Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (34 page)

When Ngaio began a book she started with a new set of characters and plot. The formula was a framework, but the challenge to be original within it was one she faced anew each time. Like an actor, she considered herself only as good as her last performance. The news about
Singing in the Shrouds,
published in the United States in 1958 and Britain in 1959, was very encouraging. On 21 January 1959, she received a memo from Richard Simon at Collins. ‘
The reviews this book
has had are really wonderful. It looks like being the most successful Ngaio Marsh ever.’ A transcript of reviews followed. George Millar of the
Daily Express
described it as:

…a book that, within its chosen limitations, is masterly…I admit to being amazed by Miss Marsh, she is astonishingly good. Moments of pure hilarity are perfectly set among moments of delicious fear. Writing, characterisation, even the sea background are as crisp and as welcome as new banknotes.

Maurice Richardson of the Sunday
Observer
said it was ‘as good as a good Christie…I had not thought such an old familiar pattern could read so fresh’.

Ngaio struggled on with
False Scent,
which she found ‘irksome, sticky & slow’. ‘
I refer to my
“twenty-first little bastard”, as some lady novelist is supposed to have said,’ she wrote to John Schroder. The character of Mrs Bellamy was not hard for Ngaio to evoke, but the technicalities of death by a deluge of insecticide sprayed unwittingly from a perfume bottle needed expert advice. The plot centres on the 50th birthday party of a fading stage star who is a time-bomb of jealous possessiveness.

Mary Bellamy’s temperaments were of rare occurrence but formidable in the extreme and frightening to behold. They were not those regulation theatre tantrums that seem to afford pleasure both to observer and performer; on the contrary they devoured her like some kind of migraine and left her exhausted.

Vivien Leigh’s birthday at Marton Cottage may have been the inspiration for this cleverly characterized but, after Alleyn’s investigation begins, rather inert novel. Mrs Bellamy, the female equivalent of
Final Curtain’s
Henry Ancred, is powerfully portrayed as a larger-than-life narcissist with bipolar tendencies. ‘You’re a cannibal Mary, and it’s high time somebody had the guts to tell you so,’ says Pinky Cavendish. But honesty like that with Mary is an invitation to dinner. ‘But could she actually do you any damage?’ Pinky later enquires of his friend, Bertie Saracen. ‘Can the Boa-constrictor…consume the rabbit?’
False Scent
was dedicated to ‘Jemima with love’, who was really Eileen Mackay the, eldest Rhodes daughter.

Ngaio’s consolation during ‘irksome’ hours of writing was the arrival back in New Zealand of John Mannings, who now hyphenated his middle and last names and was known as Dacres-Mannings, and his brother Bear. John had contracted tuberculosis while serving in Germany. ‘
In the British Army
I experienced the greatest comfort and discomfort,’ he later commented. ‘The war did not end in Europe with peace.’ Conditions there were grim and he became ill and was hospitalized for months. His return to New Zealand to stay with Ngaio was part of his convalescence. She was thrilled to have him back and he stayed with her in Christchurch.

In spite of his ill health he did a huge amount of work in Ngaio’s garden, which was one of the city’s finest. She loved flowers and plants, and gardening was one of her sustaining passions. Dacres-Mannings blasted rock and moved it from one part of the property to another to create space for a drive and garage, and landscaped terraces on the steep hillside. There was another consolation. ‘
News is that
one of our three cats…Smokey Joe, developed gastro-enteritis coupled with septic wound on the tum,’ Ngaio told Doris McIntosh. Ngaio dosed him half-hourly for nearly a week. ‘One triumphant day a little grey skeleton took three laps of milk, since when he has never looked back.’

In March 1959, Ngaio began preparations for a new play. There were ‘
auditions, drawings-to-scale
& the long,
long
job of planning moves and getting on terms with a play which the more I know of it the more I marvel at’. Elric Hooper was in London, and Jonathan Elsom now touring with the Southern Comedy Players and departing in August on a bursary to LAMDA. This left a hole in her constellation of stars, but any apprehension she may have had about talent was unfounded. In fact, selecting the best was the challenge. ‘
Agonisingly difficult auditions
for A-&-C,’ she wrote to Elsom, ‘with Annette, finally & after
some pretty hot competition, as the Serpent of Old Nile. Sticky [Glue] as Antony & David [Hindin] as Enobarbus. A newcomer, Jim Laurenson, very promising indeed as Scarus.’ The cast also included Mervyn Thompson as Proculeius, or Proc as he became known.

Rehearsals were conducted in a condemned boatshed ‘
full of holes in the walls
, (literally) through which the winter fogs & gales effect an uninterrupted entry’. She worked hard on models for the set. One was a Roman pavilion and the other Egyptian, ‘
all on the giant apron
& in front of the house curtain. Phew!’ It was an immense undertaking, so she was delighted with the response.

‘ANTONY & CLEOPATRA really did go off very well and in particular got a very enthusiastic press,’ she wrote ecstatically to Doris McIntosh. ‘
I never wish
for a harder nut to crack.’ The production had been ‘fraught with difficulties’ and the play was full of ‘traps for young players’. There were moments, she admitted, when she wondered if they would ever make the mark. She put the success of the show down to a vintage year of talent and the ‘students’ capacity for gruelling hard work and brutal treatment from the producer’. Now it was all over and she could hardly believe it.

Surely there is no activity as ephemeral as that of a stage production? Half an hour after the last words of the play are spoken on the last night, the whole thing is vanished like Prospero’s vision into the thinnest of thin air. This was particularly evident in a production of this sort, where the actual stage setting was massive and had an unusual air of permanence. One lives for a few days in a sort of vacuum, before finding oneself able to start off again on another tack.

The production was epic, and its end brought a sense of loss, but not for long because Ngaio had something in the wings. She was packing up the house for tenants and facing the awful fear of losing her passport in transit to Wellington for a Japanese visa: ‘
the
tax
clearance
…the
Bank!
…the heat & the shops & THE PEOPLE’. On top of this, she planned to sell her car.

At 64 years of age, Ngaio was making arrangements for a marathon promotional tour of Japan, the United States and Britain early in the coming year. She had begun a new book and was about to set sail.

W
hat a hurly-burly
it was at the gang plank,’ Ngaio declared after she left New Zealand. Chaos reigned on the wharf in Sydney where she was convinced that they had neglected to teach the maritime workers their alphabet. ‘With the natural results I found half my luggage under S & the rest under Z. One case still floating somewhere about dockland but said to be traceable.’

Ngaio delighted in catching up with John Dacres-Mannings and his new wife, Elizabeth, whom Ngaio described as an
‘enchanting’, ‘delicate beauty’
with a ‘good brain’. After his convalescence, Dacres-Mannings had moved to Australia where he worked half-days with a Sydney stockbroker. He married not long before Ngaio arrived. His mother, Stella, had gone over for his wedding, then on ‘for a passionately longed-for trip to England’; she and Ngaio planned to meet in London. In the meantime, Ngaio was thrilled to dine with the newly-weds and deliver a wedding present from Doris and Alister McIntosh. This was the cherished beginning to an amazing adventure.

Her promotional tour would prove exacting but immensely rewarding, and it would extend Ngaio’s international reputation as a detective fiction writer and celebrity. The boat trips were a hiatus with rest mixed with a little writing in an itinerary that would otherwise have been overwhelming. Her ports of call,
after Fremantle, included Djakarta, Singapore, Hong Kong, which was ‘
alive, grubby, beautiful
& contradictory’, and finally Yokohama.

‘
Japan was glorious
,’ she wrote enthusiastically to friends in New Zealand. Her advice to any of them visiting Japan was ‘engage Miss Shinko Matsumoto to go with you’. She cost just £30 for three weeks, but Ngaio thought she was worth her weight in gold. Without such a guide, so much precious time could be wasted in misunderstandings and the confusion of being sent off to the wrong place or, worse still, to a dull one.

Once Shinko, a young graduate and translator of English books, realized that Ngaio was a truly curious and intrepid traveller, she proudly showed her the pageant of Japan. Ngaio was enthralled. They stayed in little inns, visited remote shrines, saw a Shinto wedding, watched a judo contest and a spring festival performance of geishas, wandered through narrow back streets filled with signs and superb traditional shopfronts, and ventured into the hills among the incredibly ‘lovely farm houses’. Except for Western-style hotels, Ngaio hardly saw a European for days. One of her highlights was stopping at an island as they sailed down the Inland Sea, bathing, dining and walking through a gorgeous garden before re-embarking at midnight. Japan was an experience she commemorated by the ‘wildly extravagant’ purchase of an oriental screen and three pieces of decorative ‘lacquer’ she bought at a workshop, plus porcelain pieces and rugs.

Ngaio was a tourist, but between the sights and sounds of her trip she crammed an inventory of public functions, which included a formal dinner put on for her by the New Zealand ambassador J.S. Reid in Tokyo. There, she was introduced to eminent people and treated like visiting royalty. In three weeks, she went almost from one end of the country to the other. Her itinerary left just two full days free. ‘
It was extremely strenuous
but I managed nicely except for one rather droll mishap,’ Ngaio admitted to friends. ‘I fainted on Tokyo railway station & came to, very cosily resting on the breast of the station-master who was quite charming.’

This she believed was the result of eating spoiled food on one of the trains. But as she got older, Ngaio’s health was not always good. She began to have accidents. In Sydney, she partly crushed a bone in her toe and hobbled around the boat until it recovered. She also endured chronic stomach pains that were exacerbated by the heat and the constantly changing diet and drinking water. But Ngaio constantly pushed herself to perform.

The luxury food and facilities of the
Chusan
passenger liner from Yokohama to San Francisco provided a welcome respite. It was also an opportunity to people-watch. The ship was packed with Americans, and although she felt guilty about making generalizations, Ngaio could not help herself. ‘
They are an almost pathologically
naive race,’ she told Doris McIntosh.

They are thoroughly nice & difficult to distinguish, the one from the other. Shrewd without being subtle, observant but not penetrating, immensely capable along acceptable lines, even their ‘originals’ are eccentric according to given patterns.

Ngaio loved ‘characters’ and the comfortable conveyor-belt conformity that she detected in the many American tourists she met in Japan and onboard the
Chusan
did not go unnoticed.

However, when she arrived in the United States she found it exciting, stimulating and ‘at times beautiful’. Her tour included stays in ‘vastly’ expensive hotels, and she was picked up by an attendant and rushed around from one promotional event to another. At the Fairmont Hotel, ‘
The hospitality is all
it’s cracked up to be & was laid on like a Lord Mayor’s Show.’ She had many press and radio interviews ‘but jibbed at television which would have eaten into too much time’. Before leaving San Francisco she enjoyed a dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf, with a visit afterwards to a nightclub where they sang grand opera.

In mid-May, Ngaio boarded a train for New York, where she faced another round of celebrity interviews and events, and caught up with her American agent Dorothy Olding, whom she had first met in London in 1954. Their correspondence had warmed over the years and they were now firm friends. At a Little, Brown luncheon for Ngaio on 23 May, the guest list included key figures from the newspaper and publishing worlds. They sat among fern leaves and crimson roses and ate exquisite food in the wine room of Pierre’s Restaurant on 53
^rd
Street. While she was in New York, Ngaio did a radio interview with Martha Deane for
The World in Books,
and was interviewed by reporters for
The New York Times, Newsweek
and the
New York Herald Tribune.

An unscheduled event, however, proved one of her most memorable experiences. ‘
The great white chief
of the N.Y. police laid on a night tour in a plain car with one of his superintendents’, and they drove through the Bronx. Home in prohibition days to bootleggers and then to waves of immigrant
communities, the area had become a melting pot of social discontent, renowned for high-density housing and crime. This was the beat of hard-boiled writers like Dashiell Hammett. Ngaio and her escort arrived back at the precinct at 2am. She was thrilled to have been taken seriously by American law enforcement agencies, but this was foreign territory for her. ‘My god what a lawless city it is & how proud, in a funny sort of inverted way, they are of their criminals.’

In New York, Ngaio saw ‘exciting’ opera, some ‘revolting’ theatre and was beguiled by the brilliant Vivien Leigh in
Duet of Angels.
There was another unofficial visit. ‘Had a midnight prowl with my agent in The Village,’ she admitted to Doris McIntosh. Ngaio struggled to convince Dorothy Olding that an excursion on a very wet, holiday weekend with few trains was worthwhile. Greenwich Village was a centre of bohemian culture and progressive thought. In the 1950s it was the focus of the Beat Generation, and through the 1960s it was known for its role in gay liberation. The district was largely residential, and at night there was not much to see, but Ngaio was pleased to savour, even if vicariously, New York’s counter-culture. She managed a quick trip to Boston to see her editor Ned Bradford at Little, Brown, and was comatose with tiredness by the time she boarded the
Bremen,
bound for England. The surfeit on this week-long voyage was not American but German tourists, mostly millionaires, she observed, munching through food like ‘boa-constrictors’.

Her arrival in Southampton on 8 June was ‘bliss’, and the first sudden sight of Big Ben brought tears to her eyes. After more than three months’ travelling she was finally in the London she loved, but then came the shocking news that her luggage from Japan, containing her half-finished novel, had not arrived. It was a huge relief when it was finally traced and returned. Her first fortnight was consumed with media events—newspaper, radio and ‘telly’ interviews—and parties to promote
False Scent.

Between, she snatched time to house hunt. The area that drew her, as it had so many times before, was Knightsbridge. At 29A Montpelier Walk she found a tiny, two-bedroom Georgian house close to the Brompton Oratory, set in a ‘mewsy’, ‘pubsey’ village of its own. In a Christmas card to her Cleopatra, Annette Facer, she described it as a fairytale house, borough fronted and black, with a scarlet front door. Here the traditional traffic of London passed by. There were street musicians, and the daily cries of a chair-mender, a knife-grinder, a flower-seller with a horse-drawn cart, and an ‘any-old-rags-bones-or-bot-oools’ man. These were centuries-old echoes that reminded her of a street scene from
Henry V.
She would stash her impressions away for another novel.

Ngaio was fiercely proud of her student players who were living nearby. Elric Hooper had already begun to make an impact at The Old Vic, where he was appearing in an ‘exciting’ production of
Romeo and Juliet
by the Italian director Franco Zeffirelli. He sang the song in the ballroom scene and was understudy to Romeo. Jonathan Elsom, studying at LAMDA, quickly took up her offer of the attic bedroom in the Montpelier house at a nominal rent of £5 per week. It was a saving for him, and she enjoyed the young friends he brought home, his descriptions of LAMDA teaching, and his first-night student productions, to which they drove in the black XK150 Jaguar she bought not long after her arrival. The only drawback was how to explain their cohabitation. ‘I think we’d better introduce you as my godson,’ she suggested, and that was what she called him from then on.

They made an agreement to alternate the cost of going out together. One time she would pay for the show and he for the taxi, and then they reversed it. Ngaio cleverly engineered films on Elsom’s night and expensive theatre tickets when she paid. On Sunday afternoons when they were both at home, they would watch television together. Ngaio’s favourite recreational viewing was on-the-mat wrestling. They sat on sofas eating pieces of fruitcake topped with slices of cheese, and Ngaio would become engrossed in the action, leaning forward, leaping up, and occasionally shouting directions at the screen. A woman cleaned and cooked their evening meal, and they had a live-in family retainer, a black cat called Lucy Lockett, whom they adopted. She was a hunter, but not with good instincts. ‘
Lucy…has brought
up here from Mr Raymond’s abode of license, a small wooden fish which I found her tossing up & madly clutching on the carpet.’ Ngaio missed her cats at home and almost always tried to find a feline in London to fill the gap. Ngaio’s memories of Lucy Lockett would surface in a similarly character-filled cat in
Black As He’s Painted.

Not long after her arrival, Ngaio was asked by a theatre company to dramatize
False Scent.
It was a difficult prospect and she wrestled with what she believed was one of her weaker novels. ‘
I think the fault
may well be that like so many of my books it falls between teckery [or detective fiction writing] and a comedy of manners.’ She worked on the script in collaboration with Eileen Mackay.

In August, she took a break from their work to go to Oberammergau in Bavarian Germany for the Passion Play. She had been contemplating this trip with Jonathan Elsom since December 1959, and it was finally happening. The
visit was fascinating. They travelled on the same Blue Train that Ngaio and Nelly Rhodes had embarked on years before. The play gave her a sense of continuity and tradition that she treasured. The crowds, the shops, and the merchandise were almost as interesting: Ngaio bought crucifixes, angels and figurines made into wine-bottle stoppers, all cleverly created by German woodcarvers. Some she kept and some she gave away as gifts.

When she returned to London, she picked up the threads of her play and, as the days shortened and the winter chill settled on London, she began writing with intense focus. It was the Third Act that presented the major problem, and, apart from buying food and making the occasional trip to the theatre, she watched London from her living-room windows. For more than three months of her precious time abroad, she was locked inside her Montpelier house.

She enjoyed an enchanting Christmas break with the Rhodeses, but the New Year of 1961 brought the ‘sickening’ news that Val Muling had died of thrombosis. His health had been precarious and she had just managed to get a last letter to him. She knew Anita would be devastated: ‘brave, poor girl’. Ngaio felt numb and ill herself. Val was a unique individual in her life and it would seem strange returning to New Zealand, knowing he was not there. She struggled in the depths of winter to shake off the gloom of his death. Weekend stays with the Rhodes family and good friend, novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley were a respite. She found J.B., as she called him, very good company. ‘
[He] is a man
who has taken commonsense to a point where it almost becomes genius.’ The Priestleys owned an immense mansion close to Stratford where she stayed and enjoyed the measured pattern of an English writer’s life. After breakfast, each of them retired to one of the vast Georgian rooms and got ‘down to it’.

When she had been in London for about a year, Ngaio decided to take a holiday in Devon. She loved watching the English countryside as it changed from the scoured earth of winter, with its tracery of black-branched trees, to land that was lush green and ‘
absolutely shouting
itself hoarse with flowers’ and foliage. She walked the moors and enjoyed the woods and wildflowers of lonely uplands that were ‘so beautiful they almost hurt’. Why, she wondered, did the progression of England’s seasons have so much more significance? Its rhythms turned ‘
slowly about
the Heavens like the earth itself.’