by Will Self
PENGUIN BOOKS
DORIAN
Will Self is the author of three short-story collections, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (winner of the 1992 Geoffrey Faber Award), Grey Area and Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys; a dyad of novellas, Cock and Bull, and a third novella, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis; and four novels, My Idea of Fun, Great Apes, How the Dead Live (shortlisted for the 2000 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award) and Dorian. Together with the photographer David Gamble, he produced Perfidious Man, a sideways look at contemporary masculinity. There have been three collections of journalism, Junk Mail, Sore Sites and Feeding Frenzy. Most of his books are published by Penguin.
Will Self has written for a plethora of publications over the years and is a regular broadcaster on television and radio.
Dorian
AN IMITATION
WILL SELF
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Viking 2002
Published in Penguin Books 2003
11
Copyright © Will Self, 2002
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196097-5
For Ivan
And with thanks to Jack Emery and Joan Bakewell
There is an unconscious appositeness in the use of the word person to designate the human individual, as is done in all European languages: for persona really means an actor’s mask, and it is true that no one reveals himself as he is; we all wear a mask and play a role.
Schopenhauer
PART ONE
Recordings
1
Once you were inside the Chelsea home of Henry and Victoria Wotton it was impossible to tell whether it was day or night-time. Not only was there this crucial ambiguity, but the seasons and even the years became indeterminate. Was it this century or that one? Was she wearing this skirt or that suit? Did he take that drug or this drink? Was his preference for that cunt or this arsehole?
These combinations of styles, modes, thoughts and orifices were played out in the gloom of the Wottons’ dusty apartments and the brightness of their smeary water-closets, as if artefacts, ideas, even souls were all but symbols inscribed upon the reels of the slot machine of Life. Yank the arm and up they came: three daggers, three bananas, three pound signs. At the Wottons’, three of anything paid out generously – in the coin of Misfortune.
But such was the particular correspondence between the year our story begins, 1981, and the year of the house’s construction, 1881, and such was the peculiarly similar character of the times – a Government at once regressive and progressive, a monarchy mired in its own immemorial succession crisis, an economic recession both sharp and bitter – that a disinterested viewer could have been forgiven for seeing more enduring significance in the fanlight and the dado, the striped wallpaper and the gilt-framed mirror, a reproduction bust of Antinous and a very watery Turner, than in the human figures that actually stood in the mote-heavy beam of light which fell to the runner.
Upper-class people – that much was clear. Anyone would’ve judged Henry Wotton to be so by his hauteur alone, by the way his arrogant, supercilious face was looking past its own image in the mirror, as if searching for someone more interesting to talk to. Someone who didn’t have reddish curly hair, and eyes like the buttons of an undertaker’s suit sewn on to an expanse of waxy pallor. There are those for whom all existence is the first hour of a promising cocktail party, and Henry Wotton was one of them.
If any further confirmation were needed, it was provided by his tailoring: Wotton was swaddled in class. His immaculately-cut three-piece Prince of Wales-check suit bagged slightly at the knee; his off-white butterfly-collar linen shirt frayed a tad at the cuff and the link holes; his red knitted silk tie was casually knotted. But only a slice of this costume was on view, a long stripe from his knobbly Adam’s apple to his scuffed loafers. (An English gentleman never polishes his shoes, but then nor does a lazy bastard.) The rest of his finery was hidden beneath a full-length black Crombie overcoat; a garment that was also perfectly crafted – if, that is, you like the skirts of overcoats to be overfull, and distinctly epicene.
Behind Wotton stood a scarecrow woman, black hair flying away from her broad brow, which was buried in the hollow between her husband’s shoulder blades. He was sorting through the mail, mostly a stack of pasteboard invitations, some inked, others engraved. Wotton tapped these together on the credenza in front of him, with disconcertingly fleshy and spatulate fingers, then riffled them as if he were shuffling a pack of cards. His wife, Lady Victoria, snuffled at his back. Her skinny arms, like animated pipe-cleaners, writhed in the stale air. Wotton laid the invitations down among overflowing ashtrays, empty bottles, stained wine glasses, crumpled bits of this and that. On the floor at their feet, tumbleweeds of dust sauntered in a febrile draught.
It’s worth remarking at this stage on the precise character of the Wottons’ house unbeautiful. Please don’t let it be misunderstood that this was a filthy mucky home. Like any marital estate it had its ebb and flow of order and disorder; it’s just that this disorder was extreme by anyone’s standards. The ashtrays were huge, as big as geological features. Cigarette and cigar butts were buried in their cones of ash like the victims of a volcanic eruption. As for the empty bottles, these were so numerous that their ranks formed a kind of anti-bar, offering up a fine selection of dregs, lees and spiritous vapours. And the many glasses which accompanied them were so casually abandoned as to suggest the recent dispersal of a considerable body of people – yet no one had visited the house in days.
Lady Victoria, whose family and friends knew her by the sobriquet ‘Batface’, was still attired for this long-gone party in a girlishly tiered ra-ra skirt of navy crushed velour. Her hair was a mess and so was she. She wove, her arms snaked, she was so irrefutably aristocratic that she was allowed to do almost anything – short of pissing herself – while remaining altogether acceptable.
And, truth to tell, she could have pissed herself as well – nobody would’ve judged her. Her father, the Duke of This or That, was a dandified bully, a preposterous little popinjay of a man who privileged his children with his superfluous anger. He had so much of everything that there was plenty to spare. When he first came across the infant Victoria, who was by then aged three or four months (His Grace having spent the preceding year – after having mounted the Duchess in the enclosure they kept for rare goat breeds – gaming at Biarritz and game-pie-eating in Caithness), on seeing her vast eyes, her triangular face and her elegantly enlarged ears, he had exclaimed, ‘Batface!’ Naturally, she adored
him, both ultrasonically and stridently. The way her body and her mind both jibed with the world, the way she wriggled and writhed and gurned, all of it derived from his rejection. Lady Victoria stunted herself so as to tenant the queer space of the Duke’s contempt.
‘Lots of oblongs –’ she squeaked on this occasion. They were the first words she had spoken to her husband for some hours. Not that they had been asleep – far from it. In their separate portions of the house – he below, she above – they had spent the hours of darkness secreted in their own ways, observing silence in lieu of repose.
‘Sent out by squares.’ His tones were deep and cold, a contaminated reservoir of inky disdain.
‘We hardly go anywhere… any more… at least not together.’ But there was no captiousness in her tones; Lady Victoria cared entirely for Henry, and cared for her own caring for him. Thus she did the sympathy for both of them.
He felt for her, too. He lay down the oblongs, and one of his hands first went to his eye to remove some wakey dust, then came groping behind her, to where one of the tiers of her skirt had become caught up behind the waistband of her tights. This he untangled and set to rights, before turning to face her. ‘I don’t give a shit about going to any of them, just so long as they keep inviting us.’ He kissed her lightly on either eyelid; then, releasing her, he glanced around as if looking for a briefcase or a newspaper or some other staff of workaday righteousness, but finding none he opted instead for a bottle of Scotch within which a couple of inches still remained, and, tucking the furl of glass under his arm, he swivelled to depart.
‘Have a good day, darling…’ Lady Victoria trailed off. She was always trailing off.
‘Yeah, fuck, whatever – you too.’ They kissed again, this time on the lips, but sexlessly. He opened the front door and descended the front steps to the street, scrunching up the pocket of his coat to feel for his car keys.
It may have been the beginning of the Wottons’ day, but outside morning had passed. It was noon, a noon in late June. The street, although bathed in sunlight, had no freshness about it, but was baking to a harsh monochrome. For this was an impossible late June, with the fruit trees in blossom as well as the flowers in bloom. All along the terrace of off-white four-storey houses, cherry and apple trees were bowed down with their gay burden, like willowy brides, their veils scattered with confetti. In window-boxes and the crowded little front gardens, a thousand stems effloresced: tulips, magnolia trees, desert orchids, snowdrops, daffodils, foxgloves. It was a veritable riot of verdancy against the urbanity all around, and above it spore hung like a mist of blood over an ancient battlefield.
Wotton hung over his own front railings, as if speared by them, like an overdressed St Sebastian. He pulled the folds of his overcoat about him and shivered. His pocket trawl had resulted in the netting of two pairs of Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Levering himself upright he clamped first one pair and then the second on to his face. ‘It’s perfectly all right to stare into the abyss for days at a time’ – he addressed the empty street – ‘so long as you’re wearing two pairs of Ray-Bans.’
This was the manner of man he was – supremely mannered. A collector of bons mots and aperçus and apophthegms, an alfresco rehearser of the next impassioned, extempore rodomontade, whose greatest fear in life was inarticulacy, or worse, esprit de l’escalier. Henry Wotton might have professed an indifference about his position in society, but in truth, like all those who have ascended too high and too fast, he had failed to acclimatise, so he gasped desperately for the next inspirational acknowledgement that he existed at all.
‘Gaaa…! Christ – Christ!’ Wotton fought for breath while lighting an outsize filterless Virginia cigarette. Even this suffocating outside was too exterior for him. He longed for the night, for confining drapes, for silky sheets and silken cuddles. He pushed himself up, and like a tree falling in the forest collapsed towards the door of a dark-green late-model Jaguar saloon, which was parked near to – but not exactly by – the kerb. It was a filthy luxury vehicle, the green paintwork furry with dust-upon-sap and maculate with bird-shit. Having finally located the keys in his waistcoat pocket, Wotton admitted himself to the car as if it were a vault, then pulled the door to with a moneyed clunk. The whisky bottle he aligned carefully between the upholstered grooves on the passenger seat.
Wotton organised his two pairs of shades, and stabbed at the ignition with the key. Despite being half-blinded by his ridiculous eyewear, he still adjusted the mirror so that he could see his own face. Turning this way and that he seemed to take a particular satisfaction in observing the white rheum that had gathered at the corners of his cruel mouth, like sea froth on anfractuous rocks.
Once Wotton had shackled the Crombie to the car’s cream leather and begun dickering with the controls of the radio, he realised how muted the world’s soundtrack had been. His wife’s voice, his own footfalls, the avian din, and even the distant roar of the traffic on the King’s Road, all were muffled. When he depressed a button on the car radio he recoiled from a blast of pure, stentorian, ordinary news. Information concerning a parallel world in which people walked and talked and brawled and died. A radio announcer blurted, ‘In the wake of the disturbances the Government is considering setting up an inquiry under the chairmanship of Lord Scar –’ and Wotton – having had quite enough – punched another button, which brought synthesised pop music, thudding and peeping into the car’s interior.
Vigorously tapping, Wotton’s black loafer burrowed into a slurry of opera programmes, discarded cocaine wraps, biffed cigarette boxes and empty hip-flasks, beneath which his sole felt for the accelerator, so he could jam it to the floor. The Jag pulled away and raced up the nearside lane of the straight residential road. After four hundred yards it veered back to the kerb and stopped. Inside the smoke-filled booth, Wotton extinguished one Sullivan’s Export and lit another. The pop still peeped and he sang along with the mincing front man, ‘Oh-woh-woh tainted love!’ for a few bars before summoning himself, killing the engine and exiting the car. The Scotch went along for the ride.
Entering a narrow door in a brick wall, Wotton followed a path that ran obliquely through a patch of thick shrubbery to the door of a two-storey, purpose-built Victorian artist’s studio. Using another of his keys, Wotton opened the door of this charming building, still yodelling, ‘Take my love but that’s not really all!’
It was dark inside. Very fusty. Terribly gloomy. The shrub-choked windows and leaf-pressed skylight of the studio admitted hardly anything of the day, as if this were – bizarrely – of little importance to the artwork undertaken here. And what creation could this have been? For this studio was patently a disordered realm in the midst of an objective insurgency. Good pieces of old furniture were under attack from a rabble of trash. Here a Chippendale dresser fell victim to a slew of dirty plates and piss-filled mugs, while over there a Moroccan divan was inundated beneath a dirty dune of discarded clothing. The same bottles and ashtrays massed and jostled as at the Wottons’.
But in the middle ground there was at least some evidence of an operative intelligence. A series of nine television monitors were ranged in a semicircle confronting Wotton. All of them were on, but eight displayed static, while the ninth was tuned to an Open University programme on physics. ‘In which case, the free-ranging electron will combine to form a new nucleus…’ a white-coated geek said on screen, while tipping his bald patch at the viewer as if it were a hat. The background to this pedagogy was provided by a mixture of tapestry wall hangings and photographer’s flats. A minstrels’ gallery was devoid of musicians, but instead packed out with old tea-chests, their sides stencilled with exotic Eastern destinations: Colombo, Shanghai, Manila.
Wotton loafed and squeaked about, hopping awkwardly from rug to parquet like a flightless bird, pecking here at some abandoned underwear, there at a grubby mirror. ‘Baz?’ he called out after a while. ‘You here?’ Then, spying a joint stubbed out next to the televised physics tutorial, he knelt, picked it up and relit
it using a Ronson recovered from a waistcoat pocket. Still squatting, he ejaculated croakily, ‘Baz?’
‘In the cloud of particles formed after the impact new alignments will soon occur –’
‘Baz, are you here?!’
In the cloud of particles wreathing Wotton’s head, all was, once again, muffled. He could hear the proximate hiss of the monitors, the distant gibber of an educated voice. In the minstrels’ gallery the tea-chests scraped. Something was up there, something that then dropped like a big cat to the floor, eight feet below. ‘Hi!’
It was a man in his early thirties – perhaps five years older than Wotton. His dark, collar-length hair was mussed, while his tanned and wizened face suggested that he surfed a lot – using a sunbed as a board. The black drainpipe Levis, the white shirt open to the waist, the Egyptian amulet on a leather thong around his leathery neck, all implied guitar-strumming around beach fires and youth gilded by golden sunsets. But up close his vigour was entirely chemical, and all that glistered was sweat.
Baz advanced, his bare feet slapping the floor, while Wotton conspicuously ignored him. This was the very essence of the relationship between the two: Baz Hallward the wayward acolyte, seething with energy and bumptiousness, while the younger man played the part of his mentor, consumed with cool, eaten up with indifference. That they had once been lovers and Baz had assumed the active role meant nothing now. Nothing whatsoever.
‘Late night?’ Wotton drawled through the smoke.
‘What time is it now?’ Baz squatted down to Wotton’s level. ‘Uh-huh, taping. Lotta taping. Didn’t finish until four, got the model comfy, did some editing, sequencing…’ he shat these phrases out ‘… and now you’re here.’
‘Were you out?’ Wotton cared more about where the people he knew had been than where he himself was at any given time.
