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spluttering Wotton. ‘Christ, he’s awful, a serial realist – the very worst kind.’ He got the capsule out, fiddled, took a snort, then passed it to Dorian.
    Dorian followed suit then asked, ‘What about her?’
    ‘The Duchess? Not that she uses the title – she’s extraordinary. She wove those drabs herself in some godforsaken mud hutment in Uttar Pradesh. She has the finest Palladian house in the world, Narborough, and she’s trying to throw it – along with the rest of her husband’s staggering wealth – into the void.’
    ‘The void?’
    ‘Nirvana, that which is beyond all illusion, the eternal substratum. It’s true that the best kind of woman has an empty head and donates it willingly, but that isn’t Jane’s particular vapidity; she’s genuinely lost in Turgenev’s white void, the only alternative Buddhism offers to the black void of Christian damnation, or materialist extinction. And her house – which would offer a great deal of shelter for a great many youths – is in the process of going the same way.’
    ‘But is she happy?’
    ‘Happy? My dear Dorian, she’s fucking furious. The Buddha is the patron saint of the passive–aggressive.’
    ‘Does she go out in society much?’
    ‘Of course, she’s a fucking duchess. No amount of eccentricity debars her from her own kind. Aristo punks sniff glue together, just as aristo Buddhists meditate together. She’ll be in St Paul’s next month, along with the rest of them. She’ll probably be wearing a special Royal Wedding hair shirt.
    ‘I hate this doghole.’ Wotton suddenly changed tack.
    ‘This’ – he made as if to spit out a gulp of the white wine they’d acquired – ‘is the decoction of the bile of the livers of splenetic Communist Party bagmen in Lyon. These people’ – he gestured at the debs, the suits, the faggots – ‘can’t even make proper use of their own homes, let alone provide shelter for anyone else. That cunt over there is screwing me out’ – it was true, an intense type with spiky hair and wire-rimmed spectacles was staring at Wotton – ‘I want to break free!’ He turned on his heel and made for the distant double doors.
    Dorian remained where he was, and the intense man – who was the volunteer co-ordinator at the project – joined him. Who’s he? the man spat in the direction of Wotton’s retreating back. His own name was a classless John.
    —’Enry Wotton, Dorian sneered, despising himself for the way he automatically dropped into Mockney. ’E’s Phyllis’s son.
    —Why’re you hanging out with him?
    —Friend of a friend.
    —He looks fucking dodgy – John looked Dorian in the eye – like a junky as well as a toff.
    —And a queer – you forgot to say queer.
    —What?! John was nonplussed, but Dorian was gone.

    Meanwhile, Wotton had run into the Ferret, an old crony, by the entrance. The Ferret was staring at Dorian. ‘He’s amazingly beautiful, the one natural flower in this plantation of artifice.’ The Ferret himself was small, and his wrinkled pinhead was liver-spotted. He wore an obvious toupee.
    ‘Yes, well’ – Wotton gave a bashful moue – ‘I’m going to mount him like a butterfly until he whimpers like a hog.’
    ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ the Ferret giggled indulgently. ‘All that heroin and cocaine and alcohol and nicotine and marijuana makes your penis very small and completely limp.’
    ‘I tell you, Fergus,’ Wotton said with some seriousness, ‘I’d give up doing drugs altogether, if I wasn’t afraid of other people taking them without me.’
    A waiter was passing and the Ferret took a glass of Perrier before replying, ‘No one’s suggesting that you stop dissipating yourself for one minute, Henry. The IMF are being called into Rome – fiddle on. How’s Baz?’
    ‘I don’t mind discarding any lover – as long as they stay discarded.’
    ‘You’re unnecessarily cruel –’
    ‘And you’re ridiculously old.’
    ‘And he…’ the Ferret