Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  The first months of 1926 were crammed and exhausting for Agatha. She was moving to Styles with her family, she was buying a first home with her husband, she was awaiting the publication in May of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and all the time her heart was with her mother at Ashfield.

  Clara had written in February, her hand by this time somewhat wild but still firm.

  The coat is lovely just right. I did not expect to live to wear it, but I think I shall now!!! The worst is over, and my heart is getting stilled down . . .

  I took off nightie today, and put on clothes and Dressing gown (yours), both windows wide open, no fire, and the sun streaming in. Such a hot glorious day . . . I have really had a beautiful birthday. Miss Butler went in Motor Boat to Brixham and was happy – I have asked her to stay for the present and she seemed very pleased about it. I am still too weak to bother about getting a gardener, and she is doing the garden very well . . .

  My firm love and devotion to Archie and Rosalind.19

  And instantly Agatha was transported back to childhood: the windows pushing open to the taut smell of the sea, the boat to Brixham along the coast from Torquay, the cry of gulls scratching the sky, the garden at Ashfield. She had a yearning to go back, a yearning to escape.

  On her return from Corsica she went down to stay with her mother. Clara had contracted bronchitis: ‘Her mother looked so small and pathetic. And she was so lonely in that big house.’20 But Ashfield still sang its siren lure. The border needed tending and the rooms had become shabbier; it made not a whit of difference to Agatha, who loved this house, and the kind, clever little woman in it, with an inappropriate and indestructible passion.

  Clara kept to just two rooms now, where she and Agatha talked together like the mother and daughter in Unfinished Portrait. Miriam tells Celia that she seems happy. ‘I want you so much to be happy, my darling’. She also tells her that she has been wrong about Dermot. ‘I’ve been jealous. I haven’t been willing to recognise his good qualities.’ Then she says: ‘Don’t ever leave your husband too long alone, Celia. Remember, a man forgets . . .’

  So Agatha returned to Archie, and the dark house at Sunningdale. Madge took her place at Ashfield, and at the end of March brought their mother home to Abney. Again Clara kept to her room, but she seemed over the worst. ‘Darling Agatha, Going on about the same, a little better I think. Lovely weather here and I expect you are all sitting in the garden and Peter digging, the precious naughty one. My love to Rosalind . . . Did you back Jack Horner?’21 she wrote, in a reference to the 1926 Grand National winner.

  She died on 5 April, soon after this letter was sent, while Agatha was on the train to visit her at Abney. In her autobiography Agatha wrote that her mother had longed to be free of the ‘prison’ of her ageing body and that she herself had felt Clara’s sense of release. Her tone is sad, reasonable, resigned.

  Unfinished Portrait came closer to the truth of that time. Agatha writes of ‘her little gallant mother . . .’ whom all her life she had found ‘wonderful and satisfying . . . And now her mother had gone . . . The bottom had fallen out of Celia’s world.’

  Even this, though, does not begin to express the unbearable sense of loss: it was, quite literally, beyond words. That is why every sentence ends with ellipsis. There are no words with which to end the sentence.

  For Archie, Agatha felt the love of a woman for a man, she loved him passionately and occasionally to distraction; however much the comfortable appearance of middle age shrouded her emotions they were there, still, burning inside her.

  But Clara had been the love of her life. It was Clara who had laid Agatha’s heart bare with her courage, her earnestness, her indomitable spark. The thought of her mother alone at Ashfield, her spectacles slipping from her nose as she fell asleep over Dickens in front of the fire, had aroused in Agatha all the sweet, poignant, tender emotions that probably should have gone towards her child, that kept her childlike (‘Lots and lots and lots of love, my precious Mummy’). Without Clara she was like Joan Scudamore in Absent in the Spring, alone in the desert and unsuccoured. How would she live without the knowledge that, whatever happened, she could go to Ashfield and be with her mother? That exquisite relaxation, that sense of sinking into soft familiarity, that perfect smiling communion. Her mother’s hand in hers. Her luminous gaze, which saw Agatha as she was and thought what she saw quite perfect.

  ‘How lovely to be at home . . . Celia loved the feeling of stepping back into her old life. To feel the happy tide of reassurance sweeping over her – the feeling of being loved . . . It was so restful to be yourself . . . Oh, dear home.’

  What was home now? Was it the dark prison of Styles, where Agatha must try to be for Rosalind – cool-eyed Rosalind – the person that Clara had been for her? Or was it still Ashfield, where memory bloomed in the empty rooms like rose scent?

  Agatha clung to the thought of Archie’s return from Spain, where he was on business. He knew how she had loved her mother. He would hold her. He would fill some of the terrible space inside and around her in this shadowy house. Rosalind was useless: although she had been sad about her grandmother she was too young and self-possessed to give sympathy. Carlo gave it, in her dignified way. So did Peter the dog, whose eyes seemed to shine with the same understanding that Clara had once bent upon Agatha. She clung to him as if his warm, woolly body held all the love in the world. ‘My little friend and loving companion in affliction’,22 she later called him.

  It was Archie, though, whom Agatha needed. Her man, her love. Like a drowning person she held to the thought of him as she put on her black clothes and stood, frozen, at Clara’s graveside. Belief in God was a theoretical consolation: Clara would have felt that she was now with her maker. But this did almost nothing to help the thirty-five-year-old woman who simply wanted her mother. She wanted Clara to make it better, as she had done thirty years earlier, when Agatha had cried silently all the way home from the day trip in France and Clara had said, looking at her daughter, ‘I believe she doesn’t like that butterfly in her hat.’

  Then Archie came home. The sound of him entering the hall at Styles was beautiful to Agatha (‘Now do I surely know that I shall awake! Return once more to love and delight’).23 Now she would no longer be alone. She would be understood and cared for. Agatha had forgotten her husband’s nature: he had always hated illness and distress, it disarmed him, and now in his embarrassment he assumed an air of jollity. Everything all right? Not yet? Ah well, time heals. He suggested that Agatha come back with him to Spain, where he had more business to transact; it would take her mind off things. How about it?

  She reacted with horror. It was as if he were asking her to abandon her mother, which in a way he was. The jealousy he had felt for Clara in life was there still. Agatha’s grief was excessive, unseemly. Would she have been reduced to such a state for him?

  He had made his offer of a holiday, the best thing he could think of. There was, he felt, nothing more he could do for his wife.

  ‘In the end Celia went to sleep holding his hand, which he withdrew with relief when he saw she was really asleep.’

  Later Agatha wrote of how wrongly she felt she had behaved towards her husband. ‘My life with Archie lay ahead of me. We were happy together, assured of each other, and neither of us would have dreamed that we could ever part.’24 She should have gone with him to Spain, and dealt with Ashfield – which was now her property, and needed cleaning and sorting – on her return. She should have recognised the nature of the man she loved.

  ‘My mother left my father alone,’ said Rosalind.25 ‘Grannie always said, don’t leave a man alone.’

  So Archie went to Spain and Agatha went with Rosalind to Torquay, to clear her family possessions. The estate – such as it was – had to be settled, and a decision made as to whether to sell Ashfield. It was arranged that Styles would be let (not least because the money was needed). Archie would stay at his club in London and then, when Agatha had finished her task, the Christies woul
d take a holiday together in Italy. This was something to look forward to. Again, it was a thought to which Agatha clung.

  The smell of Ashfield was the same, within the smell of damp and decay. The roof was falling in, water was dripping through the ceilings. It was a sad house now, although every cupboard held the memory of happiness.

  ‘No man ever had a wife like you,’ read the letter that Frederick had written to Clara shortly before his death. In one of the drawers was the purse Clara had embroidered with the entwined initials F and C, and the line ‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart, for love is strong as death’.

  There was the letter to Agatha from Clara: ‘Darling little girlie, Mother is longing to kiss and love her sweet pea again. Auntie-Grannie sends you much love . . . Tell Jane to please get a partridge to make you some potted meat for tea or breakfast.’ And from Frederick: ‘I hear your Grannie is going to have your picture painted. I think it is a most lovely idea and I want you to put your little arms around Grannie’s neck and give her a hug and kiss for me. You must always be good and gentle to her and I am pleased to think you are . . .’ These things were like dead flowers, like the edelweiss Clara had kept from her honeymoon in Switzerland: as they were uncovered the faint scent of love arose and grew strong again.

  The house had become almost like an immense store-room, with all but the two rooms Clara used crammed with furniture, trunks, books, cases. Margaret Miller’s possessions were also there, transported when she moved from Ealing. In her old home Margaret had wept as her life was unearthed around her: a moth-eaten velvet dress from ‘Madame Poncereau’s’, lengths of silk from the Army and Navy Stores, print for servants’ dresses, a clothes-basket full of weevilly flour, thirty-six demijohns of home-made liqueur (five of which had been stolen by the removal men, to Margaret’s flattered delight), packets of sugar and butter stored for future Christmases, which would never now be eaten. Letters, papers, an old envelope full of five-pound notes: Margaret following her own advice. A diamond brooch slung inside a stocking. A wax-wreath memorial to Nathaniel Miller. Such were the things Agatha now had to go through.

  It is beyond endurance, the continued life of things, when the owner of those things is dead. So it was with Clara’s clothes, bought with busy plans for when they would be worn. Or the Album of Confessions, filled in with a seventeen-year-old’s solemn concentration. The humble accretions of a life. At some lost moment, every one of these things had been the most important thing in the world to Clara. Perhaps it would have been better, as Archie had suggested, to burn them at once.

  Peter bent his friendly eyes upon Agatha as she pulled out dress after dress from her mother’s wardrobe. He wagged his wiry tail every time she moved, and was at her heels as she made incessant trips up- and downstairs with boxes of hats, clothes, books. He may even have been slightly annoying, in his relentless determination to stick with her, but he would not be deterred. Meanwhile Rosalind helped her mother to carry boxes, in between playing in the garden. Agatha felt she should keep her grief away from her daughter and tried, much of the time, to suppress it. Only the dog saw its manifestations.

  Agatha worked through Ashfield with the intensity of a woman possessed: as she was, in a sense. One maid helped her in the morning, another in the afternoon, but the work went on and on. Madge could not leave Abney until August. Carlo would have been a consoling presence but she had her own concerns: she had been recalled to Edinburgh where her father was believed to be dying (but at least she would be by his side). The weeks passed, solitary and strange. Roger Ackroyd was published. Summer bloomed in the garden. The warmth and light grew outside as Agatha sat in the house among her family’s things, burying herself deeper in her past, which lay around her in heaps, like earth. ‘To have been so happy and not to have known it!’ she wrote in The Hollow, when her character Henrietta thinks of the house she had loved as a child. 4fl could go back.’’

  ‘One can’t go back,’ says Henrietta. ‘That’s the one thing one can’t do – go back.’ And soon Archie would be there, just before Rosalind’s seventh birthday on 5 August, and then they would go on holiday together to Italy (‘Summer! And love . . .’). She was slim again, as he liked her to be, although she was also worn and tired, because she was unable to eat despite the physical work she was doing. Sometimes she was not quite sure what she was doing. Would she sell the house? Would she let it? Would she ever be finished? She could do nothing with Ashfield until she had cleared every room, some of which had been locked up for years. ‘Still, another six weeks or so, and I would get it all finished,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘Then I could begin to live again.’ She collapsed in uncontrollable sobs one day when she was unable to start her car. ‘That worried me.’ She also worried that Archie did not come to Ashfield for an occasional weekend, despite the fact that she could not visit him at his London club, as she had nobody to look after Rosalind. He said he was helping in the General Strike, and that anyway it was a waste of money as they would see each other soon. It occurred to her that he did not want to miss his golf. The thought upset her so she tried to dismiss it. She heard Clara’s voice telling her that Archie could be ruthless. ‘Celia thought: “He’s not land . . . he’s not . . .”

  ‘A great wave of loneliness passed over her. She felt afraid . . . How cold the world was – without her mother . . .’

  But then there were the memories of Archie at Ashfield: infinitely lovely and precious. Chugging up Barton Road on his motorbike. Rising from his chair in the drawing-room when she had tripped home from Rooklands across the road. Turning to her in the schoolroom upstairs, saying, ‘You’ve got to marry me, you’ve jjot to marry me.’ Walking hand in hand with her in the garden before Rosalind was born, kissing her beneath the summer night sky before the nurse called and she went back into the house.

  Almost to the day, it was seven years since that night when Archie returned to Ashfield. Madge had arrived already. She was to look after Rosalind during the Italian holiday, and her presence had lifted some of the blight from Agatha, who was wrapping her daughter’s birthday presents when Archie came into the house. As soon as she saw him she knew something was wrong. It was as if somebody else inhabited his body and looked out through his eyes. He was the Gun Man of Agatha’s childhood nightmare, who came to Ashfield in the guise of a beloved person but, as became apparent, was a stranger filled with murderous intent.

  ‘Archie seems very queer – is he ill, or something?’ Madge asked her sister. Perhaps, thought Agatha, that was it. Perhaps it was cancer, even. Or perhaps there was a problem at work, something to do with money. Because he looked almost criminal in his shiftiness.

  It was none of these things.

  Archie told Agatha that he had done nothing about organising the holiday in Italy. She said it didn’t matter, it would be just as nice to stay in England. No, that wasn’t the point.

  ‘You know that dark girl who used to be Belcher’s secretary? We had her down for a weekend once, a year ago with Belcher, and we’ve seen her in London once or twice.’

  Agatha could not remember the dark girl’s name, although she knew whom he meant.

  Nancy Neele. Well, during his summer alone in London he had seen rather a lot of her.

  ‘Well,’ said Agatha, ‘why shouldn’t you?’

  She felt such relief that it was not cancer, not embezzlement, not something that would threaten her future with Archie. Just a flirtation. Not the sort of thing she would have expected from her serious-minded husband, in whom she had always placed complete trust (‘Dermot never looks at anything but a golf ball’). But then, her grandmother would have reminded her that any man was capable of that sort of thing, particularly if he was left alone. How right Margaret had been! And how awful of him, really, to flirt with that girl, while his wife of twelve years was going through such hell. But of course he had never been able to stand illness, or unhappiness. She would forgive him for his silliness. He was the silly one this time.

  He was sti
ll talking, sounding impatient, and guilty about being impatient. He was saying things that could not be believed.

  ‘You still don’t understand. I’ve fallen in love with her and I want a divorce as soon as possible.’

  As Agatha asked him to do, Archie stayed at Ashfield for Rosalind’s birthday, so that it should not be spoiled for her. The next day he went back to his club and, not long afterwards, his wife and daughter returned to Styles. Carlo’s father was less seriously ill than had been feared; in response to Agatha’s distress she came back from Edinburgh, and her stalwart presence made the days a little easier. At night only Peter brought comfort. Sleep did not come for Agatha, who wandered through the corridors of the black and terrible house, crying for her mother.