The fourth of five exclusive extracts from Tim Dowling's debut novel, in which a journalist discovers an online community devoted to ridculing him.

Different Lives

Defiantly welcoming the grandees were 200 demonstrators standing in the square in front of the Opera House. Mostly young with scruffy clothes and punky haircuts, they whistled and booed, angry that the Opera House had been sold out, allowed for the first time to be taken over by a rich patron. They were also chanting slogans about the inequity of Swiss society and the wealth of Spross's guests. The glittering horde did their very best to ignore the disturbance.

It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I've heard people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I've never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.

It takes me several tries to get the bunny head thing just right.

Grand Avenue cuts through the very heart of the city, from 71st Street all the way to the harbourfront, and although it is eight lanes wide, with a treed boulevard running down the middle, the Avenue feels claustrophobic and narrow.

The sound of fountains came in stereo. A deep splash from the courtyard below and a lighter trickle from the next room, where open arches cut in a wall that over-looked the courtyard had marble balustrades stretched between supporting pillars.

The convent was a squat, ramshackle building, its roof more corrugated iron than Gothic pinnacle. It was set among high walls spiked with shards of glass, forbidding enough to repel voyeurs, religious obsessives, nun-stalkers, sex offenders, militant Protestants, enraged atheists. But the walls were also there to keep the occupants in. For this was a convent of enclosed Carmelite nuns, who once the gate had slammed behind them would see nobody but their fellow nuns and a few priests and altar boys for the rest of their lives.

In the morning, the old general spent a considerable time in the wine cellars with his winegrower inspecting two casks of wine that had begun to ferment. He had gone there at first light, and it was past eleven o'clock before he had finished drawing off the wine and returned home. Between the columns of the veranda, which exuded a musty smell from its damp flagstones, his gamekeeper was standing waiting for him, holding a letter.

Before the Chinese burned Jyeko village, a tax-official from Lhasa stayed there. For years no revenue had reached the capital from that remote corner of Tibet's eastern province of Kham. So, in 1948, Lhasa sent its own collector. It was a four-month journey into ever-more resentful districts. But the zealous young man brought his wife and baby daughter, declared his intention to stay for as many years as it took - and was generally hated.

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.

For a man whose posthumous reputation would be mired in myths and rumours, Anthony Frederick Blunt had prosaically conventional beginnings. He was born on 26 September 1907, the third of three boys, in Bournemouth. The town's reputation was much the same then as it is now. In 1914, after attending a service at Holy Trinity church - where Blunt's father had formerly been vicar - Rupert Brooke wrote to a friend, "I have been in this quiet place of invalids and gentlemanly sunsets for about 100 years, ever since yesterday week." Blunt's father, Stanley, came from a family of impecunious but respectable and devout churchmen on the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church; his mother, Hilda, was from a well-to-do family of civil servants in the Indian Colonial Service. The Blunts were pious, austere, fiercely teetotal, anti-gambling and keen on charitable works. They had no money, but they did have good connections, both inside and outside the Church. They were a junior branch of the Blunts of Crabbet Park, landed gentry with a large estate near Horsham in Sussex, whose incumbent at Anthony's birth was the infamous poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

Solitary nights were to be feared, for when darkness fell, the mind, like the eye, saw things less clearly than by day and confusions and perversions of the brain manufactured black thoughts. Which is why he contrived to stay out into the small hours, to shrink the time left until the light came back.