Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (43 page)

Ngaio was feeling her age and finding trips overseas increasingly demanding, but Anita Muling and Marjorie Chambers were on the wharf to meet her when she returned, and she had a ‘
happy arrival
into the arms of my old Crawsie’. Sylvia Fox, who had been her housekeeper in England, flew back to New Zealand rather than taking the boat and ‘arrived hot on my heels’. ‘Syl looks a bit exhausted after her 3 day hop with only one stop at Los Angeles, but says she feels grand.’

On her first day home, Nekko-San, her cat, followed her constantly, Every time she sat down the cat leapt up, ‘all 2 stone of him’, and began kneading her lap with ‘loud purrs & much dribbling’. Apart from the fact that Bessie Porter had eaten almost everything in the deep freeze—‘Gallons of steak. Several fowls’, three curries, mulberries, casseroles, preserved fruit…and the list went on—it was good to be home. The weather in January was settled, and ‘so one takes up the familiar routine’.

Almost immediately, there were discussions about Ngaio directing the inaugural production for the James Hay Theatre in the new Christchurch Town Hall. It was a tempting offer, but she decided to take her time and think about it. This would be a huge undertaking and she was not sure she was physically up to it. By April she had accepted the commission:
‘Henry V
is on
in Sept. or Oct. God help us.’ She agreed on the basis that Helen Holmes, a player of old and now her assistant, was able to carry much of the administrative weight. But, at 77, could Ngaio cope with the stresses and strains? This was not a student production but something approaching professional theatre, which required experienced repertory players. As auditions were organized, everyone wondered how Ngaio would hold up, but once in the director’s chair she was ‘
again that vital
, sensitive, determined, decisive, enthusiastic, joyfully intense force that we knew of old’. She was every bit as tireless and exacting in her search for best actor for the role as ever. ‘
I hope most ardently
that Jonathan Elsom may come out to play Chorus,’ she wrote to Doris McIntosh. In the meantime, she had 100 actors to audition for about 30 speaking parts.

Ngaio’s old friend Olivia Spencer Bower was one of those who auditioned. She had been at Marton Cottage for lunch with Ngaio, who, out of the blue, asked her why she did not try for a part.

‘
Don’t be so silly
,’ I said, ‘I’m too old—I haven’t acted for years.’

‘Well, read the play again,’ she replied.

Of course I did & I auditioned & got the part of Alice.

Because the James Hay Theatre was new, there were no costumes and props from previous productions, so these had to be purchased or hired and Ngaio ‘hardly expected to break even’. The 1,000-seat theatre, however, looked ‘more & more exciting’ as it approached completion. As they rehearsed solidly for eight weeks, it was ‘hectic beyond measure’. ‘
Rehearsals going
reasonably well,’ Ngaio wrote in a rushed letter to Doris McIntosh in August, ‘but all sorts of side alarms almost continuous. Jonathan E. arrived & lovely to have him.’

Ngaio had a plan for the opening night. Stall seats were booked for the McIntoshes, who were flying down to see the inaugural performance. Ngaio urged them not to be late, as those who arrived after the beginning would not be admitted until Scene Three. ‘
I couldn’t bear you
to miss Jonathan’s opening Chorus which is I hope going to pack a considerable surprise.’ On opening night the curtain rose and out onto a misted blue stage walked William Shakespeare: the Bard himself would play Chorus. The audience gasped, clapped spontaneously, and as Jonathan Elsom stepped forward he could only hope there would be quiet for his opening lines. The applause died away, and for the first time in public on that new stage Shakespeare’s words were spoken:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage…

The audience was captivated, the actors were electrified, the director had pulled off a coup: Ngaio’s three-cornered world was working in perfect unison. ‘
I was lost
in admiration of much of it,’ wrote Bruce Mason in an ecstatic letter to Ngaio, ‘the Droeshout idea [a reference to the famous portrait of Shakespeare] was inspired, and brilliantly executed by Jonathan…The opening was quite unforgettable: a brilliant idea, and astonishing and dazzling.’ Mason was in the audience reviewing the inaugural performance for the
Listener.
This response was echoed in many of the other published reviews. As Olivia Spencer Bower told a friend, ‘
Every seat was taken
for the full 2 weeks but the place was booked so we had to stop.’

The production was blighted by teething difficulties, however. ‘All I can say is…the James Hay theatre must have the jaws and dental equipment of a dinosaur,’ Ngaio told Mason, in response to his letter. Their achievement had been against technical odds. At each performance there were anxieties about the fire curtain, and one night the audience waited an hour for it to rise.

By mid-November the financial results of
Henry V
were available. ‘
We made a net profit
of $12,000,’ Ngaio announced to Doris McIntosh, ‘a staggering result from a 10 day season & pretty hefty costs on the production.’ This was a ‘gratifying’ outcome, and Ngaio was warm in her thanks to cast and crew. In October, she sent a ‘round-robin’ letter to those she felt had made it possible. Annette Facer’s read: ‘
Throughout the rehearsal
period, the very difficult and all too short preliminary days in the theatre and the season itself, you were the sort of company that a director dreams of but very seldom sees.’ Ngaio saw their success as a ‘corporate achievement’ that had come out of their combined efforts and spirit.

As usual, Ngaio had stopped a book in mid-flow to direct the production. She had begun
Black As He’s Painted
not long after she arrived back in Christchurch, but the novel had started ambivalently as she tossed up whether it should be set on a boat at sea or in London. In the end, London won. The setting was Knightsbridge, and more specifically Montpelier Walk, where she had lived with Jonathan Elsom in 1960-61 and on her most recent trip to England.

The basement flat had brought back memories of the little cat she and Elsom had adopted, so Lucy Lockett would become a central character in
Black As He’s Painted,
and an agent in the murderer’s undoing. The real Lucy had been given to Ngaio and Elsom by their housekeeper, ‘a Miss Gordon-Lennox,’ Elsom recalls, ‘and, I think a member of the Cats Protection League’. Lucy had been discovered wandering round Westminster.

Lucy was black, sleek
, and enchanting with a small white ‘bib’ under her chin, and when I was about to depart for an acting career in Southwold and then Dundee, and Ngaio was soon to sail off for NZ…I arranged…a new home with a little spinster, a Miss Clinch (retired Headmistress) friend of my ‘adopted family’ down in Burgh Heath (Surrey). Lucy lived on for many years after, and I’d renew acquaintance when I visited my ‘family’ in Surrey.

Lucy was named after a character in John Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera.
‘Ngaio always said Lucy was “no better than she oughta be”—it seemed a suitable name for our little cat with loose morals.’

It is Mr Whipplestone who finds Lucy Lockett in
Black As He’s Painted:
she is wandering around Capricorn Walk. Just before the book’s publication, Ngaio received a memo from Collins publishers in London: ‘
I have a sneaking feeling
that Capricorn stands pretty much for Montpelier, with the street, square, mews, etc., and that the Oratory is none other than the Brompton Oratory. Am I right? If so, we could make a rough map of that particular area substituting Capricorn for Montpelier.’ The recently retired Mr Whipplestone is walking along Capricorn Mews and into Capricorn Place. As the traffic noise rages around him, he realizes ‘that he himself must now get into bottom gear and stay there, until he was parked in some subfuse
[sic]
lay-by’ and finally towed away. Suddenly a cat, thin and black, flashes in front of him, then there is the inevitable screech of brakes and a ‘blot of black ink’ on the pavement. A group of louts laugh at the neat little heap. Mr Whipplestone stops, leans down and, in a flash, the cat leaps into his arms and is ‘clinging with its small claws and—incredibly—purring’. It has blue eyes and is black, except for the last ‘two inches’ of its tail, which are snow white.

When Mr Whipplestone shifts flats to No. 1 Capricorn Walk, Lucy Lockett moves in and life accelerates into a higher rather than lower gear. Astonishingly, he finds that his new cleaning lady and her husband, Mr and Mrs Chubb; Mr Sheridan, the man in Flat No. 1A downstairs; the Sanskrits, two morbidly obese sibling ceramicists living and working in a ceramics factory down the road; and his near-neighbours Colonel and Mrs Cockburn-Montfort are all involved in an attempted assassination of Alleyn’s old school friend and the subject of Troy’s latest portrait, His Excellency the President of the emerging African state of Ng’ombwana.

How is Lucy Lockett involved? The fictional and real Lucy Locketts share a dubious propensity: they are cat burglars. The real Lucy stole a wooden fish; its fantastic counterpart slips into the Chubbs’ tiny apartment and disappears with a ceramic fish on a chain which is the emblem of this secret group of assassins. Lucy Lockett’s light-fingered escapades help to connect the pieces. Mr Whipplestone, who once served in the Foreign Office in Ng’ombwana and, by a strange quirk of fate, is also a friend of Alleyn’s, finds himself involved in stakeouts and international espionage, and Lucy Lockett becomes his batman.

There are three murders in
Black As He’s Painted.
The Ng’ombwana ambassador is accidentally speared at a diplomatic function in London, and towards the end of the book the Sanskrits are found hideously murdered in their pig pottery. ‘
The Oratory dome
looks bland upon us,’ Ngaio had written to John Schroder in November 1960, ‘& in an old stable a strange girl sits modelling clay unicorns & firing them on the spot in an improvised kiln.’ In fiction 12 years later, unicorns become pigs, and the ceramicists are double agents who came to a sticky end.
Black As He’s Painted
is a well-written suspense-ridden murder mystery in the ilk of Ngaio’s best. She agonized over it, as she so often did, but all the time probably had a sneaking suspicion that she had hit on something good. Her descriptions of the retired but far-from-redundant Mr Whipplestone and his cat are spare and incisive. She is writing about what she knows.

Ngaio continued to battle with
Black As He’s Painted
leading up to Christmas 1972 and into the New Year. Her Christmas tree party, planned for 15 December, and for 48 guests, was a major interruption. Reviews for
Tied Up in Tinsel
had filtered through as she was organizing
Henry V
and, in spite of her agent’s reservations, it had been very successful in the States, where it was picked up by Pyramid for a ‘guarantee $9000 straight 10% royalty’, along with three older titles:
Vintage Murder, A Man Lay Dead
and
The Nursing-Home Murder
at ‘
$14,000 guarantee
for the three…with 8% royalty’. Little, Brown, who sold them to Pyramid, was delighted.

But there was sadness, too, as Christmas approached. ‘
I’m afraid that poor little Nicola
may very well have to have her amputation before then & will not be able to come.’ Nicola, the daughter of Judie and Malcolm Douglass, had been diagnosed with bone cancer. Ngaio had offered the money to send her to a private school, which she thought would be less stressful. To be fair, she also helped to pay the fees for the Douglass’s older daughter, Joanna. Ngaio’s players were an extension of her family, and she quietly advised and helped many of them behind the scenes. ‘Helen’s Emily
has
got a hole in her heart…so we have two rather tragic little girls in one company this year,’ Ngaio told Doris McIntosh. Helen Holmes’s daughter was due for an operation at Greenlane Hospital the day after the Christmas tree party.

Annette Facer remembers the pattern of Ngaio’s Christmas gatherings.

On the night
we would arrive to be met at the door by Ngai or sometimes Crawsie and ushered in to the Blue Room (sometimes referred to as the
Long Room). The adults would be provided with deadly cocktails/drinks and the children would sort themselves out [for their play]…Each year a different theme evolved, sometimes written by the parents with references to the latest Drama Soc Shakespeare production and latterly by the children themselves…The audience was always most appreciative with Ngai clapping and cheering.

Then…the children were called to the dining table which was beautifully decorated with candles and Xmas things and name places and Ngai aided by Crawsie would enquire if each dish was to the child’s liking. If the response was no they weren’t served it. Most of Ngai’s special older friends like Betsy, Sylvia, Marjorie and Anita (all childless) were delighted observers of this ritual…When all the littlies were fed they had to wait until they heard the bells chiming. This was Ngai playing an ancient record, which did not always respond immediately to her instructions. Then they were released into the Blue Room to discover that the screens had been removed and there stood The Tree ablaze with real lit candles. Such was the power of our elegant hostess that the tree never caught on fire. Family names were called out by Ngai and those so named came forward to collect their boxes which were often bigger than the recipients.

Nicola wrote the script for the play that year, and co-wrote it for a number of years to come. Emily was in charge of properties. Her health improved, but sadly Nicola’s did not, and she died of cancer in her mid-teens.

Tied Up in Tinsel
had been dedicated to Ngaio’s godson, the Dacres-Mannings’s older son, Nicholas. At Christmas the family visited from Australia. There were now three young children—‘They are such a happy family & Bet is such a splendid wife for him’—but Ngaio did not accept their invitation to visit Sydney. The youngsters were more than she felt able to cope with and she was under pressure with her writing of
Black As He’s Painted.