Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime Read online

  London was a wonderland above and below ground. She was thrilled by the thronging Strand, and by Trafalgar Square, where humming multitudes of people pushed past iconic stone buildings and vast public sculptures. She delighted in Piccadilly Circus, where scarlet buses and black taxis hurtled. ‘This, Londoners say, is the hub of the world, and it is here that I love to stand, my feet on London stones, in the very heart of that amazing labyrinth.’ She relished the experience of diving down moving stairways, travelling through ‘strangely scented warm tunnels’ and coming out on subterranean platforms, to take the tube. ‘As we gathered way, all these figures moved very slightly and spasmodically, for all the world like…masked jiggling puppets…As one does in the tubes, I sat idly speculating about my fellow travellers for three miles under the earth.’ Mesmerized by people and places, she was looking at the city with the eyes of an outsider and it set her imagination on fire.

  Ngaio was with the Rhodeses only a matter of months before the ‘bandwagon’ carried her off to Monte Carlo. She watched in astonishment as the family planned to spend a windfall given to them by Nelly’s mother. Money worries hung over Alderbourne Manor, but Monte Carlo was chosen as an escape and a place where they could recover financially by making a fortune at the gaming tables. ‘A domestic roulette was put into instant use.’ They would take turns at spinning the wheel and record the patterns of numbers in order to devise a sensible and scientific system. Ngaio was sceptical. So, she suspected, were they. But they were having fun, and the fun was intoxicating. There were Nelly Rhodes, Ngaio, and Betty Cotterill, a student friend of Ngaio’s who also stayed for a while with the Rhodes family. The Channel was ‘grey and nasty and was covered with white horses’ when they left Dover, but the boat was intriguing. She could observe again: ‘Wondering about the nationality, private lives, and destinations of the people who are pouring up the wind-raked gangway on to the alarmingly small vessel that is to herd you all together.’ Ngaio enjoyed the drama of arriving in Calais, which was like ‘stepping on to the stage of an impromptu musical comedy’.

  But it was the train beside the wharf that arrested her attention. It was ‘the famous Blue Train,’ she explained, ‘cherished by all weavers of detective fiction on the Continental scale’. Already she was thinking of murder on an overnight express. The Blue Train carried them south from austere Paris past fields of vines and ‘pointed ranks’ of black cypress trees, through hills and heat-baked yellow houses to the Riviera. ‘Monte Carlo is beautiful in a lavish carefree sort of way that rather took me aback,’ she recorded. From the balcony of their adjoining rooms they looked down on a ‘cheerful little street’. Subdued sounds of horses’ hooves, church bells, motor horns ‘and the endless lisp of quiet voices’ drifted up in a muted haze of warmth and colour. The casino, by contrast, was a cacophony of Baroque flamboyance. Nude men supported shields; cornucopias spilled forth; voluptuous ‘larger-than-life ladies’ languished in pastoral landscapes. The colours were a muted confection of chocolate, ochre, ‘baby blues and pinks that have gone off’, and everything that could be gilded was. The extravagance of the roof and walls was an entrée to the hushed drama of the floor. ‘Roulette in extremis is a disease,’ announced Ngaio, after describing the many English habitués who came daily, their faces distorted by alcohol and drugs. She savoured the detail of hawk-like men and women who sat expressionless, watching their fortunes dance up and down on the back of an ivory ball.

  ‘I usually start with a group of people,’ Ngaio told a radio interviewer, explaining how she began a book. ‘I get interested in a group of people…and think about them, their relationships…quite often, just start writing about them…Which of these people is capable of a crime of violence?…Under what circumstances would they be likely to commit it?’

  At Monte Carlo, Ngaio was already looking for potential suspects.

  She is over middle-age and…enormous. Her face, heavily enamelled, dangles in pockets from the bones of her skull. At three in the afternoon, when I first saw her, she was dressed in jonquil-coloured satin trimmed with marabou, and on her head was a golden cap covered in sparkling diamanté and garnished with an osprey about two feet high. In her claws she carried stacks of mills plaques worth more than £8-each, and in a few minutes she had trebled them…she gathered up her golden robes and swept over to the baccarrat [sic] table where she very quickly lost it all.

  Ngaio’s party nicknamed this ‘enormous’ woman’s male counterpart ‘Dolly’, because he had minute hands and feet, a white moustache that looked as though it was stuck on with glue, and was ‘rigidly tailored and tight-waisted to such a degree that he could only move in little mechanical jerks’.

  There was also a third sex at the tables that was more memorable than Ngaio was prepared to admit to ‘Pilgrim’ readers in 1928. It was not until she recalled the event in her autobiography Black Beech and Honey dew in 1966 that she mentioned a kind of woman that was ‘entirely new to me. The croupiers referred to the most dominant of them as “cette monsieur-dame”. She seemed to have quite a pleasant time of it, running her finger round inside her collar and settling her tie. She wore a sort of habit and was perhaps by [Christopher] Isherwood out of [Aldous] Huxley.’

  The three women found the experience exhilarating. ‘We chose a table and hit Monte Carlo with our system.’ On the first evening they won so much that their purses bulged, but after a week they had lost nearly all their gains. A new tactic was devised. ‘We separated and we spent ages waiting for long runs on the even chances.’ They delighted in being together and free from restraints. In Christchurch, jealous rumours of an affair between Ngaio and Tahu Rhodes were whispered over teacups and behind theatre programmes, but it was the intimacy between Ngaio and Nelly Rhodes that was the glue.

  Ngaio was captivated by her friend’s languid, aristocratic ease. Nelly was sure of her place, and had a liberty of spirit that came from privilege. Luxury was assumed, and delicacies ordered and served before balance books were totted. She was vague about practicalities and self-indulgent, but generous to a fault with others whether family coffers were full or empty. Ngaio’s childhood of genteel poverty was vastly different, and her social position more ambiguous. She could play the aristocrat, but she was not born one. For her the upper classes were a fiction, and travelling with Nelly to Monte Carlo was as full of wonder as waking up in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall or Vile Bodies. What Ngaio brought to their relationship was her effervescent wit, her theatricality and the sheer energy of her excitement at being away. ‘[They] called us the “Ladies who Laugh”,’ she wrote, ‘presumably because we were unable to manage the correct expressionless stare at the tables, and on the occasion when we disastrously lost all our plaques laughed helplessly until we cried.’

  Nelly Rhodes and Betty Cotterill lost, then recovered to gain a little at the end. Ngaio was more fortunate. ‘I suddenly found I’d won on 15 en plein and made enough to buy a coat and skirt.’ In reality, the outfit she bought with her winnings was reminiscent of the ‘cette monsieur-dame’ ensemble she later described in Black Beech. Whether Ngaio purchased this outfit to play fashionable-butch to Nelly’s languid-femme is impossible to know, because she destroyed any intimate record of their relationship. In her 20s Ngaio began burning correspondence that would elucidate any deeply felt emotional or physical nuance in her relationships. However, a photograph survives of Ngaio in her ‘cette monsieur-dame’ dress, suggesting not just modish chic but a theatrical delight in camping it up and testing the boundaries of cross-dressing.

  They arrived back as white frosts were beginning to settle on the lawns at Alderbourne Manor. It was cold reality after the excitement of the Riviera, and the New Year of 1929 ushered in a bleak winter. ‘We are in the middle of the greatest frost England has known since eighteen something,’ Ngaio told readers. ‘The woods, the fields, the streams are all frozen and silent, and this morning I found a robin – silent too, and stiff in the grass where he had fallen out of the dead-cold sky.’ In
London there were warnings in the press against skating on the Thames, which ‘hundreds of these hardy English’ did anyway, and in a quadrangle at Cambridge people flocked to see a frozen fountain. Ngaio ignored the biting cold and relished the sights: Westminster Abbey with its unearthly collection of sightless statues, and the Tower of London emerging from a ‘thin morning mist’ so that ‘a turret shone out quite warm and clear while the underlying structure slipped away into a blue haze’. She drove through Windsor Park at sunset and watched the long, late ‘rays of light touch trees and turf with the colours of heraldry’.

  Later she visited art galleries and the spring exhibitions. Burlington House had a show of Dutch masters. She listened to a radio lecture about it by critic and art writer Roger Fry, and when she arrived to see the paintings the courtyard of Burlington House was ‘crammed with rich cars and the rooms were thronged with rich people’. It was the people rather than the art that fascinated her. Two ‘shrewdly critical Frenchwomen’ captured her attention, then the ‘modern’ art students. ‘They were very dirtily dressed in raincoats and trousers, and apparently little else. The prevailing fashion…[was to allow] their beards to grow to the “ten-days” lengths and then by a mysterious process, arresting their growth.’

  She went in search of her roots, visiting the ancient Temple Church to find some trace of her great-grandfather who, according to family record, was the promised heir to a vast estate in Scotland. Unfortunately, the property owner (his uncle) died intestate, and the fortune was thrown into the Chancery. He was forced to take ‘some extremely humble job in the Middle Temple and my grandfather went to the choir school of the Temple Church’. Ngaio had no luck. ‘The verger, a grim man, had never heard of my ancestor.’

  She lunched in style with the Rhodeses at such favourite places as the Ritz, the Savoy and the Carlton, and quietly on her own at little back-street establishments that were not always as cheap as she expected. For a time she even captured a job as a mannequin in a small, exclusive fashion shop off Bond Street. She had the perfect figure, but not an ideal temperament. She felt like a ‘richly turned-out automaton’. ‘[We] fell into lines, and, one by one, filed out of the door into the showroom, where we dropped into that curiously inhuman walk…we undulated backwards and forwards two or three times, stood in a half dozen modern attitudes, and strolled nonchalantly out of the door, the attendant nymphs fell upon us like automatic furies, switched dresses off…[and] on, and back we went into the queue again all silks and smiles.’

  She was captivated, also, by the rituals of the Royal House, standing among crowds to watch the Trooping the Colour ceremony. She described the rich pageantry of uniforms, horses and foreign guests. ‘The Sultan of Zanzibar arrived close by us, stepping from his car in an astonishing blaze of jewels and exotic robes, while the immaculate English aide-de-camps stood, silk hat in hand to usher his Midnight Extravagance to his appointed seat.’

  Three ‘Pilgrim’ articles, published in September, October and November 1929, recorded another magical trip to France. Again, Ngaio, Nelly Rhodes and Betty Cotterill escaped, taking a hotel on the Rue des Capucines in Paris. The summer was sizzling hot, and when their train reached the ‘environs of Paris the carriage next to ours actually caught fire’. Taxis flew past their hotel, tooting and adding thick vaporous exhaust fumes to the steaming boulevard. Ngaio sat out on the pavements, sipping coffee in a heat-induced dream state, while the city erupted around her. They visited Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors, which ‘is the biggest room I have ever seen’. They ate at restaurants and visited nightclubs like the famed Folies Bergère where ‘American voices, keyed up to their full siren pitch, cut the air into ribbons, French voices, with that soft, emphatic, rattle of words, burbled and eddied in a sort of conglomerate roar’. Paris was noisy, hot and expensive, but they loved it.

  Once again, financial worries hit them when they returned to Alderbourne. In spite of their troubles, Ngaio helped Nelly Rhodes and her grandmother raise money for famine relief in India. Trestle tables were erected in the empty ballroom where they began painting. They decorated wooden cigarette boxes, tin wastepaper bins, trays, tables, lampshades, blotters and bowls, and made plaques with funny rhymes for bathroom and lavatory doors. Their ‘artsy-craftsy stall’ at the famine relief bazaar was a coup, realizing what seemed a small fortune.

  It was not long before they decided that charity should begin at home. ‘I have become a shopkeeper in London town,’ Ngaio announced to her readers. ‘My partner and I have rented these minute premises for October, November and December.’ Their lock-up was in one of London’s most fashionable areas and they planned to sell gift items over the Christmas period. In London it snowed so much that immediately before Christmas Ngaio stayed at The Rembrandt hotel opposite the Brompton Oratory so she could open the shop early in the morning. Remarkably, when they cashed up their business they had made a profit, even after the Wall Street crash the previous October, and it was too tantalizing to stop. They decided to follow up their entrepreneurial success by establishing a shop at a more permanent address on Brompton Road, in Knightsbridge. They called themselves Touch and Go, after a Christchurch entertainment group with which they had been involved, and their business flourished. They then moved around the corner to Beauchamp Place, before shifting again into a bigger shop in the same street, where they focused more on furniture and interior design.

  Their salubrious address was a honey trap for the upper classes. When Touch and Go was asked to design the interior of a pet salon, Ngaio was disgusted. ‘In respect of dogs I am a New Zealander’; at home, ‘sensible dogs and sporting dogs’ chased sheep or retrieved game birds. She found the dogs in Knightsbridge obscene and dirty. ‘No amount of shampooing and twiddling will make anything but asses of them…when they were not defecating on the doorstep they were shivering in their mistresses’ embrace.’ In spite of her Antipodean scruples, the job was finished and work flowed in.

  Sadly, unlike Roger Fry’s avant-garde experimental Omega workshop in Fitzroy Square, which was supported by artists such as Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Nina Hamnett, none of Touch and Go’s objects or interior designs have survived. Omega had foundered in 1919, because of the war. Touch and Go was self-consciously commercial chic by comparison, and perhaps because of this it survived the Depression. For 18 months or more Ngaio was involved with the shop and would leave reluctantly. Her recipe for success: ‘We became slightly less amateurish, never got on each other’s nerves…and added to the staff largely from our circle of friends.’

  Among Ngaio’s circle of friends were many expatriate New Zealanders. A special person in this group was old childhood friend Dundas Walker, who had come to London years earlier in search of a professional acting career. Now that engagements had tailed off, he lived in genteel semi-retirement on a private income. With him, she visited print shops, junk shops, Portobello Road, and the bustling Caledonian market where hundreds of stallholders, ‘raked by a cold wind’, laid out their wares ‘on frost-chilled cobble-stones’. With her artist friend Rhona Haszard, she talked art-school gossip. Haszard had left New Zealand in 1926, under a cloud of scandal. In 1922, she had married talented student and part-time art school tutor Ronald McKenzie. It seemed an ideal match, but then, in 1925, she met Englishman and ex-Indian Army officer, Leslie Greener, who enrolled in her classes. Their affair began almost immediately, and halfway through the year, after a hasty divorce, the couple eloped and then married at a Waihi registry office in December 1925. They were now resident in Alexandria, but Haszard was in London for specialist back treatment. Her split with the well-liked McKenzie had polarized their friends, so she was grateful to find Ngaio still warm and friendly towards her.

  Between the wars, the West End throbbed with a racy theatrical life. In the late 19th century there had been a clean-up of brothels and seedy gin dens in the area, and fashionable plays by playwrights like Oscar Wilde and Arthur Wing Pinero began to appear. The area became a playground for the middl
e and upper classes, and foreign visitors poured in to savour the West End experience. During the 1920s, luxurious theatres like the vast 5,900-seat Roxy were built to cope with the crowds. The West End’s leading performers—including Edith Evans, Cedric Hardwicke, Leon Quartermaine, Leslie Banks and Noël Coward—were international stars. Ngaio saw popular theatre with Nelly and Tahu Rhodes and Toppy Hawkes, and when she wanted something more discerning she went alone. ‘I saw a dramatization of Christopher Morley’s Thunder on the Left, and, later, the first of the Priestley “time” plays, Pirandello’s Henry IV with Ernest Milton and a French tragi-comedy called Beauty with Charles Laughton…The first Shakespeare that I saw in the West End was John Gielgud as a very young, petulant and smouldering Hamlet’, but it was Shakespeare at The Old Vic that she loved most. For her it had a raw immediacy that evoked Elizabethan theatre. The Old Vic audience included anyone from a policeman on the beat to ‘students, labourers, tough elderly women, nondescripts, deadbeats, and characters who might have made bombs in their spare time’. Above them hung a haze of blue cigarette smoke. They drank, chewed, gave unsolicited advice, and when an actor dried up they shouted the lines.

  Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, directed by Tyrone Guthrie at the Westminster Theatre, had a huge impact on Ngaio. When it opened in Rome in 1921, it caused a riot. The bare stage was booed, and a fight broke out in the boxes. By the end of the decade audiences were more accustomed to its avant-gardism. Ngaio was captivated by the uncompromising set design and the dramatic treatment. The arbitrary nature of perception was an important theme in radical theatre following the First World War, and Pirandello’s play picked up this concept. In Six Characters, actors on stage rehearsing a Pirandello play are interrupted by a fictional family of characters who ‘demand that the drama of their own lives be performed and thus given a reality denied them as the mere figments of their author’s imagination’. They sketch out the scenes on stage for the actors to act. The supposedly ephemeral lives of the characters end up looking more convincing than those of the socially conditioned actors. The play challenges the relationship between art and life and the fictional roles played on stage and real roles played in life. The play would have continuing significance for Ngaio.