by Will Self
Dorian shuffled the pages of the typescript together and laid them down on the table. Well, he said to Victoria Wotton who was sitting opposite him, that really is… I mean to say… I… He stopped and sat in confused silence.
—You understand, Victoria said calmly, why it is that I wanted you to read it?
—I s’pose so.
—I think you have the right to know.
—To know what he actually thought of me?
—I didn’t say that.
—But it’s all here, isn’t it? It’s all here – he despised me, he fucking despised me, and af – oh, I dunno.
—You were going to say ‘after all I did for him’ – and you’d be right to, because you did do a lot for him, especially towards the end.
—I had no idea.
—Well, none of us did.
Dorian got up from the table and began to pace back and forth, the length of the kitchen-cum-dining room. It was only three weeks since Henry Wotton’s funeral, and despite the late-summer heat the house felt chilly with the atmosphere of mourning. On his third length he paused opposite Victoria and said, Didn’t you ever see him working on it?
—No, no I didn’t. I suppose you think me rather odd and cold, but I left Henry pretty much to himself towards the end. He made it clear it was what he wanted, and you know better than most, Dorian, that our marriage depended on a great deal of tolerance.
—I’m sorry… Victoria… it isn’t the way –
—No no, she damped him down. You don’t need to apologise. I knew, of course, that you and Henry had an affair, but I knew equally well that it was long ago. Besides, the tolerance was on both sides.
—I see what you mean… but what about this, Victoria, you can’t be so tolerant of this? He picked up the pile of A4 and let it fall with a thud on to the tabletop.
—Oh, I don’t know… She poured herself some more tea from the pot, but didn’t trouble to ask if Dorian wanted any… I’m delighted to discover that my husband wasn’t entirely a wastrel. I think some of the passages are competently written.
—But – but – he always swore blind he’d never write a novel, let alone a roman à clef
—Yes, he’s put a joke about that in the text. His character says that the only circumstances in which he’d write a roman à clef would be if he’d lost his car keys. You noticed, of course, that throughout the rest of the book he is continually searching for his car keys.
—No, no I didn’t notice that.
—Oh well, it’s only one of the ways he plays with the form.
—Plays with the form? Dorian was incredulous. He sat down again and swung one immaculately tailored leg across the other. He’s taken colossal liberties with the truth!
—But it’s a novel, Dorian. Besides, Henry also took the trouble to formally distinguish those scenes where he was present from those where he couldn’t possibly have known exactly what happened.
—I’m not a murderer, Victoria – I never killed anybody.
—I know that, Dorian; don’t be silly. Henry knew that too. Listen, I could’ve flouted his wishes and not shown you the damn thing at all. I did it because I respect the feelings he had for you.
—What feelings?
—Love, Dorian. Henry loved you. He always loved you. I think the book is a lengthy love letter… She trailed off. Phoebe had come into the room and was stomping from fridge to worktop, assembling the triple-decker jam sandwich of the angrily bereaved adolescent. Pas devant l’enfant, Victoria said, sotto voce.
—I’m not a child! Phoebe snapped.
—You are for the purposes of this conversation, her mother replied. But it was a measure of how upset the girl was that she didn’t argue the point, merely snatching up her snack and stomping off upstairs.
When she was gone, Dorian resumed, It’s a fucking odd love letter – he makes me out to be completely vapid as well as murderous. A ludicrous, narcissistic pretty boy, with nothing on his mind but sex and sadism.
—Listen, Dorian, you can’t have been unaware that Henry had certain criticisms of you –
—Yes, sure, but these aren’t the right ones. He turns me into a layabout – when I’ve worked hard ever since I left university. He makes me selfish and egotistical, when I’ve given a lot of my money to charity. He makes me the supreme fucking narcissist, when I’ve never cared about my appearance more than… well…
—Well what? Victoria smiled at him. You can’t deny that you’re a little bit vain, Dorian.
—I like to look good and I take care of myself – a lot of gay men do, it doesn’t make us immoral, it doesn’t make us evil people, prepared to sacrifice any vestige of morality in order to stay young. And that’s another thing I can’t bear about Henry’s roman à clef – what he says about Baz and Cathode Narcissus. Henry knew full well that it was me who cared for Baz when he was dying, and who’s done everything I possibly can to preserve his work since. I dunno… I dunno… even if it’s some kind of allegory, this stuff – he thumped the typescript once more for emphasis – is a bit much, a bit bloody much. I understand that it was difficult for Henry, believe me, but it isn’t my fault I didn’t get the virus. I didn’t screw around, I didn’t shoot up. I didn’t do these things!
Dorian’s biscuity face had got decidedly bloody and it took him a while to calm down. When he had, Victoria decided to draw the interview to a close. It had been a bruising enough time recently. True, Henry’s death had not exactly been unforeseen, but that didn’t make it any the less traumatic. True, Henry had not been a conventional husband, and in some people’s estimation he was no kind of a husband at all, but Victoria Wotton had made her accommodation to him years before. Now he was finally gone she felt the loss of him profoundly. In the last couple of years, more or less clean from drugs, Henry had done his best to improve his relationship with Phoebe, and that was the worst of the whole business.
—Look, Dorian – her voice was pitched low and her tone persuasive – he left two copies of the typescript; one is for you, one is for me. I’m going to destroy mine – if not immediately, then soon. What you do with yours is your own business, but the point is that no one is ever going to read this stuff – she gestured at the pile of paper on the table – it’s a closed book.
—I’m not surprised that you want it that way. His manner was objectionable; in his willingness to take it out on her, Victoria saw all the ugliness of character her husband had identified in Dorian Gray.
—I don’t know, Dorian, she chuckled, I rather think I come out of it better than anyone else. I’ve ascended a few rungs up the class ladder; Henry has made me a successful historian rather than a failed poet. I take his physical portrayal of me in good part – readers need one or two salient characteristics to hang on to. No, all in all I don’t object to the text that much; I even find some of it amusing. I’m also impressed that he had the vigour and application to carry it through – he was a very ill man.
Dorian left the house resolving not to return if he could conceivably avoid it. She was envious, Victoria Wotton, that was it. She was only another nouveau riche Jew, after all – no matter how she dressed herself up. And there was her late husband’s infatuation with him – she tried to pretend she was disengaged, but it must have hurt. Henry had been too clever for her, too sharp, too much in every respect. She’d probably remarry some tedious little businessman and bustle off to the ’burbs. Good riddance.
Dorian ambled along the pavement deep in thought, while his whippet, Wystan, clicked behind. Certainly, despite his poetic licence Henry had displayed a powerful turn of phrase in his writing. It would be amusing to show Fergus Rokeby his portrayal in the typescript tucked under Dorian’s arm. It was fucking mean of Henry to take Fergus’s tendency to drop off after a decent meal and blow it up into a major pathology. It was the same with the Ferret’s harmless snobbery and his mild inclination to avoid paying his share. In every case, Henry had seized upon his friends’ foibles and made them into glaring faults.
No – Dorian pulled himself up – on second thoughts, he wouldn’t be showing the Ferret or anyone else this travesty. It was reaching his own car that brought the moment of clarity. Dorian prided himself on his carflesh, and this gunmetal-grey Bristol – which Henry himself had had many a lift in – was the finest of the collection. Yet in the stupid bloody novel Dorian was reduced to tootling about town in an MG – how pathetically uncool. It occurred to Dorian precisely how twisted and bitter it was of Henry, never to say anything to his face, but instead to attempt to wound him from beyond the grave.
He let himself into the car’s immaculate interior and started up the engine. The muted roar of the big Chrysler V8 engine was reassuring, as was the ringing of his mobile phone. It was the office. Dorian ran through his secretary’s list with assurance – ease, even – as he wheeled the big car east along the Cromwell Road. Yes, he did want to see the team working on the packaging for Valmouth Cosmetics. No, he didn’t think it was necessary for him to attend the Design Awards bash that evening at the Grosvenor House Hotel. Yes, he would like to see forecasts of media spend by the top five car companies for the forthcoming year. No, he wouldn’t be attending the editorial meeting for Gray magazine that morning. And finally, yes, he would like to see the first digitisation of Basil Hallward’s video installation Cathode Narcissus and discuss with the website designer how it would look once it was downloaded to a PC. He said his goodbyes courteously. He liked to imagine that every member of the Gray Organisation, no matter how lowly, was valued for him – or herself.
The phone call made him think of Wotton’s book again. Dorian couldn’t bear to call it a novel – that suggested a certain measure of pleasurable inventiveness that this farrago was devoid of. In the book he was obsessed by his looks and lived off what? Some nebulous and unspecified private income. It was so nebulous, Dorian sneered to himself, because it had never fucking existed. Yes, he had modelled for a few years, but so what? He’d also had the guts to add to his Oxford degree with a course in graphic design at the London College of Printing. He’d started up the Gray Organisation in a room at the back of a friend’s café in Notting Hill. He’d made it a success the way anyone makes a small business a success – with chutzpah, flair, and a capacity for almost limitless hard work.
Of course, Henry couldn’t bear to acknowledge any of this. Instead, every single particular of Dorian’s life that Henry had either experienced directly himself, or heard about from Dorian or mutual friends, had been traduced and bowdlerised in this book. The relationship with Herman, which had, on Dorian’s part, been one of genuine – if misguided – affection; the sincere efforts he’d made in Manhattan to help out Basil Hallward; even his own grappling with his sexuality had presented an opportunity for Henry to paint him up as a sadistic pervert. The very idea that he’d given Octavia the virus was repulsive – it certainly hadn’t been an adulterous relationship, and she’d died in a fucking water-skiing accident. Henry Wotton hated being Henry Wotton – that was the key to his book; and he, Dorian Gray, had been made the proxy for this monumental self-hatred. Henry couldn’t abide the fact that he, Dorian, was genuinely stylish, that he, Dorian, worked hard and successfully, that he, Dorian, had, in time, come to accept his sexuality and even take pride in it. But what Henry Wotton had found hardest to take in his former protégé – and had travestied the most – was Dorian’s continued good health in the face of his own gradual decline.
It wasn’t simply that Dorian hadn’t contracted AIDS, it was also that he’d genuinely cared for those who had. At a personal level he’d done the dawn hospital runs and the midnight bed-baths, he’d filled the prescriptions and held the hands. But more than this, he’d also worked tirelessly to help make the British AIDS charities model organisations, using all his charm, his business acumen and his social connections. He’d done all this while Henry Wotton first prated, then puled and finally succumbed. No wonder Henry accused Dorian of killing Basil Hallward, because that’s exactly what he felt himself guilty of. After all, it was Wotton who’d debauched Baz when he’d turned up in London five years before, clean from drugs at last. And it was Wotton who’d derided Baz’s art, together with any other examples of a creativity to which he’d aspired without any prospect of attainment.
At least Henry Wotton was in no position to impugn Dorian’s latest efforts to ensure his late friend’s artistic longevity. True, it was clever the way Henry had twisted the very real decay of the Cathode Narcissus videotapes into his perverse tale, but he’d been far too removed from the world of technological advance to appreciate that the means now existed to preserve such artefacts for ever. It was proving highly expensive to digitise Cathode Narcissus; doubtless if Dorian waited another couple of years it would be a lot cheaper, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to ensure that anyone, anywhere, with access to a PC and the net would be able to experience what was increasingly acknowledged to be one of the most significant modern British artworks. There was a true niceness to this marriage between form and content that made the transfer of Cathode Narcissus from leaky videotape vessel to unsinkable digital virtuality seem an inevitable aspect of the life of the piece itself. Or so Dorian liked to think, as he steered the big, grey car up the blue canal of tarmac beside Hyde Park.
No, Henry Wotton couldn’t impugn this, any more than he could carry on slinging shit at Dorian’s association (to call it a friendship would be presumptuous) with Princess Diana. Still, Dorian said aloud, as he ruffled the whippet’s ears, I suppose there was at least some honesty in what Henry said about his own snobbery, eh, Wystan? Yes, he’d admitted to this mountaineering vice, even while hauling himself and his wife on to the aristocratic heights.
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.