Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  During the summer Agatha relaxed. She and Max enjoyed five days in Belgium in June, inspecting a museum named after Hercule Poirot, and in late August they went to Switzerland. Mathew came to stay at Greenway with a group of Oxford friends. He had just graduated, after reading first history and then politics, philosophy and economics at New College, Max’s old college, and now intended to try his hand at publishing. Allen Lane had offered him a job at Penguin. Agatha was reading science fiction. She kept up with new novels and plays, making an expedition to London to see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. After a slow start she began a new book in the autumn: ‘Back to work as promised!’ Third Girl was another complicated tissue of ideas. The underlying theme was, as so often in her work, similarity and change. At the centre of the story is a flat whose occupants advertise for a ‘third girl’ to share accommodation and expenses. Agatha’s notebooks have many drafts of stories about rooms where the decoration is altered or furniture moved either to make different places look the same or the same place look different, a device of particular relevance to blocks of service apartments which outwardly resemble each other while being distinctive within. Agatha’s recollections of her own nursery wallpaper, and the plots of ‘The Blue Geranium’, ‘The Third Floor Flat’, ‘The Adventure of the Cheap Flat’, are instances of her observing how easy it is to be disoriented by such alterations and thus in some way deceived.

  Into Third Girl came, too, the idea of the deceptive picture, a reminder of Agatha’s preoccupation with hidden messages in paintings, fake ancestral portraits, galleries that are a front for some racket, pictures as misleading as her own portraits in words. Again Agatha emphasised how appearances may conceal as well as reveal: ‘Is boyfriend – a Mod? – like a Van Dyck – Brocade waistcoat – long glossy hair – is he the evil genius?’ her notes for Third Girl enquired. Is ‘an Ophelia, devoid of physical attraction’, a well-connected girl, fallen amongst bad company? One of her characters is skilful with cosmetics: another is interested in psychiatry, for personalities can also be altered. ‘Does Norman take Purple Hearts?’ Agatha wondered. Nor are neighbourhoods invariably what they seem. In parts of London where Agatha had lived for years smart streets now suddenly gave on to extraordinary avenues lined with ‘boutiques’ and ephemeral restaurants, thoroughfares crowded with oddly dressed people, some deliberately scruffy, others ultra-theatrical, all apparently aged about seventeen. Quiet squares became threatening at night, studios and alleys sinister. She drew on this as well. Far more terrifying than any journey Miss Marple makes in the altered London of ‘Bertram’s Hotel’ is Mrs Oliver’s fearful exploration of hallucinatory Chelsea.

  ‘You’re too old. Nobody told me you were old,’ blurts the child of the ’sixties who comes to Poirot for help in Third Girl. Like Poirot, Agatha was ageless to her admirers. Like him, she remained professionally competent. She could nonetheless be ruefully funny about her own generation. In the autumn of 1966, on a trip to America with Max, lecturing in various university cities, she encountered a good many gallant octogenarians about whom her letters and diaries were devastatingly objective. One evening at Princeton was especially memorable: ‘Everyone seemed very rich, evening dress and they put on white gloves to go out to the lecture and all nice but incredibly aged and ailing – the husbands were mostly ill in bed or in hospital and everyone I talked to was either stone deaf or paralytic, or blind, and a dear old lady hung over with deaf-aids, nearly blind and eighty-eight, accompanied us to the lecture and insisted on supporting me in case I fell down. “Of course I can’t see anything on the screen,” she explained, “only light and dark, and these hearing aids are no good, so I can’t hear anything – but I like to be in things. You’d better put on your coat again, my dear, or you’ll catch a chill.”’ ‘She was most valiant,’ Agatha recalled, ‘and went home after the reception still as bright and untired as ever – I was half dead by then – with shouting and my feet!!’

  Dissuaded from lecturing herself to help with expenses, Agatha concentrated on two unshakeable resolutions. One was to visit Nathaniel Frary Miller’s grave in Greenwood Cemetery, a private ground, accessible only with a pass. Amazed, she described it to Cork: ‘looks like Luxor … granite monoliths everywhere’, her grandfather’s grave square black marble, six feet high and topped with an obelisk. Her other goal was more mundane, ‘to pick up some outsize knickers’, Cork warned Dorothy Olding, who had once located an enormous swimsuit for their favourite client. ‘She remembered your prowess and I am awfully afraid, sweetie, you are for it.’

  Agatha’s obsessions figure in her notes from this trip. She was profoundly impressed by American central heating and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, by the paintings and sculpture adorning private houses as well as museums in Washington, and by the variety of people she and Max confronted: ‘Supermatriarch – femme formidable’; ‘an odious man in my opinion’, who said, ‘we always call you Aggie, you know, so you don’t mind if I call you Aggie. Cold look from me’; ‘a kind of palsy – rather pathetic – dripping with emotional hero-worship but kind …’; ‘a cultural prototype – a demon for work’; ‘a 60-year-old platinum blonde, running him.…’ She adored Vermont in the frosty fall, ‘lovely scenery and the best real butter I’ve tasted for years’. Some deficiencies had compensations: ‘a super-stopper train in the last stages of decrepitude – everyone had long ago given up cleaning the windows … and the lunch was practically uneatable. In fact I now think better of British Railways.’ Texas astounded her: ‘Austin very civilized as well as rich … a quite unexpectedly attractive city – from snow to warmth [they had been in Ohio] 80°F and almost a Near East Baghdad feeling of gardens and green trees and leisure … dinner at top of recent well-built skyscraper – very good food … Dallas … Monied – lectured to a very select audience. Much too select. Wonderful display of a loan exhibition of carpets, nobody knew a thing about them – or was interested – a dull lot.’

  After Christmas in Wales, Agatha returned to chilly Winterbrook. There she wrote a book for which she had begun to make notes in America, Endless Night. It was set at Gypsy’s Acre, a strange and beautiful place which Agatha had first seen in Wales years before, when Nora Prichard, Rosalind’s mother-in-law, had told her the legend attached to it. Endless Night had few characters. Collins’s editor wondered whether this made the mystery too easy and Agatha was asked to enlarge the part played by one, Stanford Lloyd, trustee of a rich American girl who is the victim. Every character, however, is interesting, particularly Santonix, a young, dying architect, with a touch of ‘Vernon Lee’ from Giant’s Bread and of Max’s friend Esmé Howard. Another is Michael Rodgers, who dreams of Gypsy’s Acre and of the house Santonix will build there. Into Rodgers Agatha put something of her feeling about Richard III, described in her wartime letters to Max: ‘An outlaw.…’ Endless Night had some of the warmest notices Agatha ever received, with praise from friends whose discrimination she particularly respected – John Sparrow, for instance, the Warden of All Souls’, and Steven Runciman, the historian.

  Stimulated by success, Agatha told Collins she intended to continue to produce a book a year and had already thought of the next one. It was drafted in the spring of 1967, after a trip she and Max made with Mortimer Wheeler to the British Institute in Persia. Max had received a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List, so that Agatha’s latest change of name was now to ‘Lady Mallowan’. It somehow concealed ‘Agatha Christie’ even more effectively than ‘Mrs Mallowan’; there are many stories of visitors to Winterbrook or to All Souls’ being introduced to Sir Max’s unknown and unassuming wife. (Max knew, however, when Agatha should have the limelight. ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced,’ he would say at the Detection Club dinners. ‘I’m Agatha’s husband.’) Stella Kirwan would now pencil ‘A.M.’ or ‘A.C.’ at the foot of letters, to remind Agatha in which capacity she should sign them.

  The early months of 1967 were so busy that it was as well that the next book came easily. After Mathew�
�s marriage in May to Angela Maples, whose name had been appearing with increasing frequency in his grandmother’s Visitors’ Book, Agatha and Max went for a fortnight to Yugoslavia, to recall their own honeymoon and, more prosaically, to spend Agatha’s accumulated dinars. ‘I don’t really contemplate any Real Estate purchase,’ Agatha teased Cork, but ‘Ample funds’ means nothing. You must have some idea of whether I personally have got £50 or £100 – or £500 – or even (vain hope?) a thousand pounds at my disposal.’ They spent the summer at Greenway and part of the autumn in Spain. In July there had been treatment for her intermittent deafness: ‘Splendid time with Doctor,’ she told Cork, ‘Can hear clocks ticking again and most telephone voices!!!’ Max was less robust; in the autumn he had a second stroke while lecturing in Persia. He made little of it, simply taking a chair and delivering the rest of the lecture from there, but afterwards he was carried off to hospital. Visitors remembered that, though professing not to like detective stories, he loyally displayed Agatha’s books by his bedside. Max was flown home in late October. Agatha, who had remained at Wallingford, wrote to Cork: ‘I feel pretty awful but do believe it is a good thing he is not flying home in too much of a hurry. But waiting and wondering is Hell.’

  She vented her anxiety on Collins in a series of furious letters to Billy about the proofs of her new book, By the Pricking of My Thumbs: ‘Ordinary post brought me an unmarked lot, five days later a special delivery at 7/6d arrived – typescript and half a marked lot … then yesterday the other half, also special delivery, at full expense …’ ‘Perhaps you would make it clear not to change the spelling of the author unless it is actually misspelt. If I prefer phantasy to fantasy (both words are in dictionary) I want it left alone.…’ ‘I don’t want sentences twisted round to be more grammatical when they are part of someone’s spoken conversation. Otherwise everyone’s conversation would sound exactly alike and not like ordinary variable human beings.…’

  By the Pricking of My Thumbs pleased her, however, when it appeared at the end of 1968. The plot was another she had started to think out during the American tour, a story bringing together three ideas, of which one, death occurring at an old people’s home, had also crept into early drafts of Endless Night. Another was the ‘picture theme’: ‘Doctor Murray is suspicious of certain deaths in Sunny Ridge. Mrs W presented picture to her shortly beforehand – did she always do this to a prospective victim? Did she add a boat every time to picture? Signing her victim’s name underneath?’ Third was the ‘Child murder theme’: ‘mother of girl who had illegitimate baby and, perhaps, killed it’, ‘sister of Friendly Witch – a children’s nurse – confined – she used to steal children and sacrifice them’, ‘Lady Peel – barren – had had abortion – haunted by it?’ Mrs Perry, a sinister ‘Friendly Witch’, did come into By the Pricking of My Thumbs, as did the theme of child murder and child substitution. ‘Behind the Fireplace – Oct. 1967’, Agatha wrote firmly in her notebook, with the deceptively simple but sinister phrases: ‘It was your poor child, was it? No – I’d wondered – The same time every day. Behind the fireplace – at ten minutes past eleven exactly.’

  Those four days Agatha spent in New England in 1966 also produced her next plot, a ‘forged will idea’, Hallowe’en Party, the novel she wrote in the spring of 1969, in which a child who boasts of having seen a murder is drowned in a tub while ducking for apples. The party itself resembles an American rather than an English celebration of Hallowe’en, though the setting of a children’s party had occurred to Agatha before. She was interested in children’s innocence and its exploitation, in their ability, as in N or M?, to perceive or reveal the truth, and, as in Crooked House and They Do It with Mirrors, children’s capacity for evil. She knew that their beauty might be deceptive, while the phenomenon of identical twins fuelled her preoccupation with disguise, resemblance and the nature of identity. Hallowe’en Party draws on several of these themes, reintroducing, too, the notion of transformation of landscape, for, as in Dead Man’s Folly and Endless Night, Agatha supplies a character who, given money and opportunity, will realise a vision of beauty. Like By the Pricking of My Thumbs and At Bertram’s Hotel, Hallowe’en Party is muddled, not least because Agatha sought to include too many ideas. For that reason, too, it is, like all her later work, remarkable.

  By mid-1969 Agatha was being heavily bombarded with requests to appear here, pronounce there, contribute a story, a column or a witty saying elsewhere, in large part because producers, publishers, journalists and promoters of various kinds were making early preparation for her eightieth birthday. She did not look forward to the onslaught. ‘I suppose you and I will have to construct something about my “coming of age”,’ she wrote ruefully to Cork. ‘No television. Definitely.’ One producer assured her that television techniques had changed but she was immovable. ‘Entirely a personal idiosyncrasy,’ she explained. ‘I have to admit that I am not television-minded.… I find it useful – for watching race meetings, occasional news, misleading weather reports (in common with newspapers)! But not, to me, pleasurable.’ Her antipathy, she believed, might be because television was ‘possibly the wrong size for me. Some things are like that. Either photographs the size of postage stamps – or blown up to the most hideous proportions.’ Not only did Agatha ‘find it difficult to get any feeling of reality when watching that static box’, she was also filled with distaste for interviews that gave her ‘a feeling one would like to apologise for being present as an onlooker when anyone’s private and personal affairs are being questioned and probed – usually without any pretence of courtesy or good manners.…’ She admitted that she had enjoyed some television programmes: ‘The Forsyte Saga – and the thrill of seeing live men stumbling about on the moon – and the agony of fearing they will never get back.’ She herself, however, had no wish to appear or to write for it.

  Some aspects of the forthcoming anniversary did please her, the commissioning of a photograph for the National Portrait Gallery, for instance, showing her with Max, and the china horses presented by her Danish publisher. She was delighted by Mathew’s decision to establish the Agatha Christie Trust for Children in 1969, and particularly fascinated by another exercise, also arranged by Mathew. Max had suggested she have her portrait painted and Mathew had approached Oskar Kokoschka. Though he no longer did much portraiture, Kokoschka, an admirer, agreed to paint Agatha, and they had eight two-hour sittings in London, at each of which he consumed half a bottle of whisky. Painter and sitter liked each other, not least because they found a common butt in a doctor who had recently observed that people aged eighty or more were useless and should be mercifully killed. Kokoschka’s portrait is interesting. It is of a very old woman, whom Agatha gradually grew to resemble. As in his other portraits, the sitter’s features resemble Kokoschka’s own, especially the square shape of the back of the head. Yet it caught Agatha’s appearance and bearing, indicating, for instance, her habit of tapping her fingers (now afflicted with psoriasis) on the arms of her chair. ‘It’s very frightening,’ was her reaction, when Kokoschka allowed her to see it. ‘At any rate,’ she told Cork, ‘I look like someone.’ Majestic, she triumphed over Hollywood: ‘He was a great admirer of my nose – so big and important. I see all the film stars are having their noses reduced in size. Anyway I’ll stick to my Roman glory.’ Mallowans, Kokoschkas and Prichards celebrated with luncheon at Boodle’s, the painter cabling Agatha beforehand with his requirements: three kippers and a pint of Guinness.

  25

  ‘… an ordinary successful hard-working author …’

  In retrospect it seems as if Agatha had been installed at the pinnacle of international success for decades. In fact it was a long, if steady, climb. She became the acknowledged leader among mystery writers only in the early nineteen-seventies, the moment when her British and American publishers chose to promote her books more vigorously than ever. She herself had confessed to Max after the War that she must be included among the four most eminent detective-story writers, in
her article for Russia; even in 1961, however, the Cork and Ober offices issued to staff a list of ‘Christie’ manuscripts which might now be destroyed.