Dorian (37 page)

Now, at last, Dorian thought of his one-time friend and mentor with pity and even a little affection. How uncannily Henry had prefigured his own wet Tuesday afternoon of an interment with his description, in the
book
, of Dorian’s. The huddle of rain-wear at West London Crematorium that listened to a muttered invocation by a pathetic priest. The casket’s slightly tarnished handles clutched by hired hands. Then afterwards, at the Wottons’, the agony of stale sandwiches crumbling in the arthritic hands of ageing parents. Henry’s shy mother and father, down from Nottingham to do the decent thing by their flagrant son, both of them incoherent with grief.

Then there was the sibling, the sensible brother, who, with his Midlands mewl and his half-baked shoes, mysteriously came from an entirely different class from Henry. Like so many gay men of his era, Dorian reflected, Henry Wotton had had a capacity for reinventing himself, but in his case there’d been overcapacity. Rather than stopping at being gay, he’d become a twisted involution of homosexual self-hatred; instead of accepting the modest elevation provided by an Oxford education, Henry had metamorphosed into a parody of a toff.

The Bristol thrummed into Fitzrovia, its exhaust blatting at the plate-glass windows of travel agencies and sandwich shops. It was true enough, Dorian allowed, catching sight of his face in the rear-view mirror, that he remained young for his age, but the book’s airbrushing out of whatever impression the years had made on him was only the fictional correlate of Wotton’s own pretended cynicism.

No… Dorian groped for the switch under the dashboard and activated the automatic door of the underground car-park… Henry had exhibited none of the Olympian detachment he ascribed to himself in the book. He’d been as scared of dying as anyone Dorian had seen. As scared as Baz Hallward, as scared as Alan Campbell. Scared and not a little tender, too. Dorian looked up at the five storeys of the Gray Organisation. When he’d leased the building he’d doubted his capacity to generate enough business to justify the expense, but three years on he felt a proprietorial ease. He loved its 1950s functionalism, the go-faster chevrons of the mullions, the balconies like the pulled-out drawers of a filing cabinet. As for the grey flag with a ‘G’ on it, which fluttered from the flat rooftop, this seemed less like a signal of imminent surrender than like a banner proclaiming an advance, no matter how tentative, into the future.

Down in the car-park Dorian opened the passenger door for Wystan. The svelte whippet undulated out and stood twitching in the gloom. The typescript of Henry Wotton’s book lay on the back seat of the car where Dorian had slung it. Should I destroy it right away? he considered, but thought better of it immediately. After all, Victoria Wotton couldn’t be trusted. He’d have to wait until he was certain she’d got rid of her copy, or at any rate decided definitively against revealing its contents, before he could afford to abandon his own.

With that final difficult decision made – on what had already been a far from easy morning – Dorian Gray headed for the lifts and the tidier, easier world of work.

That winter and the following spring were exciting times for the Gray Organisation. Alexander McQueen and John Galliano both had
succès d’estime
at the Paris
haute couture
shows, and naturally Dorian was there, both in his personal capacity as a friend to both men, and in his professional one as the publisher of an influential design magazine. He was in his element, socialising at after-show parties, arranging for features, co-ordinating shoots and even doing some of the styling himself. There was a definite vibe about Britain in the air. It seemed that at long last the world spirit of stylishness – so long absent from London – had decided to return.

And waiting in the wings there was Tony Blair, a young, dynamic leader, ready to sweep Parliament bare of the stale, bloated and in some cases rotten Tories. As for Princess Diana, with whom Dorian sat on several different charity committees, she was pushing her personal crusade in the most radical of directions. In January she was in Angola clearing landmines with the Halo Trust, and making it absolutely clear that she had no intention of allowing royal protocol to get in the way of her humanitarian work, or her personal life.

Dorian Gray was mixed up in it all, as familiar a figure around the smart West End drinking clubs as he was in the precincts of Kensington Palace, or the corridors of New Labour’s HQ at Millbank Tower. Wherever he went he dispensed advice, charmed, facilitated the expansion of networks; wherever he went Wystan came trotting along behind.

Street fashion synergised with pop music, pop music energised politics, politics draped about its suited shoulders the humanitarian mantle of the Princess, and the cartoon antics of conceptual artists galvanised everybody. So what if the whole giddy rondo had the air of the
fin de siècle
about it? Because it
was
the end of the twentieth century, and after a hundred years of willed decline, there was a feeling abroad in the land that things could only get better.

That coming autumn, the Royal Academy would be staging a most audacious exhibition of the most controversial contemporary British artists. Dorian, who was involved on the publicity side, was in the middle of a planning dinner at Quo Vadis in Soho with the Academy’s director, when things began to go awry.

The Director was holding the table’s attention, discoursing on the scandalous situation in which he found himself – chronically hobbled by underfunding which prevented him from getting the works he’d like for the permanent collection. The other guests at the table – a sweaty art critic with fat eyes, a famous dealer with shaving-brush hair – were sympathetically nodding. Dorian was nodding sympathetically as well, when an internal voice sneered (so close to his inner ear he felt the breath tickling him from within), Fucking puffed-up little man – it isn’t his money to spend in the first place, it’s the tax-payers’. Dorian kept on smiling and nodding, but everyone around the table began to look different, and all that they were saying to sound different. It was all total and unmitigated bullshit.

The Director, the Critic and the Dealer were discussing the works that were going to be exhibited that autumn, when the Voice began again: Conceptual art has degenerated to the level of crude autobiography, a global-village sale of shoddy, personal memorabilia for which video installations are the TV adverts… I wonder if the Royal Academy gift shop is doing special offers on bottled piss, canned shit and vacuum-packed blood.

—What did you say? The Director rounded on him. Evidently Dorian had spoken aloud – but how much of what he’d said had been the Voice’s words?

He made his excuses and left. At home, at the mews house off Gloucester Road, he let Wystan out to pee in the backyard and retired inside to get himself a drink.

—Fusty and dark in here, said the Voice, like some middle-aged Sloane’s fucking
study
.

—That’s not true, Dorian snapped; these are all beautiful pieces – I chose each and every one myself.

—Yeah, the Voice prated, but that was years ago when you were young. It’s all out of date now – maybe your famous eye has deserted you, mm?

—I must be tired, Dorian said to himself; at dinner I felt so damning of everyone, but all those men are all brilliant in their fields. I need to throttle back a little, or else I’ll find myself becoming bitter despite myself.

He went to call Wystan in from the yard. The whippet stood quivering on the grate of an old fireplace, which Dorian had picked up at an antiques market but never troubled to instal. The dog’s flesh was stretched so tightly across his bones that the light from the lamp above the back door streamed right through his legs, illuminating the tracery of veins as if the poor beast were a living stained-glass window. We should snap those twiggy limbs and burn him in the grate he’s standing on, the Voice said, and Dorian muttered, This is distinctly
unheimlich
.

—You don’t even know what that means, the Voice carped; I don’t believe you’re up to speed in German. Best go and look it up in the dictionary –
if
you have one.

Dorian did as he was told. He flipped through his dictionary standing at the desk, the reading lamp illuminating the heavy book in a reassuring, scholarly fashion. He discovered that
unheimlich
meant ‘uncanny’, while
unheimlichkeit
meant ‘uncanniness’. This is certainly
unheimlich
, Dorian said to himself.

—Isn’t it, the Voice remarked.

—I know you. Dorian slammed the dictionary shut. You’re Henry’s narrative voice in that stupid book of his. I haven’t thought of it in months – I haven’t thought of
you
in months. All at once – could it be that he was a little drunk? – Dorian felt an urge to look at the typescript. It was locked in a cupboard in the attic room. He went straight up the stairs and reached for the door handle. The door was locked. Absurd, Dorian thought. I never lock this door, never.

—Perhaps there’s something inside you’d rather not see, Henry’s voice said.

—No, there isn’t. Dorian rattled the handle again. If he hadn’t locked it, could it have been the cleaner? She certainly had keys for all the doors in the house – but why would she lock this one?

—It wasn’t the cleaner, Henry’s voice insisted. It was you. You’re going mad.

—No I’m not, Dorian guffawed, but I bloody well will be if I stand here all night.

He went to his bedroom and undressed. There was a mirror attached to the inside door of his walk-in closet and, as was his evening ritual, he took the time to check himself over fore and aft. Not too bad – not too bad at all. In the bathroom he used a little cleanser and a little moisturiser, and efficiently tweezed a nasal hair. He brushed his teeth with a special-formula paste for sensitive gums. He slept soundly, floating on aquamarine sheets. In the morning all memory of the Voice had gone, and he’d forgotten about the typescript as well.

Busy, busy, busy. Trips to the gym where broad backs, thin backs, white backs, black backs, all bowed and rose. Groans rent the air as brawny and skinny arms were pulled back to reveal oval patches of healthy sweat. At the city-centre health club where Dorian was invariably to be found at lunchtime, the rowing machines were arranged haphazardly, which gave their users – as they oofed and aahed – the appearance of slaves going nowhere on a galley rendered motionless by opposing forces. At an invisible helm, Dorian pictured a giant Nubian, naked save for a Calvin Klein cache-sexe, who with massive hands beat out the hip-hop rowing rhythm on his own, drum-tight tummy.

Busy, busy, busy at the Gray Organisation, where close involvement with the New Labour campaign meant that Dorian – and Wystan – were required to attend meetings with Ministers-in-waiting, in order to formulate the communications strategies of the new regime. And what an occasion that election night turned out to be. Dorian began at a party in Kensington and, as the evening wore on, reeled into the West End. Never normally a heavy drinker, he found it hard to resist the effervescence of victory, downing glass after glass of bubbly, as Tory after Tory went down the plughole. Dorian ended the night with the select many (this was, after all, the People’s Triumph), at a massive beano on the South Bank, cheering the divine Tony as he grinned his megawatt grin. Then, on a peerless London May morn, Dorian boarded a coach with the select few, and they were bussed back across the river and issued with regulation Union Jacks. The vanguard of the future then stood in Downing Street and waved them, to titillate the entrance of the new Big Nob.