Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  Love comes as the Spring comes

  Fearing . . .

  Dreading . . .

  The brown boughs are in blossom;

  A breath of frost,

  A wind from the leas,

  And the blossom would fall . . .

  But close to the earth

  The tiny common flowers

  Blossom unheeded . . .

  It was during the stay at Ashfield that Agatha discovered she was pregnant. The year 1919 was a busy one, beginning with a search for a new home, large enough for a baby, a nanny and a servant. Decisive as ever, Archie resigned his commission. He was still ambitious for advancement but took the view – contrary to his previous one – that there was no future for him in the Royal Flying Corps, and that he should instead go into the City. Above all he was keen to make money. No doubt he looked forward to proving Clara wrong. Relations with his mother-in-law were perfectly good (‘Miriam told herself that she had been unduly hostile and suspicious,’ wrote Agatha of the mother in Unfinished Portrait), but Archie would not have been human if he had not resented that implacable opposition to his courting of Agatha.

  When he set his mind to a thing, it tended to happen. Although he wisely did not resign until he was assured of a job, Archie quickly found work with a man he described as ‘fat and yellow’ – like the financier Mr Robinson, who would later feature in several of Agatha’s books – and a salary of £500 per annum. This, plus his eighty pounds, and Agatha’s own hundred7 gave them sufficient funds. Accommodation was scarce at this time, but eventually they took possession of a four-bedroom flat at 96 Addison Mansions, near Flolland Park, for which they paid ninety pounds a year. It was light and airy, which Agatha loved, and she threw herself into the excitement of decorating it for her new family. Home-making of this kind would become a passion. Even then she had clear ideas about what she wanted – pale paper in the sitting room, a black ceiling covered with hawthorn blossom; ‘it would make me feel, I thought, that I was in the country’8 – and she set to cheerfully with her paste and brush. A rented flat in West Kensington was hardly Ashfield; even less was it Abney Hall, with its sumptuous tapestries and green satin walls (but then Archie was so much more attractive than James Watts, and Agatha’s marriage so much more lover-like than Madge’s). ‘We were a very ordinary couple,’ wrote Agatha, with a certain pride. This was down-to-earth London living, buses and trams, bustling along with one’s fellow men, an occasional night out at the Palais de Danse in Hammersmith. Money was spent in the ways that seemed natural: inconceivable to take a taxi or own more than one evening dress, equally odd to live without servants and the precious hours of leisure that they brought. That was the way things were, and they were very good. ‘We were happy. Life seemed well set up for us.’9

  Summer!

  And love . . .

  Stillness

  And at the heart of the Stillness

  A throb . . .

  Archie had not wanted the baby, though. In her autobiography Agatha wrote that he had wanted a daughter rather than a son, and only girls’ names were discussed; there had been, she said lightly, ‘great arguments’. In Unfinished Portrait the conversation about her pregnancy is odder, the sense of threat deeper. ‘I hate the thought of a beastly little boy . . . I shall beat him.’ And: ‘I don’t want a baby. You’ll think of it all the time and not of me. Women do. They’re forever becoming domestic and messing about with a baby. They forget about their husbands altogether.’ And: ‘I can’t bear it. I’ve done this to you. I could have prevented it. You might even die.’

  Agatha was violently sick through the whole nine months. ‘Sickness means girls,’ said Mrs Woods. ‘Boys you go dizzy and faint.’ Perhaps it was a secret relief to believe this. Agatha wanted Archie to be happy, after all. He was extremely kind to her through the pregnancy, despite his dislike of illness; on one occasion she found a lobster on her pillow, delicious and very expensive, with which he had hoped to tempt her appetite. She devoured the lobster (always one of her favourite foods) and enjoyed it so much that she hardly minded losing it afterwards.

  In her autobiography she wrote that she was ‘thrilled’ about the pregnancy – the conventional, sensible attitude – although she admitted having been very scared. The baby would be born at Ashfield, which was a reassurance. A sensible Torquay doctor (not one with whom she had worked as a VAD: ‘I felt I knew far too much about them’) told her not to worry about anything. Death in childbirth was a greater risk at that time, but Agatha was a healthy girl and nature would take its course.

  But in Unfinished Portrait Celia’s very nerves are sick. She drifts into pregnancy in a state of quiescence, lying back in a chair and listening as Dermot’s hatred for his unborn child breaks over her like waves.

  ‘I was just imagining that the doctor said to me, “We can’t save both the mother and the child”. And I said, “Hack the child in pieces.”’

  ‘Dermot, how brutal of you.’

  Celia is touched in her deepest soul by what she sees as Dermot’s anxiety for herself. She does not see his own fear. He craves stability rather than change; he wants Celia to care for him rather than a baby. He needs her to hold his hands and soothe away unspeakable memories. So he is possessed with resentment of the child and, perhaps, of Celia for allowing it to grow inside her.

  Yet Celia knows that ‘no child could replace Dermot in her heart’. She craves her mother at this time – craves what she still thinks of as home – but she is determined to stay with her husband in London. She feels that she might die, and ‘she wasn’t going to miss a minute of her time with Dermot . . . Sick as she was, she still loved Dermot – more than ever.’ Meanwhile Dermot waits for her to regain the ethereal beauty of her youth, and become again the girl for whom he fell.

  ‘Look at Gladys Cooper. She’s had two children, and she’s just as lovely as ever. It’s a great consolation to me to think of that.’

  ‘Dermot, I wish you wouldn’t insist so on beauty. It – it frightens me.’

  ‘But why? You’re going to be beautiful for years and years and years . . .’

  Eventually the time came to remove to Ashfield. The baby was due on 5 August; Agatha, still sick, travelled to Torquay with Archie. At home she found Clara and the nurse who had been employed as midwife, ‘like two females caught up in the rites of Nativity: happy, busy, important, running about with sheets, setting things to order’. Agatha herself was lost in the middle of it all, waiting to be initiated into the world of motherhood, feeling not just unready but unreal. On the night the baby was due10 she wandered into her beloved garden, hand in hand with Archie, as if she would have stayed there with him for the rest of her life.

  Nurse called from the house.

  ‘You’d better come in now, my dear.’

  ‘I’m coming.’

  The next morning, when her daughter was placed in her arms, she wrote that she ‘was now definitely playing the part of the Young Mother. But she did not feel at all like either a wife or a mother. She felt like a little girl come home after an exciting but tiring party.’

  This is the person at the heart of Unfinished Portrait, who deals in adulthood and remains a child. She does not engage with life, except in her imagination: she lives as if she had invented herself as one of ‘the Girls’, whose fate is to marry a mysterious man with whom she will be happy ever after. That does not mean life will not touch her. Her vulnerability to life is acute precisely because she is so remote from reality.

  Much later, in the Mary Westmacott novel The Rose and the Yew Tree, Agatha considered the difference between those people who live their lives and those – like Celia – who watch themselves living them.

  I remembered vaguely as a child going carefully and unsteadily down a big flight of stairs. I could hear the faint echo of my own voice saying importantly, ‘Here’s Hugh going downstairs . . .’ Later, a child learns to say ‘I’ But somewhere, deep inside himself, that ‘I’ doesn’t penetrate. He goes on not being ‘I
’ but a spectator. He sees himself in a series of pictures. I had seen Hugh comforting Jennifer, Hugh being all the world to Jennifer, Hugh going to make Jennifer happy . . .

  Then Hugh the narrator of The Rose and the Yew Tree – thinks about other people he knows, who similarly see themselves as figures in their own emotional dramas: falling in love with people for whom their feelings are illusory, being kind to people about whom they do not really care, playing at life.

  Finally he thinks about his sister-in-law Teresa who, although young, is wise, brave, and willing to deal in realities. ‘Here’s Teresa marrying Robert, here’s Teresa –

  No, that wouldn’t work. Teresa, I thought to myself, was adult – she had learned to say “I”.

  Agatha did not say ‘I’. She knew that she did not, which was why the idea fascinated her so much in The Rose and the Yew Tree. Back in 1919 she gave birth, she found a flat in which to live, she decorated it, she interviewed nannies, she found a competent woman named Jessie Swannell, she created a grown-up world in which to live with Archie. And she saw it all, still, through the veil that had been flung so magically across the whole of her childhood. Here is Agatha cooking for her husband. Here is Agatha smiling at her daughter Rosalind. Here is Agatha sending out cards: ‘Mrs Archibald Christie returns thanks for kind enquiries and congratulations.’ Here is Agatha walking up the four flights of stairs to her family home.

  Only when she had been lying in bed at Ashfield, with the baby in the care of the nurse, and her mother by her side – only then had she been ‘I’. She had held Clara’s hand as she fell asleep.

  ‘Don’t go away, Mummy.’

  ‘No, darling. I’m going to sit here by you.’

  Perhaps no writer learns to say ‘I’; perhaps if they did they would no longer be writers. But the Agatha of 1919 had lost all thought of writing. She had, as she wrote much later, ‘quite given up hope of ever having a book published’:11 the letter from the Bodley Head, asking her to visit the office and discuss The Mysterious Affair at Styles, dropped out of the sky as from nowhere. It arrived just after the birth of Rosalind.

  Eighteen months after the manuscript had been sent out, there she was, this attractive young mother, this ladylike figure, quite the most unlikely person to know about the properties of strychnine and bromide, sitting opposite John Lane, a real-life publisher, who ‘looked to me like an old-fashioned Sea Captain, with his small grey beard and twinkling blue eyes’.12 And here he was, saying that her manuscript ‘might have – I only say might have – possibilities’. The court scene would have to go, of course, and some other rewriting would be needed. Then publication might just happen.

  John Lane did a clever job on Agatha, recognising both a talent and an easy touch when he saw one. By making her feel grateful – and emphasising the need for alterations – he tied her into a contract for five more books with the Bodley Head, at a royalty rate only slightly above the one being offered for Styles, which was 10 per cent on any English sale of more than 2,000 copies. She barely noticed this clause, as she had absolutely no thought of writing five more books. Later she wrote, ‘It was the beginning of my career,’ but she really did not see it that way at the time. Her life now was with Archie and Rosalind. She was a wife and mother with a home to run. She would remain an amateur, writing for fun, when and if she chose. That night the Christies celebrated her piece of luck at the Palais de Danse; the next day it was back to the park with Rosalind.

  Agatha did not especially enjoy the long walk through Kensington with the pram. It was tiring and ‘when you got there you couldn’t sit still and rest and make your mind a blank’.13 But she was proud of Rosalind, a beautiful dark-haired child, very much like Archie in looks. The name came from As You Like It – Agatha later named herself after Celia in the same play – and was the choice of both parents, although before the birth Agatha had wanted Martha, after her father’s American mother, while Archie had shown himself a reader of Idylle of the King in favouring Enid and Elaine. But Rosalind was no lily maid of Astolat, living in fantasy. She was practical, pragmatic, with almost no use for imagination. Like her Shakespearean namesake she had a near-masculine boldness of character; she was, in fact, her father’s daughter. And Archie, who had taken no interest in Rosalind as a baby (‘Once she can talk and walk, I daresay I shall like her’, says Dermot in Unfinished Portrait), found himself drawn to this intelligent and self-possessed little person, whose natural delight was to engage with reality.

  From the first, Rosalind was able to say ‘I’ Always she took life as it was. She had no need or desire to dream of other worlds. This fascinated Agatha, but at the same time confounded her. In Unfinished Portrait she dreams of the day when she will take ‘Judy’14 home to her own mother: ‘Judy would play in the garden and invent games of princesses and dragons, and Celia would read her all the old fairy stories in the nursery bookcase . . .’. When she takes Judy home, however, there are no invented games in the garden:

  Judy wasn’t any good at make-believe. When Celia told Judy how she herself had pretended that the lawn was a sea and her hoop a river horse, Judy had merely stared and said: ‘But it’s grass. And you bowl a hoop. You can’t ride it.’

  It was so obvious that she thought Celia must have been a rather silly little girl that Celia felt quite dashed.

  But for all her admiration of the bright-spirited Judy, Celia’s own mother thinks differently: ‘She’s not you, my precious . . .’

  This was how Clara thought of Agatha: their relationship was one of absolute understanding, unconditional acceptance. Clara loved the ‘silly little girl’ in her daughter. She had not wanted her to marry Archie, partly because she had sensed that he would be ruthless with Agatha’s ‘silliness’. At the same time she wanted Agatha to be happy, which meant accepting the marriage to Archie.

  Now, with the birth of Rosalind, Clara tried to give Agatha advice on how to hold her husband. She warned her not to leave Archie alone, to put him first, to make him feel the most important thing in her life. ‘Remember, a man forgets . . .’ She spoke the words of Margaret Miller, knowing they were not cynicism but sober sense. Agatha knew it too, but she felt no need to apply them to her own life. It was not that Clara expected the marriage to go wrong. She simply worked in the interests of Agatha’s happiness, seeing as she did that her daughter’s ‘dangerous intensity of affection’ required the same in return. Agatha was not mature or realistic enough to live with a mere formal family union, the kind of marriage that Madge now had. She needed love.

  In Unfinished Portrait the mother says more: she tells Celia to put Dermot before Judy. She tells her that there had been struggles, even in her own marriage, between her love for her children and for her husband. ‘You care for Dermot so much – and children take you away from a man. They are supposed to bring you together, but it isn’t so . . . no, it isn’t so.’ It was the Clara character who spoke these words. But it was Agatha’s own view that was being expressed. This was the irony: it was Archie who had feared the birth of their child, and Agatha who probably should have done so.

  Agatha already had two intense relationships in her life, with her husband and her mother. Although she would never have admitted it, she had little emotional room for a child. She had married a man with whom she was passionately in love; like Caroline Crale in her novel Five Little Pigs, she had an unusually attractive husband and a small daughter, and the daughter inevitably came second in her heart. As the governess Miss Williams put it, ‘Mrs Crale was really completely wrapped up in her husband. She existed, one might say, only in him and for him.’ The Crale child is treated with affection but, says Miss Williams, a child in such a marriage ‘hardly seems very real’ to its parents. Hence Archie’s inability to get to grips with Agatha’s pregnancy and Agatha’s own passivity throughout; not fully acknowledged in the autobiography, laid bare in Unfinished Portrait. Later, of course, Archie’s attitude changed. Rosalind became a companion to him, cleaning his golf clubs with an intent
frown and sharing his dry sense of humour. She was, he told Agatha, ‘perfect’.

  But Agatha did not need a perfect child: she herself was perfect to Clara. And so in love was she with being a daughter (‘A daughter’s a daughter all your life . . .’) that she was unable to find true fulfilment as a mother. Just as Clara had reacted to being given away as a child by becoming a possessive, powerful force in the lives of Agatha and Madge, so Agatha reacted to all that maternal love by detaching herself from her own daughter. Could she ever have conjured again the close perfection of her relationship with Clara? Would she have wanted to? Rosalind’s independent spirit, her reluctance to be hugged, her disdain for imaginative play were almost a relief to Agatha. They removed the obligation to try to replicate the bond between herself and Clara, which would have been impossible anyway. Instead, Agatha could view Rosalind at an affectionate distance, telling herself that they were simply unalike. And as Rosalind’s self-sufficiency developed, so too did Agatha’s objectivity. With a son she might have been different, although of course Archie had not wanted a son.

  A child, she wrote in her autobiography, ‘is yours and yet is mysteriously a stranger . . . it is like a strange plant which you have brought home, planted, and can hardly wait to see how it will turn out.’ This is wildly at odds with contemporary thinking, which tends to believe that a child’s development is within the control of its parents; an idea that even Clara Miller, so dominant an influence upon the lives of her daughters, would have balked at. She knew very well the importance of leaving a child to occupy its own imaginative spaces.

  Agatha felt more strongly still. ‘Many children, most children, I should say, suffer from over attention on the part of their parents,’ says Miss Williams in Five Little Pigs. ‘There is too much love, too much watching over the child . . . The best thing for a child, I am convinced, is to have what I should term healthy neglect on the part of both of its parents.’