Originally written 10 years ago for a magazine that used short fiction with a book collecting theme. Hope you like it!
THE FIRST EDITION
(VERY SCARCE IN THIS CONDITION)
'Would you take £150 for it?'
There aren't too many bargains nowadays at Antiquarian Book Fairs and a bit of mild haggling seemed in order.
'No. The best I could do would be £180. They're very scarce you know, especially in this condition.'
It actually wasn't in very good condition, some scribbling on the flyleaf, spine a bit knocked, slight foxing on the title page - still, it didn't really seem a bad price for a first edition of "The Importance of Being Earnest." You couldn't call yourself an Oscar Wilde collector without an "Earnest", it was a scarce item, and I'd got £20 knocked off the £200 asking price.
Every collector knows the joy of getting home and unwrapping the new treasure - but I was going out that night so it got left until Sunday afternoon when the papers had been read. The spine wasn't really too bad and the brown fox-marks I could live with - well it was a hundred years old after all. But scribbling on the fly-leaf - and in green ink for heaven's sake:
OFOFWW
Why on earth do people do things like that? A signature, an inscription, a dedication - the right ones can add interest and even value to a book - but meaningless scribbles and doodles? And there was no way of getting it out without damaging the paper.
Then suddenly it dawned on me; this might not be a doodle, perhaps this was a signature.
OFOFWW - Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, his full Sunday name. Could this have been his own copy? Perhaps impossible to prove - but why not? Obviously the dealer hadn't made the connection or the asking price would have been more than £200, a lot more.
So I skimmed through the book, looking for any more evidence of ownership and putting on my best Edith Evans voice when I got to Lady Bracknell's "A hand-bag!" line. But there was nothing else, so up on the shelf it went alongside "The Happy Prince" and "The Portrait of Dorian Gray", promising myself that I would find the time to settle down and read it.
It was a couple of days later that I started hearing them.
Voices.
Or rather a voice. Indistinct - like next door's radio playing just a bit too loud - a couple of notches more and you could make it out, a little turn the other way and you wouldn't hear it at all.
Which might very well have been what it was. Except that my cottage was half a mile up a farm road from the nearest neighbour.
I looked around for old radios that might have switched themselves on, checked if the answering machine was playing up - nothing. Just this faint, unidentifiable voice. I couldn't even tell what language it was talking in, I couldn't even tell its sex.
This was it. All my friends, my family had warned me. A country cottage was all very fine they said, but living on your own; well, you were bound to go funny, start talking to yourself, get careless about personal hygiene, develop strange habits, hear voices.
Until now I thought I had been safe. Nobody could call me house-proud, but the garden was tidy and the cottage was usually clean enough for me to be able to invite people in without embarrassment. Hearing voices - the next step would be believing that my mind was being controlled by spacemen. Perhaps I should, after all, be thinking about the retirement flat in the city.
I had always understood that when people heard voices they heard them inside their heads - but this one definitely seemed to be external, coming from somewhere unfocused and indefinable in the living room. For two days it went on, not continuously, thank God, but gradually getting slightly louder, though still indistinct. Then I started smelling things.
The normal smell round my place is Donald spreading muck on the fields - you get used to it after a few years.
This was different, a sweet, flowery, hothouse sort of smell.
The smell grew stronger.
The voice grew stronger.
I started to look with increasing interest at the property pages.
Then on Saturday night, having failed to solve my problem at a stroke by winning the National Lottery, I was at last able to make the words out.
'That wallpaper - one or the other of us has to go!'
I'm no expert on hauntings and the supernatural, but this seemed an unlikely sort of comment from a poltergeist or the beast from the pit.
l suppose I should have been relieved, it could have been saying 'I've come to claim your soul!' In fact I was quite hurt. I had just done over the living-room in a perfectly nice paper from B & Q - when I say done, I mean that I had got Jimmy Ross from the garage to do it for me. Wall-papering isn't really my thing. The paper-hanging might have been another triumph for the black economy, but the paper was an inoffensive design and it was hung straight.
On Sunday the smell was stronger, not unpleasant, but it's nice to be able to choose your own fragrances. The voice was clearer too, every half hour or so, out it piped:
'One or the other of us has to go!'
By mid-afternoon I was getting jumpy. It wasn't that the voice was sinister -there were no Bela Lugosi or Vincent Price histrionics - it was educated, polite, quiet; tired one might almost imagine. But still it repeated over and over again:
'One or the other of us has to go!'
By the evening my nerves were at full stretch. Even my usual nerve tonic, a large malt whisky, failed in its healing mission. I went off to bed at an absurdly early hour - but it's a small cottage and a quiet countryside and all through the night I could just make out a distant, quiet voice saying:
'One or the other of us has to go!'
Nine o'clock on Monday morning found me outside B & Q waiting for them to open. Eleven o'clock found me, roller in hand, spreading Apple White matt emulsion all over the living-room wallpaper.
A late lunch. A strong smell of matt emulsion. Blessed silence.
Cleaning up. Put logs on the fire. Blessed silence.
It was early yet, but perhaps in this situation a modest dram wouldn't necessarily be the start of the slippery slope to solitary alcoholism.
Still blessed silence.
It is true what they say about living alone, you do start to talk to yourself. I heard myself say: `I'll just have a wee Laphroaig, and then get on with some work.'
'Work is the curse of the drinking classes,' came a now familiar quiet voice. That rang a bell. 'Oscar Wilde!' I thought out loud, and reached for the dictionary of quotations.
Yes, I was right, and 'One or the other of us has to go!' had been Wilde's comment on the wallpaper in the room in the Rue des Beaux Arts in Paris in which he was to die.
'I'm being haunted by the ghost of Oscar Wilde,' I thought. 'That's all I need to ruin my reputation in the village.' They are nice enough folk, neighbourly, but a little narrow. Goodness knows, enough eyebrows are raised in the village at my being unmarried, sixty-three, living alone, and claiming to be a writer - but if it ever got out that I was being haunted by Oscar Wilde it would be the last straw.
It was obviously "The Importance of Being Earnest". I had spent £ 180 on a first edition, very scarce in this condition (for once the description lived up to reality) and in some way I didn't understand, didn't want to understand, had brought the unquiet, undead, soul of Wilde into my living-room, and now had it quoting himself at me, from a book on my shelves.
I might be going mad. I might be, probably would be, found eventually, gibbering in the corner or hanging from the roof-beam. However I thought that in these somewhat unusual circumstances I was, perhaps, justified in starting a conversation with a book.
'Why... why are you here, what exactly is it that you are wanting from me, Mr Wilde.' There seemed to be no harm in being polite, we hadn't been introduced and 'Oscar' seemed a bit pushy on first acquaintance.
'I have nothing to declare, except my genius,' came the reply. By now I could appreciate both the beautiful speaking voice everyone wrote about and his taste for the well-turned phrase.
Wilde takes up column after column in my dictionary of quotations and the prospect of having become his captive audience and the thought of having to listen to all these carefully polished impromptu remarks for the rest of my days was hellish.
I might be a Wilde collector. "The Importance of Being Earnest" might be his best play, but this was much too much.
'If you can only spout quotations at me, keep quiet while I think what I am going to do.' It seemed almost normal to be talking to a ghost-ridden book.
'I couldn't exactly promise that now. You'll remember what I wrote in "Lady Windermere's Fan" - "I can resist everything but temptation," and it's been a long time since I got the chance to enjoy some intelligent talk. I'm grown quite out of the habit.'
'How's that?'
'Well, you see, I've been locked away in a tea chest in a furniture store since 1935. I thought that I had lost my voice.'
Of course he had my sympathy, but I had more for myself. Sixty years' back-log of Wildean monologue, day after day, night after endless night, a stream of polished, shining, scintillating wit from one of the language's greatest stylists. Gems each and every one of them.
Gems that would show up my own writing for what it was - the cheapest of paste, the dullest of dross.
I loved Wilde's books. I loved Wilde's mind. But I knew that I couldn't live with the man, or with his ghost.
Milton had written: 'As good almost kill a man, as kill a good book,' but surely he had never been haunted by a dead dramatist.
Oscar deserved his rest.
The Importance burned all right - but books take a dreadfully long time to burn. It wasn't easy to watch. However there seemed a certain reassuring finality about flames - I would hate to think that his spirit is still somewhere about the place.
The book has gone. In time the memory, I hope, will fade. But even now, almost a week later, I still hear that quiet, tired voice, reciting "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" from the heart of the flames:
'Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a word.'
I only pray, whatever he now is, wherever he now is, that Oscar considered the flames not a kiss but a sword.
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