Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (36 page)

Ngaio was relieved to have the lectures over, but like sand at the beach, the hole it left in her workload was rapidly filled with competing projects. ‘One sits & wonders which in hell of these tasks one will tackle next & ends up going into a cross-eyed trance.’ In March, she had already talked with students about the annual play production, which she thought would be
Macbeth;
the theatre company was demanding more changes to
False Scent
before a London launch, and she was receiving letters twice a week from her assiduous co-writer, Eileen Mackay;
A Unicorn for Christmas
was in the making, with David Farquhar desperate to see her; and thoughts of another novel, her bread and butter, were knocking at her conscience. ‘
I’ve simply got to get cracking
on a new book before rehearsals begin.’

She began
Dead Water,
which was inspired by her recent trip to Devon and Cornwall. It was an odd story, and maybe some of its quirkiness came from the feeling she had to write and the inevitable interruptions that dogged its conception and development. ‘
It’s been a snorter
to control from the kick-off,’ she later admitted to John Schroder. Ngaio dedicated the book to Alister and Doris McIntosh, who were becoming closer and closer friends.

Ngaio’s relationship with the couple was interesting because Alister McIntosh was homosexual, as Ngaio knew and discreetly alluded to in her letters. She became a part of their marriage in a profound way, because for Doris she took on many of the roles of a partner. She was her confidante and her emotional support, and possibly more, although a physical dimension to this relationship
was never suggested. But increasingly Ngaio wanted to share her special events with Doris, and Alister if he was available.

The plot of the new novel revolves around the mercenary activities of a cult that is marketing the healing properties of the spring waters of Portcarrow Island, where, allegedly, a young intellectually disabled boy’s wart-covered hands have been washed clean in the spring. Desperate to escape tormenting children, he staggers into the pool, looks up directly into the sun and sees a Green Lady, who tells him: ‘Say “Please take away my warts”. Shut your eyes and do as I tell you. Say it again when you go to bed.’ The next morning his warts are gone and word spreads rapidly. Soon tourists, along with the sick and the infirm, are coming to Portcarrow in Lourdes-like numbers. Racketeering becomes an economic strategy, and Portcarrow inhabitants organize package tours, turnstile entry into the spring enclosure, merchandising of magic water and painted plastic figurines of the Green Lady, and an annual commemorative festival run by the ‘near-nymphomaniac’, slightly unhinged Elspeth Cost.

Emily Pride, the new suzerain of Portcarrow Island, and coincidentally a great friend of Roderick Alleyn, decides to put her foot down. In a past life, she was Alleyn’s wise old grasshopper, helping him with his French irregular verbs when he was a candidate for the Diplomatic Service. She was in the French Resistance and is staunchly moral. Any more spring-water swindling will be over her dead body. There are death threats and two attempts on Emily Pride’s life before a body finally surfaces in the spring waters of the miraculous Green Lady grotto. But it is the wrong one: Elspeth Cost’s, not Emily Pride’s.

Although the storyline is farcical, and the murderer more predictable than most, the setting of Portcarrow Island is magnificently evoked, as is the crowd mentality of the miracle seekers. Memories of Oberammergau give vividness to Ngaio’s writing: descriptions of rubbish-strewn pathways after spiritual tourists have passed by, busloads of anxious people desperate for a cure or an answer to their torments, and behind it all blind faith. Oberammergau’s tourist shops sold wooden crucifixes and painted figurines; on Portcarrow Island, in Miss Cost’s Gifte Shoppe, are bottles of magic water, pamphlets, handwoven jerkins, novelties and row upon row of painted plastic Green Ladies.

This is not one of Ngaio’s best novels but it has some clever satire and startlingly vivid cameo characters, like the alcohol-addled Major Keith Barrimore, with the smell of whisky on his breath, purple veins in his face, and a tremor in his hand. The young New Zealand-born schoolmistress Jenny Williams is also
convincingly evoked. Like Roberta Grey in
Surfeit of Lampreys,
she is a stand-in for Ngaio, and when asked whether she gets homesick she gives an answer that the writer might have given herself: ‘A bit. Sometimes. I miss the mountains and the way people think.’

Rehearsals for
Macbeth
began in early June. Once again they were conducted in the most primitive conditions, but a warm sense of camaraderie among the student players made the cold crudeness less biting. Helen Holmes, who was to become a close personal friend, played an excellent Lady Macbeth, and Ngaio was thrilled with her thane, James Laurenson. ‘
The Macbeth himself
has made a most impressive beginning & I have high hopes of him,’ she told Doris McIntosh, whom she wanted to come down for the show. Finally, Ngaio had firm dates to send her. ‘
We open (now!)
on July 27
^th
(Friday) & play a week
missing
Monday 30
^th
.’ To enhance their barbaric marauding qualities, Ngaio dressed her Scottish thanes in the thonged sheepskins of the Highlands and put them against an unrelentingly metallic-grey set. The play oozed ambition, and the kind of sexual tension between the Macbeths that turned dreams into murder, and reality into a living nightmare.

Ngaio had called for an adjournment from her work on
A Unicorn for Christmas
with David Farquhar to produce
Macbeth.
There were words to write, but she could not concoct the rhymes while she was coming home from play rehearsals at 2am. Ngaio was always catatonic with nerves on opening night. ‘
If you were nervous
,’ Bob Scott remembers, ‘you never looked at Ngaio. Her hands shook like a leaf.’ As Alleyn says in
Dead Water,
‘one has to remember that all the first-night agonies that beset a professional director are also visited upon the most ludicrously inefficient amateur’.

Even after
Macbeth
closed, Ngaio was not free of commitments. In mid-September she told Doris McIntosh that she was on a regime of writing ‘
if possible 1500 words
of “tekery” a day’. She had not been out of the house for about five weeks other than to buy food. ‘I must finish this damned book by March & that’s going to take some doing. How Agatha ever does it in 3 to 4 months I do not know.’

On 31 October 1962, another event pushed its way into her busy timetable, but this was warmly welcomed. Ngaio was presented with an honorary doctorate of literature by the now fully-fledged and independent University of Canterbury, in recognition of her services to literature and the theatre. Coming on top of the Macmillan Brown Lectures earlier in the year, it made her feel that
there had been some acknowledgement of the huge contribution of time and money she had made to student theatre, and of her worldwide reputation for detective fiction writing. Ngaio was the first woman and the first non-academic to receive an honorary doctorate from Canterbury. She was delighted. University capping provided the kind of costuming spectacle that tickled her heart. More importantly, though, she wore her cap and gown with pride, knowing that the academic
é
lite of Christchurch, who had often seemed aloof in the past, had made her their peer.

Ngaio did not bask long in the glory before she was writing to David Farquhar, arranging to be in Wellington in early December. ‘
[I] would very much like to sit
in the shadows of the dress-rehearsals, if I may.’

In late November, Ngaio’s role shifted from the shadows to the limelight. One evening she received an urgent telephone call from the
Unicorn’s
production director, Donald Munro. Producer John Trevor had arrived at rehearsals drunk and had been reprimanded for his vicious verbal attack on one of the female cast members.
Things were falling
apart, and if something dramatic did not happen soon they would never open on time. ‘
There are unsettled arrangements
for all sorts of ongoings.…[I] hold myself in readiness for whatever bombshells may fall.’

She was rocked by what she found. ‘
The acting
…so bad,’ she told Jonathan Elsom, ‘that I made no bones about saying so.’ The cast’s improvement under her direction was enormous. They had three excruciatingly long rehearsals. John Hopkins, the conductor, came back after a few days in Sydney ‘and…was amazed with the progress’. According to David Farquhar, ‘
Ngaio knew
what she was doing and got it out of them.’ Her feat was to transform singers into actors. The opera had been cast with the music rather than the acting in mind. Ngaio’s libretto called for versatility in both acting and singing, and this she achieved with the cast in a production that opened on time and ran from 3 to 8 December 1962.

The initial reviews were very pleasing. ‘
Words trip from
Miss Marsh’s pen as notes dance from Farquhar’s imagination,’ wrote long-time
Evening Post
music critic Owen Jensen. But the same critic, a few weeks later, had acid second thoughts. It was little more than ‘a cross between pantomime and farce,’ he wrote. ‘The story was naïve, the libretto corny…[and] David Farquhar’s most attractive music seemed a squandering of his talent.’ Ngaio shared at least some
of his reservations. In a letter to her agents, she wrote: ‘
David’s music is essentially
sophisticated, adult & rather dry in character: extremely good musically but
not
of the light catchy sort. In a sense it is much too good for the libretto.’ To some degree it was a mismatch. Ngaio had written light libretto for children, and Farquhar epic score for adults. After all her hard work Ngaio must have been disappointed, but she was remarkably resilient to criticism.

She returned home for Christmas. ‘
This past year
has been an extraordinarily busy one for me. Not a let-up anywhere,’ she wrote to Jonathan Elsom on Boxing Day, ‘& I now find myself landed with the whole production for the Royal Performance.’ A second season of the
Unicorn
at the St James’s Theatre in Auckland was planned for the New Year with a performance in front of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh on 7 February 1963. This was exciting for Ngaio, who was an avid royalist.

Once again she found the rehearsals, held daily for two weeks, gruelling. Cuts were made to the dialogue of the wyvern and the unicorn, and Ngaio wanted further improvements in the acting. The gains were equivocal, because the final result depended on the cast on the day. ‘
One never knows
when they will suddenly lose way & go flat. A strange phenomenon in singers but they don’t apply the principles of singing to the techniques of acting.’

No one could have imagined the impact a royal performance of the
Unicorn
would have. A hundred thousand people packed the procession route. Hundreds struggled in a milling crush outside the theatre. As the Queen and Duke arrived, the police, in two lines, shouted ‘Keep back! Keep back!’ The barrier broke and the crowd surged around the official cars. For a moment some of the vehicles were separated from the entourage. At the entrance, police four deep could barely resist the push. ‘
Fifty people
, most of them elderly, who fainted before the Royal couple arrived were treated inside the foyer,’ wrote the reporter for the
Daily Telegraph.
‘St John Ambulance men sponged the straining faces of the police cordon.’

Inside, in the hush of the theatre, the royal visitors were treated to a performance that was very familiar in its symbols and storyline. Act One opened in the hall of Lacey Castle in Victorian times. Two heraldic figures in the family coat of arms, a wyvern and a unicorn, led the audience in a carol. The atmosphere was festive until it became apparent that the House of Lacey had fallen on desperate times. They had lost the Lacey Luck, a jewel with magical powers, and were on the verge of selling the castle. Act Two was a trip back in time to the Lacey
family of the Tudor period. Here the lucky stone was lost when Barbara Lacey, betrothed to the horrible Lord Eustace Pinchbeck, tried to avoid her fate. Act Three returned to Victorian times and a d
é
nouement that involved finding the jewel, saving the castle and some mistletoe romance. When the performance ended, the Queen and Prince Philip were ushered onto the stage to meet the cast and present the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council charter to Prime Minister Keith Holyoake.

New Zealand’s first opera was anything but indigenous. In essence, the
Unicorn
was a Euro-centric children’s story about family history and inheritance, imbued with class-consciousness. Roger Savage described it as ‘
fiercely Colonial
…a loving homage to home eleven thousand miles away, more English than the English’. The origin of its storyline was controversial, as were the exorbitant ticket prices. For a month before the opera opened, a battle raged over costs. David Farquhar was paid £25 to compose the musical score, and the cheapest seat was £10 2s and doubles £31 12s. The papers were vitriolic, and late in January prices were adjusted. Although it was contentious, the royal performance raised £7,100 for the new Arts Council and was a watershed in New Zealand’s operatic history.

With limited resources of money, skill and experience, it was, as Peter Platt wrote in
Landfall,
‘
a hazardous venture
, a gamble which could have failed horrifyingly’ but for the ‘imagination and spirit’ of those involved. The fervour of the crowds outside the St James’s was proof of a continuing adoration for things British. The apron strings were still intact and, in 1963, the
Unicorn
was less of an odd choice than it would become. If it was not the future of New Zealand opera, it was a beginning that reflected the priorities of many in the present.

‘
I have a strong hunch
which I scarcely dare write down, that it may go quite a long way,’ Ngaio wrote to Jonathan Elsom. She was initially doubtful about the adaptation of a children’s play for opera, but became swept up in the hope that something lasting would come of it. The genteel Farquhar saw it as an opportunity to write music and experiment with audience participation. Sadly, the opera was played on radio only twice, once live at the Royal Performance, and again in 1974 as a studio production in front of a select audience. No commercial recording of the opera was ever made. Added to this disappointment was a warehouse fire, which completely destroyed props and costumes six weeks after the opera finished. The production was lavish and the loss irreplaceable.
This was bad luck that certainly had an impact on future staging.