‘In wartime, a man like that is a hero. But in peace – well, in peace such men usually end up in prison. They like excitement, they can’t run straight, and they don’t give a damn for society – and finally they’ve no regard for human life.’ This is from Taken at the Flood and does not quite describe Monty: he was not a criminal and he was capable of affection. But he belonged to the type, often portrayed in her books and sometimes a killer, of the man who could have made something of his life, were it not for a mysterious inner fallibility. ‘A slightly different arrangement of genes,’ wrote Agatha in her autobiography of Monty, ‘and he might have been a great man.’ David Hunter in Taken at the Flood; Philip Lombard in And Then There Were None; Mike Rogers in Endless Night, Charles Arundell in Dumb Witness, Michael Rafiel in Nemesis, Leonard Vole in Witness for the Prosecution; Jacko Argyle in Ordeal by Innocence – they all have something of Monty in them.
Jacko Argyle is of particular interest. He is one of the five children adopted by Rachel and Leo Argyle, each of whom is given an upbringing of perfect regularity, in the belief that they will become well-adjusted little Argyles and fuse as a family. Yet they remain disparate, dissimilar, true to their heredity and origins; Jacko, for all the love and attention lavished upon him, grows up seductive and conscienceless.
. . . Jacko, the intrinsic human being. Was Jacko, in the words of the old Calvinistic doctrine, ‘a vessel appointed to destruction’? He’d been given every chance in life, hadn’t he? Dr MacMaster’s opinion, at any rate, was that he was one of those who are born to go wrong. No environment could have helped him or saved him. Was that true? Leo Argyle had spoken of him with indulgence, with pity. How had he put it? ‘One of Nature’s misfits’ . . .
That was how Agatha saw Monty: she believed in the essential man (‘Where am I with God’s mark upon my brow?’) and she believed that her brother, like Jacko Argyle, was essentially unsalvageable. The modern view, that upbringing forges nature, was not one she shared. Of course she knew that circumstance could make a difference: she herself was the product of a particular set of variables that had pushed her character one way rather than another. ‘Character, mon cher, does not stand still. It can gather strength. It can also deteriorate,’ says Hercule Poirot in Taken at the Flood. But later in the book he says: ‘The tragedy of life is that people do not changed This is a mantra with Poirot. In Cards on the Table he refuses to accept a confession of murder that he knows to be false, saying, ‘I am right. I must be right. I am willing to believe that you killed Mr Shaitana – but you cannot have killed him in the way you say you did. No one can do a thing that is not dans son caractère!’
Poirot is voicing the ideas of his creator, Agatha had an absolute belief that each person had an immutable essence, usually unknown even to themselves. ‘What a person really is, is only apparent when the test comes – that is, the moment when you stand or fall on your own feet’.13
Monty fell, and would always fall. Only his charm held him up. In They Do It With Mirrors Agatha addressed the post-war faith in the power of philanthropy to change lives; partly because of Monty, she found it wanting. The book is set in and around a school for young offenders, run by a man named Lewis Serrocold – ‘another man with ideals!’ – who attempts to rehabilitate social misfits through psychiatry and education. Lewis is ‘bitten by that same bug of wanting to improve everybody’s lives for them. And really, you know, nobody can do that but yourself.’
Miss Marple talks to him about his belief in social engineering. ‘I think sometimes, you know, one can overdo things . . . I mean the young people with a good heredity, and brought up wisely in a good home – and with grit and pluck and the ability to get on in life – well, they are really, when one comes down to it – the sort of people a country needs . . . Not that I don’t appreciate . . . real compassion – and one should have compassion—’
‘It is born in a man to be happy and into others to be unhappy,’ Monty himself wrote in 1924. After all, if every other member of his family could write, why shouldn’t he? Why not create stories, as his clever sisters did? During the time he spent in the cottage on Dartmoor, he covered page after page of a notebook. ‘To me is at last given understanding sufficient to carry through my project wait and you shall see. It’s all going to be so simple you will wonder why read and learn learn and read . . .’
He started several poems, plays and stories in his notebook, usually writing no more than a few lines of each. One story, ‘Black Ivory’, begins with Monty lying wounded in Africa. His servant gives him ‘two little brown tablets. What are they I asked? Opium . . . do you good.’ It has been said that Monty was addicted to drugs14 and, although there is no outside evidence for this, his own words suggest that he took them at some point. Not least because so much of what he wrote reads like hallucination:
The Glorious Dream
May happen to any
But better by far to happen to me . . .
Oh come oh come
Oh come away to play I say I’ve dreamed
A dream I say say say
Today or tomorrow there will be no sorrow
Yet within these ramblings there is a desperate search for meaning and structure.
It’s a long time since I have felt so thoroughly dissatisfied with my own arrangements for living [he wrote on Dartmoor]. It seems to me we many just follow my leader, and not in any way one’s inclinations, those poverty bound can’t help themselves, but an individual there is a lot in this word how many of us are individuals. Surprisingly few . . .
Tomorrow I begin, the search for freedom, true happiness, and true selfishness. Tomorrow.
Around the time of Monty’s sudden death, Agatha published a collection of short stories, The Mysterious Mr. Quin. One of these, ‘The Man From The Sea’, contained a passage about ‘a disreputable dog’. The dog, who has spent his life roaming the streets of southern Spain,
was standing in the middle of the road, yawning and stretching himself in the sun. Having prolonged his stretch to the utmost limits of ecstasy, he . . . looked round for any other good things that life might have to offer.
And then, without the least warning, a ramshackle car careered wildly round the corner, caught him full square and passed on unheeding.
The dog rose to his feet . . . a vague dumb reproach in his eyes, then fell over.
What a long road Agatha had travelled – one on which she herself had been caught ‘full square’ – from the charming young girl who lived at Ashfield and wrote poems like this one, ‘Ma Ville Chérie’, remembering her stay with her parents in France:
Oh pays de mon coeur
À toi seulement je pense
Oh Pau ma ville chérie
Vers toi mon coeur s’élance . . .
When she wrote this Agatha was still in her idyll; despite her father’s death, life had scarcely touched her. With her long slim body, her rivers of hair, which gleamed almost transparent in the sun, like the sea in the bay at Torquay, she belonged to the dream world of her own creation. A childhood friend wrote to her in 1966,
I remember your lovely long fair hair, I was so amused by you remembering the dancing class! Now I recall it too, and a big mirror on the wall, into which I gazed at my reflection on my sixth birthday . . . I remember you too – in a lovely accordion pleated silk dress, and longing rather hopelessly for such a dazzler too. You were like the sea nymph Thetis with your flowing golden hair.15
Agatha lived a far more social life in the years after Frederick’s death, although this made no difference to the fact that she was closer than ever to her mother. She went to dance classes where she was ‘one of the elect’ in her pleats, she attended Miss Guyer’s school two days a week, she made friends. James Watts’s sister Nan, whom she had met for the first time at Madge’s wedding, remained close to her all her life (and was briefly a crush of Monty’s). Nearer to hand were the five Huxley sisters – ‘those Huxley girls’ – who strode along the Strand at Torquay with their arms sw
inging and heads thrown back with laughter and, ‘cardinal sin against them, they did not wear gloves’; and the Lucys, who lived on the beautiful sweep of Hesketh Crescent16 and ‘had rather slurred lazy voices that I found very attractive’. Up and down the seven hills the girls would walk in their corsets, one hand on their hats, the clean sea air dancing around them. They were carefree. The Lucys in particular worried about nothing in the world, ‘What does it matter, Aggie?’ They ate whatever they wanted – sumptuous teas, Devonshire cream, nougat bought at seaside stalls – and worked it off with walking, tennis, roller-skating on the pier, swimming in the ladies’ bathing cove. They went to Torquay Regatta, to the fair on the seafront with its coconut shy and firework display, to garden parties with their pistachio ices, muscat grapes and warm swelling nectarines. It seemed that the sun shone all the time upon these healthy young animals, ‘kicking up their heels like fillies in a field’.17 ‘We were conscious of all the happiness that awaited us . . . we had belief and joy in life.’18 It was an enchanted atmosphere, protected by structures as unyielding as the bathing-machine that took Agatha, in her black alpaca swimsuit, down to the sea, where she would swim out and be free.
‘I remember you as Miss Miller,’ read a letter written to Agatha in 1970 by a man who had known her when he was a small boy. ‘Miss Beadon, of “Copthorne”, I also remember, and I was thrilled one day to hear her say to you, “Come to tea,” and my thinking how wonderful it was being able to invite anyone to tea like that, without asking your mother’s permission first!’
Agatha loved it all – she had a gift for pleasure, ‘anything she did, she enjoyed’19 – and her mother encouraged it all. ‘I wanted you to have a good time and pretty clothes and enjoy yourself in a young, natural way,’ she says, in Unfinished Portrait. Clara delighted in Agatha’s attractiveness, which had burst easily from the child’s solemn little chrysalis. Nevertheless these were the thoughts that Agatha wrote for her mother, as Miriam, after Celia turns down a marriage proposal: ‘And secretly, in spite of her disappointment and her fear for Celia’s future, a little thread ran singing joyfully, “She will not leave me yet. She will not leave me yet . . .”’
After her husband’s death Clara had little independent life. As a widow she found herself marginalised, although this was really more to do with lack of money. It made little difference to Agatha that she had to walk everywhere or paint her hats rather than buy new ones; that was how most of her friends lived anyway. None of the Torquay girls with whom she mixed was ‘rich’, they were merely ‘comfortable’, with all the attendant snobbery of the proudly non-vulgar (the Lucys are described in Agatha’s autobiography as having a good laugh at the ‘common legs’ of the local dancing teacher).20 But to a woman like Clara, money meant status. She was not importunate, as her mother had been, but neither did she have the powerful social assurance of Margaret Miller. Of course poverty is a relative thing. Clara lived in a big house with servants, she was helped from time to time by her son-in-law; she was not in actual need. Nevertheless she would seek to sell the Miller grave plot in the Greenwood Cemetery in New York, for which she had to pay just thirty dollars or so a year, saying that the family was ‘never likely to be in America and [was] in extremely low financial circumstances’. Money was a continual worry to her, and the lack of it changed her life. She was unable to offer hospitality – the ingredients for a dinner party would have eaten deeply into her income – therefore could expect none in return. Her health had weakened to the point at which Torquay’s unforgiving hills were beyond her, and she could not afford taxis. Although her mind bounced around as restlessly as ever, her world was inert; Agatha was at the centre of it and, in Unfinished Portrait, the force of the mother’s personality lures her daughter into a soft, mesmerised submission.
The evenings were some of the happiest times mother and daughter spent together. They had supper early, at seven, and afterward would go up to the schoolroom, and Celia would do fancy work, and her mother would read to her. Reading aloud would make Miriam sleepy Her voice would go queer and blurry, her head would tilt forward . . .
Clara read Scott and Dickens to Agatha, missing out any bits she found boring (‘All these descriptions,’ she said of Marmion, ‘one can have too many of them’). She took her off suddenly to see one of Sir Henry Irving’s last performances, given in Exeter, in Becket. For all her physical diminishment she remained unchanged to Agatha: impulsive, magical, cleaving like a knife to the heart of life. ‘Celia thought about her mother . . . her small eager face, her tiny hands and feet, her small delicate ears, her thin high-bridged nose. Her mother – oh, there was no one like her mother in the whole world.’
When Agatha was fifteen Clara let Ashfield for the winter and took her daughter off to Paris. They stayed at the Hôtel d’Iéna while Clara looked for a pensionnat at which Agatha might pursue her desultory education. ‘To my mother trying a school was exactly like trying a new restaurant.’ She was sent to ‘Mademoiselle T’s’, where Madge had stayed before her, then to ‘Miss Hogg’s school’ at Auteuil, then to ‘Miss Dryden’s’ near the Arc de Triomphe. That was the kind of place girls like Agatha attended; if they failed to marry, it was the kind of place they ran.
Agatha stayed in Paris for almost two years, and was eventually very happy there, although when Clara had first returned to England she suffered terribly; as much for Clara as for herself, but then this amounted to the same thing. Sometimes it was as if she were the mother, Clara the child whom she yearned to protect. ‘If she put on a blouse her mother had made for her, the tears would come into her eyes as she thought of her mother stitching at it.’ Within her love there was a painful sense of her mother’s vulnerability, of the pathos in her indomitable vitality. So sensitive was Agatha’s imagination that she was able to become Clara, or so she believed: sitting alone at Ashfield, the spectacles slipping off her nose as she fell asleep over her copy of Nicholas Nickleby, the fire dying beside her in the schoolroom.
Yet the natural joy in Agatha would always, in youth, leap into life. The dusk and honey colours of Paris began to charm her eyes. She had her first adult clothes, among them a pale grey crêpe de Chine ‘semi-evening dress’, which had to be filled out with flounces due to her lack of chest. She saw Sarah Bernhardt and Réjane at the Comédie Française. She was taken to the opera by American friends of her grandfather, whose daughter was singing Marguerite in Faust. She took classes in painting, in dictée (‘Vous, qui parlez si bien le français, vous avez fait vingt-cinq fautes!’), in dancing and deportment, (‘Suppose, now, you were about to sit down by an elderly married lady. How would you sit?’). She ate cakes at Rumpelmayer’s, ‘those glorious cakes with cream and marron piping of a sickliness which was incomparable.’ She fell for a hotel reception clerk, ‘tall and thin, rather like a tapeworm’, around whom she invented wild romantic fantasies. Later she met a young man, Rudy, half American and half French, with whom she skated at the Palais de Glace. ‘From that moment forward I stepped out of the territory of hero worship . . . I did not fall in love with Rudy – perhaps I might have, if I had met him more often, but I did suddenly feel different.’21
It was delight, all of it; the life that any normal, healthy, attractive young girl would long to live. But it left something out. At the end of this passage in her autobiography Agatha wrote, almost matter-of-factly, ‘One dream of mine faded before I left Paris.’ She meant the dream of music. The truth was that during her time in France ‘it was the music that really filled her life’. While the young Miss Miller was merrily engaged upon dress fittings and teenage crushes her pure, poetic soul was soaring inside her.
‘Clearer and clearer, higher and higher – each wave rising above the last . . .’ This is how she described music in one of her earliest stories, ‘The Call of Wings’.22 ‘It was a strange tune strictly speaking, it was not a tune at all, but a single phrase, not unlike the slow turn given out by the violins of Rienzi, repeated again and again, passing from key to key, from ha
rmony to harmony, but always rising and attaining each time to a greater and more boundless freedom . . .’
Music, for Agatha, was the essence of the numinous. Its notes and sounds made the ineffable real, whole, graspable. For a brief time she believed she could inhabit its world. She was like a young girl who dreams of dancing in Swan Lake, entering the land of aquamarine and gauze; for such girls nothing, thereafter, is ever quite so strongly desired. At the age of sixty-three Agatha played the confessions game for the last time – in the drawing room at Greenway, with its beautiful Steinway in the corner – and, in reply to the question ‘If not yourself, who would you be?’, she wrote, ‘an opera singer’. Writing, for her, was the thing that she did because she had failed at music.
She trained hard at the piano in Paris with a teacher named Charles Furster, practising for anything up to seven hours a day. But at an informal concert, towards the end of her stay, nerves overwhelmed her and she gave a catastrophic performance. ‘To be an artist one must be able to shut out the world – if you feel it there listening to you, then you must feel it as a stimulus,’ was how, in Unfinished Portrait, she recalled Furster’s verdict upon her. ‘But Mademoiselle Celia, she will give of her best to an audience of one – of two people – and she will play best of all to herself with the door closed.’
She learned singing with the prestigious Monsieur Boué. She had a fine, clear soprano voice which, mysteriously, flowered in public: when she sang, the outside world was a stimulus, and had been ever since she had triumphed as Colonel Fairfax in Yeomen of the Guard – ‘one of the highlights of my existence’ – which she had sung with the Huxley sisters at the Parish Rooms in Torquay.
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