Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

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СКАЧАТЬ She stood up and he saw that she wore a pair of exceedingly grubby flannel trousers, and a short grey overall. In her hand was a long brush. Her face was disfigured by a smudge of green paint, and her short hair stood up in a worried shock, as though she had run her hands through it. She was very thin and dark…A small canvas was propped up in the lid of an open paint-box. Alleyn drew in his breath sharply.

      Her canvas is a simplified, magnificent rendering of the wharf they have just left at Suva. Alleyn finds the sketch almost too painful to behold. Its creator, who is less sacrosanct about it, stares dispassionately at the work with an unlit cigarette between her lips. A distracted search through her trouser pockets for a match reveals only an old paint-smeared handkerchief. She runs her fingers through her hair in frustration.

      ‘Blast!’ she repeated, and took the unlit cigarette from her lips.

      ‘Match?’ said Alleyn.

      [And with that…] She started, lost her balance, and sat down abruptly.

      Agatha Troy’s first encounter with her future husband is a bruising collision of egos. He is being his usual polite, slightly supercilious self, and she is being a professional painter with all the frustration and anxiety that this entails (and no one knew this better than her creator).

      The view of the Suva wharf Troy is painting was a vision Ngaio had savoured on her return voyage to New Zealand on the Niagara in 1932. She treasured her impressions: the sultry day; the acid green of the banana leaves; the mop of dyed, ‘screaming magenta’ hair on the tall Fijian; and the brilliant sari of an Indian woman. She had wanted to paint them, but felt too inadequate. ‘It was this feeling of unfullfilment [sic] that led me to put another painter on another boat-deck,’ wrote Ngaio in her ‘Portrait of Troy’ for Dilys Winn’s Murderess Ink. ‘She made a much better job of it than I ever would have done.’

      The naming of Troy seemed a more casual process than the naming of Alleyn. Ngaio wanted a plain, down-to-earth name, and thought of Agatha, and then the rather unusual surname of Troy. She signs her paintings ‘Troy’ and is known as Troy. Ngaio said there was no link between Agatha Troy and Agatha Christie.

      Ngaio wove her whodunits out of the fabric of her own life. ‘I always tried to keep the settings of my books as far as possible within the confines of my own experience.’ For the make-up of her leading characters she looked to people she knew, and to herself.

      If Alleyn reflected the almost fussily feminine, cultured, reserved side of Ngaio, then Troy was a projection of her truculently masculine, untamed artistic self. She was the painter in fiction that Ngaio longed to be in life. Ngaio could write about Troy’s genius and her cleverly spontaneous response to the visual world, but seldom achieved this same untrammelled brilliance in her own canvases. In her painting, as in her detective writing, Ngaio looked for the golden section—for the perfect measure of ordered form, for the formula that made sense of the world and what she did. She wrote tellingly of her days at art school in Christchurch: ‘I wanted to be told flatly whether things I had drawn were too big or too small, too busy or too empty. I wanted to know, when I failed completely, exactly where I had gone wrong and how I might have avoided doing so.’ Ngaio could never be the wild soul she created for Troy. She was too busy searching for the rules to realize her own vision. ‘It seems to me, now, that I never drew or painted in the way that was really my way: that somehow I failed to get on terms with myself.’

      The parallels between Ngaio and her Pygmalion did not end there. They were uncannily alike in appearance. As the ship moved away, Agatha Troy ‘stood for a moment staring back at Fiji’.

      Her hands gripped the shoulder-straps of her paint-box. The light breeze whipped back her short dark hair, revealing the contour of the skull and the delicate bones of the face. The temples were slightly hollow, the cheek-bones showed, the dark-blue eyes were deep-set under the thin ridge of the brows. The sun caught the olive skin with its smudge of green paint, and gave it warmth. There was a kind of spare gallantry about her.

      Ngaio and Troy were alike in their ‘spare gallantry’, cherishing good manners and discretion with a kind of masculine valour. They were hugely protective of their careers. They were self-contained, yet also shy and socially reticent. They shared the same mannerisms: the same boyishness; the same worried tousling of the hair; the same ‘gruff stand-offish voice’; the same natural inclination to curl up their long legs and sit on the ground; the same addiction to smoking; the same long-fingered, tremulous hands…and the list could go on. Troy was made according to Ngaio’s pattern.

      Even in love, their paths were similarly rocky. The painter in Troy cannot resist Alleyn’s good bones. She has to take his likeness. ‘The subject,’ she confesses in a letter to her artist friend Katti Bostock, in England, ‘is a detective and looks like a grandee. Sounds like it, too—very old-world and chivalrous and so on…I’m rather on the defensive about this Sleuth—I was so filthy rude to him, and he took it like a gent and made me feel like a bounder. Very awkward.’

      Alleyn finds it equally difficult: ‘She bridles like a hedgehog…whenever I approach her’. And when she paints his portrait: ‘it’s a rum sensation when they get to the eyes; such a searching impersonal sort of glare they give you. She even comes close sometimes and peers into the pupils. Rather humiliating, it is. I try to return a stare every bit as impersonal, and find it tricky.’ It is Troy’s penetrating gaze that makes Alleyn self-reflective. In previous books he has openly regretted and loathed the more distasteful, invasive aspects of his job—the searching through ‘under-garment drawers for incriminating correspondence’, the opening up of private lives to public scrutiny.

      He also abhors the carrying of guns and capital punishment. Fox says to him in Death in Ecstasy: ‘I know how you feel about homicide cases. I’d put it down to your imagination…I’m not at all fanciful, myself, but it does seem queer to me sometimes, how calm-like we get to work…and all the time there’s a trap and a rope and a broken neck at the end if we do our job properly.’

      Alleyn is haunted by the consequences of a good result, but it is love, not death, that makes him really question his job. When they leave the ship at Southampton and find themselves tied up in the same murder case, with Troy as a suspect, Alleyn is full of qualms. He realizes she is appalled by the very aspects of his work that disturb him. Troy is running a small residential painting school at her home at Tatler’s End when, in full view of the class, the life model is dramatically impaled on a dagger, wedged through the back of the wooden throne. Only one of Troy’s pupils has pushed the model down onto the dagger, but everyone in the studio has a motive to kill her. The invasion of Troy’s privacy and that of her pupils, when Alleyn begins his investigation, makes Troy angry, and she challenges him:

      ‘Do you want to search our rooms for something? Is that it?’

      ‘Not for anything specific. I feel we should just—’ He stopped short. ‘I detest my job,’ he said; ‘for the first time I despise and detest it.’

      And if this is not disquieting enough for Alleyn, Troy is also worried about losing her independence and identity as a painter. He can see how she shies away whenever she imagines herself becoming subsumed by his job and their relationship. Through Troy, Ngaio communicates a modern woman’s reluctance to sacrifice her career and her individuality to marriage; through Alleyn, she traces a modern man’s waking comprehension of this. Theirs will be a marriage of equality, but getting to the altar will be fraught.

      Not many of Ngaio’s books are more biographically poignant than Artists in Crime. She knew the workings of the life room by heart. ‘I enjoyed best the nights when we made time studies from the nude,’ she wrote in Black Beech.

      The model…was Miss Carter, a dictatorial but good-tempered СКАЧАТЬ