Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  Better advice would have been to tell her to rewrite the book, as it is full of quality. Almost every character is given a phrase, an insight, that brings them to life; Agatha could see people almost as well as she could hear them and, above all, she could intuit. Bitchy little Hyacinth, for example, desperate for the attention of every man in Cairo, is ‘clever, very clever, so clever that no man ever suspected the fact’. Told by one of her targets, Tony, that his fiancée is coming out to Egypt, she ‘cogitated deeply. “Will she interfere with me?” was perhaps the burden of her maidenly meditation. After a moment’s consideration of this knotty question, she turned to Farquhar with her sweetest and gentlest smile. ‘Is not the sunset beautiful?’ she murmured . . .’ And the semi-deaf heroine, Melancy, engaged to Tony and meeting him again for the first time in months:

  It was all so different from what she had planned – but much nicer oh, yes, much nicer! She impressed this latter fact on her mind, it was much more natural, much simpler and jollier.

  ‘This is just heavenly!’ sighed Tony, gazing rapturously at his fiancée, with his mouth full of whitebait.

  ‘I was so disappointed and lonely when you didn’t come this morning,’ murmured Melancy.

  ‘Poor little girl!’ said Tony, touched and distinctly approving. ‘Very nice and right of Melancy,’ so ran his thoughts . . .’

  Then Melancy falls in love with another man, and Agatha’s book moves tentatively towards the territory she would later explore in her Mary Westmacott novels: that of the human mysteries that cannot be solved.

  The breathing living personality of the man who had just left her replaced all else . . . Melancy looked around her. The beauty of the rose garden was as great as ever, but she saw it with different eyes. A world of warm living realities had taken the place of dreams . . .

  From Melancy’s heart went forth a warm personal need of all this quivering, feeling world around her. In the distance, she heard voices. They came to her with the human call of comradeship. Her gladness was full and complete.

  This was not yet Agatha’s own experience: she did not fall in love in Cairo, and would not do so for another three years. But she knew what it would feel like, so she wrote it anyway.

  She lifted a hanging rose, and laid it against her cheek. It was not for its beauty, but because it was alive.

  The Husband

  ‘You think you admire moral qualities, but when you fall in love,

  you revert to the primitive where the physical is all that counts’

  (from The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie)

  ‘She lifted up her eyes and loved him, with that love which was her doom’

  (from The Idylls of the King by Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

  Ugbrooke House, near Exeter, is one of the great Devon mansions, a house of mythic beauty. By daylight its stone is rose-pink, at night it is ethereal and shadowy. It was here, on 12 October 1912, that Agatha Miller first met Archie Christie, when he strode up and asked for three dances on her card. After two of these he asked for three more. Agatha’s card was full but she gave in when Archie told her to cut the other partners, showing what was, for her, an unusual disregard for the conventions.

  Archie was twenty-three, almost exactly a year older than Agatha. He had a ‘decided manner, an air of being able to get his own way always’. He was long, lean, intense; and he had that mysterious quality of romance before which women are helpless. He had fallen too, though. He had no money with which to set up a home and no short-term prospects, but he determined from the first to possess Agatha.

  At the time of their meeting he was a second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, ambitious for advancement. He had decided upon the means: a career as a pilot. His clear brain, whose practicality was so alien to Agatha that she found it romantically compelling, saw aeroplanes not as something magical but as an inevitable future in which he could play a part. He had therefore paid seventy-five pounds for flying lessons on Salisbury Plain and, three months before he met Agatha, became the 245th qualified aviator in Britain. All of this he wrote in the notebook that logged the important facts of his life. Archie liked to organise his memories in this way. ‘16th July: Got Royal Aero Club Certificate on a Bristol Box Kite after being at the school about a month on leave from Exeter. Applied to join the Royal Flying Corps and went back to Exeter.’

  Archie was one of several members of the Exeter garrison invited to the dance at Ugbrooke by its owners, Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh; Agatha had been asked by friends of the Cliffords. She had intended to meet there another soldier, Arthur Griffiths, with whom she had had a light flirtation at Thorp Arch Hall. He was unable to attend but wrote to her suggesting that she look out for his friend Christie, who was a good dancer and might amuse her.

  ‘12th October: Went to dance at Lord Clifford of Chudleigh’s,’ wrote Archie in his notebook. And not long after his night amid the pink stone arches and moonlit balconies, he chugged up Barton Road on his motorbike. He took tea with Clara; he waited. Across the road at Rooklands, Agatha played badminton with the son of the house, also smitten with her. The last entirely carefree moments of her life were spent practising dance steps (‘We were, I think, tangoing’); then her mother telephoned to summon her home. She was reluctant to come. ‘One of your young men,’ Clara had said, not having caught the name properly, and however much Agatha had dreamed of seeing Archie Christie again (but how, in those days?) she did not for a moment think it was he who might be waiting for her. Such an effort he had made to find her. He stood when she entered the drawingroom, and gave his embarrassed story about having been ‘in the neighbourhood’. He stayed to supper.

  The two saw each other several times afterwards in quick succession; exquisitely, increasingly frustrated by the customs of the time. Archie asked Agatha to a concert in Exeter followed by tea, Clara informed him that Agatha could not take tea in a hotel with a man, so he invited Clara to come too; she relented to the extent of allowing him to give tea to her daughter – alone – at Exeter railway station. Agatha asked Archie to the New Year Ball at the start of 1913, at which he was ‘completely silent’. Two days later, on 4 January, Archie’s log records that he ‘went to Ashfield Torquay and concert at the Pavilion’. The music that night was Agatha’s beloved Wagner. The Pavilion was then newly completed, a fresh white and green building on the seafront. She and Archie sat beside each other beneath its domed skylight, their sleeves touching, listening to the music. Afterwards they went upstairs to the schoolroom at home, as Agatha put it in her autobiography ‘to play the piano’; then Archie turned to her with sudden fierceness and said, ‘You’ve got to marry me, you’ve got to marry me.’ She was surely not surprised, despite her superficial bemusement. He had known – he told her – from the night of the dance at Ugbrooke. He was leaving in two days’ time to start his training at Salisbury Plain with the Royal Flying Corps, and he needed to be sure of Agatha first. She stalled, but the next day she spoke to Clara: ‘I’m sorry Mother, I’ve got to tell you. Archie Christie has asked me to marry him and I want to, I want to dreadfully.’ The wedding would not take place for almost two years, and its delays and cancellations – due to Clara’s opposition, lack of money, the outbreak of war – look, in retrospect, like so many signs that it should never have happened. Yet the urge for it grew ever stronger in both parties. Every time one broke it off, the subsequent reunion was sweeter: so dependency grew, and the belief that here was love for ever.

  At the time of the proposal Agatha was engaged to another man, an obstacle that Archie dismissed as a housemaid might swat a fly. She had received several offers of marriage from her late teens onwards. Her sweet, serene, assured femininity made her extremely attractive to men, both sexually and as wife material. ‘You are very lovely (however ruffled your hair is) and have the most perfect nature I can imagine,’ Archie wrote to Agatha in 1914, and this was how many saw her. Later she would tell her second husband that she had no gift for men – ‘I shall neve
r have the proper . . . Olympian attitude towards the male sex,’ she wrote in 1930 – but as a girl, before her life changed so completely, hers was an entirely natural female instinct. Like Nell Vereker in Giant’s Bread, she had a pleasure in herself that was both innocent and knowing. Agatha liked men very much – preferred them to women on the whole – and she showed this in a way that they liked.

  Her first two proposals came from men she had met in Cairo. One made his approach through her mother: ‘You know Captain Hibberd wanted to marry you, I suppose?’ Clara told Agatha as they were sailing home. She had refused him on her daughter’s behalf, a presumption to which even Agatha objected. ‘I really do think, Mother, that you might let me have my own proposals.’ Clara agreed; but she still hoped, to an extent, to control events.

  There were three proposals before Archie that counted for something. The first was from a man she met in around 1911 while she was staying in Warwickshire with the Ralston-Patricks, ‘great hunting people’, who, most unusually for this time, owned a car (Agatha first became aware of cars at the end of the nineteenth century, when visiting Paris with her parents; ‘Monty would love them,’ Clara had said). She was sitting side-saddle on her mount when a man of about thirty-five, a colonel named Bolton Fletcher, was introduced to her. That evening she appeared at a fancy-dress party as Elaine, Tennyson’s ‘lily maid of Astolat’, wearing a white dress and a pearl cap; it was a costume to suit her princesse lointaine allure and it certainly aroused the chivalric knight in Fletcher, who went straight into action. He pursued Agatha as hard as Archie did later, although with a good deal more money and experience at his command. He sent extravagant presents and wonderful love letters. ‘Technically he knew a great deal about women,’ was her judgement upon a similar type of man, in the Westmacott novel A Daughter’s a Daughter.

  Fletcher called Agatha the perfect Elaine, and this was the way she liked to see herself: sitting ‘high in her chamber’, as Tennyson wrote, combing her long pale hair, dreaming of Lancelot. She was flattered, she was enjoying herself, she wondered if perhaps this was love? In fact she went a fair way to being overwhelmed. When – in a distant echo of modern sexual mores – Fletcher proposed to her on their third meeting, she ‘felt enveloped in a storm of emotion’; it had nothing really to do with the man himself, everything to do with his expertise. ‘“When you say you don’t feel anything for me,” he said softly, “you’re a liar.”’1 Agatha was filled with an excitement she did not understand, and was confused and tempted. So too was Clara. Part of her liked the idea of an older husband for her daughter, a man of the world, who knew how to treat women and who, above all, was rich. ‘I’ve been praying so that a good man would come along and give you a good home and make you happy . . . There’s so little money,’ she said in Unfinished Portrait. But she understood Agatha’s bewildered resistance, and another part of her was relieved by it. She told Fletcher to wait six months. When, at the end of that time, he sent a telegram demanding a firm answer to his proposal, Agatha found herself writing, ‘No,’ then falling asleep like a tired little girl.

  She never regretted turning down Bolton Fletcher, although later she played with the idea that the marriage might have worked. In her detective novel Three Act Tragedy she has the young ‘Egg’ Lytton-Gore in love with a much older man: ‘Girls were always attracted to middle-aged men with interesting pasts.’ The relationship is all about hero-worship on one side, youth-worship on the other, but this does not mean it would be more difficult to sustain than a marriage between apparent equals, or one that is apparently without illusions. ‘Lady Mary, you wouldn’t like your girl to marry a man twice her own age,’ a character says to Egg’s mother. ‘Her answer surprised him. “It might be safer so . . . At that age a man’s follies and sins are definitely behind him; they are not – still to come . . .”’

  There was neither folly nor sin in Wilfred Pirie, with whom Agatha was next entangled. He was merely a terrible bore: ‘young and intensely solemn about life’, as she wrote of ‘Jim’, his fictional representation in Unfinished Portrait, and ‘very strong on willpower. He had books about it which he lent to Celia. He was very fond of lending books. He was also interested in theosophy, bimetallism, economics, and Christian Science. He liked Celia because she listened so attentively. She read all the books and made intelligent comments on them.’

  As a girl Agatha had sought to please, with her answers in the Album of Confessions: her desire to be ‘surrounded by babies’, her dislike of ‘affectation and vulgarity’. Now, in agreeing to marry Wilfred, she was doing the same thing. All her life she believed in duty (‘She had a problem to solve, the problem of her own future conduct; and, perhaps strangely, it presented itself to her . . . as a question of duty.’2) It was a function of upbringing, of generation. But the complexity of Agatha’s nature meant that pleasing other people was also, more perversely, a means to inner escape. If she did what was wanted, what was expected, who knew what mysterious thoughts she might hide beneath the facade?

  She did not take Wilfred seriously as a man. Kissing him was deadly dull and her grandmother, the magnificent Margaret, despised his non-drinking, non-smoking, theosophical ways. (‘He was very polite, very formal and, to her mind, intensely boring . . . The thought flashed across her brain, “Better stuff in our young days.”’3) But he presented to her a future both safe and oddly liberating. His family, the Piries, were old friends of the Millers; his mother and Agatha had adored each other for years. Moreover, Wilfred was a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, which meant that when he was away Agatha could live at Ashfield. In fact she need hardly leave home. Her relationship with Clara would be almost unchanged. ‘A daughter’s a daughter all your life’, as Agatha wrote in her Mary Westmacott novel; this was what Clara wanted, for Agatha to move into the world of adulthood but to remain her child. And Agatha wanted it too: almost completely.

  So Clara was desperate for the marriage to take place, and Agatha was desperate to make her happy, but the day came when she knew she could not do it. The real reason lay buried in her poetic ideas of love and fulfilment, the dark yearnings for ‘the stranger knight’ who would invade her life and take her beyond herself. The ostensible reason arose when Wilfred telephoned Agatha to say that he had been invited to join a party leaving for South America to look for treasure trove, and would she mind very much if he went? He was desperate to go, not least because the two mediums he visited regularly in Portsmouth had told him he should. ‘They had said that undoubtedly he would come back having discovered a city that had not been known since the time of the Incas.’

  Agatha might have been thought to take this kind of thing seriously. Her early stories were full of ghosts, phenomena, premonitions: ‘The House of Beauty’, with its vision of a wonderful house, in which ‘dwelt the Shadow of an Unclean Thing’; ‘The Call of Wings’, in which music lifts the body ‘free of its shackles’. But the supernatural was a means for Agatha to express her sense of the ineffable. It was never something believable in itself. Her mother took such things extremely seriously, which meant that Agatha tried to do so; she had also read Edgar Allan Poe and May Sinclair4 and was, to an extent, influenced by them. Yet there was a robust side of Agatha – Margaret Miller’s granddaughter, after all – that thought it utter nonsense. Unlike Clara, she was not mystical. The supernatural was entirely separate from the dreams and secrets that haunted her imagination. She saw its power, though, and used it in her writings; increasingly, against itself. As a young girl she had written what she called ‘a grisly story about a séance’. Later she turned this into the detective novel The Sittaford Mystery, which is written with an apparent belief in ouija boards and table-turning but is, in fact, creating an atmospheric smokescreen. The séance has been engineered for the most base and practical of reasons, as an alibi for one of the people attending it; and more fool any reader who took it seriously.

  The Agatha who could write this – or The Pale Horse, or Dumb Witness, or the short story ‘Mo
tive v. Opportunity’,5 all of which take the sceptic’s view – would have found Wilfred Pirie irredeemably silly. The day he left for South America is described in Unfinished Portrait.

  How beautiful an August morning can be . . .

  Never, Celia thought, had she felt so happy. The old familiar ‘pain’ clutched at her. It was so lovely – so lovely – it hurt . . .

  Oh, beautiful, beautiful world! . . .

  ‘You look very happy, Celia.’

  ‘I am happy. It’s such a lovely day.’

  Her mother said quietly: ‘It’s not only that . . . It’s because Jim’s gone away, isn’t it?’

  This, though, is more than just the blessed relief at no longer having to pretend an interest in theosophy. These are the emotions of a girl who loved freedom more intensely than most girls did; who perceived a life beyond the known limits, in which marriage did not bring the greatest happiness; whose most intense pleasures came not from fulfilment, completion or knowledge, but from the feelings that hover around the edge of these things. The moment of Archie standing to greet her in the drawing-room at Ashfield; the memory of Archie holding her dance-card and pointing carelessly at three names (‘Cut this one . . . this one ...’); the thought of Archie on his motorbike, climbing the hill she walked every day, looking intently for Ashfield: those were sweet in a way that no realisation could ever be.

  ‘I don’t really want to marry anyone yet.’

  ‘Darling, how right you are! It’s never quite the same afterwards, is it?’6

  Yet Agatha did want marriage, nothing more, and so she accepted the proposal of Reggie Lucy. A major in the Gunners, he was elder brother to the girls with whom she had long been close if casual friends (‘We’ve thought Reggie had his eye on you for some time, Aggie’), and he shared their easy engagement with life. If one missed a train, what did it matter? Another would come along. How pointless then to worry. If one was useless at golf, as Agatha was, despite Reggie’s best efforts to improve her game on the course at Torquay, so what? She could still enjoy herself swinging a club. Agatha was mesmerised by this attitude, which was not her own, and she felt comfortable with Reggie in a way that did not entirely preclude sexual attraction. They would talk together, fall silent, talk again: ‘the way I most like holding a conversation’. She liked his proposal too. ‘You’ve got a lot of scalps, haven’t you, Agatha? Well, you can put mine with them any time you like.’ It was an idiom with which she was at home, and her mother sensed that here was the right man. ‘I think this will be a happy marriage,’ she said. Then: ‘I wish he’d told you a little earlier, so you could have married straight away.’