Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  Agatha now went to the theatre as often as she could, read a great deal of theatrical criticism, and spent many hours with theatrical friends. ‘I don’t think, you know,’ she wrote to Max, ‘that there is anything that takes you so much away from real things and happenings as the acting world. It is a world of its own and actors never are thinking of anything but themselves and their lines and their business, and what they are going to wear!’ Her interest was more than casual, for in the autumn and winter she started to adapt Ten Little Niggers for the stage.

  In December 1941 Cork had started to seek backers but found it difficult. Charles Cochran was interested, although he and Larry Sullivan (who had played Poirot in Black Coffee and Peril at End House) were unhappy with the way the story ended. Cork therefore looked over some of Agatha’s earlier work to see what, dramatised, might find financial backing and a theatre. ‘What a sale there would be for these books if there were only enough paper available,’ he told her. His first idea was for her to adapt Three Act Tragedy but, on rereading it, he felt it a better idea to take ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ from Murder in the Mews: ‘A perfectly marvellous dramatic situation and not the later, highly characterised Poirot,’ he thought.

  Agatha had meanwhile begun to think of ways in which the closing chapter of Ten Little Niggers might be changed. The rhyme on which the story was based had, in fact, an alternative ending, ‘He got married and then there were none,’ and, as she wrote to Max in 1942, she certainly ‘contemplated this as a possibility if I can do it my way.…’ In September 1942 she made her proposals to Cork: ‘Here is the hashed-up product.… I don’t think I like these cheap comedy effects and silly to build up love interest unless (quite possible) you end play by Vera and Lombard turning tables on judge – having been shamming dead to catch him.’ ‘Sacrilege,’ observed Cork, loyally, ‘but it would make easier theatre.’ He put the proposal to Bertie Meyer, who had backed Alibi, and ‘subject to certain alterations by Agatha’, they thought they could draw up a contract.

  Cork remained keen for ‘a Poirot play’; Agatha, still ‘rather anti-Poirot’, was not. Then Cork reported that Larry Sullivan was interested in her old script Moon on the Nile. Pressed by both Cork and Sullivan, with Bertie Meyer ready to back a second play, Agatha agreed to try her hand at this as well. A series of entertaining luncheons with Cork, Sullivan and Meyer did the trick; as it was, Agatha was by now thoroughly enamoured of the theatre. Her letters to Max are full of reports of plays and extracts from reviews.

  Ten Little Niggers proved easy to adapt but Agatha had repeated discussions with Sullivan about Moon on the Nile, as they intended the other play should be called. The difficulty was Poirot, to whom she had taken an intense dislike. In late October, she told Max she had led Sullivan gently to the idea of chopping Poirot: ‘suggested instead a retired Barrister – a solicitor – an ex-diplomat – a clergyman – canon or bishop – And suddenly he bit! His eyes half closed – “Oh yes – purple silk front and a large cross” – He saw it, you see. Not the speaking part – the appearance! I bet you whoever played Hamlet argued a good deal as to whether to play it in a hat or not!’ Agatha, as it happened, had just read Edith Sitwell’s Bath: ‘Lovely discussions of the time of Beau Nash, various actors – all hinging on what they wore – Garrick played Othello in uniform – someone else in Arab robes etc.’ Moon on the Nile was finished in early December. Agatha told Max she thought she had written Larry Sullivan ‘quite a good part as Canon Pennefather – a kind of budding Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir William Beveridge rolled into one’. Her enthusiastic remarks – ‘Why aren’t you here to talk to?’ – are a reminder of how these interests interlocked: disguise, uniform, theatricality, codes and conventions, mystery and mystique. In the theatre she lost her shyness. The ‘serene girl with a Cockney accent and an intense young man with masses of black hair’, with whom she discussed alterations to Ten Little Niggers, were not intimidating, for they were raw material. She entered, too, into the spirit of her own part and relaxed: ‘I am very theatrical now,’ she confessed to Max, ‘and call all the most frightful people “Darling”.’

  As Christmas approached, Agatha missed Max desperately. Rosalind, ‘who lives the life of a Wandering Jew’, occasionally passed through London and went with her mother to the theatre. She scolded Agatha for ‘doing too much knitting – I shall end by being one of those women who knit everything they have on! However my “elephant” knickers are a great success.’ There was no going to Greenway; she had sold half the garden tools to the tenant of the kitchen garden, prudently arranging to buy them back after the War, and auctioned unusable china, some of the less comfortable chairs and ‘the one Mr Arbuthnot burned a hole in with his cigar’, to cover the cost of having the contents valued and insured. As winter set in, she took to wandering round London, looking for Max’s Christmas present but ‘bookshops are getting very difficult – either old old men like crabs in them, very cross and not wanting to sell you or get you anything – or else superior research girls who only know about economics or town planning.’ As Max’s present to her, she bought a square jade ring, but without him she was miserable. ‘I have been sad tonight and cried a bit.’ She had his letters to read over, ‘a shade microscopic’, and letter cards which she could ‘just manage with a good light and my spectacles and a magnifying glass handy’. These reassured her. The fact that he could write so lovingly ‘after all the years we have been married … makes me feel that, after all, I have not been a failure in life – that I have succeeded as a wife. What a change now from the unhappy, forlorn person you met in Baghdad. You have done everything for me.…’ Max had with him a copy of The Testament of Beauty, Agatha’s farewell present in 1941. Now he told her to look out a poem, Number Eleven, in the Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century English Verse, and she went down to Winterbrook to do so. ‘Is that the one you meant? – To His Lady. If so, I feel all puffed up with pride.’

  In February Max left Cairo for Tripolitania, making his way by train to the coast, where he found not the aeroplane he had been promised but, eventually, a ship carrying war equipment which gave him a lift. His first assignment was to serve as assistant to the Senior Civil Affairs Officer in the Western Province, a glorious attachment, for the headquarters of the province were at Sabratha, an ancient Phoenician city, with Roman ruins, a classical theatre restored by the Italians, a museum ‘with its beautiful peacock mosaic … and a carpet of mesembryanthemum’, and a well-stocked library of classical literature and books on history and archaeology. For the first six months Max lived there in an Italian villa with a courtyard and patio overlooking the sea, dining on fresh caught tunnyfish and olives. It was a striking contrast to dilapidated London and Agatha’s meals of S.P.O. (sausage, potatoes and onion), snatched from a stall on her way to the hospital.

  Christmas and the New Year over, Agatha’s optimism returned. The Ten Little Niggers project, which had at one point seemed near collapse, was revived; Agatha told Max she now thought of writing ‘a wild spy drama’ about the WAAF. The proofs arrived of Five Little Pigs; there was no trouble about these, although Agatha did protest to Collins about recurrent misprints in lists of her other titles: Death on the Hill, for instance, instead of Death on the Nile, which had sent several people in search of an extra Christie. Billy Collins sent apologies and with the jacket design for Five Little Pigs a book on roses.

  Spring was difficult. Max, reminded to send his usual Valentine card to Katharine Woolley, sent another to Agatha: ‘You remember how when I married you I told you that we would be like Disraeli and Mary Anne? Well, that is how it has been and I expect we will live to a ripe old age together.’ (Mary Anne had been twelve years older than Disraeli, when they married in 1839.) At the end of March she looked in on Greenway, ‘still only occupied by the guard’, the garden ‘incredibly beautiful and all the mimosa in flower and doing well after the mild winter’. She could ‘hardly bear’ to write to Max in his villa by the sea – ‘and who likes the sea? I do.
Oh! the unfairness of life.’

  He had been away a year. Unsettled, Agatha moved for a week or two to the Park Place service flat, ostensibly to be nearer rehearsals for Ten Little Niggers, then to the Marine Hotel in Salcombe. She spent weekends with friends in the country – Allen and Lettice Lane, Larry and Danae Sullivan – and in London people were kind. There was Dorothy North and Ernest and Marion Mackintosh, and some of Max’s archaeological colleagues, like Sidney and Mary Smith. But it was Max Agatha wanted. Though tired, she felt her energy was unused. She tried to organise canteen work but that fizzled out. ‘No spring for us together,’ Agatha wrote in a letter remembering their parting. She had been reading sonnets: ‘What lovely first lines Shakespeare wrote – his “attack” is always more arresting than his climax.’ Now she took from the opening line of one, ‘From thee have I been absent in the spring’, the title of a novel, quickly written, as a present for Max. ‘Life owes one a spring – with you!’ she wrote.

  It is a powerful book. Like everything Agatha wrote as ‘Mary Westmacott’, it considers the theme of possessive love and its dangers. The central figure, Joan Scudamore, examines her life and, like Agatha’s other creations, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, comes to realise that there are many ways of seeing the same experience and that she has misinterpreted her own motives and misunderstood those to whom she believed she was closest. What good these reflections do her is another matter. Agatha wrote Absent in the Spring in three days, her back aching, and sent Max his copy in July. ‘I think it is good,’ she wrote from Winterbrook, where she had spent a month with Rosalind, ‘à la Turgenev’, eating an abundance of salmon, unavailable in London but thrust on to every customer by the Wallingford fishmonger, ‘rebuffing those who demand a nice bit of skate or hake’.

  Rosalind was expecting a baby in September. She had for a while taken a flat at Lawn Road and now, after four weeks at Wallingford, she and Agatha were to go to Abney, ‘with the “old School Trunk”, full of baby clothes.’ Abney had been invaded at ten days’ notice in November 1942; Punkie and a valiant former kitchenmaid looked after the officers billeted in that enormous house (Punkie occasionally disguising herself as a maid when she brought their breakfast). Agatha was more nervous about the baby’s birth than Rosalind appeared to be. ‘I get (all mothers seem alike) so panicky sometimes,’ she told Max, ‘though I never show it. It’s silly, I know, but [Rosalind’s] lifeline is broken in both hands – and I think of it sometimes. It’s the one thing I want for her happiness …’ The baby, ‘a large boy … looking so like Hubert to my mind that all he needs is a monocle’, was born on September 21st. Agatha had rushed up to Cheshire, where Hubert telephoned repeatedly, asking anxiously about Rosalind, ‘Does she like it?’ She did; Agatha was overjoyed.

  At such an emotional time Agatha longed for Max. She dreamed of going to have lunch with him, ‘in a large country house full of flowerbeds’ and finding him gone. ‘I woke up in a panic and had to say over and over, “It’s not true.… I’ve got his letter” and I turned on the light and read it.’ During the summer she had tried to calm herself by starting ‘a detective story, set in ancient Egypt’. This was Stephen Glanville’s suggestion and he had lent her ‘some lovely books – so far I have been enjoying them under false pretences.… but soon I shall either have to have a shot at it – or else admit I am beat! Cork horrified at the idea which rather spurs me on.’ Glanville’s ‘serpent’s tongue’ persuaded Agatha and during July she typed the beginning of Death Comes as the End in Max’s library at Winterbrook, ‘lowbrow stuff in your highbrow sanctuary’. One of the books Agatha borrowed discussed the Hekanakhthe Papers, found in a rock tomb near Luxor in the early nineteen-twenties by the Egyptian Expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These letters from a village landowner, who looked after the tomb, gave her a start. Her notebook was full of quotations and Glanville was pressed with questions. He was glad to help, for this was a difficult time for him. His wife and children were in Canada and, though he fell into one romantic scrape after another, he was lonely. A good friend to the Mallowans, he now kept an eye on Agatha, who had dedicated Five Little Pigs to him, celebrating its publication by cooking Stephen a dinner: ‘Some pâté (ersatz but I incorporated some truffles in it to create the right illusion), a lobster – hot – in the shell and Petit Pois – and stewed cherries.’ They opened ‘a bottle of the remaining wine … apparently it was very good’, she told Max, ‘and you were duly toasted in it by Stephen.’ (Agatha herself preferred ‘Pure Water’ to drink, ordering alcohol for herself only once in her adult life, when an exceedingly prim Fundamentalist came to lunch and so preached on the evils of drink that she cheerfully and ostentatiously demanded ‘Bottled Beer’.)

  At the end of July Agatha finished the first draft of ‘my 11th Dynasty Egyptian Detective Story’. She submitted it to Glanville: ‘Awkward for him if he thinks it perfectly frightful! How will his well-known tact get over that? I myself,’ she told Max, ‘felt most despondent about it half way through (but then one always does about that stage). Nearly gave up in despair! In fact wrote furious letter to S saying I couldn’t do it and it was all his fault! Then R read it and said she “couldn’t see much wrong with it” – High praise from R?! So I went ahead and finished it.’ Max wrote anxiously to Agatha and to Glanville, who reassured him: ‘No archaeological apparatus was to be imported that was not essential or at least perfectly natural in the telling of the tale. No showing off at all costs. At the same time there had to be enough implicit Egyptian feeling to make it impossible for the layman to feel that this particular story could have happened in Pimlico, and to make the Egyptologist feel that there was no reason why it shouldn’t have happened in Thebes. It was an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, and she’s brought it off.’

  Glanville, Max and Agatha made an interesting trio. Max cared for Glanville and wrote warmly about him to Agatha, glad she was keeping up Glanville’s spirits and grateful for the companionship he gave her. Agatha reported to Max when Stephen was unhappy and consoled Stephen, who confided freely in her. Agatha also begged Stephen to find Max a job that would bring him home or to help her find something in Tripoli, possibilities Stephen discussed in his corrrespondence with Max, letters which also spoke of the importance of his relationship with Agatha. She was now in her mid-fifties, no longer slim but heavy and awkward. She remained, however, very attractive, for she was sympathetic and a good listener, interested, intelligent, instinctively understanding, and diplomatic. Not surprisingly, Glanville relied much upon his neighbour at Lawn Road worn down as he was feeling by the pressure of his work in Whitehall and the complications of his private life. He spent many evenings pouring out his troubles to her and when they were apart he wrote to her seeking comfort, which she gave, in tactful measure. Agatha wrote often to Max about Stephen, neither revealing all his confidences nor complaining of the time and emotional energy he demanded. There seemed to be no jealousy on Max’s part, although his anxiety over Death Comes as the End may have partly sprung from a feeling that Stephen and Agatha were conspiring to produce something of which he would not have himself approved. But Stephen’s enthusiasm reassured Max, as did the fact that Cork liked the book and Collins took it.

  Stephen also helped Agatha with Moon on the Nile, though only to the extent of composing cries for Arab vendors ‘off’. That play was languishing for want of a cast and a theatre. It eventually opened at the Wimbledon Theatre in September and in the West End in November 1943, to favourable reviews. ‘I felt awful, of course,’ Agatha wrote to Max when she returned to Lawn Road after the first night. ‘It is an agony but Stephen came again and was very kind and soothing and he and Rosalind pulled me through. Party at Prunier’s afterwards. Smoked salmon and oysters, hot lobster Thermidor and chocolate mousse. We were 9 Little Niggers – the 10th was in Tripolitania (or perhaps Cairo?).’ It was the last party Agatha enjoyed for some time, for the following week she got ’flu. ‘Nothing to eat and aspirin has made me a very elegant
shape’, she told Max happily. (A six-year-old god-daughter had recently remarked, ‘with devastating frankness.… “You’re fat. I remember you as thin!” I told her she had been remembering wrong. “And I thought you had fair hair. It’s quite grey!” Then, a little later, “I’m getting used to you now”.’)

  Little wonder Agatha fell ill. It had been a long year, with her hospital work, two plays, a Mary Westmacott novel and a detective story, regular play-going and rehearsals. (‘It’s all new to me. Rather like an Arab at the cinema.’) Agatha had also been helping Rosalind look after the baby, Mathew. Rosaland and the baby had been unable to move immediately into Hubert’s house at Pwllywrach in Glamorgan, where his mother and sister were solidly installed. For a month they lived in London. Fortunately, Matthew was found a nurse, who told her family, when they reported that ‘the best thing they’d seen was Ten Little Niggers, by Agatha Christie’, “Ee, I know – she’s our cook.” The mistake was understandable, for Agatha arrived from time to time to help with meals and shopping. She admitted that she was very tired. She kept falling down, too: ‘Very painful and ruin to stockings (3 coupons!).’

  By Christmas Agatha was at Pwllywrach with Rosalind and Mathew. The house, she told Max, was ‘lovely but much in the state of Greenway before we got it’. She longed for the days before the War, when, ‘plutocratic’, she was ‘able to keep (I mean spend!) a reasonable whack of the money I earned’. Not a financial dirge, she said, ‘just the longing of the “inferior decorator” to do things to Rosalind’s house’. Not that Agatha would have had the energy, for she still felt very tired and depressed after the ’flu, ‘as though I was dimmed like a headlight on a car’.

  Agatha went often to Wales to be with Rosalind and Mathew. She was fond of her grandson but acknowledged that looking after a baby was tiring. Agatha had written Max occasional sentimental letters about infants and small children; one, after a visit to Allen and Lettice Lane, described how Agatha and Allen had ‘cooked some of your favourite potatoes and onions and sweetbreads in a kind of creamy sauce’ and fed them, with milk pudding and prunes, to Clare, ‘quite the most adorable baby I have ever come across’. Max sagely sent a description of a colleague who had been staying with him and had brought a baby: ‘My word, it seems to be strenuous work … getting up to feed it at God knows what hours and examining it for wind or what not and perpetual washing. Lucky [Max] can have Agatha all to himself and no one to be jealous of’.