Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (42 page)

Troy is staying at Halberds, painting a portrait, while Alleyn is working on an extradition case in Australia. The subject of her commission, Hilary Bill-Tasman, has invited her to stay for his Christmas tree party, which he puts on for the children of local prison officers and their parents. Like Ngaio, he is an agnostic, but for him Christmas is a timeless tradition, reaching back through ancient pagan ritual to the earliest Druids. He spends days planning. There are rehearsals. His uncle, Flea, will be Father Christmas. Hilary’s showpiece is a costume with a superb beard and wig, plus a long golden gown that the grand old man Flea wears as he delivers his presents. The plan is that he will come in through the french windows to the recorded strains of Christmas carols, drawing presents on a golden sleigh behind him. Hilary will oversee the present distribution, while Uncle Flea escapes back out into the snow. Thirty-one children are coming and a dozen or so adults.

In the ‘long room’ stands the tree, decorated all in gold. ‘They hung golden glass baubles…[and] mounted a golden angel. There were festoons of glittering gold tinsel and masses of gilded candles. Golden stars shone in and out of the foliage.’ The tree is a vision, completed when the children’s presents arrive in large golden boxes, one for each family. There is even a ‘Crib’ that Hilary’s Aunty Bed bought for him in Oberammergau when he was a child. Hilary is sensitive about his paganism. ‘You think I’m effete and heartless and have lost my sense
of spiritual values,’ he says defensively to Troy as they survey the splendour. He has read her mind.

Would Troy have thought the same of her creator? Is Ngaio using a fictional character to test her own behaviour? Or is she just thinking out loud? Whatever the answer, Ngaio, like Hilary, was motivated more by festivity than faith, but her religious beliefs were conflicted. While she was writing
When in Rome,
she found that Roman churches were dedicated to saints or well-known biblical or historical figures. She decided on a cryptic dedication for San Tommaso’s. ‘
Mine will be Doubting T.
[Thomas],’ she announced, ‘for whom I have always entertained a considerable amount of sympathy.’ Ngaio loved the theatre of religion and the magic of the Christmas story but, like her father, she could never entertain the idea of faith without doubt. Her scepticism, though, was fraught with her mother’s superstition. Ngaio bought crucifixes and icons as gifts, ‘prayed for’ and ‘blessed’ people, and had an enquiring mind about the spiritual dimension of human existence. She read books on spiritualism, telepathy, faith healing and fortune telling, and, in 1967, paid to have her palm read.

By the end of 1970, she was a long way through the first draft of
Tied Up in Tinsel,
and her Christmas tree at Marton Cottage ‘
was a great success
& really did look pretty stunning being all GOLD,’ she told Doris McIntosh. ‘The boxes [were] golden too.’ She spent a hectic eight days getting ready for her 30 guests. Ngaio usually had Christmas and Boxing Days on her own. Sylvia would go and stay with her nephew, Richard, his wife Ginx, and their two children, while Ngaio enjoyed the stillness and liberty to do what she wanted. Her life was so full of people that she treasured the chance to pause and reflect. Being alone did not mean loneliness: it meant the space to potter around and do ordinary things and meditate. The year had been a busy one, but her major theatrical involvement, a production of Arthur Pinero’s
The Magistrate
for the Canterbury Repertory in November, had been less taxing than working with students.

The year had begun with the sad news in January of the death of Allan Wilkie, at the age of 91. This was the end of an era for Ngaio, and for the theatre: he was one of the last actor-managers with a touring troupe.

In June, she received the shocking news that Brigid Lenihan, just 41 years old, had probably committed suicide in Melbourne. She had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and it was not clear whether this was accidental or deliberate. Her stage life had been dazzlingly brief and exotic. ‘She was a brilliant and most loveable creature,’ were Ngaio’s closing words in a collection of tributes,
organized by Bruce Mason and published in
Act
magazine in 1970. The fictional stage that Martyn Tarne walked onto so effortlessly in
Opening Night
had never been there for Lenihan. She had so much potential and talent, but it was a gargantuan undertaking to break into an English theatre world driven by class and networks. Ngaio saw her death as a tragedy.

The final bolt from the blue was news that Eileen Mackay had died. This death was immediate and personal because they had worked together so closely over the years, beginning with their collaboration on a children’s book, and ending with the script for
False Scent.
It was the loss of a friend and a cherished history. Ngaio was devastated.

But there had been events and milestones to celebrate, too. In March, she had put on a luncheon at Marton Cottage for Lady Freyberg, the widow of former Governor-General and much-decorated soldier Lord Bernard Freyberg. Just a party of either 8 or 10’ guests, Ngaio wrote in an invitation to Gerald Lascelles, ‘
so don’t get yourself
involved in a
cause célèbre
but do come & be the son of the house once more’. In the absence of family, Gerald was her surrogate son in New Zealand.

There had been her opening speech at Evelyn Page’s retrospective exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Wellington, and, in September, Agatha Christie’s 80th birthday had been celebrated around the world. Christie was still writing. In the early hours of the morning, Ngaio was linked by satellite to London and interviewed by the BBC. Unfortunately, the interviewer organized for the event failed to turn up at the studio and a technician was roped in. His first question was: ‘So what do you think of Agatha Christie’s Lord Peter Wimsey?’ Ngaio gaped like a goldfish, not knowing quite what to say, and the interview went from bad to worse. But it was a technological undertaking that underlined the changes the world had seen in her lifetime. In the late 1920s she had taken a dilapidated coal-fired steamer to England; now she was being beamed there on radio waves.

There were now just two Queens of Crime left alive. In December 1957, Dorothy Sayers had died suddenly of a heart attack, at the age of 64. She was working on a translation of ‘Paradiso’, the third volume of Dante’s
Inferno.
Sayers had been out shopping and was found at the bottom of her staircase surrounded by Christmas gifts. She had long since given up writing about Lord Peter Wimsey, but took the real mystery of her illegitimate son to her grave. Margery Allingham had died more slowly and sadly of breast cancer in June
1966.
A Cargo of Eagles,
the crime novel she was writing, was completed by her husband, Philip Youngman Carter, and published in 1968. He wrote two more Campion novels before stopping in 1970. Christie was still writing a novel a year. Ngaio’s rate was a novel every 18 months to two years, but this picked up rather than diminished as she directed fewer plays in her last years.

Tied Up in Tinsel
proved more difficult to finish than Ngaio expected. In February 1971, the ‘new’ book needed just ‘
3,000 words
& a week’s hard concentration, but can I get into it? No: It will have to be finished during the voyage I fear.’ She was planning another trip to England.

‘
I do wish that you
could come to New York to enjoy our spring or even our autumn. It would be heavenly to see you again,’ wrote Dorothy Olding. These words were the spur for Ngaio to try very hard to get a ship to England via New York, but this was impossible in the timeframe. ‘
I’m sorry you can’t find
a ship,’ Olding responded. ‘We would all love to have you here again, much more than you know.’ They planned to meet in London anyway. Olding would be there on business, arriving just two days after Ngaio, and she was prepared to change her tickets to fit around her author’s schedule. ‘
I most certainly will
want to see you
very early
in my stay (at the Connaught),’ she told Ngaio when their arrangements were more settled, ‘preferably dinner and a nice long evening.’ They planned to meet on the 17th, 18th or 19th of May, depending on Ngaio’s availability.

Ngaio’s friend Bessie Porter moved into Marton Cottage to look after the cats, and, after a week-long stay with the McIntoshes who had returned to Wellington, Ngaio left from Auckland on the
Orsoua
on 3 April. In Sydney, they picked up flood-contaminated water that began a gastric scourge of the ship. Ngaio was sick and on a ‘
dose of 6 antibiotic
pills every 4 hours & a drench in a bottle that made one as sick as a cat’. She was not well again until after Cape Town, but the remainder of the journey was ‘enchanting’.

She arrived in London in spring when the city sparkled and looked its best. Initially, she stayed at her favourite Basil Street Hotel. Once again she faced agents’ and publishers’ meetings, mixed with ‘exhaustive flat-hunting’—and her rendezvous with Dorothy Olding. The chemistry between the women had lain dormant since New York in 1960, but their meeting again in London a decade later proved as memorable and dynamic as their last. ‘I so much hated you going that I suddenly jibbed at walking out on the pavement & then thought
how damn silly & made after you,’ Ngaio wrote. But just at that moment she was called back into the hotel to take a telephone call, and when she returned to the street Olding had gone. Ngaio began plotting a longer encounter. She arranged to travel by ship with Dorothy from Nassau in the Bahamas through the Panama Canal, with stopovers in Acapulco and San Francisco.

In London, Ngaio headed for her stamping ground of the early 1960s, taking a three-room basement flat at 5 Montpelier Walk, in Knightsbridge. It was ‘
very small
& like every last—hovel in this area—fiendishly expensive’, but she delighted in the ‘leafy little square & walking down the darling little streets to my old shops’. There was Capri, her Italian grocery, and a ‘wine shop whose family greeted me as if I’d only been away for the weekend’. For the first time Ngaio noticed the difference in exchange rates and cost of living between New Zealand and Britain. ‘
There’s no denying
it’s very
very
expensive here. Food, rents, fares—
everything
had spiralled like crazy.’

The year before, she had had another tax scare. Her tax was difficult to keep track of. In the United States, she paid an alien tax of 30 per cent in the dollar, and there were national differences in currency and tax laws. Agatha Christie had tax troubles, too, magnified by the same problem of worldwide sales. Ngaio Marsh Ltd paid for Ngaio’s tickets to England and her upkeep, but costs were high and her income subject to flux. Ngaio felt financially vulnerable now and watched what she spent.

She was aware, too, of time slipping away. Her Danish publisher, Samleren, invited her to Copenhagen for a fortnight. This was ‘
another great chunk
out of precious,
precious
time’ that she had paid for in London. Ngaio wanted her Copenhagen visit shortened, but in the end thoroughly enjoyed her all-expenses-paid stay at one of the city’s most exclusive hotels. There was a succession of television, radio and press interviews, but her trip to Kronborg Castle near the town of Helsingør, immortalized as Elsinore in
Hamlet,
was unforgettable. She left feeling her Danish sojourn had been ‘a huge success’.

One of the tasks she returned to was
Tied Up in Tinsel
. The book had been a struggle. In mid-June, she promised Dorothy Olding she would look at it again and possibly ‘shorten the 1
^st
part a bit’. It was another month before she handed the finished manuscript to her agents. Reaction to the book was subdued, and she was asked to make revisions. Ned Bradford of Little, Brown in Boston was almost alone in his enthusiasm. He instantly offered her a contract on the usual terms of $10,000 advance against a royalty of 15 per cent. Collins also
confirmed their commitment, and publication was set on both sides of the Atlantic for early 1972. The typescript was sent out to serializing magazines and distributing publishers. Serial rights were sold to the
Woman’s Journal,
but the general response was that, in style and setting, it was too dated and English.

Ngaio worked on the revisions until early August, when Lord Ballantrae and his wife invited her to visit them in Scotland. Ballantrae was Sir Bernard Fergusson, Governor-General of New Zealand from 1962 to 1967, and later Baron Ballantrae of Auchairne and the Bay of Islands. Ngaio had met the Fergussons through Doris and Alister McIntosh and they became firm friends. ‘
Bernard & Laura
were both in wonderful form. What a lovely, friendly, shabby old house it is & what dears they are.’ In spite of his 30-year career as a soldier and the demands of public life, Lord Ballantrae was a published author, military historian and romantic, and this was his link to Ngaio. Her visit to Scotland consolidated their friendship, and in the future she would confide in him about her books. He was a talented man with a pedigree that appealed. This was a friendship she cultivated.

When Ngaio returned to London, she began work on yet another novel dramatization: of
When in Rome
. ‘
I must say I still
think the book is an extraordinary choice…& I have many doubts about the outcome,’ she explained to Doris McIntosh. This time Ngaio collaborated with travel book and script writer Barbara Toy. Hughes Massie, Ngaio’s literary agents in Britain, initiated the project. Even when Ngaio departed for a ‘double cruise’ in the Mediterranean in mid-October, she took her secretary Joan Pullen so that she could work on the dramatization. ‘
Talk about a working
holiday! I…worked on the play every morning [Joan] typed in the afternoon & I revised in the evening.’ Back in London Toy worked, too, and when Ngaio returned they burned the midnight oil to bring it to completion.

On 8 December, Ngaio set sail from Southampton aboard the
Oronsay,
‘with more than the usual regrets’ about a visit that had been rushed and frustrating. The voyage back that she had planned with Dorothy Olding had its wild moments of compensation. Olding was concerned about monopolizing Ngaio’s time. ‘
All I can say
to that,’ she replied, ‘is the more you monopolise it the better I shall like it.’ Ngaio attempted to get a cabin closer to her friend’s, and on one ‘
exhausting’ but memorable
evening together they went out to ‘three parties in one night’. But Dorothy Olding, 15 years younger than Ngaio, noticed the age difference. A colleague wrote to Olding, hoping the trip ‘wasn’t all busman’s
Holiday’. Privately, Olding admitted that the voyage was restful, but she was surprised to find Ngaio ‘
really quite frail
& more than a little deaf. Also, she came down with the ship’s chest and was laid low for several days.’