Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

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СКАЧАТЬ Leon Quartermaine, Leslie Banks and Noël Coward—were international stars. Ngaio saw popular theatre with Nelly and Tahu Rhodes and Toppy Hawkes, and when she wanted something more discerning she went alone. ‘I saw a dramatization of Christopher Morley’s Thunder on the Left, and, later, the first of the Priestley “time” plays, Pirandello’s Henry IV with Ernest Milton and a French tragi-comedy called Beauty with Charles Laughton…The first Shakespeare that I saw in the West End was John Gielgud as a very young, petulant and smouldering Hamlet’, but it was Shakespeare at The Old Vic that she loved most. For her it had a raw immediacy that evoked Elizabethan theatre. The Old Vic audience included anyone from a policeman on the beat to ‘students, labourers, tough elderly women, nondescripts, deadbeats, and characters who might have made bombs in their spare time’. Above them hung a haze of blue cigarette smoke. They drank, chewed, gave unsolicited advice, and when an actor dried up they shouted the lines.

      Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, directed by Tyrone Guthrie at the Westminster Theatre, had a huge impact on Ngaio. When it opened in Rome in 1921, it caused a riot. The bare stage was booed, and a fight broke out in the boxes. By the end of the decade audiences were more accustomed to its avant-gardism. Ngaio was captivated by the uncompromising set design and the dramatic treatment. The arbitrary nature of perception was an important theme in radical theatre following the First World War, and Pirandello’s play picked up this concept. In Six Characters, actors on stage rehearsing a Pirandello play are interrupted by a fictional family of characters who ‘demand that the drama of their own lives be performed and thus given a reality denied them as the mere figments of their author’s imagination’. They sketch out the scenes on stage for the actors to act. The supposedly ephemeral lives of the characters end up looking more convincing than those of the socially conditioned actors. The play challenges the relationship between art and life and the fictional roles played on stage and real roles played in life. The play would have continuing significance for Ngaio.

      Theatre nights were late, and sometimes Ngaio, the Rhodeses and Hawkes were there to savour the ‘smell of the West End in the early morning. Hot Bread. Coffee. Freshly watered pavements…Roses.’ After the curtain went down, the crazed world of the fashionable club beckoned. They would usually go to more than one. ‘“Uncles” was the smart night-club in those days and there one danced or inched at close quarters with poker-faced revellers…or sat and |listened to Hutch [Leslie Hutchinson], a Negro entertainer whose popularity was supreme…Then there was the midnight floor show at the Savoy and a Tzigani band at the Hungaria.’ It was the Hungaria in New Regent Street that they liked best because an ecstatic energy erupted after midnight. They heard Emilio Colombo lead the band, and watched as violinists threw their bows in the air while a tiny troll-like man ‘went mad on the tzimbal’. The Hungaria was the habitat of high culture, of bohemians and the dissolute. It was the knife-edge of opposites Ngaio relished.

      Sometimes the Prince of Wales was there and…alone, at a table just inside the door, sat a strange figure: an old, old man with a flower in his coat who looked as if he had been dehydrated like a specimen leaf and then rouged a little. No one ever accompanied him or paused at his table. He looked straight before him and at intervals raised his glass in a frog’s hand and touched his lips.

      One night we asked the restaurateur who he was.

      ‘A poet,’ said Signor Vecchi, ‘and once, long ago I understand, a celebrated personage. It is Lord Alfred Douglas [Oscar Wilde’s lover].’

      It is in the Hungaria that Nigel Bathgate meets his girlfriend Angela North and waits for Roderick Alleyn in A Man Lay Dead. Alleyn has allowed them to leave Frantock briefly to help him track down a secret Russian brotherhood. Men from Scotland Yard are hiding in an empty shop opposite the house where members of the fiendish ancient sect are meeting. The signal for them to strike will come from the Hungaria. Nigel has been told the secret password: it is the name of a murdered Pole.

      His heart is racing. He is alone on the street as he turns in and orders a table at the back of the restaurant because he is not wearing evening dress. He sits down. His hand shakes visibly as he takes out his lighter. He smokes three cigarettes and fidgets anxiously. The band is playing ‘in the desultory manner that distinguishes the off hours in fashionable restaurants’. There are just three couples on the floor.

      ‘Do you want to order, sir?’ murmured Nigel’s waiter.

      ‘No thank you. I’ll wait until my—I’m waiting for someone—I’ll order when she comes.’

      He lights another cigarette, wishes Angela were here, then loses himself in thoughts of Alleyn, and the agent, Sumiloff. Suddenly a voice from a solitary man at the next table cuts through his concentration. He wants to know when the Hungaria band will begin to play. Nigel is distracted and annoyed.

      ‘Not until midnight.’

      ‘That’s a long time,’ said the stranger, fretfully. ‘I’ve come on purpose to hear it. Very good, I’m told.’

      ‘Oh, frightfully,’ said Nigel unenthusiastically.

      ‘They tell me,’ continued his neighbour, ‘that some Russian is to sing here tonight. Lovely voice. He sings a thing called The Death of Boris.’

      Nigel starts violently, then controls himself. He thinks he has been given the secret password. A thrill goes through him and he almost overflows with excitement. The information rushes out. He tells the stranger that the Russian brotherhood has been tricked into meeting at Alleyn’s house, and that Sumiloff is waiting there now. With that, the stranger is satisfied and abruptly calls to the waiter for the bill. A few minutes later he passes Angela, who is just arriving at the door. Nigel Bathgate will become Alleyn’s Watson, but not before he finds himself tied to a chair with a sharp blade being pushed under his fingernail. This is his apprenticeship, and he will learn the importance of passwords and getting them right.

      Even though she was reading it in pencil from exercise books, Rose Marsh could hardly put A Man Lay Dead down. After her husband retired, by taking up ‘a number of secretaryships’ he had saved Rose’s fare to England. They could not afford for Henry to accompany her, so Rose arrived alone at Alderbourne in 1930, to find her daughter distracted from writing and acting by working in a shop during the day and living the high life at night. She bitterly regretted the waste of Ngaio’s talent and was not quiet about it. The situation gradually sorted itself out. The Rhodeses were tired of commuting and moved to London, where they took two big flats in Eaton Mansions, close to Eaton Square in Belgravia; some of the staff boarded out. Initially, Ngaio and her mother moved with them, but they stayed only long enough to find their own flat. In June or July, they shifted into a basement bedsit around the corner in Caroline Terrace. Nelly Rhodes was kind enough to make sure they were comfortably set up with excess furniture from the shop. Rose Marsh’s arrival put the brakes on one of the most exciting periods of her daughter’s life, but Ngaio could see why. She felt guilty that she had abandoned her New Zealand novel and had written only travel articles since she’d left New Zealand. Trips to the theatre became serious and critical, and fashionable nightclubs an occasional luxury. She started to think more seriously about writing a detective novel.

      For Rose, the links Ngaio made with their own life and A Man Lay Dead were uncanny. In fact she had taken names, places and characters directly from real life. Most disquieting was Dr Tokareff, the Russian from Sir Hubert Handesley’s embassy days in Petrograd. He not only shared the same name, but was obviously based on Peter Alfanasivich Tokareff, an unstable Russian émigré who had played opposite Rose in a production of George Calderon’s The Little Stone House in 1914. Rose, a talented amateur actress and excellent acting coach, had invited him to practise at their home on the Cashmere Hills. They rehearsed endlessly, and the inevitable happened: Tokareff became enamoured with Rose, then Ngaio. On the evenings he visited them, СКАЧАТЬ