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unpleasantly. ‘Something makes me think he’ll have to go on paying indefinitely.’ And without waiting for Baz’s reply, the vile fop turned on his heel and departed.

2
    Henry Wotton drove his five-litre Jaguar around central London as if he were at the wheel of a powered lawnmower, and the city itself but a rough oblong of lawn, to the rear of a romantically ruinous country house. A lawn planted with stucco models of famous metropolitan buildings, perhaps one-tenth scale, between which he piloted his vehicle at once lazily and wildly. He seemed to have no concern for either the Highway Code or the sensibilities of other drivers. Indeed, if there was the remotest awareness of a danger, it was merely that he might tip over the ha-ha.
    Dorian Gray understood this about his new admirer as soon as he buckled himself into the car’s cream interior. Clearly, to be in Henry Wotton’s Jaguar was to be in Henry Wotton’s capricious and cruel embrace. At first he stole the occasional sidelong glance at his chauffeur, who guided the car with three fingers of his left hand on the lower rim of the steering wheel, while trailing his cigarette hand out of the window and lolling his reddish curls against the headrest. But soon Dorian surrendered to the lurches, surges and drifts of the big car. He began peering at the detritus on the car’s floor, a veritable midden of discarded material from which much information on the Wotton culture could, undoubtedly, be gained. Pop music purled from the car radio, as if a sonic brook were running between the two men.
    The car was at the traffic lights at the top of Exhibition Road when Dorian exhibited his first find, a brace of opera programmes. ‘D’you like the opera?’
    ‘My wife does,’ Wotton drawled. ‘My main pleasure at Glyndebourne is counting the homosexuals in the audience and seeing if they outnumber those on the stage.’
    ‘What about these?’ Dorian held up a flyer for a stock car race at the White City Stadium. An old drug wrap was stuck to it.
    ‘I adore destructive spectacles; they are the last refuge of the creative.’ The lights changed and a loafer came down on the accelerator; the big car gathered its massy inertia under its whale’s back of a bonnet, and then slid smoothly past the Albert Memorial. By the time the Jag reached the bridge over the Serpentine it was travelling at sixty. It swiped to the left, then to the right, weaving between two lumbering vans, before tucking into the chicane that led up towards Lancaster Gate.
    Dorian knew intuitively that it was profoundly uncool to mention Wotton’s driving, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘How d’you manage to get away with it?’ he asked. ‘You had no way of knowing if there was a car in the oncoming lane.’
    ‘I have an aerial view, Dorian. I see the whole situation from above.’
    ‘Are you serious?’
    ‘Never more so.’
    ‘But how? It’s not possible.’
    ‘I don’t expect you to comprehend it’ – Wotton peeked slyly out at him from under his four brown lenses – ‘but my father buggered me relentlessly when I was a young child. While he was doing it I found myself becoming curiously disembodied, floating up to the ceiling of the room where my child-self lay as he heaved and panted. I occupied this point of view – in the region of the cornicing, although occasionally revolving around the chandelier – on a regular basis between the ages of five and eight. For so long, in fact, that I have retained it into adulthood.
    ‘You, my dear young friend,’ he continued, ‘are condemned to a seventy-millimetre, windscreen view of the city. You are a mere corpuscle, travelling along these arteries, whereas I have a surgeon’s perspective. I float above it all, and see Hyde Park as but a green, gangrenous fistula in London’s grey corpse!’ And with this flourish he yanked on the handbrake, for they had arrived in Marylebone High Street.
    Henry Wotton adored drugs and he adored