Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  Ladies, there were, of a kind that was entirely new to me. The croupiers referred to the most dominant of them as ‘cette monsieurdame’. She seemed to be having 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 Isherwood out of Huxley. The disconcerting thing about many of the habituées was their tendency to seem as if they had been written by somebody not quite on the top of his form.

  Several times I found myself next a bad-tempered, tweedy Englishman and his cagey daughter. They looked for all the world as if they had been taking the dogs for a walk right through the village and round. We thought them highly respectable and disagreeable and were rather ashamed of them for behaving in the way French comic papers expect the English to behave. It was astonishing to find that Miss Pittsin (as we had christened her) was quietly stealing my plaques. When I detected her at it and stared into her face in amazement, she made primming movements with her lips as if she’d caught me laughing in church. A famous French racing-cyclist there was, who introduced himself and was so astonished that we didn’t fall into a rapture when he pronounced his name that he seemed to take a fancy to us and asked us to have drinks with him.

  We made a number of acquaintances. Bet was greatly taken with a bald, elderly and wretchedly unhappy looking croupier whom she called Grumps. They spoke no word of each other’s languages but she would sit beside him and give him her plaques to bet with. Sighing heavily he would push one after another on to some unlucky square and in due course it would lose and his colleague would rake it in. He would then raise his shoulders in a dismal shrug and he and Bet would shake their heads at each other. ‘Poor Grumps,’ Bet would say. ‘He had no luck again.’

  On our last day, having exhausted the pool, we had little individual flings and I suddenly found I’d won on 15 en plein and made enough to buy a coat and skirt. The others also recovered their losses and gained a little. We returned to England much exhilarated.

  III

  I have suggested, without any claim to originality, that in most lives there is a repetitive pattern; that incidents which on first occurrence seem to bear no relation to this pattern often turn out to be completely integrated and to have been merely waiting offstage for their entrance. I now come to a prolonged episode which might have been designed to make nonsense of this well-canvassed theory. It came about on an impulse, it lasted some three years, and it was ended, for me, by a tragic event quite unconnected with it. As far as I can tell it has had no influence on anything that has ever happened to me.

  Charlot had an extremely illustrious grandmother who was once described by the Sydney Bulletin, a strongly antipodean journal, as being: ‘the most highly decorated female in the British Empire bar royalty’, a gloss of which her grandchildren constantly reminded her. Indeed, upon her eightieth birthday they enacted a charade (all Lampreys are superb charadists) in which the head of the family, heavily padded and bearded and speaking with a strong guttural accent, took decoration after cardboard decoration from a wheelbarrow manipulated by one granddaughter dressed as the Lord Chamberlain and pinned them all over another made up in character as the illustrious grandmother herself.

  ‘Congrrratulations, Lady D. Would you turn r-r-round if you please, Lady D., there is no more room in front. Ach, so. Congrratulations, once again, Lady D.’

  Even at her advanced age, this lady occasionally caused to be organized functions for the raising of funds: usually for famine relief in India. On our return from Monte Carlo we found that a great bazaar was to be held and that we were expected to provide objects for an artsy-craftsy stall. Charlot and I established ourselves in the empty ballroom of the Buckinghamshire house with trestle tables, paint, wooden cigarette boxes, parchment, paper and a loathsome substance called Barbola from which one daintily fashioned rosebuds round the frames of looking glasses or the lids of glove boxes.

  We created quantities of lampshades, blotters and funny rhymes for bathroom and lavatory doors. We decorated trays, bowls and trifles for what in an occasional access of hatred we called ‘my ladye’s toilette’. Charlot has neat and clever hands and when she sets her mind to a job she becomes a perfectionist. We made a great many objects and, in the event, a surprisingly large sum of money for famine relief.

  By this time the current crisis had all but caught up with the bandwagon: it approached with the Christmas season and as usual long discussions, as enthralling as they were, of course, distressing, had set in. I don’t remember which of us it was who abruptly exclaimed: ‘Why shouldn’t we make all these ghastly things to sell for US?’

  The shop-girls idea was born.

  We became immensely excited.

  The plan was to make any number of gift-objects, take a lock-up shop somewhere in SW3 for the Christmas quarter, make what profit we could and stop. We called ourselves ‘Touch and Go’ after the vaudeville effort in New Zealand, and in doing so exhibited, at any rate in one respect, the most exquisite judgement. I don’t suppose any two beings more ignorant of shopkeeping ever embarked upon it. We set to work anew and with the utmost enthusiasm. If it ever occurred to me that I would really be more sensibly employed in writing articles or even the novel that still nagged at me, I put the idea behind me for the time being. We were having fun.

  We found a lock-up shop next door to Mr Green, the chemist, in the Brompton Road. One fine frosty morning we set up our wares in the window and retired to the basement to paint and glue and varnish as fast as we could in order to maintain replacements for what was sold. I remember a cold moment when one asked oneself: ‘And if nothing is sold?’ but it passed and presently the bell rang and we served our first customer: a Kensington lady with the inevitable dog on a lead. I must digress about dogs.

  In respect of dogs I am a New Zealander. I like dogs. As a rule they have pleasant dispositions and either flatter one or make one uneasily compassionate by their excessive devotion. I very much like large, sensible dogs and sporting dogs. When dogs work they are splendid. A good huntaway, streaking down a mountainside and setting a great mob of sheep in motion is a noble sight. They are dirty, however, and can be obscene, and no amount of shampooing and twiddling will make anything but asses of them. In New Zealand they can give one hydatids and it would be idiotic to let them lick one’s face even if one liked it. I never became reconciled to the South Kensington dogs. When they were not defecating on the doorstep they were shivering in their mistresses’ embrace.

  We toiled ourselves almost to a standstill over our shop. So busy were we in the last days before the festival that I stayed at the Rembrandt Hotel in order to open shop early. It was a white Christmas that year and London, to me, was wonderful. I was too busy working too hard to become disillusioned by the great commercial racket. Moreover I was living in a household of children and experienced a kind of realization of the winter fantasy I had, myself a child, made out of Christmas in the midsummers of New Zealand. I did not know what I believed, I formed no judgements about the way things were done. I simply felt that behind all the predictable performances there was something which, like Eliot’s Wise Man, you might say was satisfactory.

  Opposite the hotel was the Brompton Oratory. When the traffic was muffled by snow its tenor bell sounded very close. On my first night in the hotel, after I had gone weary to bed, a boy sang ‘Adeste Fideles’ outside in the cold. His voice was not so much sound as vapour or perhaps a tingling vibration on frozen air. Was he a chorister? It was very late for him to be out there singing all by himself. He finished and gave a little treble cough which was stifled before it ended. I imagined him wrapping a comforter across his steaming mouth and turning for home.

  There was a great muster of Lampreys for Christmas: four generations of them and, except the youngest, they gave the impression of being prolific in the extreme. All Lampreys are devoted parents.

  When our accounts were cast up it was found that we had made a surprising profit in our shop. This, of course, was fat
al. The miasma of trade had infected us and we were unable to shake it off. Round the corner in Beauchamp Place there was a rather smarter shop to let on a yearly lease. We took it. After that I was a shop-girl in Beauchamp Place for two and a half years.

  It was, and I think still is, one of those streets where established shops of considerable snob-value are occasionally interrupted by ‘amusing’ amateurish ventures that make their rather desperate little gestures, languish and are gone. We were less ephemeral and survived, I suppose, because we did most of the work ourselves. We became slightly less amateurish, never got on each other’s nerves, made any number of ludicrous mistakes and encounters and added to the staff largely from our circle of friends. We crossed Beauchamp Place into larger premises and began to do interior decoration and specially made pieces of furniture.

  It was upon this scene that the news broke of my mother’s plans to come to England.

  IV

  It was astonishing and wonderful news. My father after retiring from his bank had taken up a number of secretaryships, I was beginning to be self-supporting, and the need for economy was growing less stringent. With his great generosity in all big decisions, my father said the visit could be managed and that he would do very well by himself as long as it was not for too long. So my mother sailed for England.

  The ship berthed before we reached Tilbury and most of the passengers had already disembarked. I see my mother now, very clearly, sitting on deck waiting for me. She wears a sealskin coat and hat and her hands are clasped over her handbag. I seem to become airborne and shoot rather than run down the deck towards her.

  ‘It’s no good pointing things out,’ said my mother on our way through the City. ‘I can only nod and say things like “Fancy!” but I’m not really noticing. I’m floating.’

  She continued to float for some time but when she came to earth, she did so to some purpose.

  I don’t remember how long it was after her arrival that the Lampreys’ affairs swooped down to a particularly tricky crisis. It was not only the familiar state of near-insolvency but the distance that we found ourselves from our occupations. We were all working in London, now: the Head of the House was in the City, Tops had become a new kind of cadet with a professional house-decorating firm and Charlot and I had our shop. Hours and hours were spent daily on the road. The lovely Georgian manor house was costing a fortune to run and on the firmly-held Lamprey principle that you must spend money in order to save it, a housekeeper had been engaged to encourage thrift among the servants. There had also been some odd sleight-of-hand changes in the staff. Chauffeurs had been converted into butlers. A pearl necklace worth some hundreds of pounds had been dropped in an empty chocolate box and burnt to blackcurrants. A private soldier from the Welsh Guards was pressed into service as footman. He was a talented mimic and one of our favourite diversions was to linger in the raspberry canes outside the servants’ hall and hear ourselves being done to the life by Thomas. He was also, as it turned out, a prodigy of sexual prowess and wrought havoc in the morale of the female staff.

  This was the general picture when the decision was taken to move up to London. From motives of economy.

  It is not necessary to enlarge upon our search for houses and flats. Enough to say that there were outstanding arguments against unsmart districts like Dulwich, Notting Hill or Maida Vale where rents were low, and overwhelming reasons why it would be cheaper in the long run to be near Beauchamp Place and a good tube to the City. I must admit that I found myself in owlish agreement with the Lampreys on these issues. My mother offered no comment.

  It was a lovely flat. Eleven rooms and charmingly panelled. SW3. Some of the servants were boarded out.

  My mother and I also went flat-hunting and continued to stay with the Lampreys while we did so. Nothing could exceed the warmth of their hospitality but it was perfectly clear that when the children came home for the holidays there would be no room for anyone else. We found a basement flat, semi-furnished, in Bourne Street, off Cliveden Place on the borders of Pimlico: a living room with a divan for me, a bedroom for my mother, a miniature kitchen and a bath in a sort of cave under the footpath. It, too, was handy to Beauchamp Place, though not fashionably so. We were set up by the kind Lampreys with extra pieces of furniture from their store. So we kept house together and my mother became as deeply committed to London as I.

  It was now that an old friendship was renewed. Dundas, nicknamed Cis, and later, James, who had so gently enlivened my childhood, was living in London. We all met again and it was as if there had been no interval of twenty years but that only yesterday he and I had been Mrs Finch-Brassy and Mrs Boolsum-Porter, sipping imaginary tea in the house in Fendalton. With James we saw another London: the London of the Caledonian Market and the Portobello Road, of junk stalls in Berwick Street and old print shops: the London of a youthful-elderly and quite successful professional actor with a private income who had been content to take what engagements came his way and when none came, settled into a state of sprightly reminiscence and the active enjoyment of many friendships. He was wonderfully kind in a hundred offbeat and unexpected ways as, for instance, when his charlady of many years’ standing confided to him that she had always wanted to see Paris.

  ‘Very well, Mrs B., you shall.’ And he took her there for a weekend to her amazement and delight.

  The Jimmy of my own professional days (he of the scarlet fever) was in London, too, and playing with Sir Nigel Playfair in a piece called Petticoat Influence. He came often to the basement flat and so there was much talk of theatre. And after so long an interval my mother and I went to the early doors again. One of the most satisfying of all our matinées was Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author superbly directed by Tyrone Guthrie at the Westminster Theatre. I hadn’t read it. I knew nothing whatever about it and that is the ideal way of seeing this play for the first time. It takes you by the throat and shakes the daylight out of you. If you long above everything to be a director, this is the play that nags and clamours to be done. I was broody with it, off and on, for some eighteen years before I finally got it out of my system in a burst of three separate productions in three separate countries. It may be a phoney play, its theme – that reality exists only in the mind of the individual – may be inconsiderable, but it remains, to my mind, more absolutely the pure material of theatre than any other piece of twentieth-century dramatic writing. One may discount its philosophy and dismiss its metaphysics (I do not altogether do so) but tackle it simply as something that happens in a working theatre and it crackles with immediacy. We were greatly excited by it.

  Throughout these months, my mother didn’t say much about the shop. She sat with us sometimes in our workroom while Charlot gummed maps on lampshades and I copied the patterns of glazed chintzes on to breakfast trays, firescreens and powder bowls. She enjoyed the jokes, was sceptical, I am sure, about the financial returns and indicated briefly that she thought I was on entirely the wrong tack. I think she worried about it and she certainly had cause to do so when the Great Depression came. We struggled on, appalled by the distress around us and horror-stricken by our inability to give work to the many, many people who appealed to us.

  My mother watched and listened and said little. I am sure it was in some sort a comfort to her when, apart from the travel articles that kept going quite regularly, I began to write steadily in the evenings.

  It started on a weekend when my mother was away on a motor trip with some friends. All day Sunday it rained and I read a detective novel from a little lending library in Bourne Street. I don’t remember the author now, but think perhaps it was Agatha Christie. I was not a heavy reader in the genre but I had, off and on, turned an idea for a crime story over in my mind. It had seemed to me a highly original idea.

  The murder game was fashionable in those days. ‘Suppose,’ I had thought in a blaze of inspiration, ‘suppose instead of a pretence corpse, a real one was found.’ I imagine some round dozen of established practitioners
had already discarded this trouveau as being too obvious but I thought it was just fine. And now, on this wet Sunday, I went to the newspaper shop that was always open in Bourne Street and bought several penny exercise books and some sharpened pencils.

  I don’t think that before or since this weekend I have ever written with less trouble and certainly never with less distinction.

  It was necessary, of course, to have a detective and having invented him to give him a name. The day before I began, we had visited Dulwich College Picture Gallery, interested in it, first of all, because my father was an Old Alleynian. I remembered how he had told me about the great Elizabethan tragedian who had founded the school and, of course, at Dulwich there were many references to him. ‘Very well,’ I thought, ‘as a sort of compliment to Popsie I shall call him Alleyn.’

  I wrote until late on Sunday night and, from then onwards, regularly in the evenings. The weeks went by and the penny exercise books grew into a pile. One afternoon when I got home from the shop I found my mother reading away at one of them. She took off her spectacles and stared at me with an air that I could not interpret.