by Janet Morgan
In 1929 Agatha also worked at her first play, Black Coffee, which concerned the murder of an eminent scientist and the theft of a formula for making dangerous weapons – exactly the sort of theme to strike the popular imagination. She had been disappointed in the portrayal of Hercule Poirot in the play Alibi that Michael Morton had adapted from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, although it had enjoyed a good run in London in 1928. She had been equally unhappy with a film, made in the same year, based on ‘The Coming of Mr Quin’. More satisfying was another film, Die Abenteuer GmbH, (Adventure Inc.), made by a German company from The Secret Adversary, but Agatha’s displeasure with the way her novels had generally been adapted for performance decided her to make a start herself. She had always been good at writing plausible dialogue, and had prepared herself for fashioning stage directions by her experience at plotting detective stories, where careful attention had to be given to placing and timing. Black Coffee was a success. It was tried out at the end of 1930, a year in which she was to make an even greater departure.
14
‘… an idea I’ve never ever considered…’
In the summer of 1929 Agatha lent the house in Cresswell Place to Leonard and Katharine Woolley, who then proposed that the following spring she should return to Ur, a week before the end of the 1929–30 digging season, and travel back to England with them through Syria and Greece, including Delphi, which Agatha particularly wanted to see. The autumn and winter were difficult. Monty died in September and, after Christmas at Abney, Rosalind caught measles from a friend in London. Agatha took her to Ashfield for the remainder of the holiday, an excruciatingly painful drive, as she had just been vaccinated in the thigh, with what she always maintained was a double-strength batch of vaccine. After a day or two she was taken, delirious, to a nursing home. Rosalind, meanwhile, was nursed by Madge until her mother returned home for their joint convalescence. In mid-February Agatha at last departed for Italy and then by boat to Beirut.
When she arrived at Ur she found the Woolleys’ household augmented by another young archaeologist, Max Mallowan, twenty-five years old, who had been away with appendicitis the previous season. Max had first joined Woolley’s team in 1925, after reading Greats at New College, Oxford. He had been attracted to archaeology by hearing one of his professors lecture on Greek sculpture, which led him to reflect on the moment at which the Temple at Olympia had been rediscovered. Immediately after taking his final examinations, Mallowan applied for a job to the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, who, by happy accident, had that morning received a letter from Woolley asking for an assistant at Ur. Mallowan was engaged straightaway. He taught himself Arabic, picking up archaeology as they went along. His duties included acting as medical officer to the workforce of 200 to 250 Arabs, as chief packer and escort of the cargo of antiquities which were carefully stowed at the end of each season in forty or fifty crates, and assistant in making up the pay-book, ‘no light task,’ he wrote in his Memoirs, ‘considering the large number of men that we employed and also the fact that we paid in rupees and annas which were extremely difficult to add up.’ Mallowan turned out to be good at keeping the accounts, for he was efficient and conscientious, particularly where money was concerned. Among the papers remaining from his own archaeological expeditions in the late nineteen-thirties and forties are all his account books, recording every item of expenditure, from the labourers’ wages to payment for half-gallons of petrol.
Mallowan learnt quickly and soon became invaluable. He also managed to please Katharine, for, as Agatha quickly observed, he was tactful and managed both the Woolleys deftly. Agatha did not yet know, however, quite how dutiful Mallowan was expected to be – how, for example, he was required to brush Katharine’s hair and administer the massage and application of leeches with which she fought recurrent headache. His diplomatic performance, together with the fact that his absence had made him once more something of a novelty, meant he was Katharine’s favourite, a role he was uncomfortably occupying when Agatha arrived in March.
Another of Mallowan’s duties was to show the site to visitors, some of whom were, to the Woolleys’ gratification, extremely distinguished. (The younger members of the team never forgot Leonard’s mortification when the King of the Belgians came to call and the Arabs serving dinner forgot to take away the soup, as they stood, transfixed, at the sight of a king.) With customary imperiousness, Katharine declared that Mallowan’s responsibilities would now extend to escorting Agatha on a tour of local sights on the way to Baghdad, where the whole party would be reunited. Agatha thought it a fearful imposition that ‘a young man, who had worked hard on an arduous dig and was about to be released for rest and a good time’, should be obliged to take about ‘a strange woman, a good many years older than him, who knew little about archaeology’. She confided her fears to Algy Whitburn, the expedition’s architect and Mallowan’s near contemporary and friend, whom she knew from her earlier visit. Whitburn assured her that if Katharine had made up her mind, everything was as good as settled.
Agatha was therefore rather nervous as she and her guide set off on their expedition. Mallowan was a calm and grave young man; he later wrote: ‘I found her immediately a most agreeable person and the prospect pleasing.’ They were not in fact such an incongruous pair as Agatha had initially feared. Max was a specialist, ready to explain the origins and associations of the places they saw, and his command of Arabic added to his authority. The women he had known had all been somewhat out of the ordinary: his Parisian mother, a Christian Scientist who wrote lyric poetry (‘some of which had, I believe, merit’), who lectured on the arts and painted enormous, swirling canvases; Lady Howard, wife of the British Ambassador to Madrid and, later, Washington, the mother of Max’s best friend at Oxford, Esmé; Gertrude Bell, then in her late fifties, who as Director of Antiquities in Iraq would come to Ur to wrestle with Woolley over the disposition of the finds; and Katharine herself. Mallowan was therefore unflustered by the companionship of a successful, well-known woman, who was in any event now dependent upon him. Agatha was, for her part, enthusiastic and interested, with a wry and appealing sense of humour. After the disciplined and claustrophobic atmosphere of the camp, where all trod carefully to avoid provoking Katharine, the journey on which Agatha and Max set out must have seemed a companionable release.
They have both described what happened next, Max in his Memoirs and Agatha in her Autobiography. There was the ziggurat at Nippur, one of Sumer’s most ancient sites, and an uncomfortable night at Diwaniyah with a venomously offensive political officer, his sociable wife and two scared missionaries. On they went to the walled town of Nejeif and then to the castle of Ukhaidir, where Max handed Agatha round the dizzy parapets. At this point in their recollections one or the other, or the pair of them, understandably becomes confused. When did they visit Kerbela? Before or after their impromptu bathe in a sparkling salt lake, Agatha demurely clad in a pink silk vest and double pair of knickers, Max in shorts and a vest? Was it on the way to Kerbela or on the way to Baghdad that the car stuck inextricably in the desert and Agatha sensibly lay down in its shadow and took a nap? Was it five minutes after their Bedouin strode off to find help, leaving what water he had (‘we of the Desert Camel Corps do not need to drink in emergency,’ Agatha, with some foreboding, heard him say), or an hour later, that a Model T Ford miraculously arrived, with the Bedouin, to hoist them from the sand? Did the hospitable policeman at the station in Kerbela, where they spent the night in neighbouring cells, recite ‘Ode to a Skylark’ in English (Agatha’s recollection) or ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ in Arabic (according to Max)? It doesn’t really matter; the point was that each acquired respect for the other and that they began to have fun.
Max and Agatha arrived late, firmly allied, in Baghdad. Katharine was annoyed. Agatha’s old friend, Colonel Dwyer, who came to the station to see off the curious party, warned Agatha that for the rest of the journey she would have to stand up for herself. She resolved to do so after
several demonstrations of Katharine’s insidiously proprietorial behaviour – she managed always to secure the largest room, driest bed, brightest lamp – and after witnessing the automatic capitulation of the men. (The sorest moment was when Agatha discovered that Max had allowed Katharine, because ‘she wanted it’, the hot bath he had drawn for Agatha.)
With occasional sorties and retreats by one party and then another, they reached Mosul, Aleppo, and next proceeded by boat to Greece. Here Max was to leave the others to make his way to the Temple of Bassae, while the Woolleys took Agatha to Delphi, a visit she eagerly anticipated, despite the risks of being left alone with this unstable pair. But at Athens a pile of accumulated telegrams waited at the hotel: Rosalind had caught pneumonia, was very ill, had been moved to Abney, was in a serious state, was slightly better. There were no air services from Athens to London; the fastest journey home was by train, which took four days. While the men hurried off to the travel agent, Agatha wandered about in a daze, stumbled in the street and sprained her ankle. It was Max who, without fuss, produced bandages and sticking-plaster and announced that he had changed his plans and would travel with Agatha to fetch and carry for her.
They left the next evening and, as people will, talked on the train about themselves, Max distracting Agatha by telling her his history. Years later, when Max seemed to some the model of an Englishman in his appointments (Fellow of All Souls College, a Trustee of the British Museum), appearance (tweeds, pipe and soft hat) and habits (pottering between his club and his Institute, fond of his cellar, a good dinner and cricket), his younger colleagues would remark amusedly that ‘he hadn’t a drop of English blood in him.’ Max’s family was indeed cosmopolitan. His grandfather, an Austrian, had lived in Vienna, where he owned a steam-powered flour mill which was so successful that it won many important prizes, including a gold medal struck by the Emperor Franz Josef. The mill, which was not insured, was eventually burnt to the ground and this disaster left the family impoverished and inspired Max’s father, Frederick, to leave Austria for England, where he spent the rest of his life.
In London Frederick found a post with a firm of merchants and after a time established his own business, trading in fats, oils and copra. He was accounted such an expert as to be appointed an official Examiner of Raw Materials for what became the Ministry of Food. After the First World War he acted as chief quality arbitrator to the firm of Unilever; Max delighted in telling the story of how Frederick, appearing before the court in a case concerning alleged food-poisoning, offered to eat on the spot some margarine that was said to be tainted. This tale illustrated how firm Frederick’s convictions were. It is an echo of an episode in the eighteen-nineties when, leading his squadron on mid-summer manoeuvres in Bosnia-Herzegovina, he defied instructions to take his troops home in the mid-day sun and, by moving them at night, ensured that they arrived immaculate and unravaged by heatstroke. This successful challenge to authority, which earned him a decoration, was one of the incidents which led Agatha to remark that Frederick reminded her of Monty. In some respects Frederick was a difficult man, caring very much for order and exactitude, testy when his point of view was questioned. This, Max admitted, made for a quarrelsome marriage. Frederick, kind but egocentric, had married an enchanting but restless woman, equally uncompromising: Marguerite Duvivier, born in Paris in 1876, the daughter of an engineer and an opera singer. She inherited her mother’s recklessness and gaiety, rapturous embrace of artistic things, preference for town life and appetite for society. Max, the eldest boy of three, was born in 1904.
In his Memoirs he described what he could recall of his childhood, an account considerably briefer than Agatha’s. Unlike her, he was not always happy; unlike her, too, he had an orthodox education. From his preparatory school, where he learned to love Greek, he went to Lancing, the High Church Anglican public school in Sussex, which he found particularly irksome. One problem was chapel, where the boys were expected to worship twice daily and five times on Sunday. Max was so sated with this regime that, to his Headmaster’s astonishment, when the time came to be confirmed he refused to take part and thus to become eligible to take Communion. The other irritation was the requirement that a good many hours be devoted to military training and parades. This was all very well while the War lasted; Max himself, from a military family, admitted to being keen for the day when he would go off to fight. But when the War was over it was different. The boys in Max’s house, led by the principal rebel, Evelyn Waugh, were passionately anti-militaristic but still they were required to drill.
Max left Lancing early, just after his seventeenth birthday, after only a year in the Sixth Form. He already had a place at New College, Oxford, and the argument with his Headmaster over the confirmation question persuaded him that it was best to leave immediately, since he would plainly be given none of the usual privileges or authority in his last year of school. Frederick agreed, not because he was himself an agnostic (Max did not tell him what had happened) but because Lancing was so obviously inferior to his own thorough Continental education. It is significant that Max took such a strong stand on this point about religion. He did not do so lightly and, indeed, he was to continue to agonise over it. His account of the episode was particularly interesting to Agatha, who was herself quietly devout and, as we have seen, anxious about the religious implications of her divorce from Archie. Max’s spiritual troubles were renewed towards the end of his time at Oxford and in the year immediately following it. His friend Esmé Howard was found to be suffering from a wasting disease and was sent to a clinic in Switzerland. On his way to Beirut Max visited the clinic, where Esmé begged him to become a Catholic and take Communion (the Howards were a deeply Catholic family), saying he had suffered for Max’s religious doubts. In the diary he kept from 1922 to 1926 Max described how he made and kept that promise, realising, when he thought the question over, that in fact his conviction was sincere.
Esmé died the following year. His illness and death had a profound effect on Max, the more because their friendship had developed at Oxford, which Max had adored. After Lancing, he said, Oxford was ‘a step from purgatory to Paradise’; here feelings could be expressed more freely than had been thought appropriate at school. He was not glued to his books, despite the efforts he made in the summer term of his third year, when his diary begins promisingly with a list of his hours of rising (8.45a.m. on good days) and retiring (between midnight and 3a.m.) and an account of his vacation reading (some of Plato’s Republic, all of Keats, Descartes’ Discourse on Method and, more frivolous, The New Arabian Nights and other Robert Louis Stevenson). The most important thing he learnt, Max always said, was how to drink wine with his friends. He was twenty-one and, though he knew what he wanted to do, he was in some ways still immature when he joined Woolley’s dig.
Four years at Ur had toughened him; he learnt to give orders and to manage the men – indeed, even to manage Katharine Woolley. He knew some of his own skills and strengths: that he could rough it, that he had great facility for learning languages and that he possessed the intuition, as well as the knowledge, an archaeologist requires. There had been time to reflect on his parents’ marriage, on the deaths of Esmé and of other friends, on his colleagues’ various and complex relationships. But when he and Agatha met, Max was in other ways inexperienced. He was not as reckless as Archie had been at the same age but he was as sensitive – easily hurt and, away from the secure ground of his own subject, unconfident. Like Archie, too, he had little money. And, again like Archie, until this encounter he had never been, as one of his oldest friends put it, so ‘thoroughly bowled over’. Agatha liked this scholarly and attentive young man and, for all her new-found independence, it was a relief to have an entertaining and discreetly helpful companion on the long journey from Athens, especially with her injured ankle and worries about Rosalind.
There was one more adventure before they reached London. At Milan they left the train to buy oranges and, while they were away, it departed, with their bag
gage. There was nothing for it but to hire a powerful and expensive car and race the train through the mountains to Domodossola, where they caught up – just – and were assisted into their coach by excited fellow-passengers. As a result of this mishap, neither Max nor Agatha had any money for the last leg of the journey, so that Agatha’s first meeting with his mother, who was waiting for Max in Paris, consisted of greeting her briefly and then borrowing all she had. Thus provided for, Agatha went on to London alone.
Rosalind, though unusually listless, was recovering quickly and after a few days Agatha took her back from Abney to Ashfield. Max was now working at the British Museum and had asked Agatha to let him know if she were coming to London. At first there was no prospect of this, until Collins asked her to a party at the Savoy to meet her American publishers. She arranged to travel up on the night train and invited Max to Cresswell Place, ‘the only person I’ve ever asked to breakfast’, she wrote to him later. After the rush of confidences at a first encounter and before the comfortable reminiscing of a third, the second meeting was awkward. Initially tongue-tied, they were soon sufficiently relaxed for Agatha to ask Max to come to stay at Ashfield. One weekend in April he left his scholar’s sanctuary at the British Museum, travelled with Agatha on the midnight train from Paddington, met Rosalind and Peter at Torquay, and was led off for picnics and strenuous walks on Dartmoor in the rain. On the last night of his visit, after Agatha had retired, Max knocked on her door, came in, sat down on the end of her bed and asked her to marry him.