Authors: Dennis Wheatley
Curtain of Fear
by
DENNIS WHEATLEY
For my friend of many years
THE RT. REVEREND
CYRIL EASTAUGH, M.C.
Lord Bishop of Kensington.
Most affectionately.
Chapter I “The Path of True Love ⦔
Chapter II The Atomic Scientist
Chapter III The Terrible Dilemma
Chapter IV The Black Limousine
Chapter V The Persistent Negro
Chapter VIII Behind the Iron Curtain
Chapter IX Luxury Suite for Two
Chapter XI The People's Representative
Chapter XII A Taste of Soviet Justice
Chapter XIII A Mind in Torment
Chapter XIV Night-Life Under the Soviets
Chapter XV The Faith that Failed
Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.
As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy's visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.
There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.
There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duc de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.
He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it's true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it's important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read âall his books'.
Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.
He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.
He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond's precursors.
The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I'm not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.
Dominic Wheatley, 2013
“THE PATH OF TRUE LOVE ⦔
“What about a little kiss from my teacher?” said Wendy with a smile.
“Come right up to the top of the class, darling,” Nicky smiled back.
The door of the class-room had barely closed before her arms were round his neck. She was a senior student and he a junior professor at Birmingham University. About three minutes had elapsed since he had finished his morning lecture. During them they had both made an impatient pretence of packing up their notes and books until the other students had left the room. At last they were free to snatch a few moments' bliss together.
For a dozen heart-beats they stood tightly embraced, then drew apart to smile into one another's eyes. Wendy Stevenson was twenty-two, a well-built athletic-looking girl with dark curly hair, a straight nose, rather full cheeks and a generous mouth. Nicholas Novák was thirty, tallish, with a slight stoop, red-headed and so thin-faced as to be almost cadaverous, but his lively brown eyes gave his face charm and strong personality.
A glance at their clothes was enough to indicate their very different backgrounds.
As it was May and a sunny day, she had put on a gaily-coloured print frock. It was new and she would not have worn it for any other Professor's class that Friday morning; but her bag, shoes and the small attaché case which contained her sandwich lunch all spoke of ample money. Her father was a rich manufacturer and she lived with her parents in a big house with a pleasant garden out at Solihull.
He was wearing an old tweed jacket, baggy grey flannel trousers and a dark blue shirt. His tie was a rag, his shoes needed
re-heeling, and the satchel into which his packet of sandwiches was stuffed with his books was gaping at the seams. This seediness about his things was not altogether due to the carelessness of appearance common among intellectuals, as when new they had been cheap and shoddy. His father had been a Czech commercial traveller who had married an English girl and taken British nationality shortly after the First World War. Both had been killed by a flying bomb in 1944 and, from the age of twenty-one, Nicholas had been left to fend for himself with very little money.
This was the second term that Wendy had sat as one of Nicholas' students in Political Economics. From the beginning she had admired his quick, vital manner and fine intellect; while he had soon, rather grudgingly, admitted to himself that for a spoilt little rich girl she showed unusual promise as a student; but their real âdiscovery' of one another was much more recent. They had been drawn as partners in the mixed doubles for the first tournament of the year at the University Tennis Club. She had asked him out to her home to practise and, with the suddenness of blossom bursting on a warm day in spring, their acquaintance had become a passionate yearning for one another.
Wendy had philandered happily with half a dozen young men in her own wealthy set, but this was her first serious affair. She felt to the very bottom of her being that Nicky was the only man she could ever possibly marry. Never having had to bother about money, she did not do so now. Imperiously she had swept aside Nicky's uneasy admission that he could not afford to get married. For her it was enough that with his brilliant gifts he was certain to go to the top of the tree. In the meantime, her father would provide; or, should he refuse, that would be a challenge to her love which she would readily accept, as in her ignorance of living meanly the prospect of life with Nicky in a tiny flat appeared to offer all the delights of a gay adventure.
Nicholas, too, had never before had a serious affair. His struggle to achieve professorship without money or influence had begotten in him a bitter class hatred; he loathed and despised what were loosely termed the âidle rich'. Yet he was fastidious
by nature and had acquired an illogical snobbishness about women which had, up till now, made him reject any permanent association with such girls as had been within his reach. On the few occasions when his loneliness had caused him temporarily to succumb he had afterwards despised himself; yet he despised himself still more for secretly hankering after the beautifully-turned-out daughters of the rich, whom he thought of as spoilt and empty-headed. But Wendy had carried him off his feet. She was neither idle nor foolish, but everything he had ever longed for. That she should return his love still seemed to him a miracle. He knew that to marry her on his income would be madness, and his every instinct revolted against accepting help from her father; but, all the same, a week before he had put all his scruples behind him and they had become secretly engaged.
They thought it a foregone conclusion that her parents would oppose the match, as Novák was very far from being the type of man the Stevensons would have chosen as a son-in-law; but neither of the love-bemused couple was unduly worried about that. Wendy had a fine chin and a will that went with it; while Nicholas at least had prospects and, although he remained adamant about becoming what he termed a âparasite', had been persuaded to agree that it would be unreasonable to insist on Wendy's refusing a handsome increase in her dress allowance. In consequence they were confident that now Nicholas was prepared to forgo any attempt to make his young wife entirely dependent on him in near poverty, consent could be won after a display of sufficient persistence.
Yet one thing secretly troubled them; it was their diametrically opposed views on politics. As a professor and a student of Political Economics, both of them took all questions of government and ideologies with extreme seriousness. Unhappily, he was as Red as any Leftist could be, while by upbringing and conviction she was a True-Blue Tory.
During the early stages of their acquaintance they had found it a fascinating game to argue their differences. Wendy, whose earnestness was leavened with a sense of humour, had had a lot of fun seeing him get hot under the collar when she shrewdly
quoted examples of the incompetence the Socialists had displayed while in office; and Nicholas had felt a pleasant sense of elation whenever he had forced her to admit one or other of the barbarous circumstances in which the governments of the rich had for many generations compelled the poor to scrape a living. But now that they were eager to marry, these differences of outlook had become like hideous insects gnawing at the core of their happiness.
Each time he came to her home she was fearful that he might give free reign to his boundless admiration for Mr. Aneurin Bevanâwhose very name was anathema to her father; while on these visits he sometimes went white with the strain of holding his tongue when her family spoke with love and admiration of the man he always thought of as âthat deceitful, imperialist warmonger, Churchill'.
Passionately as they were drawn to one another, honestly as they admired each other's minds and characters, determined as they were to exercise every possible restraint where their political feelings were concerned, both of them were horribly conscious that this was the one rock upon which their love might founder. And a crisis that held all the ingredients for bringing about such a wreck was far more imminent than either of them imagined.
