Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (4 page)

She was enchanted by the city’s strangeness. ‘The first excitement we [Ngaio and a fellow passenger] encountered was a row of Zulu rickshaw men with their amazing head-dresses of quills, feathers, and horns, their fur tippets and painted legs.’ The rickshaw ride to the hotel through sunny streets that thronged with ‘Hindoos, Kaffirs, Zulus…white people…[and] beautiful Indian women
in ample robes of vivid blue and scarlet and cerise’ was as colourful as it was exhilarating. On a hill, the driver drew himself onto the shafts of the rickshaw and ‘we free-wheeled at an alarming speed while he rang his cow bell at the crossings’. They recovered from their ordeal by drinking coffee on the loggia of the hotel ‘and looking on at the pageant of the streets’. Ngaio saw Sybil Thorndike, her husband Lewis Casson, and their small daughter in a revival of
The Liars
by Henry Arthur Jones, and in a packed Indian market she bought the food she had promised herself. For sixpence she filled a colossal basket with pineapples, oranges, pawpaws, succulent tangerines and gigantic grapefruit. Ngaio ached to paint the scene, with its bustle of humanity and kaleidoscope of costumes, produce, deeply shaded little shops and brilliant lengths of silk, but she had time only to take a photograph and make a quick sketch on the back of an envelope. She wrote about the market in her ‘Pilgrim’ article before she painted it. Increasingly she was capturing the world around her in words rather than paint, but she pictured it vividly with an artist’s eye.

Durban’s racism troubled her. She had qualms about taking a rickshaw ride, and described with contempt the treatment of a black man who ‘ran in front of three sullen-looking Dutch youths, who turned on him savagely’. She concluded: ‘
I remember Mr J H Curle’s contention
that it is the under-bred white who, at bedrock, is responsible for the “colour question”’, and this is what she believed. Ngaio was sensitive about race and culture. As a Pakeha in New Zealand, she had seen the plight of Maori in the face of colonization, and she felt for their loss of culture, language and land. She saw pathos in the position of the ‘
aboriginals who have seen
the coming of the English and the changing of their ways’. Ngaio was born a Victorian, her liberalism was flawed and limited, and her thinking sometimes straitjacketed by convention and class, but she despised racial prejudice. The final picture she painted of Durban was one that disturbed her. It was the fading image of ‘
a grinning kaffir boy
’ dancing on the wharf. He had made friends with children on the boat. ‘“He’s a nice nigger boy,” said a little girl. “He does what I tell him, ‘Dance boy’.” He danced and waved his arms obediently…till we slid away and the children lost interest in him.’

From Durban, the
Balranald
sailed in heavy seas down the coast of Africa to Cape Town, where Ngaio met Uncle Freddie, one of Henry Marsh’s six brothers. Their father, a tea broker in the days of clipper ships, had died suddenly leaving his widow in a small Georgian house near Epping with a family of 10 children to bring up. The sons, desperate for financial independence and opportunity left,
England for Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, adventurers out to make their fortunes. ‘
There seems to have been no thought
of university or profession for any of them,’ Ngaio later wrote. ‘The Colonies, it was felt, were the thing.’

Henry learned Chinese at London University for a position in the Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank, but this plan was cut short by a bout of pleurisy and an invigorating year on the veldt of South Africa. A solution to his employment problem came from his father’s eldest brother, who was Governor of Hong Kong. While this uncle was staying in New Zealand, he secured the offer of a good position for his nephew with the Colonial Bank. When Henry arrived, however, the unthinkable happened: the bank crashed and he was forced to take a humble clerk’s job with the Bank of New Zealand. He remained in the same position for the rest of his life. Ngaio’s Uncle Freddie, now permanent secretary to the Governor-General’s Fund in Cape Town, was luckier. He and his family proudly escorted Ngaio around the sights of the city, which included the museum, the ancient colonial house of Koopmans-de Wet, the ‘
old Curfew bell
that…call [ed] the slaves in from their work’, and the ‘ill-tailored statue’ of former prime minister and colonizing magnate, Cecil Rhodes.

A sultry yellow sun beat unrelentingly down as they steamed along the Gold Coast. ‘When the land breeze gets up it fans us with the accumulated heat of all Africa,’ Ngaio wrote, ‘but tomorrow we turn away towards Las Palmas, and sail out of the tropics.’

When she finally reached the silver-grey misty seas of England she could hardly believe it. ‘
Just before dawn
the cabin steward made an isolated gesture. For the first time on the voyage he brought me a cup of tea. He said…the water had been filtered…I thanked him warmly and had drunk half the tea when I found the rest of the cup was full of a thick, viscid, grey silt.’

It was with a huge sense of relief and excitement that she met the Rhodes family on the wharf. They drove her through streets that were noisy monuments to history after the colonial outposts and cicada-serenaded towns she knew. She was infatuated. Her first excursions from Alderbourne Manor into London were dream-like. ‘
There is the same fascination here
,’ she wrote, ‘as there was in the brilliance and heat of the Indian market in Durban.’ One of the early stage shows she saw was Agatha Christie’s
Alibi,
which was a ‘detective drama, remarkable for the really brilliant acting of Mr Charles Laughton as M. Poirot’. She emerged afterwards onto warm summer-evening streets to see ‘men in their evening dress, not wearing over coats or hats…[looking] exotic and important’
and women with cloaks tied around their necks who seemed ‘to move as though they are walking across a stage’.

London was a wonderland above and below ground. She was thrilled by the thronging Strand, and by Trafalgar Square, where humming multitudes of people pushed past iconic stone buildings and vast public sculptures. She delighted in Piccadilly Circus, where scarlet buses and black taxis hurtled. ‘
This, Londoners say
, is the hub of the world, and it is here that I love to stand, my feet on London stones, in the very heart of that amazing labyrinth.’ She relished the experience of diving down moving stairways, travelling through ‘strangely scented warm tunnels’ and coming out on subterranean platforms, to take the tube. ‘
As we gathered way
, all these figures moved very slightly and spasmodically, for all the world like…masked jiggling puppets…As one does in the tubes, I sat idly speculating about my fellow travellers for three miles under the earth.’ Mesmerized by people and places, she was looking at the city with the eyes of an outsider and it set her imagination on fire.

Ngaio was with the Rhodeses only a matter of months before the ‘bandwagon’ carried her off to Monte Carlo. She watched in astonishment as the family planned to spend a windfall given to them by Nelly’s mother. Money worries hung over Alderbourne Manor, but Monte Carlo was chosen as an escape and a place where they could recover financially by making a fortune at the gaming tables. ‘
A domestic roulette
was put into instant use.’ They would take turns at spinning the wheel and record the patterns of numbers in order to devise a sensible and scientific system. Ngaio was sceptical. So, she suspected, were they. But they were having fun, and the fun was intoxicating. There were Nelly Rhodes, Ngaio, and Betty Cotterill, a student friend of Ngaio’s who also stayed for a while with the Rhodes family. The Channel was ‘
grey and nasty
and was covered with white horses’ when they left Dover, but the boat was intriguing. She could observe again: ‘Wondering about the nationality, private lives, and destinations of the people who are pouring up the wind-raked gangway on to the alarmingly small vessel that is to herd you all together.’ Ngaio enjoyed the drama of arriving in Calais, which was like ‘stepping on to the stage of an impromptu musical comedy’.

But it was the train beside the wharf that arrested her attention. It was ‘the famous Blue Train,’ she explained, ‘cherished by all weavers of detective fiction on the Continental scale’. Already she was thinking of murder on an overnight express. The Blue Train carried them south from austere Paris past fields of vines
and ‘pointed ranks’ of black cypress trees, through hills and heat-baked yellow houses to the Riviera. ‘Monte Carlo is beautiful in a lavish carefree sort of way that rather took me aback,’ she recorded. From the balcony of their adjoining rooms they looked down on a ‘cheerful little street’. Subdued sounds of horses’ hooves, church bells, motor horns ‘and the endless lisp of quiet voices’ drifted up in a muted haze of warmth and colour. The casino, by contrast, was a cacophony of Baroque flamboyance. Nude men supported shields; cornucopias spilled forth; voluptuous ‘larger-than-life ladies’ languished in pastoral landscapes. The colours were a muted confection of chocolate, ochre,
‘baby blues and pinks that have gone off’
, and everything that could be gilded was. The extravagance of the roof and walls was an entrée to the hushed drama of the floor. ‘
Roulette in extremis
is a disease,’ announced Ngaio, after describing the many English
habitués
who came daily, their faces distorted by alcohol and drugs. She savoured the detail of hawk-like men and women who sat expressionless, watching their fortunes dance up and down on the back of an ivory ball.

‘
I usually start with a group of people
,’ Ngaio told a radio interviewer, explaining how she began a book. ‘I get interested in a group of people…and think about them, their relationships…quite often, just start writing about them…Which of these people is capable of a crime of violence?…Under what circumstances would they be likely to commit it?’

At Monte Carlo, Ngaio was already looking for potential suspects.

She is over middle-age
and…enormous. Her face, heavily enamelled, dangles in pockets from the bones of her skull. At three in the afternoon, when I first saw her, she was dressed in jonquil-coloured satin trimmed with marabou, and on her head was a golden cap covered in sparkling diamanté and garnished with an osprey about two feet high. In her claws she carried stacks of mills plaques worth more than £8-each, and in a few minutes she had trebled them…she gathered up her golden robes and swept over to the baccarrat
[sic]
table where she very quickly lost it all.

Ngaio’s party nicknamed this ‘enormous’ woman’s male counterpart ‘Dolly’, because he had minute hands and feet, a white moustache that looked as though it was stuck on with glue, and was ‘rigidly tailored and tight-waisted to such a degree that he could only move in little mechanical jerks’.

There was also a third sex at the tables that was more memorable than
Ngaio was prepared to admit to ‘Pilgrim’ readers in 1928. It was not until she recalled the event in her autobiography
Black Beech and Honey dew
in 1966 that she mentioned a kind of woman that was ‘
entirely new to me
. The croupiers referred to the most dominant of them as “cette monsieur-dame”. She seemed to have quite a pleasant time of it, running her finger round inside her collar and settling her tie. She wore a sort of habit and was perhaps by [Christopher] Isherwood out of [Aldous] Huxley.’

The three women found the experience exhilarating. ‘
We chose a table
and hit Monte Carlo with our system.’ On the first evening they won so much that their purses bulged, but after a week they had lost nearly all their gains. A new tactic was devised. ‘
We separated
and we spent ages waiting for long runs on the even chances.’ They delighted in being together and free from restraints. In
Christchurch
, jealous rumours of an affair between Ngaio and Tahu Rhodes were whispered over teacups and behind theatre programmes, but it was the intimacy between Ngaio and Nelly Rhodes that was the glue.

Ngaio was captivated by her friend’s languid, aristocratic ease. Nelly was sure of her place, and had a liberty of spirit that came from privilege. Luxury was assumed, and delicacies ordered and served before balance books were totted. She was vague about practicalities and self-indulgent, but generous to a fault with others whether family coffers were full or empty. Ngaio’s childhood of genteel poverty was vastly different, and her social position more ambiguous. She could play the aristocrat, but she was not born one. For her the upper classes were a fiction, and travelling with Nelly to Monte Carlo was as full of wonder as waking up in Evelyn Waugh’s
Decline and Fall
or
Vile Bodies.
What Ngaio brought to their relationship was her effervescent wit, her theatricality and the sheer energy of her excitement at being away. ‘
[They] called us
the “Ladies who Laugh”,’ she wrote, ‘presumably because we were unable to manage the correct expressionless stare at the tables, and on the occasion when we disastrously lost all our plaques laughed helplessly until we cried.’

Nelly Rhodes and Betty Cotterill lost, then recovered to gain a little at the end. Ngaio was more fortunate. ‘
I suddenly found
I’d won on 15
en plein
and made enough to buy a coat and skirt.’ In reality, the outfit she bought with her winnings was reminiscent of the
‘cette monsieur-dame’
ensemble she later described in
Black Beech.
Whether Ngaio purchased this outfit to play fashionable-butch to Nelly’s
languid-femme
is impossible to know, because she destroyed any intimate record of their relationship. In her 20s Ngaio began
burning correspondence that would elucidate any deeply felt emotional or physical nuance in her relationships. However, a photograph survives of Ngaio in her
‘cette monsieur-dame’
dress, suggesting not just modish chic but a theatrical delight in camping it up and testing the boundaries of cross-dressing.

They arrived back as white frosts were beginning to settle on the lawns at Alderbourne Manor. It was cold reality after the excitement of the Riviera, and the New Year of 1929 ushered in a bleak winter. ‘
We are in the middle
of the greatest frost England has known since eighteen something,’ Ngaio told readers. ‘The woods, the fields, the streams are all frozen and silent, and this morning I found a robin – silent too, and stiff in the grass where he had fallen out of the dead-cold sky.’ In London there were warnings in the press against skating on the Thames, which ‘hundreds of these hardy English’ did anyway, and in a quadrangle at Cambridge people flocked to see a frozen fountain. Ngaio ignored the biting cold and relished the sights: Westminster Abbey with its unearthly collection of sightless statues, and the Tower of London emerging from a ‘
thin morning mist
’ so that ‘a turret shone out quite warm and clear while the underlying structure slipped away into a blue haze’. She drove through Windsor Park at sunset and watched the long, late ‘rays of light touch trees and turf with the colours of heraldry’.