by Jared Cade
As if recognizing where her own subservience had landed her, Agatha has the heroine add defiantly that when she is married she will be a devil most of the time but will occasionally surprise her husband by behaving angelically. When the hero remarks what a cat-and-dog life she will lead, she assures him that lovers always fight because they don’t understand each other and that by the time they do they aren’t in love any more. The hero asks if the reverse is true, whether people who always fight each other are lovers? The heroine is lost for a reply.
This exchange suggests that, while Agatha had reason to feel unappreciated by Archie, she considered that discord and confusion were acceptable in a marriage because it indicated that the couple still loved each other and that the woman’s suffering was all part of the greater, nobler cause of love.
Meanwhile, Archie’s professional difficulties had at last ended; he had found a job with a somewhat disreputable firm. While he knew that he would have to be careful not to get caught up in anything shady, he was finally able to smile again. Agatha was delighted in the change in him and was relieved to find her marriage back on a seemingly even keel.
By now the Bodley Head had recognized Agatha’s commercial worth and suggested scrapping her old contract for a new one, also for five books but with more favourable terms. Agatha declined the offer without giving a specific reason.
She had reason to feel confident about her decision on account of the popular reception of some Hercule Poirot stories she had written for The Sketch and the accompanying star treatment she had received. The first series had appeared between March and May 1923 and had been heralded by a portrait taken by Boorthorn that showed a poised Agatha wearing a string of pearls. She had by now cropped her long blonde hair into a stylish red-tinted bob and had been proclaimed by The Sketch’s publicist, with reference to The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as ‘Writer of the Most Brilliant Detective Novel of the Day’. In March another page of The Sketch had been devoted to photographs by Alfieri, taken at the author’s home. Finally, ‘A Family Portrait’, in which Archie was conspicuously absent from Marcus Adams’s charming studio photograph of Agatha and Rosalind, had appeared in April. The second series of Hercule Poirot stories appeared between September and December that year.
The Sketch’s publicity had not gone to Agatha’s head – she had given no personal interview to accompany the photographs – but the acclaim gave her a sense of self-worth that was noticeably absent in her increasingly combative dealings with the Bodley Head. Although Archie had encouraged her to write for money at the beginning of her career, he had begun to resent the attention she was starting to receive. He constantly undermined her, when she tried to engage him in conversation, by snapping: ‘Must you always keep nattering on?’
Agatha was shaken by this but did not let him see that he had upset her. Inwardly, however, she was upset when he put her down. She compensated by becoming increasingly high-handed in financial matters: what money she made was hers and hers alone, and she never ceased to remind Archie of this fact. It made her increasingly uneasy that he appeared to want a wife only as a lover and housekeeper, rather than a friend and confidante. As a result she sought to control him with her money. This exacerbated Archie’s nervous dyspepsia and his growing feeling of being confined by work. She received an unpleasant jolt from an inquiry from the Inland Revenue that year, which brought home to her the fact that her earnings could no longer be regarded as pocket money, and at that point she found herself a literary agent – Edmund Cork, a benign young man from the firm of Hughes Massie.
Throughout November 1923 Agatha wrote regularly to the Bodley Head urging the company to publish a collection of Hercule Poirot stories while the publicity from the second series that was appearing in The Sketch was still fresh in people’s minds. She agreed that this collection of short stories was not to be considered one of the books covered by her existing contract but insisted that the Bodley Head agree that Vision had been submitted as her third book. Had the Bodley Head agreed that this was the case, then The Man in the Brown Suit would have counted as Agatha’s fifth book and she would not have been obliged by the terms of her five-book agreement to offer them any further novels.
But the Bodley Head now needed Agatha more than she needed them, and Vision became a bitter bone of contention between author and publisher. Both were on uncertain ground and a permanent state of stalemate could easily have followed, but Agatha capitulated over Vision, so The Man in the Brown Suit counted as her fourth novel instead of her fifth.
It was an annoying setback, but at least the London Evening News offered her the substantial sum of £500 to serialize The Man in the Brown Suit from November through to January 1924 under the rather improbable title of Anne the Adventurous. The cost of a Morris Cowley (half of all cars on the road at the time were Morris Cowleys) was £225, and she immediately acquired a four-seater model. Since Agatha’s money had paid for the car she often annoyed Archie by reminding him that it belonged to her.
Archie’s prospects improved when a friend of his, Clive Baillieu, returned from Australia and offered him a position on the board of directors with the City firm of Austral Ltd. He now felt his own man once again, back in control of his career and his abilities appreciated.
Control was one thing, freedom another. The feeling of confinement he had felt towards city life before the British Empire Tour had continued unabated on his return, and he had recently taken to relieving his frustrations by playing golf in East Croydon at weekends. Agatha, a competent player but with no real enthusiasm for the sport, had introduced him to the game and had begun to regret it. Golf was just the distraction Archie was looking for: an unimaginative man of action, he enjoyed the outdoor exercise, the camaraderie of his male friends and the physical skills and challenges demanded of him. What Agatha had originally conceived of as a mildly diverting distraction for her and Archie was now becoming an obsession with him.
Following the rise in their fortunes, Agatha unwittingly set the seal on their future relationship when she suggested they fulfil their dream of living in a cottage in the country. They finally seemed to have overcome adversity, but she was to discover, within a year, the downside of that dream.
Chapter Four
Conflicting Desires
The romantic ideal of a cottage in the country was one thing. The reality was another. Archie needed to be able to commute to London for work each day. He had recently been elected to the Sunningdale Golf Club, and he suggested that they move near by.
Sunningdale was stockbroker-belt territory, twenty-six miles out of London on the border of Surrey and Berkshire, and in January 1924 the couple moved into a rented upper-floor flat in a large Victorian house called Scotswood in the older area of Sunningdale known as Sunninghill. In the first flush of excitement of leaving crowded London it was easy to overlook the flat’s constant plumbing and electrical problems.
On 27 January 1924 Agatha signed a three-book contract with Collins, which promised a lucrative £200 advance on each title and a generous royalty, even though she had one more book to deliver to the Bodley Head. When Agatha’s agent Edmund Cork informed John Lane of the offer he grumpily responded that anyone who was prepared to pay that much for her work was welcome to it.
Agatha was now an established writer, but with success came new problems. Archie and Agatha constantly fought over money; she resolutely refused to share her earnings with him. The income from the books and short stories had gone to her head – it was the first time she had an income of her own – and she turned Archie down every time he asked for money, unaware that it was leading to a rift between them. Agatha’s financial independence led to her installing her mother in an adjacent flat at Scotswood. As Archie had always been secretly jealous of his wife’s relationship with Clarissa this had the unintended effect of making him feel even more excluded from Agatha’s life.
Clarissa was happy with the arrangement, since it enabled her to be near her granddaughter. Rosalind w
as an intelligent five-year-old, and her grandmother’s pleasure in teaching revived. The new lease of life Clarissa experienced was not without its drawbacks, however, since she was as jealous of Archie’s relationship with her daughter as he was with hers and she was becoming distinctly set in her ways. It was fortunate that Clarissa divided her time between Ashfield and the home of Madge and Jimmy in Cheshire. Agatha would later opine that living in close proximity to a mother-in-law is enough to wreck most marriages – it is unclear to which mother-in-law she was referring.
After the war Archie’s mother had moved to the market town of Dorking in Surrey, just twenty-five miles from Sunninghill. His stepfather, William Hemsley, now had a post as a schoolmaster at Rugby School. During term time he did not commute the 113-mile journey to his home every day, as he was required to live at the school. This led to Peg having a good deal of spare time on her hands, and Agatha found she coped best with her in small doses. Agatha’s volatile mother-in-law was only too happy to tell other people their business and had never rid herself entirely of the belief that Agatha was not good enough for her eldest son. Relations between Peg and Agatha would undoubtedly have been more strained if the latter had been less tactful and outwardly compliant.
One activity that united Agatha and Archie was looking for a home of their own to buy, since Scotswood needed continual maintenance. House hunting was always one of Agatha’s great pleasures in life, and their protracted search for a suitable property had the effect of bringing them closer. But the stability of their union was illusory, as events would reveal. For all her meddling ways Peg was more clear-sighted than she was given credit for when she intimated to friends that her son and daughter-in-law were beginning to lead separate lives.
Following the publication in August 1924 of The Man in the Brown Suit, Agatha immersed herself in the world of London theatre. At this time her sister Madge had a play, The Claimant, produced by Basil Dean at the Queen’s Theatre. The Claimant opened on 11 September and ran for five weeks. During the British Empire tour, when Agatha had first heard of Madge’s impending success, she had confided her excitement in a letter to her mother and had added that she would be furiously jealous if Madge made it into films first with her writing.
During rehearsals of the play, Madge was carried away by her own self-importance and conducted herself like a dowager-duchess. She became convinced that the cast were captivated by her and that Basil Dean, in particular, considered her a ‘genius’. ‘They can’t do without me’ became her catch-phrase. She relished the experience so much she planned to write a play about Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, but despite Basil Dean’s encouragement it was never produced. Agatha was keen to see a rehearsal of The Claimant, and Madge spent some weekends with the Christies at Scotswood in Sunninghill, which enabled Agatha to keep up with all the theatrical gossip.
Given her sister’s airs of grandeur, it is understandable that Agatha much preferred the company of her friend Nan to Madge’s. By this time Agatha’s daughter Rosalind appeared to be much closer to her Aunt Madge, whom she called Punkie, than her own mother, which is not altogether surprising since Madge and Jimmy had looked after Rosalind while her parents where on the British Empire tour. Decades later, Rosalind would say of Madge, ‘My aunt was more entertaining than my mother. She was great fun. Slightly buried in Manchester.’
Agatha contented herself that year by publishing, at her own expense under the imprint of Geoffrey Bles, The Road of Dreams, a series of rather mystical love poems she had written, several of which were based on the mythical figures of the commedia dell’arte, which in the form of the china figurines on her mother’s mantelpiece had fascinated her ever since she was a child. Although Agatha was never more than a pedestrian poet, publishing the collection enabled her to express the repressed romantic side of her nature she was unable to give rein to in her marriage. While she and Archie still took intermittent pleasure in shared activities – golf permitting – he had always been reluctant to reveal his innermost feelings. He considered discussing emotions to be indecent. This disinclination to confide his feelings, while initially surprising and hurtful to Agatha, had resulted in her attempting to repress her own feelings and had led her to conclude that Archie probably loved her more than she loved him, since he apparently needed less expression of love to satisfy him.
One of the advantages of having a Morris Cowley was that Agatha could drive her mother to Ashfield whenever they wanted a break instead of taking the train to Torquay. Clarissa loved being driven by Agatha to the homes of friends and other interesting places she had had difficulty getting to in the past. Agatha’s friend Nan and daughter Judith, now aged eight, were regular house guests at Ashfield. The writer would begin each day by having a cup of tea in bed. It was Judith’s habit to wake early and go to Agatha’s room and chat to her while Agatha played with her two dogs, Peter and Billy. Of the two dogs, Peter, a wire-haired terrier, was her favourite. ‘Come to missus,’ Agatha would say to him.
A popular activity for Agatha and Nan was to pack themselves, their daughters and the two dogs in the Morris Cowley and go for picnics on Dartmoor. The writer stated in her autobiography that ‘rough country held no terrors’ for her because she did so much walking and exploring in the region. One of the things Agatha’s family and friends had to suffer out of affection for her was her optimism about the weather and her belief it would be better on the moor than in Torquay. Judith recalls that the weather could be treacherous and it would often bucket down with rain on Dartmoor.
On one occasion Peter attacked and killed a farmer’s hen. There was nothing Agatha could do except apologize and offer to pay the farmer for the loss of his livestock. On the drive home Judith and Rosalind sat in the back of the car with the two dogs. The only way they were able to survive the journey was to lean their heads out of the windows because Peter and Billy stank after spending the day foraging around in the mud and undergrowth.
By now Rosalind had developed into a bright, affectionate, direct and hyper-active child. ‘She was the kind of child,’ Agatha once said of her daughter, ‘who was never still for a moment, who, if you returned from a long and gruelling picnic, would say brightly, “There’s at least half an hour before supper – what can we do?” It was not unusual to come round the corner of the house and find her standing on her head.
By March 1925 Agatha was hard at work on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, unaware that Archie had been introduced at the golf course to a brunette typing clerk who worked at the Imperial Continental Gas Association in London. Nancy Neele was vivacious, had plenty of time for socializing and was down to earth and practical; more significantly, her passion for golf equalled Archie’s. Romance blossomed.
Agatha remained in total ignorance of Archie’s affair while she was busy writing. Given that her tastes were literary and Archie’s sporting, Sunninghill was clearly not the place for them to regain what she believed was the temporary lost footing in their marriage. Somewhere altogether different was required. Following the completion of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd they went abroad in the summer of 1925 to Cauterets in the French Pyrenees. The holiday could not have come at a better time: Archie had stopped seeing Nancy because he was convinced that their affair was sure to lead to further complications and unhappiness. It seemed Agatha and Archie might be able to unite their lives once again.
The decision to visit Cauterets was Agatha’s, since she had happy memories of staying there with her family as a young child. At first, the couple found it disappointing. Their holiday soon acquired momentum, however, with walks up the mountains where they drank the sulphurous waters, which in a letter to Clarissa they described as ‘la douche nasale’. There were charabanc expeditions (Archie wrote scathingly about their fellow passengers to Clarissa) and games, including boules, before they moved on to San Sebastian, where they indulged in one of Agatha’s favourite passions: swimming. The evenings were spent at the Kursaal, where Agatha found Archie sadly lackin
g in spontaneity. The cabaret show started at 10.30 each night, and Archie, who was used to going to bed early at home, duly retired at the first interval. Agatha, who took pleasure in being as impulsive and capricious as her mother, considered her husband was becoming rather stuffy. Their holiday ended on a more carefree, frivolous note when, having endured the outward journey to France sitting upright in a second-class compartment all night for reasons of economy, they decided to travel home first class. What Agatha was unaware of was that Archie’s moodiness during the holiday was caused by his mixed feelings about Nancy, and soon after their return home Agatha began to feel like a golfing widow once more – and with good reason. The abandoned wife was more abandoned than she knew, for Archie was once again seeing Nancy.
Archie’s preoccupation with furthering his career intensified, and this meant that Agatha was obliged to attend a number of business dinners, every minute of which she hated. When he came home from work in the evening he often immersed himself in a book or in business matters after dinner. By working so hard through the week Archie was deliberately contriving to ensure his weekends were free to spend with Nancy.
Agatha loved him too much to displease him by complaining and looked forward instead to the weekends when she could reclaim him from his work. But the country walks and picnics Agatha and Archie had enjoyed earlier in their marriage had become things of the past. The strain of Archie’s double life took its toll: he became tired and listless, the routine of City life dragged him down, and his work-day often began with him arriving at Sunningdale Station so late that he had to run across the tracks in front of the approaching train to reach the far platform in order to catch it.