Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

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СКАЧАТЬ fields, the streams are all frozen and silent, and this morning I found a robin—silent too, and stiff in the grass where he had fallen out of the dead-cold sky.’ In London there were warnings in the press against skating on the Thames, which ‘hundreds of these hardy English’ did anyway, and in a quadrangle at Cambridge people flocked to see a frozen fountain. Ngaio ignored the biting cold and relished the sights: Westminster Abbey with its unearthly collection of sightless statues, and the Tower of London emerging from a ‘thin morning mist’ so that ‘a turret shone out quite warm and clear while the underlying structure slipped away into a blue haze’. She drove through Windsor Park at sunset and watched the long, late ‘rays of light touch trees and turf with the colours of heraldry’.

      Later she visited art galleries and the spring exhibitions. Burlington House had a show of Dutch masters. She listened to a radio lecture about it by critic and art writer Roger Fry, and when she arrived to see the paintings the courtyard of Burlington House was ‘crammed with rich cars and the rooms were thronged with rich people’. It was the people rather than the art that fascinated her. Two ‘shrewdly critical Frenchwomen’ captured her attention, then the ‘modern’ art students. ‘They were very dirtily dressed in raincoats and trousers, and apparently little else. The prevailing fashion…[was to allow] their beards to grow to the “ten-days” lengths and then by a mysterious process, arresting their growth.’

      She went in search of her roots, visiting the ancient Temple Church to find some trace of her great-grandfather who, according to family record, was the promised heir to a vast estate in Scotland. Unfortunately, the property owner (his uncle) died intestate, and the fortune was thrown into the Chancery. He was forced to take ‘some extremely humble job in the Middle Temple and my grandfather went to the choir school of the Temple Church’. Ngaio had no luck. ‘The verger, a grim man, had never heard of my ancestor.’

      She lunched in style with the Rhodeses at such favourite places as the Ritz, the Savoy and the Carlton, and quietly on her own at little back-street establishments that were not always as cheap as she expected. For a time she even captured a job as a mannequin in a small, exclusive fashion shop off Bond Street. She had the perfect figure, but not an ideal temperament. She felt like a ‘richly turned-out automaton’. ‘[We] fell into lines, and, one by one, filed out of the door into the showroom, where we dropped into that curiously inhuman walk…we undulated backwards and forwards two or three times, stood in a half dozen modern attitudes, and strolled nonchalantly out of the door, the attendant nymphs fell upon us like automatic furies, switched dresses off…[and] on, and back we went into the queue again all silks and smiles.’

      She was captivated, also, by the rituals of the Royal House, standing among crowds to watch the Trooping the Colour ceremony. She described the rich pageantry of uniforms, horses and foreign guests. ‘The Sultan of Zanzibar arrived close by us, stepping from his car in an astonishing blaze of jewels and exotic robes, while the immaculate English aide-de-camps stood, silk hat in hand to usher his Midnight Extravagance to his appointed seat.’

      Three ‘Pilgrim’ articles, published in September, October and November 1929, recorded another magical trip to France. Again, Ngaio, Nelly Rhodes and Betty Cotterill escaped, taking a hotel on the Rue des Capucines in Paris. The summer was sizzling hot, and when their train reached the ‘environs of Paris the carriage next to ours actually caught fire’. Taxis flew past their hotel, tooting and adding thick vaporous exhaust fumes to the steaming boulevard. Ngaio sat out on the pavements, sipping coffee in a heat-induced dream state, while the city erupted around her. They visited Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors, which ‘is the biggest room I have ever seen’. They ate at restaurants and visited nightclubs like the famed Folies Bergère where ‘American voices, keyed up to their full siren pitch, cut the air into ribbons, French voices, with that soft, emphatic, rattle of words, burbled and eddied in a sort of conglomerate roar’. Paris was noisy, hot and expensive, but they loved it.

      Once again, financial worries hit them when they returned to Alderbourne. In spite of their troubles, Ngaio helped Nelly Rhodes and her grandmother raise money for famine relief in India. Trestle tables were erected in the empty ballroom where they began painting. They decorated wooden cigarette boxes, tin wastepaper bins, trays, tables, lampshades, blotters and bowls, and made plaques with funny rhymes for bathroom and lavatory doors. Their ‘artsycraftsy stall’ at the famine relief bazaar was a coup, realizing what seemed a small fortune.

      It was not long before they decided that charity should begin at home. ‘I have become a shopkeeper in London town,’ Ngaio announced to her readers. ‘My partner and I have rented these minute premises for October, November and December.’ Their lock-up was in one of London’s most fashionable areas and they planned to sell gift items over the Christmas period. In London it snowed so much that immediately before Christmas Ngaio stayed at The Rembrandt hotel opposite the Brompton Oratory so she could open the shop early in the morning. Remarkably, when they cashed up their business they had made a profit, even after the Wall Street crash the previous October, and it was too tantalizing to stop. They decided to follow up their entrepreneurial success by establishing a shop at a more permanent address on Brompton Road, in Knightsbridge. They called themselves Touch and Go, after a Christchurch entertainment group with which they had been involved, and their business flourished. They then moved around the corner to Beau-champ Place, before shifting again into a bigger shop in the same street, where they focused more on furniture and interior design.

      Their salubrious address was a honey trap for the upper classes. When Touch and Go was asked to design the interior of a pet salon, Ngaio was disgusted. ‘In respect of dogs I am a New Zealander’; at home, ‘sensible dogs and sporting dogs’ chased sheep or retrieved game birds. She found the dogs in Knightsbridge obscene and dirty. ‘No amount of shampooing and twiddling will make anything but asses of them…when they were not defecating on the doorstep they were shivering in their mistresses’ embrace.’ In spite of her Antipodean scruples, the job was finished and work flowed in.

      Sadly, unlike Roger Fry’s avant-garde experimental Omega workshop in Fitzroy Square, which was supported by artists such as Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Nina Hamnett, none of Touch and Go’s objects or interior designs have survived. Omega had foundered in 1919, because of the war. Touch and Go was self-consciously commercial chic by comparison, and perhaps because of this it survived the Depression. For 18 months or more Ngaio was involved with the shop and would leave reluctantly. Her recipe for success: ‘We became slightly less amateurish, never got on each other’s nerves…and added to the staff largely from our circle of friends.’

      Among Ngaio’s circle of friends were many expatriate New Zealanders. A special person in this group was old childhood friend Dundas Walker, who had come to London years earlier in search of a professional acting career. Now that engagements had tailed off, he lived in genteel semi-retirement on a private income. With him, she visited print shops, junk shops, Portobello Road, and the bustling Caledonian market where hundreds of stallholders, ‘raked by a cold wind’, laid out their wares ‘on frost-chilled cobblestones’. With her artist friend Rhona Haszard, she talked art-school gossip. Haszard had left New Zealand in 1926, under a cloud of scandal. In 1922, she had married talented student and part-time art school tutor Ronald McKenzie. It seemed an ideal match, but then, in 1925, she met Englishman and ex-Indian Army officer, Leslie Greener, who enrolled in her classes. Their affair began almost immediately, and halfway through the year, after a hasty divorce, the couple eloped and then married at a Waihi registry office in December 1925. They were now resident in Alexandria, but Haszard was in London for specialist back treatment. Her split with the well-liked McKenzie had polarized their friends, so she was grateful to find Ngaio still warm and friendly towards her.

      Between the wars, the West End throbbed with a racy theatrical life. In the late 19th century there had been a clean-up of brothels and seedy gin dens in the area, and fashionable plays by playwrights like Oscar Wilde and Arthur Wing Pinero began to appear. The area became a playground for the middle and upper classes, and foreign visitors poured in to savour the West End experience. During the 1920s, luxurious СКАЧАТЬ