Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  After Frederick’s death, Agatha became increasingly anxious lest Clara should be run over by a tram or die suddenly in the night; she would creep along the passage and listen at the door to ensure that her mother was still breathing. Although, as Agatha admitted, children of twelve or thirteen do suffer such exaggerated worries, Clara’s condition did give grounds for concern. She, too, had suffered a number of mild heart attacks and eventually Agatha took to sleeping in what had been Frederick’s dressing room, next to Clara’s bedroom, to be on hand to revive her in the night with brandy or sal volatile. This is not to say that Clara was a prostrate invalid. In many ways she was as lively as ever, suddenly carrying Agatha off to hear Sir Henry Irving (‘He may not live much longer and you must see him, a great actor. We’ve just time to catch the train …’) and, when she accompanied Agatha to Paris, going with her to the theatre and the opera.

  Clara depended largely on Agatha for companionship and amusement. They could no longer afford to entertain at home and, partly for that reason, Clara did not often go out to lunch or to dine. In any case, the position of a widow, even a young one, was different from that of a woman with a husband to escort her, particularly if, as in Clara’s case, she had not been accustomed to going about alone even before her marriage. In the evenings she and Agatha would read aloud from Scott, Thackeray and, their favourite, Dickens – Clara, who wanted light nearer than the gas jets, balancing a candlestick on her chest.

  Clara’s circle had been enlarged, however, by Madge’s marriage. James Watts’s mother, Annie Browne, had been a great friend of Clara’s when they were schoolgirls and it was in this way that Madge and James had met. James came from a prosperous Manchester family, whose fortunes derived from a colonial export business founded by his grandfather, Sir James Watts. In his palatial warehouses Sir James stored the bicycles, alarm clocks, flannel trousers and other goods destined for the furthest reaches of the Empire. His house, Abney Hall, was an equally famous sight. An enormous Victorian Gothic mansion, it had been altered and extended at Sir James’s direction and included a vast room that was used for religious and political gatherings, for Sir James was Lord Mayor of Manchester. The Prince Consort was entertained at Abney. while Mr and Mrs Gladstone and, on a separate occasion, Mr and Mrs Disraeli had stayed there. Madge’s father-in-law, James Watts Senior, had inherited the house in the late eighteen-seventies. An antiquarian and amateur photographer, he had continued to embellish and enrich it until it almost overwhelmed the occupants.

  Much of Abney’s lavish ornamentation, including its carvings, carpets, furniture and hangings, was ‘Gothic revival’; indeed, the work was based on designs by Pugin, who had worked on the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament. There were unnumerable staircases, alcoves, galleries and arches, all fancifully decorated. Windows of coloured glass were traceried, mullioned and ornamented with gargoyles. The main drawing-room had a frieze on which a proverb was endlessly repeated, the walls were hung with green damask covered with more hangings stencilled in bright colours, and the ceiling had octagon-shaped inverted pinnacles, tipped with gold, descending from each panel – ‘like the Alhambra,’ the children said. Another drawing-room, bursting with chintz-covered sofas, had a fireplace set in a huge curlicued marble chimney-piece. The woodwork and the papier-mâché carving of doorways and shutters was picked out in ultramarine, vermilion and green; ceilings and tiles were initialled; doorhandles, lock-plates and hinges, grates, candelabra and standard lamps were all specially designed. Agatha remembered Abney as having three pianos and an organ and, years later, when it was sold, harpsichords and virginals were discovered here and there (as well as half a valuable tapestry whose remainder had hung for centuries in a church in Bruges). Every corridor was crowded with oak chests and every wall hung with paintings, some by Madge’s father-in-law. There was a room for jigsaws and in the garden a lake, a waterfall, a tunnel and a set of houses for children to play in, one a small fort with its own pointed windows and crenellations.

  Madge and her husband lived at Cheadle Hall, a Georgian house nearby. Agatha and Clara spent part of every winter there, for after 1903, when Madge’s son Jack was born, they would go north to look after him while his parents went to St Moritz for skating, and at Christmas they joined the whole Watts family at Abney, feasting gloriously with James and Annie, Madge and James, Madge’s four brothers-in-law and her sister-in-law Nan. Christmas Day was especially strenuous, with a huge lunch, tea and supper, interspersed with quantities of chocolates, preserved fruits and confections from the store-room, to which, unlike its counterpart at Ealing, access was unrestrained. On Boxing Day there was an expedition to Manchester to the pantomime, while Abney itself was pervaded by charades and dressing-up, for all the Watts family, apart from James, were enthusiastic actors. Humphrey, James’s brother, who was eight or nine years older than Agatha, had his own theatre in Manchester, while Lionel, another brother, acted professionally in London. Madge, too, never lost her mania for disguise. Once, late in her married life, she came down to dinner dressed as a cricketer, in black breeches, cricket cap and shorts. James disapproved, but she induced Agatha to show solidarity by assuming the appearance and manners of a Turkish woman; entirely swaddled in black, she sat through the meal making little belching noises, as Madge instructed. (Jack Watts, Madge’s son, had the same trait. As an undergraduate at Oxford he is reputed to have dressed up in women’s clothing, on one occasion as the Virgin Mary.)

  From the day of his birth Jack gave Agatha great pleasure; she was then thirteen, still baffled as to how babies originated and ignorant as to how long they took to arrive, but enthusiastically assuming the duties of an aunt. Her Autobiography has many descriptions of Jack’s sayings and doings and her album pages of photographs of her playing with him, reading to him and, wearing a large oilskin cap like a pudding-basin cover, taking him bathing in the sea. Agatha liked small boys and from the age of twelve until her marriage at the age of twenty-four she saw a good number – the children of her mother’s friends or of her own. One of these remembered, years later, playing at Ashfield when he was three and she was twenty. He had sprinkled someone’s feet with a watering-can and, when Agatha told him he was a rascal, gleefully cried out, ‘And you’re a lady rascal.’ She carried him off to the schoolroom, riding on her back, so he called her ‘Lady Elephant’, and, when she showed him the stuffed swans in two glass cases in the Billiard Room, he called her ‘Lady Swan’. Agatha remembered this occasion too; nearly twenty years afterwards she brought back a lapis lazuli elephant from the East as a present for her former playmate, and the game they played is described by Mrs Ariadne Oliver in Elephants Can Remember.

  From 1902 or thereabouts, Agatha’s companions were not just little boys of her nephew’s age. This was the time when she was sent for lessons first to Miss Guyer’s and then to the succession of French pensions, in part, perhaps, because Clara did not wish that the two of them should become too exclusively dependent on each other’s company. At home in Torquay Agatha was now old enough to go about independently with other young people – the Huxleys, Hoopers, Morrises, Lucys, Bushes and Thellusons: to the Fair, where they bought nougat from a stall and rode on switchbacks and gilded roundabout horses, the girls sitting side-saddle, balancing their fruit, flower and ribbon-laden hats; to the Regattas at Dartmouth and Torquay, where they watched the yachts from the quay and the fireworks in the evening. There were teas and suppers on neighbours’ lawns and grand garden parties, with splendid ices and cakes, served by professional waiters, whom they knew because they also helped at dinner parties. Agatha’s album has many photographs of young men in high starched collars and young women in muslin leg-of-mutton blouses or narrow-waisted, fur-trimmed costumes, their skirts only a few inches from the ground, playing croquet or manipulating the sticks and strings of the new game called Diabolo.

  In the morning Agatha and the Lucys would take their skates and pay their twopences to go roller-skating on the pier; there is a picture of the five
of them, holding hands in a line, just managing not to roll away. Agatha, tall and slender, with quantities of thick, pale hair, is wearing a splendid hat with three or four pheasant’s tail-feathers sticking out at a dashing angle. Prim though Torquay society was at that time, with its careful segregation of the classes and the sexes, it afforded many amusements for the young – yachting and tennis, roller-skating, eating fresh mussels and oysters bought mid-morning, listening to the Royal Marines’ String Band. It was also a healthy place; the train that steamed into Torre had reached the end of the line and, though horse-drawn cabs and broughams plied between the station at the top and the quay at the bottom of the town, Agatha and her friends usually walked everywhere, up and down Torquay’s seven hills, in the clear sea air. In the summer she would cheerfully walk the two or three miles to and from her favourite swimming place; she adored sea-bathing and continued to take every opportunity to swim until she was very old. It is not surprising that she and her friends had hearty appetites, nor that, despite them, they retained their elegant shapes. Artifice helped. In a list she drew up in the nineteen-sixties comparing the advantages and disadvantages of ‘Then and Now’, Agatha put first among the drawbacks of the early nineteen-hundreds: ‘Boned collars of muslin blouses. Most painful, giving red sore places,’ and, ‘Corsets. One was encased in a kind of armour of whalebone, tightened round the waist and coming up like a painful shield over one’s bosom.’ That, and the rest of the list, gave a crisp summing-up of her circumstances; the disadvantages continued with: ‘Patent leather high-heeled shoes in which one went to garden parties. This entailed walking in them for anything up to three miles, holding up one’s long skirts at the same time. A refined form of Chinese torture. Long skirts. A continual nuisance, though useful because one could dust one’s patent leather shoes on the back of one’s stockings on arrival at a party, and your skirt concealed all. Cold hands and feet, and chilblains. Agony in winter. Children’s, and others’, tight buttoned boots. (Probably the cause of the chilblains.) Hair dos. Elaborate and painstaking, and usually entailing the use of tongs.’

  The advantages, though fewer in number, were as deeply felt: ‘High standard of domestic comfort. Fire lit before you got up, cans of hot water brought at intervals all day. Luxurious train travel. Hot foot-warmers pushed in at stations at intervals, lots of porters to handle luggage, delectable lunch baskets, comfortable carriages and well cleaned. Leisure. Our greatest loss. The one really valuable thing in life – a possession that is yours to do what you like with. Without it, where are you?’

  4

  ‘… she will have to make up her mind between them some time …’

  Though Agatha was strong and happily occupied, Clara was unwell and her life emptier than before. Shortly after Agatha’s return from Miss Dryden’s in 1910, her mother fell seriously ill; no doctor could diagnose exactly what was wrong – they suggested, variously, gallstones, paratyphoid and appendicitis. Disenchanted with all of them, Clara took matters into her own hands. She believed she needed a change and, having found a doctor who advised her to try sunshine and a warm climate, settled on Egypt. This was not a bizarre choice. Near and Middle Eastern countries that today seem exotic and somewhat dangerous to Europeans were much less mysterious to the Victorians and Edwardians. They were in large part administered by the British (and, here and there, the French), there were regular sailings to and fro and Thomas Cook and Sons were used to making arrangements. Egypt was a particularly sensible place to spend the winter; it was dry and sunny and not too far away, Cairo had reputable hotels where English people stayed, several regiments were stationed nearby, there was polo to watch and a dance at one or other of the hotels nearly every night of the week. As Clara could not afford to give Agatha a London season of dances and afternoon parties like that which Madge had enjoyed in New York, Cairo was a perfect substitute. It was not expensive, there would be Englishwomen to give Clara some society and English girls for Agatha to mix with, but not so many and so smart that she would be daunted, and plenty of unattached young men with whom she could dance, flirt and go on expeditions and among whom she might even discover a husband.

  They sailed on the SS Heliopolis and installed themselves for three months at the Gezirah Palace Hotel. Chaperoned by Clara, Agatha went to some fifty dances. She was profoundly irritated by the difficulty of putting up her hair, which was so long that she could sit on it; dressing it with an artificial knot of curls was almost impossible. She took, however, enormous pleasure in her first evening dresses: one of pale green chiffon with small lace frills, a plain one of white taffeta and a third of deep turquoise material, produced by Auntie-Grannie from one of her bottomless chests but so fragile that during the course of a dance it split in all directions. Its replacement, ‘bought from one of the Levantine dressmakers of Cairo’ (a fashionable one, Agatha believed, since the dress was very expensive), was pale pink shot satin with a bunch of pink rosebuds on one shoulder. This wardrobe is described in Unfinished Portrait, whose heroine Celia, during her own season in Cairo, is obliged to pad the bodice with the ‘delicate ruchings of net’ called ‘plumpers’, being, like Agatha, tall and thin.

  Agatha’s photograph album shows how they passed the afternoons. There were the Cairo Races, attended by the Duke of Connaught, and Spring Manoeuvres (the pictures show the officers sitting on folding stools and the men on the ground); there was the Review, watched from a pavilion by the visitors, the ladies wearing muslin veils to protect them from the sun. Dashing officers mounted on beautiful horses brandished polo sticks and leapt over hurdles, and, with boaters and cigars at a rakish angle, perched on tables or lay languidly in wicker chairs during leisurely tea parties. There was an expedition to the Citadel and a picnic in the desert (at which the ladies in their whalebone sat heroically in canvas deckchairs). There was also, as at home, croquet and Diabolo.

  Egypt was not yet the object of popular fascination that it was to become in the early nineteen-twenties, when Howard Carter’s archaeological investigations were crowned with the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Some of the findings of early explorers were, however, to be seen in the Cairo Museum and Clara tried to persuade Agatha to accompany her there. Agatha, vastly enjoying her new acquaintances and social preoccupations, resisted her mother’s entreaties. Nor did she wish to make an expedition up the Nile to visit Karnak or Luxor, although she was taken to see the Pyramids and the Sphinx, where she was photographed, sitting confidently on a donkey. It was not, then, this first stay in Egypt that stimulated Agatha’s later interest in antiquities and archaeology but it was certainly a happy visit, her first association of the East with feelings of comfort, amusement and success.

  At least one of the attentive young subalterns and captains immortalised in Agatha’s photograph album asked Mrs Miller whether he might ‘speak to’ her daughter. The only men who stirred her heart, however, were a couple of bronzed colonels of thirty-five or forty, who conceded an occasional dance and teased the ‘pretty young thing’. Agatha was, moreover, still shy, with no conversation. Indeed, one of the older men said as he returned her to Clara after a dance: ‘Here’s your daughter. She has learnt to dance, in fact she dances beautifully. You had better try and teach her to talk now.’ This was Captain Crake, who had accompanied the party to the Citadel. From his photograph he looks a playful fellow, shown kneeling in his tartan trews and looking upwards at the tennis ball his fiancée is about to drop on his head. In Unfinished Portrait, Agatha made a joke of this remark, but, though justified, it was cruel.

  During her stay, Agatha made friends with at least twenty or thirty young men and that, after all, was the main objective. In her autobiography she has much to say about the procedure by which girls of her age and class were launched into adult life, into a world where public affairs were with few exceptions managed by men, and older men at that. Her description is of a time of gaiety and freedom, the season in which girls who might have known few young men intimately, apart from their brothers and o
ther male relations, might now meet large numbers of them from much the same background and with much the same expectations as themselves, while youths, hitherto confined to each others’ company at school, in the Army or Navy, might at last encounter girls other than their sisters and female cousins. From a circle so dramatically enlarged, a suitable mate might be selected. Agatha was delightfully straightforward about this; several passages in her Autobiography explain what it was like to find herself, as she put it, in ‘the world of females on the prowl’, looking for ‘their Fate’. She reminds us that, certainly before the First World War, when she was a girl, and arguably up to the Second, the career which middle and upper-middle-class women were exhorted to seek, the destiny promised them by mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts, nannies, popular literature and social convention, was marriage. ‘No worry,’ she wrote, ‘about what you should be or do – Biology would dictate. You were waiting for The Man and, when The Man came, he would change your entire life.’

  Here was a collection of young people, at their most healthy and attractive, primed with romantic anticipation, lacking sexual experience but not sexual exuberance: as Agatha later said, ‘We didn’t need pep pills; we didn’t need sedatives.’ They were not careworn or anxious; Agatha attributed this to the fact that neither examinations nor careers weighed them down. Their responsibilities were limited: the world’s affairs were considered a matter for adults and the business of the young was held to be emotion, not facts. As for their own entanglements, shrewd social arrangements minimised risk. Chaperones were ever present and philandering men and ‘fast’ girls who flouted convention were as far as possible excluded from dances and weekend parties. Overall, a careful balance was struck. On the one hand the young were encouraged to indulge intensely romantic emotion; on the other, they were protected from the consequences of mistakes which, given their innocence and inexperience, they might easily make. Life was, as Agatha recalled, ‘great fun’; it was also reasonably safe.