In May 1930 he was insistent that he and Agatha should both write to Katherine with the dire news of their engagement. Her reply was gracious: ‘It is lovely to know that two people I love so much as you two are going to be so happy’, although revenge would come later. Katherine did say that Max should be forced to wait before the marriage, as it would be bad for him to get everything he wanted so quickly. This was a perceptive, if outrageously rude, remark, but keeping men keen was not Agatha’s style. As she wrote to Max: ‘It’s no good – I shall never have proper K. like Olympian attitude towards the male sex. I shall either think they are pigs or else perfect darlings.’41
She had had ‘K. like’ allure once, of course, in the days when men like Reggie Lucy had fallen at her buttoned boots. Now she was tired, lonely and intensely grateful. Somehow she knew that, despite everything, this alliance with Max would suit her. It would restore her wrecked confidence – see, Archie, I can still get myself a husband! Fifteen years younger than you! – and it would allow her the freedom she cherished. It would not interfere with her writing, as Max was far too sensible to do such a thing and far too confident to be jealous of her success. It would not oblige her to change herself in any way, as she so obviously should have done with Archie. She worried, nonetheless, about her fading looks and her weight, although she tried to make a joke of it. ‘Perhaps I am (little Piglet!) your favourite size!! Do say I am!’ Later Max would tease her a good deal about this. But now he wrote, ‘I know you are very beautiful’, and she loved him for the lie.
Above all, marriage would provide companionship. For this she would take the many risks. She craved solitude, but not infinite solitude. And those bleak, sad years of the late 1920s had nearly killed her, going to bed alone, seeing her ageing face and body in the mirror, trying to make a life out of friendships and parties, remembering life as it had once been, clinging to Peter as if only his love came between her and nothingness. Now this little smiling man had come along to save her. ‘Bless you my love,’ he wrote to her on 6 September, five days before the wedding. ‘I want you to be as happy as I am and I think you will be, my darling.’ This was kindness, and she drank it in like water in the desert. She would be a better wife to him than she had been to Archie, because she was not in love with him. Nor was he in love with her. They were together for reasons other than love; and this, she thought, might very well make for greater happiness.
She wrote as much a year after their marriage, when she was working on Lord Edgware Dies. The words are Poirot’s, the reasoning Agatha’s.
‘And suppose he marries a girl who loves him passionately, is there such a great advantage in that? Often I have observed that it is a great misfortune for a man to have a wife who loves him. She creates the scenes of jealousy, she makes him look ridiculous, she insists on having all his time and attention. Ah! Non, it is not the bed of roses.’
So she became, in a way, a realist. She compromised. After the happy honeymoon (‘so many lovely things’) she accepted the call of the Woolleys upon Max, and his instant jump to their attention. They behaved very badly, in fact, as they had done all along. ‘The devils are going to do their best not to make it easy for us’, as Max put it. Agatha recognised that Leonard was merely weak, and she blamed Katherine. She also wrote: ‘K. I think is jealous not of happiness, but simply and only of money!’
Woolley extracted the last ounce of work from Max before the wedding (‘Made him sit up and draw pottery practically the night before they were married,’ says Joan Oates),42 then recalled him to Baghdad on 15 October. This would have been all right, but Agatha had fallen ill in Athens on the last days of the honeymoon. It was a kind of food poisoning, apparently brought on by ‘joyful eating of Crevettes and Langoustines’, and it was very serious. Agatha was taken into hospital and Max left for work. ‘The doctor has just been,’ she wrote to him from Greece, where the treatment cost her a fortune, ‘and there is no doubt, from the coldness of his manner, that he regards you as a brutal and inhuman man . . . My poor Max – and you so kind and tender to your Ange.’43
What she really thought, it is impossible to know. Of course the Woolleys – Katherine – were to blame for terrorising Max into such craven obedience (especially as they themselves did not turn up at Baghdad for another week), but should he not have said that his loyalties now were to Agatha? She herself insisted that he return to Baghdad. Nevertheless she would surely have liked him to insist that he stay with her. ‘Don’t forget to tell me exactly how you are and whether you really are free from all traces of that poisoning,’ he wrote, in his precise way, then: ‘I don’t think I dread meeting the Woolleys half as much as I did, I feel more aloof and independent now that I have my ange to think of.’44
She kept wisely silent on the subject for five years before referring, in Death in the Clouds, to ‘an Englishman whose wife had been taken ill. He himself had to be somewhere in Iraq by a certain date. Eh bien, would you believe it, he left his wife and went on.’ The English girl to whom this story is told replies, ‘One’s work has to come first, I suppose’, but the mere fact that Agatha brought up the incident suggests it had rankled.
Despite Max’s dutiful return from his honeymoon, relations with the Woolleys were unsalvageable. ‘It was Katherine who not only forbade Agatha to come to Ur, but said she was not allowed to come to Iraq at all,’ says Joan Oates. ‘Because Max had suggested that she should stay in a hotel in Baghdad and he could go off on the occasional weekend and see her.’ This, it was made clear, would not be possible; Woolley himself had hinted as much when dining with Agatha before the wedding. It was quite mad, but it really did not matter very much. Max was in a position to get work elsewhere and this would be his last season at Ur. He had gained experience with Leonard Woolley; he had gained a wife; through his marriage he became a man of means. The future was bright for him. For Agatha, who wrote to him from London where her journey finally ended:
It is the first time for several years that I have arrived in England without a feeling of such misery.
My dear, you have lifted so much from my shoulders – so much that I didn’t even know was there – I can feel the wounds healing all over. They are still there – and very little would open them again.45
This was, perhaps, a reminder to Max that she was still vulnerable. Back at Ashfield – where Rosalind had coolly accepted her mother’s new status, saying, ‘I think it’s rather a good thing having two sets of parents’ – she wrote:
I couldn’t bear you ever to be less nice than you are now . . . I think men often are their best at about your age. They have a finer vision and a bigger ideal of life. And then, very often, life narrows them – they get egotistical, self-centred, petty, self-indulgent and censorious – you mustn’t – you must always be Max.46
She was happy, though. ‘Everyone has said I look very well and ten years younger and that being married to you suits me.’ What also suited may have been that she was married but had her own life while Max was away. She was free but she was safe, just like in the old days. A letter from November 1930 bubbles over with effervescence.
Have just had a most exciting and reprehensible day – I have been to a SALE! . . . Oh! I have enjoyed myself... A lovely Chippendale Tallboys went for £8 10/-, I just didn’t get there in time. Just as well perhaps – for where I should have put that I really do not know! What fun life is. I do think archaeology is the most fascinating thing in the world . . .
I am still doing my best to be a worthy wife. Have drawn one super pot [she was taking art lessons, as suggested by Max] . . . Black Coffee coming in on December 8th – so I shall have to go up to town for rehearsals next week – I’m really very busy just now . . . Six eminent detective story writers have been asked to broadcast again47 – we’re all getting together on December 5th to plan the thing out a bit – Dorothy Sayers will begin on January 10th, I shall follow on 17th and again on 31st – all rather fun.
Another thing I’m doing is embroidering a peacock �
�� I started it when I was nineteen and found it the other day . . . I feel as though I’d gone back to nineteen again!
In December she wrote from the Ladies’ Army and Navy Club – both her houses were let –
just to say that you are my own darling Max and that I love you frightfully and I might fill up the page with kisses like children do – !! Very sweet kisses . . . I really am frightfully happy, darling. And that’s what gives such a zest to everything and makes me feel life is so wonderful.
Max replied in kind: ‘Ange, shut your eyes now and pretend that you are in my arms and that I am returning your kisses.’
The opening of Black Coffee was a particular delight – Madge was there, as Agatha had been at the opening of The Claimant back in 1924, so were Nan and George Kon – and the reviews were good. ‘I like Francis Sullivan better than Charles Laughton as Poirot. He makes him much more lovable,’ she wrote to Max. On the strength of this success, a play version of The Secret of Chimneys was scheduled to be staged, although this did not happen:48 ‘but it’s exciting any way’. There was even a possibility of work from Hollywood: ‘We might clean up a nice little sum and with it we’d raze a mound to the ground!’, which must have sounded like music in Max’s ears. ‘Darling Max – why are you so far away? Or why am I? But Rosalind is very pleased to have me.’49
On Christmas Eve she wrote more soberly. ‘It’s my old wedding day today. It’s always been a sad day for me – but not this year. Bless you, my darling, for all you have done and given back to me.’
Agatha went out to Ur for the last time in the spring of 1931. ‘I have written to Katherine and hope all will be well.’ Rather oddly – but Agatha tended to enjoy displays of forbearance – she dedicated The Thirteen Problems to the Woolleys. By this time Max had a new job lined up, with Dr Campbell Thompson at Nineveh (the eighth century BC capital of the Assyrian empire). ‘CT’, as he was called, was not an especially clever archaeologist, although he and his wife were easier to deal with than the Woolleys. Still he too thought it his business to ‘vet’ Agatha before she could be permitted to visit the dig. He also remonstrated with her when she bought a writing table to use at the sparsely furnished dig house at Mosul. Economy was his passion, and he could not understand why Agatha should not write her books on a packing case. What business this was of his, the Lord alone knows, although Agatha did not say so. Her good humour in the face of her husband’s strange colleagues – who had the dry, petty, rather childlike belief in their superiority that often characterises the ‘intellectual’ – was remarkable; perhaps she simply drifted away from it, secure as she was in her own creative world. Anyway she did not want to make trouble for Max. She strove to get along with CT and his wife, Barbara, making an effort she had never bothered with when it came to Archie’s golfing friends. Max went out to the Nineveh dig in the autumn and Agatha went alone to Rhodes, where she worked on Lord Edgware Dies before joining her husband at the end of October and finishing the book (dedicated to the Campbell Thompsons) on her table.
Her letters to Max had become more lover-like. Before the honeymoon there had been no talk of the sexual delights that awaited, if indeed these were anticipated. ‘Don’t forget your hot water bottle,’ Max wrote; and, in his innocence, ‘I can promise you stiffs all through life’; he meant the dead bodies that emerge from archaeological digs. But a year later Agatha wrote: ‘Max – sometimes I want to sun myself on a hotel beach and bathe with nothing on – in daylight – and then I want to lie on my face in the sun and have you kiss me all down my back. Can we ever do that? Is there any place? We could have in Greece, I believe, only we weren’t like that then, were we?’50
This letter rather gives the lie to A. L. Rowse’s theory that Agatha and Archie’s marriage ended, in part, because she lacked sex drive.51 Agatha was proper, but she was not at all prim. ‘Slip in, and gently in/Till breast and neck and arms/Are kissed and swung . . . ,’ she wrote, in a wonderfully sexy poem called ‘The Evening Bathe’. Swimming was always a voluptuous experience for her; as, in 1931, was her second husband. ‘I go to bed so sleepy I haven’t even the energy for sensual thoughts!’ she wrote in December, when back in England for a hectic Christmas.
In Rhodes, meanwhile, she had gone into a cathedral and ‘said a prayer to (I think it was!) St John the Baptist. Not perhaps a very good person to pray to for a son.’ She wanted a new family, or so she believed. Her own – ‘restless Punkie, indefatigable Rosalind’ – exhausted and exasperated her. But she was past forty, and her sole pregnancy ended in miscarriage in 1932. Just as well, perhaps, as when Rosalind’s child was born Max would write to Agatha saying how relieved he was not to have a baby, and to have all his wife’s attention to himself.
Not that she had all his attention. In Rhodes, she began to feel that their separate lives might be a cause for concern.
Darling are you real? Or just a dream I had . . . I’d like you to be here to laugh at me when I come out of the sea all happy like a dog . . . Suppose I never saw you again? As soon as one loves anyone one gets afraid, doesn’t one? That is why dogs go about growling with a bone. They’re convinced it will be taken from them by other dogs. Are there any other dogs at Mosul, darling? Perhaps you’d better not tell me if there are!52
In fact Max was far more concerned about his career at this time. But what Agatha had called ‘the wounds’ were opening again: just a little. She had had one unfaithful husband and was preparing herself for the possibility of another (so much younger, after all), although she showed no outward sign of insecurity. She remained the happy, busy, successful ‘Agatha Christie’, with her theatrical triumphs and her procession of acclaimed novels: The Sittaford Mystery, Peril at End, House, Lord Edgware Dies, Murder on the Orient Express and Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? were published between 1931 and 1934, with two sets of short stories, The Listerdale Mystery and Parker Pyne Investigates. This last is an interesting one. Parker Pyne is a specialist in happiness: he runs a business that supplies happiness to discontented people. Although not a detective he has the quality of omniscience that Agatha found so irresistible, and he is both wise and kind. He is visited, for example, by a middle-aged wife whose husband is straying with a pretty young secretary. The situation is presented as too familiar to be distressing – a consoling idea in itself – and the solution is simple: the wife must smarten herself up and conduct a harmless romance of her own. This works so well at bringing the husband back into line that Agatha must have wondered whether she should have done the same thing with Archie.
For it was Archie who was on her mind. Why otherwise should she have written Unfinished Portrait? She had been busy enough already in 1933; in that year alone she had produced Orient Express, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, some of the stories in The Listerdale Mystery (others were reprints from magazines) and Parker Pyne Investigates. Her urgent desire to write, which had relaxed its grip in the first two years of her marriage, was burning again. And what she wanted to do was revisit memory. She wanted to be the one to open ‘the wounds’. She was a writer. Only a writer would behave in such a way.
So out it all came again: the idyll of childhood, the beloved mother and husband, the end of her world. How could she bear to write it? She bore it because that was what Mary Westmacott did.
She had helped Max achieve the goal of his own dig. After a season at Nineveh he was now in charge at Arpachiyah in Iraq, which he excavated – for one year only, due to the political situation – in 1933. Agatha did drawings and described herself as ‘bursting with happiness’ when ‘our pimple of a mound’ proved to contain some magnificent pottery. She enjoyed herself, although her son-in-law described her attitude to archaeological life thus: ‘Max liked it, so Agatha liked it.’53 Meanwhile she planned Unfinished Portrait, that hymn of love to the past.
At the end of the book she described the man who wanted to marry her after her divorce:
He told me that what I needed was gentleness . . . he’d been unhappy too. He understood what it
was like.
We enjoyed things together . . . we seemed to be able to share things. And he didn’t mind if I was myself. I mean, I could say I was enjoying myself and be enthusiastic without his thinking me silly . . . He was – it’s an odd thing to say, but he really was – like a mother to me . . .
A part of her wants to marry the man, ‘Michael’, but in the book she does not do so. Her fear of being hurt is too great. She tries again to kill herself and is rescued. Then she goes out into the world to face an unknown future. ‘She went back at thirty-nine – to grow up,’ writes the narrator of the book. ‘And she left her story and her fear – with me . . .’ This, perhaps, was how Agatha felt when she reached the end of Unfinished Portrait. The past was now the past, buried within words. But of course it was not so simple.
I am tired of the past that clings around my feet,
I am tired of the past that will not let life be sweet,
I would cut it away with a knife and say
Let me be myself – reborn – today.
But I am afraid of the past – that it will creep back to my feet
And look in my face and say, ‘You laugh and eat
But I am here with you yet . . .
You would not remember – but I will not let you forget . . .
What is or is not courage? Who shall say?
Shall I be brave or base if I cut the past away?54
War
‘It’s not the crisis, it’s the Christie, that is keeping people awake at night!ₘ
Agatha Christie Page 35