Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  Agatha spent her birthday in Devon, in a summer of celebration. There were parties for friends at All Souls and Boodle’s and a family feast at Greenway:

  Picnic on the Moor with 5 dogs and a super dinner last night:

  Avocados Vinaigrette

  Hot Lobster à la Crème

  Blackberry Ice Cream and real blackberries and lots of cream, and special treat – half a large cup of neat cream for ME while the rest had Champagne.

  Furthermore, Agatha reassured Cork, ‘I’m still alive today!!!’ She was obliged to ask Hughes Massie to deal with greetings from abroad. The flowers, enormous telegrams and cards had, she said, made her feel ‘like a Prima Ballerina, indeed quite above myself. No proper modesty left.’ She was particularly delighted with a present of something she had – surprisingly – never owned before, a gold pen, sent by Cork: ‘Death to anyone who borrows it and doesn’t give it back.’ Last was a party at Collins, where Agatha confessed that she ‘enjoyed myself very much!!!’ She asked for copies of the photographs of herself cutting a huge chocolate cake, of herself with Max and her ‘good-looking publisher!’ and of the literary editors surrounding her in a group, with ‘a little plan of names … because it will be nice to keep it with the 80th birthday souvenirs.’ It was a publication party too; by artful counting, Passenger to Frankfurt was advertised as Agatha’s eightieth book for her eightieth year.

  The New Year’s Honours List for 1971 announced that Agatha was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire. It was her last change of name. Friends and neighbours continued to call her Lady Mallowan. but her new style completely foxed American admirers (‘Dame Christie?’ was one ingenious guess), who flocked to buy Passenger to Frankfurt when it appeared in March. Agatha and Max went to Paris for a few days in January but she now found it increasingly difficult to get about. She managed, nonetheless, to deliver her new book in May, a Miss Marple story called Nemesis. It was an elaboration of a ‘National Trust idea’, listed among the ‘Projects 1966 Oct’, when Agatha had mused on what Miss Marple might discover on a tour of country houses and gardens and what her fellow-passengers might be like. (‘Lawyer? A doctor and his wife? A queer clever girl …?’) Nemesis itself was begun in January 1971. It is touching to see that Agatha has written ‘DBE’ on the line above the title of her notebook, as if she were murmuring encouragement to herself. She started her notes with a ‘Recap. Death of Mr Rafiel in Times.’ Mr Rafiel was the old man in the wheelchair whom Miss Marple had helped in A Caribbean Mystery; he was to use her as Nemesis, to see that justice was done.

  The notion of retribution had always interested Agatha. Her views fluctuated but by and large she believed that, whether people were innately wicked or had chosen evil, they should not go free. The fact that certain basic rules and conventions of behaviour had been broken – taking another’s life being the most extreme case – should, she felt, be recognised; very few of Agatha’s murderers are unpunished, although a number die before they can be brought to trial. Bringing the guilty to justice also relieves the innocent, she maintained, not just those who may have been wrongly convicted but also those afflicted by not knowing where guilt lies. Justice restores order, closes an incomplete circle. She saw her detective stories as morality plays, demonstrating that there was wickedness in the world, but that it could be found out and sin expiated.

  ‘Justice’, however, is not punishment, vengeance or retribution. It is fairness. Agatha often leaves punishment to the gods. She wondered a good deal about all this. She would have liked to have felt that the matter was simple and, as she grew older, became more strongly convinced that crime should be strictly punished, that attempts to ‘rehabilitate’ criminals were often futile (though not all efforts were as daft as those described in They Do It with Mirrors), that punishment could deter others and that a good many dangerous madmen were allowed to wander about (not at all a surprising opinion given some of the paranoid correspondence that, despite Cork’s screening, found its way to her). Even in the mid-’fifties, however, she allowed characters in Butter in a Lordly Dish to wonder whether capital punishment allowed men to play at being gods, and possibly to make mistakes. By far the most convenient resolution was to leave retribution to providence, nature, fate, some divine power or the Eumenides, whom Agatha, after reading Aeschylus in the War, likened to the spirits summoned in voodoo ceremonies. Miss Marple was not an embodiment of these avenging Furies, but the instrument of justice, picked by Mr Rafiel to investigate a crime that had happened long ago. He had chosen an ideal person, shrewd, sensible and wise, to do what human beings can do: mete out justice to other human beings. It is interesting that Miss Marple also represented the absolute objectivity of justice to an unexpected set of readers: the Tupamaros guerillas, who had kidnapped the British Ambassador, Sir Geoffrey Jackson, in Uruguay in 1970. Not only did Sir Geoffrey find consolation in Agatha Christie’s works during his long imprisonment, fastening on Miss Marple – and, indeed, Hercule Poirot – as fixed points in an uneasy firmament, but his captors were interested in discussing Miss Marple with him, venerating her as they did their own revolutionary leader.

  Nemesis, like many of Agatha’s detective stories, mixes the important and the mundane. The creeper which hides the victim’s burial place resembled the tangle of white flowers – Polygonum baldschuanicum – over the ruins of a greenhouse at Winterbrook, ‘concealing’, Agatha said meaningly to her friend Lady le Rougetel, ‘a multitude of sins’. The motive for the crime, the passion of a forceful, possessive woman for an impressionable girl, was both a powerful and an ordinary theme. (It is, incidentally, nonsense to suggest, as some critics have done, that in extreme old age Agatha suddenly broached more daring subjects, for from the beginning her books explored complex and unusual sexual and emotional relationships, of a type familiar to anyone living in a village, let alone Chelsea in the nineteen-seventies.)

  Nemesis contained a number of discrepancies and oddities but, considering Agatha’s age and increasing shakiness, needed little work. There was more difficulty with the play she sent Cork in the early weeks of 1971, This Mortal Coil. Agatha had recently made vague notes for several plays, including ‘Mousetrap II’; an idea about a ‘mousetrap party in Soho’, with hired waiters, which ended with the victim being poisoned, ‘a mixture of 3 Act tragedy and “Sparkling Cyanide”.’ This Mortal Coil was based on one of these ideas, ‘death duties’, and Agatha’s first rough outline indicates the thoughts that were now running through her mind: ‘M sends money to Chancellor of Exchequer: “How do you spend conscience?”’ The play’s next title became ‘Fiddle-De-Death’, later, ‘Fiddlers Five’. Agatha had great hopes for her play. ‘We saw Move Over Mrs Markham in Oxford last week,’ she wrote to Cork. ‘Max thought it very silly. Good audience and lots of laughs. People want to be cheered up and are tired of nothing but nudity.’ She set off to Paris, leaving Cork to do what he could. Peter Saunders declined the play but James Grant Anderson, the actor-manager, took it on tour in June. It was not a success.

  Agatha was by then confined to bed. She had fallen at Winterbrook and damaged her hip; at the beginning of June it was found to be broken. She was operated on at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital in Oxford, returning home shortly afterwards to convalesce. Billy sent books and Mathew and Angela music on cassettes. Rosalind, Anthony and Max did what they could to amuse her but she was bored, entertaining herself by dispatching argumentative letters to Billy about the proposed jacket for Nemesis, enclosing cuttings of book reviews complaining about other publishers’ jacket designs. By Christmas she was walking, though she found it difficult to get about in London, where she went briefly to be measured for her waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s. (Agatha gave them an old dress, being both practical and anxious not to part with clothes she liked and could still wear.) There was also Christmas shopping. ‘Most years I find it rather fun,’ she told Cork. ‘But now I get tired and want to go home.’ She discovered, however, that ordering by mail would help, supplying, for in
stance, a cuckoo clock, a ‘modern tool box’ for her nephew, ‘a hammering apparatus for her great-grandson’, and a ‘perennial fountain for moistening the sitting room’.

  The winter was hard. By now Winterbrook was exceedingly dilapidated: ‘A lot of wind and rain and somewhere water is running or dripping,’ Agatha wrote to Angela. ‘The Hall light has crashed – so there must be SOS on Monday to a plumber and an electrician.’ The garden was overgrown, the kitchen dark and difficult for Mrs Belson to work in. Max worried about the cost of keeping up the house, meeting his bills, his own and Agatha’s old-age pension. They had acquired a Mercedes-Benz at the end of 1971 and he was anxious about the cost of its maintenance. Agatha now asked Cork to reassure him by showing him the last Miss Marple book, ‘Cover Her Face’ (published as Sleeping Murder). She remained in good spirits. Even the coal strike at the beginning of the year did not defeat her: ‘My nose gets icy cold at 4.30 a.m.,’ she told Cork. ‘I now attach an egg cosy to it at this hour.’ She arranged an expedition to Nice, so she and Max could find some sun, ordered opera tickets, took herself to Sleuth, went out to luncheon and dined with friends, amazing another octogenarian, with delicate digestion, by tucking into osso buco and ginger ice cream.

  She also refused to admit defeat over ‘Fiddlers Five’. Allan Davis, a director who had seen the play in Brighton the previous autumn, made suggestions for improving it and in the spring and summer of 1972 Agatha amended the script, amalgamating two of the characters and changing the title to Fiddlers Three. She stoutly rebuffed some of Davis’s bolder ideas: ‘I do not want a play of mine to be one that deals with everyone in it doing swindles – or in thoroughly criminal surroundings.… Swedes or Norwegians or Danes seldom look anything but English – and seldom talk with Scandinavian accents. My own sister-in-law is Finnish.… I cannot see any reason for building up the Spanish Waiter’s act – he’d do just as well as an English waiter.…’ Fiddlers Three opened at Guildford at the beginning of August and Agatha was there. It toured for a few weeks but failed to find a theatre in London, which was perhaps fortunate, for it would have disappointed those who remembered Witness for the Prosecution and who still trooped to The Mousetrap. Agatha nonetheless derived great pleasure from the performance for she was still enchanted with the theatre. Indeed, the only society, apart from the Detection Club, over which she agreed to preside, out of hundreds of requests, was the Sinodun Players, an amateur dramatic society at Wallingford. She continued to scribble notes for plays to the end of her life.

  That summer, too, Agatha conscientiously delivered her next book, Elephants Can Remember. ‘Mrs Oliver. Poirot,’ she wrote, clearly this time, for her psoriasis had retreated. ‘Does a problem come to P? Or to Mrs O?’ Another old friend returned in this book as well, Mr Goby, the ubiquitous but elusive purveyor of information, who had first appeared in The Mystery of the Blue Train and returned in After the Funeral and Third Girl. Mr Goby was what in the United States would be a ‘gofer’, an errand boy, but he procured facts. As other people in Agatha’s novels were arrangers of money, Mr Goby was an arranger of material, from dossiers and reference books. He provided the data from which Poirot derived his knowledge, the intellectual tools to take apart the engines of conspiracy. Into Elephants Can Remember Agatha also brought some favourite themes: the long shadow of old sins; the shame of an unresolved crime; complicated domestic crimes (‘Wife kills husband? Husband kills wife? Sick women killing children? Sisters jealous of sisters-in-law.…’) ‘All so long ago,’ Agatha wrote in her notebook. ‘Everyone will have forgotten. People don’t forget things that happened when they were children.… It’s like elephants. Elephants never forget.’ So Agatha rambled through her own childhood and her own fixations: ‘Calls on Poirot. Asks about Josephine (Crooked House).’ Ideas surfaced that had been set aside: ‘Lunch for literary women. Mrs Oliver. Mrs Gorringe. Discussion between them. A child could do a crime; Hyde Park. Nurse with Pram. Talk of gas – to make a baby sleep …; ‘Lizzie Borden family – father and mother killed – two daughters – devoted sister-in-law.…’ Old fixations resurfaced: ‘Boys pull flies’ legs off but they don’t do it when they grow up.… Mr G says Professor of Genetics or Biology and Jesuits have to take a child before 7.…’ Not unexpectedly Elephants Can Remember wandered about as well. It was nonetheless ingenious, full of forthright and often very funny passages, blunt about the physical deterioration of the old and endearing in its depiction of the relations between generations. It was the last novel Agatha wrote before her powers really declined.

  She was now trying to put her literary affairs in order, looking over some of her notebooks, and trying to label pages where ideas for new detective stories had first emerged; the contents were so haphazard, that she abandoned the effort. In February 1972 she sent Cork ‘the odd poems that I have collected.… I think it best to transfer them to your care now because, at the age of 81, one might at any time leave this world rather suddenly: either as a result of motor crashes on our roads, heart attacks from doing a few of the things one has been told not to do – running upstairs – or opening the door to a long-haired young man who would bash one over the head just for the fun of it.’ Cork, she wrote, could, ‘after crying at my funeral and if my family agree, introduce them into the world.’

  Three months later, she sent him Akhnaton: ‘It seems to me to be particularly applicable just at this time, that is if anyone was willing to put some money into staging it – and it would no doubt be an expensive production – but there is such a furore over the Egyptian Tutankhamun.’ She added one or two sentences to take account of recent discoveries and speculations – the fate of Nefertiti, for example – but otherwise thought it not at all dated. ‘I like the play very much,’ she observed, ‘though I am quite prepared to accept the fact that no one will put it on the stage. If that does turn out to be the case, I would like to have it published.’ Both Poems and Akhnaton were brought out by Collins in 1973, together with a detective story Agatha painfully put together. ‘I’m so tired,’ she told Mrs Thompson, who helped look after things at Greenway, ‘and they’re waiting for every word I write.’ She also felt responsible to Agatha Christie Ltd, feeling, unnecessarily, that she owed them an annual book. ‘Notes for November 1972 and Plans’, she wrote, drafting the first few chapters as she had always done. (‘Possible point: the wrong woman died.… Various ideas … Next make a list of possible characters.…’)

  Tommy and Tuppence were among those with whom she toyed. The title of her next book was taken from a poem of Flecker. Agatha had noted in a plotting book some lines which sounded well, though their sense is obscure:

  Pass not beneath, O Caravan, or pass not seeing.

  Have you heard

  The silence where the birds are dead, yet something pipeth like a bird??

  She tried several titles: ‘Postern of Fate; Doom’s Caravan; Disaster’s Caravan; Fort of Fear …’; she settled on Postern of Fate.

  Agatha found it harder than ever to concentrate – Max told Rosalind that writing this book nearly killed her – and she herself was uneasy. She asked Cork for a candid opinion and he tactfully suggested she have some help with editing. Max and Mrs Honeybone, who did typing for the Mallowans (and to whom Agatha had dedicated Nemesis) tidied it up, though Agatha’s family – Rosalind in particular – was unhappy. But when Postern of Fate was published, in Britain at the end of 1973 and in the United States early in 1974, the notices were unexpectedly good and so were sales. It moved rapidly up the best-seller list and by February 1974 was in third place in the list compiled by the European edition of Time magazine.

  Rosalind was firm. Worried about Agatha’s health, she was also a stern guardian of her mother’s literary reputation. She asked Collins to press for no more books. Billy Collins agreed that Agatha’s health must be protected, though he left the question open by declaring that, while her mind was active, ‘maybe it is a help to her to be thinking out a plot, and surely we should not definitely turn down the idea if s
he thinks she would like to write another story.’ For the time being, Collins agreed that the next book would be a volume of short stories, from those hitherto published only in America or in magazines.

  There was no new story. In October Agatha had a heart attack, which left her frail, although she managed to scrawl a note to Cork on a scrap of paper: ‘Heart much steadier and doctor lets me get up and come downstairs every other day for short time but otherwise still in bed. Boring!!!’ She read a great deal; all the newly reprinted Mary Westmacott books (‘Unfinished Portrait I think is one of the best after Rose and the Yew Tree’), a batch of novels, including Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow, Brian Moore’s Catholics, and some non-fiction, Mysterious Britain and The World of Victoriana. She also asked Cork to send a script of her Autobiography: ‘I have time on my hands and would enjoy reading it at leisure.’ She played with memories – ‘Dickens Menus: Salmon (Martin Chuzzlewit) Lamb. Peas. Innocent Young Potatoes. Cool Salad. Sliced Cucumber. Tender Duckling. A Tart.’ She made notes for ‘Suggested Tours by AM in Idleness: Wickham (Elephants?) Pretty Spot.… Lambourne. Views all along road and bridges … Seven Barrows.… East Hagbourne – interesting heads in Church …?’ – all the drives along the lanes and over the Downs between Oxford, the Thames and the Berkshire Downs. Some of these places came into a ‘Possibilities and Ideas’ list she also made. One was for a set of ghost stories, based on the ‘white horses’ cut into the grass of the chalky downland in different parts of England (‘perhaps in a party with White Horses at which a Ghost Horse might appear suddenly …?’). In another: ‘Jeremy – discusses with friends. Murders. What difference would it make to one’s character if one had killed someone? “Depends on what the motive had been?” “No. No motive. For no reason. Just an interesting experiment.” The object of the crime – Oneself. Would one be the same person – or would one be different? To find out one would have to commit homicide – observing all the time oneself – one’s feelings. Keeping notes – Needed A Victim.…’ And there was ‘Cookery Story. About A Meringue? Trifle. Skewer.…’