Читать книгу Dorian - Уилл Селф - Страница 14

5

The soles of your feet snagged and scratched by twigs, sap smearing your calves, you proceed on tiptoes over the treetops of Battersea Park. Occasionally your passage disturbs a nesting pigeon, which burbles with sleepy alarm. This portion of London is an old shambles, where stagnant water once lay and gypsies encamped to render horseflesh down for glue, which is why bad air so adheres to the place. No amount of imperial landscaping can cover up this malodorousness, the swamp that lies beneath the pleasure gardens and the miasma percolating up through the run-down ornamental terraces.

You pause in the clearing between one stand of trees and the next, hovering above the boating lake, looking down on its brown lapping of pondweed and sweet-wrappings. No, this is not an era for municipal grandeur. The city, feeling itself to be moribund, is simplifying its routines, deaccessioning its most solid and durable possessions in favour of sentimental trinkets and plastic gewgaws. It wants to move into a gigantic granny flat, where – while still preserving the illusion of independence – it can have all of its practical needs taken care of.

In the mid-distance, bright yellow pinpricks indicate the dark liner of the Prince of Wales Mansions, as it slides through the inky urban night.

In memory arrivals were always made of this: the oblique and the impossible, as one tunnelled up from below into the brightly-lit burrow, or swung in through a skylight on a flying trapeze. But even if it cannot be recalled, it must be assumed that Henry Wotton arrived for Dorian Gray's vernissage by means of his car. Because that was how he arrived almost everywhere in those days, the car being, he said, a kind of mobile potting shed in which he might sit and muse and infuse. Smoke, mostly.

Wotton drove south over Chelsea Bridge, circled the roundabout once, looking for the exit, but decided not to take it for magical reasons. He circled it again and again and again, until forced off by dizziness and fear of the police.

Despite being extremely late – the result of car keys hopelessly lost in the domestic forest – Wotton parked the Jag in Lurline Gardens and sat there for a full three Sullivan's Exports. He smoked the unnaturally fat and white cigarettes while grimacing into the rear-view mirror, squeezing blackheads and smearing their yellow-white lode across the piebald areas of the windscreen the wipers had failed to reach. Eventually he got out, locked the car and walked up the street. Fifty yards further on he couldn't remember whether he had locked the car, so he returned to check it. He repeated this exercise five more times before he realised that if he were to continue in this fashion for much longer he would, de facto, be insane. So he wrenched himself around the corner to the front door of the block, and pressed the buzzer. He muttered into the intercom, entered the vestibule and ascended in the lift.

Ah yes! But in Wotton's recollection it was always an ambulatory arrival that he'd made, sixty feet up in the sky, sliding smoothly from the dark verglas without on to the icy pile of the carpet within. Vernissage – such a great, glissading word – literally ‘a varnishing’. It was, in every sense. That night, every encumbered soul in the minimalist apartment was completely stripped and then thoroughly coated.

Wotton took the view that such orgies were no less than the shucking off of the threadbare constraints of contemporary morality, and yet, even at the time, he also understood that in some crucial yet indefinable way (was it for solace alone?), a slave's morality might be preferable to the whips and chains of a mastery that was already becoming little more than attitudinising.

Perhaps it was this division within himself that explains why Wotton was so dilatory in even arriving. As the brass booth rattled up five floors, he thought of fascistic chic, and how his companions’ sense of history was savagely concertinaed, like a speeding limousine that's hit a concrete pillar. Was it any wonder that in place of any real ceremonial or culture of their own, they'd sooner watch the expensive charades invented for a German ruling house by a nineteenth-century popular novelist? Namely:

‘The royal-fucking-wedding! What's this?’ He had found the door on the latch and banged through it to confront Dorian, Baz, Herman and Alan Campbell grouped around one of the Cathode Narcissus monitors, watching a videotape of the ceremony.

‘I think it's quite amusing,’ Dorian drawled. ‘I love all this ancient pomp.’

‘Ancient pomp! Repro charade more like it. The whole ghastly business was dreamt up by these Krauts when they got the regime in the last century. Perhaps a more honest ceremonial would've been for them to broadcast the results of the virginity test the future brood mare was compelled to undergo.’ And Wotton, sloughing off his overcoat as a lizard abandons his skin, grabbed for a Champagne flute from a tray that stood atop the monitor. He would've continued – having warmed to his theme – but Baz, who was sweating and twitching, saw fit to add complaining to his roster of active verbs.

‘I thought this was a vernissage for Cathode Narcissus.’

‘No no, it's a vernissage for this – this black Narcissus …’ Wotton advanced towards his quarry, hand outstretched. ‘You must be Herman – Dorian has told me fabulous things about you.’

‘Yeah?’ Herman neglected to take it.

‘Oh yes indeed. He says you are beautiful and talented, and Dorian is too wise to be foolish in such matters.’

‘Yeah, an’ he wants to fuck me.’

‘You are direct – very direct. But I rather think you're mistaken. The way I understand it – and I hope Dorian will support me – he would far prefer it if you were to fuck him.’

‘Who cares about fucking anybody?’ Baz broke in. ‘Let's see the fucking installation.’

To forestall any more of Wotton's attempts at seductive badinage, Baz went over to the niche where the video recorders were stacked and began changing the tapes.

‘Whatya gonna do with the thing now it's done, Dorian?’ Alan Campbell said. Campbell was a man it was easy to avoid bestowing attention upon. He was, Wotton averred, ‘far too evil to be seen in close-up’. Older than the others – perhaps as old as forty – wiry, dapper, with salt-and-pepper hair and a neat moustache, he was dressed conservatively in dark slacks, a brown pullover shirt and a tweed jacket. His accent was that particular kind of emotionless Australian that suggests a willingness to do anything to anyone. In Wotton's wonky circle his notoriety rested on two, equally contaminated grounds. First, his willingness – as a medical doctor – to prescribe with great liberality; and secondly, his attempt to hang Francis Bacon.