Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  After Madge’s marriage, Agatha and Clara spent Christmas with the Watts family. Agatha later remembered the bursting stockings, presents heaped on chairs, a dining room that dimpled and glittered with lights, a meal beyond compass – oyster soup, roast turkey, boiled turkey, sirloin of beef, plum pudding, mince-pies, trifle, grapes, oranges, plums, preserved fruits. It was the world of the past made flesh. And the Abney image of Christmas was one that Agatha tried to re-create all her life: that plenitude, that Englishness, those Dickensian configurations of gleam and depth.

  Madge became the chatelaine of Abney when James Watts took over the export business established by his grandfather. James, as Agatha’s second husband Max put it, had a ‘strange respect for money as a token of man’s merit’,5 although when Agatha first met him in 1901 he was a shy young Oxford undergraduate with no plutocratic tendencies. ‘I took a great fancy to him at once,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘He was kind to me, always treating me seriously, and not making silly jokes or talking to me as if I was a little girl.’ Twenty-five years on he offered the idea (also claimed by Lord Mountbatten) for her most famous detective novel, The Murder of Rojjer Ackroyd. James’s reserve gave him an empathy with Agatha but made him an odd husband for the extrovert Madge. In later life she became frankly too much for him – he was unnerved by her penchant for disguise, for instance – and he was certainly not enough for her. ‘They are an unhappy lot at Abney, I think,’ Agatha would write in 1930.6

  In her autobiography, Agatha wondered if her sister ‘would have gone on writing if she had not married’ (so it was probably a relief to Agatha that she did marry). Madge was the kind of woman who nowadays would have felt free to live alone, and that might have suited her best. It is certainly possible she would not have married James if Frederick, who never liked him, had still been alive. But Madge and Agatha had been left a hundred pounds each a year from the Miller estate. This was not negligible in the 1910s; still, the thought of Madge beneath the shelter of Abney must have been an irresistible relief to Clara, who was a realist about money. From her own upbringing she knew the damage that the lack of it could do. So she encouraged the couple not to wait, and – although Madge herself felt this was too soon – the wedding took place nine months after Frederick’s death: ‘Mother said, and truly I think, that it would be even more difficult to part with Madge as time went on and their companionship drew them closer.’7

  In the period between Frederick’s death and this marriage, Clara’s relationship with Madge had an intimate intensity. They went to the South of France together for three weeks, leaving Agatha alone at Ashfield. She did not mind this; enjoyed ordering meals for herself from Jane (‘technically, she was the mistress of the house!’,)8 and dimly understood that a grown woman was a better companion for a new widow than a pious girl bleating inadequately about Paradise. Had Madge not married so quickly, Agatha’s relationship with Clara might have been rather different. As it was, from 1902 onwards she was first daughter.

  Agatha put Madge into her story, ‘The House of Beauty’,9 written around 1908 and the earliest of her works to find subsequent publication. Allegra Kerr mesmerises the hero, John. ‘She was marvellously effective. Her effectiveness was, he thought, more studied than natural. But behind all that, there lay something else. Flickering fire, fitful, capricious, like the will-o’-the-wisps that of old lured men into the marshes.’ She outdoes her young friend, Maisie – who is in love with John – with ease. ‘You are hateful, Allegra,’ Maisie tells her.

  ‘But stimulating, darling.’

  In Unfinished Portrait there is a version of Monty but no Madge character; Celia’s sister, ‘Joy’, dies young. Agatha did not want Madge’s dominant personality in the book, interfering with her own relationship with her mother, doing so many things better than she did: flirting, joking, telling stories, painting, acting, writing. When Madge’s play The Claimant was taken up by a West End management – it went on at the Queen’s Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, in 1924 – Agatha was obliged to be delighted for her. But the balance of their relationship, which for the past four years had been redressed by Agatha’s literary successes, had tipped again. It is a rare writer who is not competitive, and an even rarer sister. Agatha had the sense that Madge, having touched her toe on the accelerator for one quick second, had leaped instant miles ahead of her.

  She had believed Madge to be under control – thick of waist, mother to her grown-up son (Jack, born in 1903), locked away in her funereal mansion – while her terribly slow sister won plaudits from the outside world. She should have known better. When the eighteen-year-old Madge had played the confessions game she had written that her idea of happiness was ‘to be successful’. It was an idea that she had not yet quite abandoned.

  And with what blithe glee she rubbed it in, during rehearsals for The Claimant. The play was based on the true story of Sir Charles Tichborne – a Victorian Martin Guerre – who had laid claim to a baronetcy in the 1870s and gone on trial to establish his identity. Madge delighted in the fun of the story, although she treated its complexities with a lighter and more ragged touch than Agatha would have done: ‘Inexperienced dramatists are apt to be over-lavish with their plots,’ read the generally favourable review in The Times. It was a remarkable thing for an amateur to have pulled off- another triumph, in a sense, for Clara, who would have instilled in Madge the certainty that she could write a West End play – and Madge relished every moment of the experience. In the confessions game she had said that ‘London’ was the place she most wanted to live. Aged forty-five she was there at last, staying at the Garden Club in Mayfair, taking her vast reserves of assurance to the theatre every morning and bamboozling producer Basil Dean with them. Accustomed as he was to desperate actors and neurotic playwrights, the nonchalant grandeur of‘Mrs Watts’ charmed him half to death. Or so she told her family.

  My Two Darling Is [she wrote to her husband and son at Abney], it’s going so well that Basil Dean says it might be produced earlier . . . I think the end of Act III is ‘soft’, always did think so. I want Fay Compton to have a speech – asked BD and he said ‘Do exactly what you like; if you like you can make it terrific – anyway, anything you do I’m for. Very surprising? So – I’m typing again!

  ... I went into Browns [Hotel] again. Said how I wanted rooms not for 16th but 11th. They were full but on my mentioning the play, she went quite mad, and said ‘Of course, you shall have rooms no matter who is turned out!’ Gives one a sheer sense of power. I hope I don’t get very swelled headed . . .

  Agatha was then living at Sunningdale – not far from London – so Madge spent some weekends with her: ‘I went to Sunningdale yesterday – Sunday – but I was so tired I kept dropping off to sleep all the time!’ It is possible that she was rather tiring herself at that time, especially to Agatha, who according to Madge was ‘mad to see a rehearsal’; probably in order to reassure herself that The Claimant was no masterpiece. The tone of Madge’s letters shows how irritating she must have been to her sister. ‘Wrote and typed all night. BD came back in about five minutes seized me by the arm and said “My God! You can write – It’s magnificent.” So that’s that. He now thinks me a sort of genius . . . They can’t do without me’.

  This was Madge’s particular and provoking idiom: it could annoy to distraction but it could also charm. That she was the only woman in her family with her father’s innate sense of humour is shown in this letter about the actress Lottie Venne, who had been cast in The Claimant for the natural barmaid qualities that – as she was playing an aristocrat – she felt at pains to suppress. ‘I’ve an awful job this afternoon – I’ve got to tell Lottie Venne (orders from BD) that she is to be vulgar. She said “Of course, as a Duchess I can’t do this or that” – Frightfully pleased at being one.’

  Madge described the meeting thus:

  Dear Miss Venne, I’m so charmed to meet you! I’m dreadfully afraid everyone who’s coming only to see you, will be so disappointed. They don’t
want to see my Duchess, they want to see you. They want their ‘Lottie’ . . .

  ME – I don’t care about my lines. You must put yourself into the part. Let yourself go. Take it broadly.

  MISS V – But a duchess, y’know?’

  . . . Never have I found it so difficult to keep serious.

  Agatha could not have written this; could not have been the woman who wrote it. She must have known, deep down, that such a direct expression of personality on the page is not the mark of a real writer. And she thought that she saw what lay beneath Madge’s constantly rippling laughter. ‘I’ve always suspected,’ says a character in her late Westmacott The Rose and the Yew Tree, ‘that a sense of humour is a kind of parlour trick we civilised folk have taught ourselves as an insurance against disillusionment. We make a conscious effort to see things as funny, simply because we suspect they are unsatisfactory.’ Yet for all this Madge could always make Agatha feel ‘curiously colourless’, like her imaginary self Sue de Verte. ‘My aunt was more entertaining than my mother,’ said Agatha’s daughter Rosalind.10 ‘She was great fun. Slightly buried in Manchester.’

  After The Claimant came to the end of its short run, Madge returned to her vast, crypt-like house. She wrote a couple more plays but nothing else was produced. Instead it was Agatha who moved into the West End, where she achieved a remarkable dominance. It was as if a particular rivalry had to be settled in her favour; although there was a quality in both Madge and The Claimant – that sweet, airy essence of self – that would always elude her.

  With a true lightness of touch, for example, the play portrays a character called Charles Cleghorne. ‘Don’t care about coppers, never did,’ he says, tossing his small change on to the stage. Not that this was art, exactly, on Madge’s part. It was a clever, elliptical and faithful reproduction of her brother Monty.

  Monty never cared about small change, nor indeed about much else; or so he affected to pretend. He was a hopeless case. The matriarchy within which he grew up overwhelmed him. ‘I mean, it makes you feel an awful ass!’ says Eustace Leonides, the young boy in Crooked House, who lives in a family full of powerful women. This was the line that Monty took – his natural idiom was that of the Old Harrovian – but, as with Eustace, the sense of inadequacy went deeper. Eustace has suffered from infantile paralysis, and this is given as the explanation for his ‘injured male pride’ and possible murderousness: ‘The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that Eustace might fit the bill . . . He’s not normal.’ With Monty there was no outward illness but there was, within, an odd paralysis of the spirit.

  A normal man could have thrived, or survived, among all those women, since there was no lack of love for him in the family. Frederick adored him as the only boy: ‘Monty, I think, was really his favourite,’ wrote Agatha in her autobiography. But his closeness in age to the bright and brilliant Madge has started him off on the wrong foot. Thereafter he limped along, finding his way through life with a certain careless confidence and great dashes of luck. From Harrow – where he kept white mice (‘Mr and Mrs Whiskers’) and took no exams – it was hoped that he would go into banking, but this was beyond him and he was sent into a ship-building yard on the Dart. This too proved a failure. When the second Boer War broke out in 1899, he volunteered for the army and, having obtained a commission in the East Surreys, went to India. Army life suited him better than anything else would have done. But when he resigned his commission, in around 1910, it became clear that here was a quite extraordinary misfit.

  Having come of age just after the death of his father, he ran at speed through the tiny amount left in the Miller estate. He acquired such desperate debts that he moved first to Kenya, then to Uganda, and sent begging letters to Madge asking for help in a scheme to run cargo boats on Lake Victoria. The Batenga was built with Watts money – ‘My brother-in-law was livid,’ Agatha later wrote – but by the time it was completed (with wildly luxurious ebony and ivory fittings) the First World War had broken out. Monty sold the boat at a loss and joined the King’s African Rifles. He narrowly avoided a court-martial when, against orders, he stopped his convoy of mules at a place he insisted was perfect for battle; while in the act of arguing with his commanding officer, a force of Germans arrived and was triumphantly beaten in what became known as ‘Miller’s Battle’.

  Then Monty was wounded in the arm, the wound became infected, and he returned to Ashfield with his African servant, Shebani. He had come home supposedly to die. In fact his return ‘nearly killed my mother’, as Agatha wrote in her autobiography. Monty would eat dinner at four in the morning, if the whim took him, and shoot at people out of the window with his revolver. Calm, silent Barton Road had never known the like: ‘Some silly old spinster going down the drive with her behind wobbling. Couldn’t resist it . . .’ There was a self-consciousness about his eccentricity that made it almost boring, as well as terrifying, and harder still to endure. Agatha and Madge were frantic for their mother, who had longed for her son’s return and now longed for him to leave. In the early 1920s the sisters paid £800 for a cottage at Throwleigh on Dartmoor, where Monty lived with his sixty-five-year-old housekeeper, Mrs Taylor, a peroxide blonde with thirteen children. A few years later, Mrs Taylor died as she was moving with Monty to the South of France. Rooms had been taken for them there, again by Agatha and Madge; now Madge defied her husband’s cold fury to travel to Marseille and do something for her brother, who pleaded that he was greatly weakened and lying alone in hospital. In fact the nurse who looked after him, Charlotte, had become the last to fall for his pitiable charm. Madge arrived to find him living in the nurse’s flat. He was with Charlotte until he died in 1929, from a sudden stroke, while having a drink in a seafront café.

  His death was probably a relief to his sisters. Nevertheless Agatha felt a kind of guilt about Monty; the chaos of his life haunted her, although he may have been less unhappy than she imagined. She sent occasional sums of money to ensure the upkeep of his grave in Marseille, and was anxious that flowers should be placed there on Armistice Day: ‘You may rest assured it will be well looked after,’ wrote one of Monty’s fellow East Surreys in 1936.

  Would Monty himself have cared? He grew up with love all around him, but the acceptance shown by his parents, the sense of responsibility felt by his sisters, made no difference in the end. None of it could fill the gaps. Perhaps that was why, when he filled in the Album of Confessions in 1897, he wrote that his favourite virtue was ‘integrity’: it was the quality he lacked above all others, although he did have others. He had all his father’s charm – though less of his humour, and almost none of his moral sense – and he was not without self-knowledge. When asked whom he would be if not himself, his answer was ‘a better man’.

  His chief characteristics, he wrote, were ‘skylarking and flirting, whittling, obstinacy, talking slang and getting into tempers’. His idea of misery was ‘working and borrowing money’. His heroes were ‘Fenians’, his heroines Margaret Miller (‘Gran’) and Clara. His present state of mind was described as ‘Oh my!?!’ Pathetic answers, really; so unlike the sharp, crisp responses of his sister Madge. And the picture in which he sits behind a harnessed goat in the cart, Truelove, dressed in full coachman’s regalia, is just the sort of joke that Madge might have conceived, but she would have pulled it off with an assured gleam in her eye. Monty looks merely silly. In another photograph he is in uniform: sitting on a bamboo bench at Ashfield, his legs hooked over those of two young men at either side of him, his eyes full of a confused zest for life. The last picture shows him outside his cottage on Dartmoor. He is leaning on a stick, wearing a dressing-gown, cravat and mangled hat, a cigarette dropping from his mouth. He looks dissolute beyond measure; a Lord Lucan discovered in sick old age; but a certain ashen charm survives.

  Agatha was acutely aware of this charm, and having been under its spell she came to understand its nature. As a child, when Monty had dismissed her scathingly as ‘the scrawny chicken’, she had found him hopeles
sly glamorous (he was the best-looking of the Millers). Adult life taught her that a man could be weak yet irresistible. Her last Westmacott novel, The Burden, has a young girl in love with just such a man.

  She still found it delightful to be married to Henry, but she perceived that it had its disadvantages. Henry had by now had four different jobs. It never seemed difficult for him to get a job – he had a large circle of wealthy friends – but it seemed quite impossible for him to keep a job. Either he got tired of it and chucked it, or it chucked him. Also, Henry spent money like water, and never seemed to have any difficulty in getting credit. His idea of settling his affairs was by borrowing . . .

  As a small boy, Monty would receive his pocket money for the week and spend it all instantly. ‘Later in the week he would suddenly push my sister into a shop, quickly order three penn’orth of a favourite sweet and then look at my sister, daring her not to pay. Madge, who had a great respect for public opinion, always did. Naturally she was furious about it . . . Monty would merely smile at her serenely and offer her one of the sweets.’11

  Twenty years later, when Monty took money from James Watts with which to build a boat, he also used it to set himself up in style at a Jermyn Street hotel, buying silk pyjamas and a bonsai tree for his room. To placate Madge he spent large amounts of her husband’s money on giving her presents and lunch at the Berkeley. It was the same trick he had pulled as a boy; and Agatha would later write of the terrible sadness of ‘a grown man with the mentality of a child . . . One must put away childish things ‘Yes . . . A man who is a child is the most frightening thing in the world.’12

  Agatha learned a good deal from Monty. Her large, sombre eyes took in the smiling anxiety of her father, the baffled frustration of her mother, Madge’s concerned contempt. Even when Monty was away from home the problem of him supposedly ‘solved’ – Agatha was aware of the weak dark presence that trickled through her family. She understood him, in so far as it was possible. He informed her views on human nature; helped to make her the wise realist of her detective fiction.