Agatha Christie

by Janet Morgan

  10

  ‘… I do not think she knows who she is’

  It was a different matter with Agatha’s disappearance. It may be hard to explain why she behaved as she did and what exactly took place on that occasion but it is not at all difficult to understand why there was a fuss, on a memorably large scale. To unravel that affair, it is necessary to examine not simply Agatha’s actions but also the reactions to them then and ever since. The story is instructive less, perhaps, for what it reveals about Agatha’s character and state of mind than for what it shows about the wisdom and professionalism of those who took it up. It is undoubtedly, a remarkable tale, a mixture of the wryly amusing and deeply painful, an affair that, though intensely private, somehow or other – and to Agatha’s continuing distress – achieved the status of a popular legend. More than half a century later, it provided the basis of a tasteless piece of fiction, Agatha, subsequently filmed. The episode was, and has remained, the subject of constant speculation, amateur and professional theorising, and insatiable curiosity. The nature of that ‘somehow or other’ is as interesting as the facts of the matter themselves.

  By the end of 1924 Agatha was unsettled and lonely and the impulse to move house became irresistible. She produced some familiar rationalisations: ‘Comfortable though we were in Scotswood, it had a few disadvantages. The management were not particularly reliable. The wiring of the electricity gave us trouble; the advertised constant hot water was neither constant nor hot; the place suffered from a general lack of maintenance.…’ (In the first draft of her Autobiography this appears as ‘suffered from too many cars’.) Men grow bored and restless too, and in this case it seems to have been Archie’s idea that they leave Scotswood, not, however, for somewhere other than Sunningdale but to buy a house of their own. Sunningdale, said Archie, had everything they wanted: ‘It’s the right distance from London and now they’re opening Wentworth golf course as well.’

  Agatha did not demur. Perhaps the prospect of buying a house – indeed, designing one, since the Wentworth estate had been acquired by a builder – was sufficiently interesting to make her set aside her doubts. Moreover, she was as usual ready to fall in with Archie’s plans. Her acquiescence may also have been connected with the fact that her ‘golfing ambitions got a sudden booster’. In the finals of the Ladies’ Tournament at Sunningdale she had encountered an opponent with the same handicap and the same degree of nervousness as herself and, having utterly despaired of beating her, she relaxed and captured the silver trophy. Mrs Christie in 1926 was not very different from Agatha Miller some fifteen years before, who had persuaded herself that she shared Wilfred Pirie’s obsessions. Even when she and Archie decided that they could neither afford nor, even at what seemed to be ‘a colossal price’, bring themselves to like the sort of house the builder could offer them, they nonetheless bought Agatha a debenture share of £100 in the Wentworth development, which, she touchingly observed, ‘would entitle me to play on Saturdays and Sundays on the links there, as a kind of stake for the future. After all,’ she added bravely, ‘since there would be two courses there, one would be able to play on one at least of them without feeling too much of a rabbit, and until Wentworth had worked itself up to the status of Sunningdale, I should probably be able to play with other rabbits of my acquaintanceship.’

  The house on which they eventually settled, after a year or so of looking, appealed to Archie chiefly because of its proximity to the station and to Agatha because of the beauty of its garden. The price was reasonable, though still rather more than they could afford, since the property had been on the market for some time. Agatha found the house itself unnatural and depressing; ‘It was,’ she wrote, ‘a sort of millionaire-style Savoy suite transferred to the country,’ decorated regardless of expense with panelling, gilt and ‘quantities of bathrooms, basins in bedrooms and everything’. She consoled herself with the thought that, when their finances were in better shape (Archie’s income was assured, but her own fluctuating, and they had no capital), they might redesign and redecorate the interior. Waiting to do so was difficult for Agatha, who liked to put her own stamp on her surroundings straightaway. The garden provided some compensation. Long and narrow, it had a lawn bordered by a shallow stream, thick with water plants, in which it was safe for Rosalind and Judy, Nan’s daughter, to play. A wild garden, with azaleas and rhododendrons, gave on to a kitchen garden, and beyond that was a tangle of gorse bushes.

  The house had a local reputation for being unlucky; Agatha heard that, of the three couples who had lived there, the first had lost their money, the second owner had lost his wife, and the third couple had separated and departed. Agatha and Archie started afresh by renaming the house. Archie proposed that they call it ‘Styles’, after ‘the first book which had begun to bring me a stake in life’. This choice, presumably intended as a joking compliment to Agatha, nonetheless strikes the outsider as odd, for the events that took place in The Mysterious Affair at Styles were hardly the sort with whose memory a newly acquired house should be blessed. Archie’s idea, moreover, has an off-hand ring, as if he were implying that the house was Agatha’s, not a joint enterprise, while Agatha’s agreement suggests that she accepted that they could not invent a new name together. On one wall they hung the painting The Bodley Head had commissioned for the jacket of Agatha’s book. It cannot have been a comfortable picture to live with, not only because it is contrived and slapdash, but also because it is extremely sinister. It showed a background of black and sea-green draperies, against which a hollow-eyed figure in a scarlet dressing-gown looked aghast at some unseen horror. The flame from his candle revealed a murky personage busily crouched over a table and the haughty figure of a woman, clutching diaphanous veils round her polished shoulders, with a flock of ghostly shapes, newly roused from sleep, crowding in behind.

  The Christies tried to make the best of Styles. They bought new carpets and curtains and, with some difficulty, found a married couple to look after them – the wife an excellent cook, the husband an idle fellow – and a cheerful if languid maid. Setting up the new establishment did not, however, prove the answer to their unease. In fact, it made it worse, as they began to worry about the expense of maintaining the house, two cars and three servants, and of living on an altogether more ample scale. Whether there was real need to worry is beside the point. Agatha, certainly, was insecure: ‘Our bank account seemed to be melting in a most extraordinary way.’ Madge took her away for a fortnight’s holiday to Corsica; Agatha enjoyed being removed from domestic cares but photographs show her looking heavy and strained, although her appearance is not flattered by the clumsy felt cloche hats that were then fashionable.

  A month or so after Agatha’s return, Clara fell ill with bronchitis. She had stayed for several months at Scotswood, in the flat opposite Archie and Agatha’s, taking great pleasure in playing with Rosalind, on whom she practised what the fascinated Miss Fisher, who found Clara ‘intelligent but decidedly eccentric’, described as ‘great ideas of child education’. There was little else to interest Clara in Sunningdale, and eventually Archie and Agatha had arranged for her to take rooms with some friends in London, where she could, if she wished, keep entirely to herself, or join her hosts when she wanted company. Ashfield had not been sold. It remained an important part of Agatha’s life, a refuge and a draw. Clara repaired to Torquay from time to time; when Archie and Agatha were in the Pyrenees she looked after Rosalind there. The house was difficult to keep up but its memories were of recuperation and reunions. Clara was at Ashfield when she became ill and Agatha went down to be with her. She was then replaced by Madge, who eventually telegraphed to say that she was moving Clara to Abney, where it would be easier to look after her, and for a time Agatha joined her mother there. Although Clara seemed to mend, she moved little from her room. She was now seventy-two and weakened by illness. Agatha returned to Sunningdale but a week or so later she was urgently summoned back to Abney. In the train to Manchester she had a premonition – �
�a feeling, I think, of coldness, as though I was invaded all over’ – that her mother was dead.

  However many deaths one has seen (and, as Agatha reminded herself in her Autobiography, in the hospital she had seen many people die), that of someone close gives a special shock. ‘It is only the shell that remains there,’ she wrote. ‘All my mother’s eager, warm, impulsive personality was far away somewhere.’ Agatha and Clara had depended upon each other, not just because Clara was Agatha’s mother but also because, since Frederick’s death, Agatha had to some extent mothered Clara. The fact that Agatha had not been with Clara when she died may have increased natural feelings of misery and guilt. Archie was unable to reasssure her. At the time of Clara’s death and her funeral he was away in Spain on business, and in any case he found unhappiness and inadequacy embarrassing. His own feelings for Clara were mixed; some of their friends suspected he was jealous of Agatha’s devotion. At any rate, on Archie’s return to his grief-stricken wife he was puzzled and uncomfortable. Rather than proposing, however impracticable it might have been, that he might defer his business to be at home with Agatha and Rosalind, he clumsily suggested that Agatha return with him to Spain. He meant well, for he thought it might distract her. Agatha afterwards blamed herself for preferring to stay at home. ‘I see now,’ she wrote, ‘that that was where I was wrong. My life with Archie lay ahead of me. We were happy together, absolutely assured of each other, and neither of us at that moment would have dreamed that we could ever part, or that anything could come between us.’ These brave words are not wholly convincing, for Agatha and Archie’s life together seemed already to have lost its momentum. Archie certainly appears to have been thoughtless. He may not have used the exact words that Agatha ascribed to him when she recalled his saying, later, that he had wished her to be ‘the same as usual, and full of jokes and fun’, but it is significant that she brooded over some such remark. Difficult though it is to share another person’s grief, it is nevertheless possible to nurse them through it, blundering, perhaps, by supporting them, rather than for the time being expecting the usual support for oneself. Archie does not appear to have realised this.

  Death, moreover, brought in its train not just emotional turmoil but hard physical and intellectual work. There was the estate to settle and clearing up to be done, and this fell on Agatha’s shoulders. Clara had left Ashfield to her, together with the immediate responsibility for rescuing it from the disrepair into which it had fallen. Hard physical work was in some respects therapeutic: sorting and ordering helped to soothe shock, ruthless tidying and throwing out assuaged the anger accompanying grief. Agatha attacked the debris and dilapidation, the accumulated treasures and rubbish of years. There had been no money for repairs, the roof was falling in and the walls leaking. All but two of the rooms had been abandoned. From top to bottom the place was crammed with possessions, those brought by Margaret added to Clara’s own, all in various stages of decay. Auntie-Grannie’s removal from Ealing, and the destruction, waste and chaos it involved, had disturbed Agatha severely when she was younger and more resilient. Now she was miserable, tired and despairing. Her description is of monstrous, pointless objects, like the large wreath of wax flowers, under a glass dome, that was her grandfather’s memorial: ‘It was all right for Granny – it was her husband’s, but I had never even known him. What does one do with a thing of that kind?’

  She worked like a demon, assisted by one maid in the morning and another in the afternoon, searching, discarding, carting stuff down flights of stairs. Nor was she clear as to her actual purpose: the first draft of her Autobiography speaks of the prospect of ‘rehabilitating Ashfield, or, at any rate, if necessary, getting ready to sell it’. Undermining her, too, were further worries about money. The Christies were overdrawn at the bank and, as people often will when they are in a frenzied state, in their efforts to escape that complication they devised another. The scheme was to let Styles for the summer at a good rent. Agatha and Rosalind would stay at Ashfield, while Agatha continued sorting out and stripping down, with Archie staying at his club, making golfing expeditions at weekends. By August, when Madge would be free to leave Abney, the bulk of the work at Ashfield would be done, so that Agatha could leave with a clear conscience and, entrusting Rosalind to Madge, go abroad with Archie for a holiday. They settled on Alassio in Italy; Agatha, writing later in her life, could not remember why, but it may have been related to the serene and sunny associations of Elgar’s music ‘In the South’. It was a prospect to which she clung during the six weeks’ clearing and trudging at Ashfield.

  The holiday promised escape, rest and companionship, for Agatha now found herself with no adult in whom she could confide. Archie had retired to business and golf, declining to come to Ashfield at weekends on grounds of inconvenience and expense, and Carlo too had gone. Her father was believed to be in the last stages of cancer and she had returned to Edinburgh. Hating to leave Agatha, she departed. It is not clear exactly when Carlo went away nor when she returned. Agatha describes it as being at the time of ‘all this confusion, work and unhappiness’, while Carlo herself, in a letter she wrote to Rosalind describing the events of this perplexing and miserable time, spoke of Agatha’s sending for her from Scotland and telling her that Clara had died. What is plain, however, is that Agatha’s only friend and confidante was absent during these sad summer months.

  It is understandable that Agatha’s chronology is confused. She was sleeping badly and eating insubstantial and erratic meals, and from time to time would momentarily forget who or where she was. Some believe that Agatha’s autobiographical description of her state is a mixture of truth and self-deception and that, although she was undoubtedly ill and upset, she later took pains to establish that she was bewildered and forgetful, the better to sustain the public explanation of the events that followed. Her account is, however, convincing in small, apparently unimportant ways. She speaks, for instance, of hesitating as she signed a cheque, and of doubtfully putting ‘Blanche Amory’ as her signature. In the second draft of her Autobiography this passage was abbreviated; but the first draft was persuasive: ‘I still had the feeling that it was not quite right. Was it Blanche, or some other name? Was Amory spelt with an E or with an O?’ And, later in that paragraph: ‘It had something faintly familiar about it, and in the end I remembered, or at any rate thought I remembered, it was a character apparently in one of Thackeray’s novels – Pendennis, I thought. I still did not know why I had bagged it for myself: Pendennis was not a novel I was particularly fond of though I remembered Thackeray was Father’s favourite. But I was not fond of any Thackeray; Dickens was my love – so why Blanche Amory? I put it aside.’ This sort of despairing muddle over unimportant detail – ‘O’ or ‘E’, the fact that she did not like Pendennis – rings true.

  August came and with it Rosalind’s birthday, Punkie’s arrival, Archie and the Italian holiday. Archie, however, seemed unlike himself, edgy and evasive, so much a stranger that Agatha recalled her old nightmare of the Gun Man, in which a familiar, loved and hitherto loving person was suddenly transformed into someone hostile and unreachable. Worried that something might be wrong at the office, even, wildly, that Archie might have, if not embezzled, ‘embarked,’ as she put it, ‘on some transaction for which he had not proper authority’, she pressed him to explain. During the next few days he admitted, first, that he had made no arrangements for their holiday, and eventually, that he had fallen in love with someone else, Miss Nancy Neele, with whom he had played golf. Agatha learnt this news at Ashfield, where Rosalind had been born, at the time of Rosalind’s birthday.

  There are moments in people’s lives on which it is unwise, as well as impertinent, for an outsider to speculate, since it is impossible to be certain about what actually took place or how the participants felt about it. Often, indeed, the people most closely concerned cannot themselves explain how they reacted and why. In her Autobiography Agatha has given her own account of her reaction to Archie’s confession that he no
longer loved her and that he wanted a divorce. Her description is entirely plausible and intelligible: bewilderment gave way to shock, shock to guilt and anger. At first she did not understand what Archie was talking about. Then she could not believe his mood would last: ‘I thought it was something that would pass.’ She looked for reasons, blaming her own preoccupied and miserable state: ‘If I’d been cleverer, if I had known more about my husband, had troubled to know more about him, instead of being content to idealise him and to consider him more or less perfect.… If I had not gone to Ashfield … if I had stayed in London … I must in some way have not been adequate in filling Archie’s life.…’ From feeling guilty she turned, increasingly exasperated, to explanations rooted in Archie’s character and stratagems for survival: ‘He must have been ripe for falling in love with someone else, though he didn’t know it himself.… Or was it just this particular girl? Was it just fate with him, falling in love with her quite suddenly? He had certainly not been in love with her on the few occasions we had met her previously. He had even objected to my asking her down.… He said it would spoil his golf. Yet when he did fall in love with her, he fell in love with a suddenness with which he had fallen in love with me, so perhaps it was bound to be.…’ There is no reason to disbelieve Agatha’s account. She is not manipulating characters in a book – her mother’s death and Archie’s defection had painfully shown that in real life events were uncontrollable and human beings perverse – but describing an experience of her own, in troubled and untidy phrases.