Sometimes the Prince of Wales was there and…alone, at a table just inside the door, sat a strange figure: an old, old man with a flower in his coat who looked as if he had been dehydrated like a specimen leaf and then rouged a little. No one ever accompanied him or paused at his table. He looked straight before him and at intervals raised his glass in a frog’s hand and touched his lips.
One night we asked the restaurateur who he was.
‘A poet,’ said Signor Vecchi, ‘and once, long ago I understand, a celebrated personage. It is Lord Alfred Douglas [Oscar Wilde’s lover].’
It is in the Hungaria that Nigel Bathgate meets his girlfriend Angela North and waits for Roderick Alleyn in A Man Lay Dead. Alleyn has allowed them to leave Frantock briefly to help him track down a secret Russian brotherhood. Men from Scotland Yard are hiding in an empty shop opposite the house where members of the fiendish ancient sect are meeting. The signal for them to strike will come from the Hungaria. Nigel has been told the secret password: it is the name of a murdered Pole.
His heart is racing. He is alone on the street as he turns in and orders a table at the back of the restaurant because he is not wearing evening dress. He sits down. His hand shakes visibly as he takes out his lighter. He smokes three cigarettes and fidgets anxiously. The band is playing ‘in the desultory manner that distinguishes the off hours in fashionable restaurants’. There are just three couples on the floor.
‘Do you want to order, sir?’ murmured Nigel’s waiter.
‘No thank you. I’ll wait until my—I’m waiting for someone—I’ll order when she comes.’
He lights another cigarette, wishes Angela were here, then loses himself in thoughts of Alleyn, and the agent, Sumiloff. Suddenly a voice from a solitary man at the next table cuts through his concentration. He wants to know when the Hungaria band will begin to play. Nigel is distracted and annoyed.
‘Not until midnight.’
‘That’s a long time,’ said the stranger, fretfully. ‘I’ve come on purpose to hear it. Very good, I’m told.’
‘Oh, frightfully,’ said Nigel unenthusiastically.
‘They tell me,’ continued his neighbour, ‘that some Russian is to sing here tonight. Lovely voice. He sings a thing called The Death of Boris.’
Nigel starts violently, then controls himself. He thinks he has been given the secret password. A thrill goes through him and he almost overflows with excitement. The information rushes out. He tells the stranger that the Russian brotherhood has been tricked into meeting at Alleyn’s house, and that Sumiloff is waiting there now. With that, the stranger is satisfied and abruptly calls to the waiter for the bill. A few minutes later he passes Angela, who is just arriving at the door. Nigel Bathgate will become Alleyn’s Watson, but not before he finds himself tied to a chair with a sharp blade being pushed under his fingernail. This is his apprenticeship, and he will learn the importance of passwords and getting them right.
Even though she was reading it in pencil from exercise books, Rose Marsh could hardly put A Man Lay Dead down. After her husband retired, by taking up ‘a number of secretaryships’ he had saved Rose’s fare to England. They could not afford for Henry to accompany her, so Rose arrived alone at Alderbourne in 1930, to find her daughter distracted from writing and acting by working in a shop during the day and living the high life at night. She bitterly regretted the waste of Ngaio’s talent and was not quiet about it. The situation gradually sorted itself out. The Rhodeses were tired of commuting and moved to London, where they took two big flats in Eaton Mansions, close to Eaton Square in Belgravia; some of the staff boarded out. Initially, Ngaio and her mother moved with them, but they stayed only long enough to find their own flat. In June or July, they shifted into a basement bedsit around the corner in Caroline Terrace. Nelly Rhodes was kind enough to make sure they were comfortably set up with excess furniture from the shop. Rose Marsh’s arrival put the brakes on one of the most exciting periods of her daughter’s life, but Ngaio could see why. She felt guilty that she had abandoned her New Zealand novel and had written only travel articles since she’d left New Zealand. Trips to the theatre became serious and critical, and fashionable nightclubs an occasional luxury. She started to think more seriously about writing a detective novel.
For Rose, the links Ngaio made with their own life and A Man Lay Dead were uncanny. In fact she had taken names, places and characters directly from real life. Most disquieting was Dr Tokareff, the Russian from Sir Hubert Handesley’s embassy days in Petrograd. He not only shared the same name, but was obviously based on Peter Alfanasivich Tokareff, an unstable Russian émigré who had played opposite Rose in a production of George Calderon’s The Little Stone House in 1914. Rose, a talented amateur actress and excellent acting coach, had invited him to practise at their home on the Cashmere Hills. They rehearsed endlessly, and the inevitable happened: Tokareff became enamoured with Rose, then Ngaio. On the evenings he visited them, they would hear him coming up the hill singing ‘at the top of his formidable bass voice…My father, who found him noisy, would look up from his book and say mildly: “Good Lord, the Russian.”‘ Henry and his wife were worried. Their daughter was the focus of their life and they did not want her to marry. Ngaio was flattered but not emotionally mature enough to handle the volatile relationship. After declaring his love for her, the rebuffed Russian disappeared. Rose Marsh recognized his singing and his accent intonations in the fictional Dr Tokareff’s dialogue and mannerisms. The doctor was a suspect in the novel; Peter Tokareff, a victim of real life. On 28 October 1919, he was discovered dead in a Christchurch park. The unfortunate man had committed suicide.
In early 1932, Rose Marsh returned to New Zealand, reluctantly leaving Ngaio in England. She had hoped her daughter would come back with her, but did not feel she could push the point. Ngaio would only realize how much her return would have meant to her mother when it was too late. Really, there was no contest: her wild London life with the Rhodeses was infinitely more appealing than daughterly domesticity in sleepy Cashmere. With sadness, and a sense of guilt mixed with a certain amount of relief, she saw her mother off, then moved back in with the Rhodeses to immediately resume her old life. But it was only a matter of months before a worrying letter arrived from her mother. Rose was ill and it seemed her recovery would be protracted. Other letters came, and then a cable from her father that clutched at her heart. Three days later she sailed for New Zealand.
Frantic to depart, she barely had time to think about her book. Fortunately it had been typed and was left with Edmund Cork, a literary agent in London. On the wharf it dawned on her that her life was in two places half a world apart. She wondered if she would ever see her mother again, but also whether the Rhodeses would save her a seat in the English ‘bandwagon’ she had come to love.
CHAPTER TWO The Theatre of Death
It was August 1932, the chill end of a stark Christchurch winter, when Ngaio returned. Her parents’ bedroom at Marton Cottage was a hushed sickroom. There were silences and huddled out-of-sight consultations. Death could be only briefly contained, but to Ngaio, sitting by the bed watching, Rose Marsh’s end was as ‘cruelly and as excruciatingly protracted as if it had been designed by Torquemada’, the most cold-blooded of the Dominican inquisitors. Rose’s pain was managed