Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (5 page)

BOOK: Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime
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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 middle 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.

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.

BOOK: Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime
10.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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