4

Simpson’s in the Strand

Waterloo Station on that close september morning was hot and crowded. The station clock had failed; there was chaos on thle concourse.

As Arthur Conan Doyle stepped down from our fourwheeler, I handed him his case, his travelling bag, and the hatbox and bouquet of summer flowers intended for his wife. As he stood there, laden, smiling, bidding us farewell, he had about him an air of trustworthiness and decency that was utterly compelling. In my life, I have known many remarkable men—poets, pioneers, soldiers, statesmen—but I have known few better men, and none more straightforward, than Arthur Conan Doyle.

Oscar, still seated in the cab, was feeling in his pockets for money with which to pay the fare. Arthur called to him, “Let me pay my share, Oscar, but keep the cab. I want you to go directly to Scotland Yard. I can see myself off well enough.”

“To Scotland Yard?” said Oscar.

“Yes,” said Doyle, firmly, moving close to the open cab door and adopting his best bedside manner. “This is a matter for the police, Oscar. That boy was murdered—I have no doubt of that. If he was lying with his head towards the window, as you describe him, and his feet towards the door, then I suspect his throat was cut from right to left in a single, savage slice. The carotid arteries leading to his brain will have been severed instantly. He will have died in a matter of moments. Given his youth, the immediate loss of blood must have been considerable.”

Oscar was silent.

“How do you know this, Arthur?” I asked. “There was no sign of blood in the room.”

“Not on the floor, nor on the skirting,” said Doyle, “but some five feet up the right-hand wall, as you face the window, I noticed the tiniest traces of blood—not smears, but minute splashes. I imagine that when the internal jugular veins burst, for an instant a stream of the boy’s blood spurted high into the air and left its tell-tale mark.”

Suddenly, impulsively, Oscar reached out towards Conan Doyle with both hands. “Stay, Arthur,” he beseeched him, “stay and help me find who has done this terrible thing.”

“No, Oscar, I must get home. Touie is expecting me. It is her birthday, remember.”

“Will you return tomorrow?” Wilde implored.

Conan Doyle shook his head and smiled. His sharp blue eyes were ever mournful, but he had a quick and merry smile. “Oscar,” he laughed, “I am not a consulting detective. I am a country doctor. Sherlock Holmes is a figment of my imagination. I cannot help you and neither can he. You might as well ask the Happy Prince or one of the other heroes of your fairy tales to assist you. Go to the police. Go to Scotland Yard. Go at once.”

“I cannot,” said Oscar.

“You must,” said Doyle. “I have a friend at Scotland Yard—Inspector Aidan Fraser. Mention my name and he will give you every assistance. You can trust him. He is from Edinburgh.”

Oscar wanted to protest—absurdly, he held out supplicating arms!—but Conan Doyle would have none of it. Gently shaking his head, he began to back away from us, disappearing into the throng, calling as he went: “You will like him, Oscar. Tell Fraser everything—and follow his advice. Robert, make sure he does! Go now! Go at once!”

We watched and waved, as our new friend, laden with his bags and bouquet, turned his back on us and vanished amid the confusion of passengers bustling between platforms. “He is golden,” murmured Oscar, “and he has gone.”

As I climbed back into the four-wheeler, I called up to the driver, “Great Scotland Yard, cabby,” but Oscar countermanded me at once.

“No,” he said, coolly. “No. It is after twelve o’clock, Robert, and I have a fancy for oysters and champagne.”

“But—”

“But me no buts, Robert. Simpson’s in the Strand, driver, if you please.” Oscar sat back and looked at me appraisingly. “I need to think. And to think I must have oysters and champagne.”

Oscar got his way. Of course. Oscar always got his way. We were driven to John Simpson’s Grand Divan Tavern in the Strand. But when we arrived at the restaurant and were seated (at the ‘best’ table, on the ground floor, in the far left-hand corner, the one table that commands the room as a whole), to my surprise, Oscar waved away the proffered menu and announced our order. “We shall have potted shrimps and a bottle of your finest Riesling to begin with,” he told our waiter. “And then, from the trolley, I shall take the saddle of mutton and Mr Sherard will have his customary roast beef—pink and cut slantingly to the bone—with your freshest horseradish sauce, your heaviest Yorkshire pudding, and some lightly boiled cabbage, served, if you please, unexpectedly hot. With the roast meat, we will take whatever red Burgundy the sommelier recommends. I am in the mood to live dangerously.”

When the young waiter, smiling, had gone about his business, I said to Oscar, “What happened to your fancy for oysters and champagne?”

“That was a quarter of an hour ago,” he replied, “when we were south of the river. I have changed my mind since then. Consistency, as you know, is the last refuge of the unimaginative. Besides, I have done my thinking. I have decided we should do as Arthur advises. We shall go to meet Inspector Fraser—after lunch.”

“Why did you not go to the police at once—yesterday—as soon as you had discovered the body?”

Oscar, frowning, unfurled his napkin and tucked a corner of it into the top of his waistcoat. “I had my reasons…”

I looked at him expectantly. Carefully, he arranged the napkin across his ample stomach and sat gazing at me in silence. I waited. He said nothing. I tried to coax him. “And?” I said.

“‘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.”