Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (38 page)

Unchained from her ‘gnawing misgivings’, in April Ngaio became involved in another production. Jonathan Elsom and Brian Bell, production supervisor of local channel CHTV3, decided to put on a two-man show. Ngaio liked the material they were doing, and when they asked her to produce
Two’s Company,
‘
dived in boots & all
& I must say with
great
satisfaction’. It was a medley of part-plays from Noël Coward, Anton Chekhov, John Mortimer, Luigi Pirandello and Marcel Achard, innovatively performed. ‘The changes of make-up are effected at two side tables in view of the audience, & the whole thing runs like cream from the bottle.’

In April, Ngaio sent a desperate letter to Billy Collins. The new law, applied retrospectively to her last two visits to England, had left her with a tax demand of £1,700. ‘
This just about cleans
out my savings & is a horrid blow.’ She appealed to both her agent and her publisher for help, but double taxation seemed unavoidable and all she could hope for was a partial rebate when everything was settled in New Zealand. Collins was deeply concerned about the tax; he also discussed the autobiography. Jonathan Elsom’s mother, Vy had been commissioned to draw a portrait of Ngaio for the back cover. He told Ngaio this, had been sent on from New York to Boston, where
Black Beech
would be published first. Collins in Auckland wanted a few changes, and Billy Collins
himself asked for some additions, which he regarded as minor; for Ngaio, they were excruciating. The project soured in her hands, and by September she wrote to John Schroder: ‘
I’ve been having a gruelling time
with my autobiography, unwillingly ventured upon (& I think perhaps unwisely, too).’ Collins had been persistent. The autobiography was finished, but it was ‘not the book I hoped it would be. I have been defeated by my own reticence.’ She sent off the final manuscript with ‘profoundest misgivings’.

Ngaio did not plan to produce a student play that year, but she still became involved in annual rehearsals. They were in the dog show shed in Addington: ‘One wonders if billions of fleas are coming up for the fur orgy.’ She turned down an opportunity to produce a play for the Wellington Repertory Company because she was at work on
Death at the Dolphin,
a new detective novel that once again drew on her passion for the theatre.

Somehow, though, in the latter part of the year she became caught up in the concept of a touring
Hamlet
or
Macbeth
with the New Zealand Theatre Centre, a ‘pretty generously subsidised’ organization intended to assist regional professional theatre. Ngaio was on the board and Dan O’Connor was tour manager, with Richard Campion assisting him. Ngaio was invited to direct their first major production. She delayed her departure from New Zealand, began organizing, spent all day with Raymond Boyce on set design, and talked to Douglas Lilburn about music, but by November the venture had fallen through. She was deeply disappointed, and seriously out of pocket, as she had to pay an additional £200 to travel on a large passenger liner ‘which I dislike instead of a ship I know & love’. She had turned down an opportunity to launch
Black Beech
in the United States, and because of the tour had delayed the Collins launch in London until after Easter ‘at great inconvenience to all concerned’. It was an upheaval and a waste of time. It was nobody’s fault, she admitted: ‘
Just theatre
where that sort of thing happens continuously. What a life.’

In the meantime, she stayed with Stella Mannings in Wellington in October. ‘
Our relationship
is more like that of sisters than cousins.’ She was looking forward to introducing Stella to Doris McIntosh. ‘[Stella’s] a great dear but rather agonisingly shy…[with a] very good cranky sense of humour which pops up at surprising moments. I dote on the old tart.’ While in Wellington, Ngaio presented the Katherine Mansfield Award. The event was not without incident. ‘
I had just been told
I had to be televised canoodling with Frank Sargeson,’ Ngaio explained to John Schroder. The problem was they lost Sargeson, so she had to
lie on the lawn ‘& be photographed until he could be found’. The organizers neglected to tell Ngaio that he had won the award, which ‘botched up my speech’, and forgot to ask Sargeson ‘to come & get his hundred smackers’.

Around speeches and public engagements, Ngaio packed and prepared to leave. There were permits, injections, tenants and cats to organize. She bought a new sewing machine for Crawsie, who was desolate after her ‘old warrior’ broke down. Ngaio rationalized the gift: ‘
instead of waiting
till I pop off she might as well have something’. The parcel was duly delivered, accompanied by a note that said, ‘with love from His Holiness the Pope’.

At the beginning of 1966, Ngaio was still ‘packing & stowing’, while an avalanche of
Black Beech
promotion rumbled in the background and began to pick up momentum. ‘
I’ve got T.V. chaps
from Wellington tomorrow & Friday, all day, doing a programme in the house.’ She also agreed to a ‘whirlwind’ of promotional events in Auckland. Ngaio departed Wellington aboard the
Arcadia
on 7 March, but on arrival in Auckland found that she had lost her luggage. ‘
I’m going pretty crazy
as you can imagine.’ A painting of Anita Muling’s she was taking to Sotheby’s, and a mink coat and precious camera, were all packed in her lost luggage. Her relief was palpable when, after a frantic telephone call, Gerald Lascelles managed to trace the luggage.

In Sydney and Melbourne she faced further ‘book-shop-crawls’ plus press, radio and television interviews. ‘
The Sydney T.V. gentleman
would keep asking me why I had never married,’ she wrote in her thank-you letter to Lascelles, ‘& how, in my surprise & exasperation, I answered him I tremble to conjecture.’ Ngaio caught up with Elizabeth and John Dacres-Mannings and their young family, which included a toddler and a baby, Nicholas and Sarah. She was delighted to see them in their new house, still under renovation. Dacres-Mannings had visited her in the New Year. ‘
There we were
: just as usual,’ she explained to John Schroder. ‘I couldn’t like him better if he were my son & yet have no cluck-clucking desire to attach him to myself.’ Perhaps that was the answer she could have given the Sydney ‘T.V. gentleman’—that she cherished intimacy, but above all valued her freedom.

The journey was something of a
Marie Celeste
passage. The missing luggage was followed by disappearing galley proofs for her ‘new tec’, sent registered mail to Fremantle by her American publishers, and to be corrected and returned urgently. She was anxious that this would mean a delay in publication. In the end, a second set reached her in Gibraltar and she spent two ‘
hectic days &
nights in the Bay of Biscay O, correcting them’ and returned them by airmail from London, which cost a small fortune. Ngaio was ‘dreading the hullabaloo’ of the London launch of her autobiography. ‘
I quite like the earlier bits
, now,’ she confessed to John Schroder, ‘but shall never be reconciled to the thing as a whole.’

To her great delight, ‘
Jonathan and Elric
were both down at the docks at the crack of dawn’ to meet her. As soon as she arrived, she found her engagement book a ‘
thorny thicket
’ of events ‘& time’s winged chariot, with a return ticket to N.Z. is hard on my heels’. Leisurely London stays were a thing of the past and she must make the most of her time.

The first three weeks vanished in a blur of press, television and radio interviews, followed by semi-business luncheons with publishers, Crime Club representatives, and her agent. A luncheon with Lady Freyberg made a pleasant interlude. She stayed at the Hyde Park Hotel until she found a flat at 5/51 Pont Street, Kensington. It was here that a ‘bombshell’ fell in the form of a commission from Alexander Cohen, ‘the Eminence Grey of Broadway’, to dramatize
Singing in the Shrouds.
Ngaio was staggered by this unique opportunity, but if she accepted ‘
I shall have my nose
to the grindstone as usual’. It was a risk and she was not sure she could ‘make a job of it’. In mid-May, Ngaio enjoyed a weekend stay with Billy Collins. She was stunned by the beauty of his 14th-century house, with its massively proportioned comfortable rooms ‘smelling of applewood fires’, and furnished with ‘lovely’ antiques. His library was in a huge silo separate from the house.

Work soon resumed. By the end of May, Ngaio had seen only five shows, and far less of her favourite family than she liked. This stay was shaping up to be another working holiday, with an emphasis on work. What theatre Ngaio did see, though, she enjoyed. ‘
YOU NEVER CAN TELL
gets superb treatment at the Haymarket and the KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE, a terrifyingly funny play about lesbian ladies, is wonderful,’ she told Gerald Lascelles. She also saw ‘THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN…[which was] superbly mounted and acted…TRELAWNY OF THE WELLS…an enchanting revival but the VOYSEY INHERITANCE’ was not well done. Ngaio could not get in to see Sir Laurence Olivier’s
Othello
and hesitated to write a private letter requesting a seat. She was always reluctant to push herself forward, even when it was justified.

In the midst of all this came responses to
Black Beech,
both personal and
published, from readers and reviewers. The initial reaction was positive, but as the flurry of enthusiasm died down more critical voices emerged. One of those belonged to writer and publisher Dennis McEldowney, reviewing the book for
Landfall
in September 1966. In part his reaction was a statement of the obvious. There was not much about Ngaio Marsh ‘
except indirectly
, in the latter part of her autobiography,’ he stated in his opening sentence. ‘Most of her adult life remains undisclosed.’ He also observed that there was almost no discussion of her detective fiction. ‘Followers of her criminal career may be disappointed to find so little of it.’ There were none of the colourful Detection Club descriptions she had read out over the radio, and little revealing analysis of her theatrical work. What glowed brightly from an otherwise subdued fire were the coals of her youth. ‘She recalls as convincingly as anyone I have read the unstable and extravagant emotions children are subject to, before they have grown wary of emotion.’ Ngaio was less reticent about her early life and could recall it without embarrassment, McEldowney postulated, because time had elapsed.

These were reasonable comments, but there was a cruel barb to the review that must have stung Ngaio. McEldowney claimed she had only ever written about New Zealand ‘as though she were a visitor, while believing she was a native’. He made cutting remarks about the way she handled the New Zealand accent in fiction as opposed to the cockney, implying that she was an Anglo-centric snob. And he ended with a diatribe against detective fiction. ‘It is doubtful whether any New Zealand writer as ambitious as she was could now bring himself to write detective novels, even as a means of making a living.’ He acknowledged that things were different when she began, and that detective fiction was ‘then recreation of some respectable talent’. However:

It has never seemed to me…that Ngaio Marsh was a potential novelist wasting herself on detective stories. She has not been either passionate enough or detached enough. This doubt is strengthened by her autobiography, pleasant to read as it is. The reader can trace fascinating patterns but wonders if she knows they are there.

On the one hand, McEldowney admonished Ngaio for not offering more about her detective fiction; on the other he demonstrated the intellectual snobbery that had silenced her. Ngaio’s reticence over her detective fiction writing had proved well founded. She had carried the weight of academic condescension for years.
It was an intense disappointment to her that what she sometimes slaved over was given so little respect in her own country.

Her discretion about her private life was probably equally well placed. She revealed her childhood because the people in it were mostly long dead, and among her more contemporary friends and associates, she easily mentioned those whose careers were already in public view: Dan O’Connor, Jack Henderson, Paul Molineaux, Elric Hooper and Jonathan Elsom. But she was more hesitant about the Rhodes family, whom she called the Lampreys in
Black Beech,
about her cousins, the Mulings, Doris and Alister McIntosh, and was almost completely silent about one of her closest friends, Sylvia Sibbald Fox. Although he was a major character in her novels, Ngaio never explained how Detective Inspector Edward Walter Fox got his name. His surname was that of her best and most faithful friend, Sylvia, and his middle name came from her father, Walter Sibbald Fox.

Their association began at Miss Ross’s dame school. In
Black Beech,
Ngaio mentioned the boys who helped her adjust to the trials of her early school life, but never Sylvia. She was born on 5 December 1898, the eldest of three children, and the only girl. Her father, Walter Fox, was a surgeon and superintendent of Christchurch Public Hospital from 1914 to 1935. The family mixed in well-to-do circles and knew people of prominence in Canterbury, including the Aclands.

Sylvia Fox’s was a genteel life of privilege and culture. She rode side-saddle and executed dressage as if the horse were an extension of her slim body. She was brought up to read widely, and loved art, music, theatre and ballet. In her youth, Sylvia was taken to cultural events that came to town, and there was always a horse to ride on one of her father’s farms. Later, when the family fell on harder times, she mixed in circles where mounts were available and money for concerts was found regardless. Sylvia and Ngaio went to St Margaret’s College together. One was poor and the other privileged, and although Ngaio was three years older they became firm friends. Sylvia went on the Marsh camping trips to Glentui, and discovered High Church Anglicanism with less fervour than Ngaio, although her Faith remained.

Beyond high-school years, their lives continued to overlap. Sylvia was a close friend of Evelyn and Frederick Page, Olivia Spencer Bower, Betty Cotterill, and many people Ngaio knew in art and theatre circles. Ngaio’s imaginative,
indulgent parents allowed her to follow her dream of studying art, while Sylvia’s father had a more pragmatic path in mind. ‘You must make yourself useful in life,’ he told his daughter, ‘so you need to get a qualification and I’m just setting up this cancer thing. You can be one of my first nurses.’ Walter Fox was involved in establishing the first cancer clinic in New Zealand, which began as a crude system of radium treatment with needles. Aged about 20, Sylvia was among the first intake of five student nurses trained in the specialist procedure. They wore heavy lead aprons for protection, but after years of the work it seemed that they had been absorbing radiation along with their patients and were succumbing to cancer themselves. They were quickly pensioned off in their late 40s. ‘Tipped out,’ as Sylvia’s nephew Richard Fox said, ‘
with a fairly useful pension.
’