As always, though, the weight of Agatha’s feelings was bent towards her mother. She wrote to her in a pencilled scrawl immediately she boarded the Kildoncm Castle: ‘Darling Mummy – Everything very comfortable – Nice cabin with lots of room – I do love my violets. Take care of yourself, darling – I do love you so much.’ She also sent many typed pages of her ‘diary’ and lots of photographs: shots of kangaroos, a pineapple farm, and two black children standing on their heads with ‘Little Boys’ Pastime’ written carefully on the back. It worried Agatha to be away for so long. ‘If you want me home earlier I can come. I can come right away any time.’ With her ability to inhabit Clara’s emotions she felt her mother’s vulnerability, solitude, fear of ageing more painfully than if they were her own; and she sought constantly to reassure Clara that she was in her thoughts. ‘Lots and lots and lots of love, my precious Mummy’. On arrival in South Africa, Agatha had ‘bought a 1/- basket of peaches, great yellow ones, five we thought, but discovered there were lots underneath and really about fifteen. We ate them juicily in the garden, and little Natal pineapples at 5d. each . . . I do wish you could be here. We would have a lovely eat together! Darling Mummy, it would be nice.’33
From Australia she wrote in May that the river Tamar ‘for most of the way is almost exactly like a rather bigger Dart, with the wooded hills sloping down each side. It made me feel quite homesick.’ This might have been true, but at the same time it was intended to please. Agatha also reassured her mother (and Madge) that her books were flourishing: ‘Two splendid batches of cuttings from John Lane were awaiting me here – Very good ones,’ she wrote of The Secret Adversary. T really feel Tommy and Tuppence is going to be a success – so don’t worry about money.’34 Among the letters sent from the Empire Tour were scraps of paper relating to the small investments that Agatha had made: ‘Chinese Bonds: 4 at £2.5.0, 2 at £1.2.6 . . .’ Money was still tight, and worrisome. ‘Remember I have 200 in my deposit at home if you want it,’ Agatha told Clara. ‘Very glad you’ve got an invalid chair for Monty . . . I feel rather awful being away enjoying myself and living off the fat of the land here.’35
But Clara loved Agatha to be happy, and was pleased by her buoyant letters. She also received, from her son-in-law, a souvenir from Honolulu: ‘Some Scenes from the great Cinema Picture entitled Agatha goes Surfing’, a book that Archie had made containing captioned photographs of Agatha in her swimsuit (a little thick in the thigh, but confident and attractive), carrying her surfboard, sitting on it in deep water and finally ‘entering a drug store for an ice cream soda’. The front page of the book read: ‘Scenario by Archibald Christie; Produced by Archibald Christie; Directed by Archibald Christie’. So Archie was making an effort for Clara (‘Dear Mrs Miller’), and he and Agatha clearly enjoyed their month off in Hawaii. They were not alone together. They chose to be almost constantly in company – ‘Lord Swenfen and St Aubyn’, also members of the country club, where they played golf – but they were spared Belcher, and they made the most of their freedom to bathe and surf. ‘The first day’s bathing so burnt us that we were in real agony! Archie was much the worst. . .’ In fact Archie’s health was starting to break down under the strain of travelling and socialising. He had a ‘bad cold’ in Honolulu, then in Ottawa collapsed with severe bronchitis and nettle-rash
so that he was almost screaming with the pain and frustration. It started at Winnipeg when he went over one of the big grain elevators and returned with streaming eyes and wheezing . . . I’m terrified of his getting pneumonia. It’s been snowing all today and yesterday the wind was cruel. We are both sick of the Mission and longing to get home.36
Archie lacked Agadia’s resilience. On the voyage out, back in January, he had looked after his wife when she was seasick, then played deck quoits with her against a pair of Belgians (‘Everyone kept coming up to us and saying ‘I hear you’ve knocked out the Dagoes! Splendid’). But as the tour wore on so Archie’s strength wore out. He was ‘not a sociable animal’.37 His weak nerves and stomach craved respite.
In May the mission sailed to Adelaide. Agatha wrote to her mother that she was ‘sea sick for the first half of the voyage’, but that afterwards she
had rather a merry time. There were several young people on board and we played silly games every evening or else danced – and the last three nights we had supper parties with the Captain or one of the other officers and got to bed about 3 a.m. I loved it (Archie, needless to say, retired punctually at 10.30, as usual – but fortunately had no objection to my being gay even if he wasn’t – though marvelling at my taste). Then we got up a jazz band – also played balloons in which game everybody banged others on the head with a large balloon . . .38
At which Clara surely longed to say: Remember, Agatha. Don’t leave a man alone too much. Don’t ignore a husband. Put him first.
One night in Sydney Agatha was dining alone in the hotel, Archie having gone off on an official outing, when she was swooped upon by a Major Bell and his sister Una. The mission had been invited to stay with the Bells at Queensland but had other commitments, so it was arranged that Agatha should stay with them for a week, then be joined by the men. She went off that night. ‘We arrived about 10.00 after motoring five miles, and the room seemed full of tall energetic girls cooking scrambled eggs over the fire and all talking at once!’
The Bells, who owned large parts of Queensland, were ‘rather like a Royal family’, as Agatha wrote to Clara. The sisters treated her as one of their own. She helped them organise a local show, sang in it to great acclaim, and generally revelled in their admiring company. They reminded her of the merrily confident Lucy sisters (‘“One of us” as the Lucys say the first people I have met out here who were!’) And as with Reggie Lucy, with whom Agatha had had a serious flirtation, so it was with one of the Bell brothers, Frick. ‘I really lost my heart,’ she wrote in her autobiography. In later life Frick’s son Guilford would redesign Greenway House for Agatha, and become a close friend to both her and Rosalind.39 ‘I felt quite one of the family by the time I left! And quite sad to leave. We left Brisbane the next day and sail for New Zealand on the 29th. Archie has an awful cold and is very done up . . .’
But when Agatha wrote of having ‘lost her heart’, or of playing a balloon game on board ship until three in the morning, or of being ‘snapped’ with a camera by a young man who had watched her surfing, there was nothing but simple pleasure in the tales. She had no eye for anyone but Archie. Her flirting was merely that of Anne Beddingfeld with the ‘strong, silent’ Colonel Race, whom Anne finds attractive in a way that does not impinge upon her desire for Harry Rayburn. Similarly she took no notice of the woman in New Zealand who, on a drive to Lake Kanieri, took an ‘immediate fancy to Archie’ and insisted that he sit in her car. Agatha and Archie were married; they were in love; there was nothing more to consider.
(What was that strange dry sound?
A leaf that crackled beneath my feet
Withered and brown . . .)40
In her next book, The Secret of Chimneys, Agatha would again portray a joyful and passionate couple.
‘Marriage, the kind of marriage I mean, would be the biggest adventure of the lot.’
‘I like that,’ said Virginia, flushing eagerly . . .
Chimneys was perhaps the happiest book that Agatha ever wrote. A comedy thriller published in 1925, it steals from The Prisoner of Zenda and P. G. Wodehouse but has a soufflé quality all of its own. The hero, Anthony Cade, is long, lean, daring and passionate: another dream Archie. The heroine, Virginia Revel, is clever and charming, with her ‘delicious and quite indescribable mouth that tilted ever so slightly at one corner in what is known as “the signature of Venus”’. The politician George Lomax is a cleverly drawn monolith of pomposity: ‘Not that I approve of women in politics – St Stephen’s is ruined, absolutely ruined, nowadays. But a woman in her own sphere can do wonders.’ The owner of Chimneys (a house very much like Abney) is one of nature’s nobodies whose misfo
rtune it is to have a position in life, and his perpetual petulance is exquisitely done. ‘“Omelet,” said Lord Caterham, lifting each lid in turn. “Eggs and bacon, kidneys, devilled bird, haddock, cold ham, cold pheasant. I don’t like any of these things. Tredwell, ask the cook to poach me an egg, will you?”’
Agatha was not an especially humorous woman – something deep in her took life very seriously – but Chimneys bubbles deliciously with laughter. ‘For a moment or two, no one spoke. Superintendent Battle because he was a man of ripe experience who knew how infinitely better it was to let every one else speak if they could be persuaded to do so . . . George because he was in the habit of having notice given him of the question.’ Very possibly Agatha had seen a George Lomax or two on her travels round the world during one of those interminable official dinners she had attended with Archie; had observed, with silent amusement, his worried desire to control the world.
Chimneys is what nowadays would be called a snobbish book. Almost all its characters are upper class and those who are not are described as such. ‘I certainly know her face quite well – in that vague way one does know governesses and companions and people one sits opposite to in trains. It’s awful, but I never really look at them properly. Do your’ And when Virginia first meets Anthony in bizarre circumstances, nervous of asking for his help,
‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but are you – I mean—’
‘Eton and Oxford,’ said the young man. ‘That’s what you wanted to ask me, wasn’t it?’
‘Something of the kind,’ admitted Virginia.
Agatha was too relaxed, in Chimneys, to bother to see round the class question in the way that she would later do, although probably never to the satisfaction of modern sensibilities. In her Westmacott novel The Rose and the Yew Tree, set at the time of the 1945 Labour election victory, she would look hard at the ‘old ideas’ and consider their validity (‘The ruling class. The governing class. The upper class. All such hateful phrases. And yet – be honest – something in them?’). In Towards Zero, written in 1941, she would show sympathy with a young man who is despised by his social ‘superiors’ because he has no money and lives off his looks.
‘You’re happy and superior in your little roped off enclosure shut off from the common herd. You look at people like me as though I were one of the animals outside!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary.
‘It’s true, isn’t it?’
‘No, not quite. We are stupid, perhaps, and unimaginative – but not malicious. I myself am conventional and, superficially, I dare say, what you call smug. But really, you know, I’m quite human inside . . .’
‘You’re a nice creature,’ he said. ‘But you don’t know much about the animals prowling about outside your little enclosure.’
Impossible to deny that Agatha lived in an enclosure, that of the upper-middle class into which she was born. Her letters home from the Empire Tour take a similar tone to Chimneys. A hotel room in Sydney ‘reeks of stale commercial traveller’; a woman on the ship to Adelaide is ‘rather common – but amusing – and when at a fancy dress evening she actually came as a “very fast chorus girl” we could hardly contain ourselves!’ She also threw out the odd, casually xenophobic remark. ‘It was a relief to get away from the “Australian voice”,’ she wrote to Clara from Wellington. ‘The New Zealand people really are like English people.’ In Chimneys she describes the rich banker, Isaacstein, as being dressed ‘in very correct English shooting clothes which nevertheless sat strangely upon him. He had a fat yellow face, and black eyes, as impenetrable as those of a cobra.’ In fact Isaacstein turns out to be a sympathetic character. Even more so is the Jewish Sebastian Levinne in the 1930 novel Giant’s Bread, which – as always with the Westmacotts – takes a rounded view, and examines anti-Semitism in some depth. Nevertheless this kind of jaunty remark, typical of Chimneys – ‘Like all Dagoes, he couldn’t swim’ – can only be explained away by saying that every class and every era has its own prejudices: a Tory MP in the late twentieth century might have been described with just as much contempt, and just as little general outrage, as a foreigner in early Agatha Christie.
As only a highly complex person can, she created simplicity in The Secret of Chimneys. She created a world that she longed to inhabit, full of people from a class slightly higher than her own, who took life easily; the kind described here by Superintendent Battle.
‘You see, the majority of people are always wondering what the neighbours will think. But tramps and aristocrats don’t – they just do the first thing that comes into their heads, and they don’t bother to think what anyone thinks of them. I’m not meaning just the idle rich . . . I mean those that have had it born and bred in them for generations that nobody else’s opinion counts but their own. I’ve always found the upper classes the same – fearless, truthful and sometimes extraordinarily foolish.’
That was not Agatha. She was not fearless, she was not always truthful and she learned the hard way not to be foolish. She was also self-conscious to a degree that was not aristocratic at all. Perhaps it was that very quality which she yearned, at times, to be free of: to be a wife and mother, lead a happy woman’s life, nothing more.
(Closer, O heart of mine.
I am afraid . . .
Your lips . . .)41
The Secret Adversary
‘To Lloyds Bank Torquay, 16th March 1926: to pay Wentworth Club £8.8/-
every year, Mrs A. Christie, Styles, Sunningdaie, Berkshire’
(bankers’ order form, signed and kept by Agatha Christie)
‘What did Roddy know of Mary Gerrard? Nothing – less than nothing!
. . . It was the old story – Nature’s hoary old joke!’
(from Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie)
In 1943 Agatha wrote her third Mary Westmacott novel, Absent in the Spring. She wrote it very quickly – in less than a week – as the idea had been burning in her for a long time.
The central character, Joan Scudamore, whose life has been lived in pleasantly sheltered environs, is travelling home to England from a visit to her daughter in Baghdad. When her train fails to arrive due to bad weather, she is left alone in the desert for three days. During her time in the wilderness she comes to realise that her marriage, which she had believed to be entirely happy, is a lie: her husband, apparently so devoted and respectable, has for years been in love with another woman. Alone in the desert Joan understands all this. She reads the signs that should have been clear. She sees what she had been too obtuse, too complacent and too innocent to see before.
. . . Tony’s scornful boyish voice:
‘Don’t you know anything about Father?’
She hadn’t. She hadn’t known a thing! Because, quite determinedly, she hadn’t wanted to know.
When Agatha and Archie returned from the Empire Tour, having finally docked at Southampton on 1 December 1922, life was harder for them than either had anticipated. They had known that they would return to problems but had been too excited by the idea of change – or ‘risk’ – to take the realities seriously. Now they were back in a wintry London, tired and broke. Rosalind would hardly acknowledge their presence (‘I want my auntie Punkie’). Jessie Swannell had fallen out with Clara and been replaced with an annoying new nanny, known as Cuckoo (‘Now then, little dear ...’). Monty’s erratic behaviour had driven Clara to breaking-point. And Archie, whose job in the City had of course been given to somebody else, now found it impossible to get work.
He probably wished he had never embarked on the tour. Agatha – who had enjoyed it immensely, on the whole, and retained her eager zest for life – now stayed with him in London as he trailed through the days in pursuit of employment, even though he urged her to go away with Rosalind while he was in such a depressive state. ‘I’m no good in trouble. I can’t stand trouble.’ She refused to stay with Clara or Madge, remembering that a man should not be left alone, even if he wanted to be. It did not occur to her that she should put her shorthand and
book-keeping to use by getting a job – married women of her class did not do that – but as the Christies no longer had a maid she had work to do around the house. ‘I want to share this with you,’ she said to Archie, although she was sorely tried by his irritability and melancholia, which her presence seemed to exacerbate. Later she wrote a version of this time in her Westmacott novel The Burden, in which the glamorous young Henry is stricken with illness and takes out his frustrations on his wife, Shirley, who similarly sticks it out by his side.
‘I don’t want to leave you.’
‘I don’t care whether you go or not. What use are you to me?’
‘I don’t seem to be any use,’ said Shirley dully.
Life was catching up with Archie, in fact. The trip abroad and the toll it had taken upon his health, the humiliating search for work, the knowledge that his mother-in-law would consider him to have failed her daughter, the constant background babbling of Cuckoo, the penetrating eye of Rosalind, the anxious smiling face of his wife and, beneath it all, the memories of death and blood and terror: his nerves felt as exposed as wounds. The Christies were not mentally robust. Peg was volatile in the extreme and in 1963 her younger son, Campbell, would be found dead in his gas-filled kitchen. Archie’s air of masculine decisiveness, his charm and his extreme self-control kept his vulnerability hidden. But the effort cost him. He was later described as looking ‘tied-up inside’.1 Agatha knew her husband’s fragility – she had found it powerfully attractive – but now she longed, above all, for it not to be exposed. She dreaded Archie’s unhappiness because he coped with it so badly, almost in the manner of a small boy who demanded that things be made better. ‘I can’t stand not having what I want.’ She prayed that he would quickly find a job. Eventually an offer of work was made, albeit from a firm of dubious reputation. ‘It was employment and brought some money in, and Archie’s mood improved.’ No more evenings spent across the table from a tense white face staring down into an uneaten dinner, without television or even radio to divert the attention (‘. . . on the hearth dead embers lie/Where once there burned a fire of living flame’).2 It had been hellish, Agatha could not help but admit to herself. But now life was back to the happy normality she craved. And her work – which thrived on that normality – was going wonderfully well.
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