by Jared Cade
One afternoon Judith and Graham were at Bickley Mill when they got a telephone call. Agatha had invited six or seven guests to Greenway and wondered if she might bring them over to the couple’s house. The Gardners assented, and a short while later Agatha and her party arrived for cocktails. Rather uncharacteristically she asked Judith and Graham if she might take a look around on her own. The couple gave their permission since she was such a trusted old friend. Upstairs in the large studio the writer saw a painting on an easel depicting a pink house next to a canal spanned by a hump-backed bridge. Agatha later incorporated the painting into her 1968 novel By the Pricking of My Thumbs; the secret room in the canal house, where the character of Tuppence Beresford confronts the killer, was based on one of the rooms in Bickley Mill. When Agatha came back downstairs half an hour or so later she amused everyone by remarking enthusiastically: ‘What a wonderful place for a murder.’
In 1967 Gordon Ramsey, an American academic, produced Agatha Christie: Mistress of Mystery, a complete bibliography of her work and an affectionate assessment of her writings. Agatha’s literary adviser had urged her to cooperate with him since they were having considerable difficulty keeping up with her prolific output. Initially she had allowed him to visit her in London and had also welcomed him to Greenway, but she had restricted their talks mainly to her books so that there was very little discussion of more private aspects of her life. Agatha had soon tired of helping him with his research and had become so acutely defensive that she had even objected to him mentioning the two unpublished murder mysteries she held in reserve from 1940.
Her reaction to his raising the subject of the novels was extraordinary, since she had already mentioned their existence to Francis Wyndham in a rare interview for the Sunday Times Weekly Review on 27 February the previous year:
‘One is Poirot’s last case, and one of course is Miss Marple’s. I wrote them during the war, just after The Body in the Library, when I was in London working in hospitals [sic]. I had plenty of time in the evenings; one didn’t want to go out in the blitz . . . I gave one to my husband and one to my daughter – definitely made over to them by deed of gift. So when I am no more they can bring them out and have a jaunt on the proceeds – I hope!’
What Agatha was most unhappy about was a reference in Gordon Ramsey’s bibliography to when she went missing in 1926, although he summarily dismissed the notorious episode in half a page by explaining the author had amnesia at the time of her disappearance.
In June 1968 Max was knighted for his services to archaeology. Agatha had the satisfaction of knowing that he would never have achieved such success if she had not financed his expeditions. Moreover, becoming Lady Mallowan meant she had achieved her own childhood ambition of becoming ‘Lady Agatha’, and her title helped her mask her identity from her fans even more effectively than had ‘Mrs Mallowan’. Meanwhile Barbara remained in the background, making herself as indispensable as ever to Max, and Agatha stoically turned a blind eye to their relationship.
The author remained acutely sensitive to references to the disappearance. For instance, when an American publisher asked her to complete an outline for a plot begun by Franklin Roosevelt about a man who successfully plans his own disappearance, she refused to cooperate on the project. Stella Kirwan, who became Agatha’s secretary from the 1950s onwards after Charlotte Fisher retired to Eastbourne suffering from arthritis, had enormous difficulty persuading the producer of the television series This Is Your Life that there was nothing Agatha would hate more than to have her personal history presented to her on television in front of an audience. Privacy was paramount to Agatha, and she was greatly distressed at being shown unauthorized aerial photographs of Greenway that had been taken for a magazine.
By this time Agatha and Max had befriended A.L. Rowse, a fellow of All Souls College. The historian subsequently wrote about them at length in his 1980 memoirs Memories of Men and Women: ‘After my stimulating lecture to the Royal Society of Literature about Simon Forman and the sex life of the Elizabethans, Agatha did say, “I hope it won’t start Max up again.”’ Although love appeared frequently in Agatha’s books, Rowse pointed out ‘there is nothing about sex’, and this led him to wonder if this might have been one of the reasons her marriage to Archie had failed.
The closest Agatha ever came to discussing the breakdown of her first marriage with the press was when she relaxed her guard with the sympathetic journalist Marcelle Bernstein in a much-publicized interview that appeared in the Observer on 14 December 1969.
‘I married at 24; we were very happy for 11 years. Then my mother died a very painful death and my husband found a young woman. Well, you can’t write your fate: your fate comes to you. But you can do what you like with characters you create.’
Agatha had good reason to idealize her first marriage. During the painting of her portrait that year by Oskar Kokoschka, the famous artist noticed her habit of tapping her fingers, which were then badly afflicted with psoriasis, on the arms of her chair. She was still upset over Max’s relationship with Barbara, which showed no sign of abating. To make matters worse, an anonymous journalist – unaware of her marital problems – had attributed the following quote to Agatha: ‘The advantage of being married to an archaeologist is that the older you get the more interested he is in you.’ Agatha hated the quote and always denied having said it.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Twilight Years
Agatha was at the peak of her fame in the 1970s, and to those fans who eagerly awaited each new ‘Christie for Christmas’ it seemed as if she had brooked no serious rival for yours. The decade began with the publication of Passenger to Frankfurt, which became a best-seller in Britain and the United States. Initially, however, her UK publishers had hesitated over whether to publish it at all and had only done so on condition that she subtitle it ‘An Extravaganza’ and include an introduction to explain why she had written it.
In Passenger to Frankfurt Agatha had produced an international thriller involving terrorism, hijacking and an attempted resurgence of Nazi Germany by the son of Adolf Hitler. Although the plot was extremely unusual for a Christie novel, it is interesting to note that the book centres on the successful hunt to recover Project Benvo, the code-name for a drug, which, when injected into a person, effectively eradicates violent impulses by inducing a permanent state of benevolence. Readers who do not like this book often fail to realize just how concerned she had become about the violence she felt she saw, initially in Britain, and latterly as a world epidemic.
Despite Max’s continued relationship with Barbara, the author’s self-esteem rose when she heard she was to be made a Dame of the British Empire in the 1971 New Year’s Honours list. Agatha was an ardent monarchist, so she was delighted by such a title bestowed by the Queen. Not even the attention of the press could prevent her from attending her investiture at Buckingham Palace, although she declined to be interviewed by journalists.
Her new book, Nemesis, which marked a return to the domestic whodunits for which she was famous, was begun in January 1971, and next to her name and the title in her notebook she added the initials DBE. The plot deals with the depravity that can result from thwarted love and supplies one of the most emotionally compelling motives for crime in Agatha’s literary canon.
In June she was treated for a broken hip at Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital in Oxford after falling at Winterbrook and hobbling about painfully for a week. Judith and Graham had advised her to get her injury examined straight away. Agatha dismissed the idea, thinking she was just bruised, but it turned out to be more serious. Graham also had the misfortune at this time to injure his leg while he was cleaning his and Judith’s outdoor swimming-pool. Max wrote to the couple on Agatha’s behalf expressing her concern at Graham’s accident and sending them her best love; he expected it would be about another fortnight before Agatha left the hospital with her new metal hip.
Max was concerned about their finances at this time. In addition to Greenway a
nd Winterbrook, there was the upkeep of his new Mercedes and the Swan Court flat in London where he would spend time with Barbara. It angered Judith and Graham that he did so little to ensure Agatha’s comfort: the hall light at Winterbrook came crashing down one day, the roof leaked and the house was in urgent need of general maintenance and repair. Although Agatha was a wealthy woman, much of her money had been distributed in trusts for her family in anticipation of her death. The only immediate money at hand came from Agatha Christie Ltd. The fact that Max was keeping Barbara added to his financial anxieties, recalls Graham.
One day when there was a passing reference in the conversation to Max and Barbara, Agatha alluded to the couple’s affair by saying in Graham’s hearing, ‘It doesn’t matter about Max because he’s too old now. There’s no need to worry about anything with him.’
During the previous decade Max had suffered two strokes, one in 1961 and the other at the end of 1967, and these had aged him considerably. It was impossible to discern he was fourteen years younger than Agatha, for they now looked around the same ago. His decrepit appearance owed itself to a love of rich food and alcohol that had left him pot-bellied; he also stooped and walked with a shuffle. Agatha’s attitude towards his relationship with Barbara had altered: she no longer feared he might divorce her for his mistress, and this led to her adopting a more forgiving and philosophical attitude towards Barbara’s liaison with Max. Love was at the root of a flower for Agatha. She also felt a sense of gratitude toward him for standing by her all these years.
Agatha’s relationship with her daughter remained prickly. Rosalind disapproved of her mother’s latest play, Fiddlers Five, and she was right to do so. Producer Peter Saunders was unable to find a West End theatre that would take the play and it was not well received in the provinces. Determined to salvage her creation, Agatha met the director Allan Davis who agreed to redirect the play the following year after it had been rewritten and whittled down to Fiddlers Three.
The unhappy experience led Agatha to write a long ranting letter to her daughter in which she defended all her plays in general. Although she said she knew Rosalind had her best interests at heart, Agatha was clearly in denial about how bad her play was. Plainly unable to forget Rosalind’s ‘long, intimate lunches’ with Max at the Savoy, Agatha tried to defend her dramas by taking a sour and somewhat hypocritical pot-shot at her daughter to the effect she would have missed out on forty years of happiness with Max if she had taken the advice of her sister Madge and refused to marry him. The letter ended bitterly: ‘If one doesn’t take a few risks in life one might as well be dead!’
Agatha’s self-esteem received a boost that year when Madame Tussaud’s expressed a desire to model a wax effigy of her. She gave her permission with pleasure, as she had always enjoyed visiting London’s waxworks museum as a child.
In 1972 Michael Parkinson, the television chat-show host, compiled Michael Parkinson’s Confessional Album – 1973, in which famous people were asked to record their likes and dislikes. It was unusual for Agatha to respond to a public questionnaire, but she was happy to oblige on this occasion because filling in family confessional albums had been an enjoyable pastime in her youth. She gave her ideal of beauty in nature as ‘a bank of primroses in spring’, cited Elgar, Sibelius and Wagner as her favourite composers and named T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral as the play she most admired. Her favourite quotation came from Sir Thomas Browne: ‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us’; while she gave as her motto Dr Johnson’s ‘The business of life is to go forwards.’ She stated that the qualities she most liked in men were ‘integrity and good manners’. When asked who her heroes were in real life, she wrote, ‘None. I am not a hero-worshipper.’ This complete volte-face from her intensely romantic outlook during her first marriage revealed how much she had changed over the years. She did, however, cite her favourite heroines in real life as the ‘Little Sisters of the Poor’.
When the publishers of the Guinness Book of Great Moments wrote asking for her permission to reproduce a corrected proof of a page from Nemesis, she agreed. It was a distinct feather in her cap for a woman whose grammar and literary style had often been, with some justification, derided by her critics. They usually made the mistake of judging her as a prose stylist when, really, she was a great story-teller. She was particularly good at writing about children and had the ability to be equally convincing when using the first person as either a man or a woman. In fact, Agatha frequently belittled her writing, calling herself ‘a good, honest craftsman’. What is not in doubt is that she had become a literary legend in her lifetime.
Max continued to worry about his finances. On 17 July 1972 Agatha wrote to her literary agent Edmund Cork asking him to send her a copy of the unpublished Miss Marple novel she had written during the Second World War and a copy of the deed of gift assigning ownership of the copyright to Max, as she felt it was only right that he ought to have copies of them. So long had passed that she was unable to remember if the novel’s current title was Cover Her Face or She Died Young.
Originally the manuscript was entitled Murder in Retrospect after one of the chapters in the book. Agatha’s royalty statement for 15 March 1940 shows that the secretarial agency Edmund Cork hired to type the manuscript charged £19 13s. 9. On 7 June that same year Edmund Cork had written to Agatha advising her that he would have the necessary deed of gift drawn up for the Miss Marple novel. Agatha had eventually visited her literary agent’s offices at 40 Fleet Street, London, four months later on 14 October and signed the document transferring ownership of the copyright of Murder in Retrospect to her husband in consideration of what was termed her ‘natural love and affection for him’. This was before Agatha’s American publishers had appropriated the title for Five Little Pigs in 1942 (a year ahead of the release of the UK edition that retained the nursery-rhyme title). Agatha duly renamed the novel Cover Her Face. In one of her notebooks there are references to Cover Her Face under ‘Plans for Sept. 1947’ and ‘Plans for Nov. 1948’, suggesting she was considering revising the unpublished manuscript. But these alterations did not occur until early 1950. After drafting most of the book that became Mrs McGinty’s Dead and thinking about plans for another Mary Westmacott novel, Agatha wrote to Edmund Cork from Nimrud saying that, as she was well ahead of her normal writing schedule, she had gone over the Miss Marple novel thoroughly, ‘as a lot of it seemed to have dated very much’. She had removed all the political references and remarks that emphasized the period, although she stressed that the story must remain set in the 1930s, as so much of the action depended on houses with plentiful servants, ample pre-war meals and so on. She observed that it was especially catchwords and particular phrases that seemed to make a book old-fashioned. On rereading this one she thought it was quite good, and she added, somewhat facetiously, she was not sure her writing talents hadn’t gone downhill since then. Following the publication of P.D. James’s début crime novel Cover Her Face in 1962, Agatha became aware of the need to think up yet another title for her Miss Marple book, hence her confusion in July 1972 as to whether it was still known by this title or She Died Young.
John Curran speculates in his 2009 book Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making that the reference to ‘Plans for Sept. 1947’ and ‘Plans for Nov. 1948’ indicate Agatha was still plotting Cover Her Face and did not write it until much closer to 1950. But his theory is not endorsed by the evidence of the Agatha Christie–Edmund Cork and Harold Ober correspondence files currently held at Exeter University, which also includes a copy of Agatha’s deed of gift to Max. In her autobiography Agatha had this to say about the last Poirot and Miss Marple novels:
‘It is only now that I fully realise, looking back over my wartime output, that I produced an incredible amount of stuff during those years . . . I had written an extra two books during the first years of the war. This was in anticipation of my being killed in the raids, which seemed to be in the highest
degree likely as I was working in London. One was for Rosalind, which I wrote first – a book with Hercule Poirot in it – and the other was for Max – with Miss Marple in it. Those two books, when written, were put in the vaults of a bank, and were made over formally by deed of gift to Rosalind and Max.’
The publication in 2010 of a CD of Agatha dictating portions of her autobiography confirms that the essentials of this passage was faithfully transcribed. Cover Her Face was eventually published in 1976, several months after Agatha’s death, as Sleeping Murder. Nowadays most editions have dropped the subtitle Miss Marple’s Last Case presumably because its setting is so evidently rooted in the 1930s unlike Nemesis, the last Miss Marple book she wrote in 1971.
As Agatha’s health began to deteriorate, her daughter made increasingly frequent visits to her mother’s side. In Rosalind’s absence Agatha’s most devoted companion was a Manchester terrier named Bingo, who had been so terrified as a puppy that he used to bite everyone on sight. The one person he did not attack was Agatha. Mistress and dog adored each other, and Bingo slept at the end of her bed. Max’s ankles became a mass of scars, and visitors to Winterbrook soon fell victim to Bingo’s jaws, for he was adept at lying in wait. Agatha would joke with Max that the reason Bingo bit him every time he picked up the telephone when it rang was because he thought the devil was inside it. Notwithstanding, he was a good guard dog, for he gave the alarm one day when a burglar erected a ladder outside Agatha’s bedroom window and escaped with just two rather moth-eaten fur coats.
Agatha’s 1972 novel, Elephants Can Remember, concerned a love triangle that ended in triple tragedy. There is a veiled reference to Agatha’s alter ego in Harrogate when one of her characters remarks that the ill-fated Lady Ravenscroft had spoken before her death about starting a new life connected with St Teresa of Avila, the nun who became a saint through her reform of the convents. The remark is intriguing for it in no way propels the plot or leads to an explanation of Lady Ravenscroft’s death.