Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (29 page)

The members of the upper-crust Pastern and Bagott family find themselves embroiled in the not-so-unfortunate murder of a philandering piano-accordion player called Carlos Rivera. Lord Pastern and Bagott’s Toad-like fixation with percussion instruments inspires him to convince Breezy Bellair and his boys to let him join them on stage. For their first public appearance together at the Metronome in London, Pastern suggests a promotional prank that involves the fake firing of a gun across stage at Rivera, who is to feign death. A wreath will be laid on his chest and he will be carried out on a stretcher by pallbearers to the mock strains of a funeral dirge: pure Spike Jones.

Predictably, the blank cartridge is replaced, almost unbelievably, by a lethal parasol tip, and when Pastern fires the gun Rivera slumps down dead. Drug dealing and its co-dependent companion, blackmail, make a thin appearance, as does a ‘bolshie’ Australian Communist called Skelton. These are old themes that have not appreciably developed, but it is the aristocracy that takes the cake. Pastern is an irritating, quarrelsome peer whose eccentricities fail to redeem him. Even Ngaio’s humour falters in the face of his selfish stupidity. His wife, Lady Pastern and Bagott, calls him ‘A madman, except in a few unimportant technicalities’, but it is his niece Carlisle Wayne who has the insight:

There’s really a kind of terrifying sanity about him. He’s overloaded with energy, he says exactly what he thinks and he does exactly what he wants to do. But he’s an over-simplification of a type, and he’s got no perspective.

Pastern is an anachronistic comic clichéstraight out of Ngaio’s property box of 1930s stock characters. Before the war there had been nostalgia value and shared humour in this aristocratic type, but that cosy familiarity had disappeared
somewhere in the grey daily grind of casualty lists. There is no place in post-war Britain for Pastern’s hedonism. The wreath for Rivera is really Pastern’s, and the only news in
Swing, Brother, Swing
is that Nigel Bathgate is leaving for good and Troy is expecting a baby. Alleyn drops the bombshell casually, to maximize its impact. ‘Did you know you were going to be a godfather, Br’er Fox?’

Although Ngaio was out of date and out of touch, her writing retained a vibrancy that still made it creditable. It was testimony to her professionalism that, in spite of her intense workload and personal loss, she produced a book that sold well. There was more of Ngaio’s life caught in the pages of her next novel, begun on the
Orion
on her way to England. In the mornings she and Pamela Mann would work on the book, but after this they were at liberty to participate in games and shows and mix with the passengers. For the first time in years Ngaio was free from constant commitment, and she found the rolling, empty sea of relaxing space creative. She drew on her recent experiences in the theatre to write
Opening Night,
published in the United States in 1951 as
Night at the Vulcan
and released in Britain in the same year. The dedication was ‘To the Management and Company of the New Zealand Student Players of 1949 in love and gratitude’. Her central character, a young New Zealand girl who travels to London to follow an acting career, could have been Biddy Lenihan, who was already looking for work in English repertory, or perhaps Pamela Mann, or even Ngaio herself as a young woman—certainly there is a little of all of them in Martyn Tarne.

Martyn Tarne’s circumstances are fraught by comparison. She is penniless and desperate for work because her money has been stolen on the boat. It is a damp, dark evening and Martyn is lingering in an alleyway outside the Vulcan Theatre. She has missed the audition. An overpainted, large-faced woman wandering away from the stage door stops to talk. Martyn had met her that morning. ‘You’ve had it, dear. I gave you the wrong tip at Marks’s. The show here, with the part I told you about, goes on this week. They were auditioning for a tour.’ Martyn is so hungry and the news is so bad that she staggers under the weight of her disappointment. What can she do? She remembers the church back in the Strand. She has been told you can sleep there: perhaps there is even a soup kitchen. She picks up her suitcase, suddenly heavier than before, and walks towards the entrance of the alleyway. Half a dozen huge raindrops plop ominously in a puddle. People hurry by, looking up and unfurling umbrellas. She approaches the front of the theatre, which she thinks is locked. A wedge of
light from a plate-glass door that is ajar cuts across the blackness. Two people are talking in the office behind it. They are in dire straits. Helena Hamilton, star of the stage and silver screen, is opening in a new show,
Thus to Revisit,
and she has no dresser. Martyn steps forward: ‘I believe…you are looking for a dresser.’

A door has opened, literally and figuratively, and this is the beginning of a three-day roller-coaster ride that will end in Martyn performing Gay Gainsford’s key role on stage on the opening night. Murder occurs late in the book, so the investigation is reduced and the machinations of the theatrical world take centre stage. Ngaio’s characters are convincing because they are influenced by people she knew. Helena Hamilton and her ex-lover Adam Poole are megastars recently back from a tour of Australia and New Zealand. It is hard not to see the parallel between these characters and Leigh and Olivier. Before she left, Martyn had queued many times to see them, and all of Adam Poole’s films had been shown in New Zealand. They were ‘famous faces’. Inspired by their example, Martyn had joined an English touring company in New Zealand a year before and travelled to Australia. The pay was quite good, and she supplemented it with broadcasting. From there she sailed directly to England.

Ngaio cleverly explores Martyn’s deep sense of anxiety before going on stage, and her experience, once there, of connecting with her part. It is a kind of nirvana on stage. ‘That perfection of duality for which actors pray and which they are so rarely granted now fully invested her. She was herself and she was the girl in the play.’ This was pure Stanislavsky. Ngaio fictionalizes her theatrical philosophy in
Opening Night.
‘Reflect upon the minuteness of Edmund Kean,’ says Jacko Doré designer, and assistant to Adam Poole:

upon Sarah’s one leg and upon Irving’s two, upon ugly actresses who convince their audience they are beautiful and old actors who persuade them they are young. It is all in the mind, the spirit and the preparation.

Like Ngaio with her players, Jacko has watched the magic happen. And are these Ngaio’s own views about the voice?

Martyn had formed the habit of thinking of people’s voices in terms of colour. Helena Hamilton’s voice…[was] golden, Gay Gainsford’s pink…Adam Poole’s violet. When Alleyn spoke she decided…[it] was a royal blue of the clearest sort.

Once again the action on stage echoes real events in the lives of the actors in the book. In the play, one of the leading men kills himself off stage. The actors and the audience hear the gun go off and Adam Poole explains to Alleyn: ‘[Then] I come in, shut the door, go up to Helena, and say:
“You’ve guessed, haven’t you? He’s taken the only way out.
”’ In real life, five years before when the Vulcan was known as the Jupiter, Helena’s husband was found immediately after the show, asphyxiated by a gas heater in his dressing room. Then it was ‘homicide dressed up to look like suicide’; now lightning has struck again.

Opening Night
is a more successful novel than her last. The characters are credible, and the action tight and convincing. Ngaio even manages to weave in a thread from
Surfeit of Lampreys.
One of the young constables handling the case was PC Lord Michael Lamprey, grown up and doing what he had watched Alleyn do a decade before at his parents’ double flat in Pleasaunce Court Mansions. Life has come full circle, as had Ngaio, who had returned to the company of the Rhodeses as soon as her boat berthed at Southampton.

Two of the Rhodes children, Denys and Teddy, were there to meet Ngaio and Pamela Mann. Ngaio was absolutely delighted to pick up this connection after so many years of separation. The youngest Rhodes children were adults, and three were married. The new arrivals were transported by car to the Rhodes family home at Mount Offham in Kent, to be greeted by pandemonium, excitement and confusion. It was the village fête. The local band was playing and children in fancy dress were chasing each other through the crowds. The Rhodes family was assembled to meet an overwhelmed Ngaio. ‘
We’ve invited a few people
to meet you,’ said the now not-so-young Eileen Rhodes. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’ It was a delight to see them all, and it was as if Ngaio and Nelly had never parted. They laughed together like a mischievous pair of schoolgirls, and made a pact to see as much of each other as they could. Whenever Nelly came to town she visited, and when Ngaio could escape to Mount Offham she did.

It was an exhilarating time, and one of the highlights of Ngaio’s visit was a trip in October to Monte Carlo. Nelly Rhodes’s family, the Plunkets, had rented an old converted Saracen castle at Eze in the hills behind Monte Carlo. The ancient stronghold, hewn in parts out of the sheer cliff face, was both an engineering marvel and a spectacular example of medieval Islamic architecture in the most sumptuous Mediterranean setting. From almost any vantage point there were startling vistas of countryside and dazzling turquoise sea. ‘
[Nelly] and I joined
[a] house-party there for a fortnight and then, since the alpine
atmosphere did not agree with her came down to our old hotel, and, for a few days, revived old goings-on.’ It was wonderful, although not the same as their young days in London because ‘our old quartette was now only a pair’. Sadly, Tahu Rhodes had died prematurely in 1947, and Ngaio’s escort and the Rhodes farm cadet, Toppy Blundell Hawkes, had died even earlier, in 1935.

The Monte Carlo visit inspired another book, which Ngaio began when she returned to London.
Opening Night
was submitted to Collins in August 1949, and by November Ngaio was already shaping her experiences in a Saracen castle on the French Riviera into ideas for
Spinsters in Jeopardy.
Somewhere in the fictional space between
Opening Night
and
Spinsters in Jeopardy,
Alleyn and Troy have had a baby boy called Ricky, who is already six years old when he makes his first appearance. The family is thinking about a holiday in Roqueville in the Alpes Maritimes. Alleyn will be on a mission in conjunction with the Narcotics Bureau, the Sûeté and MI5, to bust an international drug ring. Troy is curt. ‘You can’t go round doing top-secret jobs…trailing your wife and child. It would look so amateurish. Besides, we agreed never to mix business and pleasure.’ She would have been better sticking to their resolution, but the lure of the Riviera and temptation to meet her distant cousin P.E. Garbel, a chemist who lives in Roqueville, is overwhelming.

On the overnight train to Roqueville, Troy and Alleyn catch a fleeting glimpse through a castle window of what turns out to be a murder. The train grinds momentarily to a standstill as it struggles to climb the oppressive alpine grade, and across a distance of about 100 yards they see the figure of a woman fall against a blind, releasing it so it springs up. In the room beyond the woman is a man in a long white robe.

‘And in his hand—?’

‘Yes,’ Alleyn said, ‘that’s the tricky bit, isn’t it?’

Neither Troy nor Alleyn has time to make out what is in the man’s hand before the train lurches forward into a tunnel of concealing blackness. As serendipity would have it, an aging spinster on the train becomes seriously ill with a ruptured appendix, and Troy and Alleyn, with Ricky in tow, make a mercy dash to the Chateau de la Chèvre d‘Argent, where the only doctor not attending an out-of-town medical conference is staying. As they approach the castle by road, they see, on their right, ‘a cliff that [is] mounted into a stone face pierced irregularly with
windows. This in turn broke against the skyline into fabulous turrets and parapets.’ It was in one of these windows that they saw the woman from the train.

Its clever manipulation of tension makes
Spinsters in Jeopardy
more of a thriller than a mystery. Ricky is kidnapped in the book’s opening section, and Ngaio leads readers through a sensitive portrayal of a child’s terrifying separation from his parents and a mother’s angst-ridden search for her son. ‘[Troy’s] heart rammed against her ribs…sweat poured between her shoulder-blades and ran down her forehead into her eyes. She was in a nightmare.’ To this tension is added the sinister drug culture and strange satanic sun practices of a house party up at the ancient Saracen castle. Alleyn breaks in and disguises himself in a cowled gown to join a secret ceremony held in a white-stone room with a window and a pentagram on the floor. He finds himself surrounded by similarly dressed, drugged cult members, all making ‘small feral noises’ and occupying one of the points of the pentagram. They are awaiting the high priest’s sexual sacrifice of a young female initiate.
Spinsters in Jeopardy
is a return to
Death in Ecstasy’s
mix of drug taking and religious euphoria, but the handling is more sophisticated and the issues are better explored. ‘By and large [drugs are] probably the worst thing apart from war that’s happened to human beings in modern times,’ Alleyn explains to Troy in his narcotics monologue. ‘The addicts were killing themselves in studies, studios, dressing-rooms, brothels, boudoirs and garrets; young intellectuals and misfits were ruining themselves by the score.’

There is also a tract of pure Henry Marsh on the pitfalls of organized religion. The case of the satanic sun worshippers at Roqueville reminds Alleyn of his earlier one in Knocklatchers Row in London. For centuries, intelligent people have subjected themselves to the ordeal of reciting senseless chants and liturgies, to the indignity of bizarre practices and the ghastly fear of punitive retribution. They have ‘starved, frightened and exhausted themselves…got themselves racked, broken and burnt’, and it is all so senseless. By contrast, Alleyn and Troy are incarnations of sublime sensibleness. ‘You’re almost pathologically normal, aren’t you?’ Alleyn says proudly to Troy. ‘Forgive me if I bolt back to my burrow, the glare is really
more
than I can endure.’