Dorian (30 page)

‘Really?’ Wotton didn’t do surprise any more than he did America. ‘Where have we had the pleasure?’

‘We ’aven’t,’ the other hissed, ‘but about fifteen years ago I was mates with a bloke called Herman. There was this rich queer – nasty piece of work – who took a shine to ’im. This was all in Soho. Herm was a grievous fucking junky –’

‘
Moi aussi
–

‘An’ this geezer was supplying him an’ fucking him – because Herm was a renter too. Is any of this jogging your memory,
Mister
Wotton?’

‘A little… maybe.’

‘This rich queer took Herm to a party. I dunno what went down there – probably the usual fucking daisy-chain shit that kind got up to then – but the thing is…’ and the man’s voice, muted until now, choked and swelled ‘… the thing is, he wound up fucking dead. Fucking dead! I’ve been tracking the cunt who took him there for years now, fucking years. I know his scene, I know the other scum he hangs out with. I even know his name – Dorian-bloody-Gray – and don’t forget I know your name, too.’ Ginger stopped and huffed and puffed – but if he’d expected Wotton to be blown away by these revelations he was to be disappointed.

‘Mm, yes: Herman –
of course
I remember him. Utterly charming. I knew him – but only carnally – in the days when I was an active homosexual rather than a passive host. It’s interesting that you should blame Dorian Gray for Herman’s death – and incidentally, he’s told me about your homicidal designs on him – because if you won’t accept that your friend committed suicide, then
I
am the person you should blame for his demise…’ Wotton, with a gesture that summed up all the fearless condescension that had characterised his life, now took Ginger’s arm and, supported by the pudgy former skinhead (is it possible to call a skinhead a skinhead once he has become naturally rather than intentionally bald? Is ‘being a skinhead’ – like being a homosexual – a question of attribution or essence?), turned and made his way downstairs. As the two of them came in sight of the denizens of the
pays bas
, Wotton was saying, ‘… I gave him the smack that did for him… Still – not that it constitutes any kind of retrospective justification – Herman has had his revenge from beyond the grave…’ He paused for effect and summoned up a ravaged sob. ‘
Erha!
It was Herman who gave me AIDS.’

‘I see you’ve met Ginger,’ Cal Devenish said, squinting up at them through the skunk smoke billowing around his long face, ‘he’s my house dealer.’

‘What on earth d’you mean?’ the Ferret asked.

‘Precisely what I say. I let Ginger stay in the spare bedroom and in return he gives me and my friends priority service in his drug-dealing capacity. Are you doing some deliveries now, Ginge?’

‘Maybe,’ Ginger said, but the way he clutched the strap of his kitbag confirmed that he was.

‘Well, if so, would ya serve up this lot before you go? Does anybody want anything? I can vouch for the gear and the coke; I’ve plenty of E, anyway…’

Wotton, who had been standing looking out at the empty night-time street through a gap in the blinds, chose this moment dramatically to resume his exchange with Ginger. ‘I’ll give him to you, if you like,’ he said, his voice devoid of emotion. ‘Dorian Gray, that is.’

There was silence, and the open bourse in drugs ceased trading.

‘Whaddya mean?’ Ginger asked.

‘I’ll tell you where to find him and when. Should you wish to take your time, here’s his address.’ He passed over a visiting card. ‘I think’ – Wotton savoured the sentence – ‘it would probably be quite a good idea if you
were
to kill him, Ginger.’ A train bearing spent fuel rods chose this moment to shake the house like a terrier at a bone. Everything vibrated; the paper mound rustled. Gavin and the Ferret looked as if they thought the rumble and crash were the fury of a deity who had finally decided to punish Wotton, but he himself appeared unaffected. When it was gone, he resumed, ‘He’s at a crack house in Limehouse right now. I know because I spoke to him earlier this evening.’ He turned to Devenish. ‘Have you an
A–Z
?’

‘How do I get in?’ Ginger asked, packing his unsold stock away in his kitbag.

‘Simple. Tell the truth – say you’ve come to meet Dorian Gray. He’s such an habitué of the place you’ll get in. Here.’ He pointed out the location in the gazetteer. ‘Happy hunting.’

The quondam skinhead let himself out of the front door without farewells. ‘He has a key,’ Devenish muttered, as if Ginger were his teenage son heading out for an evening with mates, and these peculiar men disported about the place were really family friends enquiring after arrangements. ‘I dunno why we have to have him here at all,’ Zippy bleated, as she swung her tightly girded loins loosely in time to the music that infiltrated the room from covert speakers; ‘it’s not as if he’s remotely amusing,
or
sexy.’ She was trying to be provocative, but no one paid her any mind. Devenish was lost inside his stubble-burning; the others were in assorted states of shocked stupefaction. The evening, like a car recklessly driven by drunken youths over winter roads, had hit a patch of black ice. Its wheels spun, its engine screamed, the wind rushed past the darkened, rain-flecked windows. Inside, the five passengers, knees jammed against their ribs, waited in agonised silence for the inevitable impact.

‘Do you imagine’ – the Ferret spoke at last, in the absence of a crash barrier – ‘that he actually will
murder
Dorian?’

‘No,’ Wotton sighed, ‘I don’t think so. Not tonight, at any rate. He isn’t a fool, is he?’

‘Ginger?’ Devenish ground out his spliff. ‘No, he’s no fool. He’s upwardly mobile in a curious way: he’s putting one of his kids – he’s estranged from the mother; she lives up the road in Kensal Green – through prep school on the proceeds of his drug-dealing.’

‘Too many witnesses.’ Wotton ignored this blether. ‘I imagine Ginger’s gone for a recce. He’s bided his time this long; I don’t think he’ll want to screw things up through undue haste.’

‘May I ask,’ Gavin enunciated very clearly, if squeakily – the atmosphere in the room was so highly pressurised that it seemed to him as if he were breathing helium – ‘why it is you’ve decided that Dorian should die?’

Wotton took his time in answering. He gathered the skirts of his Crombie around his thighs and circumvented Devenish’s slag heap of words. He assumed his position on the curious Belle Époque throne, accepted the plate his host passed him, snuffled up the line that was upon it, took a glass of wine from Zippy and drank from it. He began to kill a Kurd. It was clear to everyone present that a speech was about to be made, as clear as if a toastmaster in a tartan waistcoat had stepped forward from the filthy kitchenette, tapped a small mallet and announced, ‘My sleepy lord, slutty lady and dopey gentlemen, pray silence for the moribund Mr Henry Wotton, self-hating homosexual, drug addict and AIDS sufferer, who will now rant and rave.’

‘I think we all know why Dorian must die. De Quincey didn’t have it right at all. Murder shouldn’t be considered one of the fine arts; rather it’s one of the wilder forms of popular entertainment. In view of that I think we can agree that Dorian is becoming a comedy hoofer; he must be stopped. True, we have no definite proof that he’s responsible for Baz’s or Alan’s death, while Octavia and Herman could be described as casualties of war. If we were to take our evidence to stupid squad they’d probably say we were suffering delusions, provoked either by drugs and disease or merely by the hissy fits of three ageing queers dumped by this Adonis.

‘We know better. It isn’t so much retribution we’re after in seeking to get Dorian killed, and only you, Fergus, are aroused by punishment. No, it’s a kind of symmetry we seek, a rounding off of events. Baz discovered Dorian over a decade ago, when he was a gauche little thing down from Oxford. Baz thought that he embodied the dawning age of “gay liberation”, and that his video installation of Dorian would become an icon of all that was beautiful and true and important about the inverted “lifestyle”. In fact, what has happened is quite the reverse: instead of this cathode portrait’s going on show and attracting praise, it has languished somewhere in a darkened room. Meanwhile, it’s the portrait’s subject who has become a kind of sadistic genius, exhibiting an infinite capacity for causing pain.

‘As this scourge of a retrovirus has flayed the backs of the in and the out, the queer and the queen, the faggot and the poof, this narcissistic nematode has wormed his way through the world, hollowing it out from within, while himself appearing completely unaffected. It moves me to speculate that he is a magus of some unknown kind, and that Baz’s portrait of him must be a voodoo doll, which Dorian has adapted so that it usefully malfunctions, absorbing – rather than transmitting – all the marks of age, pain and disease that should, by rights, be inscribed on his oddly blank face.’

At this, Gavin made as if to interrupt, but Wotton shushed him and continued.

‘I could video a portrait of him better than Basil Hallward ever did. I could capture him for you right now, as if there were a CCTV system that took in the Chinaman’s den. See Dorian Gray in one of the myriad rooms of this tumbledown mansion of Morpheus. Not for him, tonight, the darkened crack den, where dwarfish figures are lit intermittently by the flare of their equipment; nor does he wish to recline in the opium-smoking parlour, where Iranian businessmen repose on carpeted divans beneath the Peacock Throne rendered in purple tinfoil. No, Dorian has brought a brace of posh, leggy, arty chicks with him this evening. He’s force-fed these goslings with liver-busting pharmaceutical
foie gras
, while he himself has put a wad of MDMA powder under his foreskin, as a hillbilly might insert a chaw of tobacco in his cheek. See Dorian, then, his hands running over their silken armatures, as he and Chloë and Angela subside giggling behind dusty velveteen hangings; their six pupils large and flat and black and shiny, like a half-set of chinaware for some decadent’s dinner party.

‘In the remote distance there’s knocking, followed by raised voices at the front door, then pounding footfalls. Feeling the draught on his exposed nape, Dorian looks up from the sweet he’s been sucking, to find that it’s not Angela’s beading that is clicking in his ear, but Ginger’s dentures. “I’ve seen you, Prince-fucking-Charming! I’ve seen you!” he snarls. “I know where you live now, you murdering fuck, and I can have you whenever I want. Whenever-I-fucking-want!” He emphasises each word with a squeeze on the divine scrotum which is close at hand. For once it is Dorian who’s left moaning and thrashing about in pain, while his assaulter lets go and thuds off down the stairs, elbowing aside two saddo home boys sucking on a Volvic-bottle crack pipe. There’s a distant crash – the front door slamming – and he’s definitively gone. The posh girlies splutter and retch, while Dorian rocks back and forth in a foetal position, both hands grasping his bruised balls.

‘Well?’ Wotton aimed his monocular gaze like the barrel of a rifle at each of the others in turn. ‘What say you to that vision?’

But the Ferret, Gavin and Zippy were all asleep, the two men in each other’s arms, while the girl, who had crumpled where she’d been dancing, now formed a pool of dark satin on the red floorboards. Only Devenish remained in any position to comment. ‘Yeah, well,’ he muttered, dabbing at his side-winding spliff with a moistened finger, ‘Gray was always a nasty little piece of faggotry, no mistaking. Still, this portrait riff, Wotton, I like it – it has the resonance of a modern myth. When people say youth is wasted on the young, what they really mean is that they’d like to have their health and their looks again so that they could despoil them in the full awareness of their ephemerality. Your riff captures that very well. If Gray were able to stay young and have this video installation age in his stead, he’d be
the
icon of an era in which everyone seeks to hang on to their childhood until they’re pressing furry fucking teddy bears against wrinkled cheeks.’ He looked pointedly at the Ferret and Gavin. ‘You homosexuals are only the vanguard of a mutton army dressed as denim lambs.’

Wotton heard this out with an expression of contempt. ‘Fuck you, Devenish,’ he said conversationally, when the other man had finished. ‘You writers only ever pay attention to events so you can set fire to them during your paper ceremonials. Suppose Dorian Gray’s portrait were such a magical thing – you’d never believe it. Whatever my faults, I have at least lived my life at first hand, rather than filtering it through this paper as part of a literary experiment.’ He kicked Devenish’s ziggurat of tat; it rustled obligingly. ‘Besides, it would be better if you avoided attempts at eloquence; in my experience the English don’t weave tapestries of words, we lay prose carpet tiles.

‘I myself have only one virtue – I hate every little thing and all big ideas. I loathe the so-called “art” of the twentieth century with a particularly rare and hearty passion. Would that all that paint, canvas, plaster, stone and bronze could be balled up and tossed into that fraud Duchamp’s
pissoir
. With a few notable exceptions – Balthus, Bacon, Modigliani – the artists of this era have been in headlong flight from beauty or any meaningful representation of the human form. Were Basil Hallward’s video of Dorian Gray to have a life of its own, it would be a fitting coda to this vile age with its spasms of isms. Yech!
Christ
, how this city sickens me. I wish the season would begin so that I could escape to the country and shoot a little smack.’

17

In the misty dawn of a steadily brightening November morning, when the grass was lucent with hoar-frost, and each gnarled, mistletoe-wreathed oak or bare beech that loomed up from the parkland had the appearance of a petrified example of prehistoric megafauna, a lone traveller who had chanced to stumble upon the country house of Narborough could have been forgiven for imagining that he had travelled back in time to some gentler, nobler age.

Occupying a broad valley which had been dammed to create several ornamental lakes and fishing ponds, the Narborough estate had an air about it, at once foursquare and diaphanous, that would have made it an ideal subject for a set of Wedgwood dinner plates. In the late-eighteenth century, the 2nd Duke had indeed been approached by Josiah Wedgwood with precisely that aim in view, but he had shown the potter the door. A door that, like all of the main house, had been built by Vincenzo Valdrati himself, together with his travelling band of master craftsmen.