Ngaio Marsh: Death of a Peer

With much love,

Your affectionate

AUNT HILDA

P.S. I have written a little note to Lady Charles Lamprey. By the way I hope that is the correct way to address her! Should it perhaps be Lady Imogen Lamprey? I seem to remember she was The Hon., or was it Lady, Imogen Ringle. I do hope I have not committed a faux pas ! I think her husband is the Lord Charles Lamprey who was at Oxford with dear old Uncle George Alton who afterwards became rector of Lumpington-Parva but I don’t suppose he would remember. AUNT H.

P.P.S. On second thoughts he would be much too young!! A. H.

Roberta grinned and then laughed outright. She looked up to find her fellow-passenger smiling at her. “Everything as it should be?” he asked. “Lovely,” said Roberta. ii

As the distance lessened between wharf and ship the communal life that had bound the passengers together for five weeks dwindled and fell away. Already they appeared to be strangers to each other and their last conversations grew more and more, desultory and unreal. To Roberta, the ship herself seemed to lose familiarity. Because she had so much enjoyed her first long voyage she was now aware of a brief melancholy. But only a ditch of dirty water remained and on the wharf a crowd waited behind a barrier. Isolated individuals had begun to flutter handkerchiefs. Roberta’s eyes searched diligently among the closely packed people and she had decided that neither Henry nor Frid was there when suddenly she saw them, standing apart from the others and waving with that vague sideways sweep of the Lampreys. Henry looked much as she remembered him but four years had made an enormous difference to Frid. Instead of a shapeless schoolgirl Roberta saw a post-debutante, a young woman of twenty who looked as if every inch of herself and her clothes had been subjected to a sort of intensive manicuring. How smart Frid was and how beautifully painted; and how different they both looked from anyone else on the wharf. Henry was bare-headed and Roberta, accustomed to the close-cropped New Zealand heads, thought his hair rather long. But he looked nice, smiling up at her. She could see that he and Frid were having a joke. Roberta looked away. Lines had been flung to men on the wharf. With an imperative rattle, gang-planks were thrown out and five men in bowler hats walked up the nearest one.

“We won’t be allowed ashore just yet,” said her friend. “There’s always a delay. Good Lord, what on earth are those two people doing down there? They must be demented! Look!”

He pointed at Henry and Frid who thrust out their tongues, rolled their eyes, beat the air with their hands and stamped rhythmically.

“Extraordinary!” he ejaculated. “Who can they be?”

“They are my friends,” said Roberta. “They’re doing a haka .”

“A what?”

“A Maori war-dance. It’s to welcome me. They’re completely mad.”

“Oh,” said her friend, “yes. Very funny.”

Roberta got behind him and did a few haka movements. A lot of the passengers were watching Henry and Frid and most of the people on the wharf. When they had finished their haka they turned their backs to the ship and bent their heads.

“What are they doing now?” Roberta’s friend asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered nervously.

The barrier was lifted and the crowd on the wharf moved towards the gangways. For a moment or two Roberta lost sight of the Lampreys. The people round her began laughing and pointing, and presently she saw her friends coming on board. They now wore papier-mache noses and false beards and they gesticulated excitedly.

“They must be characters,” said her acquaintance doubtfully.

The passengers all hurried towards the head of the gangplank and Roberta was submerged among people much taller than herself. Her heart thumped; she saw nothing but the backs of overcoats and heard only confused cries of greeting. Suddenly she found herself in somebody’s arms. False beards and nose were pressed against her cheeks; she smelt Frid’s scent and the stuff Henry put on his hair.

“Hullo, darling,” cried the Lampreys.

“Did you like our haka ?” asked Frid. “I wanted us to wear Maori mats and be painted brown but Henry wanted to be bearded so we compromised. It’s such fun you’ve come.”

“Tell me,” said Henry solemnly, “What do you think of dear old England?”

“Did you have a nice voyage?” asked Frid anxiously.

“Were you sick?”

“Shall we go now?”

“Or do you want to kiss the Captain?”

“Come on,” said Frid. “Let’s go. Henry says we’ve got to bribe the customs so that they’ll take you first.”

“Do be quiet, Frid,” said Henry, “it’s all a secret and you don’t call it a bribe. Have you got any money, Robin? I’m afraid we haven’t.”

“Yes, of course,” said Roberta. “How much?”

“Ten bob. I’ll do it. It doesn’t matter so much if I’m arrested.”

“You’d better take off your beard,” said Frid.

The rest of the morning was a dream. There was a long wait in the customs shed where Roberta kept remeeting all the passengers to whom she had said good-bye. There was a trundling of luggage to a large car where a chauffeur waited. Roberta instantly felt apologetic about the size of her cabin trunk. She found it quite impossible to readjust herself to these rapidly changing events. She was only vaguely aware of a broad and slovenly street, of buildings that seemed incredibly drab, of ever-increasing traffic. When Henry and Frid told her that this was the East End and murmured about Limehouse and Poplar, Roberta was only vaguely disappointed that the places were so much less romantic than their associations, that the squalor held no suggestion of illicit glamour, that the Road — looked so precisely like its name. When they came into the City and Henry and Frid pointed uncertainly to the Mansion House or suggested she should look at the dome of St. Paul’s, Roberta obediently stared out of the windows but nothing that she saw seemed real. It was as if she lay on an unfamiliar beach and breaker after breaker rolled over her head. The noise of London bemused her more than the noise of the sea. Her mind was limp; she heard herself talking and wondered at the coherence of the sentence.

“Here’s Fleet Street,” said Henry. “Do you remember ‘Up the Hill of Ludgate, down the Hill of Fleet’?”

“Yes,” murmured Roberta, “yes. Fleet Street.”

“We’ve miles to go still,” said Frid. “Robin, did you know I am going to be an actress?”

“She might have guessed,” said Henry, “by the way you walk. Did you notice her walk, Robin? She sort of paws the ground. When she comes into the room she shuts the door behind her and leans against it.”

Frid grinned. “I do it beautifully,” she said. “It’s second nature to me.”

“She goes to a frightful place inhabited by young men in mufflers who run their hands through their hair and tell Frid she’s marvellous.”

“It’s a dramatic school,” Frid explained. “The young men are very intelligent. All of them say I’m going to be a good actress.”

“We’ll be passing the law courts in a minute,” said Henry.

Scarlet omnibuses sailed past like ships. Inside them were pale people who looked at once alert, tired and preoccupied. In a traffic jam a dark blue car came so close alongside that the men in the back seat were only a few inches away from Roberta and the Lampreys.

“That’s one of the new police cars, Frid,” said Henry.

“How do you know?”

“Well, I know it is. I expect those enormous men are Big Fours.”

“I wish they’d move on,” said Frid. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we fell into their hands one of these days.”