Dorian (31 page)

Even to call Narborough ‘the finest Palladian house in England’ was to demean it by association with any lesser edifice. Put simply, Narborough stood entirely alone, a rampart faced with delicious Portland stone, fully two hundred and fifty yards from east wing tip to west; the entire, sixty-foot-high façade rendered with the most edible masonry; the roof surmounted with no fewer than thirty six-foot-high rose-hued marble urns, each one bearing an individual bas-relief of fornicating fauns, salivating satyrs or diddling dryads. Surrounded by fifty acres of William Evans’s landscaped gardens and a further five hundred of the aforementioned parkland, with its lakes and orchards and outbuildings, its conservatories and gazebos and follies, its shoots and fisheries and farms, Narborough was not so much a house as an entire world.

Which is why such a lone traveller, crunching over the gravel in the first silvery rays of a winter morning, and gaining admission to the central hallway of the house via an inconspicuous side door (the main ones, fully two storeys high, had not been opened since the visit of the last King Emperor), might have been alarmed to hear, bouncing along the milk-white marble of the main corridor and echoing off the Baldini frescos, a rousing chorus of feel-good fag-haggery. ‘It’s raining men!’ the big black mama’s voice bellowed out. ‘Hallelujah, it’s raining men, ev’ry spe-ci-men! Big! Tall! Short! Fat! I’m gonna go outside and get ab-so-lute-ly soaking wet!’ And so on and so forth.

The next thing our hypothetical wanderer in a sea of mist might have registered as being at variance with his expectation of an aristocratic Arcadia would’ve been the sight of Jane, 8th Duchess of Narborough. This lady came running from the back of the house, wearing a muu-muu sewn from an entire rainbow of parachute silks, which billowed about her slender form like a psychedelic tent. Her lank, grey hair flying, she disappeared into the first of a series of enormous reception rooms. Following in her train went a retinue comprising – in order of size – a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, a pygmy goat, a Canada goose and a Peking duck. As they traversed the hallway, feeling the cool of the marble beneath trotters, hooves and webbed feet, they all shat.

In the Hyderabad Drawing Room (which had once housed a collection of Mogul miniatures beloved of the 4th Duke, but now contained only a free calendar from a local Indian takeaway, tacked on to one of the teak-panelled walls), she found nobody save a thirteen-year-old girl in the full bloom of puberty, dancing around a boom-box, which sat on the bare parquet belting out the gay anthem. The girl gyrated in an altogether abandoned way, shaking her long auburn hair into an entire aureole of frizz, waggling her long legs in their flared jeans. She clawed at the air with painted nails and undulated her arms like a squid’s tentacles. On the far side of the room from this spectacle was a marble fireplace as big as a crusader’s tomb, in the very grate of which stood a quivering whippet, its flesh stretched so tightly across its bones that sunlight streamed right through its legs, illuminating the tracery of veins as if the poor beast were a living stained-glass window.

‘Phoe-beee!’ the Duchess ululated, and again, ‘Phoe-beee!’ until the girl, deigning to register the presence of the honking, grunting, ponging menagerie, snapped off the music with a naked toe. ‘Oh, Phoebe,’ Jane Narborough continued, ‘it’s
awfully
early to be having a disco down here – I don’t think anyone else is up yet.’

‘My dad’s up; he’s in the west-wing conservatory.’

‘Well, that’s as may be, but to be honest, Phoebe, I don’t think he went to bed last night. What I’m trying to suggest – and this is only a suggestion – is that it might be considerate if you were to wait until after nine to play your pop music. My Nichiren Shoshu group will be here then – and their chanting wakes people up as it is.’

‘O
K
,’ Phoebe said with ill grace, ‘but it’s bloody cold in here, Jane – and this is the only way of keeping warm. It’s
so
cold and I can’t find any fuel; I even considered breaking up that silly whippet over there and burning its horrid twiggy limbs.’

‘Um, well, I don’t think that would be
too
good an idea, my dear.’ Despite her legendary respect for all living things, the Duchess didn’t appear too outraged by Phoebe Wotton’s suggestion. ‘Wystan is Narborough’s dog and he’s most fond of the poor beast. I myself find pedigree dogs to be evidence more of their owners’ willingness to play God than of any love for animals. Your father’s in the west-wing conservatory, you say? I’ll go and see if he wants anything. Come come!’

This last was to her snuffling, pecking entourage, whom Jane Narborough also addressed with a smattering of what she imagined to be their respective languages, so convinced was she of their intelligence. The little ark coasted off behind its multicoloured silken sail. As soon as they were gone, Phoebe shut the vast doors and turned the boom-box back on. She resumed undulating.

The west-wing conservatory was a glass and cast-iron construction, an exact replica (one-tenth scale) of the original Crystal Palace. It had been commissioned by the 4th Duke in a fit of mid-nineteenth-century modernity, and ever since had stood alongside the stately home, tethered to it by a glass corridor of an airlock, and closely resembling a Victorian spaceship that had made one, ill-fated voyage to the past. However, it had at least this virtue: while most of the chattels from the rest of the house had been sloughed off by the châtelaine in her spasms of ill-considered and ineffective efforts at spiritual improvement, the superb collection of exotic plants amassed by the 4th, 5th and 6th Dukes remained not simply intact, but perfectly well tended.

It was logical that Henry Wotton would have fetched up here, because it was the only part of the entire property – saving the staff cottages – that was properly heated. His wheelchair stood atop one of the grilles, its wheels almost hidden in steam, while its occupant was obscured by the cascading branches of
Felix fidelis
(the highly toxic Faithful Cat tree of Sumatra). A few handfuls of conveniently-shed eucalyptus leaves lay on the lap of his Argyll plaid travelling rug. These Wotton gathered up in one of his claws-for-hands and crushed under his pitted knife of a nose.

His other hand was fiddling with a cigarette, and it was this that Jane Narborough noticed as she and her menagerie came crashing through the undergrowth. ‘Henry!’ she expostulated. ‘You aren’t
smoking
, are you?’

‘No,’ he replied ruefully, ‘I’m not. You know perfectly well that I’ve given up, Jane.’

‘I know you made an awful fuss about it, but what’s that in your hand?’

‘True, it’s a cigarette; I think that
au fond
I will always be smoking – you cannot break the habit of a lifetime so simply. But I hold on to this one for something to do with my hands. If you pass me over that duck I’ll cheerfully wring its neck instead.’

‘Oh Henry, I-I-I think it’s simply marvellous the way you keep joking in –’

‘In the face of death?’

‘I was going to say “in spite of your illness”.’

‘The illness is over, Jane; this is the endgame. I should’ve thought you, with your doctrine of eternal recurrence, would have less of a problem referring to it. Anyway’ – he summoned himself, cast aside the cigarette and the eucalyptus and reached out for one of the Duchess’s hands – ‘if you are right about the cosmos I should like to be reincarnated as one of your goats; however silly you may be, you are also genuinely kind. Thank you for letting me and Phoebe stay. Just getting out of town is a balm to me now.’

‘Oh… um… well… Henry… you needn’t…’ Jane was profoundly uneasy with such compliments, especially from such an odd quarter. They felt like an ill wind, but she blustered on. ‘It’s no trouble, truly; stay as long as you like – and Phoebe is a dear. One thing, Henry – it’s Binky; they’re shooting today and he… well… he’s
very
particular about lunch –
placements
and so forth… He wanted to know if Batface would be down in time… and Dorian?’

Wotton gulped a few mouthfuls of the humid, vegetative air before answering, ‘Honestly, Jane, it’s astonishing that Binky Narborough is still slaughtering wildfowl after all these years of your indoctrination –’

‘He doesn’t shoot himself any more,’ she put in; ‘he only likes to make sure the guns are doing it properly.’

‘Even so, I thought that when you trepanned him it would put a stop to the killing. You assured me having a hole in his head would unblock his chakras, or whatever.’

‘Oh it does, Henry, it does,’ she said mournfully. ‘It unblocks them only too well. I fear he’s having some sort of
dalliance
with Emma Wibberly.’

‘The Bishop’s wife?’ Wotton queried, and Jane nodded mutely. ‘Christ, it’s difficult to… I mean, he’s a very
slight
fellow…’ Wotton was bewilderingly out of character ‘… and she – she’s distinctly
robust
… It must be…’ and all out of words ‘… it must be –’

‘Like a tomtit on a side of beef,’ the Duchess snapped. ‘My thoughts exactly, Henry, and they’re not pretty ones. So you see’ – she was sobbing a little – ‘I’m doing my very best not to upset him at the moment. D’you think they’ll be down for lunch?’

‘Jane, poor you, and a house full of people to boot. Adding Dorian Gray to all of this is hardly likely to improve things.’

‘Oh, I’ve never thought he was as bad as people make out, and I’m amazed you should be one of them, Henry; I thought he was your friend.’

‘All the more reason why I should know
exactly
the sort of thing Dorian gets up to. He called me only last night to inform me of his latest bad behaviour.’

‘Tell
me
, then.’ She scraped up a cast-iron chair and floated down on to it. ‘Tell me the sort of thing. Tell me what he did – it’ll take my mind off the image of Binky and Emma… well, y’know.’

‘I’m not sure anything
could
erase that image, Jane,’ Wotton said, and then muttered, ‘A tomtit on a side of beef – you couldn’t make it up.’

Dorian Gray liked to cruise anywhere and anything. As the years had passed, so catholic had his cruising become that he would’ve been perfectly at ease coming on to a consistory of cardinals in the Vatican. No grouping of people was safe from his attentions: a coachload of Mormons from the Midwest ‘doing’ Europe; a housewives’ club down from the North on a shopping spree; a Sado-Masochist Pride March wending its way through the West End. Irrespective of age, gender, race or sexual orientation, Dorian Gray delighted in their seduction, and if he could afford the time to ruin them into the bargain, then so much the better.

The important thing was always to stay alert. Dorian had discovered that once your conquests run to thousands it becomes increasingly likely that you’ll bump into some ravaged nun, traduced traffic warden, or sinned-against civil servant from your past. It helped that Dorian remained as much of a chameleon as ever, ceaselessly adapting his style to fit his surroundings; it helped too that as the years went by from each pressing of the flesh, and the vintage aged, the vintner remained the same. In order to minimise unpleasant encounters, Dorian had discovered it was best to follow a systematically altered course through the ocean of body fluids. As for the ever present threat of Ginger, Dorian carried a gun.

None the less, there were cruising locations that were irresistible by virtue of their convenience and the variety of flesh on offer. Happy hunting grounds to which he returned again and again, where the abundance of game never declined, and the watering holes remained crowded with fine specimens. One such was London’s South Bank arts complex. From the newly-opened Oxo Tower at one end to the Royal Festival Hall at the other, there was a solid strand of cafés, bars, galleries and venues. The embankment itself attracted any number of casual strollers, and the walkways of the brutalist Hayward Gallery had their own subcultures, of teenage skateboarders and street people – both of which, in their peculiar way, held an attraction for the jaded raptor.

On a Sunday such as this, when the posh people he knew were clomping in the country and the bourgeoisie were cavorting with their wretched whelps, Dorian would often take in an exhibition or attend a play or a concert. Invariably, he’d been out all night in the clubs, and a lick of his sweat alone could have loved-up another. So he prowled, on the look-out for the lone quarry, who could be separated out from the herd and brought to the dusty ground in a welter of stale intoxicants.

Dorian loitered in the main gallery of the Hayward, not bothering too much with the rusty steel pillars of Donald Judd, except as a neutral background against which to observe his true objective. Not
him
– too ugly, too furtive, too easy. Nor
her
– too hysterical, too nervy; wouldn’t get her off the premises except in a black plastic bag. Him, possibly… yes, very nice, very pert indeed, although the beige suede culottes are a desperate shame. He certainly looks at a loose end… Oh shit! A grin had split the muzzle of Dorian’s intended prey. He’d seen his special friend. Silly bitch! Dorian took a few seconds to despise the young men thoroughly as they hugged and kissed, before strolling off arm in arm. He turned away from the revolting spectacle and, moving fast, nearly ran straight into… Helen!