Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (10 page)

Ghosts, gravediggers and Danes walked the ramparts of Ngaio’s quiet nights. She went to
Hamlet
a number of times. The season ended too quickly, and as abruptly as it had arrived the company was gone. The experience had been ephemeral, like a shadow she wanted to pin down, so between the company’s first and third visits to Christchurch she wrote a romantic regency drama called
The Medallion.
She hoped Allan Wilkie would cast a professional eye over it. Her mother encouraged her. Towards the end of 1919, they braved the ordeal of handing the script in at the theatre with a note, then seeing Allan Wilkie in person at the Clarendon Hotel. As always, Ngaio was tentative about her writing. The play was mannered and rhetorical, but her raw enthusiasm captured Wilkie’s attention.

After art classes had finished one afternoon, Ngaio returned to her shared studio with her paint-box slung over her shoulder. She climbed the stairs, walked in, and there they were—Allan Wilkie and his wife. ‘”
I obtained the address
,” Mr. Wilkie said in his resonant actor’s voice, “from
your father
. I have a suggestion to make…How…would you like to be an actress?”’ He thought that if she was going to write for the theatre she needed experience on the stage. She was speechless, stunned. It was as if Wilkie had opened a door through which she glimpsed her future. She had two hours to make up her mind. The Wilkies were leaving town almost immediately, but would employ her when they returned, if her parents agreed.

Ngaio’s ‘yes’ was immediate, and her father’s followed; Rose Marsh was harder to please. But Peter Tokareff’s suicide was still fresh in her mind, and now there was a new threat. Her daughter had another besotted suitor, this time a middle-aged Englishman. Once again, Ngaio was flattered, but out of her depth.

‘
Your father
,’ [Rose] said, ‘will speak to him.’

And so he did and to some effect. ‘I felt damn’ sorry for the fellow…He made such a thing of it…He’ll get over it, no doubt.’

But the Englishman began stalking Ngaio. ‘One night, when I was alone in the studio, he came up the stairs and stood…in utter silence on the landing while I sat petrified and sick, on the other side of the door.’

Fear forced Rose to agree to Ngaio’s touring with the Wilkies, plus the fact that
she was greatly impressed with Allan Wilkie, who was a consummate charmer. Henry was amused: ‘So you’re off…with the raggle-taggle-gypsies, O.’ Ngaio was ecstatic. Rose felt she had been painted into a corner. While she waited for the company to return to Christchurch, Ngaio took a relieving position as lady editor at the
Sun
newspaper. She wrote about clothes, society hostesses and ‘concocted paragraphs to fill in the gaps’. Her anticipation mounted.

Ngaio was 25 years old and had never been out of the South Island. She would be living away from her parents and enjoying the pleasures of travel and adult life for the first time. ‘
On a warm autumn morning
I reported at the Theatre Royal, walked under the ringing iron stairs I had so often climbed and went in at the Stage Door. The world of glue-size, canvas, dust and shadows engulfed me.’ They played a season in Christchurch. The parts for Ngaio were limited. She had a deep contralto voice, which seemed odd in a woman, and was taller than the average leading man. As Wilkie remarked, ‘Only I…am at liberty to take six foot strides on this stage.’ To ensure she took demure steps, Ngaio hobbled her legs together above the knees with a stocking. The kindly Wilkie found her work in spite of this. She played a dubious ‘Franco-Teutonic’ maid in a spy thriller called
The Luck of the Navy,
where the main character was tied to a chair (like Nigel in
A Man Lay Dead);
an ex-WAAF, now housemaid, in
A Temporary Gentleman;
a vicious craggy crone in the farce
The Rotters;
and, in
Hindle Wakes,
yet another maid.

Rehearsals were arduous and Wilkie was a hard taskmaster, but Ngaio’s energy and enthusiasm seemed endless. ‘
I learnt how actors
work in consort,’ she wrote, ‘like musicians, how they shape the dialogue in its phrases, build to points of climax, mark the pauses and observe the tempi.’ This was an apprenticeship she would draw on for the rest of her life. ‘
Without knowing it
I laid down a little cellar of experiences which would one day be served up as the table wines of detective cookery.’ The people she met in the company fascinated her. She tended to see them as types: the male heart-throb, his meltingly magnificent woman, the character actor, the juvenile, the straight man, and the comic. She relished the details that made the actors like the characters they played.

After Christchurch, there was a season in Auckland. They took the ferry from Lyttelton to Wellington, then a 14-hour train journey. Ngaio’s senses were heightened by exhilaration.

I, however, persisted
in my rapture. It was the first of many such occasions
and I was to grow familiar with the look of my fellow-players in transit: the ones who read, the ones who stared out of the window, the ones who slept, the cheerful, the morose and the resigned. Mr. Wilkie and Pat Scully [the stage manager], their shoulders hunched and their heads nodding with the motion of the train, played endless games of two-handed whist. Mrs Wilkie read.

Through the winter they travelled up and down New Zealand with their four modern plays. Spring brought the end of a life she had come to love. Wilkie reformed a Shakespearian company in Australia, taking key players with him, but minor roles, especially maids, were dispensable. ‘
On a wet night
in Wellington I said good-bye and returned alone in the ferry to Christchurch. One of the first things I did was to wrap up Gramp’s book and sent it to Mr. Wilkie. In return I received a ring of which, he wrote…“It is a trifle of some reputed antiquity.”’ Ngaio, an only child, had tasted life with a carnival company of actors. Like a desert flower, the experience bloomed, then vanished. She would spend a lifetime trying to recapture its brilliance.

‘
It wasn’t easy
to settle down again: to return to a pattern, that, however freely designed, turned about a small house, one’s parents and a circle of quiet friends.’ Her sepia existence seemed drab by comparison. She painted with her friends and wrote for the
Sun.
But life was insular and restrained, until the Rosemary Rees English Comedy Company rolled into town and she was invited to tour again. Her mother was adamant that it would ‘lead to nothing…Why do you want to do it? It’s not the right kind of thing for you.
I know.’
But Ngaio was determined.

The tour was fraught from the beginning. The juvenile, who had no understudy, came down with scarlet fever. He had a big part and it was a disaster. Ngaio had an out-of-body experience: ‘
I heard myself saying
that I thought I could play the boy, “Jimmy” ’—and she did. There were costume difficulties. She could fit Jimmy’s fumigated suits, but cramming her long hair under a wig was torture. In desperation Rosemary Rees suggested she cut it. When Ngaio wrote to her mother, asking for permission, she received a ‘snorter’ of a reply by return post. Rees followed with a pleading epistle, but Rose Marsh was intractable. ‘
She was unable to discover
,’ Ngaio recalls, ‘why it should be imagined the antics of a music-hall soubrette could reconcile her to the thought of her daughter masquerading in male attire in a third-rate company.’ Rose almost ordered Ngaio
home, but was tempered by her own fond feelings for the stage. If she had to abide her daughter playing a boy, there would be no haircut.

They travelled ‘by buses, trains and coastal steamers’. The audiences were provincial and small, and the company lasted three months before it was disbanded. Rose had won a skirmish, but other battles were inevitable because Ngaio was not happy. Christchurch was claustrophobic and she was unsettled.

The bliss of touring was artificially prolonged when Kiore (Tor) King, a young woman Ngaio had become friendly with on the comedy tour, came to stay. Rose approved because King came from the right sort of family. Discussions with King about the theatre inspired Ngaio to write a piece called
Little Housebound.
‘
My mother must have
exercised superb self-control during this period…she did not discourage us: I was writing.’ The play was almost a parody of Ngaio’s life. It was about breaking free, taking risks and stepping out into the world. Perhaps Rose Marsh was too close to see the parallel.

They decided to tour it through provincial towns in the North Island. A recovered Jimmy from the Rosemary Rees company was roped in to play the male role and they were ready. ‘
Jimmy discovered
that touring companies of five or more were allowed first-class railway accommodation at second-class fares.’ The mothers were invited to boost numbers and, not surprisingly, they came. Ngaio’s play, plus some sketches and recitations, was taken to Hastings and Havelock North. They had fun and made a modest profit. Ngaio was sad when the enterprise came to an end. Jimmy went to Australia to join the Marie Tempest Company, and Tor King to the Allan Wilkie Company. Once again, Ngaio was housebound.

It was her first vivid sense of getting away with the Allan Wilkie Company that Ngaio captured in
Vintage Murder
in 1937. ‘
There were to be other tours
with other companies,’ she wrote in
Black Beech,
‘and many solitary train journeys in many parts of the world. In all of them, whenever I have found myself in a half-empty Pullman carriage I have re-peopled it with those long-remembered companions.’ She dedicated the book to Allan Wilkie and his wife, ‘In memory of a tour in New Zealand’. ‘All the characters in this story are purely imaginary and bear no relation to any actual person,’ she wrote in the foreword, but this was the convention. Many years later, in a BBC radio interview, she would admit that
Vintage Murder’s
Susan Max
was based on an elderly Australian actress who
was dresser for Mrs Wilkie. In the novel, Roderick Alleyn is in New Zealand on an enforced holiday for his health. In between sleeping and waking, he watches a group of dozing actors as his train hurries through the night.

For the hundredth time he opened his eyes to see the dim carriage-lamps and the rows of faces with their murky high-lights and cadaverous shadows…Opposite him was the leading man, large, kindly, swaying slightly with the movement of the long narrow-gauge carriage, politely resigned to discomfort. The bundle of rugs in the next seat…was Miss Susan Max, the character woman. An old trouper, Susan, with years of jolting night journeys behind her, first in this country, then Australia, and then up and down the provinces in England.

Susan Max has toured for 45 years. Two years before, she had held the sobbing Stephanie Vaughan in her arms when Surbonadier was shot at the Unicorn Theatre. After that murder investigation closed
The Rat and Beaver,
she joined Carolyn Dacres Comedy Company, which is now touring New Zealand. It is the gorgeous Carolyn’s birthday and they have planned a party for her on stage after the company’s opening night in Middleton (a fictional mid-North Island town). Cast and crew are invited, plus select guests. A trestle table is set up, loaded with food. In the middle is a nest of maidenhair fern and coloured lights mixed with exotic flowers. At the crowning moment a massive jeroboam of wine is to descend on a crimson cord and settle in the centrepiece. Everyone is assembled. For impact, Carolyn Dacres delays her entrance. She looks fabulous as Alleyn presents her with his portentous gift of a ‘he tiki’, a Maori symbol of fertility. The moment comes: Carolyn cuts the cord.

Something enormous…flashed down among them, jolting the table. Valerie Gaynes screaming. Broken glass and the smell of champagne. Champagne flowing over the white cloth. A thing like an enormous billiard ball embedded in the fern. Red in the champagne. Valerie Gaynes, screaming, screaming. Carolyn, her arm still raised, looking down. Himself [Alleyn], his voice, telling them to go away, telling Hambledon to take Carolyn away.

It is a horrifying spectacle: the bald head of actor-manager Alfred Meyer, squashed in the ferns and fairy lights under a huge jeroboam of wine.

Ngaio’s imagination was gaining momentum. She would develop a reputation for sticky ends. Some would seem hardly plausible, but her skill at picturing them silenced most sceptics. As P.D. James has commented, regarding the ingenuity of her murder methods, ‘
Readers in the golden years
demanded not only that the victim be murdered, but that he or she be mysteriously, intriguingly and bizarrely murdered…The method of death in a Ngaio Marsh novel tends to linger in the memory.’

While her ingenious murder methods became a trademark, Ngaio’s police interrogations could be much drier. It was here that some of the brilliant momentum she created in setting scenes and introducing characters reached a plateau and on occasions even a frustrating hiatus. The unusual thing about
Vintage Murder
is that although the story depends heavily on police interrogation, it remains fresh. Perhaps the newness of New Zealand for Alleyn seals its vitality. Convalescent, as Ngaio had been, he is abroad for a complete break. For the first time in her writing they swap places: Alleyn is a foreigner in her country. Ngaio knew what it felt like. ‘
On my return
to New Zealand after five years, I found myself looking at my own country, however superficially, from the outside, in.’

Ngaio could have chosen a more conventionally upper-class place for her detective to recuperate. He could have basked in the warmth of the Riviera, or enjoyed the buzz of the metropolis—Paris, Rome, Berlin—anywhere but the crisp stillness of a small mid-North Island town moving into winter. But although a murder mystery was traditionally pure entertainment, and not intended to be taken seriously, a clever writer like Ngaio had opinions, especially about New Zealand and its problematic relationship with Britain.
Vintage Murder
gave these their first proper airing. There is no Nigel Bathgate, so the central consciousness becomes Alleyn himself, and the story unfolds from his perspective. Whatever health breakdown he has had has transformed him: any remnant of silly-assed sleuth has gone. He is more considered, reflective and mature, but his seriousness is meted by a clever strain of humour that runs through the book. Alleyn is aware of his outsider status in relation to both Pakeha cultural cringe and Maori cultural difference.