Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (20 page)

Is Questing’s end the judgment of Tane, protector of Rewi’s adze, or a cover-up for espionage? Perhaps it is a bit of both. In both
New Zealand
and
Colour Scheme,
Ngaio describes Maori as being like the easygoing generous Scottish Highlander or Irishman. They are tribal like the Celts, family-orientated, war-like at times yet extremely hospitable—and they have their own mysticism and law, which she respects. In
Black Beech,
Ngaio wrote of her mother’s ability to sense things, to anticipate events, to see into the future: if she had been a Highlander, it would have been called second sight. Ngaio was never the complete sceptic that her father was, and there was always room in her imagination for the unknowable.

What grates for modern readers, though, is Ngaio’s representation of Maori as the noble savage. All her most admirable Maori characters, such as Dr Rangi Te Pokiha in
Vintage Murder
and chief Rua Te Kahu in
Colour Scheme,
have a European crust of education, manners, breeding and dress, beneath which seethes their essential savagery, waiting to erupt like the plume of a geyser. As well as her usual ‘Cast of Characters’ routinely listed at the beginning of her books, in
Colour Scheme
she included a list of Maori words so readers could understand them in context. Ngaio was hoping the novel would promote an interest in Maoritanga overseas.

The Claire family represents another cultural group under siege. They came to New Zealand for vague and misguided reasons. Their business has languished because of their incompetence and the tough conditions. Colonel Claire puffs and procrastinates over bad manners and bad form, but does nothing. His heyday was his time in the Indian army. Mrs Claire’s hands are callused and stained, as are her daughter’s. For years God’s Own Country has delivered the slimmest margins, and now they are in debt to a charlatan property developer who has possibly committed treason. Isolated in New Zealand by their old-fashioned Edwardian ideas, they turn away dubious guests in order to maintain standards that have no relevance in the New World. The Claires have run out of money and hope, but it is the next generation who will pay the proper price of their misplaced idealism.

Like Eru Saul, their son Simon is caught between two cultures—he is neither a proper Englishman nor a proper New Zealander. Simon has become introverted and uncouth. He is aggressive and speaks with an unpleasant twang.
Ngaio, with her superb ear for spoken dialogue, delights in putting the most banal sayings and brutal slang into his mouth. His sister Barbara, who has escaped her brother’s state school ‘education’ at Harpoon High, has not integrated like her brother. Without her parents’ background, she has become shy and awkward, the unsophisticated product of a genteel poverty that is becoming less genteel by the day. Geoffry Gaunt observes her deprivation with such sympathy that he secretly instructs his secretary to order a new black dress from a fashion store in Auckland. It arrives with an anonymous Shakespearian quotation written in green ink. There are shoes, gloves, and stockings to match—even underpants, because Gaunt shudders to think what the old ones were like. In England, the Claires had the class system to tell them they had something and were something. In New Zealand, they merely survive.

Ngaio understood the difficulties of biculturalism, and knew that it was permeated with prejudice on both sides. The night Questing is killed there is a village concert. Guests from the Claires’ Wai-ata-tapu spa, plus the locals, cram into a medley of seats in the meeting house. ‘It became very hot and the Maori people thought indulgently that it smelt of
pakeha,
while the
pakehas
thought a little less indulgently that it smelt of Maori.’ Ngaio saw the relationship between Maori and Pakeha as a partnership, if unequal and flawed. She also acknowledged that colonization created victims. For both Maori and Pakeha, cultural and geographical displacement had truncated the historical and social roots that defined people’s place and identity.

Colour Scheme
explores this in an entertaining and thought-provoking way. In the dénouement of
Colour Scheme,
Ngaio brings attention to a piece of New Zealand legislation she thought long overdue. As Dikon Bell says of the book’s murderous spy, ‘It’s no good asking me to work up a grain of sympathy for him…There’s no capital punishment in this country now. He’ll spend the rest of his life in jail.’ On 17 September 1941, the Labour government abolished the death penalty for murder, commuting sentences to life imprisonment with hard labour. To Ngaio, this seemed a substantial humanitarian victory, and she did not miss the opportunity to point this out.

Colour Scheme
was generally well received by critics, the only major difficulty being the implausibility of the spy theme. The reviewer for
The New York Times
commended Ngaio for her ‘
marvellous sense of comedy
’ and gift for ‘crazy characterisation’, and went on perceptively to identify the book’s major strength and its central problem:

Alas for my desires, however: I never will know the destiny of the Claires, for Miss Marsh just had to make
Colour Scheme
into a mystery story, and the establishment of the Claires is just so much background for a spy hunt. But I, for one, would like to see Miss Marsh write a real book about the Claires.

In some respects, Ngaio was too successful in her efforts to create realistic characters experiencing the real consequences of colonization. She gave them an imaginative life that made them linger longer in the reader’s mind than the circumstances of the death. The murder was resolved, but their lives were not. They were still there like a haunting after-image. What happened to the truculent Simon and his shabby sister, Barbara, or to Eru Saul and his girlfriend? The perfect exorcism would have been a serious New Zealand novel, but Ngaio steadfastly resisted the challenge. The structure of detective novel was too appealing and she was too successful to give it away.

Ngaio’s next novel,
Died in the Wool,
published in 1945, was also set in New Zealand. But this time it was located in the South Island High Country where issues of cultural displacement and integration were less central to the plot. Overpoweringly present in this novel is its sense of brooding landscape, in the awesome amphitheatres of treacherous mountains. Visions of
Died in the Wool’s
grizzly murder steal along the dark passages of the imagination to the primal depths of horror. The suffocation and subsequent rotting of Florence Rubrick in a wool bale echoes the chilling claustrophobia of the setting. Everyone is a suspect and everyone feels trapped in this mausoleum of frozen rock.

Flossie Rubrick is attending an auction of Mount Moon’s wool clip. She is in her late 40s, with dyed blonde hair; is short and finely built, but clumsy in her movements. In fact, everything about Flossie Rubrick is rough and abrasive. She is not supposed to be there, yet she forces her way backstage so she can look into the faces of the buyers. She is ecstatic when her Japanese friend, Kurata Kan, buys Mount Moon’s clip. ‘Top price!’ she shouts shrilly, to the mortification of her husband, Arthur Rubrick, who is sitting politely in the audience.

It is one of those stinking-hot nor-west days in February 1942, when wool buyer Sammy Joseph and the storeman set about checking the bales. There is a terrible smell. They wonder if it is dead wool, but that smell usually diminishes over time. Sammy Joseph thinks it is more likely a dead rat. The storeman, wearing a canvas glove, reaches an iron hook into a large cut they have made in
the offending bale. When he draws the hook out, it is covered in rust-coloured gore and a strand of metallic-gold hair. The stench is unbelievable, but not a whiff is left when Alleyn arrives at Mount Moon to investigate the murder in May 1943.

He is still in the country chasing spies. Flossie Rubrick’s unsolved murder alone would not have drawn him into the mountains. She was a member of parliament and much too free with her wartime information. There has been a leak through a Portuguese journalist that has been traced back to Mount Moon, where Flossie’s nephew, Douglas Grace, is working with Arthur Rubrick’s nephew, Fabian Losse, on the development of a secret magnetic fuse for antiaircraft shells. The fuse is designed to explode when it approaches anything metallic. Was Flossie Rubrick a German spy? Has she been killed to cover up the activities of a double agent? These are the questions Alleyn is hoping to answer 15 months after Flossie was murdered, bound in the foetal position with ropes, and pressed into a wool bale. This is Alleyn’s first cold case.

Ngaio had never used a timeframe of recollection that went so far back; nor had she had a victim dead in the first few pages of the book. Almost every aspect of Flossie Rubrick, and the events of the night she died, is remembered by suspects at Mount Moon. Alleyn refers to the group’s need to unburden itself about Flossie as ‘verbal striptease’. ‘You are using this room as a sort of confessional,’ he tells them, ‘but I’m bound by no priestly rule.’ There is very little action in the present until close to the end of the book, when it becomes suspense-ridden and the criminal is caught in the act of cleaning up the woolshed after a second murder attempt. Vivid recollections of the unpalatable Flossie Rubrick save the narrative from suffocating in its own inertia. Once again, Ngaio’s set of characters take on lives that are fascinating in their own right.

Perhaps it was the relevance of some of the issues to Ngaio’s own life that gave the story its potency. Like Flossie, Ngaio felt the lack of a son and heir. In 1943, she had travelled to the North Island to stay with her Aunt Edith, whom she called Aunt Amy. This was her father’s eldest sister, who had immigrated to New Zealand with her husband Frederick Baker and five adult children in 1924. Aunt Amy now lived in Tauranga with Lill and Hal, her unmarried children. While Ngaio was staying with them, they drove to Hamilton to meet Aunt Amy’s daughter Stella, her husband John Mannings, and their children Jean, John and younger brother Roy. It would prove to be a life-changing visit. Lack of family in her life was something Ngaio felt keenly, and she always regretted not
having children. In Stella she found the closest thing she would have to a sister and a ready-made family. Ngaio was drawn to the Mannings children whom she came to see as surrogates for her own. The boys captivated her, especially John, the more sedate and contemplative of the two brothers.

John was a well-mannered ‘Etonian’ boy, already suited to her notions of an upper-class son. As a child he was happy to sit at the piano while Roy, nicknamed Bear, ‘rough-and-tumbled and got grubby outside’. Ngaio really only saw the boys: ‘
[Hers] was very much the Edwardian psyche
even though she was a woman herself,’ remembers Jean Crabtree, Stella Mannings’s daughter. Blood relationships meant a lot to Ngaio, and she was generous to all her extended family, but ‘she definitely took a shine’ to John. For the Mannings children, Ngaio was something of a bombshell with her deep voice, international chic, and odd eating habits. She ‘produced a salad for lunch with oranges and garlic in it…she wiped the bowl with garlic’. This was extraordinary cuisine for Hamilton in the 1940s.

Later, the Mannings would stay with Ngaio in Christchurch, and in the early 1950s they lived at Marton Cottage for a number of years. When they stayed, Ngaio would take Stella on shopping expeditions to town and drag her into men’s clothing shops to buy shirts and jerseys. With her unusually long arms, Ngaio claimed these were the only things she could find to fit her. Stella Mannings was a self-taught typist, and when she stayed she translated Ngaio’s handwritten pages into typed manuscript. Ngaio loved the comforting buzz and activity of family life, but also the freedom to isolate herself and write. Stella became a confidante and source of practical assistance and advice. Ngaio was naïve about money. ‘
Anyone could take her down
and they did,’ Jean Crabtree recalled. She ‘lived for months with a huge hole in the kitchen’ when the workman just took off. ‘If she ever got anything done, she paid through the nose for it.’

Having seen the potential of Stella’s son John, Ngaio decided to foster it. She wanted a surrogate son who could benefit from the money she had made and in return give her affection and respect. In 1945 there was much heated discussion, particularly between Ngaio and Stella’s husband, John, about Ngaio paying for young John to go to high school at Christ’s College in Christchurch. In the end it was decided that John (whom she called ‘Johnny’) would become a boarder at the
é
lite boys’ school, and he was enrolled in 1946.

Ngaio derived a huge amount of pleasure from knowing that young John was
in Christchurch. He came for regular Sunday visits, biking over from Christ’s College and working in the garden while strains of music wafted from the windows of the sleepout or ‘whari’, where John was allowed to play Ngaio’s state-of-the-art gramophone. They enjoyed each other’s company. Like her father, Ngaio was capable of moving easily between generations. Cecil and Dundas Walker were often there until 1pm on Sundays, when they departed to return in the evening for a game of Lexicon. Ngaio would pour drinks, and inevitably some excellent apple cider would find its way into John’s glass. His bicycle ride back to Christ’s College for Evensong, Compline, and bed was anything but steady.

Ngaio, the indulgent, mild-mannered rule-breaker, was the perfect patron for a teenage boy. But John’s experiences at Christ’s College were not as positive as Ngaio had hoped. The school, with its internationally trained staff, opened a window for him on the world—‘
When you took literature
, your teacher actually knew T.S. Eliot’—but the emphasis was academic and sporting, rather than cultural. It was a macho atmosphere with well-bred trappings. John Mannings, musically inclined and from the provincial north, was out of step. Although he was joined at Christ’s College, and in his Sunday excursions to Ngaio’s, by his brother Bear in 1949, this did little to alleviate his sense of isolation.