by Janet Morgan
13
‘London – Paris – Lausanne – Milan – Venice …’
From this moment it is as if Agatha gradually became two people. One, Agatha Christie, was regarded by the press and to some degree the public as their property, someone in whom there would be continuing interest, about whom there would always be talk, a popular author who every year would apparently without difficulty produce at least one detective story and several shorter pieces. The merits of her work, its technique and fairness would be constantly dissected. There would be unceasing speculation as to her nature and, in particular, about her actions and motives during that time of her life when she had been at her most vulnerable. This Agatha Christie, the subject of public admiration and curiosity, would nonetheless manage to remain extremely private, neither courting publicity nor feeling it necessary to explain herself. That reticence and restraint would only quicken public attention and serve to enhance her mystique. The more she eluded her devotees, the more firmly they appropriated her. The less she said about herself, the more they claimed to know. Agatha Christie was to become a public institution; ‘an Agatha Christie’ the term, immediately intelligible all over the world, for one of her detective stories.
The other person was Agatha, natural, domestic, an ordinary human being rather than a myth, the person whose development she would herself eventually chart in her Autobiography. This woman did not wear a single label, ‘Agatha Christie’, a guarantee of certain unvarying characteristics. She assumed, rather, a succession of guises at varying moments in her life: ‘Agatha-Pagatha, my black hen’, trussed up by her grandmother; Agatha Miller, a thoughtful and interested child; ‘Mac Miller’ and ‘Nathaniel Miller’, ‘Martin West’ and ‘Mostyn Grey’, the pseudonyms under which she first wrote; Mrs Christie, Archie’s ‘Angel’; and Theresa Neele, who lost herself. There was ‘Mary Westmacott’, the novelist; ‘Miss Agatha Christie’, as the detective story writer was often erroneously called; Mrs Mallowan, after her remarriage, and, later, Lady Mallowan, ‘Nima’ to her grandson and great-grandchildren, and ‘Ange’, as Punkie and her nephew Jack first called her; and, finally, Dame Agatha, whom the Post Office unhesitatingly recognised as the person to whom they should deliver a letter addressed simply to ‘Greatest Novelist, Berkshire’. The public read Agatha Christie’s books and saw her plays; it was the other, complex Agatha who wrote them.
Nor was their composition effortless, particularly after the turmoil of 1926. The beginning of the following year found Agatha undergoing treatment in Harley Street, still not knowing what would become of her marriage, where she would live and what the effects of these upheavals would be on Rosalind. Agatha owed her publishers a book and she needed money but, completely unable to write, she could resolve neither of these problems. Fifteen years later, when she asked her agent to hold a manuscript in reserve, she remembered that time. ‘I have been, once, in a position where I wanted to write just for the sake of money coming in,’ she told him, ‘and when I felt I couldn’t – it is a nerve-racking feeling. If I had had one MS then “up my sleeve” it would have made a big difference. That was the time I had to produce that rotten book The Big Four and had to force myself in The Mystery of the Blue Train’.
The Big Four was a stopgap, a compilation of the last twelve Poirot stories, published in the Sketch. Agatha put them together at Campbell’s suggestion and with his help. The book sold well but Agatha was not proud of it. She and Rosalind spent the summer in Devon, calmly with old friends, and in the autumn Agatha tried again to finish the book with which she had been struggling at the time of Clara’s death. She attempted to dictate it to Carlo, now living with Agatha and Rosalind in Chelsea. Rosalind went to a small private day school, where she shone – Agatha kept all her reports – but she missed her father, though Archie used regularly to take her out. She wrote to him on Sunday evenings; other girls, Rosalind said regretfully, had only one letter to write. Agatha still hoped her marriage might revive. Archie, however, was convinced that only marriage to Nancy would make him happy. With great reluctance Agatha agreed to divorce him. She was deeply troubled by this decision, partly because she loved and missed her husband, partly because divorce was at that time regarded as something of a disgrace. Agatha’s distress was the greater because she felt that she had somehow betrayed Rosalind and, wise though she became about the nature of marriage and the problems people have in sustaining that complicated and demanding tie, she was always to feel a small ache of guilt, in her own eyes and before God. After her divorce, she did not take Communion in Church, fearing that now she might be refused. At this difficult time Agatha greatly depended on two people, her brother-in-law James, who helped her recognise that Archie really had made up his mind and that she should now try to concentrate on her own work and life, and Carlo, who had from the first believed that, once gone, Archie would not return. Encouraged by these two staunch allies, Agatha left England in February 1928, taking Rosalind and Carlo to the Canary Islands, to make a final attack on The Mystery of the Blue Train. They moved around in search of good bathing, finding it eventually at Las Palmas, where there was a beach for surfing. Agatha’s photographs show her sitting in the sun and paddling among the rocks with Rosalind but she looks drawn around the eyes and her shoulders are tense.
Painfully, the book was finished. A notebook she took with her shows how hard a task it was: beside the heading for each laboriously completed chapter she has written the accumulated total of words. The narrative has strikingly bright patches, as if the sparkling sea, strong sunlight and stripey shadows of the Canaries helped Agatha, and Carlo, with the description of that part of the French Riviera where much of the story occurs. The heroine, Katherine Grey, is one of the humorous, self-sufficient, independent young women Agatha took pleasure in drawing. Like Agatha, she was in her thirties – there are a number of references to her reconciling herself to a single life – but, unlike Agatha, she has just been left a fortune, with which she proceeds to dress and equip herself in a way which makes the most of her natural beauty, hitherto obscured. The Mystery of the Blue Train was not well written – it is full of well-worn expressions and soulful sentiment – but as well as being an exciting story it is somehow touching, and not simply for the brooding references in the early chapters to the fading of love and the practicality of divorce. Agatha is trying hard to be spirited and adventurous and there is a good deal of wishful thinking in her picture of Katherine Grey determinedly setting off for the Riviera. The last lines of the book are particularly interesting when we know Agatha’s state of mind, and their self-consciousness is perhaps one reason why she always thought of this book with embarrassment. Hercule Poirot is discussing the Blue Train, that runs between London and the Riviera, with a young, lovelorn American girl, who has observed how relentless a thing is a train: ‘People are murdered and die, but [trains] go on just the same.’ Poirot, reflective and paternal, replies that, in that sense, life is like a train which will at last reach its journey’s end. ‘Trust the train, Mademoiselle,’ he murmurs, ‘for it is le bon Dieu who drives it.’ Agatha is reassuring herself. Not surprisingly, however, her wounds were still raw. The Mystery of the Blue Train is dedicated to the two companions to whom, in the difficult days at Styles, she had confided her troubles – Carlo and Peter. The inscription at the front of the book – ‘To the two distinguished members of the OFD, Carlotta and Peter’ – refers to the ‘acid test’ Agatha and Carlo applied to their friends and acquaintance, putting the loyal into the honourable Order of the Faithful Dogs. Agatha still felt that Archie had betrayed her. Into a writing-case, with his letters and various mementos, she put a cutting from a copy of Psalm 55, verses 12, 13 and 14:
For it is not an open enemy, that hath done me this dishonour: for then I could have borne it.
Neither was it mine adversary, that did magnify himself against me: for then peradventure I would have hid myself from him.
But it was even thou, my companion: my guide, and mine own familiar fri
end.
In April 1928 Agatha was given her divorce. In her Autobiography she says little about the year that followed, except for a short account of her search for a school for Rosalind, who wanted to go to somewhere large, ‘the biggest there was’. After much hunting, Agatha chose a preparatory school at Bexhill, Caledonia, whose staff, pupils and routine were later successfully blended with those of her next school, Benenden, to provide the background for Agatha’s story Cat Among the Pigeons. It is interesting that in her search for a preparatory school Agatha turned to her old friend and colleague Eileen Morris. True, Eileen’s brother John was the headmaster of a boys’ preparatory school, so that she might be well placed to assist in the search. But it is also the case that at certain difficult moments in her life, when her resolution needed strengthening, Agatha looked to Eileen for moral reinforcement. It had been Eileen, strong-minded, self-assured, who had encouraged Agatha to write and to send her work to magazines, who had brought her into the dispensary, and who now helped her into her new and independent life as if there were nothing unusual about it. A photograph of the two, taken then, shows Eileen striding out in a smart overcoat, forthright and slightly grim, while Agatha, more slight and soft, is catching up. It is obvious that Eileen would be an unshakeable and confident ally in an emergency.
At this time Agatha was doubtless lonely. She had Carlo, of course, and a circle of married friends in London but, having been used to having a husband, it was not the same to go about alone or even with another woman. As she had always done in such troughs, Agatha worked. In late 1928 and 1929 she produced a number of short stories which she sold to magazines. These, and her next two books, The Seven Dials Mystery and Partners in Crime, paid the bills.
Agatha’s first notes for The Seven Dials Mystery were made in a small black notebook Archie had left behind. Its first few pages are taken up with jottings for other stories (‘The Stain on the Pavement: Drops on a Tube train? Umbrella that has rested on blood …’). Agatha habitually took up any handy notebook – including Rosalind’s old school exercise books, half-completed account books, out-of-date diaries partly occupied by recipes and lists of bulbs, things to be packed, and inventories – and scribbled her ideas for stories on whatever pages happened to be blank. She wrote fast and illegibly, in pencil or ink, approaching her task in a workmanlike fashion: ‘New Book’ heads the page on which she started to concoct Seven Dials. She was not at first sure of the title (‘The Secret Six’ was an alternative) nor of the plot, for her initial try begins: ‘Bundle and her father. She drives up to London – runs over man – or rather swerves to avoid him – but finds she has killed him – not quite dead – says Secret Six. Tell Jimmy Thesiger – doctor is got – says man has been shot.…’ A page later, however, her notes settle into the story as it eventually appeared. Seven Dials is firmly written at the top of the page and her draft goes steadily on: ‘Country House Party – at Chequers? – One man can’t get up in the morning. Everyone gets up a joke – They buy alarum clocks – and hide them round his room. In the morning man does not appear. He is dead. One clock has disappeared. 7 left.…’
Although she experimented before settling on the names of the rest of the cast in Seven Dials, Agatha decided from the beginning that she would revive the energetic and aristocratic ‘Bundle’, who had first appeared in The Secret of Chimneys. Her other novel of that year, Partners in Crime, also reintroduced a previous invention, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, now married, slightly older and, perhaps for that reason, even more irritatingly perky. Albert, the assistant porter in The Secret Adversary, has become their factotum. Both Seven Dials and Partners in Crime are cheerful books, with sprightly conversation and deftly worked plots. Indeed, in Partners in Crime some of the mysteries are so delicately fashioned as to be like fragile puddings, delicious but wholly unmemorable, as Agatha herself admitted nearly fifty years later in a letter to Edmund Cork. To show Tommy and Tuppence parodying the speech and mannerisms of characters created by other detective story writers – Freeman Wills Croft’s ‘Inspector French’, for instance, or G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’ – seemed, she wrote, ‘an amusing idea at the time but doesn’t really come off now’. The only story she felt people still remembered was ‘The Man Who Was No. 16’, in which she was actually making a joke at the expense of her own Hercule Poirot. The fact that Agatha was sufficiently confident to make jokes at all, let alone a pastiche of other crime novelists’ creations, indicates that she was regaining her self-esteem and that she was happier. Rather than turning miserable memories over in her mind, in idle moments she spun parodies for herself, as she had done during the companionable days in the dispensary, and was later to do on birthdays and holidays in Devon and the desert, celebrating with verse in the style of Edward Lear, Hilaire Belloc or Lewis Carroll. Agatha was also now less anxious about money. Her books sold well, newspapers and magazines were ready to serialise them, and she had rediscovered her zest for writing. She was fertile with ideas, happy with her new publisher and secure in the hands of an able and understanding agent.
Agatha’s state of mind in late 1928 is particularly evident from the fact that at this moment she chose to undertake an experiment, the writing of a long novel, ‘straight’ only in the sense that it was not a detective story, for its plot was complicated and its theme ambitious. This was Giant’s Bread, published in 1930 but delivered to Collins in January 1929. She wrote it under the pseudonym of ‘Mary Westmacott’; some jottings show that she first tried ‘Nathaniel Westmacott’, a development of her old disguise of ‘Nathaniel West’, after her grandfather and great-grandfather. It is possible that she chose to write under another name partly because, as she later put it, she felt ‘guilty at departing from the usual type of story’; detective fiction was her profession and this something of an indulgence. This novel is, moreover, very revealing, more discursive and speculative than a detective story, without the formal conventions and disciplined construction which in crime fiction distract the reader’s attention. Giant’s Bread takes in many themes, too many, written with an immediacy that betrays their closeness to the author’s own experience. The hero’s recollection of his childhood is rooted in Agatha’s own memories and other moments, like the retort the small boy hopes to make on meeting God, derive from her observations of her nephew Jack. The experience of the hero’s wife, Nell Deyre, as she works as a ward-maid during the First World War, echoes Agatha’s own and the picture of Jane, a singer who eventually overstrains her voice, having her breathing, endurance and aptitude tested by the composer, Radmaager, suggests Agatha’s own ordeal as an aspiring opera singer.
More disturbing, in that they seem to expose too much of Agatha’s own feelings, are those themes and passages in Giant’s Bread which describe how her characters face impossible choices, how greatly they mind about things, how much they hurt themselves thereby. The novel explores painful subjects: frustrated longing for a particular place (in this case ‘Abbots Puissants’, the home of the hero and his ancestors); appeals for love, affection and vindication; the desire for recognition and for anonymity. The plot is, on reflection, daft, but – as in her crime fiction – Agatha convinces, in part because the pace of events leaves little time for consideration, in part because, however sketchily they are shown, her characters’ appearance, remarks and emotions are as they should be. Agatha ensures that the detail is right. Just as poisons, topography and legal niceties are correctly and unobtrusively described in her crime novels, so in Giant’s Bread she exactly depicts the cultural setting of her story, in the years before and immediately after the First World War. Her references to the ballet are right, her descriptions of popular reaction to contemporary music appropriate, she conveys perfectly the state of the theatre, the ambitions of the Futurists and Vorticists, the hope that was placed in post-Revolutionary Soviet art, and, particularly, the nature and objectives of contemporary musical composition. She was interested in new theories and Giant’s Bread is most thoughtful when it examines c
hanging attitudes to new forms of artistic expression. Agatha had mulled over the difficulties of the composer’s struggle with experimental forms while watching the efforts of Roger Coke, whose mother was a friend of Madge Watts. Coke offered a stimulus and a sounding-board for Agatha’s description of Vernon Deyre but her ideas for Deyre’s opera The Giant were very much her own. The final form of that opera almost exactly resembles her first notes.
Agatha’s portrait of Vernon Deyre, obliged to compose despite himself, is not autobiographical, save for one moment at which Vernon’s adult experience comes uncomfortably close. His friends persuade him to see a hypnotist, who tries to restore the memories he has suppressed. The doctor, ‘a tall, thin man with eyes that seemed to see right into the centre of you and to read there things that you didn’t even know about yourself …’ made you ‘see all the things you didn’t want to see’. That passage is certainly an allusion to Agatha’s treatment in 1927. So is the novel’s preoccupation with the idea of personal identity and with the nature of fear, for Vernon Deyre’s terror of the ‘Beast’ resembles Agatha’s horror of the Gun Man and, as Vernon faces his nightmare, Agatha, by writing this book, confronts her own. Between the first and second pages of her notes is pressed a four-leaf clover. No one knows when it was put there, or by whom, but it is a fitting symbol.