Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (16 page)

Ironically, too, although the war interrupted so many things, it did not affect the ascendancy of the detective novel. People continued to read crime fiction while bombs rained down and vast casualty lists were posted. Special pocket-sized editions of detective novels were produced for easy reading in bomb shelters, and lending libraries posted crime sections close to bunker entrances. The demand for intriguing puzzle plots would soar.

D
on’t pretend to be so
feeble!’
cries Roberta in a fury at Henry’s acquiescence.

‘But it’s true,’ Henry explodes with equal vehemence.

We are feeble. We’re museum pieces. Carryovers from another age. Two generations ago we didn’t bother about what we would do when we grew up. We went into regiments, or politics, and lived on large estates…Everything was all ready for us from the moment we were born…Now look at us! My papa is really an amiable dilettante. So, I suppose, would I be if I could go back into the setting, but you can’t do that without money. Our trouble is that we go on behaving in the grand leisured manner without the necessary backing. It’s very dishonest of us, but we’re conditioned to it. We’re the victims of inherited behaviourism.

Roberta Grey and Henry Lamprey are standing on a tussock-covered ridge in South Canterbury’s Mackenzie Country. They have walked up through bush to the lower slope of little Mount Silver, where there is a view over Deepacres sheep station and across the paddocks, roads and shelter belts that stretch as far
as the eye can see. Henry’s father, Lord Charles, has bought Mount Silver Station on a whim and renamed it after the family estate in Kent. He has brought his family out to New Zealand and farms the rough unrelenting landscape like a country squire, with a butler, maids, a nanny, and a governess and a French tutor for his six children.

Lord Charles has failed in his attempt to become a runholder. His efforts to assimilate have been so extreme that Henry believes his father has used sheep-dip on his hair. He has proved hopeless, especially with the dogs. He bought four at the exorbitant cost of £20 each, and when he sat on horseback his whistle was so feeble that his mount gazed blissfully into space, the dogs went to sleep and the sheep stood and stared at him in ‘mild surprise’. When he swore and shouted at them, he lost his voice. Henry feels their coming out to New Zealand was a mistake.

Only child Roberta has been drawn into the Lamprey circle since meeting Henry’s sister Frid at boarding school. When the winter holidays came, she stayed at Deepacres, and from then on at weekends and during the long summer break. Enchanted with the Lampreys, she has stayed regularly for two years. But in the midst of this idyllic existence is the sense of impending disaster. They are running out of money. Lady Charles has begun economizing: they will no longer take
Punch
or the
Tatler,
and will dispense with table napkins to save laundry bills. A second, cheaper, car is purchased to save taking out the Rolls so often. Of course, they are shocked when these strategies prove insufficient. The decision is made to return to England.

The memory of her 1937-38 stay with the Rhodes family was still vivid as Ngaio wrote
Surfeit of Lampreys
in 1939. By the end of that year, she realized that she was trapped in New Zealand by the war, so the novel may have been inspired by her need to revisit and pay tribute to the family who had changed her life. By fictionalizing her friends she could relive cherished experiences. In the quiet hours of the morning she mixed real life with fiction to create one of her most acclaimed pieces of writing, and the most personally revealing of all her novels. ‘
There can be no doubt
,’ wrote Ngaio many years later in
Black Beech,
‘however much we may disclaim the circumstance, that fictional characters are pretty often derived, sub-consciously or not, from persons of the writer’s acquaintance.’ She was writing about the Rhodes family, whom she also called the Lampreys in her autobiography. Things were changed in the novel, and a murder or two added, but these people were based on the Rhodeses, and
Ngaio’s connection to them had begun before she was born.

The Pakeha settlement of the South Canterbury High Country started with George Rhodes and his brothers in 1851, when they drove a flock of 5,000 sheep south from Banks Peninsula to a tract of land that would become The Levels. This station covered a huge area of 150,000 acres (60,700 hectares), between the Opihi and Pareora rivers, and from the snow-capped Southern Divide to the sea. Within four years the flock was increased to 24,000 sheep.

The Levels’ far-flung boundary lines were subject to sheep rustling. James McKenzie was a poor Gaelic-speaking Scottish immigrant who was found with 1,000 of the Rhodeses’ sheep, which he had rustled. He and his border collie, Friday, proved an elusive pair, slipping through the hands of a posse sent to apprehend them. Even when he was caught, McKenzie escaped. A £1,000 reward was offered for his capture, and it was Sergeant Edward Seager, Ngaio’s grandfather, who arrested him in Lyttelton and was a witness at his trial. As Seager remembered, ‘the only time Mackenzie
[sic]
showed any emotion was when the dog was produced in court and tried in vain to reach her master’. The giant ginger-haired sheep-stealer broke down.
‘Poor lassie!
They’ve got you too!’ he is reputed to have cried. A Rhodes family album contains a photograph of a border collie inscribed ‘Yours faithfully Friday’, and she is said to have ended her days on The Levels as a favourite dog.

George Rhodes died at 47, of a chill he caught dipping sheep, but his family continued, and one branch moved to Fendalton in Christchurch, where young Tahu Rhodes and his sister Marie played with Ngaio before the Marsh family moved to Cashmere. The Rhodes family lived across the lane in a very large house, with a long drive and a lodge at its gate. They had ‘
carriages and gigs
, a motor, grooms, servants and a nanny’. Ngaio’s friendship with the fairytale family continued at St Margaret’s, where Marie Rhodes was also a pupil. Ngaio visited the Rhodes farm at Tai Tapu on a school trip, which she wrote about for the school magazine.

But it was not until after Tahu Rhodes had been injured at Gallipoli, married Nelly Plunket and had three children that they met again. It was in Christchurch, in June 1924, when Ngaio was directing an Unlimited Charities production of her childhood favourite,
Bluebell in Fairyland,
and two of the Rhodes children were in the production. ‘
After the final performance
I went dancing with the Lampreys,’ wrote Ngaio in
Black Beech.
‘In the early hours of the morning we drove to their house, twenty miles away in the country. Its doors opened
into a life whose scale of values, casual grandeur, cock-eyed gaiety and vague friendliness will bewilder and delight me for the rest of my days. If one can be said to fall in love with a family I fell in love with the Lampreys. It has been a lasting affair.’

After the Rosemary Rees tour, and her own of the North Island with Tor King and Jimmy in 1922, Ngaio had settled in Christchurch, producing plays for amateur societies, and teaching drama at the newly founded Wauchop School of Drama and Dance. At this time an organization called Unlimited Charities began in the city to produce a large annual show for charity. Ngaio and her parents attended the inaugural meeting in rooms above a piano shop. There she met the Honourable Mrs Rhodes, and their friendship began. As a child, Ngaio, the daughter of a bank teller, had been taken to a public procession where she had glimpsed her young contemporary, Nelly Plunket, daughter of the Governor, in an official carriage with a crown on the door. Socially, the friendship was unequal, but time and talent would tie their lives together. Nelly Rhodes became the patron of Unlimited Charities, and her children delighted in the
Bluebell in Fairyland
production, which was an extravaganza of choreographed dancers, orchestral music and magnificent costuming. Ngaio’s sedate existence was suddenly technicolored. At last she had found the magic ingredient of romance.

The Rhodeses’ weekend parties at Meadowbank, which Ngaio attended, were prominent social occasions. The family ‘
lived on a scale
probably unmatched in any other New Zealand establishment except Government House’. When the Duke and Duchess of York visited New Zealand in 1927, Meadowbank was on their itinerary, although the duke came alone as his wife had tonsillitis. He dined with the Rhodeses, and the next evening attended one of their charity cabarets. The royal visit to Meadowbank was ‘typical of a Lamprey occasion’. Both Ngaio and the family were ‘grossly unmusical’, yet a nursery song around the piano seemed to entertain their eminent guest. ‘I can only suppose that he too was unmusical or that we were bad enough to be funny: I know we were bad.’

But these were the glowing embers of a dying way of life. In reality, the Rhodes family lived a precarious existence based on inherited wealth and family remittances. There was always a feeling that it might not last. This did not, however, stop the Rhodeses from being great philanthropists. Life had been generous to them and they were open-handedly generous to others. ‘
While the Lampreys
did not seem able to earn anything for themselves,’ Ngaio remembered,
‘they were enormously successful in raising princely sums for good causes.’ The Rhodes family sponsored a cabaret and amateur vaudeville group called Touch and Go, which Ngaio produced and toured. Altogether, she estimated the Rhodeses’ earnings for charity at £12,000. Their way of life, though, was difficult to maintain in New Zealand, and then there was the children’s education to consider: as they grew older, English schools were deemed essential. Ngaio’s ‘Brideshead’ days of charity drama mixed with astonishing luxury lasted little more than two years.

Like Roberta Grey, Ngaio was desolate at the Lampreys’ departure. It felt as if summer had gone forever and every day from now on would be a hoar frost. An invitation came for Ngaio to stay with the family in England and she would write a detective novel. A similar invitation comes for Roberta and she will become involved in a murder. Before she began writing
Surfeit of Lampreys,
Ngaio, at dinner with her surgeon, Sir Hugh Acland, enquired about the quickest and cleanest way of dispatching a victim. He recommended a sharp instrument, perhaps a skewer, pushed through the eye socket into the brain. ‘For Sir Hugh and Lady Acland with my love,’ she wrote in the dedication to the novel. ‘For the one since he has helped me so often with my stories and for the other since she likes stories about London.’ Not only had the Aclands given her advice and encouragement, but their extensive South Canterbury property at Mount Peel was the model that helped her to visualize Mount Silver Station. The plot would revolve around a sudden financial crisis into which the Lampreys had lurched.

After returning to England, Lord Charles goes into business with a man horribly in debt who promptly commits suicide by shooting himself through the head. The Lampreys are left to pay his bills. Roberta Grey arrives in London on the eve of a begging request to Lord Charles’s brother Gabriel, the Marquis of Wutherwood and Rune, for a ‘permanent loan’ of £2,000. He and his wife Violet are to visit the Lampreys at their double flat in a building known as Pleasaunce Court Mansions, on the corner of a fictitious street linking the real Cadogan Square, in Brompton, with Lennox Gardens. The Rhodeses’ double flat had been in a similar building a few blocks away at the back of Sloane Square, on the corner of Cliveden Place and Bourne Street. The newspaper agent where Ngaio bought her exercise books was on Bourne Street; the basement flat where she had written
A Man Lay Dead
was around the corner in Caroline Terrace. Roberta is living with the Lampreys in the heart of Ngaio’s London. As a sweetener,
the Lamprey children have been instructed by their parents to perform an impromptu charade for the marquis and his wife. Interestingly, Roberta is of the Lamprey children’s generation, not their parents’. This circumvents any difficulties implicit in the
ménage
that developed between Ngaio, Nelly and Tahu. Roberta can and does fall in love with Henry, the Lampreys’ son and heir. In his parents’ generation, whom would she have fallen in love with?

The charade, an ugly echo of what is about to happen, is an unmitigated disaster because it completely fails to impress, as does the ancient Chinese pot offered to Gabriel as a gift by the Lampreys’ youngest son, Michael. After their improvization is finished, the family, including Gabriel’s wife, Violet, retire to various rooms, leaving Lord Charles and his brother closeted together. Lord Charles makes his supplication, but the miserly Marquis of Wutherwood and Rune is intractable. He storms out of the room, shouting loudly for his wife to join him in the lift. When she arrives, she discovers him dead. The plated-silver skewer used by the Lamprey children in their charade is protruding from Gabriel’s eye. The fur-lined motoring gloves they also used are covered in blood and lying under the chair where the marquis is slumped. Violet screams and screams and screams.

Ngaio provided readers with a map of the two third-storey flats, joined by a landing that housed the lift and the stairwell. This was common detective fiction practice—to provide some piece of empirical evidence that might hold a key. She included the charred fragments of a note in
Death in Ecstasy,
and a map of Pen-Cuckoo village in
Overture to Death.
In 1930, writing in conjunction with Robert Eustace, Dorothy Sayers followed this logic in
The Documents in the Case,
to the extent that the book was a collection of letters and documents: all the evidence required for the armchair detective—the reader—to solve the crime. Lord Wimsey’s services were not required.

But Ngaio was too interested in her characters to allow the problem to take over. In fact, it is in
Surfeit of Lampreys
that Alleyn makes a comment that parallels her own attitude to crime writing. He admits that he gets heartily sick of the monotonous routine of investigation, but people fascinate him and homicide is all about people. Each person is secure inside their psychological ‘bomb-proof shelter’ until the ‘holocaust’ of murder blows their world apart. It is Alleyn’s job in
Surfeit of Lampreys
to cast an objective eye over a collection of characters who are based on Ngaio’s friends. He summarizes his findings for Nigel Bathgate who, by complete coincidence, is a personal friend of the family’s.