I had travelled to London to visit the past, to haunt the spectre of Oscar Wilde. The year was 1895; the place, the Cadogan Hotel in Sloane Street, set amid the leafy purlieu of London squares and grandiose mansions. On April 5th, 1895, in a corner bedroom of the hotel, Oscar Wilde, his suitcase open on the bed, half packed for a journey, found himself suddenly impaled on the pivotal moment of his life. That afternoon at the Old Bailey his libel action against Lord Queensberry had collapsed, amid great publicity and Oscar's timely absence.
It was a moment of decision. Behind him lay dizzying success, high-flown celebrity as a vaunted wit and playwright; ahead lay disgrace and ignominious demise.
I stood in the bedroom where Oscar had dithered, sipping hock. I gazed through the veil of lace and the window panes, past the tree tops of Cadogan Gardens, as Oscar in turmoil must have done, to view a skyline of rooftops and spires barely changed in 100 years. Why did he kick his heels and sit drinking until the moment of his arrest, at 10 past six? Why didn't he hurry instead to the boat-train? Why didn't he seize his last ditch chance to flee for France, without impediment, where sodomy cut a less controversial swathe through society's mores? In this, the centenary year of his death, these questions still hover, somehow amplified by silence, just as his life 100 years on seems almost closer. Oscar remains contemporary.
The Cadogan commemorates his stay almost sotto voce. It incorporates the apartments of Lilly Langtree, music hall diva and famous mistress of Edward VII, whose soirees were feted events which Oscar often graced before that final, fated visit. Now refurbished in late-Victorian/Edwardian style, with an emphasis on friendly informality, it provides a pampering ambience for the Oscar-hunter-at-large. The casual visitor will note a rash of photographs by the bar: portraits of Oscar and other ephemera. The hotel, as general manager Malcolm Broadbent points out, has been the venue for Oscar Wilde dinners and has staged readings of Oscar's musings by Corin Redgrave and Eleanor Bron.
Guests can still book the first-floor bedroom, where Oscar was collared for indecent acts, and sample his wit from the book of epigrams left ensuite. A pair of American devotees once booked the room and erected a shrine, inspired, perhaps, by famous photographs of Oscar around the walls. Alas, Wilde left us no graffiti. Painstaking efforts have ensured that the drapes and furnishing, the lace curtains, match those in vogue during Oscar's arrest - an almost macabre attention to detail. The last thing preoccupying him then would have been the decor.
Poet John Betjeman immortalised the moment: "He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer/ As he gazed at the London skies/ Through the Nottingham lace of the curtains/ Or was it his bees-winged eyes? He rose, and put down the Yellow Book,/ He staggered - and terrible-eyed,/ He brushed past the palms and the staircase/ And was helped to a hansom outside.
He spent that night in cells at Bow Street. It is unlikely that he slept, or that the police have marked the occasion, a la Cadogan, with portraits of Oscar on the walls.
The hotel is ideal as a hub from which to venture out in search of the landmarks of Oscar's London - the Haymarket Theatre and the Criterion, where his plays were first acclaimed; or Royal Arcade from which Goodyear's shop provided the hallmark green carnations that somehow epitomise his flamboyance.
I took the short stroll from the hotel's door, through the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, to nearby Tite Street where Oscar lived for many years with Constance, his wife (they married in 1884, when Wilde was 30, and had two children). On his letterhead the address is number 16. It was there he met Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, third son of Lord Queensberry, and began the fated affair that would undo him.
In tree-lined Tite Street, across the road from number 16 (a grandiose town house with high, wrought iron gates), stands Oscar Court, apartments named, I suppose, in homage. I stand on their steps, point the camera, zoom in on the door. Click, click, click. Then I pan the wall by the window. Oddly, no plaque denotes Oscar's former presence. I see a curtain sway and tip-toe away in embarrassment, crossing Royal Hospital Road where a little restaurant called Foxtrot Oscar sells potted shrimp and Brutus salad.
Alas, I had stumbled upon the wrong house. Since Oscar's sojourn there, Tite Street's dwellings have been renumbered. What was formerly number 16 is now 34, complete with blue plaque: "Oscar Wilde, wit and dramatist, lived here". A baleful terraced house, much less splendid than number 16 - this was where Oscar must have swooned over Bosie Douglas and planned their getaways together. A place of dreams.
The Marquis of Queensberry, enraged at his son's cavortings, on February 18th 1895, left a visiting card at Wilde's club: "To Oscar Wilde, posing as a sodomite," it read. Foolishly, Oscar decided to sue. Perhaps he feared that Bosie's father would go even further. However, Queensberry, marshalling evidence from a covey of Oscar's rent-boys (known as the panthers) forced Wilde's withdrawal of the action. The cat was out. Arrest would follow. Oscar sweated in the Cadogan, awaiting his fate in that upper room.
From Tite Street, I wander the Chelsea Embankment, along the Thames, to Little College Street, in the shadow of Big Ben. This is the route those rent boys would have taken, but in reverse, from their College Street eerie, where they lived on the attic floor of number 13. It is now a Church of England property. Gazing up, I can imagine the fevered gossip, the panic, the whisperings. I stand for a while, then make off towards Hyde Park Corner. Nearby, at 9 Carlos Place, formerly Charles Street, stands the house, tall and elegant in red brick, where Wilde lived years before. There you can sense the life of gentility, a reverie suddenly shattered for me by a fiftysomething Italian who propositions me from his car. It almost seems apt. He is selling, he says, Versace woollens, and has my size, a perfect fit. What would Oscar have said in reply?
To imagine him with me is not as fanciful as it seems. His presence still stalks the beat of leafy London, the Paris boulevards, the Georgian by-ways of Dublin, just as his words, his thousand bon mots, still ring in our heads. All day as I walked, I half expected - half hoped - I might glimpse him in the distance, with top hat and cane, his mind aswagger. I ask Malcolm Broadbent if the Cadogan would stage a centenary Irish wake in Oscar's honour this November. "A tempting idea," he said, then looked doubtful. On reflection, I hope he resists. Wakes, after all, are for the dead.
Tom Adair travelled with British Regional Airways (0044 345 222111). The Cadogan Hotel, London (phone 0044 20 7235 7141)