Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  Alleyn’s first meeting with Sir Herbert Carrados is equally obnoxious. His opening response is to call on the old boy network. Immediately Alleyn and Fox are seated, Sir Herbert says, ‘Your C.O. tells me you are a son of another old friend. I knew your mother very well years ago and she sees quite a lot of my wife, I believe.’ Bunchy was murdered after attending Sir Herbert’s debutante ball at Marsdon House. The superficiality of his reaction is breathtaking. After briefly bemoaning his friend’s death, Sir Herbert comments, ‘I cannot help thinking that my hospitality has been cruelly abused.’ Alleyn is almost in disbelief: Sir Herbert seems to ‘regard murder as a sort of inexcusable faux pas’. Selfishness, keeping up appearances and name-dropping are second nature to the worst examples of the upper classes, and their children are no better. Wealthy debutante Bridget O’Brien sets out her priorities for suitor, Donald Potter:

  I suppose you think I’m hard and modern and beastly. I dare say I am, but I can’t bear the idea of everything getting squalid and drab because we have to worry about money. A horrid little flat, second-rate restaurants, whitewood furniture painted to look fresh and nice. Ugh! I’ve seen these sorts of marriages.

  Then there are the victims of the debutante meat market. In the character of Miss Birnbaum, the plight of the plainer debutante is followed to its isolated and lonely conclusion. Alleyn feels for her. He urges his mother to invite her over. Not to a fashionable party, he tells her, because they give her an inferiority complex. Miss Birnbaum, he explains, is one of the casualties of the season.

  Ngaio uses her cosy collection of characters to expose the class system’s flaws. Her aspiration was to write novels of social manners that included a puzzle plot. Death in a White Tie broke the rules. Its transgressions begin with the fact that the victim is a familiar and likeable character. Bunchy’s end comes after the reader has viewed the debutante world from his perspective for some time. The reader knows his motives, has looked into his heart and knows his death will leave London a poorer place. He is someone to grieve over, and one of his pallbearers will be Alleyn himself. Bunchy’s murder affects Alleyn as no murder has done before. To his friend’s sister, Mildred, he vows: ‘if it takes me the rest of my life, and if it costs me my job, by God! if I have to do the killing myself, I’ll get this murderer and see him suffer for it’. This murder is personal, and so is Alleyn’s desire for retribution. But then Death in a White Tie is intimate in many of its revelations. There is more agony for Alleyn over his job, as he tells Troy:

  If you painted a surrealist picture of me I would be made of Metropolitan Police notebooks, one eye would be set in a keyhole, my hands would be occupied with somebody else’s private correspondence. The background would be a morgue and the whole pretty conceit wreathed with festoons of blue tape and hangman’s rope.

  His heightened feelings of despair come from Troy’s complete horror of capital punishment. Confused, she tries to explain her feelings to him: ‘I don’t even know that I agree with the stock arguments against it. It’s just one of those nightmare things. Like claustrophobia.’

  Capital punishment was one of the serious social issues Ngaio tackled in her writing. Her scruples were exactly the same as those of Alleyn and Troy. Hanging by the neck has a long history in Britain. It was introduced in the fifth century by Anglo-Saxon invaders. During the reign of Henry VIII, an estimated 72,000 people were executed by methods that included beheading, burning, boiling, and hanging with the possibility of drawing and quartering. It was hanging that survived. In 1810, the ‘Bloody Code’ listed an astonishing 220 crimes punishable by death. An 1832 Act reduced the list by two-thirds. In 1957, it was six. It was not until 1930, and again in 1938, that a five-year experimental suspension of capital punishment was recommended, first by a select committee, then by a clause in the Criminal Justice Bill: one was ignored, and the other postponed by war. Between 1900 and 1949, 621 men and 11 women were executed in England and Wales. The last two executions in England occurred simultaneously on 13 August 1964.

  Troy confesses to Alleyn that as a child she adored the Ingoldsby Legends. ‘One day I came across the one about my Lord Tomnoddy and the hanging. It made the most extraordinary impression on me…I used to turn the pages of the book, knowing that I would come to it, dreading it, and yet—I had to read it.’

  My Lord Tomnoddy jump’d up at the news…

  ‘But to see a man swing

  At the end of a string

  With his neck in a noose, will be quite a new thing!’

  ‘Death in a White Tie might have been called Siege of Troy,’ wrote Ngaio. Against the backdrop of Bunchy’s death, Alleyn woos his future wife. In a heated moment, Donald accuses his uncle Bunchy of being a bloody ‘Edwardian relic’. He could have said the same thing about Troy. Although she has modern expectations of career and marriage, her ideas about sex come lukewarm from a Victorian priory. ‘I’ve always been frightened of the whole business,’ she tells Alleyn. ‘Love and so on…The breaking down of all one’s reserves. The mental as well as the physical intimacy.’ And, perhaps by way of an explanation, she says, ‘I don’t understand physical love. I don’t know how much it means. I’m just plain frightened, and that’s a fact.’

  Alleyn, often described as monk-like, is no more worldly-wise. In desperation, Lady Alleyn takes her 43-year-old son aside and tells him the facts of life. ‘Arrogant masculinity…attracts ninety-nine out of a hundred’ women, she explains. Alleyn is appalled. ‘Do you suggest that I go to Miss Agatha Troy, haul her about her studio by her hair, tuck her under my arrogant masculine arm, and lug her off to the nearest registry office?’ No, replies his mother, to the nearest church, ‘if you please’. So Alleyn dons a bearskin and demands Troy marry him. He kisses her hard on the mouth, then says, ‘And don’t think I shall ask you to forgive me…You’ve no right to let this go by. You’re too damn particular by half, my girl. I’m your man and you know it.’

  Theirs will be a marriage of profile careers. Troy makes a comfortable living from her painting and is famous, as well known in artistic circles as Alleyn is in his. Ngaio writes knowledgably about Troy’s work. She paints in a simple, high-keyed late Post-Impressionist style. Her wharf at Suva is an interpretation of a scene rather than a rendering. It is ‘an expression of an emotion,’ Alleyn thinks, as he admires it, ‘rather than a record of a visual impression’. In the real world of contemporary art practice and criticism, what Troy paints may be fashionable in 1937, but it is certainly not avant-garde. However, this is fiction, and the ‘private viewing’ of her show at the Wiltshire Galleries in Bond Street is a notable social event of the Season. She ‘pulled her smart new cap over one eye and walked’ in.

  It always embarrassed her intensely to put in these duty appearances at her own exhibitions…She became gruff with shyness and her incoherence was mistaken for intellectual snobbishness. Like most painters she was singularly inarticulate on the subject of her work. The careful phrases of literary appreciation showered upon her by highbrow critics threw Troy into an agony of embarrassment.

  Like Troy, Ngaio came closest to marrying when she had aspirations to being an artist. While she was at art school, Peter Tokareff proposed to her, and a little later, her middle-aged English stalker also wanted to get married. Both were unlikely candidates, assiduously warned off by her parents. Ngaio never asserted her feelings for these men the way she did when, infatuated, she wanted to follow Allen Wilkie onto the stage or the Rhodes family back to England.

  More, however, can be said of her fairytale fiancé, Ned Bristed, who died in Belgium in December 1917. He was the friend of her childhood who later took her to the theatre. Edward Griffith Bristed was a year older than Ngaio and he grew up to be a shepherd. When he enlisted in 1915, and left with the First Battalion of the Canterbury Regiment in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, he was just 20 years old. He was blue-eyed, fair-haired and, at 5 foot 6 (1.67 metres), of modest height. In June 1917 he was promoted to platoon commander. The comment on hi
s army file read: ‘this officer is keen but requires more experience as an officer’. He was killed in action less than a month later.

  Although 19-year-old Ngaio towered over Ned, he was a perfect escort. Like her, he enjoyed theatre and the outdoor life. They had a youthful romantic attachment, and probably an engagement. She kept his ruby ring all her life, and this relationship was undoubtedly significant. Ngaio was one of many women whose husbands, lovers or fiancés were killed in the First World War, and they remained single. There was an assumption in Ngaio’s circle, partly fostered by Ngaio herself, that Ned’s tragic death prevented her from marrying. However, there seems also to have been a distinct lack of drive on Ngaio’s part to pursue sexual relationships with men. Although a frightening number of the males of her generation were buried on battlefields and in military graveyards, many also returned. Throughout her life Ngaio had close relationships with men—older, younger, married, homosexual—but she did not, it seems, sleep with them. Sexual reticence was a trait she shared with Troy.

  Ngaio continued to write for The Press as ‘Canterbury Pilgrim’ while she worked on Death in a White Tie. Her articles included tales of the voyage from New Zealand to England with friends Betty Cotterill and Jean Webster, plus a colourful two-episode account of a remarkable three-month road trip through Europe.

  Their journey took them through Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Northern Italy, and France. Towards the end of June, Ngaio, Betty and Jean took off in a car they christened ‘B.F.’. ‘We said at the beginning that we would not give our car a pet name,’ she wrote. ‘When…our engine and chassis numbers both began with B.F. we felt the dice had been loaded against us.’ Their 1934 Ford was the type ‘still used by the British police for…traffic control’. After crossing the Channel, they drove through Belgium’s Flanders fields where Ned Bristed was buried. Ngaio had lived 20 years longer than her fiancé, and almost unbelievably there was the threat of another war; many believed it was only a matter of time.

  ‘All towns look their best by twilight,’ wrote Ngaio of Bruges. She watched lamps being lit by people returning home from work to ‘houses still warm with the day’s sun’. Their drive along the canal was a journey into the past. ‘Peasants turned homewards,’ she recorded,

  and they were by Jean Françis Millet to a peasant. The waters of the canal were filled with a golden translucence, the long rows of trees stood dark and still, the air was filled with the smell of unshed rain. Along the banks stood single ranks of small flat houses…They were houses that might have been drawn by a child with an unerring sense of the decorative.

  For a time they were tourists, drinking in a different world. In Bruges, they took a room at the Le Panier d‘Or, a tiny hotel kept by two elderly women. ‘They led us up stairs as crooked and worn as those of a fairytale [and] into a low room whose windows opened on the square.’ Across the cobbled market square scurried nuns escorting schoolchildren, a soldier on a Flanders horse, and three priests. They could just make out ‘Breidal and de Coninc’, two bronze battle heroes on plinths, and against the skyline the three-tiered shape of Nôtre Dame’s famous bell tower. In midsummer warmth, they sat outside a café and ‘drank Burgundy and black coffee in glasses with their own filters. Then, before it had grown quite dark, we took a walk through the crooked streets.’ They were lulled to sleep by the soporific chime of Nôtre Dame’s 49 bells.

  The following day they saw Memlinc’s and Jan van Eyck’s paintings and Michelangelo’s Virgin and Child, and after lunch set off for ‘ancient Ghent’, where they marvelled at ‘the tall turrets and the pointed towers’, then drove across Flanders Plain to Brussels where, suddenly, the traffic converged. Driving on the right-hand side of the road was a challenge. ‘Jean read aloud instructions from our admirable A.A. tour; Bet ventured boldly into the heart of lurking traffic; I sat bemused in the back seat.’ They crossed Brussels, found the Chaussé de Wavre, which took them to the Forest of Soignes, and on ‘into an upland country and our road passed through cornfields where poppies were in bloom’. They saw half a house. ‘It was curtained and there were flowers in the window-boxes’, but it had been bombed. This sight, the scarlet poppies and the ‘great many soldiers’ reminded Ngaio of the war. ‘In Flanders they are everywhere,’ she wrote, ‘stocky, workmanlike soldiers going about their business in everyday uniforms. There is something disturbing in this constant reminder of a standing army.’

  It was seven o’clock on a hot evening when they drove into Namur, where they dined at a wayside café near the town centre. ‘It is difficult to order from Belgian menus,’ Ngaio explained. The only word they felt confident to say in French was poulet, and they had eaten ‘three poulets in as many days’. They were determined to eat something different. Scanning the menu, they spotted Jambon d’Ardennes—‘Ham!’—only to find, when it was delivered, that it was ‘sliced pig, heavily salted, but otherwise quite raw. In a ghoulish sort of way we rather enjoyed it. The salad, as usual, was excellent.’

  Their journey took them deep into Belgium. ‘The young forests on the mountains were half-veiled in a delicate smoke. The river’s surface was a sliding mirror.’ The countryside was old; the smell of new-mown grass and honeysuckle captivating; the fireflies in the orchard a spectacle from their pension window. They slowed their pace to savour the trip. At Profondeville, on a brilliant day, Ngaio attempted to paint a sweeping vista of the Meuse River valley with its ‘procession of young trees’.

  Before long a large Belgian bull, two Flanders draught-horses, and the bull’s five wives all gathered about me, sighing heavily…Before we left, Monsieur told us how this same valley had been cut down by shrapnel after the battle of Dinant in August 1914. Over and over again he made a violent gesture with his hands. Coupé! Coupé! C’était terriblé! Coupé! That is why all the trees in the valley of the Meuse are so young.

  Ngaio’s last ‘Pilgrim’ article ended in the Meuse Valley with the words ‘to be continued’, but there would be a five-year gap.

  It was not until she wrote the script for a series of radio broadcasts in 1942 that she continued her account of the road trip, taking up their story in the Duchy of Luxembourg. Ngaio’s description of the countryside was vivid and sensual, her picture of roadside cottages infused with sensitivity. ‘There are glimpses…into lighted rooms where families gather for their evening meal,’ she wrote, ‘glimpses that are arresting & dramatic because the lamplit figures are unaware that outside in the dusk there is a stranger who sees them so briefly & so intimately.’

  At a corner inn they stopped the car and took instructions from three tipsy men. ‘I shall always be grateful to them’, Ngaio recalled, for they directed the travellers up the road to the enchanting medieval village of Esche-sur-Sûre. They drove on until they came to a tunnel. ‘The only way into Esche-sur-Sûe was by the Rip-van-Winkleish, the Peer Gyntish, the altogether goblin-like way of a hole in the hills. Dank walls closed about us & at the far end there was a dazzling little medieval landscape.’ The Sûre River they had been following looped at this point, turning the village, with its fortified castle, into an island. Daylight was disappearing as they drove through the streets and stopped outside an inn directly above the river where it ‘widened into a millpond’.

  They were given one huge room with three feather beds. ‘It was a three-bears sort of apartment with windows that opened above the water.’ That night they feasted on chicken pâté a variety of spicy sausage, a mixed salad and a glass of rough wine. ‘Our lodging for the night in this pleasant inn cost us about 5/-,’ Ngaio explained. ‘But then three months’ travel in Europe in 1937, including our shares in the car cost each of us only £40, & what richness we found on our journey.’

  Before bed they explored the village with its ‘round towers, pepper-pot roofs and loophole windows’. Ngaio tried to make a sketch but found herself surrounded by a crowd, first of children, then of adults—all eager to communicate. By the time they finished their pantomime of gestures interspersed w
ith broken French, German and English, it was too dark to paint. Ngaio looked up again at her fairytale subject. Through the blackness, on the castle battlements, she could just make out, ‘of all extraordinary things, a monkey in a skyblue coat, chattering at me. He ran up & down on the battlement shaking his chain.’

  That night the heat and humidity precipitated a massive thunderstorm. Everything rumbled as they sat up and listened. The next day Ngaio was up early to paint. She thought her work was insipid, but kept it as a reminder of an adventure that would otherwise seem ‘more like a dream’.

  But the dream had a darker doppelgänger. At Wasserbillig they crossed the border into Nazi Germany. ‘Lots of people thought it was wonderful,’ she remembered. ‘Even the humblest tourist saw only the fine rooms in the Herrenvock house. The Bluebeard cupboards were kept tactfully locked.’ But not at Beilstein on the Mosel River, where they were delayed three weeks while Betty Cotterill recovered from pleurisy. If they had moved on they would have missed the dark side of this picturesque town.

  ‘Think of the nicest woodcut…in the oldest book you have ever seen,’ Ngaio wrote. Imagine a town with a castle, with houses with rooftops ‘crazily joined together’, ‘where hay is stored in the attic rooms & the cow lives in the basement’, and you have pictured Beilstein. The sound of singing and the hospitable clink of glasses lured them up twisting stairs to a wine garden owned by the widow Lippmann and her son. It was with the Lippmanns that they stayed. During the day the village emptied of all but the youngest children and crones, who would ‘lean out of their windows & screech amiably across the square’. At sunset, the able-bodied peasants returned from sweltering vineyards ‘dyed from head to foot, in cerulean blue’ from copper sulphate sprays.