Dorian (6 page)

The Ferret had serious taste. There were good Persian rugs on the parquet floors, fine modern paintings on the silken yellow walls. The place had an apian smell. Pollen, wax, royal jelly, honey. There were proper bookcases which appropriately sequestrated the Ferret’s serious collection of weighty tomes. Outside, the sweep of the river was unusually glittery in the sun. Inside, all was furtive, comforting gloom.

The Ferret and his guest were being imperfectly served by the current catamite, yet another Dilly boy, Jon. He was a big, crop-headed bruiser who lent a tin ear to his silver service. Each time Jon offered the rack of toast, Wotton observed the word ‘FUCK’ tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand, and each time he charged Wotton’s glass, the word ‘CUNT’ was manifested on the knuckles of his left. ‘Thank you, Jon,’ said the Ferret; ‘now put it back in the cooler – the
bucket
, that’s right.’

Wotton exhaled cigarette smoke over a small silver dish of truffles. ‘I’ve taken a shine to that boy Gray,’ he purred.

‘I know,’ his host slurred with fatigue.

‘It’s disgusting the way you know everything, Fergus – perhaps you’re God?’

‘That would be a turn-up.’ The Ferret appeared to be genuinely pondering the ramifications; at any rate his old, lizard eyes were being occluded by near-transparent lids.

If the Ferret had been God it would have explained a lot. The occurrence of evil, for one thing, and the extent to which it thrived, because for much of the time he left the world to its own devices and slumbered, a curiously willing victim of narcolepsy. So it was on this occasion: the window of the Ferret’s consciousness was slowly pulled to, and his brow declined towards the smoky truffles. ‘Perhaps,
pour m’sieur un petit cachou
?’ Wotton mimed pill-popping for Jon’s benefit.

‘I was gettin’ one, mate.’ He went to the sideboard and selected a pillbox from a display of bibelots and knick-knacks.

‘What’s he on nowadays?’ Wotton adopted the hobbyist’s tone he used for serious drug talk.

‘Same as ever, five-mil Dexies in the day, tombstones or bombers if he’s out on the razzle.’

‘Spares?’ A twenty-pound note appeared in Wotton’s hand and was exchanged for the pillbox less the required dosage.

‘C’mon, Fergus me old love…’ Jon cradled the Ferret’s head with surprising tenderness, and as the jowls sagged open, deftly inserted a couple of Dexies ‘… ’ave a little shampoo to wash ’em down…’

‘Gaa! Oh – gaa! This is bitter.’ He came round abruptly.

‘It’s always bitter – when you crunch ’em.’

‘But I
like
crunching them – more Champagne… ah, better… much.’ As the Ferret slurped, Jon continued to cradle his warty head. The lizard eyes flickered, opened and then focused on the twenty, which was still tucked between the ‘N’ and the ‘T’ on Jon’s left hand. ‘You young people imagine money will get you everything,’ the Ferret said, without rancour.

Wotton reflected that he was a noble queer of the old school, who rather than paying his servants preferred that they steal from him with panache. ‘And old ones like you know it full well.’ He ostentatiously munched a Dexy of his own and snapped the box shut.

‘You still here?’ said the pocket Morpheus.

‘I’m not going until you tell me what you know about Dorian Gray.’

‘That would take simply hours…’ the Ferret disengaged himself from Jon’s arms ‘… I’m not prepared to have you remain for a fraction of the time necessary – you consume so much, Wotton, it’s like having elevenses with a high-class bloody renter. Still, I was right about recognising him, I knew his bloody father – I know his bloody mother too. As a matter of fact he lives virtually next door to me… across the river behind Battersea Park –’

‘Fergus, I know where his flat is, what I want to know doesn’t appear in the A–Z. He’s distinctly cagey about his family.’

‘As well he might be.’ The Ferret yawned expansively, stretched, rose and walked to the mantelpiece, which, instead of leaning upon as any average man might, he tucked himself beneath. ‘Dorian’s father was a peer and a curly-wurly. An habitué of the Grapes, he liked a bit of scarlet as we all did in the war –’

‘The war?’ Wotton was incredulous. ‘Which war – the Crimean?’

‘No, the Second. You youngsters take so much for granted, you know nothing of the way we were, the tenderness that can exist between men from quite different stations in life…’ Reaching up above his head, the Ferret selected a photograph in an ornate gold and ivory frame from among many similar. It showed a young man in pillbox hat and frogged jacket. ‘Ah well’ – his eyes grew misty – ‘I’m wandering. Dorian’s father, Johnny Gray. He was a gambler and a drinker, part of the set around Lucky Lucan. What passed for a man of the world in the days when the world – for that sort of man – was the size of a schoolroom globe. He put on a grand show, indeed he did. Very upright, didn’t want any whispers –’

‘So how did you know he was queer?’

‘Like I say, we had similar tastes. Must I elaborate? Anyway, he married Dorian’s mother – Francesca Mutti – for what? Show, certainly, and I daresay issue as well. Although he already had an heir from a previous marriage, these types like a spare. I’ve heard it said he was vicious to the boy before a friendly aorta took him from us.’

‘And the mother?’

‘You’ve never heard of her, my dear! She was a thinner, more elegant Lollobrigida. Very beautiful, very sexy – if you like a pudendum, that is…’

For much of the time Henry Wotton wasn’t altogether sure which human gender he preferred, or even if he liked sex with his own species at all. Pudenda? Pricks? Petals? What now?

It was true that his raving, rampant and still rambunctious drug addiction took up much of his energy, but he wasn’t impotent – yet; and there was a deeper, stranger ambivalence at work in him than straightforward and manly homosexual self-hatred. Henry Wotton was prone to saying – to anyone who would listen – that ‘the chameleon is the most significant of modern types’. And while his outer appearance – the suits from Savile Row, the accessories from Jermyn Street and Bond Street – would seem to belie this, the truth was that beneath Planet Wotton lay a realm of complete flux. He was a Mandarin intellect who had calluses from annihilating Space Invaders and a social climber who revelled in the most dangerous class potholing. He professed no politics other than revolutionary change – for the worse. In the context of such a comprehensively contrary temperament, his conflicted sexuality was almost superfluous. Or so he liked to imagine.

He also liked to imagine that what he looked for in a lover was not so much this face or that figure, let alone
style
. (Yech! How
poofy
, how
precious
, how
twee
, how
bide-a-wee
. Style – the very word could trigger the telling of another hundred decades on his internal rosary of contempt.) No, what Wotton sought was mortal clay to be moulded and shaped with a degree of definition that he felt lacking in himself. Henry Wotton wanted only to be
anybody
by proxy.

Basil Hallward, with his talk of being ‘unashamed’, his proselytising for ‘gay’ rights (another word that couldn’t exist in the Wotton lexicon, save in so far as it applied to bunting), proved all too resistant to Wotton’s project. But it wasn’t on account of his pink militancy that he’d been discarded. Wotton didn’t mind if his doppelgänger was a campaigning homosexual, in fact it suited him. It was rather because Baz clung on to such exalted notions of his own artistry that he had to go.

Baz would keep trying to reassert himself as a flamingo when Wotton was seeking to employ him as a croquet mallet. Not that Wotton thought of himself as a player – after all, what could he possibly do
were
he to be an artist, save price up piss bottles, and stack more shit cans on the shelves of the personal memorabilia mart? He knew Baz was right about the direction conceptual art was taking, and as for art that depended on more than craftiness, well, he had not the craft for that. People who met him at the square cocktail parties advertised by oblongs assumed that he styled himself as some contemporary dandy,
flâneur
, or boulevardier, and that he saw himself as a work of art. Whereas people who met him in squats, or at underground clubs, took it for granted that he had a private income. But neither lot was correct.

Wotton lived off his wife, Batface, and he had no other creations besides those, such as Dorian, whom he met and manipulated. Like some royal matriarch, Wotton himself displayed none of the grosser symptoms of misogyny; rather he was a carrier. No one –
avant la lettre
– could credit the idea that the Wottons had sexual intercourse. She seemed too vague and he too disengaged for them to bring their genitals into sufficient proximity with each other at the right time. If tumescent simultaneously, it was to be supposed there was a wall or a floor between them.

Still, if Wotton could achieve intercourse through solid surfaces, his imaginative gifts were equally magical. It took him only a short time in his lovers’ company for him to be able to picture their doings with unbelievable accuracy. Henry Wotton could have written a brilliant book about the life and times of… Henry Wotton, but as he himself said derisively, ‘The only circumstances in which I would write a
roman à clef
would be if I’d lost my fucking car keys.’

After a week’s acquaintance with Wotton, which included a single night in the blood-red-painted bedroom he kept on the ground floor of his Chelsea home, Dorian found himself suffering from a florid bout of woman-hating. He despised their shape, their smell, their genitals, their gooey secretions – lachrymal, vaginal, emotional – their hair, their faces, the lilt of their voices. All of which was particularly unfortunate for the young woman he had been been making love to during his last term at Oxford. ‘Making’ in the sense that he was making it up as he went along, while she was assembling a prefabricated illusion for herself to inhabit. ‘Love’ in no sense at all.

She came to see him in London after a two-week lapse in phone calls. On his part. She went to his penthouse, which was on the posh, park-facing side of Prince of Wales Mansions. He let her in and she kicked off her sweaty sandals so as to feel the tiled floor cool beneath her hot soles. It was the fetid mid-morning of the same day Wotton rendezvoused with the Ferret. Dorian made tea for her in the splendidly-appointed kitchen, while she padded around the main room, combing the deep pile with her paws. She was feline and blonde, her name was Helen and she too was beautiful – if you like pudenda.

—What’re all these monitors? she said.

—It’s a video installation, a kind of TV sculpture.

—I know what that is.

—It’s by this guy Baz I met.

Dorian went to a niche in the wall and dickered with switches. The monitors fizzed into life. On the screens the naked Dorians effervesced. Helen stared at the gorgeous bodies. Baz Hallward’s piece was most cunning; it forced all who looked upon it to become involuntary voyeurs, Laughing Cavaliers, compelled to ogle the young man with eyes pinioned open.

—Is he a poof? she spat out.

—What?

—You heard. Is the man who made this a poof? You know what that is, right?

That’s how it went, possibly. It’s a mistake altogether to write off young women of Helen’s sort, scions of the upper-middle-class Hampshire convent-school set, who go wild when they discover what’s between their dewy thighs. She was smart enough to read theology, and perceptive enough to read what was in her tea leaves once she’d drained her cup.

—Why the Earl Grey?

—What?

—Why’re you drinking Earl Grey? It’s such a cliché.

—Oh… I dunno… this guy I know… he makes it… and he says the flavour’s incomparable.

—Is that the artist?

—No, a friend of his, the son of the woman who’s the benefactor for the Youth Homeless Project.

—Does
he
have a name?

—Wotton… Henry.

The silence between them wasn’t awkward – it was boorish and stupid. Like a drunk, drooling student it bumped about the trendy minimalism of the penthouse, knocking into the blocky blue divans, the huge coffee table, the varnished wood pediments that supported
Cathode Narcissus
’s nine monitors. Dorian was so easily influenced – they both knew this. He took on other people’s styles, modes and even habits the way kitchen towelling sopped up spilt milk. And was there any point in crying over this? When he’d begun fucking Helen he’d taken to drinking Lapsang Souchong – now he was getting infused elsewhere.
Of course
she’d known he was a poof, but only in the way we all know we’re going to die.