by Jared Cade
The weather that summer was glorious. Rosalind and Anthony bought Agatha’s grandson Mathew, now aged nine, to Greenway. Whereas his mother was inclined to moodiness, Mathew had a happy disposition, and a close bond had formed between him and his grandmother because they were both optimists at heart. Max taught Mathew cuneiform signs and played cricket with him; in fact, he became so involved for a time with Mathew’s upbringing that this led to ill feeling on Rosalind’s part and she eventually felt the need to reassert her rights as his mother.
Other visitors to Greenway included Humphrey Watts’s daughter Penelope (Nan’s niece) and Adrian McConnel. The couple worked on his father’s farm near Newton Abbott and planned to marry that September. In 1928 Adrian’s godfather Sir Gerald du Maurier had directed Michael Morton’s stage play Alibi based on Agatha’s novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Adrian thought Agatha was marvellous. She was effervescent with happiness and bonhomie, telling jokes and playfully patting others on the shoulder. Meanwhile Max topped up people’s glasses and remained in the background. He struck Adrian as polite and rather dull. He wondered why Agatha had married a much younger man. ‘People couldn’t figure him out,’ Adrian recalls.
An avid lover of flowers, Agatha was delighted to see the garden in full bloom, and she spent much time that summer swimming in the sea. There was an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables from the kitchen garden, and her gardener Frank Lavin carried off numerous prizes at the Brixham Flower Show.
There were echoes of the aftermath of Agatha’s disappearance in Destination Unknown, which was published in November 1954. The heroine Hilary Craven’s marriage has failed. Moreover the death of her daughter, Brenda, after a long illness, has left Hilary without religious hope or optimism for the future. After her husband has defected into the arms of another woman, Hilary escapes ‘the fog, the cold, the darkness of England’ in search of ‘sunshine and blue skies’. But on arriving in Casablanca, Morocco, she discovers ‘with a horrible, stricken coldness’ that she has not left her problems behind: ‘it was from Hilary Craven she was trying to escape, and Hilary Craven was Hilary Craven in Morocco just as much as she had been Hilary Craven in London.’ Agatha had made the same discovery about herself when she visited the Canary Islands after her disappearance. Hilary decides to commit suicide with sleeping tablets, but a secret agent intervenes and asks her to put her life in danger by impersonating the wife of a scientist who has mysteriously vanished; she is advised that the best way of impersonating someone is to feign concussion, because this excuses apparent memory lapses and unpredictable behaviour. Although a conventional thriller in many respects, the book deals with the causes and consequences of defection and assumed identity and makes the point that in the face of major problems there can be no escape and running away solves nothing.
When Agatha gave producer Peter Saunders permission to take a touring version of The Mousetrap to Germany to play to the English troops in 1954, he cast Anthony Marlowe in the role of Sergeant Trotter. The actor was married to Merelina Watts, whose father Lyonel was Nan’s brother. The couple’s daughter Fernanda recalls that before The Mousetrap tour left England Peter Saunders released her father from the production when he was offered another acting job – this one closer to home. Sailor, Beware!, a three act comedy by Philip King and Falkland L. Cary, opened at the Strand Theatre in London in February 1955.
Early that year Agatha and Max returned to Nimrud for the sixth season. The excavations unearthed by his team far exceeded his expectations, but working conditions were harsher than usual; there was a severe drought and high winds whipped up dust storms that alternated with thunderstorms. The expedition house featured a kitchen, a large living-room, an office used by Max with a window through which he paid the workmen, and two large workrooms, one of which featured a darkroom where photographs were developed. At the end of the house was a writing-room that had been built especially for Agatha, in which she kept her typewriter as well as her clothes. The expedition team slept in tents, pitched at right angles to the south end of the house, with Max and Agatha heading the queue and his mistress Barbara Parker occupying the tent next to theirs. Baths were a once-a-week luxury for members of the expedition; the water was heated on a primus stove and poured into a large Victorian hip-bath installed in a mud-brick bathhouse. A jug of hot water was delivered to each tent every morning and before dinner at night.
Agatha loved flowers and would often wander into the fields and pick them for the expedition house. She enjoyed observing birds, particularly the colourful bee-eaters and rollers, and strolling about the dig photographing the workers, local children and stray dogs. After Agatha’s death her son-in-law Anthony Hicks said of her interest in archaeology: ‘Max liked it, so Agatha liked it.
More than one archaeological colleague has stated that Max was ‘very conceited and competitive’. He was not one to hold back when it came to asserting his opinions, stating the worth of his own work and taking the intellectual high ground. It was felt by some who worked on the Middle Eastern digs that he would have been harder to get along with if Agatha had not been there. Max could be volatile and flare up easily when things didn’t go his way, but Agatha knew how to calm him down. ‘Now, Max,’ she would say quietly. This would pull him up, and his rage would quickly dissipate.
Agatha, now in her sixty-sixth year, fell ill with a severe chill at the end of March and was driven to hospital. Following her recovery she returned to Nimrud but spent a considerable amount of time writing in her room. At the end of April a hurricane flattened the tents of the expedition team and tore the roof off the expedition house. It was apparent to everyone that the rigours of desert life were becoming increasingly hard for her. Back in England, when Judith Gardner visited Greenway on one occasion, Agatha greeted her with a hug and the heartfelt words: ‘Max is wearing me out. I can’t keep up with him!’
Sometime during the 1950s Max and Barbara were indiscreet enough to be photographed together in what may have been the sitting-room of her London flat. At one end of the sofa, attired in a shabby suit, a complacent Max is stretched out comfortably, reading a book, his elbow resting on the arm of the sofa, his right hand pressed against the side of his face, his feet encased in grubby slippers. Sitting within an inch or two of him, rather than at the opposite end of the sofa, is his mistress. Barbara’s tired, lined face is wreathed in a cat-like smile, and she is looking directly at the camera, holding up a bottle of Gordon’s gin. The mood of the picture is one of relaxed intimacy. Each has their right leg crossed over the left, unconsciously mirroring the other’s body-language as lovers often do. They are sitting so close together that it would have been awkward for Barbara to get up without either asking Max to move or brushing against him.
On 9 July 1956 A Daughter’s a Daughter, the play Agatha had written about Nan and Judith in the late 1930s, was performed for the first time at the Theatre Royal in Bath. Although Mary Westmacott was billed as the author, word leaked out that it was by Agatha Christie, thereby ensuring that the eight performances were well attended. The play did not début in London’s West End until 14 December 2009 where it was well received critically with a limited run of thirty-one performances at the Trafalgar Studios. The advance publicity claimed it was based on Agatha’s relationship with her daughter, presumably in a bid to stimulate public interest.
Agatha sublimated her ambivalent feelings for Barbara in her last and most unusual Mary Westmacott book, The Burden, published in November 1956. Its sketchiness arises from its uneven style and the cramming of too many ideas into a slim novel. The Burden is essentially a reworking of the Cinderella theme: the noble, long-suffering sister ultimately finds love while the self-indulgent, immature and selfish sister perishes.
Laura Franklin is a repressed child who yearns to be loved by her parents. She is unable to bear the thought of her younger sister Shirley getting more affection from their parents, and so she lights a candle of intention in the hope that her sister will die. When the hous
e catches fire that night Laura is horrified by God’s apparently brutal response. After her courageous rescue of Shirley, Laura vows always to care for her.
Seventeen years have elapsed, and the sisters’ parents have died in a plane crash. Laura has long acted as a mother to Shirley and has no personal life of her own. One of Shirley’s admirers is a ruthless, care-free young man called Henry, who turns up unexpectedly on a motor cycle. Romance blossoms. By marrying Barbara’s fictional counterpart, Shirley, off to Henry – plainly based on Archie – Agatha was reinforcing her conviction that if Barbara had ever known the true joys and agonies of being in love she would never have dreamed of usurping Max’s affections.
Shirley soon discovers what it is like to be married to an unfaithful husband who is constantly in debt. After Henry is crippled by polio, he takes his frustrations out on his wife. In a moment of selflessness Laura gives her brother-in-law an overdose of sleeping tablets in order to free her sister Shirley from the marriage. His grief-stricken widow subsequently discovers that her much-longed-for escape with the attractive and considerate Sir Richard Wilding has been a mistake.
Shirley becomes an alcoholic. After being married for three years to the doting Sir Richard and living in luxury with him on an island, she discovers this is not what she wants from life. She confides to Llewellyn Knox, a former American evangelist, that while she was never very happy with Henry their marriage had been, in a way, all right; it had been a life she had chosen.
She mourns Henry’s premature death, and her sentiments come straight from Agatha’s heart in describing the man she still loves as selfish and ruthless in a gay and charming kind of way. She says she loves him still and would rather be unhappy with him than ‘smug and comfortable’ without him. Shirley says she hates God for letting Henry die, and Llewellyn assures her that it is better to hate God than our fellow man because God has always been our scapegoat, shouldering the burden of our joy and our pain.
In the final part of the book, where the action becomes absurdly compressed, Laura learns from Llewellyn that Shirley has been killed after drunkenly stepping in front of a passing vehicle. Laura is devastated by her sister’s death and questions whether it was suicide, but Llewellyn insists it was an accident. Laura confesses to her hand in Henry’s death and explains how she has attempted to absolve her guilt by running an institution for ‘subnormal’ children. Llewellyn tells her that he has fallen in love with her, and Laura accepts his proposal of marriage within less than twenty-four hours of having met him. Although Agatha had a dislike of commercialized religion, the retired evangelist is cast as the perfect husband for Laura because he has retained his humility and belief in God. The story ends happily with Laura feeling loved for the first time.
This Cinderella-like ending represented a wish fulfilment on Agatha’s part. The extraordinary courtesy Max always displayed towards her helped to sustain the marriage, despite his continuing affair with Barbara. Her pet dogs, those most faithful of companions, and cats were a constant source of comfort to Agatha during her bouts of agitation and depression and recurring outbreaks of psoriasis.
There was cause for celebration that same year when Agatha was awarded a CBE in the New Year’s Honours List for her contribution to detective fiction and the stage. ‘One up to the Low-Brows!’ she triumphantly wrote to Edmund Cork from Baghdad, where she was helping Max in his work. Despite her elation, fame never went to her head, and by now she was an extraordinarily famous woman.
Inevitably there were allusions to her disappearance from time to time. Once when she was in Baghdad someone asked her about it, and she never spoke to that person again. She was also very upset about an article on the elusive best-selling novelist Rowena Farre that appeared in the Daily Mail on 19 February 1957, in which Kenneth Althorp passed the comment: ‘I’m sure she’s not doing an Agatha Christie on me.’ Although Agatha’s secret remained safe with Nan, Edmund Cork was dispatched to have lunch with one of the Daily Mail’s top executives to point out the newspaper’s bad taste in bringing up the subject of his client’s disappearance. While the innocuous article did not warrant such a response, constant reminders of the incident made Agatha more anxious to avoid the limelight than ever. She also remained exceptionally modest.
Judith Gardner has stated that Barbara made herself such an indispensable factotum to Max and Agatha that she regularly came to Greenway. Barbara and Max often spent long periods together in the library, leaving her shoes outside in the hall as a sign to the rest of the household that they did not wish to be disturbed. Another unusual aspect of Barbara’s visits is that she never sat down to meals with Agatha and Max and their guests; instead her food was sent upstairs to her on a tray. She was obviously more than just a secretary. Max’s and Barbara’s passion for each other led them to become indiscreet. Once Graham encountered them embracing by the boat-house and, on another occasion, on the Greenway ferry around dusk. It became a habit of Max’s to rise from the table after lunch and announce that he was ‘just going upstairs to get on with a paper’. While Max and Barbara were upstairs together, Agatha and Nan did crosswords together in the library.
By this time Judith and Graham were living at 10 Branksome Close in the nearby village of Paignton. Nan had left London for good and was residing in the same street at number 16. Judith visited her mother constantly. Graham got on so well with his mother-in-law and Agatha that he put two and two together while he was reading Unfinished Portrait. One day, when he raised the subject of the disappearance with Nan, he asked her if she had helped Agatha disappear. She admitted her involvement in the affair and added with admirable aplomb: ‘What does it matter after all this time?’
Judith’s Uncle Jimmy died in June 1957 shortly after he and Agatha had visited his sister Nan in Branksome Close. For many years Jimmy had run the family textile business, S. and J. Watts, after taking it over from his father James Watts II. Jimmy was seventy-nine and had been unwell for some time. His death was a sad loss to his family, especially for Agatha who had received an enormous amount of moral support from her brother-in-law after her disappearance. Calm, prudent and slow of speech, Jimmy had always advised her to the best of his ability and encouraged her to stand by her convictions even when he didn’t entirely agree with her. Agatha had loved him dearly and, in addition to The ABC Murders and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, she had officially dedicated her 1953 novel After the Funeral to him ‘in memory of happy days at Abney’. Jimmy’s fortune and Abney Hall passed to his son Jack; a clause in the will stated that if Agatha’s and Nan’s nephew Jack should predecease his father then Agatha’s grandson Mathew Prichard was to inherit everything.
During summers at Greenway Agatha went to Churston Church every Sunday. The east window was considered rather plain, and she gave some money towards a new one of stained glass. She asked if the design could include pastures and sheep; she felt children would relate to this idea as it harked back to her own childhood vision of Heaven. After the window, depicting the life of Christ, was installed in July 1957 Graham photographed it at her request.
By October that year Agatha had begun work on her new detective novel Ordeal by Innocence. Usually she liked to finish a project as quickly as possible, but she temporarily set it aside to write a supernatural story called ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ in which she vented her feelings about Barbara Parker. The life-sized velvet and silk doll is a puppet, a decadent product of the twentieth century that lolls in a dressmaker’s studio, limp yet strangely alive, next to the telephone or among the divan cushions, looking sad but at the same time rather sly, determined and knowing. The women who work in the studio are never able to work out how she got there, and they feel a sense of menace when the doll assumes a macabre life of its own. Believing it to be evil, one of the women throws it out of the window. An overwrought colleague insists that she has ‘killed’ the doll, when to their horror an urchin in the street makes off with it. The frightened women follow, but the child refuses to give up her find, e
xclaiming that she loves it and that being loved is all the doll ever wanted. Pitiful yet menacing, the creature was an expression of Agatha’s deeply ambivalent feelings towards Barbara.
November 1957 saw the publication of 4.50 from Paddington. This absorbing mystery involves the ingenious disposal of a body from a passing train down a railway embankment into the grounds of a family mansion and was inspired by the railway line that abutted the corner of Abney Hall’s grounds.
One day Agatha was at Paddington Station looking for something to read at the W.H. Smith bookstall when she was accosted by a bookseller who recommended the book to her. He said all his regular customers had bought a copy and spoke highly of it, but Agatha’s response was non-committal. Finally he asked incredulously: ‘Don’t you want to read it?’ Agatha informed him she was not really interested. She was amused by the incident, because, as she later told family and friends, if the man had looked at the back of the book he would have immediately spotted her picture.
‘The Night of a Thousand Stars’, the lavish party theatrical producer Peter Saunders threw at the Savoy on 13 April 1958 to celebrate The Mousetrap’s achievement in becoming the longest-running play in the history of the British theatre, was a fraught occasion for Agatha – and not just because the press turned out in force. As the most important star of the party Agatha agreed, with some reluctance, to arrive early to pose for some publicity pictures, only to be told by an officious doorman that no one would be admitted to the ballroom for another half an hour.
Agatha’s response to the rebuff was extraordinary. She went away, although she need only have said who she was and why she was there to have been let in. She was eventually admitted, however, and the pictures of her cutting the cake were taken and the party proceeded. The story that the crime writer was so self-effacing and shy that she allowed herself to be turned away appeared in the newspapers the following day, and it had the beneficial effect of helping to keep at a distance journalists and admirers who might have wished to intrude on her privacy and ask too many personal questions.