Black Beech and Honeydew. Ngaio Marsh

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СКАЧАТЬ do you think I put it there?’ asked my gentle mother.

      ‘Not truly,’ I wept. ‘Not really and truly.’

      With her arm sheltering me, she said profoundly, to herself, not to me: ‘It must have been The Fool’s Paradise.’

      This, I should explain, was a play. Was it by Sutro or perhaps a translation from Sardou? My parents, who were gifted amateurs, had recently played in the piece and had, I imagine, rehearsed their scenes together in my hearing, never supposing that I understood a word of them. The theme was that of a femme fatale who slowly poisoned her husband and was suspected and finally accused of her crime by the family doctor. I have no idea whether it ended in her arrest or suicide but rather think the latter. I am sure my mother was right and that it was this highly coloured drama that engendered the terror which obsessed me, in the validity of which I did not believe and which took so long to evaporate. To this day, on the rare occasions that I use poison in a detective story, I am visited by a ludicrous aftertaste of my childish horrors.

      It may be seen from this episode that I supported the theme, so indefatigably explored by psycho-novelists, of the anguish of the only child. I was, I am afraid, a morbid little creature.

      For all this, there were raptures, delights and cosy satisfactions.

      Here are my parents, standing before the range in an old-fashioned colonial kitchen. My father, an amateur carpenter, has been building a boat. He carries his pipe in his hand and wears a red tam-o’-shanter on his head. His arm is round my mother. They are smiling at me. I am in a sort of fenced baby swing that has been slung from the ceiling. I swoop towards them and my father says delightfully, ‘We don’t want you.’ He gives me a shove and I am swung away from them, shouting with laughter. He has me on his shoulders. The doors have been shut and we are in a dark passage but perfectly secure. He gives a leap and we are in the roof. He is talking to the friendly house-pixies who reply in falsetto voices. Do I know that it’s an act? I think I do, but am enchanted all the same. He tells me, for the hundredth time, his original story of Maria and John who bought a piglet called Grunter which, in trickery, was replaced by a terrier pup. If he changes a word I correct him. He tries Alice in Wonderland but is too dramatic with ‘Off With Her Head’ and frightens me. He reads Pickwick Papers and The Ingoldsby Legends. I am enraptured, particularly with Mr Winkle with whom, for some reason, I feel I have much in common: timidity perhaps. Even the discovery, when I look into the book myself, of the awful picture of a dying clown in a four-poster, although it appals me, doesn’t put me off Pickwick Papers. Worse than this is the cut of the Dead Drummer in Ingoldsby. The book is in our Edwardian drawing room, a tiny peacock-blue and white place. I sneak in there, and for the sheer compulsive horror of it, turn the pages until the ghastly lamps of the dead drummer’s eyes are turned up at me. Further on and still worse is the Nun of Netley Abbey being walled up by smug-faced monks. Yet neither of these diminishes my relish of the Witches Frolic, of the macabre, the really ghastly, but strangely enjoyable reiterations of ‘The Hand of Glory’ or the rollicking wholesale slaughters of Sir Ingoldsby Bray. I am enchanted by the legend of The Leech of Folkestone and gratified when my father points out that the description of Thomas Marsh’s Arms correspond with our own. These, with the Teutonic brutalities of the brothers Grimm, leave me engaged but unmoved – yet a story of Hans Andersen is so dreadful that even now I don’t enjoy recalling it. Who can tell what will frighten or delight a child, or why?

      II

      It seems to me now that in those early days my father was a kind of a treat: that I enjoyed him enormously without being involved with him. It was my mother who had the common but appalling task of ‘bringing me up’ and who had to steer an uncharted course between the nervous illogic of a delicate child, prone to fear, and the cunning obstinacy of a little girl determined to give battle in matters of discipline. Here she is, suddenly, running in a preoccupied manner across the lawn from the garden gate where she has said goodbye to a caller. She runs with a graceful loping stride, unhampered by her long skirt: brown stuff with brown velvet endorsements. I watch her from the dining-room window and twiddle the acorn end of the blind cord. She looks up and sees me and a smile, immensely vulnerable, breaks over her face. How dreadfully easy it is to love and hurt her. I adored, defied and finally obeyed my mother and believed that she understood me better than anyone else in my small world.

      It was a very small world indeed: a nurse called Alice, whom I don’t remember and who must have left me when I was still a baby, a maid called May who had a round red face and was considered a comic, my maternal grandparents, my parents and their circle of friends. A cat called Susie and a spaniel called Tip.

      Quite early in the day I learned to laugh at my father: not unkindly but because it was impossible to know him well and not to think him funny. He thought himself funny when his oddities were pointed out to him. ‘I didn’t!’ he would say to my mother. ‘How you exaggerate! I did not, Betsy.’ And break out laughing. It was, in fact, impossible to exaggerate his absent-mindedness or the strange fantasies that accompanied this comic-opera trait in his character.

      ‘My saddle-tweed trousers have gone!’ he announced, making a dramatic entrance upon my mother and a luncheon guest.

      ‘They can’t have gone.’

      ‘Completely. You go and look. Gone! That’s all.’

      ‘How can they have gone?’

      My father made mysterious movements of his head in the direction of the dining room and May.

      ‘Taken them to give that chap,’ he whispered. May had a follower.

      ‘Oh, no, Lally. Nonsense.’

      ‘All right! Where are they? Where are they?’

      ‘You haven’t looked properly.’

      He stared darkly at her and retired. Doors and drawers could be heard angrily banging. Oaths were shouted.

      ‘Are they gone, do you suppose?’ asked our visitor who was a close friend.

      ‘No,’ said my mother composedly.

      My father returned in furious triumph. ‘Well,’ he sneered, ‘that’s that. That’s the end of my saddle-tweed trousers.’ He laughed shortly. ‘You won’t get cloth like that in New Zealand.’

      ‘They must be somewhere.’

      He stamped. His eyes flashed. ‘They are not somewhere,’ he shouted. ‘That damn’ girl’s stolen them.’

      ‘Ssh!’

      My father’s nostrils flared. He opened his mouth.

      ‘What are those things on your legs, my dear chap?’ asked our guest.

      My father looked at his legs. ‘Good Lord!’ he said mildly, ‘so they are.’

      Early one morning he met Susie, our cat, walking in the garden. He carried her to my mother who was not yet up.

      ‘Look, Betsy,’ he said. ‘I found this cat walking in the garden. Isn’t she like Susie?’

      ‘She is Susie,’ said my mother.

      ‘I thought you’d say that,’ he rejoined, delightedly. Susie purred and rubbed her face against his. ‘She’s awfully tame. You’d think she knew me, wouldn’t СКАЧАТЬ