But it was the train beside the wharf that arrested her attention. It was ‘the famous Blue Train,’ she explained, ‘cherished by all weavers of detective fiction on the Continental scale’. Already she was thinking of murder on an overnight express. The Blue Train carried them south from austere Paris past fields of vines and ‘pointed ranks’ of black cypress trees, through hills and heat-baked yellow houses to the Riviera. ‘Monte Carlo is beautiful in a lavish carefree sort of way that rather took me aback,’ she recorded. From the balcony of their adjoining rooms they looked down on a ‘cheerful little street’. Subdued sounds of horses’ hooves, church bells, motor horns ‘and the endless lisp of quiet voices’ drifted up in a muted haze of warmth and colour. The casino, by contrast, was a cacophony of Baroque flamboyance. Nude men supported shields; cornucopias spilled forth; voluptuous ‘larger-than-life ladies’ languished in pastoral landscapes. The colours were a muted confection of chocolate, ochre, ‘baby blues and pinks that have gone off’, and everything that could be gilded was. The extravagance of the roof and walls was an entrée to the hushed drama of the floor. ‘Roulette in extremis is a disease,’ announced Ngaio, after describing the many English habituées who came daily, their faces distorted by alcohol and drugs. She savoured the detail of hawk-like men and women who sat expressionless, watching their fortunes dance up and down on the back of an ivory ball.
‘I usually start with a group of people,’ Ngaio told a radio interviewer, explaining how she began a book. ‘I get interested in a group of people…and think about them, their relationships…quite often, just start writing about them…Which of these people is capable of a crime of violence?…Under what circumstances would they be likely to commit it?’
At Monte Carlo, Ngaio was already looking for potential suspects.
She is over middle-age and…enormous. Her face, heavily enamelled, dangles in pockets from the bones of her skull. At three in the afternoon, when I first saw her, she was dressed in jonquil-coloured satin trimmed with marabou, and on her head was a golden cap covered in sparkling diamanté and garnished with an osprey about two feet high. In her claws she carried stacks of mills plaques worth more than £8-each, and in a few minutes she had trebled them…she gathered up her golden robes and swept over to the baccarrat [sic] table where she very quickly lost it all.
Ngaio’s party nicknamed this ‘enormous’ woman’s male counterpart ‘Dolly’, because he had minute hands and feet, a white moustache that looked as though it was stuck on with glue, and was ‘rigidly tailored and tight-waisted to such a degree that he could only move in little mechanical jerks’.
There was also a third sex at the tables that was more memorable than Ngaio was prepared to admit to ‘Pilgrim’ readers in 1928. It was not until she recalled the event in her autobiography Black Beech and Honeydew in 1966 that she mentioned a kind of woman that was ‘entirely new to me. The croupiers referred to the most dominant of them as “cette monsieur-dame”. She seemed to have quite a pleasant time of it, running her finger round inside her collar and settling her tie. She wore a sort of habit and was perhaps by [Christopher] Isherwood out of [Aldous] Huxley.’
The three women found the experience exhilarating. ‘We chose a table and hit Monte Carlo with our system.’ On the first evening they won so much that their purses bulged, but after a week they had lost nearly all their gains. A new tactic was devised. ‘We separated and we spent ages waiting for long runs on the even chances.’ They delighted in being together and free from restraints. In Christchurch, jealous rumours of an affair between Ngaio and Tahu Rhodes were whispered over teacups and behind theatre programmes, but it was the intimacy between Ngaio and Nelly Rhodes that was the glue.
Ngaio was captivated by her friend’s languid, aristocratic ease. Nelly was sure of her place, and had a liberty of spirit that came from privilege. Luxury was assumed, and delicacies ordered and served before balance books were totted. She was vague about practicalities and self-indulgent, but generous to a fault with others whether family coffers were full or empty. Ngaio’s childhood of genteel poverty was vastly different, and her social position more ambiguous. She could play the aristocrat, but she was not born one. For her the upper classes were a fiction, and travelling with Nelly to Monte Carlo was as full of wonder as waking up in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall or Vile Bodies. What Ngaio brought to their relationship was her effervescent wit, her theatricality and the sheer energy of her excitement at being away. ‘[They] called us the “Ladies who Laugh”,’ she wrote, ‘presumably because we were unable to manage the correct expressionless stare at the tables, and on the occasion when we disastrously lost all our plaques laughed helplessly until we cried.’
Nelly Rhodes and Betty Cotterill lost, then recovered to gain a little at the end. Ngaio was more fortunate. ‘I suddenly found I’d won on 15 en plein and made enough to buy a coat and skirt.’ In reality, the outfit she bought with her winnings was reminiscent of the ‘cette monsieur-dame‘ ensemble she later described in Black Beech. Whether Ngaio purchased this outfit to play fashionable-butch to Nelly’s languid-femme is impossible to know, because she destroyed any intimate record of their relationship. In her 20s Ngaio began burning correspondence that would elucidate any deeply felt emotional or physical nuance in her relationships. However, a photograph survives of Ngaio in her ‘cette monsieur-dame‘ dress, suggesting not just modish chic but a theatrical delight in camping it up and testing the boundaries of cross-dressing.
They arrived back as white frosts were beginning to settle on the lawns at Alderbourne Manor. It was cold reality after the excitement of the Riviera, and the New Year of 1929 ushered in a bleak winter. ‘We are in the middle of the greatest frost England has known since eighteen something,’ Ngaio told readers. ‘The woods, the 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,