady Jane Wilde’s salons. Constance was twenty-one her first time. The address then was Park Street, and Oscar’s mother kept thick curtains drawn over every window, so that visitors ushered into her double drawing room would at once have to grope their way, like heathens struck blind. On that particular afternoon, the room was so crowded and the lit pastilles so ineffectual and the mirrors so large it was impossible to see how far the room extended or where exactly you stood within it.

A program of sorts was offered. There was a Miss von Trift, who played the mandolin. A Greek gentleman named Mr. Perdicaris, who lived in Tangier and wrote on the subject of Moroccan pastimes. An American girl performed a poem with endemic bird sounds, and a spiritual intellectual relayed his most recent conversation with Queen Anne. Each act, upon its completion, plunged right back into the darkness from which it had emerged, and when Constance and her mother stumbled out again an hour later, the brightly lit June afternoon came at them like a scimitar.

“Good God,” muttered Constance’s mother, pressing a forearm to her eyes. “It has been like crawling into a lamp to find the genie.”

Here, if nowhere else, they were in accord. In Constance’s enduring memory, Lady Wilde was the genie, granting wishes that nobody had ever supposed they had, sitting there with such blowsy improbability in a low-cut lavender silk dress and a bright-green Roman scarf, her hair primped, her face daubed. Many in her newly adopted city of London found her ridiculous, but Constance knew that, in Dublin, of a Saturday afternoon, Lady Wilde might draw as many as a hundred esthetes into her drawing room, more than could be contained now within her entire Mayfair home. Yet, even in her new confinement, she carried on as though nothing had changed, as though darkness were her truest medium.

Since then, the genie has ventured less and less from her lamp, and when Constance and Oscar first broached the idea of her joining them on holiday in Norfolk, they braced for a refusal. Perhaps her creditors were pinching particularly hard, but with a passion that caught them both by surprise, she declared:

“Take me away. I hate London.”

The logistics were complicated, for Lady Wilde can no longer walk more than a block on her own recognizance, and must be heavily bundled even at the height of summer, but once she was set in the center of that rocking railway carriage, she rode it out like a galley oarsman, eyes on the horizon. Now that she has found a second womb of darkness at Grove Farm, she has remained there without a stir, except to emerge for tea and, occasionally, dinner. As best Constance can tell, her days are spent as they always were: sitting by a single squat, guttering, fattening candle, scanning newspapers and journals and volumes of poetry and dispatching the briefest of letters to friends in every quadrant of the world: Italy, Sweden, India, America. At times, her voice can be heard rising in a conversational way—she likes to unburden herself with her late husband—but at most hours, a stranger might pass her door with no knowledge that somebody lives on the other side. Even now, at three in the afternoon, Constance pauses before she knocks, as though to reassure herself that someone will answer.

“Tea already?” calls Lady Wilde.

“No, Madre. I am only paying a call.”

“You are most welcome, of course.”

Constance drags open the door, takes two guarded steps. Humped shapes well from the murk, one of them her mother-in-law, sitting up in her tent bed. Even sunless, the room has gathered some warmth, on top of which Lady Wilde has pulled the blanket over her and wrapped herself in a mantua. Old slide bracelets glow on her plump wrists.

“My dear,” she says. “I can’t be certain, but I believe there’s a chair somewhere.”

“There is.”

Taking hold of a ladder-back, Constance seats herself in the corner and waits patiently for her pupils to dilate.

“I hope we can expect you for dinner,” she says.

“Do you know,” answers Lady Wilde, “I’ve half a mind to speak to that young Mrs. Clifton.”

“What about?”

“Her demeanor. I have always believed a bride on her honeymoon should endeavor to look the part.”

“The groom is no more convincing.”

“That’s just it. I remember you and Oscar, fresh from Paris, bright as thrushes, perfectly engrossed with each other. Heaven knows such feelings are too febrile to last, but they do get a marriage off the ground, which is what every marriage must positively do.”

“Perhaps the Cliftons would have been happier on their own somewhere.”

“So they wouldn’t have to compare themselves every moment to you and Oscar? I shouldn’t wonder.”

Never once has this occurred to her.

“She’s pretty,” muses Constance.

“As you were, my dear.”

“Ha. I like that were.”

“I use it because what you are is so much better. The soul of goodness.”

In the next moment, they both falter, a little. How many times has Constance received some hasty summons from her mother-in-law and come running, by cheque or in person, and told Oscar nothing? And felt nothing like the soul of goodness because she only wanted to know there was a mother who, unlike her own, needed her.

“I’m glad you came,” says Constance.

“Oh, my dear, it was a summons from the angels. How perfectly oppressive London has become. So dull, so dark, so violent. Before too long, I’ve no doubt, my whole house must be put in entire repair. The foundation is sinking, as I think I’ve told you…”

“You have.”

“… and Number Six, Park Street, is quite beautifully done up, with substantially larger rooms. I could have it for seventy pounds a year and move at once.”

“We must look into it,” says Contance, with a light sadness that they are reuniting on old terms. “Might I ask you something?”

“Cara mia. Of course.”

“Did you ever find yourself favoring one of your children over the other?”

Lady Wilde closes her eyes and draws up the question like sap.

“Oscar over Willy, you mean.”

“Or the other way. I’m only wondering if you had moments where one of them felt peculiarly dear.”

“I suppose,” says Lady Wilde, “I always favored the one who didn’t live.”

This Constance wasn’t expecting. Isola, the baby girl, living out her nine years on God’s Earth (nine years, thinks Constance with a sudden pang) in the full bloom of her family’s love before being claimed by a sudden implosion on the brain. Lost forever, though, more than once, her mother has tried to retrieve her via séance, with unsatisfactory results.

“Are you asking,” says Lady Wilde, “because you favor Cyril over Vyvyan?”

Constance is glad of the darkness now.

“I don’t always know that I do. Or, if I do, why. I suppose Cyril, being older, is a bit easier. Sunnier as a rule, when he’s not fretting over his rabbit. I suppose, too, without the nanny here, the prospect of two boys underfoot…”

“My dear, please don’t exculpate yourself on my account. Vyvyan is well looked after, and his presence here would be superfluous.”

“Why?”

“Because he is still a child.”

“Surely that’s all the more reason to—”

“No, you don’t understand. He lacks as yet a soul, and until he acquires one, he has no greater claim on you than a dog or a pony. Oscar was the same way, you know. Purely animal until, at the age of seven, he said—and I shall never forget it, Constance—he said, Mamma, that wallpaper is perfectly scandalous, and I said, Ah, there you are. For, in that moment, there flashed out a soul, and our relations could ascend to the next level, where, I am happy to report, they have remained ever since. So it shall be with you and Vyvyan before long.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Oh, I do. You know, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Vyvyan turned out to be the artist between the two of them. Solitude does that to a sensitive soul.”

It is meant to comfort, she knows, but does it cast her in any better a light, to be starving a child into art? Is that really how artists are made? She herself grew up in acres of solitude, and what is she now?

“Oscar has a friend,” she says. “Coming tomorrow.”

Lady Wilde gives the news its due gravity.

“It was only a matter of time, I fear. My son has never been the sort to pine away for his art. Why do you think he goes to so many parties? Why do you think he writes in such an obscenely collegial form as the theatre?”

“I always thought it was so that he might be multiplied. But, you see, I don’t want him multiplied just yet. I’m selfish enough to want him undivided for a bit.”

“Oh, my dear,” says Lady Wilde, extending one of her arms like a bridge and waggling her bejeweled fingers. “I gave up on that long ago.”

“SHE’S AWFULLY OLD for the terrors,” she reme. . .