Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime Read online

  Theatre nights were late, and sometimes Ngaio, the Rhodeses and Hawkes were there to savour the ‘smell of the West End in the early morning. Hot Bread. Coffee. Freshly watered pavements…Roses.’ After the curtain went down, the crazed world of the fashionable club beckoned. They would usually go to more than one.’ “Uncles” was the smart night-club in those days and there one danced or inched at close quarters with poker-faced revellers…or sat and listened to Hutch [Leslie Hutchinson], a Negro entertainer whose popularity was supreme…Then there was the midnight floor show at the Savoy and a Tzigani band at the Hungaria.’ It was the Hungaria in New Regent Street that they liked best because an ecstatic energy erupted after midnight. They heard Emilio Colombo lead the band, and watched as violinists threw their bows in the air while a tiny troll-like man ‘went mad on the tzimbal’. The Hungaria was the habitat of high culture, of bohemians and the dissolute. It was the knife-edge of opposites Ngaio relished.

  Sometimes the Prince of Wales was there and…alone, at a table just inside the door, sat a strange figure: an old, old man with a flower in his coat who looked as if he had been dehydrated like a specimen leaf and then rouged a little. No one ever accompanied him or paused at his table. He looked straight before him and at intervals raised his glass in a frog’s hand and touched his lips.

  One night we asked the restaurateur who he was.

  ‘A poet,’ said Signor Vecchi, ‘and once, long ago I understand, a celebrated personage. It is Lord Alfred Douglas [Oscar Wilde’s lover].’

  It is in the Hungaria that Nigel Bathgate meets his girlfriend Angela North and waits for Roderick Alleyn in A Man Lay Dead. Alleyn has allowed them to leave Frantock briefly to help him track down a secret Russian brotherhood. Men from Scotland Yard are hiding in an empty shop opposite the house where members of the fiendish ancient sect are meeting. The signal for them to strike will come from the Hungaria. Nigel has been told the secret password: it is the name of a murdered Pole.

  His heart is racing. He is alone on the street as he turns in and orders a table at the back of the restaurant because he is not wearing evening dress. He sits down. His hand shakes visibly as he takes out his lighter. He smokes three cigarettes and fidgets anxiously. The band is playing ‘in the desultory manner that distinguishes the off hours in fashionable restaurants’. There are just three couples on the floor.

  ‘Do you want to order, sir?’ murmured Nigel’s waiter.

  ‘No thank you. I’ll wait until my—I’m waiting for someone—I’ll order when she comes.’

  He lights another cigarette, wishes Angela were here, then loses himself in thoughts of Alleyn, and the agent, Sumiloff. Suddenly a voice from a solitary man at the next table cuts through his concentration. He wants to know when the Hungaria band will begin to play. Nigel is distracted and annoyed.

  ‘Not until midnight.’

  ‘That’s a long time,’ said the stranger, fretfully. ‘I’ve come on purpose to hear it. Very good, I’m told.’

  ‘Oh, frightfully,’ said Nigel unenthusiastically.

  ‘They tell me,’ continued his neighbour, ‘that some Russian is to sing here tonight. Lovely voice. He sings a thing called The Death of Boris.’

  Nigel starts violently, then controls himself. He thinks he has been given the secret password. A thrill goes through him and he almost overflows with excitement. The information rushes out. He tells the stranger that the Russian brotherhood has been tricked into meeting at Alleyn’s house, and that Sumiloff is waiting there now. With that, the stranger is satisfied and abruptly calls to the waiter for the bill. A few minutes later he passes Angela, who is just arriving at the door. Nigel Bathgate will become Alleyn’s Watson, but not before he finds himself tied to a chair with a sharp blade being pushed under his fingernail. This is his apprenticeship, and he will learn the importance of passwords and getting them right.

  Even though she was reading it in pencil from exercise books, Rose Marsh could hardly put A Man Lay Dead down. After her husband retired, by taking up ‘a number of secretaryships’ he had saved Rose’s fare to England. They could not afford for Henry to accompany her, so Rose arrived alone at Alderbourne in 1930, to find her daughter distracted from writing and acting by working in a shop during the day and living the high life at night. She bitterly regretted the waste of Ngaio’s talent and was not quiet about it. The situation gradually sorted itself out. The Rhodeses were tired of commuting and moved to London, where they took two big flats in Eaton Mansions, close to Eaton Square in Belgravia; some of the staff boarded out. Initially, Ngaio and her mother moved with them, but they stayed only long enough to find their own flat. In June or July, they shifted into a basement bedsit around the corner in Caroline Terrace. Nelly Rhodes was kind enough to make sure they were comfortably set up with excess furniture from the shop. Rose Marsh’s arrival put the brakes on one of the most exciting periods of her daughter’s life, but Ngaio could see why. She felt guilty that she had abandoned her New Zealand novel and had written only travel articles since she’d left New Zealand. Trips to the theatre became serious and critical, and fashionable nightclubs an occasional luxury. She started to think more seriously about writing a detective novel.

  For Rose, the links Ngaio made with their own life and A Man Lay Dead were uncanny. In fact she had taken names, places and characters directly from real life. Most disquieting was Dr Tokareff, the Russian from Sir Hubert Handesley’s embassy days in Petrograd. He not only shared the same name, but was obviously based on Peter Alfanasivich Tokareff, an unstable Russian émigré who had played opposite Rose in a production of George Calderon’s The Little Stone House in 1914. Rose, a talented amateur actress and excellent acting coach, had invited him to practise at their home on the Cashmere Hills. They rehearsed endlessly, and the inevitable happened: Tokareff became enamoured with Rose, then Ngaio. On the evenings he visited them, they would hear him coming up the hill singing ‘at the top of his formidable bass voice…My father, who found him noisy, would look up from his book and say mildly: “Good Lord, the Russian.”’ Henry and his wife were worried. Their daughter was the focus of their life and they did not want her to marry. Ngaio was flattered but not emotionally mature enough to handle the volatile relationship. After declaring his love for her, the rebuffed Russian disappeared. Rose Marsh recognized his singing and his accent intonations in the fictional Dr Tokareff’s dialogue and mannerisms. The doctor was a suspect in the novel; Peter Tokareff, a victim of real life. On 28 October 1919, he was discovered dead in a Christchurch park. The unfortunate man had committed suicide.

  In early 1932, Rose Marsh returned to New Zealand, reluctantly leaving Ngaio in England. She had hoped her daughter would come back with her, but did not feel she could push the point. Ngaio would only realize how much her return would have meant to her mother when it was too late. Really, there was no contest: her wild London life with the Rhodeses was infinitely more appealing than daughterly domesticity in sleepy Cashmere. With sadness, and a sense of guilt mixed with a certain amount of relief, she saw her mother off, then moved back in with the Rhodeses to immediately resume her old life. But it was only a matter of months before a worrying letter arrived from her mother. Rose was ill and it seemed her recovery would be protracted. Other letters came, and then a cable from her father that clutched at her heart. Three days later she sailed for New Zealand.

  Frantic to depart, she barely had time to think about her book. Fortunately it had been typed and was left with Edmund Cork, a literary agent in London. On the wharf it dawned on her that her life was in two places half a world apart. She wondered if she would ever see her mother again, but also whether the Rhodeses would save her a seat in the English ‘bandwagon’ she had come to love.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Theatre of Death

  It was August 1932, the chill end of a stark Christchurch winter, when Ngaio returned. Her parents’ bedroom at Marton Cottage was a hushed sickroom. There were silences and huddled out-of-sight consultations.
Death could be only briefly contained, but to Ngaio, sitting by the bed watching, Rose Marsh’s end was as ‘cruelly and as excruciatingly protracted as if it had been designed by Torquemada’, the most cold-blooded of the Dominican inquisitors. Rose’s pain was managed so that they could whisper their parting words. The change in the woman Ngaio and Henry loved was terrible to see. She had been the family’s mainstay; elegant, effervescent, always the driving force. As a child, Ngaio had watched in awe, believing her mother to be the most beautiful, talented woman alive. Rose had that special mixture of qualities that accelerated a child’s imagination: she was both literary and theatrical, so life in her small family became a pantomime of castles and strange imaginary creatures.

  Rose came from a family of conjurors, so it was only natural that she would add the magic. Her mother, born Esther Coster, taught her how to work hard, how to economize, and how to be a good wife; but it was her father, Edward Seager, who taught her how to perform, brilliantly. He was an Englishman who had arrived at the tiny settlement of Port Lyttelton in 1851. Behind the fragile makeshift buildings of Lyttelton loomed the natural amphitheatre of the Port Hills, and close behind them was the settlement of Christchurch on the flat Canterbury Plains, stretching 40 miles (65 kilometres) across to the blue mountainous margins of the Southern Alps in the west. In England, Edward had been a poor schoolteacher, but he did not pursue this job in the colonies. At 24 years of age he became a sergeant, virtually in charge of the district police force. He designed a new police uniform, and within three years had tracked down and arrested James McKenzie, the notorious sheep rustler.

  His job meant that Seager was in charge of both the prison and the asylum, because the colony made no distinction between the mad and the bad. At the time of his arrival, the Lyttelton prison housed 11 inmates in a room 14 feet (4.3 metres) square. Blankets crawled with lice. ‘The roof leaked. There was no proper sanitation, no books, no indulgences, a diet that was not a diet, and hardly any furniture.’ Seager lobbied for better conditions, and when in 1863-64, Sunnyside Hospital was finally built a few miles out of Christchurch, he moved there to become superintendent, and his wife, the matron. His treatments were both progressive and unorthodox. He improved diet, hygiene, and access to fresh air and exercise, but it was his commitment to cultural and mental stimulation that was almost unheard of. He called the patients his ‘children’; he built a stage; he had a piano and organ installed; he gave magic lantern shows; circuses came; plays were performed; madness and fantasy mixed in a way that was medicinal.

  His great love was conjuring. One of his favourite tricks was an act of levitation, where an appropriately sized daughter was ‘crammed into a torturous under-suit of paper-thin jointed steel’. She would sit on stage reading a book with her chin propped pensively on her hand. Edward Seager waved his wand and turned ‘a secret key in his daughter’s back. The armour locked.’ And, as Ngaio later recalled, ‘Puck-like, Gramp snatched the stool from under her and there she was: suspended.’ For encores, he would saw his daughters in half, or make them disappear in a magic cabinet. ‘The patients adored it.’ He was also something of a mesmerizer-cum-faith-healer: ‘he would flutter his delicate hands across and across’ the foreheads of difficult patients, and family and friends, until their headaches disappeared.

  Rose emerged from her eccentric childhood as a quite ‘extraordinarily talented’ actress. She lived the parts she played and brought the characters alive in a way that was spellbinding. At just 19, she was chosen to play Lady Macbeth for a visiting company led by American Shakespearian actor-director George Milne. He wanted her to travel with the company, but she refused. When the English actor Charles Warner visited New Zealand, he offered to take her to England and launch her career. Again she declined, travelling with him and his wife only as far as Australia to get a flavour of the professional actor’s life.

  Rose found the makeshift bohemian existence of the travelling theatre unpalatable. The life was too untidy; the change, the uncertainties, the stress of opening to unknown audiences in unfamiliar centres too much for her. She returned to Christchurch, resumed her amateur acting activities, and on the stage met future husband, Henry Marsh. He was a tall, good-looking man like her father, theatrical and imaginative, with a dry wit and an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world that was unexpectedly funny. He wooed her with his humour and his make-believe. The chemistry between them on and off the stage was magnetic. They married in 1894, when Henry was 31 years old and Rose a year younger.

  Ngaio described Gramp Seager and her father, Henry, as ‘have-nots’. Christchurch was a cruel place in which to be a ‘have-not’. The colonial vision for New Zealand was an egalitarian England reconstructed in an Antipodean Eden. It was to be a clean start: a post-industrial culture in a pre-industrial country. Community would stratify and flourish naturally without the artificial strictures or social evils of the Old World. In reality, class consciousness and social evils were packed in trunks along with the ballgowns, white ties and tailcoats.

  In Canterbury, the founding charter was less egalitarian. The Canterbury Association Society, established to colonize the province, planned to transplant a perfectly variegated specimen of English society, complete with aristocracy and middle and lower classes. A good deal of the land surrounding Christchurch was sold off in huge farming blocks to wealthy English families who became the social élite. The city itself, laid out on a grid pattern with civic parks and gardens and, later, an elegant Gothic Anglican cathedral at its heart, was to be the service centre of the rich farmland that developed.

  Christchurch’s social stratification began with the first four Canterbury Association ships that landed in Lyttelton Harbour in December 1850. The well-heeled immigrants on board became the city’s founding fathers, bequeathing to their descendants membership of an elect group. Since both sides of Ngaio’s family had missed these social boats, there was only property ownership to distinguish them, and, as much as he was admired (and even romanticized), Gramp Seager was only a public servant and Ngaio’s father a simple bank clerk. Thus, in Christchurch they were ‘have-nots’.

  Rose and Henry Marsh rented a small house in Fendalton—the best area they could afford—and kept a maid, which was almost beyond their means. Gramp Seager was a dreamer and a spendthrift, but still an ambitious man; Henry Marsh lived in a world of his own. From early days, Rose realized he would make a better father than provider. Their daughter, Edith Ngaio Marsh, was born on 23 April 1895. Henry’s belated attempt four years later to register her birth created an official error, that Ngaio later used to claim she was born in 1899. (And this mistake was perpetuated in print many times.)

  It was a perfect marriage of opposites. Henry’s soft-centred fantasy combined with Rose’s galvanized theatricality to create an imaginative wonderland for Ngaio that she never completely escaped. She was the centre of their world, and their world was a stage where life and drama mixed so seamlessly that the anxious, sometimes highly strung young Ngaio could not distinguish the difference. She was disconcerted when she saw her parents rehearsing a new script: suddenly they became strangers. In The Fool’s Paradise, her mother was transformed into a wicked femme fatale who slowly poisoned her husband. The tension of the scenes was overpowering for the terrified child. Her horror of poison lingered, and was reignited when Rose Marsh took her to a production of Romeo and Juliet. The fighting scenes were incomprehensible. She buried her head in her mother’s lap. ‘They aren’t really fighting, are they?’ she asked desperately. ‘Yes, yes!’ cried Rose, consumed by the action on stage. And to add to the awfulness, ‘there was Poison and a young girl Taking It!’ This confirmed Ngaio’s lifelong phobia about poisons.

  But Rose’s judgement was usually sound. She took Ngaio and her young friend Ned Bristed to children’s plays like Sweet Nell of Old Drury and Bluebell in Fairyland, and when the vast International Exhibition opened in Christchurch in 1906, Rose took her daughter numerous times to see displays of paintings, go t
o concerts, watch the dazzling nightly fireworks, and take wild sideshow rides. She introduced Ngaio to literature that braced her mind and imagination. Between the ages of 11 and 14 Ngaio read David Copperfield, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. She was read to, and read herself, a kaleidoscope of different titles that included anything from Peter Pan to Roderick Random and Tom Jones, which her father recommended she read to find out about ‘fast’ girls.

  Sexual looseness was tolerated by neither of her parents; nor did they accept breaches of etiquette or sloppy diction. Their uncompromising Victorian standards were rigorously policed, especially by her mother. It was a hothouse childhood Rose wanted for her daughter, and she was prepared to sacrifice having another baby to provide it.

  Ngaio’s first taste of the real world was a tiny, 20-student dame school run by Miss Sibella E. Ross for children between the ages of six and 10. Fitting in was an ordeal for Ngaio, who was the tallest in her class and had an astonishingly deep voice. Rose Marsh was anxious, but she realized that her only child must integrate. Ngaio made firm friends with two bristling boys in the class, and the bullying ceased.