Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (7 page)

It was probably with a sense of relief that Rose Marsh watched as ‘Miss Ffitch said goodbye and bicycled down the lane for the last time’: Ngaio was going to school. It would cost them a fortune for fees and the expensive uniform, but Rose felt certain that it would be worthwhile. Ngaio needed taming.

It was 1910, and St Margaret’s College had just opened and was run by a strict order of Anglo-Catholic nuns. Only the best families could afford to send their daughters there. Rose would have to scrimp and save even more, but the school had the values and status she wanted. It was not that she was an avid Christian, or even a great snob; what impressed her most was the school’s serious attitude towards young women’s education. The curriculum was heavy in literature, history and the arts, but what they taught promised to be equal to that of any good boys’ school. She knew Ngaio had potential and believed that Ngaio could realize it there. She was right. ‘From the first day, I loved St. Margaret’s.’

Ngaio swapped Huck Finn for High Anglicanism. ‘
To say that I took
to Divinity as a duck to water is a gross understatement. I took to it with a sort of spiritual whoop and went in…boots and all.’ St Michael and All Angels was the school’s parish church. She adored its theatre: the sermons denouncing sin and promising retribution; the processions; the banners; the dressing-up—the stoles, the copes and the cassocks; and the ‘drift of incense’ mingled with the smell of waxed wood and coir matting. The vicar’s children, the ‘Burton sisters’, became special friends. They were English and loved acting and the theatre. The other close friend was Sylvia Fox.

Then there was the drama of her English classes. ‘
Eng. Lit.
with Miss Hughes was exacting, and absorbing, an immensely rewarding adventure…she gave me a present that I value more than any other: an abiding passion for the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare.’ But Ngaio felt guilty about Miss Hughes. After winning a Navy League Empire Prize ‘with an essay containing thirty-one spelling mistakes’, she got the distinct impression that her teacher was not amused and would have liked to have read this, and other things her pupil wrote. Ngaio’s diffidence about her work made it hard for her to ask for assistance. She was very independent, but also painfully shy at times.

However, Ngaio’s interest in literature, creative writing, drama and art was fostered, so she distinguished herself, becoming head prefect in her senior year. This brought her into regular contact with her ‘schoolgirl crush’, the
headmistress, Sister Winifred. They began swapping confidences, Ngaio trying awkwardly one day to express her wish to do something for the Church. ‘
To my amazement
,’ Ngaio recalled,

she opened wide her arms and, with a delighted smile exclaimed, ‘You are coming to us!’

Nothing could have been farther from my thoughts. Never in my most exalted moments had I imagined myself to have a vocation for the Sisterhood. Immersed in the folds of her habit, I was appalled and utterly at a loss. It was impossible to extricate myself…I listened aghast to her expressions of joy and left in a state of utmost confusion. It was an appalling predicament.

But Ngaio did find a calling at St Margaret’s. In fact, she found two: art and the theatre. While still at high school, she studied part-time at the Canterbury College School of Art, taking classes two afternoons a week in the antique room from 1909 to 1914. The results were encouraging. She believed art would become her occupation, and the theatre her leisure. In her lunchtimes, twice a week she went to the lower school at St Margaret’s to entertain the small girls by writing stories and enacting them. This evolved into the play
Bundles,
which was deemed good enough by Sister Winifred (who harboured no hard feelings) to be performed at the end-of-year prizegiving.

Encouraged, Ngaio wrote a full-length play called
The Moon Princess,
based on a fairy story by George Macdonald. ‘
I showed it to my friends
, the Burtons and they bravely decided to produce it on quite an imposing scale at St. Michael’s.’ Her mother agreed to take a leading role, as the witch. Rose played her heart out. She screeched the ‘dark nights’ curse so frighteningly that the neck of every small child in the house crawled with fear. Her big scene was with Helen Burton, who was director as well as star of the show. They gave it ‘everything they had’, transforming Ngaio’s dialogue. Gramp Seager was there, too, and after the final performance he presented Ngaio with two precious heirlooms. One was a book called
Actors of the Century,
with his own emphatic annotations in the margins; the other was the ‘tawny-coloured lush-velvet coat’ of renowned actor Edmund Kean. This was his highest accolade.

Rose Marsh was a very proud woman that night. There were social engagements in Christchurch she could not attend because of the state of her clothes. She recycled her dresses, coats, hats and shoes so that her daughter could
stay at school. Now, her sacrifice was vindicated. Ngaio was a work in progress. Through her, Rose could relive her own life and overcome the fear that had halted her development. There was much at stake.

Ngaio believed that her mother ‘over-concentrated’ on her. ‘
Is there such a thing
as a daughter Fixation?’ she asked in
Black Beech.
‘If so, I suppose it could be argued that my beloved mother was afflicted with it.’ But how else could Rose realize her ambition?

After school finished, Ngaio’s life became harder for Rose to control. When Ngaio met the Rhodes family in 1924, it was almost impossible. There were weekend parties at Meadowbank. ‘In perpetuity’ wrote Ngaio flippantly in their visitors’ book after one of her stays. Her parents went to Meadowbank, too, and enjoyed it, but found the life of indolent luxury there something of an enigma. In England the Rhodeses were very kind to Ngaio, but Rose felt they had led her daughter astray. Her illness had brought Ngaio home.

Whatever I may write
about my mother will be full of contradictions. I think that as I grew older I grew, better perhaps than anyone else, to understand her. And yet how much there was about her that still remains unaccounted for, like odd pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Of one thing I am sure: she had in her an element of creative art never fully realised. I think the intensity of devotion which might have been spent upon its development was poured out upon her only child.

Rose Marsh died of liver cancer on 23 November 1932. She was 68 years old.

Three months after Ngaio’s return to New Zealand, ‘
on a warm evening
, my father and I faced each other across my old schoolroom table and divided between us the letters of sympathy that we must answer’. It would be a different future without Rose. Paradoxically, in spite of all that she had done to realize her daughter, it was in Rose Marsh’s absence that Ngaio became herself. ‘
Most of us
,’ she wrote reflectively in
Black Beech,
‘could point to a time, often long after physical maturity has been reached, and say to ourselves: “it was then that I…grew up.” My mother’s illness…marked I think my own coming-of-age.’ The Marsh household became orientated towards masculine things. Ngaio and her father bached together in a comfortable but less colourful life.

Then one day a note arrived from her literary agent Edmund Cork to say
that he had placed her book with publisher Geoffrey Bles and that it would be released in 1934. It seemed nothing short of miraculous. Ngaio had hoped, but had hardly had time to give the book’s progress a second thought. Geoffrey Bles offered her £30 in advance and a 10 per cent royalty. She worked on the proofs long-distance. When the book arrived, two months after it was on the shelves in England, Henry read it captivated, as Rose had, ‘
with his hand shaking
and the pipe jiggling between his teeth when he came to the exciting parts’. The dedication was:

For
My Father
And in memory of
My Mother.

Nineteen thirty-four was a big year for the Queens of Crime.

Agatha Christie released her chilling
Murder on the Orient Express
with another remarkable dénouement that left readers rushing for the rulebook. Surely, it was not cricket to have everyone involved? After writing 29 novels, plays and collections of poems, Christie was reaching her zenith.

Then there was Dorothy Sayers, who was realizing her aim of integrating detective fiction with the novel of manners. In her eighth novel,
Murder Must Advertise,
published in 1933, she found her stride and so did Lord Peter Wimsey. He was less affected, and so was she. Sayers was writing about her own experiences working in an advertising agency. Her familiarity with the people and the settings gave the story conviction, making it her most successful and well integrated so far.
The Nine Tailors,
published in 1934, continued this process, providing readers with perceptive observations of church life and bellringing. By enriching the crime novel, Sayers expanded its market. Her interventions did not change the style or form, but they did rehabilitate it for a more sophisticated audience, ultimately broadening its readership.

The publication of Margery Allingham’s
Death of a Ghost,
also in 1934, was another watershed. This was her first truly accomplished piece of crime writing. With her talent now tempered by the experience of writing six Campion novels, Allingham combined the dramatic tension of earlier books with more convincing characterization and plot to create a captivating story.

The Queens were in their prime when Ngaio began publishing, and their writing helped generate a huge interest in the genre. During the inter-war
period—marked by the end of one catastrophic conflict and the anticipation of another—there was a seemingly spontaneous desire among readers to assuage fear of universal death by focusing on the particular. The demand for detective fiction burgeoned. But it was a difficult field to break into, and its exponents were well practised. Considering the context of its launch, Ngaio’s
A Man Lay Dead
did remarkably well. Critics who had watched Christie, Sayers and Allingham develop seemed prepared to let Ngaio do the same, although there was confusion over the writer’s race and gender. The
Times Literary Supplement
critic took a stab. ‘
Mr. Marsh’s manipulation
of motive and alibi is neat and effective and repays careful attention’, but ‘His methods of detection…[are] somewhat distracting’, and Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn, a ‘most superior person, expensively educated and a connoisseur of good living [is] rather tiresomely familiar’. This kind of criticism inspired Ngaio to develop her own individual approach.

She was working on a script that represented a new departure.
Enter a Murderer
drew on her knowledge of the theatre, ‘
trying to get the smell
and feel of backstage’.
The Rat and Beaver
at the Unicorn is a play-within-a-novel, which echoes rather than explains the action. Roderick Alleyn is in the audience at the Unicorn Theatre, as a guest of Nigel Bathgate. The tension is palpable in the final fatal scene of
The Rat and Beaver.
Anger boils between cartel bosses the Beaver, played by Surbonadier, and the Rat, played by Felix Gardener. The intensity of their venom has brought the audience to the edge of their seats. Bathgate feels extremely uncomfortable because he knows the fury between the men is more than just acting: off stage they hate each other. Inspector Alleyn’s eyes are riveted to the action. Nigel can see the tension in his face. The anxiety is almost unbearable.

This is the moment of truth when the infamous Rat is exposed as an illicit drug trafficker, traitor, Nazi spy, or hero of the British Secret Service. The Beaver’s masterminding of the opium trade is well known. On stage he takes a revolver from his pocket and loads it, then addresses Gardener, the man who, in real life, has stolen his starring role and his lover.

‘So the Rat’s in his hole at last!’

‘Beaver,’
whispered Felix Gardener…
‘You’re not a killer, Rat,’
he said.
‘I am.’

Gardener raises his hands above his head, but then in the doorway stands Stephanie Vaughan holding a revolver pointed at Surbonadier. The Beaver has been outmanoeuvred by his cheating stage girlfriend (and real-life ex-lover). He drops his hand. The gun hangs limp in his fingers. Sneeringly, Gardener thanks Stephanie as he takes the revolver from Surbonadier. She taunts him. Suddenly Surbonadier snaps, grabs at Gardener’s neck, and pushes his head back. Gardener’s hand jerks.
Bang
goes the gun across the blackness. The sound is deafening. ‘Surbonadier crumpled up and, turning a face that was blank of every expression but that of profound astonishment, fell in a heap at Gardener’s feet.’ Alleyn seems to know what has happened, even before the shocked usher finds him, seated on the aisle. He urges Nigel to get out as quickly as possible.

Someone has exchanged real bullets for fakes, breaching the boundary between illusion and reality. In the make-believe of the play, the Rat shoots the Beaver. In real life, Arthur Surbonadier is dead on the stage floor. There is no doubt that Gardener has killed Surbonadier, but did he murder him? It is in the slippage between illusion and reality that the ambiguity of the crime exists. The act of murder presupposes intent: the act of acting assumes pretence and therefore innocence. Is Gardener innocent or guilty? The answer is in his face when Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn tricks him into climbing up a ladder backstage beyond the ceiling cloth and into believing that a large sack hanging from a rope in the ceiling is the body of his second victim, Props.

‘Alleyn!’ he cried in a terrible voice, ‘Alleyn!’

‘What’s the matter?’ shouted Alleyn.

‘He’s here—he’s hanged himself—he’s here.’

‘Who?’

‘Props—it’s Props.’

His horrified face looked down at them.

‘It’s Props!’ he repeated…

‘Come down,’ said Alleyn.

Gardener comes down, and within six rungs of the stage he turns and sees the men who are awaiting him. With an incoherent cry he stops short. His lips are drawn back, showing his gums. A streak of saliva trickles down his chin. He squints. ‘And
how
do you know it is Props?’ asks Alleyn. In that instant, the actor is unmasked to reveal the murderer, and his animal-like snarl is confirmation.
Felix Gardener is the face of deviance exposed. In Ngaio’s closed world, he represents a temporary aberration in the fabric of normality. As in most Golden Age detective fiction, his psychology, his pathology, his reason for being what he is, is of less interest than the process of his identification and removal. The genre’s focus is the restoration of order, and in the anxious decades of inter-war uncertainty this was immensely appealing.