Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  ‘Benefits to humanity are tricky things to deal with. Poor old Beveridge, freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from whatever it was . . . it hasn’t made a heaven on earth and I don’t suppose your benvo or whatever you call it (sounds like a patent food) will bring heaven on earth either. Benevolence has its dangers just like everything else. What it will do is save a lot of suffering, pain, anarchy, violence, slavery to drugs. Yes, it’ll save quite a lot of bad things from happening, and it might save something that was important. It might – just might – make a difference to people. Young people.’

  This, then, was Agatha’s view of the future: prescient, courageous. Passenger to Frankfurt ends optimistically (if somewhat absurdly), for in her heart Agatha believed in the redemption of human beings. She had faith, after all. Nevertheless she accepted the passing of the old order and the introduction of disorder; accepted it, too, in a smaller and more personal way, in her novel At Bertram’s Hotel.

  In this book she relives her past; alongside her fierce engagement with the modern world this was something she would do, more and more, as she talked her memories into the Dictaphone. Bertram’s Hotel is an idealised version of Fleming’s (not, as Dorothy Olding brightly guessed, the Connaught): a perfect Edwardian period piece. In an attempt to remember her own youth Miss Marple visits the hotel and finds it utterly unchanged. A fire still burns in the lounge where tea is served, immaculately, with seed cake and buttered muffins; a rosy-cheeked chambermaid brings a breakfast of properly poached eggs; the barman talks knowledgeably about the racing at Newbury; the clientele is good families, dowagers, clergymen; and the ‘television room’ is hidden from general view.

  It really seemed too good to be true. She knew quite well, with her usual clear-eyed common sense, that what she wanted was simply to refurbish her memories of the past in their old original colours. Much of her life had, perforce, to be spent recalling past pleasures . . . she still sat and remembered. In a queer way, it made her come to life again – Jane Marple, that pink and white eager young girl . . .

  Miss Marple’s memories are precisely Agatha’s: the Army and Navy Stores, the drive to a matinée in a four-wheeler, the coffee creams at the theatre. Miss Marple traverses the London she once knew and finds it almost completely changed. It seems a miracle that Bertram’s should survive intact; and it is, as she realises, indeed ‘too good to be true’. Bertram’s Hotel is merely a façade, a virtual reality re-creation of the past, peopled by characters like herself who add verisimilitude to a hollow stage set: mahogany fittings made of metaphorical cardboard and paste. ‘Le five o’clock’, a Frenchman is heard to say appreciatively in the foyer of Bertram’s; a passing policeman says to himself: ‘That chap doesn’t know that “le five o’clock” is as dead as the Dodo!’

  What more perfect image could Agatha have used, for the disappearance of the world she had known? How wrong – how utterly wrong – were those who believed that Agatha Christie was a fossilised creature, suspended in an England that was forever 1932, comfortably taking tea in a firelit lounge: the very setting that Agatha herself was portraying as a sham.

  She knew that the world had changed, although her critics – and her fans – thought that she had not changed with it. Like Miss Marple, however, she could face facts that the modern world wanted to shun. The young girl in At Bertram’s Hotel, Elvira Blake, has had every advantage, but she kills and lies without scruple. In the eyes of Agatha and Miss Marple, she is irredeemable: a sad fact, but a fact. Yet when the book was sent to Good Housekeeping for sale as a serialisation, the magazine wrote to Obers that, if they publish, ‘they must indicate that the daughter will at least have some psychiatric help and guidance . . . there has to be some hint that she is salvageable’. Here was where Agatha and the modern sensibility parted company: not in her preference for Earl Grey over CocaCola, but in her willingness to see the truth about human nature. She had always known the wretchedness of which people are capable. She knew that the selfishness of apparently decent men and women knows no bounds, that the desire to be safe or rich or happy can override all but the strongest moral sense. She knew that murderers sometimes deserve compassion, but that it is the effect of this compassion that has to be considered. She understood – none better – that adultery may cause incalculable distress, but that it is committed by nice people as well as by rats. She understood that although children may appear sweet and innocent, they are capable of evil, and adults are capable of evil towards them. This was the kind of thing that she wrote, without comment and without the need for comment. It was her subject matter. And in her old age she saw a link between the naΐvety of the modern world – its politicised belief in the perfectibility of human beings – and its love of ideology, anarchy and violence.

  Meanwhile in her secret imagination, into which she increasingly withdrew, she conjured memories.

  In By the Pricking of My Thumbs, Tuppence Beresford remembers her life as a VAD in the First World War. ‘All soldiers, that was,’ says Tuppence to herself. ‘The surgical ward. I was on A and B rows.’ And when the murderess is identified, the familiar quotation from Peer Gynt is spoken by her former husband:

  Who was she? Herself? The real one, the true one

  Who was she – with God’s sign upon her brow?

  In Passenger to Frankfurt, Sir Stafford’s aunt Matilda recalls her distant youth: ‘In the mornings, you see, girls were supposed to be doing something useful. You know, doing the flowers or cleaning silver photograph frames . . . In the afternoon we were allowed to sit down and read a story book and The Prisoner of Zenda was usually one of the first ones that came our way . . .’ So Agatha had written in 1903, at Ashfield, in the Album of Confessions: her favourite male character in fiction had been ‘Rudolf Rassendyll’, the hero of The Prisoner of Zenda.

  In Elephants Can Remember, it is Mrs Oliver’s turn to recall Agatha’s past. ‘She then entered into what she thought of in her own mind, with vague memories of going to dancing class as a child, as the first figure of the Lancers. Advance, retreat, hands out, turn, round twice, whirl round, and so on . . .’ Into the book Agatha wrote a character called Zélie, who is a governess and keeper of secrets. ‘Lady Ravenscroft had been ill, and had been in hospital. Zélie came back and was sort of companion to her and looked after her. I don’t know, but I believe, I think, I’m almost sure that she was there when it – the tragedy – happened. And so, you see she’d know – what really happened.’ Here was something of Charlotte Fisher, that staunch young woman who had stood by and kept silent until the day she died: just two months after Agatha, at the little house in Eastbourne to which she had retired, having confessed to her niece that her heart had troubled her since the death of her former, much-loved employer.15

  In Nemesis Agatha’s last masterpiece – the memories are different, more obscure. Yet the book is deeply personal. It is fraught with a passion that Miss Marple feels so powerfully she is barely at one remove from it. It is the story of Michael Rafiel, son of the Mr Rafiel whom Miss Marple met in A Caribbean Mystery. Mr Rafiel sends word after his death, through his solicitors Broadribb and Schuster, that Miss Marple should investigate a crime. Michael Rafiel is in prison for the murder of Verity Hunt, the young girl to whom he was engaged.

  Miss Marple meets the archdeacon who was going to marry the couple, and he says to her:

  ‘I know when a couple are really in love with each other. And by that I do not mean just sexually attracted. There is too much talk about sex, too much attention is paid to it. I do not mean that anything about sex is wrong. That is nonsense. But sex cannot take the place of love, it goes with love but it cannot succeed by itself. To love means the words of the marriage service. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. That is what you take on if you love and wish to marry. Those two loved each other. To love and to cherish until death us do part.’

  At the end of the book, when Miss Marple has solved the case, she returns to the Archdeacon�
�s words.

  ‘He did not, I think, believe it would be a thoroughly happy marriage, but it was to his mind what he called a necessary marriage. Necessary because if you love enough you will pay the price, even if the price is disappointment and a certain amount of unhappiness.’

  Nemesis is a beautiful book, despite its ramblings and repetitions; not really a detective story but a sombre meditation on the realities of love: ‘one of the most frightening words there is’. It was planned in one of Agatha’s plotting notebooks and, on the top of the page, she had written: ‘Nemesis – January 1971 – D.B.E.’. As Edmund Cork had predicted she would back in 1956, she had received her damedom in the New Year’s Honours List. Her life had reached a last glorious peak before the slow, inexorable descent.

  In 1971 Agatha became old. She tried the theatre one last time, with the weak little play called Fiddler’s Five, which was turned down by Peter Saunders. Back in 1962, after the Rule of Three débâcle, Saunders had declined a rough script that Agatha had written for Margaret Lockwood, and Edmund Cork had written to Rosalind with decorously concealed jubilation: ‘I don’t see any prospect of any more Christie plays being put on in London at the moment.’ But Fiddler’s Five opened in Bristol in 1971, while Agatha was on holiday in Paris. The reception, as expected, was generally poor. In an agony of protection Rosalind told her mother that the play should not go to London. Agatha, in the long letter sent from Winterbrook, replied with an agitation that was almost anger; and with an almost pathetic desire to remind Rosalind – and herself – of her achievements.

  I’ve not urged it specially – I can’t see why you are so opposed to its being a commercial success on tour – if it does turn out to be so – I don’t suppose you or Mathew or the Harrison Homes and the rest of those who benefit in the company will really refuse their cut of the takings . . . I knew I’d get bad reviews – and I’ve had several rather surprising good ones – and five curtain calls at many theatres. The Mousetrap – on tour originally – had only one criticism that could be used as advert – all the critics were somewhat unfavourable. Verdict was not a success in London – but I’m very glad it came on. I’ve had to put up with several plays and films that I hate to be associated with my name . . .

  Agatha then wrote at length of how much she had disliked the early dramatisations of her books.

  It was because I hated them so much that I determined to adapt The Hollow myself – I did this at Pwllywrach and you did your utmost then to persuade me not to! If you’d succeeded in making me stick to books – there would probably have been no Mousetrap, no Witness for the Prosecution, no Spider’s Weh – I could have stopped any more adaptations of my books – but I should not have been a playwright and should have missed a lot of fun! . . .

  All theatrical things are a pure gamble. If there’s no London production I’ll be quite glad for your sake!!

  In June that year Agatha was taken into the Nuffield Hospital in Oxford, having broken her hip in a fall at Winterbrook. ‘Things were critical for a day or two,’ wrote Edmund Cork to her American agency, ‘but I am delighted to tell you that she has made a miraculous recovery.’16 On her return she wrote to her daughter in a different tone. Her writing was jumbled on a small piece of card, and looked very old and frail.

  Dearest Rosalind – It was wonderful to escape from Hospital and get HOME. You arranged that room beautifully and it was so cool – much cooler than the bedroom upstairs. The last nights in Hospital were deadly hot and sultry – almost impossible to sleep – was stuck to a bedpan that hadn’t been powdered enough, practically tore bits of skin off. Flowers you had done everywhere are lovely – I’m so happy. You’ve been wonderful –

  I’m walking very well, doctors and sisters both said so. Max looks after me nobly at night. Commode absolute luxury after procession of innumerable bedpans waking one up – Mrs Belson [the housekeeper at Winterbrook] very good helping me dress and arranging my legs. Dear Rosalind – it was good of you to come up and do all you have . . .

  Bingo is beginning to forgive me for having left him.

  Bingo had replaced Treacle, who died in 1969. He was desperately highly strung: ‘You know Agatha, your dog’s dotty,’ A. L. Rowse would say to her when he visited Winterbrook. The sound of the telephone sent him mad – ‘Agatha had a fantasy that Bingo believed there was a devil that lived in the telephone’17 – and he bit everybody who came to the house. Occasionally he bit Max, who was nonetheless very fond of him. But Bingo worshipped Agatha. Rather as Peter had been forty years earlier, he was a necessary source of loyalty. ‘New every morning was the love with which he snuggled under Agatha’s eiderdown,’ wrote Rowse of the little dog.

  The sound of his manic barking can be heard on the recorded conversation between Agatha and Lord Snowdon, who visited Winterbrook in 1974 for a photographic session. Agatha herself sounds polite, amiable but grandly distant. Snowdon has to work hard for her replies; there is a faint echo of Poirot’s effortful interview with the Princess Dragomiroff in Murder on the Orient Express. Also to be heard is Max, putting in the odd remark. At one point Agatha is asked about the filming of her books, on which subject she is unenthusiastic. She greatly disliked the film of Endless Night18 and objected to the semi-pornographic violence: ‘It had a very unpleasant scene which was written at the end, which was very unnecessary. I mean the bit where the other woman is strangled. It made it into a really horrible scene. Well, that of course I didn’t like.’ Max remarks that he thought the photography of the film was good. ‘Well,’ says Agatha, ‘I think otherwise.’

  Snowdon also asks about the forthcoming film of Murder on the Orient Express, and if the prospect of such a starry cast – Albert Finney, John Gielgud, Lauren Bacall and the rest – will annoy her. ‘Yes, I think it will – if that is so.’ In fact she had no objections to the film when she saw it. Having become so violently anti-cinema after the MGM experience – she repeatedly turned down a request from Hollywood to film Passenger to Frankfurt, for example – she had agreed to this partly because it was put to her as a direct, personal proposal from Lord Mountbatten, with whom she had corresponded in 1969 about The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and whose son-in-law, Lord Brabourne, wanted to produce. ‘As you know,’ wrote Lord Mountbatten at the end of 1972, ‘all my family are “Agatha Christie” fans . . . None of us feel that the films so far made do real justice to the “Agatha Christie” spirit.’

  ‘I must tell you frankly that I am in a difficult position as regards films of my stories,’ Agatha replied. ‘They have been so painful to see, such awful scripts, and such bad casting . . . A firm refusal to anyone who makes films is a much easier attitude to take up and stick to, but in spite of all this I should very much like to meet your son-in-law.’ The film was a massive hit in 1974, and generally a critical success also, although Dorothy Olding had disliked it (‘but I had the sense to keep my mouth shut’) and Time magazine’s scathing review contained this snide, not wholly inaccurate comment: ‘The idea is that everything will be more interesting if Sean Connery or Ingrid Bergman, rather than the characters they play, is suspected of having committed foul deed.’ But the film led to a whole new style of adapting her books: Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun both became beautifully made blockbusters, with the highest possible production values.

  Agatha recovered from her hip operation in 1971, and by the end of the year was walking again. She went to Madame Tussaud’s to be measured for her model, and slowly she did some Christmas shopping. ‘Most years I find it rather fun,’ she wrote to Edmund Cork, ‘but now I get tired and want to go home.’ This was a new feeling. ‘I am so tired,’ she confessed to her housekeeper at Greenway, ‘and they’re waiting for every word I write.’ Yet the words continued to come: in 1972 she wrote Elephants Can Remember and made changes to Fiddler’s Five, now called Fiddler’s Three. The play still failed to find a London theatre, although Agatha went to see it at Guildford.

  By 1973 she was retreating ever more into her priva
te, secret, imaginative world. On scraps of paper she wrote her thoughts.

  I am 83 years of age. Do I want, being 83, to feel six years old – ten years old twenty-five years old? No. I don’t. It would mean leaving an era of peace of mind, of tranquillity, of interesting reminiscences to go back to activity – or making it plural – activities which is worse – without having the necessary machinery . . .

  I do not want, I myself, to be back there . . . I have different joys and pleasures – those of 1973 – delight in music, great joy in scenery – the red and gold autumn beauty of leaves and trees – the pleasure of the entry into sleep when it comes with the darkness that swallows light –

  The excitement of morning when it comes – another day – and what will that day bring? Something? Or nothing – one does not know. But that day is MY day – it comes to me – I am alive and here – waiting – It is as certain and true as the Past – the Past is with me – all of it – drifting by, with me always – I have only to open the secret coffer that all of us carry within us – My canary in its cage near my cot – my Yorkshire terrier dog . . .’