by Jared Cade
That night I felt terribly miserable. I felt that I could go on no longer. I left home at 10 o’clock in my car with a few articles of clothing in a suitcase and about £60 in my bag. I had drawn some money from the bank shortly before as I had decided to go that winter to South Africa with my daughter, and I wanted to make preparations.
All that night I drove aimlessly about. In my mind there was the vague idea of ending everything. I drove automatically down roads I knew, but without thinking where I was going. As far as I can remember I went to London and drove to Euston Station. Why I went there I do not know. I believe I then drove out to Maidenhead, where I looked at the river. I thought about jumping in, but realised that I could swim too well to drown. I then drove back to London again, and then on to Sunningdale. From there I went to Newlands Corner.
When I reached a point on the road which I thought was near the quarry I had seen in the afternoon, I turned the car off the road down the hill towards it. I left the wheel and let the car run. The car struck something with a jerk and pulled up suddenly. I was flung against the steering wheel, and my head hit something.
Up to this moment I was Mrs Christie. I was certainly in an abnormal state of mind, and scarcely knew what I was doing or where I was going. All the same I knew I was Mrs Christie. After the accident in the car, however, I lost my memory. For 24 hours after the accident my mind was an almost blank. Since I recovered my health I have managed to recall a little of what happened in those 24 hours.
I remember arriving at a big railway station and asking what it was and being surprised to learn it was Waterloo. It is strange that the railway authorities there did not recall me, as I was covered with mud and I had smeared blood on my face from a cut on my hand. I could never make out how this had been caused. I believe I wandered about London and I then remember arriving at the hotel in Harrogate. I was still muddy and showed signs of my accident when I arrived there. I had now become in my mind Mrs Tessa Neele of South Africa.
I can quite understand why I went to Harrogate. The motor-accident brought on neuritis, and once before in my life I had thought of going to Harrogate to have treatment for this complaint. While I was in Harrogate I had treatment regularly. The only thing which really puzzled me was the fact that I had scarcely any luggage with me. I could not quite make this out. I had not even a toothbrush in my case, and I wondered why I had come there without one.
I realised, of course, that I had been in some kind of accident. I had a severe bruise on my chest, and my head was also bruised. As Mrs Neele I was very happy and contented. I had become, as it were, a new woman, and all the worries and anxieties of Mrs Christie had left me. When I was brought back to my life as Mrs Christie once again many of my worries and anxieties returned, and although I am now quite well and cheerful and have lost my old morbid tendencies completely I have not quite the utter happiness of Mrs Neele.
At Harrogate I read every day about Mrs Christie’s disappearance and came to the conclusion that she was dead. I regarded her as having acted stupidly. I was greatly struck by my resemblance to her and pointed it out to other people in the hotel. It never occurred to me that I might be her, as I was quite satisfied in my mind as to who I was. I thought I was a widow, and that I had had a son who had died, for I had in my bag a photograph of my little girl when young with the name ‘Teddy’ upon it. I even tried to obtain a book by this Mrs Christie to read.
When I was finally discovered it was not for some time that doctors and relatives restored to my mind memories of my life as Mrs Christie. These memories were drawn from my subconscious mind slowly. First I recalled my childhood days and thought of relatives and friends as they were when children. By gradual steps I recalled later and later episodes in my life until I could remember what happened just before the motor accident. The doctors even made me try to recall the events in the blank 24 hours afterwards, as they said that for the health of my mind there should be no hiatus of any kind in my recollection. This is why I can now recall at the same time my existence as Mrs Christie and Mrs Neele.’
Of course a person with amnesia would have no difficulty in recognizing her true identity on seeing herself in the newspapers. A distinguished London psychiatrist consulted in the research for this book has confirmed that if Agatha had incurred a blow to her head her memory loss would have been most unlikely to last more than three or four days. The fact that she signed herself into the hotel register as Mrs Teresa Neele from Cape Town on Saturday 4 December 1926, burrowed library books under the same name on Monday the 6th, then later that week placed an advertisement in The Times using the name and answered to the same name throughout her hotel stay is not consistent with amnesia. The actions are the hallmarks of someone who has assumed a secondary personality or, alternatively, fashioned a new identity for an ulterior motive. Another eminent psychiatrist commented: ‘An amnesiac wouldn’t invent another name for themselves because they would be too busy trying to remember their own.’
Agatha’s story also fails to account for the fact that it is impossible to see the chalk pit, into which her car almost crashed, when driving past Newlands Corner, because the brow of the hill obscures the pit, which is some three hundred yards further down the hill. Furthermore, if her car had been deliberately driven off the road at high speed the gearstick would not have been found in neutral.
Fortunately for Agatha most readers of her explanation were not medical experts, nor were they familiar with Newlands Corner or the circumstances in which the car was found, so her version of events had the effect of reaffirming the official explanation by her family and the two doctors.
On Friday 20 April 1928, dressed in a brown tweed jacket and skirt, cloche hat and marten fur stole, Agatha faced a further ordeal when she testified in court that she wanted to divorce Archie. She abhorred the intensely personal questions put to her in the witness stand. Worst of all, she hated colluding with Archie, whose lawyers had presented evidence fabricated on his behalf, claiming that he had committed adultery in London’s Grosvenor Hotel with an unnamed woman. The judge, Lord Merrivale, was not deceived by Archie’s evidence, and in granting a provisional divorce and giving custody of nine-year-old Rosalind to Agatha his concluding statement implied sympathy for her: ‘When a gallant gentleman frequents hotels with a woman in order to secure release from a marriage he dislikes I have no course but to grant a decree.’
Agatha had to wait six months before the divorce was finalized. Owing to the furore over her disappearance, producers of silent films were drawn to her crime stories, and that year saw the release of The Passing of Mr Quinn, a British film that was a grotesque travesty of Agatha’s original story, and the following year the release of a German-made film Die Abenteuer GmbH based on The Secret Adversary. There was, however, a successful stage adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Michael Morton, which opened under the title of Alibi in April 1928 at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. Reviews of the opening-night performances mentioned that when the time had come for Agatha to take a bow with the rest of the cast she had remained hidden at the back of her box, denying the audience the opportunity of seeing the woman who had become so famous.
Agatha was understandably at a low ebb as she waited for her divorce papers, and she spent much of her time writing her first non-crime novel. Giant’s Bread, which was the first of her books to be published under the secret pseudonym of Mary Westmacott, contained a number of autobiographical touches. The childhood of the protagonist, Vernon Deyre, has much in common with Agatha’s own. He plays with the same imaginary characters as she did and develops a fanatical love for his child hood home. He also has disturbing dreams of ‘the Beast’, reminiscent of those Agatha had of the Gun Man.
When Vernon reaches adulthood, he discovers a latent artistic talent for musical composition. His wife Nell experiences poverty in the early stages of their marriage, just as Agatha did with Archie. Nell’s experiences as a nurse during the First World War are based on Agatha’s. The other wom
an in Vernon’s life is his unacknowledged mistress, Jane, who strains her voice and is forced to give up her career as an opera singer. After becoming a prisoner of war Vernon is presumed dead. He escapes and discovers through a magazine article that his wife has remarried. The shock results in him stepping in front of a lorry, being knocked down and developing amnesia for nearly four years.
Many have assumed that Agatha was imbuing Vernon with aspects of her own experience of memory loss, but nothing could be further from the truth: in a wholly unrealistic scenario he simultaneously assumes the ‘secondary personality’ of an ex-deserter Corporal George Green of the London Fusiliers. Agatha had the valuable knack of perceiving life as did 99 per cent of her reading public, and her lack of specialist knowledge about amnesia was not radically different from the overblown imaginings of her fellow writers; nor was it challenged.
After ‘recovering’ his true identity, Vernon finds himself travelling on a ship when it collides with an iceberg. When the boat lists dangerously and the two women he loves most slide down the deck towards him on their way to an icy death, he has only one free hand with which to reach out to save one of them. Vernon instinctively saves his former wife, because he has known her longer than his mistress. In her way Agatha was reconciling herself with the belief that it would take a similar melodramatic scenario for Archie to choose her over Nancy.
While Giant’s Bread has an undeniably unrealistic and melodramatic story-line, it is none the less very readable. The novel explores the inequality of love between the sexes, and what remains striking about the book is that love and happiness elude all the main characters. The book ends, like a reflected image of Agatha’s circumstances in 1928 when it was written, with the anti-hero Vernon, who has suffered the most in love, deciding not to risk future heartbreak by avoiding relationships, immersing himself instead in his art.
Agatha’s divorce was finalized on 29 October 1928. Less than three weeks later Archie married Nancy on 16 November at London’s Prince’s Row register office. Charles Neele was one of the witnesses at the wedding. The newspapers got hold of the story and took the opportunity to remind the public of the disappearance. Although the couple’s marriage went a long way towards pacifying Nancy’s parents, it was always a matter of regret for them that their daughter had married a divorced man.
Agatha’s immediate reaction to the divorce was to tell her publishers that she wished to publish her detective novels and stories under another name. Sir Godfrey Collins, however, dissuaded her from this because he knew that such a change would confuse her readership. Nevertheless Agatha was so upset by the break-up of her marriage that she never saw Archie again.
She was always to regret that he had not cited Nancy as the third party in the divorce case. If he had done so Agatha could have told her daughter that she had had no other choice than to divorce him. By agreeing to the deception she felt she had participated in a lie and irrationally believed she had betrayed her daughter for the man she still loved.
Although the worst of Agatha’s misery was over and she could move on to a new life, the future was not made easier by constant reminders of the past. She was never to forget the man she loved nor the notoriety caused by her disastrous scheme for revenge.
Part Three
While the Light Lasts
Chapter Twenty
Partners in Crime
After her divorce Agatha had to accept the fact that her love for Archie had been no safeguard against his defection. Nor was his passion for Nancy short-lived, as the couple were to live together happily for many years. Agatha soon came to realize that Archie would for ever remain the grand passion of her life – ‘the Man from the Sea’ for whom she had left safe shores and swum into uncharted waters. She never took communion in church again, fearing she would be refused because of her divorced status. Although a number of changes she made in her life were to enrich her creatively, culturally, socially and financially, she was unable to put the past behind her completely, no matter how hard she tried. ‘Agatha never got over Archie,’ recalls Nan’s daughter Judith.
Agatha’s plans to have a holiday in the West Indies underwent a radical alteration in the autumn of 1928 when she met a married couple at a dinner party just two days before her anticipated departure. They had recently returned from Baghdad and spoke so glowingly about their stay that Agatha, on learning that it was possible to travel there on the fabled Orient Express, cancelled her trip to the West Indies and booked herself a ticket to the Middle East.
Rosalind was at school and Agatha decided to travel alone. Her secretary wondered if it was prudent for Agatha to do this, but she found ‘safety at all costs’ a repulsive creed. It was an important decision. She could cling to a life that was familiar and predictable or she could develop her independence.
The journey began badly. On the train Agatha met an experienced and overbearing woman traveller who attempted to take her under her wing. Unfortunately the woman was going all the way to Baghdad and promised to introduce Agatha to the social life of the English community. Agatha was anxious to avoid this. The two parted company, to Agatha’s relief, when the woman left the train at Trieste to continue her journey by boat.
Agatha remained on the train, which passed through Yugoslavia and the Balkans. She found the mountains and gorges awesome and took little interest in her fellow passengers. After the train entered Asia the frantic pace of modern civilization seemed to recede and time became less significant. The train stopped briefly and the passengers disembarked to admire the sight of the Cilician Gates by sunset. In her memoirs Agatha recorded that she was glad she had come, as a feeling of ‘thankfulness and joy’ overcame her.
Her journey continued through Turkey and into Syria. She became feverish after being bitten by bedbugs on the train but soon recovered and was well enough to be shown around Damascus by a Thomas Cook guide and enjoyed visiting the bazaars at Baalbek in the Lebanon.
She then travelled across the desert to Baghdad accompanied once again by the well-intentioned but suffocating female companion from whom she had earlier parted at Trieste. She survived the two-day journey across the desert, however, which she found both fascinating and sinister. She recounted that the desert gave her a curious feeling of ‘being enclosed rather than surrounded by a void’. She was invigorated by the sharp air, the feel of the sand running through her fingers, the beauty of the rising sun and the taste of simple food cooked on a Primus stove. She felt at peace with life and herself.
Once in Baghdad she was introduced to the husband of her travelling companion and was taken off to their home. She had intended to book into a hotel, but it was impossible to fend off their goodwill. Despite being caught up in the social whirl of the English colony in the city, she was still able to enjoy its sights, sounds and smells. She was entranced by the rickety buildings, the beautiful mosques and the gardens full of flowers.
She finally made her escape from her host and hostess. A highlight of her trip was a visit to the famous death pits at Ur, which were being excavated by Professor Leonard Woolley and a team of experts. Visitors to the digs were a constant source of annoyance since they interrupted the work, and Agatha initially owed her favourable reception to the fact that Leonard Woolley’s wife had greatly enjoyed The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
The relationship Agatha forged with the Woolleys was to alter the course of her life. Leonard was a quiet, rather snobbish scholar who tended to defer to his temperamental wife Katherine, whose first husband had shot himself in front of the Great Pyramid. Her friendship with Agatha came about partly because the two women had suffered in love; each recognized the pain through which the other had gone. Although Katherine loved Leonard and craved affection, she was terrified of allowing him, or anyone else, to get too close to her in case she was rejected. This resulted in a tendency in her to lead men on only to reject and humiliate them when they got serious about her. She was to become the basis for the character of the victim in Murder in Mesopotamia.
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Agatha’s readiness to act as a sidekick to the flamboyant and wilful Katherine ensured that their friendship grew; also Katherine had enormous respect for the writer’s literary achievements.
Agatha was never to forget a meeting in Baghdad with a rather solitary man called Maurice Vickers, who lent her a copy of J.W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time. The book gave her a sense of her place in the universe, and this trip to the Middle East marked the beginning of Agatha’s lifelong fascination with time.
The novelist returned to England in time for Christmas with Nan and the rest of the family at Abney Hall, having extended an invitation to the Woolleys to stay at her mews house in Cresswell Place if they came to England in 1929.
After the publication of Partners in Crime in September that year, Agatha felt able to make light of the disappearance when she added a message to the flyleaf of Nan’s copy of the book in gratitude to her for sheltering her on the night Friday 3 December 1926: ‘To Sweet Nan, of Old Chelsea, from Agatha.’ The book was bequeathed subsequently to Nan’s daughter Judith. Two of the stories from the collection were ‘A Pot of Tea’ and ‘The Case of the Missing Lady’, and the inscription was an in-joke between Agatha and Nan. ‘A Pot of Tea’ had originally been called ‘Publicity’ and in this story the character of Tuppence had arranged for a friend who was engaged to the heir of an earldom to disappear so that her new detective agency could gain kudos in the ‘highest places’ for apparently solving the baffling mystery. The disappearance of Mrs Leigh Gordon in ‘The Case of the Missing Lady’ led to suspicions of foul play, but soon afterwards she was found hiding at a health spa, where she had gone to lose weight.