Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  24

  ‘… like a cinema film run backwards …’

  In August 1961 UNESCO reported that Agatha was now the world’s best-selling author writing in the English language, her books being sold in 102 countries (twice as many as the runner-up, Graham Greene). From the letters that flowed unremittingly into the offices of Hughes Massie and Harold Ober Associates, it was easy to believe. Admirers were disappointed at not being received by Agatha, at her failure to sustain a lengthy correspondence, to edit their own manuscripts or send hints on writing. They did not realise not only that she was busy with her own life and work but also that such requests now totalled dozens by the week. An African who had chosen Agatha as his mother proposed to come to claim her, an Italian enquired where one might obtain Lapsang Souchong. A French magazine asked for articles on ‘les grands sujets féminins’ (‘Nothing I’d hate more!’); there were requests for help in saving the temples of Nubia (she sent a cheque) and with litigation over a sun tan lotion mentioned in Death in the Air. ‘It was just a joke people made, not a reference to a specific preparation!’ she told Cork desperately, begging him to ‘Deal with enclosed by saying I am abroad!’

  Secluded at Winterbrook, Agatha pressed on with the book Collins were to publish in 1961, the bizarre story in which she commemorated the pharmacist who first gave her practical training. It took its title from the Book of Revelation: ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’ The Pale Horse combined two ideas. One, with the working title of ‘The Thallium Mystery’, she thought would ‘start somehow with a list of names … all of them dead.’ The other reintroduced Agatha’s earlier thoughts about ‘Voodoo etc., White Cocks, Arsenic? Childish stuff – work on the mind and what can the law do to you? Love Potions and Death Potions – the aphrodisiac and the cup of poison. Nowadays we know better – Suggestion.’

  Mrs Oliver appeared in The Pale Horse, with Mrs Dane Calthrop and her husband, who had last been seen in The Moving Finger. Agatha was now finding it difficult to keep track of her creations. ‘Was he a rector or a vicar?’ she asked Cork. ‘And was there a hyphen?’

  The Pale Horse was delivered in January 1961 before Agatha and Max departed once more for Persia. She also left behind the proofs of Double Sin, a collection of eight stories for publication in America, including ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’. Arrangements were made to reprint the early Mary Westmacott novels in the United States. Agatha was still sad that her cover had been blown – ‘it spoilt my fun,’ she told Cork – but she now agreed that her American publishers might indicate on the book-jackets that ‘Mary Westmacott’ and she were the same. Mary Westmacott’s name, however, was to be given greater prominence. Collins were enthusiastic about The Pale Horse, and seized on its publication as the moment to launch a special campaign, to be related, in Cork’s words, to the fact that Agatha was now ‘out of the suspense writer class’, and could be regarded as ‘a considerable novelist exciting world-wide interest’.

  Cork wondered whether Agatha would give the theatre a rest. Her passion for the stage, however, was unsated. In the summer of 1961 she drafted the first acts of two different plays. ‘Don’t much like either of them,’ she informed Cork sunnily, ‘but hope for better things soon.’ These were the beginnings of The Patient and Afternoon at the Seaside, to which Agatha added The Rats, and, after Peter Saunders had read the scripts, a further seventeen pages of dialogue, so that Rule of Three, as the combined sequence was entitled, was long enough to fill an evening at the theatre. To keep abreast of current trends, she took herself to see Samuel Beckett’s plays, and found them difficult; less earnestly, she went often to the opera. The ‘Cork Intelligence Service’ was also asked how one might secure a box at Covent Garden and obtain tickets for the Bayreuth Festival; to her delight Agatha had discovered that Mathew, now eighteen, was also a Wagner enthusiast. ‘As you will perceive,’ she told Cork, ‘I am devoting a lot of attention to enjoying myself.’

  The key to Agatha’s work in the nineteen-forties was books and in the ’fifties, plays. In the ‘sixties it was visual – films and paintings, though not, as yet, the television she so loathed. Early in 1960 Cork had concluded a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the film rights to some of the Miss Marple stories. Agatha had given way reluctantly: ‘I hope there won’t be “broken hearts”,’ she warned Cork. ‘What one loses in cash one may gain in absence of worry. But don’t break your heart over it, Edmund dear.’ In the summer of 1961 the first film was released, an adaptation of The 4.50 From Paddington, now called Murder, She Said. After a preliminary glimpse Agatha had feared that the story would be ‘mixed up’ and in September gave Cork her reactions after seeing the film in Torquay. ‘My spies (daily helps!) duly tracked it down,’ she reported, ‘at the Regal at Torquay and we went en famille this afternoon. Frankly, it’s pretty poor! I thought so that evening in London, but I couldn’t say so before Margaret Rutherford. The truth is there’s no sustained interest – it’s muddling with a lot of brothers turning up in the middle, and no kind of suspense, no feeling of things happening.’ She had wondered from the start why MGM had chosen that particular book, a difficult one, she thought. Even so, she added, ‘I do think it a bad script (I could have made it more exciting).’ She also thought it badly produced and the photography poor. She went on, ‘As my eldest nephew said to me in a sad voice as we left, “It wasn’t very exciting, was it?” and I really couldn’t have agreed with him more. None of us thought much of it.’ ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ Agatha concluded, ‘I have been spared a good deal by keeping aloof from films etc. Ten Little Niggers was bad. Spider’s Web moderate. Only Witness was good.’ But, she assured Cork in a postscript, ‘Don’t think I’m upset by Murder, She Said. I’m not! It’s more or less what I expected all along.’

  To Margaret Rutherford Agatha dedicated the novel she planned in the summer of 1961, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. Agatha first conceived this as a story of ‘Miss M – Unravelling’, and her initial working title was ‘Development Murder’, for she liked to speculate about the tastes and habits of the owners of the new houses ‘developed’ on the estates she saw on country drives around Oxfordshire and Berkshire. At the centre of the plot was a film star, Marina Gregg, and Agatha’s notes for the book show that she saw it first as a series of scenes:

  M buys Bantry’s old home. Mrs B lives in lodge – rather like le Rougetels’ cottage. Good garden … Heather Beasley (?) – in a ‘development’ house. Miss M – out walking – falls down – Heather picks her up. Cup of tea. Talk etc. Miss M and Mrs B. Tea at Lodge.… The Do – Grounds graciously opened (for Nurses?) Or house? Encounter between M & H – husband there.… her eyes … staring – over Heather’s head – as though she saw something terrible – at what?

  The plot was inspired by Agatha’s reflections on a mother’s feelings for a child born mentally or physically afflicted. Shortly before the book was to be published, the attention of Americans was drawn by the case of Gene Tierney, the actress, and a similar tragedy involving the Dutch Royal family had recently been given a great deal of publicity in Britain. Dorothy Olding and Collins’s editor, who had guessed the key to Agatha’s plot after reading only a chapter or two, recommended that she alter her draft, out of delicacy as much as the need to keep the reader guessing. This Agatha neatly did, not without a qualm, confessing to Cork that this time she felt she was cheating her readers: ‘Not quite fair – but you were all against me!’

  The next novel done, in the autumn of 1962 Agatha went with Max on a three-month trip to Persia and Kashmir. Max had recovered from a slight stroke in the summer; Cork told Dorothy Olding that, though Agatha was playing it down, he looked twice his age. Max’s life was now less strenuous, since in 1962 he had left the University of London for a Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, where he was not obliged to teach or to lecture. There he could concentrate on research and writing, principally the preparation of Nimrud a
nd Its Remains, and on promoting the interests of his protégés. From Oxford it was still easy for him to go to London. He had become a Trustee of the British Museum and of the British Academy and he was a busy and conspiratorial member of academies and institutes. Rather than taking the train, he drove himself furiously along the A40 to London, maintaining that his car was ‘much heavier than anything I might barge into’. It was a miracle that he and Agatha had only a single major accident, skidding on icy roads as they drove to Wales one winter. Agatha was bruised and shaken; Max found it ‘all actually rather exciting … wasn’t it?’ Sometimes Max’s secretaries and research assistants would be persuaded to drive him but this was almost as terrifying. He urged them to perform U-turns where it was forbidden and shouted ‘Why so slow?’ when they did less than seventy in the thirty-mile-an-hour zone. The only quarrels he and Agatha ever conducted in the presence of others were about motoring: what the route should be, how long it would take and whether Max might drive more prudently.

  While Max worked in college, Agatha wrote, or cultivated the garden at Winterbrook, taking special pride in her white peonies. Max had a good eye for fine things; he and Agatha made a collection of silver, a piece for every year from 1700 to 1800. (‘Wrong year,’ Max would say regretfully, putting aside a marginally interesting piece brought forward in a shop.) Agatha’s days were serene, her companion Treacle, a Manchester terrier obtained from Rosalind. The house was beginning to need a good deal of repair – the plumbing in one bathroom did not connect, but ‘it will last my time,’ observed Agatha. She still ensured that its running was orderly. Winterbrook was managed with pre-War formality but Agatha’s nephews and godchildren, however unkempt, were always welcomed to ample meals prepared by the housekeeper, Mrs Belson. Agatha did not, for instance, seem to turn a hair when a godson hitch-hiked up to the door with an equally scruffy-looking friend and bravely asked for luncheon.

  Agatha was generous to children – and to adults, for she loved giving: benefactions to her small cluster of charities; unexpected presents (a guitar, a camera, opera glasses, a fishing rod, a thirty-six-piece dinner set for a wedding present, baby clothes – Agatha, like Miss Marple, sensibly sent the second size – glass bottles, copies of Pinter’s plays and Jane Austen’s novels, pieces of Lalique glass produced from a canvas shopping bag). She gave presents to the children around her, imaginative gifts to her relations (a squash court for Mathew), treasures to old friends (spring bulbs, powder puffs, glasses, real sponges). She was lavish with food and drink: a dealer in an Oxford antique shop was asked for the very largest Chinese porcelain bowl and, finally satisfying Agatha with a particularly precious piece, was told it was for holding rice. Agatha had, of course, to take care not to give to all who applied to her, for many did. If once she were to depart from her own list of beneficiaries, her disbursements would never end. Cork screened most requests and Agatha herself was sufficiently level-headed to realise that some of the ‘long-lost cousins’ who wrote to her were self-appointed. (In any case none of her elderly cousins was lost and any needy ones were helped.)

  The transfer of Max’s work to Oxford did not mean that he and Agatha ceased to go to London. They continued to entertain their friends at the Detection Club and at Boodles, where Agatha liked the veal dishes and Boodles’ Orange Fool. There was also theatre and the opera. In 1962 Agatha went further in search of Wagner. Cork had obtained tickets for the Bayreuth Festival in late August and Thomas Cook made arrangements for Agatha and Max to progress gently through Germany. ‘By the way,’ Agatha told Cork, ‘tourist class by air is quite alright as they are only short hops. It’s only if I am going to be all night – or for about 24 hours – that I need enough room for my behind and my elbows.’ There they joined forces with Mathew who, Agatha insisted, studied the scores with her each day. A considerate hotel proprietor protected her from hordes of admirers by arranging that each morning, for one hour only, books might be delivered for autograph. ‘I got a great ovation in Bayreuth,’ Agatha told Cork, with mixed feelings: ‘I got a few privileges, anyway, so didn’t mind as much as I usually do!’

  On her return Agatha began a Hollywood venture of her own. This was not the first time she had dipped a toe into the turbulent waters of work for film studios; in 1956 she had agreed to prepare a screenplay of Spider’s Web. Her suggestions for its treatment had been guided by the tone and direction of the plot: ‘Commence with vast spider’s web gradually dissolving into Clarissa studying a spider’s web in country house.… Angle could be (A) Shots of antique shop and house – all leading up from that, or: (B) All leading up from Clarissa. Depends on whether sinister aspect or romantic aspect is to be stressed. Personally think B is better.’ Her method was the same in 1962 when MGM asked her for a screenplay of Bleak House, her favourite Dickens novel. She began, as she had opened The Unexpected Guest, with Dickens’s description of fog, and with the scene in Chancery, where the origins of the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce were now lost in the mists of the past. That case and the people whose lives were shaped by it, she told Cork, represented the essence of the film. Through it, she emphasised, ran ‘a thriller or detective streak that Dickens nearly always had’. She found it difficult to reduce his densely worked plot: ‘Two thirds of the book I have already thrown out, and have selected for the chuck those people and incidents which, delightful in themselves, might just as well have figured in any other of Dickens’ works.… I quite realise,’ she told Cork, ‘that perhaps a third (or more!) of the present script will have to go.’ Her supposition was correct. MGM’s only concern was its length, a 270-page draft that would play for four hours. They asked Agatha to boil it down, and she therefore conferred with Larry Bachmann, the MGM producer ultimately responsible for adapting her own work. His team, however, was ruthless and eventually the project was abandoned. In a sad appendix to her notes, added in 1970, she closed the saga: ‘Two portions of it were completed and sent – they wished to complete it themselves. I did not like their ideas – I wished to end it as forming a circle to the beginning – Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. End of famous case – and fog coming over London. From my point of view it was a good film.’

  Agatha still seemed in the best of health, although in 1962 her back began to give trouble. Her hearing and sight were dimming and walking was more difficult; the gardens at Greenway had several strategically placed wrought-iron and wooden seats. Even now she enjoyed bathing in the sea, and, for a woman of seventy-two, produced a prodigious amount of work. New projects excited her. For example, Mathew brought to Greenway John Wells, a former master at Eton, and Alexis Weissenberg, the pianist, to discuss the adaptation of Hickory, Dickory Dock as a musical, with John Dankworth to orchestrate the score, Peter Sellers to play Poirot and Sean Kenny to design the sets. A title was produced by John Wells – Death Beat – and some songs written. Though the project came to nothing, Agatha enjoyed these preliminaries. Then there was another idea – for a play she provisionally entitled ‘Ten Little Niggers 2’, a reunion dinner of those whose lives were touched by the earlier horrors. This proposal, perhaps fortunately, also petered out. One initiative, however, was a triumph. For the first and last time in her life, Agatha made a speech. At the end of 1962 The Mousetrap celebrated its tenth anniversary and, at another huge party at the Savoy, Agatha’s friend the actress Dame Sybil Thorndike, presented her with a copy of the original script, bound in gold. ‘Don’t let anyone ever say to you that nothing exciting ever happens to you when you are old,’ Agatha replied, as proud, surprised and shyly determined as a child.

  Mathew had now left Eton, after staying an extra year to captain the cricket team. Summers of practice at Greenway had borne fruit, for he was now a considerable cricketer, and in 1961 and 1962 Agatha, who liked the game, had proudly watched him play in the annual match against Harrow at Lord’s. In 1962, when he was captain, they celebrated by taking the team to The Mousetrap, where she beamed at the way in which her play amused and tantalised even these worldly young men. There was, how
ever, a shadow over that first match, for on that day Jack Watts died. He had never married (to the question ‘What are your favourite qualities in woman?’ in the ‘Confessions’, he had answered, half-truthfully, ‘Don’t know any well enough’) and he left Mathew much of his property and Agatha his house in London, with the furniture that had belonged to him and his mother.

  Agatha’s own generation was vanishing too but Greenway was always full in summer. As well as Mathew’s friends, there were John and Peter Mallowan, and the children of neighbours and old friends who came to stay. Agatha presided, saying little but listening benevolently. She was most at ease with small children; more than one guest, missing her at tea-time, found her at the top of the house playing Animal Snap and telling stories. Those children who stayed up for supper, however, were expected to take part in conversation, which for some was an ordeal, since the regular cycle of guests who came for a weekend or a week at Greenway included scholars and diplomats who were terrified of children and who therefore needed encouraging with tactful small talk. This lively household, and the books, ideas and anecdotes that filled it, stimulated Agatha not into chat but, as always, into trying new books and plays. There, even at seventy-two, she remained adventurous.