After the book was finished, Ngaio decided to produce it as a play, Exit Sir Derek, with a group of local amateur actors. Once again, she called upon the expertise of Henry Jellett. He was a perfectionist, insisting on endless rehearsals. A stickler for detail, he made a ‘startlingly realistic false abdomen with an incision and retractors’. He stationed a fully trained theatre sister in the wings to prepare the patient. He gave strict instructions to the cast that if a glove was dropped it must not be retrieved. The opening night audience was peppered with doctors, who came to see their colleague’s collaboration. The last Act was set in the operating theatre. To make it realistic, Jellett released ether into the audience. The medical malpractice began when the assistant surgeon dropped a glove, and picked it up off the floor. (The audience laughed, especially the doctors.) Meanwhile, beneath the felt abdomen the actor writhed in muffled gasps of pain. In the wings, the overexcited sister had clipped his flesh rather than the felt with the retractors. The nauseating smell of ether plus the graphic unveiling of the felt incision was too much for the circle. An ‘actress from an English touring company screamed and fainted’ and, with difficulty, was carried out of the auditorium. In spite of initial hitches, the play opened to packed houses, and Ngaio considered sending the script to her agent, but decided it was too similar to another American stage play.
The rhythms of life at Marton Cottage were predictable and sedate, yet Ngaio’s books were far from tranquil. In Death in Ecstasy, published in 1936, she faced her phobia: poison. ‘The House of the Sacred Flame, its officials, and its congregation are all imaginative and exist only in Knocklatchers Row,’ Ngaio wrote in her foreword. This was a touch of irony, because in Christchurch the story was instantly recognizable.
Forty years before, the fictional House of the Sacred Flame’s flesh-and-blood forebears had existed in the town’s Latimer Square. American Arthur Bently Worthington had taken the globe, spun it around and chosen the most far-flung outpost to escape to. He was one of life’s real villains, a polygamist (with nine wives), a thief, a defrauder, a fake. Worthington, notorious in the United States for marrying wealthy women and taking their money, arrived in Christchurch in January 1890, with his ‘soul mate’, the already-married Mary Plunkett, international journal editor for the Christian Scientist sect, and her two children.
Worthington and Plunkett, renamed Sister Magdala, began a sect called the Students of Truth, based on a junket of beliefs that included pantheism and free love. By August 1892, with vast amounts pledged by the people of Christchurch, the sect built ‘the imposing Temple of Truth, and next to it a “magnificent 12-room residence” for the Worthington family’. Worthington’s mistake was to cross Sister Magdala, whom he banished with a splinter group to Australia when finances got low. She, and a collection of concerned Christchurch clergy, exposed Worthington in the press. The tide turned in September 1897, and at a series of revival lectures at the Oddfellows’ Hall 6,000 angry people gathered in Lichfield Street to protest against Worthington; the crowd had to be forcibly dispersed. Ngaio’s father, an arch sceptic and evangelizing atheist, chuckled over the episode until he nearly collapsed. His daughter was two years old when Worthington met his Armageddon, and Henry Marsh delighted in retelling the story as she grew up.
The version Ngaio tells in Death in Ecstasy is slightly different. Outside is blackness. The wind blows and rain beats against the temple roof as Sister Cara Quayne reaches a state of dishevelled ecstasy.
Her arms twitched and she mouthed and gibbered like an idiot, turning her head from side to side…She raised the cup to her lips. Her head tipped back and back until the last drop must have been drained. Suddenly she gasped violently. She slew half round as if to question the priest. Her hands shot outwards as though she offered him the cup. Then they parted inconsequently. The cup flashed as it dropped to the floor. Her face twisted into an appalling grimace. Her body twitched violently. She pitched forward like an enormous doll, jerked twice and then was still.
Ngaio’s equivalent of ‘Sister Magdala’ was dead.
‘To this day, on the rare occasions that I use poison in a detective story, I am visited by a ludicrous aftertaste of my childish horrors.’ Ngaio must have spent some time exorcizing the after-image of Cara Quayne, ‘eyes wide open and protuberant…At the corners of the mouth were traces of a rimy spume. The mouth itself was set, with the teeth clenched and the lips drawn back, in a rigid circle.’ This was a death mask of rigor mortis brought on by the ingestion of cyanide of potassium.
Ngaio researched every aspect of her novels, especially the deaths. She knew police procedure and kept a diagram on her wall of the hierarchy of command at New Scotland Yard. Her shelves at home began to fill with books on poisons, medical jurisprudence, and forensic medicine. She consulted her medical friends and the reference section of the local library. Ngaio never wrote anything unless she investigated it before Alleyn. The vividness of Cara Quayne’s ugly end, and its power as an image ‘to linger in the memory’, came from its authenticity, and from the fact that, as crime writer and critic P.D. James has said, ‘Death is never glamorised nor trivialised in Ngaio Marsh.’ In Death in Ecstasy, Ngaio harnesses the power of death to shock more fully than in her previous novels, and this she would refine further. Her fear of poison unlocked her imagination to explore the experience with a horror that was more than just intellectual.
Heroin was another substance she researched for her novel, because worshippers at the House of the Sacred Flame are hooked on more than just religion. Their highs come from heroin-laced cigarettes and a chalice of Le Comte’s Invalid Port spiked with pure alcohol. The sect, inspired by the teachings of Father Jasper Garnette, Ngaio’s Worthington figure, is broadly pantheistic, with Scandinavian deities Wotan and Thor mixed with a hint of free love between Garnette and his ‘Chosen Vessel’, Cara Quayne. ‘Garnette seems actually to have persuaded her that the—the union—was blessed, had a spiritual significance,’ announces Alleyn in disgust. Cara, a young, gullible neophyte, has made a £5,000 donation to the temple building fund. She is hypnotized by Garnette’s religious prognostications and hooked on heroin, which, along with cocaine, was a favoured drug of 1930s detective fiction writers. Narcotics such as these were known as the abuse of the upper classes. It became fashionable to write about drugs and drug trafficking, along with blackmail, jewel robbery, embezzlement, trophy-wife snatching and will jumping. ‘Pin-point pupils’ were synonymous with high-society doping. Well-connected Arthur Surbonadier is shot at the Unicorn Theatre because of his drug connections. Wealthy Cara Quayne dies in an ecstasy of unwitting addiction. Drugs would become a regular theme in Ngaio’s novels.
Death in Ecstasy makes teasing reference to Ngaio’s colleagues in crime. She is playing with the reader and with other writers of detective fiction. It is halfway through the story and Alleyn and Nigel Bathgate are ‘taking stock’:
‘Look here,’ said Nigel suddenly, ‘let’s pretend it’s a detective novel. Where would we be by this time? About half-way through, I should think. Well who’s your pick [for the murderer]?’
‘I am invariably gulled by detective novels [Alleyn replied]…You see in real detection herrings are so often out of season.’
‘Well, never mind, who’s your pick?’
‘It depends on the author. If it’s Agatha Christie, Miss Wade’s occulted guilt drips from every page. Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter would plump for Pringle, I fancy. [Freeman Wills Croft’s] Inspector French would go for Ogden.’
This is a delicious irony, a playful piece of unconscious self-consciousness that underscores the real nature of Alleyn’s and Bathgate’s existence compared with their fictional colleagues. Ngaio’s humour, her increased confidence as a writer, and her respect for practitioners like Christie, Sayers, and Freeman Wills Croft inspired this very public private joke. She also paid her respects to Arthur Conan Doyle. ‘I receive facts…as a spider does flies,’ announces Alleyn in Holmesian style, and Bathgate makes this sl
ightly nauseating comment: ‘I am your Watson, and your worm. You may both sit and trample on me. I shall continue to offer you the fruits of my inexperience.’
Ngaio would return to the theme of human gullibility in the face of religious sham, but never again with quite the same echo of reality. ‘Damn, sickly, pseudo, bogus, mumbo-jumbo,’ says Alleyn with great violence about Father Garnette, and those were Ngaio’s thoughts. As an adult she was sceptical about all religion. She grieved for the loss of her adolescent fervour, wanted to believe in Christianity, but the leap of faith became a chasm.
Ngaio was the only agnostic Queen of Crime. Agatha Christie slept all her life with a crucifix by her bed; Dorothy Sayers was a theologian and a devout, if not always practising, Christian; and Margery Allingham became an avid follower of Christianity in her later years. Ronald Knox was the Roman Catholic chaplain at Oxford University when he formulated the precepts of Golden Age detective fiction in his ‘Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes’, published in 1928. His precepts were steeped in Christian ideology. For the Queens of Crime, writing about murder was not a betrayal of Faith but an affirmation, the Christian theme of sin and expiation played over and over again. The murder victim was the sacrificial lamb, given up so that the agent of sin, the murderer, could be found out and exorcized. The detective was the high priest, the detective story a modern apocrypha. Ngaio may have lost faith in the Christian message, but she never tired of retelling its story.
In the evenings, when she began a new book, Ngaio wandered from room to room. In perpetual motion she formed the ideas, and it was often daybreak before they flowed freely. She slept, then waited again until nightfall to begin bringing her characters alive. Her nocturnal habits meant she rose late, but the rest of the day was free for the theatre and to paint. Exit Sir Derek reconnected her with repertory, which was lively in the city, Stepping onto the stage took her back to her beginnings. As a child she had written a play in rhyming couplets for a cast of six, called Cinderella, and at St Margaret’s Bundles and The Moon Princess. It was the arrival of the Allan Wilkie Shakespeare Company in 1915 that rekindled her interest in writing for the theatre. She was transfixed, as if she was watching the progress of a miraculous comet across the sky. ‘The opening night of Hamlet was the most enchanted I was ever to spend in the theatre.’ English actor-manager Wilkie, his striking actress wife Frediswyde Hunter-Watts, and their travelling company played to audiences in the Far East, North America and Australasia. They were the remnant of a bygone era, but to a centre starved of professional theatre they seemed rare and illustrious. People queued for tickets, Ngaio and her student friends cut evening art classes, and for two weeks Shakespeare took Christchurch by storm.
Ghosts, gravediggers and Danes walked the ramparts of Ngaio’s quiet nights. She went to Hamlet a number of times. The season ended too quickly, and as abruptly as it had arrived the company was gone. The experience had been ephemeral, like a shadow she wanted to pin down, so between the company’s first and third visits to Christchurch she wrote a romantic regency drama called The Medallion. She hoped Allan Wilkie would cast a professional eye over it. Her mother encouraged her. Towards the end of 1919, they braved the ordeal of handing the script in at the theatre with a note, then seeing Allan Wilkie in person at the Clarendon Hotel. As always, Ngaio was tentative about her writing. The play was mannered and rhetorical, but her raw enthusiasm captured Wilkie’s attention.
After art classes had finished one afternoon, Ngaio returned to her shared studio with her paint-box slung over her shoulder. She climbed the stairs, walked in, and there they were—Allan Wilkie and his wife. ‘”I obtained the address,” Mr. Wilkie said in his resonant actor’s voice, “from your father. I have a suggestion to make…How…would you like to be an actress?”’ He thought that if she was going to write for the theatre she needed experience on the stage. She was speechless, stunned. It was as if Wilkie had opened a door through which she glimpsed her future. She had two hours to make up her mind. The Wilkies were leaving town almost immediately, but would employ her when they returned, if her parents agreed.
Ngaio’s ‘yes’ was immediate, and her father’s followed; Rose Marsh was harder to please. But Peter Tokareff’s suicide was still fresh in her mind, and now there was a new threat. Her daughter had another besotted suitor, this time a middle-aged Englishman. Once again, Ngaio was flattered, but out of her depth.
‘Your father,’ [Rose] said, ‘will speak to him.’
And so he did and to some effect. ‘I felt damn’ sorry for the fellow…He made such a thing of it…He’ll get over it, no doubt.’
But the Englishman began stalking Ngaio. ‘One night, when I was alone in the studio, he came up the stairs and stood…in utter silence on the landing while I sat petrified and sick, on the other side of the door.’
Fear forced Rose to agree to Ngaio’s touring with the Wilkies, plus the fact that she was greatly impressed with Allan Wilkie, who was a consummate charmer. Henry was amused: ‘So you’re off…with the raggle-taggle-gypsies, O.’ Ngaio was ecstatic. Rose felt she had been painted into a corner. While she waited for the company to return to Christchurch, Ngaio took a relieving position as lady editor at the Sun newspaper. She wrote about clothes, society hostesses and ‘concocted paragraphs to fill in the gaps’. Her anticipation mounted.
Ngaio was 25 years old and had never been out of the South Island. She would be living away from her parents and enjoying the pleasures of travel and adult life for the first time. ‘On a warm autumn morning I reported at the Theatre Royal, walked under the ringing iron stairs I had so often climbed and went in at the Stage Door. The world of glue-size, canvas, dust and shadows engulfed me.’ They played a season in Christchurch. The parts for Ngaio were limited. She had a deep contralto voice, which seemed odd in a woman, and was taller than the average leading man. As Wilkie remarked, ‘Only I…am at liberty to take six foot strides on this stage.’ To ensure she took demure steps, Ngaio hobbled her legs together above the knees with a stocking. The kindly Wilkie found her work in spite of this. She played a dubious ‘Franco-Teutonic’ maid in a spy thriller called The Luck of the Navy, where the main character was tied to a chair (like Nigel in A Man Lay Dead); an ex-WAAF, now housemaid, in A Temporary Gentleman; a vicious craggy crone in the farce The Rotters; and, in Hindle Wakes, yet another maid.
Rehearsals were arduous and Wilkie was a hard taskmaster, but Ngaio’s energy and enthusiasm seemed endless. ‘I learnt how actors work in consort,’ she wrote, ‘like musicians, how they shape the dialogue in its phrases, build to points of climax, mark the pauses and observe the tempi.’ This was an apprenticeship she would draw on for the rest of her life. ‘Without knowing it I laid down a little cellar of experiences which would one day be served up as the table wines of detective cookery.’ The people she met in the company fascinated her. She tended to see them as types: the male heart-throb, his meltingly magnificent woman, the character actor, the juvenile, the straight man, and the comic. She relished the details that made the actors like the characters they played.
After Christchurch, there was a season in Auckland. They took the ferry from Lyttelton to Wellington, then a 14-hour train journey. Ngaio’s senses were heightened by exhilaration.
I, however, persisted in my rapture. It was the first of many such occasions and I was to grow familiar with the look of my fellow-players in transit: the ones who read, the ones who stared out of the window, the ones who slept, the cheerful, the morose and the resigned. Mr. Wilkie and Pat Scully [the stage manager], their shoulders hunched and their heads nodding with the motion of the train, played endless games of two-handed whist. Mrs Wilkie read.
Through the winter they travelled up and down New Zealand with their four modern plays. Spring brought the end of a life she had come to love. Wilkie reformed a Shakespearian company in Australia, taking key players with him, but minor roles, especially maids, were dispensable. ‘On a wet night in Wellington I said good-bye and returned alo
ne in the ferry to Christchurch. One of the first things I did was to wrap up Gramp’s book and sent it to Mr. Wilkie. In return I received a ring of which, he wrote…“It is a trifle of some reputed antiquity.”’ Ngaio, an only child, had tasted life with a carnival company of actors. Like a desert flower, the experience bloomed, then vanished. She would spend a lifetime trying to recapture its brilliance.
‘It wasn’t easy to settle down again: to return to a pattern, that, however freely designed, turned about a small house, one’s parents and a circle of quiet friends.’ Her sepia existence seemed drab by comparison. She painted with her friends and wrote for the Sun. But life was insular and restrained, until the Rosemary Rees English Comedy Company rolled into town and she was invited to tour again. Her mother was adamant that it would ‘lead to nothing…Why do you want to do it? It’s not the right kind of thing for you. I know.’ But Ngaio was determined.
The tour was fraught from the beginning. The juvenile, who had no understudy, came down with scarlet fever. He had a big part and it was a disaster. Ngaio had an out-of-body experience: ‘I heard myself saying that I thought I could play the boy, “Jimmy” ’—and she did. There were costume difficulties. She could fit Jimmy’s fumigated suits, but cramming her long hair under a wig was torture. In desperation Rosemary Rees suggested she cut it. When Ngaio wrote to her mother, asking for permission, she received a ‘snorter’ of a reply by return post. Rees followed with a pleading epistle, but Rose Marsh was intractable. ‘She was unable to discover,’ Ngaio recalls, ‘why it should be imagined the antics of a music-hall soubrette could reconcile her to the thought of her daughter masquerading in male attire in a third-rate company.’ Rose almost ordered Ngaio home, but was tempered by her own fond feelings for the stage. If she had to abide her daughter playing a boy, there would be no haircut.
Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime Page 8
