After her divorce Agatha never again took communion in church. Always she felt shame and guilt, especially towards her daughter, for having ‘given in’ to Archie’s demands for a divorce. ‘I don’t even know why I did give in’ she wrote in Unfinished Portrait, ‘– because I was tired and wanted peace – or because I became convinced it was the only thing to be done, or because, after all, I wanted to give in to Dermot... I think, sometimes, it was the last . . . That’s why, ever since, I’ve felt guilty when Judy looked at me . . . In the end, you see, I betrayed Judy for Dermot.’
Archie’s second marriage lasted until Nancy died of cancer in 1958. Agatha wrote to Archie to condole with him, and he wrote back thanking her for giving him thirty years of happiness with Nancy: an apparently benign exchange which nonetheless, hums with undercurrents. Was Agatha really so altruistic, or was a small part of her reminding Archie of the luxurious, splendid life he could have had with her? And was Archie’s reply entirely tactful, in the light of the suffering that his love for Nancy had caused Agatha?
The marriage of Archie and Nancy – whose son was born in 1930 – must have been shadowed with memories. Agatha was not a person they could escape. Her fame grew, her name was constantly in the newspapers, her books were everywhere: how odd for the Christies to see The ABC Murders, say, in the window of the local bookshop, and to know that its celebrated author had been willing to go to such lengths on their account. At home Agatha’s name was not mentioned, nor were the events of 1926 (indeed Archie’s son knew almost nothing about them until he reached maturity)- Like Agatha herself, these were people who believed in the value of concealment and reticence. Whatever either Archie or Nancy thought or felt about the strange beginnings of their relationship, they pushed it aside and dealt with the realities.
It is generally agreed that their marriage was a success. Nancy, it was said, was ‘fun and full of life. I’m sure theirs was a happy marriage because she was such a happy woman.’2 Yet Agatha, too, had had a vast capacity for joy, and her zest for life had ended by irritating Archie greatly. He was ‘not a sociable animal’, said his son; ‘although my mother was’.3 So Nancy was not exactly Archie’s soulmate, any more than Agatha had been. And he fell for her in the same abrupt way that he had fallen for Agatha. The difference, of course, was that while Agatha had been beautiful, Nancy was beautiful still. And she was a wife, in the way that Archie craved: she did not have that quality of obtuseness which Agatha had displayed towards her first husband, and which seemed, unjustly, like selfishness.
After their separation, the lives of Archie and Agatha diverged so completely that it is hard to believe they ever thought they would grow old together. Archie did well in the City and acquired several directorships, including one in the Rank Organization. Although in a 1958 letter to Rosalind he admitted that ‘Twice I have been down to zero and that may happen again’, he left upwards of £90,000 gross when he died in 1962. Before the Second World War he had a home in London’s smart Avenue Road, and later acquired a house in Godalming (which apparently had ‘no taste’).4 By that time he had given up golf. He lived quietly. ‘He was a good chap,’ said Agatha’s perceptive son-in-law, Anthony Hicks, who met Archie with Rosalind on a few occasions. ‘Rosalind didn’t want to meet Nancy so I didn’t meet her very often. She was quite dull. And Archie became duller.’5
Meanwhile Agatha glittered and shone and became one of the most famous women in the world; she bought houses with abandon, living as she chose in Kensington, South Kensington, Oxfordshire or Devon; she travelled to glamorous, faraway lands; she married again, a man of intellect who had no fear of her brilliant, fertile mind but had the sense, instead, to revel in the fruits of its labours. She learned a different way of life.
Archie weathered the shame of the police investigation, the embarrassment of the scandal, the near-total rupture with Rosalind. He acquired the life with Nancy that he had craved throughout 1926. The pain of getting rid of his wife had, it seemed, been worthwhile. But some years later he had a breakdown of his own, requiring hospital treatment of a serious nature, from which he recovered well. Like his mother and brother he had always been fragile, although his selfcontrol was remarkable.
Ever blunt in his opinions, A. L. Rowse had little doubt that Archie had done the wrong thing in leaving Agatha, and that he must have known it. ‘Poor Mr Christie – what a story he would make, looking at it from his point of view! What a mistake he made!’6 A friend of Agatha’s told Rowse that Archie had had ‘reason to regret his conduct since’; in other words, that he knew he should have stuck with his first wife. This is speculation, of course. But it is the sort of question that Agatha would repeatedly ask: whether Archie might not have been happier, in the end, had he stayed. And whether she herself would have been happier, had she lived until death with her ‘own familiar friend’; had the lifelong compensations for his absence been unnecessary.
‘What did Roddy know of Mary Gerrard? Nothing – less than nothing! . . . It was the old story – Nature’s hoary old joke! . . . Didn’t Roddy himself – really – want to be free of it?’
So wrote Agatha in Sad Cypress; and indeed, when Mary Gerrard dies, Roddy emerges from her spell with the easy bewilderment of a man waking out of a dream.
Of Elinor Carlisle, the girl who loves Roddy so deeply, it is said: ‘She’ll forgive him the Mary Gerrard business. It was only a wild infatuation on his part, anyway.’
But Hercule Poirot speaks with the wisdom of his creator, and says: ‘It goes deeper than that . . . There is, sometimes, a deep chasm between the past and the future. When one has walked in the valley of the shadow of death, and come out of it into the sunshine – then, mon cher, it is a new life that begins . . . The past will not serve . . .’
In 1927 Agatha did not understand this yet; or understood it only in theory. Her life, on the surface, was as grey and dreary as a prison exercise yard, her mind prey to a daily succession of torments. She lived in London, hating it. But to hate was easier than to be at Ashfield, where she would remember love. Madge had suggested she live quietly in Devon but, as she wrote in her autobiography, ‘Something that reminds you of a happy day or a happy thing – that’s the thing that almost breaks you in two.’
She thought, on the whole, that she would prefer to be dead (but those who had failed to kill themselves ‘didn’t do it again’. So she wrote in Towards Zero). She could not bear her notoriety, the fact that every time she went out, or gave her name, she was waiting for a reaction: recognition, curiosity, contempt. She was an acutely sensitive creature whose wrenching griefs had been exposed to national ridicule. She had been condemned for something she had not done. In 1929 she wrote in the Sunday Chronicle about the ‘Croydon murders’, as they were known, in which three members of the same family were poisoned: the murderer clearly came from within the family circle but the case was – and remains – unsolved. It always fascinated Agatha, not least because ‘It is a case where the innocent suffer most horribly for sins they have never committed. They live in a haze of publicity; acquaintance and friends look at them curiously; there are continually autograph hunters, curious idle crowds. Any decent happy private life is made impossible for them.’ The idea in this article would later be written into one of her best detective novels, Ordeal by Innocence.
She knew, of course, that Rosalind was bewildered and upset. When Agatha’s own mother had been devastated by the death of her husband, she had been told to ‘live for her children’, but this was not Agatha’s way. ‘The bright spot of my life was Rosalind,’ she wrote in her autobiography; in fact it was not quite that simple. She was too much of a child herself, she still missed her mother too much, and she was torn by her complex feelings towards her daughter. ‘She never said anything, but I thought that, secretly, she blamed me for the loss of her father,’ she wrote in Unfinished Portrait. ‘I failed her.’ The guilt that Agatha felt made her deeply uncomfortable: she was sorry for her daughter, but not always sympathetic, particularly as
Rosalind remained so determinedly keen to see Archie.
This was not a modern divorce, so Archie did not have ‘access’. He did not turn up at Agatha’s door to take his daughter off for weekends. Rosalind did not meet Nancy; she did not even meet her half-brother until Archie’s funeral; Archie, for his part, never met Rosalind’s son.7 The lives of Rosalind’s parents became entirely separate, which would nowadays seem odd, but it is hard to imagine how Agatha would have coped with Archie’s constant presence in her life. For Archie, too, it would have been quite impossible.
As an adult Rosalind was discreet about her meetings with Archie, the boxes of whisky he sent her at Christmas. ‘I certainly always saw my father myself, we were very fond of each other,’ she wrote in a letter not long before she died. She was pragmatic enough to accept what he had done, and loyal enough to proclaim her affection. ‘I hate the image of him as someone cold and unfeeling,’ she said.8
And as a child she missed him badly. She had been uprooted from Sunningdale – the big house, the proper family – and moved to a London flat full of women, around which her mother drooped like a dying bird. Although barely nine she was glad to go to the Caledonia boarding-school in Bexhill, where both her parents could visit her (when Agatha was away, as increasingly she would be, Carlo or Madge would go in her stead). The letters that Rosalind sent home to her mother were cool, funny and occasionally barbed: ‘Thank you very much for the letter you sent me although it was very short. Rose May Lever was sick all over the passage the other day. She is going out today. Her mother came to church to take her out. She looked rather nice.’9 And: ‘I am getting a bit tired of writing to you so I will now write a short letter to Daddy.’10 And, after Agatha’s second marriage: ‘Don’t be late for sports will you!!! Don’t come in your black and white dress come in an ordinary dress. Who are you bringing to the Sports this year. I would rather you brought only Carlo.’11
This was utterly remote from the relationship that Agatha had had with Clara, all that ‘darling Mummy’ and ‘pigeony pumpkin’. Rosalind had never been easy for her mother to deal with; something about this marvellous, bright, sharp-edged child seems to have shrivelled Agatha’s maternal impulse in the bud, and the break with Archie ensured it would never flower. Always there would be tension, a kind of tough, joshing bonhomie between the two that precluded simple affection.
‘I don’t know whether she loves me or doesn’t love me,’ wrote Agatha in Unfinished Portrait. ‘The kind of person I am is no good to the kind of person she is . . . I love her, just as I loved Dermot, but I don’t understand her.’ In fact there was love on both sides; and a neediness that for some reason neither could show. When Agatha was trying to write again, on a holiday to the Canary Islands in February 1928, she was nearly driven mad when her daughter would not leave her alone. Had Peter the dog been standing there, Agatha would have melted. So she did, subsequently, with her grandson. With her daughter, though, it was different: always there was the barrier, the gulf.
Agatha sensed that she had let Rosalind down but, more obscurely, she felt that Rosalind had contributed to the death of her marriage. She believed that a child came between a man and a woman, and she had no compunction about writing this in both Unfinished Portrait and A Daughter’s a Daughter. So Rosalind knew her mother’s feelings and, it was said, ‘felt in some way responsible for the divorce’. There was guilt on both sides; there was resentment of this guilt. And there was the irreducible fact that Agatha had been prepared to abandon Rosalind when she disappeared in 1926. Hardly surprising that both mother and daughter should have taken refuge in the ‘amnesia’ theory; although Agatha’s books told Rosalind a good deal that was otherwise left unsaid.
‘I have always thought how singularly lucky you were to have her for a mother and I have no doubt at all that you share this opinion,’ wrote a family friend to Rosalind after Agatha’s death. Her reply would have been exemplary; her feelings were a good deal more complicated.
The book that Agatha had been writing on her 1928 holiday was The Mystery of the Blue Train. The year before she had finished cobbling together some Poirot short stories, previously printed in the Sketch, into a book entitled The Big Four. In her autobiography Agatha emphasised how difficult it had been to finish these two books, although what she did not say was that she had actually been half-way through both at the time of her disappearance. Nor was Blue Train in need of much original thought, as, like The Big Four, it was derived from a short story (‘The Plymouth Express’).
The difficulty was that she had never before had to write when she did not want to. Writing had always been a happy activity. It had been hard work, but the work had been her choice. Now she had to write.
She was not quite as destitute as her autobiography implies: she had been left something in the region of thirteen thousand pounds by her mother, and although she had sunk all her capital into Styles, the house was on the market. A flat in Chelsea, a home in Devon, a child at boarding-school and a personal secretary does not sound like penury. But when Agatha wrote about her financial fears – ‘I had no money coming in from anywhere’ – what she was really describing was her state of mind. She was utterly panic-stricken about the future. Like most women who have been protected all their lives – looked after by their family, then their husband – and who suddenly find themselves completely alone, Agatha was frightened. Who would look after her now? Even if writing The Mystery of the Blue Train seemed like the most hideous job in the world – which it did – she had to do it. Simple as that.
In her autobiography she described the transition in straightforward terms – she had been an amateur, she was now a professional – but what had happened was far more subtle and profound. There was a fundamental difference in the way she engaged with her work. And even in Blue Train, which she professed to detest,12 this came across: she was writing it not just because she had to, for money, but because she had to: for herself.
Some of the book is, indeed, workaday Christie. But she created in it a character called Katherine Grey, and this calm, observant, attractive woman was balm to her shattered spirit. Katherine is alone in the world, albeit with money, and is described as being in the ‘autumn’ of her years: a situation terrifying to her creator but which Katherine handles with a quiet, humorous assurance that Agatha must have longed to possess. It soothed her to dream it into life.
‘Don’t think you’ll get married, my dear, because you won’t,’ says an old lady friend, before Katherine leaves for the Riviera. ‘You’re not the kind to attract the men. And, besides, you’re getting on. How old are you now?’
‘Thirty-three,’ Katherine told her.
‘Well,’ remarked Miss Viner doubtfully, ‘that’s not so very bad. You’ve lost your first freshness, of course.’
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Katherine, much entertained.
On the Blue Train Katherine dines with a fellow traveller, Ruth Kettering, who is coming to the end of a bad marriage (‘You may have a hankering after the fellow still. Cut it out,’ her father says to her, urging divorce as the only possible solution. ‘I might find ways of whistling Derek back to you, but it would all come to the same in the end.’) Ruth intends to meet a lover in Nice, and asks Katherine whether she should go ahead. ‘It seems to me an awfully silly thing that you are going to do,’ is the unarguable reply. ‘I think you realise that yourself.’
Throughout much of this book Agatha is talking to herself, reassuring herself about the divorce, allowing the integrity of her heroine to console her. Katherine might have hankered after Archie still, but her instinctive sense of self would have come to her rescue, and she would not have longed for what could not be. She would have faced facts.
Hercule Poirot, too, admires Katherine Grey; and by allowing a friendship to develop between the two, Agatha gave a new quality to her detective, hitherto a mere charismatic assemblage of moustaches and bombast. On the Blue Train Poirot is wise as well as clever, his eyes penetrate emotion as well
as facts. He has, in his way, a tendresse for Katherine;13 and this, too, was oddly comforting to his tired and sad creator. “Well, Mademoiselle, how goes it?” She looked at his twinkling eyes, and was confirmed in her first impression that there was something very attractive about M. Hercule Poirot.’
Later Poirot is talking to the daughter of one of his contacts. They are standing beside a bridge, and the girl says to him that it is a favourite spot for suicides. ‘So it is said. Men are foolish, are they not, Mademoiselle? To eat, to drink, to breathe the good air, it is a very pleasant thing, Mademoiselle. One is foolish to leave all that simply because one has no money – or because the heart aches. L’amour, it causes many fatalities, does it not?’
This was the attitude that Agatha yearned for: again, there was consolation in writing it into life.
But perhaps the greatest solace of all was the Blue Train itself. Murder scene it may have been, yet it bloomed in Agatha’s mind as a symbol of order and escape. She had always wanted to travel. However much she had loved Archie she had known, in her heart, that they were very different people; that while he moved with apparent contentment between Sunningdale and Waterloo and the City, day in day out, she craved the sight of the unknown (‘. . . they’d go on and on and on – probably at Dalton Heath or somewhere like it . . . She’d never see things – faraway things – India, China, Japan – the wilds of Baluchistan – Persia, where the names were like music: Ispahan, Teheran, Shiraz . . .’). She had longed for freedom and for love, and she was beginning to learn that the two rarely went together.
Now she had exchanged the one for the other, and she had that other thing: writing. She would write her books – including the special, secret one, Giant’s Bread, which was all about the things that fascinated and perplexed her – and she would travel. Carlo and Madge would visit Rosalind at school and she, Agatha, would go to the West Indies. She booked her tickets, excited at the prospect of spending the winter of 1928 in the sun. Then came a push from fate. A day or two before she was to leave, she went to a dinner-party in London and sat next to a man just back from Baghdad. Oh, she said, that was somewhere she had always dreamed of visiting. He seemed unsurprised and was full of information. You could get there, he told her, by train: the Orient Express. Oh, how wonderful that sounded! You could see the archaeological dig at Ur, which was then all over the Illustrated London News: its leader, Leonard Woolley, was making spectacular claims to have found the site of the biblical Flood. Oh, yes, said the man, you should certainly go to Iraq some time.
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