A Dandy in Aspic

by Derek Marlowe

  Caroline said, “Stop it!” loudly to the whippet and glanced at Eberlin, but he took no notice and looked for an ashtray, catching sight of the fat man’s reflection, still studying him slyly, one hand toying with a plaster dog, in the long, gold-framed, delicately carved mirror over the mantel. He threw the cigarette into the fire.

  “Don’t you want to take your coat off?” Nigel remarked, giving Caroline an overt peck on the cheek. “It’s awfully hot in here.” Eberlin took off the coat and handed it to Nigel who hesitated, then plonked it on the edge of the couch and shouted “Michael!” Eberlin picked it up again and carried it, draped over his arm, out of the room to the entrance hall and laid it on the chaise longue, and then returned to the room by another door, entering behind everybody, and taking a book off a table, opened it and considered the first paragraph.

  Two more guests arrived; one, carrying a large metal pipkin of beer, was presumably James. The other, a big-boned girl with black curly hair, praised everything in the room with exaggerated gasps of contemporary slang and then left quickly after ten minutes with a blue apothecary bottle which Lady Hetherington had brought all the way from Tunbridge Wells. One bold zealot had put Purcell’s O Come Ye Sons of Art on the record player and was hushing members of his tightly knit clique of two every time the counter-tenor reached a disturbingly high octave. Caroline herself retained the attention of the more imaginative members of the group by demonstrating her appealing ability to touch her toes without bending the knees, while her best friend muttered miserably alone under the base shelf of The Collected Works of Dickens. The fat man offered Eberlin a Will’s Whiff, which he refused curtly, crossing to a vacant hamlet chair that was conveniently out of everyone’s way near the window. It was now one minute to nine. He sat down at an angle from the other guests, facing an elderly man who gave him a nod and said, “What an excellent suit,” and nodded again. The music stopped abruptly with cries of “Shame!” and “God!” then the more modish sounds of a pop group hit out at all-comers. Eberlin considered abandoning the whole sorry affair altogether and returning home, when a soft white arm, wrist jangling with Persian charms appeared over his shoulder clutching a full glass of Chivas Regal, and Caroline whispered in his ear:

  “I saved this especially for you in the hope that you might arrive. It seems silly to introduce myself now, but I’m Caroline.”

  “How do you do,” he said, taking the glass and drinking it slowly.

  Standing behind him, she rested her arm on his shoulder and whispered again: “The fat man in the corner asked me if I knew you. He seemed terribly interested when I said you might come. Do you know him?”

  “No.”

  She leaned forward, smelling heavily of Amontillado and Numero Cinq, so that her hair irritated his cheek, and smiled at him. Eberlin got up, walked across the room, and appreciated Prince Rupert.

  “The Duke of Marlborough,” said a male voice behind him and another said, “No, it’s Prince Rupert,” and a pretty girl in a trouser suit said, “Prince Rupert,” and then the fat man said, “My name’s Copperfield.”

  Eberlin turned and looked down at a beaming round face, squint-eyed behind spectacles. His hair was sparse, his tie Winchester, and sweat hung around his obese cheeks. “How do you do,” and he extended a chubby hand.

  “How do you do,” said Eberlin quickly and returned to the painting.

  “You’re Eberlin aren’t you?” Copperfield said quietly. “I’ve heard a lot about–”

  “Excuse me.” Eberlin returned to the hamlet chair and sat down again and picked up his drink. It was now twelve minutes past nine. Caroline was standing with a group of men near the piano and was listening to none of them. She looked steadily at Eberlin over her shoulder and smiled, and then walked across the cluttered room toward him.

  “I do hope you’re not bored,” she said. “A little.”

  “Would you like to see the rest of the house? It’s not much but you might like it. I’ll show you.”

  Copperfield stubbed out his cigar and stared at the two of them. Michael, an ex-lover of Caroline’s, muttered in his ear and he smiled and they exchanged glances and another man laughed. Then Copperfield came up behind her and hovered his splayed fingers under her bottom and the two men chuckled, and he winked over her shoulder at Eberlin who said “All right” to Caroline and left the room, treading on Copperfield’s black, neatly polished, patent leather toe.

  There were only three other rooms in the house, besides bathroom and kitchen. One was a form of study where the late Lord Hetherington had begun every year his definitive biography of Edward the Confessor, contemplated his butterfly collection, and had made love twice, with blatant exertion, to his wife three days before their wedding. It was now never used except to store Caroline’s old dolls and her mother’s copies of Elle and Vogue. The other two rooms were bedrooms, decorated in a ridiculous shade of yellow, with paper grapes cut out and stuck over the ceiling by an earnest designer friend of Lady Hetherington’s, long since forgotten. The sexual undulations of Lady Hetherington were, in fact, well known in her section of London society, as well as on a small but impishly pert Greek island in the Adriatic. She had, it seems, lost her virginity at an early age and had been offering herself as a reward for its recapture ever since.

  Eberlin stood on the white carpet of Caroline’s bedroom and glanced at his watch.

  “Well, that’s about it,” she sighed, “except for the John, and that’s in a horrid puce color. Some odd whim of Mummy’s after she spent the weekend at the Chestertons’. I’m glad you came. I feel very privileged.”

  He looked at her as she sat on the edge of the bed chewing the inside of her mouth.

  “I expect you’re fed up with my saying that, aren’t you?”

  “Not at all.”

  She gave a quick laugh and pulled at her hair.

  “I don’t really want to go back down there yet. I know it’s my party and all that but it’s awfully dull. They always are. Oh dear.”

  She pulled her left leg at right angles onto her other leg and toyed with her toes. She was indeed an eminently seductive girl, being small-breasted in the right manner and wide-mouthed and pleasantly apathetic about everything important. Eberlin moved a step nearer and she looked up at him with a wide smile and returned in inviting concentration to her foot.

  He had met many attractive women in his life, and despite his lack of apparent interest, had retained his boyish surprise at the infinite variety of beauty there was in this narrow sphere. He had had a few affairs of no import in his early twenties with various fashionable girls of small minds. And then at twenty-five had prolonged an affair into a confined relationship that had broken the back of his cynicism toward women and had left him, after the full final cymbal-crash of the breakup had faded, with a profound respect for the opposite sex, an abject disenchantment with himself, and a darkhaired young son called Jesse. He had tried vainly for the last weeks of the affair to alchemize the horrendous quarrels into something better but, mostly through his own fault, it all collapsed around him; except for the final pathetic attempts to establish himself, like a struggling spiritualist slipping her card into a passing coffin.

  At first, after they had lived apart, he would visit her and his son with a shifting uneasiness, buying small presents like colored bricks and bibs. And then as the months passed, he found himself being pushed further away, until the very district where she lived, with new friends and new patterns of speech, began to bear the exclusive properties of a sanctuary to all but himself. His visits became rarer then as he steeled himself to blunder through the looks and questions of his strangers and her intimates, until he abandoned it altogether in a morass of self-pity and bitterness. After five years he never saw her again, though he read somewhere, or somebody told him, that she had married a property owner and was living in grand style somewhere near Bath. The end of the affair had been made official, and yet even now, at thirty-six, he felt an involuntary pang at oblique re
minders of her–her name, walk, gestures, phraseology echoed in someone else, the inevitable comparisons when bores praised their lovers, the whole, sad, enviable, incredible monolith of the affair.

  Once he had found an old letter of hers in a neglected book, and had sat staring at it without reading it for a quarter of an hour, blocked in the whole agony of the moment. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy it, yet he feared rediscovering it on some unexpected day in the far future. And so he tried to lose it, leaving it around negligently, hiding it amongst a gallimaufry of rubbish, pushing it under things, out of sight and between things. Finally it did disappear and he spent three frightened hours in his pajamas one night looking for it feverishly, but it never turned up. For two months afterward he never touched an object that didn’t readily come to the eye, and then the letter gratefully slipped into the back of his mind and he relaxed.

  Eberlin still regretted one thing above all–that he could never be sure if he should have married her. His antipathy began in fear but went on into something more inexplicable that he never resolved. He didn’t marry her and henceforth nurtured a bitterness at all married people, as he had watched contemporaries marry and assume that marital hat, that middle-class insular smugness which seemed to be the hallmark of the pedestal they had erected. And so he abandoned them and lived with himself, suffering only the briefest of relationships with women, preferably none at all. Each month his bank would send a check to his ten-year-old son, whom he wouldn’t recognize in a small room, and each year he became more attractive to women in general and more forgotten to one in particular. Eberlin hated it all. He stood studying the crown of hair of this girl, this child sitting before him, this small, inconsequential creature whose narrow life had hardly yet begun. He felt old.

  “Aren’t toes funny things when you think about them, which I do never,” she said suddenly, then looked up and caught his expression. “What are you thinking? Awful question.”

  Eberlin smiled and turned away toward the window. It was now nine forty.

  “I don’t suppose you remember ever meeting me before,” she was saying, “but I saw you when I was with Mummy in North Africa, last month. You looked all sort of brown and distinguished and very English in a nice sort of way, and very super, and I asked someone who you were and they said your name was Eberlin and you were in the Ministry of something. All very mysterious really. Mummy fancied you like mad.”

  “What part of North Africa was that?” said Eberlin quietly. “Oh, Tripoli. Mummy’s got this thing about Dido–you know, the jolly old queen of Carthage. That’s Tripoli, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Near there.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  A sigh and a pout. “What do you do?”

  “Nothing very dramatic. A desk job.”

  “Oh, I can’t believe that. I bet it’s all swish and underhand and night flights to Budapest,” she gurgled, and stared frowning at Eberlin’s back. He had to stay there eleven more minutes now at the least. It was a slight discomfort, but with an attempt at Stoic resolution, he could probably last out. She was quite a sweet girl but so very young, and would probably say, any minute, something like “Do you find me attractive?” He lit another cigarette. Smoking too much, Eberlin.

  “Do you think I’m attractive–I mean, sexually attractive?” she said suddenly, standing up and thrusting out her jaw as if it were the most serious matter on earth. Which to her it was. “Mummy’s incredibly sexy and is always having it away all over the place. No end of lovers. I’m not at all seductive though,” and then, “Am I?”

  Eberlin inclined his head slightly toward her and replied: “A little. But it doesn’t disturb me.”

  “Oh.”

  She looked down at herself, prodding her stomach, casting a scrutinizing look every now and then at Eberlin, then at a mirror on one wall. Someone downstairs shouted, “Caroline!”

  “I suppose you’re right.” She frowned finally, staring into the mirror. “I’m not really what you might call–voluptuous, am I?”

  Eberlin laughed and said pleasantly, “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to your reflection. I’ve always thought that in this modern age of scientific advance, it was about time someone perfected the art of making the common mirror. In all my life, I have not encountered one that has interpreted my image correctly.”

  “Caroline! Caro-line!”–it must be Nigel–“that dog has messed all over Michael’s coat and he’s furious!”

  There was a long pause, and then Caroline shrugged and walked slowly to the door.

  “I’d better go down. Are you coming?”

  “Not yet.”

  She nodded thoughtfully, gave a sudden smile and went out quickly. He heard her running down the stairs and someone saying, “Where have you been?” and the reply, “Oh, shut up–I’ve been in the john, for Godsakes!” Eberlin walked out of the room, paused on the landing and entered the musty dark study of the late Lord Hetherington. He closed the door, sealing out the social whirl, and studied the objects on the desk, then glanced out of the window. London was a cold city at the best of times, but retained a casual indifference to its inhabitants that was comforting. He could see the dark shape of a domed building–couldn’t be St. Paul’s, could it? Brompton Oratory more likely–and the lighted windows of the Georgian houses opposite. No one particular in the street. He was about to turn and leave when a voice behind him said:

  “Oh there you are.”

  Copperfield entered quietly, shutting the door behind him. “I thought you’d gone.”

  He stood, smiling fatly up at Eberlin, a dead cigar still in his mouth. Eberlin dropped the heavy curtains back into place and, pulling a chair out from under the desk, sat down, crossed his legs and waited. Copperfield wandered around the room irritatingly, picking up irrelevant objects like a chunk of Dover chalk labelled DOVER CHALK, and a rolled-up rubbing of the Black Prince rather badly done. He moved heavily, breathing emphatically as if from asthma and now and then humming an odd tuneless mnemonic of music to himself. No words were exchanged for three whole minutes. Eberlin listened to the strained highlights of music and noise below and thought of nothing at all. There was a sudden thump as Copperfield dropped the unfinished Chapter One of Edward the Confessor, A Portrait onto a small side table, took the cigar from his mouth, and remarked casually to a print of the Magna Carta, bought from H.M.S.O., that was hanging on one wall:

  “Pity about Nightingale.”

  Eberlin pulled at, imperceptibly, the crease of trouser above his knees and made no reply.

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “No.”

  “Funny chap,” said Copperfield.

  Eberlin swung around in the chair and stood up. “I’m afraid I must leave.”

  Copperfield glanced at him carefully, then crossed deliberately to the door and leaned on it, facing Eberlin and fixing him with a cherubic smile of utter complacency.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, but never had the pleasure of meeting you before. Frazer thinks very highly of you.”

  Eberlin stood in the center of the room, deadpan, and stared at a spot just above Copperfield’s indecently covered scalp. There was no impatience or insolence in his attitude; he was just someone passing the time by standing still. The fat man gave a quick tug to the points of his waistcoat and picked at some imaginary fluff on his lower jacket.

  “I’ve always felt that you were being wasted tied down to the office. It suits me because I’m a lazy sort of chap, not one to go running around. But you … always surprised me … you sticking it there. No ties or anything,” and then looking up through his silly little glasses, “have you?”

  “No.”

  “No, I thought that. No ties. I’m a married man myself–well, I look it don’t I? Married. You must have gathered that from the way I was ogling the sexy little hostess. A man of your perception must have noticed that. It’s very obvious. But I can’t help it. I go to strip clubs on the sly. I’m that kind of man. I even have a collecti
on of pornographic magazines at home, hidden away. Untouched photographs–they show everything. You know? He gestured. “Well, you can tell I’m the type who does things like that–by just, well, looking at me. I get the magazines from a friend of mine in C. and E. He’s not really a–you speak Russian, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say something in–no, that’s silly. I speak it too but not too well. French, yes–but Russian, not too good I’m afraid.”

  He looked up quickly and appraised Eberlin with a diminutive smile. Eberlin stared back calmly and then said:

  “Do you mind moving out of the way? I’m leaving.” Copperfield did mind and ignored the question. “You were in North Africa recently, weren’t you?” No answer.

  “Tangiers, wasn’t it?”

  “Tripoli.”

  “Oh yes. Tripoli. Of course. I don’t know why I said Tangiers.

  Nightingale, I suppose…. Speak Arabic at all?”

  “No.”

  “No. Well, who does nowadays?”

  Copperfield was suddenly propelled forward into the room and away from the door he had been leaning on, as it was pushed open from the outside suddenly and Caroline stood staring in, lower lip under top, at the two men in the study.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know–”

  She turned to move away, when Eberlin stepped forward smiling.

  “It’s all right. I was just leaving.”

  She caught Copperfield’s sudden look of anger as he turned quickly back toward the door.

  “Do you have to?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid so. I have some work to do.”