A Dandy in Aspic Read online

  Praise for Derek Marlowe’s

  A DANDY IN ASPIC

  ‘He writes like John le Carré at the top of his form’ Yorkshire Post

  `A classic of the cold war spy stories - one of the earliest and one of the best. Marlowe’s Eberlin/Krasnevin is on the run from himself on different levels and in different places: the evocations of London and Berlin in the 1960s are superb.’ Piers Paul Read

  ‘Characters and settings make it near-compulsive reading with the tension rising to an exciting finale in Berlin’ Daily Mail

  ‘A Dandy In Aspic is a great spy novel: beautifully written and with a melancholy soul beneath its wry humour, it’s high time it came out from the shadows again’ Jeremy Duns, author of the ‘Paul Dark’ novels

  ‘Nicely told, with occasional wit and considerable irony . . . A most promising debut’ Sunday Times

  ‘A very well written, intelligent spy thriller’ The Observer

  A DANDY IN ASPIC

  DEREK MARLOWE

  SILVERTAIL BOOKS • London

  When she got back to the Cheshire-Cat, she was surprised to find quite a large crowd collected round it: there was a dispute going on between the executioner, the King, and the Queen, who were all talking at once, while all the rest were quite silent, and looked very uncomfortable.

  The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it from; that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn’t going to begin at his time of life.

  The King’s argument was that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren’t to talk nonsense.

  The Queen’s argument was that, if something wasn’t done about it in less than no time, she’d have everybody executed all round. (It was this last remark that had made all the party look so grave and anxious.)

  The Cat’s head then began fading away, and soon it had entirely disappeared. So the King and the executioner ran wildly up and down looking for it, while the rest of the party went back to the game.

  LEWIS CARROLL,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  FOREWORD

  I wonder what happened to my first edition of A Dandy In Aspic. I must have been careless about lending it when it could no longer be bought. Derek’s succeeding novels, from The Memoirs of a Venus Lackey (1968) to The Rich Boy from Chicago (1979), are in their place on my bookshelves; seven titles, lacking the first and ninth. The last novel, Nancy Astor (1982), based on his own screenplay, had passed me by. But it was A Dandy in Aspic, written in four weeks in a flat he shared with me and Piers Paul Read just off the Vauxhall Bridge Road in 1965, that changed Derek’s life.

  Derek, Piers and I were friends but not a trio. We each had a room and kept to it. We had a kitchen but seldom ate communally. I was sharing my room with my future wife, Jose. It was the year of ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’ by The Righteous Brothers: Derek played it on a loop. He went out most days because he had some kind of a job, and there were indications of an exciting life elsewhere. He’d met some people who had a rock band, and the band became The Who.

  I’m writing from memory, an increasingly fallible resource, but my memory recalls that when Derek told us that he was writing ‘a spy novel’, we were sceptical. Surely that band-wagon had passed by? The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had been published years ago! But what I do remember is that when Derek told me the basic premise for his novel (a spy with two identities who is ordered to kill his other self) I thought: now, that is an absolutely brilliant idea.

  By that time, Derek had delivered his riposte to our scepticism. Gollancz, he announced one day, had accepted his book. The American rights and the film rights followed. By our lights, Derek was rich. Success had arrived.

  The flat in Vincent Square was the third chapter of my times with Derek. We had met as tenants of bedsits in a house in Blenheim Crescent just off Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill. Today those houses change hands for millions of pounds but back then, 1961 to 1964, Blenheim Crescent was the wrong side of a frontier between respectable Notting Hill and Rachmanland, so named after a notorious landlord whose fiefdom was rife with drugs and prostitution. London was getting into its famous 60s swing, and Derek, a romantic figure in dark clothes, had a life of which I (a country mouse in the big city) knew little. I don’t think I was aware until later that he’d had at least a couple of plays modestly produced in London. But in 1964 we were independently invited, as promising young playwrights, to spend a few months in West Berlin with a group of young writers and film-makers, a ‘Literarisches Colloquium’ funded by the Ford Foundation. That’s where we met Piers. Comfortably installed in a substantial house on the shore of a lake, the Wansee, we young writers were left to do pretty much as we liked (to work, as was hoped). This extraordinary perk culminated in a kind of graduation evening of performances of the results of our fitful labours. My dim memory of Derek’s play suggests that it might have been the same piece, titled ‘The Scarecrow’, mentioned by Wikipedia as having been produced in London the same year. All I recall is the scarecrow and the unexpected (and effective) intrusion of a recording of ‘I Won’t Dance’.

  From the first meeting in Blenheim Crescent to the last day in Vincent Square there were three or four years during which our lives conjoined. I think of him as slightly mysterious, slightly withdrawn, mostly keeping his thoughts to himself. But perhaps that was me. I have to concentrate to recall his laugh. Later, as married men, we saw each other at intervals at each other’s houses. Three of my copies of his books are inscribed, from 1970, 1976 and 1980.

  In the late 70s, perhaps (I don’t keep a diary), I stayed with Derek and his wife Suki at their baronial mansion in Gloucestershire (subsequently sold to a Rolling Stone). After their divorce he moved to Los Angeles, in 1989. One day in a bookshop on Sunset Boulevard, I saw him for the last time. He was, as ever, laconic, smiley, quiet, and darkly good looking. I should say something about that. Whether by his choice or by his publishers’, the early novels come without an author’s photograph. Among my ‘English firsts’, there is no photo until Somebody’s Sister (1974), his sixth novel. I remember Derek making a deprecatory remark about his looks, to the effect that he had a funny-looking face. I thought he was beautiful, with full wide lips, dark creased eyes, and a neat head of hair around a slightly flattened face, as if he’d run into a wall in a cartoon. It was a hipster look which in itself didn’t give much away, but the mind behind the face was, and is, an open book; literally. The epigraphs of the novels come from Browning, Hart Crane, Blaise Cendrars, Ford Madox Ford, William Empson, Walter de la Mare, C P Cavafy, Malcolm Lowry, Edward Gorey. Can one call the list disparate? To me, it evokes an aura of doomed romanticism in different guises. The names of characters – Mallory, Dowson, Hallam, Lytton, and others – seem not so much made up as borrowed from the same period piece, a scrapbook of country-house England before 1914. Derek’s favourite novels were The Good Soldier by Ford; and (the exception that proves the rule) The Great Gatsby.

  Hemingway versus Fitzgerald was an argument we had more than once. Derek was a Fitzgerald man, and the books made the case for him, especially The Rich Boy from Chicago. Even the title sounds like Fitzgerald. That book’s epigraph is from a poem by Henry Bax, and perhaps it’s not fanciful to suppose that the four lines spoke more for Derek than did Browning and the rest …

  In all forms of endeavour, private and public,

  there are only two poles: sex and power.

  Between these poles is a line called the equator.

  It is an imaginary line.

  … because Henry Bax was imaginary, too.

  It has been a fast fifty years since I used to hear Derek typing his way through A Dandy in Aspic, long eno
ugh for a reputation to wax and wane, and wax again. To be out of print is not a value judgement in itself, more like a hazard of the writing life. The novels were well received when they were new, and it’s good to see the first one back again. It will find and please new readers for a graceful writer and a graceful man who died too young.

  Tom Stoppard

  13 August 2014

  APOGEE

  1

  Amontillado Caroline

  In the Country of the Blind, the One-Eyed man is

  probably in a circus.

  –ALEXANDER EBERLIN

  The surest way to be out of fashion tomorrow is to be

  in the forefront of it today.

  –ALEXANDER EBERLIN

  EBERLIN ate alone as usual. Returning to his apartment at about six o’clock, he would shower in silence, change into something less comfortable, and sit down to a dinner-for-one prepared by an aged, yet untalkative, valet who let himself in at four o’clock every afternoon and let himself out at eight o’clock every evening. No words were ever exchanged between master and servant but “Good evening” and “Good night,” except on one garrulous evening when the valet apologized, with uncontrolled discretion, for the wine. It was a happy relationship and Eberlin wouldn’t have it otherwise. He was a quiet man by nature, to such an extent that an honorary member of Brook’s, a jovial fellow and consequently shunned by all, remarked to an acquaintance that the reason why Eberlin was inarticulate was because he was born with a silver spoonerism in his mouth. It was an inaccurate statement, but nevertheless this pleasantry was taken up by all the fashionable wits of the town and earned Eberlin a mysterious reputation as an outsider, a man to claim and cultivate as one’s own. In no time, feasted, toasted and courted by a bevy of open-mouthed sycophants from all the right schools, Eberlin was guest of honor at the best parties and functions in London, a situation that made not the slightest difference to Eberlin’s personality since he attended none of them.

  Instead he would spend his free hours locked in his rooms at 24 South Street, contemplating the view from the rear window, occasionally reading a book from his library–he was now halfway through Pelham–or taking a slow walk across Hyde Park until he reached the Serpentine and then returning home. Once a week, on a fine Sunday morning, he would walk under Park Lane and emerge on the central island where Byron sat, all bronze and pigeonsmeared, and would read all the newspapers without discrimination, and then leave for South Street, throwing the wads of news into the trash bin outside the Dorchester Bar; and then, like this evening, he would, as usual, eat alone.

  The wine was awful. The valet had bought it cheap from a supermarket, knowing from experience that his master was apathetic about the acquired bigotry of vintages and bouquets. It came out of the decanter like sludge. Eberlin drank it unconcerned, as he leafed through the letters on the table. There were ten of them, mostly unsealed invitations from S.W.1, which were usually dropped on sight, unopened, into the wastebasket. But this evening, Eberlin opened all, glancing quickly at Who or What was At Home, and then stopping on a small white card which stated simply:

  Caroline Sue Hetherington requests your pleasure

  at 14 Ruston Gate S.W.3

  for some of her Amontillado Sherry.

  Seven P.M. 12 August. R.S.V.P.

  Eberlin tucked the card into his wallet and left the table. He walked slowly into the white-walled bedroom and studied a large map of London lying on the bed. Then he folded the map together and put it in the bedside table drawer.

  The valet was waiting in the hall, arms extended, holding up, with professional foresight, a deep blue, blue-silk-lined overcoat. Eberlin put it on, felt the pockets for keys and money, and then strolled back into the dining room, closed the door, turned off the light and looked out of the window. The street was empty of people. He stood there, hands in pockets, for a long while. The valet was in the next room, washing up plates with the minimum of noise. Eberlin was just above average height, thin in the body and, much to his disdain, thirty-six years old. He considered it an uncompromising age, lacking the finesse of earlier years and the authority of later. Never one to consider his life of any great importance, he had endured the years of his youth with the frivolous abandon of a monk, retiring further and further from his fellow men as the months passed, until he reached the point when he contemplated celebrating his thirty-sixth birthday in the high manner of Captain Oates. But he didn’t. Obliged, by a quirk of fate long since regretted, to play out his role, he blundered on into the dawn of middle age, a hermetic dandy, surrounding himself only with the fetish of himself–predominantly his clothes, which he chose with exquisite and envied care, his books, his three double-barreled fowling pieces by Manton, and his collection of old Sèvres porcelain locked in a vault in the V and A–and an utter lack of envy for his fellow man. He had that noble selflessness of a man who cares for no one but himself. Brummell, a man he admired unashamedly, had that. Until he went mad.

  A plate bounced off the edge of the sink in the next room, cracked in midair, then split into pieces on the floor. Eberlin made no reaction, but turned suddenly from the window, crossed the dining room, entered the hall as the valet appeared shamefaced from the kitchen, and left the apartment. It was a cool summer evening, pleasant in that part of London with the park and the mews houses and the small squares. Eberlin considered walking, not because of the weather, but because his car, a Maserati Mistrale 3.7, was at present disemboweled and eight feet in the air at Cuchet’s Garage, twenty kilometers from Lyons. A taxi man stood ten yards down the road as an elderly man and his wife dithered over the fare. Then the roof sign lit up once more, just as Eberlin had decided to walk.

  “Ruston Gate,” he said quietly to the driver. Then he closed the door and settled back into the seat of the taxi.

  * * *

  “Don’t you think bottoms are the most super common denominators men and women have?” she said with a strident brashness that fanfared her virginity.

  It was a large room on the first floor, decorated fashionably in Art Nouveau colorings and bric-a-brac from side-street boutiques, and carried the confused weight of self-consciousness with admirable dignity. Not one square foot of the carefully chosen wallpaper was evident behind the melee of assorted musical instruments, reproductions, bookshelves and Victorian kitchenware. Lady Hetherington called it her conversation room, with all that implied, and had been known to amuse the Montagus of Beaulieu in this very room by hanging radiators of vintage cars around the portrait of Prince Rupert as a special treat.

  The music was loud but no one danced. The eleven people instead posed awkwardly around the room clutching warm, empty glasses in their hands and made polite comments about absent guests and the state of the Crown. In one corner, huddled on a brown velvet-covered couch, three out-of-work actors sat talking about themselves, like three Gorgons passing round the I from one to another. A small, fat man, in a three-piece suit, stood, hands clasped behind his back, staring at the spines of the books on one wall, now and then reading out a title aloud with mock surprise to an incredibly plain girl with fat legs whom Caroline had chosen as her best friend, being herself blessed with the fragile translucent beauty of a corner angel. She (Caroline) was now squatting on a footstool at the feet of two of her male guests, dressed in a simple violet sleeveless sweater and tight deep-velvet trousers, her slender arms clasped under her thighs, her head on her knees, gazing fixedly at a whippet who was asleep by her feet.

  “Balls,” she said suddenly and looked up, frowning, at Nigel, a childhood friend, who was caressing her back with his hand, “why doesn’t John marry Mummy and get it over with? I mean, it’s not as if she’s unattractive or anything. All he wants to do is sleep with her and take her to Brinkley’s on Sundays and all that horrid routine. I feel for her sometimes, but she won’t listen. Don’t you think it’s unfair?”

  Nigel’s fingertips had now reached Caroline’s bottom and were resting on the thin pile of the trouser material
with breathless apprehension. He said, “Oh I agree” quickly and slid his thumb under the cotton belt and onto the warm skin of her lower back. Caroline pulled a face, moved away, and woke up the whippet as Eberlin entered the room.

  He stood at the door and looked around at the other guests. “Too late for whisky and the sherry’s awful, but if you hang on for a while, James is bringing along a pipkin,” said a small pinkfaced young man in a petulant tone and a honey corduroy suit.

  “Caroline never has enough in the house, does she?”

  Eberlin ignored him and walked across the room toward the fire as Caroline jumped up with a smile and tugged at the sleeve of his overcoat.

  “I’m awfully glad you could make it. Sherry’s not too good though, I’m afraid.”

  Eberlin nodded and took out a cigarette from a light leather case and lit it.

  “Do you want to be introduced around or would you rather be stuffy and ignore them? I recommend being stuffy and ignoring them because they’re all very dull and boring, except for Mark and he’s in Canada.”

  She was a short girl in her bare feet, five foot one or two perhaps, but precociously attractive, and had had mild affairs with a dozen or so middle-aged men in the four years since leaving finishing school. All had proposed marriage and all had been refused in the nicest possible way, and all remained ardent enemies of her, meeting in public and condemning her as nothing more than a whore, and phoning her in private, hopefully, in the early hours of the morning from the bar of their club. She wore her blond hair straight, curling up only within chewing distance of her wide, pale-painted mouth, and stood invariably with her small stomach forward, looking up out of violet eyes at all and every self-respecting man who longed to put her under his arm or over his shoulder and into his bed. All except Eberlin, who barely glanced at her, but surveyed the room openly, studying each guest in turn without expression and taking in, in detail, the absurd fracas of the décor. The fat man in the corner stared at him, waiting to catch his eye, then opened his mouth in expectant greeting when Eberlin did, but remained gaping as Eberlin flicked his eyes to a framed print of a Modigliani Jeanne above the man’s head, then over to a nineteenthcentury oboe that hung, impotent, in pieces, over the armoire door.