Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  He had a less tricky companion than Lady Camoys in the young girl, D., aged around twenty, whom he befriended very soon after Agatha’s death. She had asked if she could graze her pony in the grounds at Winterbrook; Agatha was very ill at the time but, after she had died, Max contacted the girl and they quickly became close. He drove her in his Mercedes74 to lunch at Boodles – ‘there was me, just in my scruffy clothes’75 – and would suddenly whisk her off for icecream at Fortnum & Mason, where he parked outside ‘practically on Piccadilly’76. Max’s cars were always flamboyant – in the 1950s he drove a silver Rolls-Royce, ‘a monster of a machine’, according to John Mallowan, in which he would do around seventy m.p.h. on the curving road along Slapton Sands in Devon – and he was known for driving right in the middle of the road. In the end D. drove the Bentley, taking Max down to Greenway in it – ‘stopping on the way for sherry and sardine sandwiches’ – and resisting his urges to ‘see if it would do a hundred and thirty m.p.h.’. So D. became a regular visitor to Greenway, and for about six months went to live in the mews house at Cresswell Place that Agatha had bought in 1928. Max was worried about squatters, so he said, ‘Why don’t you go and live in my house?’77 He also suggested that she might go out to Iran with him and ‘act sort of like a hostess, take him around, and all that’. This, for Max, was obviously in the nature of a dream; by that time, his days of swanning around the East were over.

  There was nothing whatsoever improper about this relationship, although it was not perhaps what might have been expected at that time. It was in the nature of an innocent last fling. D. ‘had the impression that Agatha was a bit tricky towards the end, that it was a bit of a relief to Max when she died. I would think the last two or three years of Agatha’s life were tough on him.’ So he conducted himself like an ageing, still frisky dog let off the leash. He enjoyed his old role of teacher – ‘He was a mentor to me’ – and particularly with this very young, direct, fearless girl, who was unimpressed by his considerable standing and knew nothing of his achievements. ‘I’d just sit there and say, “Well, what did you do, then?”’ Doubtless this amused him a good deal. After so many years of ingratiation and social-climbing and academic politicking, after a life spent as Mr Agatha Christie, how very refreshing it must have been to nip into the Bentley with this bright and unpretentious young thing, play King Cophetua and show her a jolly good time.

  Certainly she remembers him with great fondness. ‘Everyone should have a Max in their life. It was like a picnic.’78

  D. knew Barbara, of course, who was ‘always around’ (Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop remembers Barbara saying, ‘I can’t do anything at weekends,’79 because she was looking after Max at Winterbrook). ‘She was great. She was a real case. She drove Rosalind mad because she wouldn’t eat this, she wouldn’t eat that . . . She had this wonderful old fur coat, it was quite raggedy but she’d wear it in the summer because she felt the cold – I think that used to annoy Rosalind as well.

  ‘Rosalind’, she says, ‘used to like to talk about Agatha. But she was very possessive, very very possessive of her memory.’80

  D. obviously detected Rosalind’s antipathy towards Barbara; it was with some trepidation that Max told his step-daughter of his plans to remarry. ‘No one will ever take the place of my dear Agatha,’ he wrote in March 1977, ‘but I think she would have approved for she used to tell me to marry in case anything happened to her . . . It is lonely now, and will not be so with Barbara who has always been a devoted friend.’

  ‘It was just obvious that he should marry Barbara,’ says D. ‘Because she was spending so much time there . . . He said, “I’m tempted to ask you” – thank God he didn’t! No, there was never anything . . . I mean, I used to get teased.’

  Jared Cade’s book gives the impression that Barbara was desperate to marry Max but D., who was at Winterbrook much of the time, says, ‘She wasn’t bothered. I heard her saying, “It’s so silly – so silly – I know he’ll look after me.” But Max wanted to marry her, as a thank-you.’ Max and Barbara lived together for barely a year at Winterbrook House. Their companion was the dog Bingo, Agatha’s second Manchester terrier, who, in her declining years, had been viewed by a watchful friend as ‘her ally’.

  When Max died in August 1978 Barbara was left £40,000, with which she eventually bought a house in Wallingford where she lived alone until her own death in 1993. Winterbrook was sold. This caused Rosalind a good deal of anguish, as the house was full of things that had belonged to Agatha – even to Archie – whose ownership she had constantly to prove. ‘It must be understood that under the terms of my mother’s will she left all her personal possessions to me,’ she wrote to Cecil Mallowan, Max’s brother, in 1981. ‘Secondly under Max’s will I was able to choose certain ornaments particularly associated with my mother after Barbara left the house. I have always known and agreed that Winterbrook was Max’s house . .

  Perhaps there is little wonder that D. remembers Rosalind at the lunch after Max’s funeral, ‘going round Winterbrook saying, “That’s mine, that’s mine . . . Nor is it hard to understand why Rosalind became ever more protective towards Agatha as her mother grew older, and ever more alert to the fate of Agatha’s legacy.

  Yet Agatha’s own attitude was rather different. Whatever she suspected about her second husband – that he had married her for money; that he was unfaithful; that he would quickly remarry if she predeceased him – she remained defiantly on Max’s side. In 1971 she sent a long letter to Rosalind on the subject of her plays (Rosalind was urging her against a new production of Fiddler’s Five, a late work that had been poorly received). The letter ended: ‘I know you have my best interests at heart – as A.P. [Madge] had when she implored me not to marry Max . . . and even refused to come to the wedding – I’m thankful I didn’t listen to her! Forty years of happiness I should have missed. If one doesn’t take a few risks in life one might as well be dead!’81

  This, then, was Agatha’s stance. Max made her happy. Which may mean that Max was not having a long-term affair with Barbara Parker and that the Mallowan marriage was mutually devoted until the end. This is the way that Max portrayed it in his memoirs. Or it may be that Max was having an affair, and Agatha knew nothing of it (although the Gardners insist she was aware of it all along). Or it may mean something more complex, more mature, more accepting. The evidence for this is in Agatha’s writing: so often the key to her mysterious character.

  Her play Verdict, which was produced in 1958, was not a success. It was booed on its first night and ran for just four weeks. It was not an ‘Agatha Christie’ play: there was no puzzle, no dénouement. It was a human drama. Karl, a middle-aged professor, is married to Anya, an invalid. One of Karl’s young students, Helen, falls in love with him so passionately that she murders his wife, justifying it as an act of philanthropic euthanasia. Another woman, Lisa, is accused of the crime. She is the wife’s companion; she and the professor are in love, although their passion is suppressed and not acted upon, ‘Every month, every year, she gets a little weaker,’ Lisa says of the wife. ‘She may go on like that for many, many years.’

  ‘It’s tough on him,’ is the reply.

  ‘As you say,’ says Lisa, ‘it is tough on him.’

  Of Helen, the student, Lisa says, ‘She has fallen in love with Karl, of course,’ but she does not think that he will respond. Indeed he does not. ‘How little you understand,’ he says to Helen, when she makes her blatant play for him. ‘You talk like a child. I love my wife.’ The girl cannot understand this, saying that he may have loved Anya once but that, now she is old and her life as a sexual being is over, she is no longer the same person.

  KARL: She is. We don’t change. There is the same Anya there still. Life does things to us. Ill health, disappointment, exile, all these things form a crust covering over the real self. But the real self is still there.’

  HELEN: I think you’re talking nonsense. If it were a real marriage – but it isn’t. It can’t be, in the circumstance
s.

  KARL: It is a real marriage.

  Towards the end of the play, Karl confesses to Anya’s doctor that he is in love with Lisa.

  KARL: I love her. Did you know I loved her?

  DOCTOR: Yes, of course I knew. You’ve loved her for a long time.

  KARL: . . . It didn’t mean that I didn’t love Anya. I did love Anya. I shall always love her. I didn’t want her to die.

  DOCTOR: I know, I know. I’ve never doubted that.

  KARL: It’s strange, perhaps, but one can love two women at the same time.

  DOCTOR: Not at all strange. It often happens. And you know what Anya used to say to me? ‘When I’m gone, Karl must marry Lisa.’

  The Times wrote of Verdict that, although the play contained no surprises of the familiar ‘Agatha Christie’ variety, it did have surprises of another kind: ‘that people should behave as she makes them behave’. The reviews, in general, were catty and patronising. Yet the play has aged well, better than theatrical successes like Spider’s Web or even Witness for the Prosecution. It is true that both Karl and Helen behave in ways that are not ‘realistic’. Rather, they act according to their convictions: Karl seeks to protect Helen from an accusation of murder because, according to his philosophical belief, she lacked the capacity to realise what she had done (‘Life has not yet taught her understanding and compassion’). But shielding Helen leads to Lisa being accused of murder instead. Thus Karl, who is a good man, is also dangerous. He lives according to ideas, rather than realities, and in some way it is the blinkered dedication of his mind that makes him attractive to women. Agatha sees his foolishness; she also sees his virtue; and if this was not the truth about Max Mallowan, it was almost certainly the truth as Agatha perceived it.

  Was it also the truth about her marriage? Did Max love two women at the same time? Did he have feelings for Barbara, and did they – as in Verdict – remain unconsummated during the lifetime of his wife? It is impossible to know how far Agatha wrote the facts of the situation into her play. Not fully, is the most likely answer. Up to a point she might have been deceiving herself, writing what she wanted to believe; yet she faces a good deal in the play, and she does not give her life an easy ride. There is no reason to think she is sparing her own feelings about her marriage. She saw its realities, in all their ambivalence and, unlike Anya in the play, she lived with them.

  During the war, she had described to Max a dream in which he no longer wanted her and she was left alone again: ‘I woke up in a panic and had to say over and over – “It’s not true – it’s not true – I’ve got his letter.”’ One letter in particular was kept in a secret drawer of a little desk at Greenway. It had been written to Agatha for her to receive on the sixth anniversary of her marriage, and it made her happy.

  I think that sometimes, but not so very often, two people find real love together as we do, and then it is something that lies deep and intangible, not to be shaken by the wind.

  You are my dearest friend and my darling lover at the same time, and for me you remain beautiful and precious with the passing of years. You have the sweetest face of anyone in the world. This is a lover’s letter darling, and I won’t add anything more to it except that I don’t think anyone can know how much we mean to one another.82

  God’s Mark

  I shall not return again the way I came,

  Back to the quiet country where the hills

  Are purple in the evenings, and the tors

  Are grey and quiet ...

  (from ‘Dartmoor’ by Agatha Christie)

  Thank you for being Agatha Christie’

  (fan letter sent from Maryland, USA)

  Agatha was upset by the reception of Verdict. Its failure was to become the usual fate of her plays. The glorious period when she had dominated the West End – even Broadway – was coming to an end. Only The Mousetrap sailed on.

  The Unexpected Guest did well enough in 1959 (‘Verdict atoned for,’ Agatha wrote to Edmund Cork), running for eighteen months. But Go Back for Murder, the dramatised version of Five Little Pips, which opened at the Duchess Theatre in March 1960, was found severely wanting: ‘Her dialogue is so strictly utilitarian that it hardly pretends to have the colour of life,’ wrote The Times. In a letter to Rosalind, Edmund Cork warned of ‘the most malicious press we have ever had – not even excepting Verdict. . . Agatha might be well advised to give the theatre a rest for a while, and get on with a new novel, for after all her novels are the basis of her success.’1 In reply Rosalind wrote that the reviews for Go Back for Murder ‘seemed quite a surprise for everyone. My mother is really very upset about it.’ Post-Look Back in Anger the theatrical world had changed. The feebleness of Agatha’s adapted plays, which had previously been obscured by the dazzle of her name, was now laid bare.

  She was not done with theatre, though. She had wanted to take on its challenge ever since 1924 when she had played the supporting role to Madge during the brief run of The Claimant. Her ‘shyness’ was not so great that she did not enjoy the world of rehearsals, actors and first nights; although she always purported to hate the parties and publicity with which Peter Saunders so cleverly kept The Mousetrap alive, she went along with it all nonetheless (‘See you at “Hell at the Savoy”!’2 she wrote to Edmund Cork). It was as though the part of her that, as a girl, had dreamed of singing Isolde still yearned for expression, and bringing her writing to life on a stage was the way to achieve it. Why, otherwise, did she long for her plays to be produced, when the reception had become almost uniformly hostile?

  Her belief was that the public still enjoyed what she wrote and it was just the critics who found her a soft, convenient target. ‘Whatever I wrote in the play line would get nasty notices,’ she wrote to Rosalind in 1971, ‘chiefly because of The Mousetrap, which is much resented by the younger journalists.’ There was truth in this, although Agatha was not entirely right: in 1962 the Evening Standard wrote that ‘the public didn’t care Then There Were None’ when the play of Ten Little Niggers was taken off after twenty-four days, and Verdict had, of course, been booed on its first night (although this was partly because the curtain fell too early, cutting off the last two critical lines of dialogue and changing the message of the play entirely). There was, undoubtedly, a growing divergence between the reception of the books and the plays. After Agatha’s death they would be revived frequently, become popular mainstays of repertory companies and appear from time to time in the West End (‘You have to say one thing: Mrs Christie got away with murder,’3 wrote Michael Billington after a 1987 revival of And Then There Were None). But they do not endure in any meaningful sense; not even The Mousetrap. The books do. That is why it is demonstrably absurd to talk about ‘Agatha Christie’ as a mere producer of plots. In the books, the plot really does thicken – with subtext, with resonance – but when the books are adapted for the stage it is stranded, like a jiggling skeleton, bereft of what gives it artistic life. Verdict and Akhnaton are different altogether, being original works. They are not brilliantly theatrical but they are full of depth; Akhnaton, with its representation of the idealistic, doomed Egyptian king,4 is highly unusual and was much admired by Max Mallowan. Spider’s Web, also an original work, has considerable charm. Witness for the Prosecution was so changed from its source material that it became de facto a new work and is Agatha’s most accomplished play. The rest, however, are shadows of the books, and the mystery is that Agatha herself did not realise this.

  But being advised to give up the theatre made her stubborn. She knew that Cork wanted her to concentrate on books, with his not-so-subtle remarks about the unpredictable fate of plays: ‘No wonder the theatre destroys so many authors, especially those who become wholly dependent on it,’ he wrote in April 1960. Yet the next year Agatha produced three new playlets, clever but slight, entitled Rule of Three. These opened in Aberdeen in November, while Agatha was travelling in ‘Persia’ (as she always called it). Cork reported that the reception for Rule of Three ‘was on balance both frien
dly and favourable’, although the closer the plays came to London, the less favourable the reception grew. At Blackpool they opened to just thirty-eight pounds in box office receipts. Rosalind saw them at Oxford; Mathew wrote to Cork saying, ‘I hear frightful rumours about Rule of Three: Mummy seems to think that everything is “awful”, but then she always does.’5 No West End theatre was available to Peter Saunders, ‘which’, as Cork put it, ‘solves one problem for us’. But by the end of 1962 Saunders had managed to get the Duchess, by now the usual home of Agatha’s plays, where Rule of Three opened to wretched reviews: ‘I have never known a more shameful running amok,’ wrote Cork, on New Year’s Day 1963. The Sunday Telegraph wrote that ‘the thriller is the lowest form of drama. The better it is as a conundrum the worse it must be as a play. But the bad thriller, which does not even obey its own logic, is simply a tedious practical joke. The real victims at the Duchess are the audience.’ This particular review ‘really made me mad!’ wrote Agatha. ‘“Quite out of touch with today’s beach life.” I doubt if anyone knows more about real life on the beaches than I do, spending all my Augusts in South Devon!! Sacrificing myself for the enjoyment of nephews and other children. I’m an AUTHORITY. What a spiteful ignorant lot critics are!’6

  Within the newspapers, at least, it was becoming the accepted view that Agatha was a has-been. In 1962 Ten Little Niggers was disastrously revived and the failure of this dubiously titled play helped to reinforce the idea of her as a symbol of a vanished age, the one that contemporary history likes to believe was swept away when John Profumo lied to the House and the Beatles got the MBE. As if it were that simple; Agatha Christie’s reign might have ceased over Drury Lane but, as Edmund Cork said, the theatre was not the foundation of her success, however much it had helped propel her towards stellar status. It was the books that counted. Maybe the ‘Christie for Christmas’ was bought partly because it symbolised a vanished age, but it was bought nonetheless, and Agatha’s sales merely grew mightier. Through the 1960s she moved steadily towards a new and almost imperial standing, which culminated on her eightieth birthday in 1970. From that point onwards her position was unassailable. She was the best-selling author in the world, after the Bible and Shakespeare; as she remains.