Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  After six months with Boué she was allowed to perform arias: ‘Te Gelida Manina’ from La Bohème and Tosco’s exquisite ‘Vissi d’artè’. When she returned to England she continued to study, and sang to acclaim at parties and local concerts. Then, after a visit with Madge in 1909 to see The Ring at Covent Garden, the dream of singing – of becoming an Isolde – truly took flight. She could imagine nothing more magical than to pierce the heart of music, to sound the call of wings (‘I saw them – the Wings! . . . the colour of them! Wing colour ...’). Something in Agatha longed to step outside herself and her imaginative world, to burst clear of its solitude and perform.

  Wagner she would love all her life: his music is at the heart of her very late novel, Passenger to Frankfurt. But when, in 1909, an American family friend with connections at the Metropolitan Opera House agreed to listen to her singing she was told, very kindly, that her voice was that of a concert singer only. Accomplished, charming, essentially weak.

  ‘So I put wishful thinking aside,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘I pointed out to mother that she could now save the expense of music lessons. I could sing as much as I liked, but there was no point in going on studying singing. I had never really believed that my dream23 could come true – but it is a good thing to have had a dream and to have enjoyed it, so long as you do not clutch too hard.’

  Sane, wise, realistic Agatha: her idea of misery, in the confessions entry that she made in 1903, was ‘to wish for the unattainable’, and this was what she truly believed. But this, from her Westmacott novel Giant’s Bread, is what she truly felt. The character speaking is Jane Harding, whose beautiful soprano is too weak for opera but who sings it nonetheless. In doing so she wrecks her voice for ever.

  ‘I pretend I don’t mind – but I do . . . I do. I loved singing. I loved it, loved it, loved it. . . That lovely Whitsuntide music of Solveig. I shall never sing it again.’

  Jane fails at the thing she most wants to do and, in the face of this, she is magnificent. ‘It’s been a gamble, you know, all along – my voice was never really strong enough. I gambled with it. So far I won – now, I’ve lost. Well, there it is! One must be a good gambler and not let the hands twitch . . .’ This kind of courage, or personality, was not Agatha’s, although she admired it more than almost anything. Yet there is something of the secret Agatha in Jane: Jane as Solveig in Peer GyM, ‘with her silver thread singing steadily upward and ever upward, higher and higher, till the last note was left to her – high and incredibly pure . . .’ Then her voice was ‘gone, my child. Gone for good.’

  Jane is supremely generous: unselfish, and therefore unsuccessful, as both a woman and an artist. She gives up her voice for a man: Vernon Deyre, who as a small boy played with Poodle, Squirrel and Tree, and who has grown up to be a musician; he wants Jane to sing in his first opera and, because she loves him, she agrees. Yet Vernon falls for Nell Vereker, a drifting fair-haired beauty with the looks of a nymph and the soul of a bourgeoise. Nell has no talent, except for men, but even if she had she would have risked nothing for it. She is Agatha’s lesser self. Her greater self is Vernon who, after a period of nervous breakdown, dedicates his life to art.

  As a child Vernon had been frightened of the piano in his house –‘The Beast’, as he thought of it, with its terrible white teeth – but that was because he was resisting his calling. As a young man he hears the words ‘This night shall thy soul be required of thee’, and knows that he must give his life to music:

  I couldn’t run away any longer . . . music’s the most wonderful thing in the world . . .

  There’s so much to know – to learn. I don’t want to play things – never that. But I want to know about every instrument there is. What it can do, what are its limitations, what are its possibilities. And the notes, too. There are notes they don’t use – notes that they ought to use. I know there are . . .

  Agatha began to write much more consistently in her late teens, although writing did not fill her mind as music had. It did not have the same capacity to stretch the world into its fourth dimension, which is what Vernon Deyre seeks to do and what interested Agatha so much in Giant’s Bread. Music and infinity, music and mystery, music and art were as one to her: music left nothing out. Of Vernon Deyre she wrote:

  He called it vision for it seemed more that than sound.24 Seeing and hearing were one – curves and spirals of sounds, ascending, descending, returning.

  . . . He snatched at paper, jotted down brief scrawled hieroglyphics, a kind of frantic shorthand. There were years of work ahead of him, but he knew that he should never again recapture this first freshness and clearness of vision.

  It must be so – and so: a whole weight of metal – brass – all the brass in the world.

  And those new glass sounds . . . ringing, clear.

  He was happy.

  And so ‘The Call of Wings’ was about the transubstantial power of sound; and Agatha’s first full-length story, ‘The House of Beauty’, lived within the sphere of dreams, the places she had imagined as a child and to which music had taken her. ‘He was at the door of the House. The exquisite stillness was unbroken. He put the key in the lock and turned it.

  ‘Just for a moment he waited, to realise to the full the perfect, the ineffable, the all-satisfying completeness of joy . . .’

  Clara had encouraged Agatha to produce stories, ‘as Madge had done’, and from the age of eighteen she banged them out on Madge’s typewriter before signing them with various pseudonyms: Mack Miller, Nathaniel Miller, Sydney West. Unlike Madge, however, she failed to get anything published. This must have driven her to distraction. She knew she was as good as Madge. Her autobiography insists upon her lack of ambition at this time, and indeed a good deal of her attention was taken up with dances and house-parties; but the creativity – and competitiveness – within Agatha would not be stilled. Her life was enchantingly ordinary. Her imagination was fierce and unstoppable.

  I pass

  Where’er I’ve a mind With a laugh as I dance,

  And a leap so high . . .

  And nobody ever sees Harlequin,

  Happy-go-lucky Harlequin,

  Go by.25

  Photographs from this time tell the tale of Agatha’s social life: the regatta at Torquay; a party of theatricals at nearby Cockington Court (Agatha dressed as a gypsy, ‘Sister Anne’); a meet of the South Devon Foxhounds; a house-party at Thorp Arch Hall for the St Leger meeting at Doncaster; another at Littlegreen House26 in Petersfleld, for Goodwood. The captions are carefully inked next to the pictures, out of which Agatha smiles confidently. She was an extremely attractive girl. She was not brilliant but she had an air of charming selfassurance; partly because socially, at least, she was out of Madge’s shadow. Despite her Roman nose and heavy grey eyes – her face was very much her father’s – she oozed a delicate, firm femininity. Men liked her and she dealt with this easily, naturally.

  ‘She took it for granted that she was pretty – and she was pretty – tall, slender, and graceful, with very fair flaxen hair and Scandinavian fairness and delicacy of colouring.’27

  No doubt Clara told her how attractive she looked in her sweeping skirts, with her quantities of pale hair – so long that she could sit on it – piled on her head. But Agatha herself thought she was beautiful. ‘I was a lovely girl.’ She was Celia going to a fancy-dress ball as Marguerite from Faust, she was Nell Vereker in the moonlight with her ‘princess’s cascade of golden hair’. She was a pierrette in high-necked blouses, a Thetis in patent leather-buttoned boots, an Isolde with tonged curls. Despite the complex apparatus of Edwardian dressing, her images of herself were always of someone loose and free and ethereal. Memories of how she had once looked would haunt her in later life.

  The golden green light, the softness in the air – with them came a quickened pulse, a stirring of the blood, a sudden impatience.

  A girl came through the trees towards him – a girl with pale, gleaming hair and a rose flushed skin.


  He thought, ‘How beautiful – how unutterably beautiful.’28

  So the nymph danced through the worlds of her protected youth, gazing towards a blissful future. What would happen to her? It was obvious. She would meet a man – ‘Her Fate’ – and have a wonderful life with him, cooking or ordering the ‘receipts’ that her mother had copied into an exercise book, giving birth to his child and wrapping it in her own christening lace, creating a world like Ashfield.

  (Pierrot singing to the moon

  For love of me . . .

  Ages welling Find me dwelling,

  Ne’er rebelling,

  By his fire.)

  This was the only future that Agatha consciously contemplated. It was with this end in sight that she danced, dressed herself prettily and sang after dinner (occasionally to a large teddy-bear: ‘All I can offer in excuse is that all the girls did that sort of thing’).29 She was waiting to fulfil her female destiny; the one that women still dream of, on the whole.

  ‘I wasn’t sitting and writing,’ she said much later,30 ‘I was going about meeting young men and embroidering great bunches of clematis on cushions . . . We did lots of creative things in those days; perhaps that’s why we didn’t feel the need for careers. When I was sixteen or seventeen only financial disability would have forced you out into the world. I think we had more fun then. Now girls have to worry about A levels . . . Flirtations to us meant a lot. You had lots succeeding each other, you went to all the dances and on your card you’d given three dances to one young man and only two to the other; it made you feel on top of the world. You were a young female, not bad looking, and they had to please you.’

  (Columbine sits by my fire!

  She is mine! She is mine!

  Columbine!)

  ‘People went to a lot of trouble arranging things. When you went to a house-party there were always three or four young men and nice-looking young girls so they could all have a good time . . . Even if you weren’t allowed more than three dances with one young man, it was quite fun to get hold of him for that time.’ More than three dances with the same man was considered ‘fast’ (‘but one managed!’).31 The innocence of this world was absolute, and the men preferred it that way; they treasured the purity of the girls they might marry. ‘Just to be a woman made one precious . . .’32 Men had affairs with married women, or with ‘little friends’ in London. To Agatha, the idea that she would have sex with anyone but her future husband was as remote as catching the plague.

  She and her friends were protected, necessarily she believed, against their own vulnerability. ‘In the past there were safeguards,’ as she wrote in her 1969 novel Hallom’en Party. ‘People were looking after them [girls]. Their mothers looked after them . . .’ Yet Agatha was not ignorant. She had heard all her life the whisperings of her grandmothers. A girl she knew had gone to stay with a schoolfriend and, too innocent to know quite what was happening, had been made pregnant by the friend’s roué father. A male friend was shocked to be invited by a young girl – apparently of the marriageable variety – to spend an hour with him at a hotel before they went on to a dance. ‘I’ve often done it,’ she said.

  Agatha might not have been as shocked as the man had been: while she understood the importance of purity, she was no prude. She saw that purity derived its value from the concomitant value of sex. Later, she also saw that innocence need be nothing of the kind, and that conventional morality might have its own impurity. Jane Harding in Giant’s Bread sleeps with Vernon, Nell marries him; there is no doubt whatever that Jane has the cleaner soul.

  But Jane is of the demi-monde. The world of Agatha’s youth did not admit to her kind of transgression. Its sins took place behind curtains that were shaken every morning by servants, within structures as rigid as corsets, while smiles were fixed and tea was poured. Agatha was starting to realise all this as she wrote her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, in around 1909. Its subject matter is the arrangement of love lives: sex lives. It is as far removed as possible from the stories and poems that had flowered from dreams; it was born of observation rather than fantasy; and it shows her, for the first time, getting to grips with the realities of being a writer.

  Poverty and ill-health had led Clara to give her daughter her first season in Cairo, rather than London. It was there that Agatha found the material for Snow Upon the Desert. The pretty but rather silent girl – ‘You had better try to teach her to talk,’ said a handsome captain to Clara, after a wordless turn with Agatha around the floor – was in fact noting everything, missing neither a trick nor a nuance of the sexual and social ronde taking place around her. Slowly, remorselessly, she was developing her grasp of human movements and motives, seeing and delighting in their predictability.

  On holiday in Rhodes, watching the to-and-fro of hotel life, Agatha’s detective Hercule Poirot comes to the same conclusion that she herself had done years earlier.

  ‘Nature repeats herself more often than one would imagine. The sea’, he added thoughtfully, ‘has infinitely more variety.’

  Sarah turned her head sideways and asked: ‘You think that human beings tend to reproduce certain patterns? Stereotyped patterns?’

  ‘ Précisément.’33

  Agatha loved her three months at the Gezirah Palace Hotel. At this time Cairo was a familiar – and cheap – destination for people of her class. She stuck into her albums many photographs from her stay, as usual carefully captioned: ‘Polo’; ‘Cairo races’; ‘Picnic in desert’; ‘Mrs Appleton, Duke of Connaught, Lord Feilding’. The exoticism of her surroundings, which would later set her imagination aflame, meant almost nothing to her. As far as she was concerned Cairo was Torquay with pyramids, Kensington-over-Sands. As one of the characters in Snow Upon the Desert, Lady Charminster, puts it: ‘Egypt (social Egypt, not the tourists’ Egypt, all mummies and tombs and pyramids, but our Egypt) . . .’.

  During the winter there were five dances every week, and Agatha – coolly shimmering in a pale pink shot satin dress, made by a Levantine seamstress – met around thirty men. ‘Cairo as Cairo meant nothing to me – girls between eighteen and twenty-one seldom thought of anything but young men, and very right and proper too!’34 Considering how absorbed she professes to have been in enjoyment, it is remarkable how much she noticed. Agatha had been accustomed all her life to the conversation of women, the delicious phrases that could be picked out and stored. Like Miss Marple, ‘who was very skilful in tones of voice’, having ‘done so much listening in her life’35 – and, indeed, like the musician she was – Agatha had an immaculately tuned ear. The opening lines of Snow Upon the Desert showed her ease in re-creating what she had heard in Egypt:

  ‘Rosamund’, said Lady Charminster, ‘is an amazing girl!’ Then fearing that perhaps she had not done herself justice, she added, with a flash of inspiration: ‘She can neither be ignored nor explained!’

  This was distinctly good. Lady Charminster felt that she had never done better. It was terse, it was apt, it was one of those concise sayings that have a certain backing of truth to their epigrammatic force . . .

  Of course, anywhere but in Cairo, Lady Charminster reflected, she would not have been sitting beside Connie Ansell, but Egypt, in its social sense, was distinctly limited.

  Snow Upon the Desert is a comedy of manners, worldly in the extreme and, although its structure is hopelessly disordered – two ideas stitched determinedly into one – in terms of character portrayal it is the finished article. This was what Agatha could do, above all, as a writer: understand people. That was her true, her innate gift. As soon as she realised it, she was set free. The character of Rosamund Vaughan was her starting point, and she is almost worthy of a short story by Scott Fitzgerald: an ageing beauty, unmarried, with a slightly used quality that can perplex, repel and fascinate. ‘Come what might, she would take her pleasure.’

  Agatha had observed the original of this girl – ‘hardly a girl in my eyes, because she must have been close on thirty’35 – having supper at the Cair
o dances, sitting between the same two men every night, keeping both in thrall. ‘She will have to make up her mind between them some time,’ was the phrase that Agatha overheard; it was the kind of thing Margaret Miller might have said, and it set her off: on Rosamund, on her novel, and on ideas that she would use all her life.

  The way in which Rosamund plays off her two men recurs again and again in the detective novels. Here was one of the patterns that Agatha had begun to perceive, and in Rosamund there is something of – for instance – Arlena Marshall in Evil Under the Sun, or Valentine Chantry in Triangle at Rhodes. These women cannot exist without male admiration. For this reason the world sees them as dangerous. Agatha’s instinct told her that they were in fact vulnerable: prey rather than predators. In Rosamund – who at the end of the novel is doomed, a femme fatale about to be killed – lie the origins of the belief that underpins Agatha’s detective fiction, that it is a victim’s character that determines his or her fate. It was this that always interested her: the distilled essence of human nature, contained within the act of murder.

  She was later contemptuous of Snow Upon the Desert which was rejected for publication. ‘I made the heroine deaf,’ was what she always said about the book, as if that in some way invalidated the whole enterprise. Encouraged by Clara, to whom Agatha’s novel was both an excitement and an inevitability (what couldn’t her daughters do, after all?), she sent the manuscript to a neighbour in Torquay, the writer Eden Philpotts. He responded with perceptive kindness – ‘You have a great feeling for dialogue’ – and sent Agatha an introduction to his own literary agent, Hughes Massie. This firm would later have the immeasurable good fortune to represent her. But Massie himself, whom Agatha went to see in London, told her that Snow Upon the Desert was best forgotten.