Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  Percy Chew wrote a letter about Mack to their mistress.

  Dear Madam,

  Every morning he peep up his grim face of choler. Repeatedly ask what for breakfast. Reply egg. Constantly bang on saucepan loud hard noises. Continue to groan and grouch on daily. We wonder, madam, that you care to employ this churlish fellow.

  Your Servant,

  Percy Chew

  Soon after this Mack hit Percy Chew and was dismissed. He became a hospital porter and bore, I believe, a grudge.

  The ménage, apart from the peripatetic servants, consisted of Lamprey parents, occasional friends and relations from England, the Lamprey children (five after my godson was born), a nanny – Nanny Appleby who was the quintessence of everything that has ever been written on her species – a governess, French governess, and later a tutor. There were also two cadets who were said to be learning how to farm in the New Zealand manner.

  Life with the Lampreys was enormously exciting and my weekends grew longer. Sometimes they met. There was always some project toward, usually theatrical, and often on a most elaborate scale, as when the then Duke of York, following his father’s earlier example, visited New Zealand. For this occasion we mounted a cabaret which he attended, having dined the previous evening with the Lampreys. They were involved in one of their recurrent financial crises and were down to a minimal staff. However, the English butler and cook came back for the dinner party. Little warning had been given and our preparations were hurried. Owing to the crisis the windows had not been cleaned for some time and the Lampreys argued a great deal about whether we should draw blinds and light lamps or allow the horizontal midsummer sun to reveal the imperfections. Finally, they settled for lamps but not blinds and so it came about that when the ducal entourage drove past the drawing-room windows it was afforded an uninterrupted view of myself falling in a series of serio-comic curtseys at the feet of one of the English cadets. Mr Moriaty, the village constable, had been alerted for the occasion. The appointment went a little to his head and prompted him to take an overdramatic view of duties which should have been confined to wearing his uniform, standing in the avenue and saluting at the appropriate moment. It was disconcerting to see, through the dirty unveiled windows, this large man, helmeted, sweating and doubled over his own bulk, dart from shrub to shrub in the garden. Keeping observation.

  It is typical of a Lamprey occasion that while all of the Lampreys and I were grossly unmusical, we were successful in entertaining the illustrious guest with a nursery song at the piano. I can only suppose that he too was unmusical or that we were bad enough to be funny: I know we were bad. The royal cabaret on the following night was a triumph and made a great deal of money for deserving orphanages. Indeed, it was remarkable that while the Lampreys did not seem able to earn anything for themselves they were enormously successful in raising princely sums for good causes. What with these cabarets and an amateur vaudeville group called ‘Touch and Go’ which they sponsored and I produced, it was reckoned that while they were in New Zealand they raised directly and indirectly £12,000 for charities.

  For two years the Lampreys held me as irrevocably in thrall as if they had been The Lordly Ones Who Live In The Hollow Hills. The children attached me to themselves as firmly as their elders. I have never been able to give very much emphasis to the age gap between myself and any children or adolescents with whom I become well acquainted. This lack of attitude has been accepted – indeed I think it has never been noticed – by the Lampreys. Although the eldest is almost twenty years my junior, we established a friendship that has gained in texture but is otherwise unchanged. Children are not nearly as ‘childish’ as people think: they are only inexperienced.

  As for their elders, one grew accustomed to the off-beat rhythm of their fortunes. It became increasingly obvious that the financial crises were drawing closer together and the passages of rest growing more and more illusory. Gestures were made; table napkins, to the surprise of the butler, were abandoned. In an effort to cut down the laundry bills, enormously expensive washing and ironing machines were installed. The one, being insufficiently bedded, threatened to bolt and the other savaged many a handmade shirt and pair of Savile Row polo breeches before its intricacies were mastered. All the Lampreys made intermittent efforts to economize and then compensated for these bouts of abstinence by giving each other presents at the gold cigarette-case level. ‘After all,’ they would say to each other, ‘he (or she) must have some fun.’

  As we have seen, it is characteristic of the bandwagon that it never entirely collapses. It will show every sign of being about to do so and then suddenly set off in a new direction: downhill, and at a tidy clip. I suppose it wasn’t really a great surprise when I heard that it was now to carry the Lampreys back to England.

  We had discussed such a move often enough during those long, cosy, gossips that, however horrific their content, I so greatly enjoyed. Did Sullivan Powell cigarettes go out with the Second World War? If I were to find an unopened tin in some neglected corner and if I were to light one of them, should I not return to the enchanted house that smelt of them and of roses and a sweet-scented oil that was burnt in the drawing room?

  It had always been understood that the children must be educated in England and the great obstacle was held to be the impossibility of raising funds for the move, let alone the schooling. It was perhaps a little confusing to learn that now, when financial disaster stared the Lampreys blankly in the face, their only possible means of salvation lay in the instant transference of the whole family, Nanny, a lady’s maid and a tutor, by first-class liner via Panama to England.

  So the house and farm were sold. The difference, a considerable one, between the price offered and the price required was settled by a billiards match played by the principals at a club in Christchurch and this, although they lost, greatly cheered the Lampreys. While the two men and their fellow club members were occupied with this contest, the wives and women-friends assembled elsewhere and made plans about how we would all meet in London.

  At last the day came when our voices echoed through empty rooms. Sunshine poured in at the blank windows and dappled barefaced walls and naked floorboards. Everything was gone except, very faintly, the smell of a house that had been loved by a number of people.

  IV

  When the Lampreys had gone, their friends looked blankly at each other and felt rather as children do when the plug is pulled out of a swimming pool and summer goes down the drain. We told each other that it was no good being dismal and set about our lawful occasions. We even produced a cabaret in the grand manner.

  I painted, and wrote verses, articles and short stories some of which found local publication. At that time, I had two ideas in my head: one for a full-scale novel with a New Zealand background and one for a detective story as an exercise, or so I thought, in technique. I wrote one or two short stories that I have never shown to anyone and have long forgotten. The manuscripts are lost and well lost, too. But there was one, influenced by E. M. Forster’s earlier tales and perhaps by Walter de la Mare, which I have remembered. In it a benighted traveller found himself driving interminably down an unknown road into a valley too deep to be true. He came to a halt at last and was entertained in a submerged house by a hostess whom he took to be maimed in some way, since she lay on a very wide couch overspread with rainbow silks. She dismissed him and he was shown to his room. In the night he woke and heard the sound of wings. He looked out of his window and saw that she flew in great upward sweeps between him and the stars which appeared distantly above the walls of the abysmal ravine. Perhaps it is as well that this story is lost. I might find it foolish now and that, I suddenly realize, is a sensation I would not enjoy.

  As for the novel, I wrote two chapters into which I tried to put mountains and a handful of people. In those days there was no talk, as there has been persistently in later years, of ‘the New Zealand novel’. Or if there was, I was not by way of hearing it. The mountains and people chose me rather t
han I them and I found I wanted, quite passionately, to write about them. Perhaps if I had stayed in New Zealand I would have finished this book. I am almost sure that I would.

  I did not stay. The Lampreys wrote gaily and affectionately from England saying that they were settled now and why couldn’t I come? It was a lovely house, with lots of rooms, set in the woods and hills of Buckinghamshire. ‘Do come, darling,’ they said. ‘Tell Betsy and Popsy’ (for so they insisted on calling my parents) ‘they must say yes.’

  ‘Well,’ my father said slowly, ‘you’ve always wanted to go Home, haven’t you?’

  Not only had I always wanted to go but I had always felt quite sure that sooner or later it would happen. When I was about twelve years old, a silent film called Living London came to New Zealand and we went to it several times. It ravished me. It was extremely long, jerky and rather dim and it was not at all surprising. It did not contradict anything I had imagined about London but seemed rather to confirm my dreams. I mean real dreams as well as waking ones. I had dreamt often and vividly of The Strand and Piccadilly, of Ludgate Hill and Threadneedle Street. Always it was night time and I was alone in the crowded streets, exhilarated. Perhaps these dreams were engendered by my father and Gramp when they gossiped about Old Smoky and perhaps by David Copperfield, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, all of which I read when I was very young indeed. You may say it was a foredone, romantic and unreal London that I conjured up for myself.

  I’m a compulsive spendthrift by nature but I had contrived to save some of my earnings, I had sold some paintings and I was commissioned to write a series of travel articles which, if they turned out well, would be syndicated through the New Zealand press. My father said he could manage the fare, if it was not more than £100, and also a modest allowance to supplement what I was able to earn. ‘We have always lived quietly,’ he said. ‘We can do this. It would be a pity for you not to go.’

  My mother agreed. I looked at her and saw a kind of anguish in her smile. I fell into an inward rage of compassion and love and resentment and, as so often before, hated myself for ever wanting to escape. It was terrible to know how good they were to me and how little I could do in return. This, I suppose, is the classic predicament of an only child. I have no doubt there are any number of surprising explanations and that Freud and the Greeks had a word for each of them and every one a mot juste. Is there such a thing as a daughter fixation? If so, I suppose it could be argued that my beloved mother was afflicted with it and I wasn’t, under those terms, as beastly as I sometimes thought myself. A soothing exposition but not one which I find entirely persuasive.

  There was no talk of when I should return and I was glad of that. I remember that we even speculated about a permanent family move to England but in a tentative, unreal sort of way. We seemed, almost, to be under some kind of spell.

  Time went by and I started to pack about two months before there was any need to so much as think of doing so. I had taken a passage in a one-class ship called the Balranald of the P. & O. Branch Line, sailing to London from Sydney by way of South and Western Australia and South Africa. The voyage would take about ten weeks. Mine was a single berth cabin and cost £85. Its equivalent today would be thirty times as much, I imagine. I would cross to Sydney by trans-Tasman liner: first-class since it was widely held that any other accommodation was unsuited to a young female travelling alone on that line.

  Encouraging cables and vague, pleased or funny letters came from the Lampreys. My ex-pupil, Bet, had already left by more conventional means of transport to stay with the Lampreys in England. Time seemed alternately to gallop and stand still.

  The day of departure suddenly rushed upon us. I was to leave in the evening by the now familiar inter-island ferry steamer to await the trans-Tasman ship in Wellington.

  ‘I really don’t know why she’s going,’ said my father looking at my mother’s and my own blubbered faces, ‘if it makes you both so miserable.’

  We had agreed that they should not come to the station. A friend was calling to drive me there. After dinner my father settled in his chair, opened his paper and lit his pipe. He caught my eye, nodded and made a hideous grimace which I ineffectually returned. My mother and I tried to behave unemotionally. When I saw headlamps coming up the lane, I hugged my parents and ran down the hill.

  At once, as it seems to me now, with the closing of the house door and the slam of the garden gate, I moved into a new life.

  CHAPTER 8

  Northwards

  In the antipodean autumn of 1928 the trans-Tasman steamer sailed down Wellington harbour between bush-dappled hills and through the Heads into Cook Strait. There are late afternoons in our part of the South Seas when the air is clear and the colour so lucid that it hurts. It was like that now. The South Island, although softened by the haze along the coast, was elsewhere brilliantly defined. The Seaward Kaikouras, those emphatic ranges, cobalt against a cerulean sky, floated above a Reckitt’s Blue Pacific.

  Our course was north-west. We sailed close in to the north coast of the South Island, passing D’Urville Island, Tasman Bay, Golden Bay and then Cape Farewell. As we stood out to sea and the land diminished, it collected itself into a country, something to be looked at from a distance, a discovery: New Zealand. Its colour intensified: it was now an astonishment. These were the last islands at the bottom of the world. One saw them that evening as the first canoe voyagers and Tasman and Cook saw them. They receded quickly, turned dark and presently were gone. I thought: ‘How lovely they are. I wonder when I shall see them again.’ I did not regret them.

  Having never taken a sea voyage before but having suffered many a violent passage through Cook Strait, it did not astonish me when the next day proved stormy. The passengers, muffled and queasy, assembled in deck chairs and looked but greenly upon a mountainously heaving Tasman Sea and upon cups of beef tea. The elements seemed to get much rougher very quickly which I supposed to be normal and in the manner of Joseph Conrad, but it was nevertheless a surprise when quite suddenly all our deck chairs shot into the scuppers and discarded their occupants. An elderly gentleman’s arm was broken. Beef tea was poured down bosoms. Several ladies screamed. A young man disengaged me from my chair and asked me if I would like to come and hear some of his records. We climbed, slid and ran down swinging passages and crawled up a companionway to a smoking room where the young man played ‘Hallelujah!’, a very good jazz piece, on his gramophone. Several times the needle skidded across the surface and it was difficult to hear very well because of the thunder of the seas against our beam and the almost ceaseless crash of crockery as well as the incessant, ambiguous, basic hullabaloo. I hurried away once to be sick but I was enjoying myself and returned as soon as possible to my companion. We could only converse in shouts and all I can remember about him is that he screamed out that he was an old boy of the Merchant Taylors School.

  When I went below to make some gesture towards dinner, I found a commotion of stewards in the corridor. The porthole in the cabin next to mine had been stove in. There was a general notice out that passengers were not to go on deck. One of the stewards said we were sailing in ballast and that it might have slipped a bit.

  I attended dinner with perhaps a dozen other passengers but did not remain there long. The second officer and I were the only members of his table present. I rejoined my friend and we had quite a gay time of it in the deserted bar, drinking brandy and dry ginger which he said was a good thing and clinging to the tables when our anchored chairs threatened to decant us. I found that the brandy and dry ginger was not really a success and said goodnight. People always do tell one the Tasman Sea can be rough, I thought hardily, as I wedged myself down in my bunk. The noise was frightful but I think I slept quite a lot and I hoped that by the next day I would have found my sea legs. In the morning the stewardess said we had been hove-to in the night but I wasn’t sure what that meant. ‘Hove to what?’ I asked myself as the Tasman thumped, crashed and hissed on the other side of the wall.<
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  It continued violent all the next day but by the following morning was less so. Before dawn, on the fourth day, we came into Sydney Harbour. It never entered my head, until I heard other people saying so, that the passage had been in any way exceptional.

  Sydney was my first big city and as unlike New Zealand, I thought, as it could possibly be. Remarkable, for instance, at dawn to see a lady on the wharf whose general aspect instantly recalled Sadie Thompson in Mr Somerset Maugham’s Rain. She was encased in black satin and actually wore white boots with an overlap of calf and much jewellery. Her hair was the colour of new bricks and her face not so much painted as impastoed. She stood down there, all alone, and gazed through a black nose veil at the forward portholes below decks from which presently emerged the heads of stewards and able seamen. Words were exchanged. Presently she nodded, turned her back and with rhythmic jerks and alternating flash of highlights, hipped and thighed herself down the wharf. Life!

  I had ten days in Sydney, staying with friends who were extremely kind to me. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was there and I was taken to the first night of Turandot, superbly presented and, or I thought so, gloriously sung. Sydney was en fête for the occasion – tails and white ties, orchids, jewels, dazzling décolletages: opera hats, even. But far, far better for me than all this splendour was the news that the Allan Wilkie Company was opening with Henry VIII at a big theatre in the academic quarter of Sydney. I felt a little as if I was in a picaresque novel where, however far I travelled, key figures would appear at rhythmic intervals.