by Janet Morgan
There was still no firm news from Reinheimer. Some money came in from Ten Little Niggers, in addition to royalties on work published in Britain and the colonies, but in February Agatha reported to Max that ‘Ten Little Niggers is a war casualty (or rather their abode was)’. Collins, too, were completely bombed out; records that remain – copies of letters and fragments of royalty statements typed with blotchy ink on scraps of reprint order sheets – indicate the struggle the office had to keep going. Life was haphazard, unpredictable and hand-to-mouth for everyone; Agatha was determined not to panic about her accumulating debt but she was rueful. She again suggested that Greenway should be sold, writing to Max for advice. He was not helpful, merely assuring her that he supported whatever decision she might take and observing feebly that: ‘As you say, it is obvious that we must reconcile ourselves to giving up that lovely place.’
Max was equally pessimistic about his work after the War: ‘as you know, my bent and inclinations are all for Archaeology, where I have much to publish and still much to do. But one must be practical. We shall no longer be able to put up the money to indulge in digging and it is an uncertain profession.’ He had begun to consider a future as a colonial administrator, the sort of work he now found himself doing in Tripolitania. After a blissful six months at Sabratha, much of which he spent overseeing the allocation of grain rations in the Western Province, he had moved to a lonely oasis, Hun, in the Eastern Province. His next posting was to the coastal town of Misurata. ‘As magistrate,’ he told Agatha, ‘I also try cases in the Courts regularly and this type of work is more satisfactory because you are given a definite problem and have to come to a definite solution in accordance with certain well-defined principles.…’ Max was suited to these duties and pressed Glanville to find him something of the sort for the future, especially if no archaeological posts appeared. But his plans were half-hearted at best; in October when he had moved to Tripoli, as Adviser on Arab Affairs, he spent a day in an airy library, and remembered that he had a scholar’s training and temperament. His elevation to Deputy Chief Secretary for Arab Affairs, with the rank of Wing Commander, only confirmed his awareness that he was not an administrator at heart, for he found ‘the higher echelons’ less agreeable than ‘administering the provinces in a humbler capacity … in touch with the Nomads, small land owners, peasants and the unsophisticated characters of the countryside’.
One advantage of remaining in North Africa after the War was that at least it would enable Max to show Agatha the places he had visited – Leptis Magna and Zliten and less celebrated sites: ‘I think your work sounds interesting and real,’ she had written. ‘I want one day to go to the places where you have been in the war and – as it were – recoup myself.’ But she encouraged him to think of these visits as part of a future that would focus on archaeology, a profession ideally suited to both of them: ‘A private concern,’ she wrote, ‘for [we] are very private people.’
She tried to raise Max’s spirits in small ways. One joyful discovery was that for two years she had been wasting a quarter of the space on her aerograms by leaving the first page empty. ‘Max, we have been mugs. Always leaving a blank page,’ she wrote, having at last worked out how to fold the flimsy paper. And they had each other. Agatha remembered that as she spent a week with Hubert, Rosalind and Mathew in Wales. ‘I can just imagine,’ she told Max, ‘how it would be coming back to London, just a lonely person, thinking of Ros and Hubert and the baby, a unit by themselves and having really no place in their lives. As it is, I am so happy to think of them, and that I can be “sent for” when wanted and feel useful, and yet have a real life of my own.’ Hubert’s regiment was now stationed in France. Rosalind’s occasional letters to Max consisted mainly of accounts of her struggles with an unheated house, recalcitrant livestock and a small baby. Agatha admired Rosalind’s spirit but worried privately about Hubert’s safety.
Early in 1944 it seemed that Agatha might be able to come out to Africa with an ENSA tour. It would be a way of seeing Max, but the project came to nothing. She practised patience but missed him with ‘a sort of corkscrew feeling’ – ‘Definitely [your] emotion,’ Max replied, ‘with me it is a sort of emptiness, of being unfilled, not unlike being hungry.’ Without constant exposure to Agatha’s conversation and teasing, his letters became more wooden. She sent him books to take his mind away from bureaucracy and court cases – two volumes of Herodotus in the Greek and in translation, A Preface to Paradise Lost, Arthur Waley’s translations of Chinese poetry, the latest novels by Monica Dickens and Compton Mackenzie and – a concession to Max’s speculations about his professional future – Nigel Balchin’s novel about administrative life, The Small Back Room.
Agatha worked. Rehearsals for Hidden Horizon, as Moon on the Nile was now called, began in January in Dundee. She enjoyed these: ‘Larry is a Canon and is toying with the idea of being a Bishop in the London production (if there is a London production!!)’ Danae Sullivan supplied costumes and properties, ‘like a general store’. ‘Such a rest and I had such fun’, she told Max. For the first night she was ‘well hidden away up in the balcony with Danae’. A friend of the Sullivans ‘(from Cabaret)’ did ‘Arab noises off at Abu Simbel during the second act and it did give a desert feeling’. The house was full and it was ‘so good [that] many people booked again the second night’.
Full of enthusiasm, she dramatised Appointment with Death, finishing it in March. Absent in the Spring came out and Towards Zero, one of her most original books, deferred from the previous year. She had plenty of plots ready to work up into detective stories but there was one ‘of those terrible blank pauses when nothing gets through. You feel despairing.’ She thought this all part of ‘creative work … a release from the body’s hold … always followed by withdrawal, an absence of place’. ‘It is part of the same thing’, she went on, as ‘voodoo or levitation’. For Agatha continued to be puzzled by levitation: ‘All children dream of it,’ she wrote to Max and, remembering only her own childhood dreams, ‘the flying dreams one has are not bird flights at all – they are always floating off the ground. And one can’t dream of something of which one has no racial memory and of which one has never heard.’
‘Ideas for June 1944,’ Agatha wrote firmly in her exercise book. One was for a play on the Harlequin theme (‘R. Helpmann?’ she put hopefully beside this, having seen him earlier in the year in Hamlet). She considered a ballet, with Harlequin and Columbine dancing with a mortal (‘a Pavlova’). It was interesting that Agatha should think of this and odd that no one took it up, for many of her detective stories are intricately choreographed. Movement, time and place were the basis of her plots; her clues were often visual rather than verbal. In 1944 she also explored a familiar idea, domestic murder, a thought to which she had lately returned in her correspondence with Max about Greek drama: ‘an interesting point,’ Agatha noticed, ‘was the distinction made between killing a mother and killing a husband.’ Another preoccupation was what she called ‘Moral issue’ – provoked by reading a book of essays on Shakespeare and, in particular, one on Richard III. ‘Do evil men ever acknowledge to themselves that they are evil?’ she asked, believing herself that ‘most “bad” people do not think themselves bad. It is all right for them to do the things they do …’
The plot on which Agatha settled was a loose amalgamation of these two last themes, domestic murder and the nature of evil, in a novel she called Remembered Death. It does not seem to have been easy to draft; Agatha began with a list of characters and a play on the names Rosemary and Rue but tried several variants before fixing on who actually was the murderer, and why. Collins reported that booksellers felt uncomfortable with its title: ‘Remembered Death,’ they said, ‘may have a particular application that would upset many people at this juncture.’ They preferred Sparkling Cyanide but Agatha did not: ‘a flippant title for a really rather serious book’, she told Collins. There was, however, no time to mull over alternatives, though Remembered Death was retained as the
title of the American edition.
‘Our separation is only an interruption,’ Agatha had assured Max – and herself – in 1943. It seemed, now, to be dragging on eternally. Agatha continued to write. She finished The Hollow, a detective story dedicated to the Sullivans, ‘with apologies for using their swimming-pool as the scene of the murder’, and started to adapt Towards Zero for the stage. At Christmas she put together a collection of stories and poems on religious themes, one of which, ‘Promotion in the Highest’, is very funny. Agatha sent these shyly to Cork in the New Year: ‘Any good anywhere? I can hardly believe so.’ The volume was put aside for twenty years.
The autumn of 1944 was sorrowful. Hubert had been reported missing and in August Rosalind learnt that he had been killed. Max did not hear until October, so long was mail taking to arrive. Rosalind’s letter was brief and matter-of-fact. Agatha wondered at her daughter’s directness and courage. She described how bravely Rosalind had broken the news to her and reminded Max, and herself, that they had expected it, but she could not bring herself to write more.
In her mid-fifties, as in her childhood, Agatha grew dumb when she was moved. She confided neither in her family nor her friends; they might sense her emotion, as she often guessed at, and sought to soothe, their pain, but nothing was said. She had always been tongue-tied; successive shocks – Archie’s defection, Clara’s death, the divorce, her miscarriage, her son-in-law’s death – did not unlock speech but deepened her silence. She could convey her feelings only through her work: in the novels she wrote as ‘Mary Westmacott’, protected by that pseudonym, in plays and detective stories where convention and form circumscribed her. As a wife, a mother and a friend, she held back, self-protective. As a writer, she gave generously and incessantly, book after book. The bulk of her work was of one type: fiction, in which a mystery was propounded, clues given and connections made, and a problem solved, with a twist at the end. In her books Agatha ‘parted with information’ but, even there, obliquely, on her own terms.
The feelings and beliefs Agatha revealed through her writing, if only there, were genuine and strongly held. That, as well as the fact that her work dealt with familiar, universal themes, accounts for the success of her books and plays. Their style is not graceful or magical, their characters are stereotypes, the plots often implausible, but her work is sincere and, for all its contrivance, spontaneous. Agatha minded greatly about the way people should treat one another; she had firm views about good and evil, justice and mercy, innocence, cruelty and revenge. She said what she felt in her books and, increasingly as she grew older, her plays. Outwardly passive and undemonstrative, she found herself at ease in the theatre. It was an arena where she could safely experience and express emotion.
By the end of 1944 Agatha had left the dispensary, not so much because she was exhausted, though she was, but because her theatrical fervour frequently took her away from London. ‘Am quite worn out with the strain of theatrical life,’ she wrote to Cork in January 1945, ‘what with flu … colds, snow, films, matinees and dressmakers … most of the cast are never there’. Appointment with Death was to open in February but Agatha believed that ‘it really seems quite impossible that the play can be ready for Glasgow! However, one has felt like this before. Sullivan seems to have all the dates booked – but no producer or cast or anything settled. What a queer lot they all are!’
The play came to the Piccadilly Theatre in London at the end of March. The critics were harsh. Cork sent a batch of unfavourable press cuttings, with a kindly letter: ‘The public seem to like it and figures from Bertie Meyer show it is doing better business than 10 Little Niggers at the beginning.’ The poor reception for Appointment with Death added to the difficulties Sullivan had in finding a London theatre for Hidden Horizon. There were other problems. An official at the Ministry of Labour objected to the presence in the play of a maid: ‘so unreasonable at this stage’, Cork remarked, promising to take the matter up with ‘the Director-General of Manpower, a neighbour of mine’. This hitch was not overcome until September, when the play opened in Cambridge. Agatha was there to criticise her work and make suggestions: ‘How would it be to make Simon in Commandos and have play definitely post-war – possibly 1946 – one or two of Simon’s lines would need altering – what do you think?’
For the European War had ended in May and the war in Japan in August. Agatha’s life had returned to a sort of normality some months earlier, for in February she had begun to ‘struggle into Greenway’, filling the front of an exercise book with details of cleaning-up procedures (‘Coats and hats (heavy): Hang in Air 24 hours. Send away to steam’), things to do (‘Pack: sheets and towels, Hot water bottle, Jam, Honey’), and, optimistically in view of the shortages that prevailed, items that needed replacement (‘Dusters, Saucepan cleaner, 63 yds carpet A’s bedroom …’). The tenants had left the house in a better state of repair than she had expected. The mahogany doors were unshrouded and rehung and in the library Agatha decided to retain one reminder of the American sailors’ occupation, a long frieze, in blue and white, painted around the cornice, showing the flotilla and the places where its ships had called, with Greenway and the trees, and – at journey’s end – the luscious figure of what in her Autobiography Agatha aptly called ‘a houri’.
She was delighted to have her house and garden again. Even better, Max came home, arriving at Lawn Road unexpectedly one evening in May, via Sicily and Swindon. Agatha had known for two months that he would be coming back to the Air Ministry and she was not unnaturally anxious about the changes in their relationship that their separation might have caused. ‘I am so afraid sometimes that we shall grow outwards instead of a nice parallel track,’ she had written. Not convergent, but ‘parallel’, for Agatha was now sufficiently wise, and content, to recognise that in many respects she and Max were unalike. She was also aware that time and increased responsibility and authority, not just separation, might have altered her husband. May 1944, a year before his return, had brought Max’s fortieth birthday. ‘It makes such a difference to me,’ Agatha had written, ‘… it closes the gap a little.’ As Agatha watched Stephen Glanville’s troubles, she had wondered whether she and Max were ‘idealising each other in absence. It would break my heart.’
Her fears were unfounded. Max found his wife older, wearier, greyer, but everything at home was aged, exhausted and bruised by six years of war. His return recharged Agatha’s batteries. Come, Tell Me How You Live, which gives her memories of Syria, was finished by the end of June and sent off for comment to various friends and colleagues. Their opinions were mixed. Stephen Glanville, for instance, found it ‘delightful’, whereas Sidney Smith, Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum (who had helped Agatha pass the War by teaching her the algebra she had forgotten) felt that, ‘while the whole thing is thoroughly enjoyable reading, I am not quite sure that you would be wise to print it all.’ Cork also liked the book and Max himself greatly approved of his homecoming present, which Agatha insisted should be published under her married name.
Her standing at Collins was now gratifyingly high. Figures for sales of her books at the end of January 1945 showed that the last three British and colonial editions had nearly sold out (Towards Zero and The Moving Finger with a printing of 25,000 copies each and Five Little Pigs with 24,000). Despite the difficulty of assembling a run of figures from those records that had survived the bombing, Agatha’s publishers had the impression that her overall sales were huge and her prospects promising. Pushed by Cork, who felt that Collins now ‘rather took her books for granted’, in mid-1945 they doubled her advance to £2,000. This so woke them up, Cork told Ober, that ‘the books are promoted more intensively and the sales have actually gone up to three times what they were.’ Sparkling Cyanide was serialised by the Daily Express in the summer; Agatha, consulted in good time about the jacket, was even obliged to confess that she had ‘no very solid idea … a Rosemary motif – sprig of same – on a Restaurant Table
set for dinner with bowl of Rosemary in centre?’
Agatha’s finances were generally improving, at least in prospect. In February 1945 the British Revenue authorities reached a settlement with her accountant on the amount of additional tax for which she was liable; in May Harold Ober reported that the United States was to conclude a double taxation treaty with the United Kingdom, with all matters in dispute being settled on a sympathetic basis, ‘whatever,’ he prudently observed, ‘that may mean’. It was a relief to think that Agatha might be able to receive her American earnings, which far outstripped even the total of her income from Collins and from other countries overseas. Moreover, René Clair’s Ten Little Niggers film, And Then There Were None, opened at the Roxy Cinema in New York in the autumn, ‘a really big Twentieth Century Fox success’, Cork told Agatha, which should have an important effect ‘on the film value of your other subjects’. The BBC began to come round too, requesting Agatha’s participation in a ‘Quiz Match … in the Home Service, for which they would offer a courtesy fee of Five Guineas’, and the Ministry of Information made up for its refusal to sanction her wartime visit to Cairo by asking Agatha to write an article ‘on the four leading detective writers this century (including yourself, of course) for publication in Russian in a Moscow magazine’. Cork emphasised that the Ministry ‘seem to think that detective stories may even rival football in effecting a mutual rapprochement’. Agatha found herself unavailable on the date of the proposed BBC quiz (she loathed such performances) but she was ready to help the Ministry of Information: ‘I am not antagonistic to writing the articles for Russian publication – I think it very important to “get together” with Russia in any non-political way.’