Dorian (33 page)

‘I feel at one with the world,’ he pronounced.

She seized on this: ‘Oh good, I’m so glad you’re reconciled.’

‘Absolutely – it appears to have a terminal illness just as I do.’ He grabbed her hand with his talons. ‘I can’t even stand up any more – I’m afraid of my own height; yet look at those ambulatory retroviruses by the sideboard, they’re destroying the white blood cells of Nature herself!’

‘Aren’t you being a little extreme?’

‘You think this is insignificant –?’ He changed tack abruptly: ‘Who’s that over there?’

‘The guy who’s just come in?’

‘That’s the one, describe him for me, Lady Hall. Paint me a prose picture, albeit that the English language is a furred tongue between thin lips.’

‘He’s a big, chubby young man, wearing a T-shirt with a smiley face on it. His hair’s all wild and he looks kinda… stoned –’

‘Ah! Say no more; it’s the heir to all of this, the future 9th Duke.’

‘I’ve never met him.’ She didn’t sound particularly excited by the prospect. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Good question. I myself have given him a courtesy title, “The Brown Bottle”, on account of his pernicious – and now fifteen-year – addiction to oral methadone. He goes into Narberton, stands by the till in the chemist’s and swigs the stuff down like any street junky. You wouldn’t be so good, Lady Hall… ’ his voice descended into intimacy ‘… as to gain his attention? I’d like a little of his medication for myself; you can never get too much of a bad thing.’

‘D’you think you should?’ This goaded her conscience in another direction. ‘I understood that new drugs have been made available – you were on that trial… Delta, right?’

‘Indeed, and it has effected an increased lifespan… for some. There are new methods of testing for viral load as well as new drugs – protease inhibitors, they call them: it seems that they may be on the verge of a radical breakthrough. Instead of all HIV patients’ being strapped into the same pharmacological straitjacket, treatment is to be tailored to the individual. Believe me, Lady Hall,’ he sighed, ‘I’ve been keeping my wavering patch of vision trained on it. My daughter Phoebe is something of a wizard with the Internet; she researches the subject for me. It seems they have a new acronym that they place great faith in, Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Treatment. However, I fear it’ll be too late for me to take any HAART.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘Absolutely. My other virus, hepatitis C, has enacted a pincer movement with the HIV and given me liver cancer. My lungs are finished from pneumonia, my sight is irrecoverable. I feel gothic with disease – as if Cologne Cathedral were being shoved up my fundament. No, this is the end.’

It was the end of lunch too. The sportsmen went off to gather together their hip-flasks, shooting sticks and shotguns, all the kit required for birdie-blasting. ‘Bip-bip-bip!’ bipped Binky Narborough, manifesting himself at this end of the table like a mad munchkin. ‘Who’s shootin’? Who’s shootin’? Bip-bip!’ Dorian went off quickly to dress, and David Hall, who despite his stroke still enjoyed winging his fellow creatures, limped in his wake.

The Ferret made his way to Wotton’s chair. ‘Shall I push you back to the conservatory?’ he yawned. ‘If it’s warm in there I think I could do with a little nap. It’s peculiar, but when I’m staying at Narborough on shooting weekends I find myself dreaming of the shoot.’

‘Yes, all right, Fergus,’ Wotton said, ‘but get Phoebe to accompany us; if you conk out
en route
I don’t want to find myself forgotten and freezing to death in the wilds of the west wing.’

Lying curled up like a little ferret in a hollow between the mighty roots of a vast shrub with trumpet-shaped scarlet flowers (
Rhododendron cinnabarinum
), the Ferret dreamed of shooting. He had frequently shot at Narborough himself in the time of Binky’s grandfather, the irascible 6th Duke, who had commanded a regiment in the Boer War and made a secret collection of dried Kaffir penises. The Ferret supposed it must still be buried somewhere in the bowels of the house.

The Ferret knew that not least of the attractions of the shooting at Narborough was that to the north of the landscaped gardens the park mounted steadily towards the Cotswold escarpment and was fairly thickly covered. With over two hundred acres of well-stocked woodland there was no need for anyone to go short, as long as he was a reasonable shot. Gone, however, were the game bags of the Ferret’s youth, when thousands of brace of pheasant, partridge, snipe and quail would be annihilated in a single afternoon, by whole regiments of the gentry, who formed up in hollow squares like their martial forefathers at Waterloo, while the peasantry flushed out the republic of the birds.

On this beautiful afternoon, which felt more like early spring than late autumn, the first drive was commenced by a handful of beaters who strolled through the poplars and ashes of Dunter’s Wood, smiting the underbrush. The guns lined up in a loose rank, with all the big, serious beefcake at one end, and the irregulars at the other. Dorian Gray was on the very furthest flank. His shotgun was serious rather than flashy, and his tweeds serviceable rather than chic, yet from the tip of the grouse feather stuck in his hatband to the very toes of his lace-up boots, Dorian, as ever, exuded a lethal elegance.

The Duke ran hither and thither behind the guns, bearing his own absurdist weapon, a replica Purdey lovingly carved – by Binky Narborough himself – out of a single piece of wood. Bip-bip! he cried. Bip-bip! I say, fellows, remember, kill birds if you must, but no people please. Bip-bip! Had a fellow last year, winged a beater, very bad show. Bip-bip! Better if you all had guns like mine; still, bip-bip! Won’t insist. Bip-bip! If there were to be any accidents that day, it looked as if it was the Duke himself who would cause them. But as the first pheasants whirred up into the air, levelled off, and came swooping towards the guns, he saw his son mooching along an avenue of lime trees two fields away, and cantered off to join him.

Dorian Gray loosed first one barrel, and the bird he’d drawn a bead on – a particularly fine cock – staggered in mid-air, then went into a tailless spin. It was a beautiful day, he enjoyed shooting, and last night he’d managed a particularly satisfying piece of devilry; Dorian should’ve been in his element – and yet he couldn’t rid himself of a sense of uneasiness. There were still some birds in the air and the other guns were blazing away. Dorian had plenty of time for a second shot, but a hint of colour in the trees caught his eye and he lowered the gun. It was one of the beaters, a stocky fellow with a malevolent glare – aimed directly at Dorian. Dorian registered the pudgy features of his nemesis at the same time he heard the report of David Hall’s gun by his ear. Almost unthinking, as if it were an instinctive act of self-defence, he raised his own gun and pulled the trigger. The pudgy face went bright red.

It took long seconds for the confused cries of the other beaters to silence the remaining guns, then a small bit of hell broke loose and erupted into the world above.

18

The faces of two men flickered from green to orange to blue to white in the light from a television screen. The brightness of these hues belied the tawdriness of the spectacle that provoked them. One of the watching faces was so emaciated that it had the crude features – big vertical creases, savagely undershot jaw, black button eyes – of a glove puppet fashioned from a sock. The other face was a feral little muzzle, with a pince-nez on a ribbon taking the place of whiskers.

The colours played on the two faces and spread out behind them, lighting up the serrated leaves and soaring stalks of the surrounding foliage. It was as if the two men – one wheelchair-bound and rug-wrapped, the other awkwardly poised on a cast-iron chair – were lost in a peculiar rainforest, one where electricity was available (a power point neatly implanted in a prickly pear?) so that they could scare off the animals of the night by burning an illusion.

On screen a young woman – shortish hair neatly coifed, wide eyes blackly lidded – was earnestly explaining to an earnest man how her marriage had been compromised by her husband’s mistress. ‘There were three of us in this marriage,’ she breathed, ‘so it was a bit crowded.’

‘I don’t call three
that
crowded, d’you, Fergus?’ Henry Wotton said. ‘Besides, if the transcripts of his mobile-phone calls to his mistress are to be believed, her old man thinks he’s a tampon.’

‘A tarpon?’ the Ferret mused; he wasn’t altogether there. ‘Is it some kind of fishing fantasy?’

‘No, you old fool, a
tampon
, the Prince of Wales thinks he’s a
tampon
. He wants to be a tampon shoved up inside Camilla Parker Bowles, so if that were the case there’d only be two full-size individuals in the marriage. Both of them, admittedly, women.’

‘I didn’t know Princess Di was a lesbian,’ the Ferret came back gamely. ‘Still, with her and the Parker Bowles woman it isn’t hard to see which is butch and which femme.’

‘No no no,
really
, Fergus, if you can’t be bothered to concentrate there’s no point in talking to you at all. Don’t you realise this is a historic television moment, and therefore,
a fortiori
, an event of worldwide significance?’

The Ferret, who felt he’d been making a perfectly constructive contribution to the evening’s entertainment (after all, it was he who’d wheeled the television all the way into the conservatory), lapsed into a sulky silence. But after a while he stirred himself and whined, ‘You’re not the only one who has an illness y’know, Henry.’

‘Is that so.’

‘It is. It may’ve escaped your attention, but I have severe narcolepsy.’

‘I don’t think it’s escaped anyone’s attention, Fergus; we’ve
all
been awake
all
the time – it’s you who’ve been missing out on things.’

‘I realise that many people find my condition risible, but it was never funny to begin with and now I’m getting old it’s becoming a lot worse.’

‘
Getting
old?’ Wotton was incredulous. ‘You’re eighty if you’re a day.’

‘That’s as may be, but this hormone deficiency is increasingly severe. You know all about drugs, Henry; can’t you find some hypocreton 2 for me on the black market?’

‘Hypocreton 2 – what the fuck’s that?’

‘The hormone I’m lacking. If I had enough I wouldn’t sleep so much.’

‘Oh
please
! That’s priceless. Hypocreton 2 – d’you think that’s what Fatty Spencer’s on…?’ (In the background the Princess of Wales murmured, ‘I would like to be a Queen in people’s hearts… someone’s got to go out there and love people and show it…’) ‘She certainly appears to be loved-up on something, and hypocreton 2’s more plausible than E, don’t you think?’

‘I’ve no idea, Henry,’ the Ferret miffled, ‘and I’ve had quite enough of your ragging; I’m rather regretting letting you have any of
my
medication. I wonder what’s happened to the rest of the party – what time is it?’

‘Oh I don’t know, nineish.’

‘The guns must have got back hours ago. Why hasn’t anybody been to see us? There’s no sign of Batface or Jane, either.’

As if they were poltergeists summoned up by the petulant old man’s piffle, there came a flurry of footfalls in the tunnel connecting the conservatory to the house; footfalls that announced the arrival – some minutes later, for it took him a while to locate their jungle clearing – of Dorian Gray.

‘Stupid squad!’ he expostulated. ‘They never get any smarter, do they.’

‘I assume’ – Wotton, sensing Dorian’s dramaturgical desires, adopted a measured tone – ‘that is a rhetorical question.’

‘Yeah, fucking rhetorical. I’ve been with the morons for nearly five hours. Five hours over a lousy fucking shooting accident!’ He looked around for a patch of earth to ground his live wire, but the only vacant space in the clearing was occupied by Wotton’s wheelchair and the Ferret’s seat – in which the latter had, with Newtonian predictability, fallen asleep.

‘A shooting accident?’ Wotton killed the Princess of Wales’s calculating confession with the remote. ‘Who’s been shot?’

‘One of the beaters.’

‘Fucking hell,’ Wotton breathed, ‘that’ll be more trouble for Jane; the estate workers are almost in open revolt as it is.’

‘Oh, he wasn’t a local man.’ Dorian produced a silver cigarette case and a lighter, and lit up. ‘Nobody knows who he is at all. The head keeper only took him on for the day – found him in the pub in Narberton. What’s more, his face was turned to mush by the blast, so unless someone was travelling with him it’s going to take the rural plods a while to identify him.’

‘How convenient.’

‘For whom?’ Dorian snapped.

‘For whoever shot him.’

‘Well, they’re saying
I
did that, but it could just as easily have been David Hall – he was being bloody wild with his shooting. I don’t care if he’s a fucking Minister; it’s insane allowing a cripple to shoot.’

‘They’ll find out in due course, Dorian – ballistics and so forth. Still, isn’t it funny how people get dead around you.’

‘What’re you implying, Wotton?’

‘No implication, merely an observation.’

‘It was an accident – I don’t know who the disgusting pleb was. I’ve never had any truck with anyone who has ginger hair in my entire life.’

‘Is that so.’ Wotton held the image of Dorian’s injured innocence in his viewfinder eye, and dipped his eyelid to record the moment for posterity.

‘Yes it bloody is.’ Dorian ground his cigarette out on the floor. ‘Look, Wotton, are you going to stay out here all night?’

‘Me? No… no, I don’t
think
so. Tell me, are you free to leave Narborough, Dorian?’

‘They say I can go where I please as long as I tell them; they haven’t charged me or anything ludicrous like that.’

‘In that case, you can drive me back to London.’

‘To London, tonight?’

‘That’s right. I rather think it’s the place of a patrician – as it is of a
plebeian
– to die in the eternal city, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘What do you mean by that?!’ Dorian’s eyes flashed and he made as if to grab at Wotton, but the dying man merely laughed.