Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (47 page)

It was during this time that two important records of Ngaio in her late years were saved: one was her interview for a
Kaleidoscope
television programme; the other was a series of interviews conducted by a young student, Bruce Harding, for his master’s thesis in English at Canterbury University.

Harding first met Ngaio in 1977, but because of her ill health it was not until April 1978 that he began recording their conversations. He had difficulty being taken seriously. ‘
I certainly ran
into quite a lot of academic snobbery and disdain for wishing to do a project…on an author who dared to dirty her hands in the commercial world of popular writing,’ he recalls. He went with his topic proposal to the Head of the English Department, Professor John Garrett, who was originally appalled at the idea. I think I actually remember him saying: “Ngaio Marsh! After I’ve taught you: Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley!” ’ In the end, Professor Garrett was persuaded to write a letter of introduction to Ngaio’s secretary, Rosemary Greene, and an appointment was made. Harding asked Ngaio many questions about her life, and particularly her writing, which she answered candidly. The one taboo subject was the Rhodes family and their relationship to the Lampreys. Always the privacy of her intimates was paramount.

He canvassed her frustration at being marginalized by the New Zealand literati because she wrote detective fiction. She was cautious not to generalize, because significant people such as John Schroder, Allen Curnow, Maurice Shadbolt, Mervyn Thompson and Bruce Mason had supported her writing over the years. But she did think there was a prevailing provincial snobbery in New Zealand that was largely absent overseas. In Britain and the United States, academics like Ronald Knox wrote detective fiction to demonstrate their flexibility and as a diversion from their usual mode of writing. The academy’s disdain of her
books was a matter of contention for Ngaio. Ironically, those who dismissed her work as Anglo-centric often had a misplaced sense of superiority born of English-based academic élitism. As Harding explains: ‘New Zealand literary academia was…I would now say, too provincial, too Neo-colonised—acting as though the concrete quadrangles of Ilam [Canterbury University] was still somehow Oxbridge’. Harding’s research anticipated a scholarly interest in New Zealand popular culture, fostered by Post-Structuralism and already blossoming overseas.

Ngaio’s friends were succumbing to old age. Sylvia had a frightening reoccurrence of cancer. ‘
She’s as brave as a lion
& makes nothing of it but I’m afraid things don’t look at all good,’ Ngaio told Doris McIntosh. Sylvia received radiation treatment in 1979, and miraculously went into remission. News of Ned Bradford’s death reached Ngaio in October 1979; and sadly, less than a year before, a friend of the McIntoshes called to tell her that Alister had died. Doris was now too frail to write, so Ngaio rang instead. ‘
I was so happy
to hear your voice sounding exactly as of old.’ But she worried that her telephone calls were tiring. ‘Unless you say “don’t” I shall go on [ringing] from time to time.’

In the midst of disruptive renovations to add a new study and lift to her house, Ngaio began thinking about another novel. The renovations would be at ‘awful expense’ and she had received a crippling tax bill of $28,000 that cleaned out her savings. She needed the money and the distraction, and what she had in mind was almost a date with destiny. ‘
It’s been in my head
for years and I’ve always shied off it realising how difficult it would be,’ she explained to Elizabeth Walter. Ngaio planned to set
Light Thickens
at her fictional Unicorn Theatre in London, with the now mid-career director Peregrine Jay and his sidekick, set designer Jeremy Jones. The murder would occur during a production of
Macbeth.
It would bring together the worlds she loved, literature and the theatre, and draw on the idea that staging
Macbeth
was bad luck.

With this in mind, she tackled her ultimate challenge.

P
eregrine stood with his back to the curtain, facing the company with whom he was about to take a journey. Always it felt like this.’ This is his opportunity to direct a perfect
Macbeth.
It needs to be compact and drive quickly through to the end. It must be remorseless, like Macbeth’s own slide into evil. He has cut out ‘spurious’ parts of the play to reveal its structure and economy. He has chosen his cast carefully and without bias. Some of them he does not like, but they are actors not friends. His Lady Macbeth oozes the sexual allure that might steel a man to murder, and his thane seems infinitely capable of it. Jeremy’s set is perfect. ‘It’s so
right!
It’s so bloody
right,’
Peregrine exclaimed when he saw the sketches.

The witches are right, too: two women and a Maori man called Rangi, who understands the mysticism of the tribe and brings the power of his ancestors to the stage. Peregrine is not superstitious, but Rangi has presence. What Peregrine wants is authenticity: to capture the essential forms and linguistic magic of the Bard. His costuming is accurate, down to the detail of the black sheepskin tunics. His fight scene, in which Macbeth is decapitated off stage, has been choreographed by an expert swordsman, Gaston Sears, who carries a real
claidheamh-mòr
on stage.

The rehearsals are exacting. Peregrine expects the best from his players, but is clear about what he wants. He talks the characters through with the actors who play them. It is as if he momentarily merges with the characters himself, and his insights are profound. He is good; they are good. He feels it, that moment in rehearsal when ‘the play flashes up into a life of its own and attains a reality so vivid that everything else fades’. The life of a brilliant production is there, and all would be perfect—if it were not for the sequence of hoaxes that blister concentration and send his superstitious actors into a frenzy of crucifix kissing. There is the fake decapitated head mysteriously suspended in the king’s room, then planted under a dish on the banquet table; there is the real rat’s head in Rangi’s witch’s shopping bag; and the anonymous note that reveals nine-year-old William, who plays the son of Macduff, as the real son of a serial killer.

The play is to start on 23 April, Shakespeare’s birthday, and royalty will be there on opening night. Peregrine can only pray that the prankster will take a night off, and miraculously this happens. ‘AT LAST! A FLAWLESS MACBETH’ sing the praises of the press: ‘the best Macbeth since Olivier’s and the best Lady Macbeth in living memory’. When he receives his review copy, William the child prodigy shouts, ‘Mum! What’s an Infant Phenomenon? Because I’ve avoided being one.’

How long can perfection survive the bad luck of
Macbeth?
The company plays for a month to full houses. The tension builds, foreboding and ominous, until the murder of Macbeth in
Light Thickens
seems as inevitable as Duncan’s. For one last time, a murder will happen while Alleyn sits in the audience. At the end of the final duel between Macbeth and Macduff, there is a cry off stage, more action, then Gaston Sears appears with Macbeth’s head held aloft on the end of his
claidheamh-mòr.
It is supposed to be a fake, but this time it drips real blood. ‘The ambulance men came in and put the body into a plastic bag and the bag on a stretcher.’ It is an ignominious exit for Sir Dougal Macdougal, playing the thane.

It was the most difficult book Ngaio had ever written. ‘The play closes in on him. And on us,’ Peregrine tells the cast. ‘Everything thickens.’ The same thing was happening for Ngaio. As she told John Balfour, ‘
It was extremely difficult
& has the form of a fugue, really, with sophistications woven through the growth of the play…It was hell to write.’ She thought, in the end, that if it appealed to anyone it would be to theatre lovers and academics rather than to her stalwart detective fiction readers.

Before she completed the manuscript, she heard the sad news that Denys Rhodes had died. Now there were only two left ‘out of that most lovable family’, Maureen and Teddy. Her own health was a delicate balance of cautious living and complex medication. She could not be alone at night, and, after a succession of live-in housekeepers, she had found Mrs Berens, a ‘
magnificent Dutchie,
terribly expensive but a godsend’. Then Sylvia broke her ankle on a treacherous visit through the hedge. ‘
She skidded down hill
on her bottom into my garden where she remained for some time wailing to us,’ Ngaio explained to Maureen Balfour. As soon as she was out of hospital, on crutches and mobile, Sylvia moved in with Ngaio and they were both cared for by the devoted Mrs Berens. It was like old times. They laughed together and entertained each other with their private jokes. Sylvia spent the winter with Ngaio, then moved back to her house behind the hedge.

The Christmas tree party was at Roses and Mike Greene’s that year. Just a small one, with Helen Holmes and her second husband Hamish, Marjorie Chambers and Anita Muling, Jean Esquilant (a friend of Ngaio’s and the Rhodeses), Olivia Spencer Bower, and Sylvia. ‘
Ngaio was in great form
& looking marvellous in her Chinese coat.’

She battled on with
Light Thickens
until it was finished and in the post on 7 January 1982. She dedicated the book to James Laurenson, the thane, and Helen Thomas (Holmes), his lady, in ‘the University Players’ third production of
Macbeth’.
The manuscript was sent with the most diffident note that had ever accompanied one of her scripts. She was not sure she had pulled it off. ‘
I don’t know what
you will think of the result,’ she wrote to Elizabeth Walter. ‘If you feel it really is unsatisfactory may be we just scrap it?’ For the first time, Dorothy Olding considered turning it down, but in the end decided she could not. ‘
I’ve had a cable
from my U.S. agent: “Little Brown very pleased with
Light Thickens
same terms as last…congratulations & much love”.’

Ngaio was delighted, but still hovered for a response from Collins. It was a relief, though, to know that publication would go ahead in the States. The renovations had cost her ‘$40,195’. She needed to pay the bill, but did not ‘begrudge a penny’. Marton Cottage now had the perfect study lined with books, and a lift, which meant she could stay in the house. She began organizing her diary for the year. John
Dacres-Mannings
was planning a visit at Easter—and Jonathan Elsom, too. ‘
Well, my sweetie-pie
, I
do
hope you will be walking in, come April, & will like to stay here,’ she wrote. The aerogramme was sealed
and sent by a friend. It was probably the last letter she wrote.

On 18 February, ‘
Helen Holmes rang up
to say Ngaio had died, which was a terrible shock,’ recalls Gerald Lascelles. She had lunch, then vomited. Mrs Berens and Helen Holmes called the doctor, who could see that the end was near and decided not to admit her to hospital; he called ambulance men to help carry her to her room. She died peacefully in her own bed two hours later. Lascelles arrived soon afterwards and rang the undertaker: ‘I thought, God, after a life of distinction, to end up in a black plastic bag’, but this was the only way of carrying her out of the house and safely down the precipitous steps.

‘
The days leading up
to the funeral were very demanding…particularly for Helen who did a magnificent stage managing job,’ wrote Jean Esquilant to Jonathan Elsom. It was a sad, but strangely wonderful, experience of friends together remembering old times: Helen, Jean Esquilant, Roses Greene, Gerald Lascelles, Simon Acland, ‘who was to take the funeral service, and Sylvia. ‘
There is going to be
a very big gap for many of us,’ Roses Greene wrote to Elsom. ‘I realise it very physically everyday I sit at the desk with the empty armchair opposite.’ The funeral was delayed until 26 February so that John Dacres-Mannings and his son could travel from Sydney. Jonathan Elsom was in England, and work commitments meant that he was unable to attend.

Christchurch Cathedral was packed, and Simon Acland began a eulogy that would have warmed even the blustering, dyspeptic heart of proud atheist Henry Marsh. He talked of the paradox of Ngaio Marsh, of a private, shy woman with a ‘
chaste reticence
’ who had become a public figure and touched so many lives. He talked of her contribution on the world stage and to literature, and to theatre in New Zealand, to which she had given vast amounts of time and money. The detective fiction she wrote allowed her to do this. Her gift was unstinting. ‘Publicly, in her own right, Ngaio Marsh was a great person. Privately I believe she was an even greater one.’ She was overwhelming in both generosity and loyalty to friends. Acland also spoke of the mystery of Ngaio’s age. It was only when she died that it was discovered she was four years older than most people cconsidered her to be. But this was not Ngaio’s only secret. There were others she would almost certainly take to her grave.

She spent her life writing cosy whodunits, but there is no criminal in the frame or detective to tidy up the ends in her story. Her private life remained private. Who she was physically intimate with and how she constructed and expressed those relationships will remain a mystery. The consummate crime
writer is the best person in the world to destroy incriminating evidence, to litter their life with red herrings and escape detection. Ngaio wrote according to the rules of Detection Club fiction, but she lived a richly complex life that is open to diverse interpretations or readings, and embraced flux, cultural diversity, sexual ambiguity and multiple truths.

Only one person had an overview of Ngaio, and that was Sylvia Fox. She knew and loved Ngaio as no one else did. The people of Ngaio’s own generation in her intimate circle were women: Nelly Rhodes, Doris McIntosh, Anita Muling, Marjorie Chambers, Olivia Spencer Bower—and Sylvia. Her private world was female, and many of the men she felt particularly drawn to were homosexual. But although Ngaio was constant in her affections and friendships, she was never exclusive. She moved between hemispheres, cultural mores, passionate relationships, artistic, literary and theatrical circles, giving something of herself to everyone, but never enough for anybody to put her in a cosy and close the book.

A typed copy of
Light Thickens
arrived at Collins on the day she died, so Elizabeth Walter never had time to respond. Perhaps that was a good thing, because as it stood the manuscript was unpublishable. Embedded in the text was an essay on the direction of
Macbeth,
which needed to be cut so that it was less intrusive. Walter worked hard to reshape it and offered her revisions to Little, Brown. ‘
I’m just delighted
to be able to take advantage of your fine work,’ the senior editor, William Phillips, responded. ‘Lord knows, the book can use it. I think we all agree this is one of Ngaio’s least efforts, but ironically it may be the most commercially successful.’ He urged Walter to send the changes immediately because there was ‘already a major book club interest’. Ironically, he was right.

Light Thickens
came out in England in September 1982, to excellent reviews and record sales. ‘
I am delighted about this
and feel the hard work on the book was well justified,’ Walter wrote to Pat Cork at Hughes Massie, ‘although I would have done it anyway for Ngaio Marsh.’

Light Thickens
was Ngaio’s final curtain.