Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  Having left Belcher with friends and Bates to his own devices, Agatha and Archie at last set off for their longed-for and hard-earned holiday in Hawaii. They arrived on August 5th. Agatha. was ecstatic and wrote from the Moana Hotel to Clara:

  Rosalind is three years old and we have arrived at HONOLULU. It is exactly as stated. You arrive early in the morning, take a taxi, and go along a road between palms and lovely flowers – hedges of hibiscus, red, pink, white oleanders, blue plumbago and great laburnum trees and poinsettias, like laburnum only blood red – till you get to a green and white palace of a Hotel with a courtyard behind with a great banyan tree (which they light up at night with coloured lights) and the sea washing right up to the steps – with Hawaiians standing on great surf boards flashing in from the reef to the shore.

  Overjoyed to be free of the Mission, Agatha and Archie dashed into the sea as soon as they had unpacked, but their surfing experience in South Africa was no use here. At the end of the first week, Agatha wrote to Clara:

  Still enjoying ourselves, though we’ve had our troubles! The first day’s bathing so burned us that we were in real agony! Archie was much the worst – his skin came up in huge blisters all over his back and shoulders and the backs of his legs. He could hardly bear his clothes rubbing against it.… We have tried all remedies – anointing ourselves with coconut oil, whitening, peroxide cream, etc. Finally A. has taken to bathing in pyjamas, to the intense amusement of the natives who roll about in ecstasies of mirth!

  Hawaii was more sophisticated – and expensive – than they had expected: ‘There are also magnificent roads everywhere – tarred and oiled, and a constant stream of motors – everyone has a motor! You hear them passing in a stream up till 3 in the morning. It’s also pleasing to see nice-looking, well dressed people again, after the drab bourgeoisie of the Colonies!!’ After five days they decided that the Moana, all very well for a week, would be ruinous for a longer period. They hunted round and found the Donna Hotel ‘half way between the town and Waikiki – but on the trams’, where they had a little cottage to themselves and spent all their time ‘(a) on the beach, (b) in the town drinking ice-cream sodas and buying new remedies and preventatives for sunburn’. A friend arranged for them to become members of the country club, where they could laze and drink ‘the ubiquitous ice-water of Prohibition’ and enjoy the local food, about which, particularly the varieties of fresh banana, Agatha wrote home enthusiastically. Out of habit, perhaps, they also allowed themselves to be taken on a tour of a pineapple cannery.

  This idyllic existence was, however, disturbed by several minor disasters. ‘A tremendous shower of “liquid sunshine” came down from the mountains and wet us to the skin and Archie has now got a bad cold! Also he stayed in the sea too long at the beginning of the week and has all blistered up and peeled – back and shoulder nearly raw again.’ One catastrophe which brought unexpected benefit was the destruction of Agatha’s handsome and expensive silk bathing dress, which she had brought from England. To her embarrassment, the waves tore it from shoulder to ankle, almost dividing it in two, and she was obliged to buy at the hotel shop ‘a wonderful, skimpy, emerald green wool bathing dress, which was the joy of my life, and in which I thought I looked remarkably well.’ Archie thought so too, and sent a photograph to Clara, with a letter whose stiltedness is striking after Agatha’s racy correspondence, since it consisted mainly of remarks about the complications of packing luggage.

  Much more unfortunate was a sudden attack of neuritis in Agatha’s left arm, so painful that she could hardly move it. She ascribed it to surfing: ‘You “paddle” with your arms very vigorously when you surf, and that does it, I suppose.’ This agonising pain could not have come at a worse time, for September had arrived and Agatha and Archie were obliged to end their holiday and join Belcher and Bates in Canada. They braced themselves for the reunion and for stringent economies, since Archie’s £1,000 fee was dwindling fast and they still had Agatha’s living expenses in Canada to meet. Agatha did not mention this in her letters home; indeed, she urged Clara to look to her for any necessary help with keeping Monty’s native servant: ‘I can pay Shebani’s wages. I’ve got far more money now than I ever dreamed I should have after this trip – my March a/c from John Lane is £47 for “Swedish rights”, and things like that, of Styles – and I shall get a good lot of Tommy and Tuppence money this Sept – and all my dividends pouring in at home, so do do what you’d like.’ In Canada she was obliged to adopt various parsimonious expedients; her chief scheme was to eat everything on the hotel’s breakfast menu, which cost a dollar, supplementing her diet by sending for large jugs of boiling water, with which she made a soup from spoonfuls of meat extract, the most useful present she and Archie had been given in New Zealand. She thought ruefully of missed opportunities: ‘I also wished heartily that I had flattered the Dehydrator to the extent that he would have pressed large quantities of dehydrated carrots, beef, tomatoes and other delicacies upon me.’ By these means, and by eating enormous meals when civic dignitaries entertained her, Agatha managed to keep body and soul together, and to sustain herself for the exertion of the trip from Victoria, on the West coast, across Canada to Ottawa.

  By now the Expedition was weary. ‘From Calgary we went to Edmonton and from there to Regina and from there to Winnipeg. We stayed a day in each place, usually sleeping in our faithful private car.… All the towns are much the same, set in the middle of flat endless prairies, the “bald headed Prairie” indeed – interesting to those interested in wheat – but not otherwise.’ In Winnipeg, they were struck by another catastrophe. Archie had been taken with Belcher to inspect a grain elevator, and his sinus, always sensitive, became so badly inflamed that he collapsed with congestion of the lungs. It developed into bronchitis and a doctor declared that he should not be moved. This infuriated Belcher, who had already had an attack of ‘Wild Man’ in Winnipeg: the Governor General had arrived on the same day, so that Belcher was overlooked. He refused to move and sat in his room dictating to Bates an article to the Daily Telegraph on ‘Winnipeg the Yankee City’, before departing in a rage, taking Bates with him. Agatha, woefully short of money, was left to nurse her sick husband. She did tell Clara about their ordeal:

  His temperature was up to 104 for days and finally a terrible bout of nettle rash came out – all over him – so that he was almost screaming with pain and irritation.… He was very bad one night and the doctor said he would like another opinion and brought another old idiot along, who appeared to be a King of the ‘99s’ and kept mislaying his stethoscope. But the nettle rash is abating a little and he’s had an hour or two of sleep today, so I feel much relieved about him.

  When Archie recovered, they joined Bates and Belcher for a trip to the Rockies and to Banff, where Agatha soaked herself each morning in hot sulphurous water from the springs, running a current on to her painful neck and shoulder. She doubted it would do any good but to her relief the neuritis disappeared. There was a triumphant moment for Belcher, too, when he disembarked from the train to find a huge crowd, far outnumbering the plenipotentiaries on the platform, ready to welcome him. Sadly, he discovered that the gathering had assembled in the mistaken belief that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, also touring the Rockies, were on the same train. Archie’s illness had meant that he and Agatha had to change the remainder of their itinerary. Still weak, he went with Bates and Belcher to Newfoundland, while Agatha took the train to New York City, to stay with her Aunt Cassie, sister-in-law of Mrs Pierpont Morgan. She still worried lest Archie should catch pneumonia – winter had set in and it snowed all the time – but she was glad to be done with the Expedition. ‘We are both sick of the Mission and longing to get home,’ she wrote to Clara, and she even contemplated sailing earlier than the rest of the party, so anxious was she to see her mother, Rosalind, Madge and Monty. Staying with Aunt Cassie was extremely comfortable and great fun; Agatha learned about her father’s doings in New York as a young man, and she was taken to restaurant
s to be restored to her former well-nourished state. After a week, however, she began, as she put it, to feel a little like a caged bird, since her aunt would not let her explore the city alone, although she was allowed a final treat – to go to a drugstore, or, as Agatha put it, ‘a cafeteria’.

  Archie, Belcher and Bates, all exhausted, managed to finish their work in Canada in time to come to New York to take up their passages on the RMS Majestic (not, as Agatha mistakenly recalled in her Autobiography, the Berengaria). They left New York on November 25th and arrived at Southampton on December 1st. As the Mission was decanted from the train at Waterloo, 40,000 miles and ten months since it had embarked, Archie told The Times: ‘The tour has been a great success. We were enthusiastically received everywhere, and are completely satisfied with the result of our work. We have had a strenuous time and are glad to reach home again, but it was worth it.’ Less diplomatic but more telling were the remarks written on the Majestic’s menu for the last night at sea, which was, appropriately, Thanksgiving Day. Around the list of dishes – oysters, cream of tomato soup, poached turbot, sweetbreads, roast turkey and cranberry sauce, salad, mince pies and dessert – Major Belcher and his colleagues gave a franker verdict. Over his dashing signature, underlined twice, Belcher wrote: ‘Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit’: a quotation from the first book of The Aeneid: ‘Perhaps it will one day be a pleasure to remember these things.’ Archie, more modestly but following his former schoolteacher’s example, put ‘Finis Itinerum’: the end of the journey; Agatha, remembering the slang she had picked up in Australia, put ‘1st Class! Good oh! Right here’; while beneath the signature of Francis W. Bates appeared, feelingly, ‘RIP’.

  9

  ‘… the next I write will be the 5th’

  In the five years after the Empire Tour Agatha was transformed from a little-known contributor to magazines and newspapers, writing imaginative stories for amusement rather than for money, to a professional author who earned her living by writing and who was so well known that it was a misery to her. As she found, acquiring and perfecting professional skills is a time-consuming process and so is the business – for it is a business – of maintaining a professional reputation for working to reliable standards and fulfilling the terms of a contract even when its first enchantment has worn off. Agatha, however, did not set out to become a professional and no one encouraged her to turn herself into one. It is easy to understand why she started to write; character, skills and circumstance all inclined her in that direction. It is more difficult to explain why she became a professional writer. Her practical nature had something to do with it; her skills were applied skills – cooking, gardening, arranging flowers. There was no point in writing stories simply to put them away. She was also, though reticent, a generous person, who most easily expressed her feelings obliquely, with a gift, a service, a performance. It was not so much that, as her family put it, ‘Agatha doesn’t like parting with information’, as that she could not part with it spontaneously but would wait for the appropriate framework – wisely, because in that way an audience was more likely to be attentive. She liked an audience and she wanted to display her craftsmanship.

  At the time when Agatha had, at Clara’s suggestion, showed Eden Philpotts her work, she had no idea that she might become, like him, a professional writer. She was merely curious to know his opinion and she was also vaguely aware that there were flaws in her writing which he might help her correct. But from his first words of advice she learnt that writing was a craft as well as an art and that there were methods and tricks for overcoming stylistic and technical obstacles. She began to learn not just technique but also that, to satisfy herself, her writing had to meet other readers’ standards as well as her own. With practice she became increasingly confident that she knew what her readers required and could produce work which would please them. Her correspondence with her publisher showed a growing firmness. It also illustrated other characteristics which propelled her along the way: efficiency and conscientiousness. Orderly and methodical, she had a sense of duty, as she had shown by remaining good-tempered during the long days with the exasperating Belcher.

  There are, moreover, few things more certain to galvanise a shy amateur than the discovery that he or she is more efficient and resourceful than the professional people engaged to act as advisers and intermediaries. The mystique of professionalism vanishes for ever and the amateur realises that he is himself just as much of an authority. So it was with Agatha during the early nineteen-twenties, as, more and more sure of herself, she gradually put her publisher in his place. She discovered that The Bodley Head was dependent on her and not the other way round, that she had an unusual talent and that by exercising it she could earn money. She found she must maintain expected standards and manage her work and affairs intelligently. Her attitude to her writing became professional.

  This is not how Agatha herself described it in her Autobiography, where her account focusses on domestic preoccupations. Not that these were trivial. When Agatha and Archie returned to England at the end of 1922, they were faced with two immediate problems. Archie had to find a job, since his old one had gone, and something had to be done about Monty. He was as unmanageable as ever, as Agatha had discovered when, just before their departure with the Mission, Archie had been dispatched to Tilbury to meet Monty and Shebani and bring them to rooms he had found in London. Though a sick man – his old wound had become infected and he had been given no more than six months to live – and heavily dependent on sedatives, Monty had retained his charming and airy guile, inducing Archie to deposit him not in his new apartments but at his favourite, extremely expensive hotel in Jermyn Street; ‘Somehow,’ said Archie, ‘it seemed so reasonable the way he put it.’ ‘That is Monty’s strong point,’ Agatha informed him. A course of treatment by specialists in London so restored Monty’s health that his mother and his sisters could hope that by living quietly he might last a good number of years. He was accordingly moved to Ashfield, where Clara had converted several rooms and built a new bathroom for him, as well as persuading her two elderly maid-servants that they need entertain no anxiety about sharing their quarters with an African (an exotic and perplexing phenomenon in Torquay in the nineteen-twenties) but could take this opportunity to convert him to Christianity.

  Agatha frequently asked about Shebani in her letters; she and Madge between them paid his wages. He was an immense success, listening patiently as the maids read the Bible to him and pacifying his master when his demands – for grilled chops one hour before sunrise, for instance – were particularly unreasonable. Monty himself, however, refused to settle down and, the better his health, the more difficult it became for him to fit into Ashfield’s sedate routine. He took to discharging his pistol from the window (just ‘keeping his eye in’, he explained to the police), terrifying those who sought to call at the house. Clara was exhausted. When, a few months after Agatha’s return to England, Shebani announced that he must return to his family in Africa, it was clear that some new scheme must be devised for Monty’s care. The solution turned out to be the purchase by Madge and Agatha, for £800, of a cottage on Dartmoor, where they installed their brother and an elderly, placid and unconventional housekeeper, a doctor’s widow, who calmed Monty down and looked after him happily. Thus, after much wear and tear, one problem was sorted out.

  The other proved less straightforward. In early 1923 the City had lost the buoyancy and confidence of the immediate post-War years and Archie, at thirty-four, found it difficult to find a niche. Anxious and depressed, he fended off Agatha’s attempts to soothe him. She wanted to be helpful but could think of nothing appropriate to say or do. Untrained, she could not expect to find anything remunerative for herself, while work for which little training was necessary was in short supply. Not that she made any serious attempts to find a job; that would have made Archie feel even more inadequate. He suggested that she go with Rosalind to Clara or Madge; Agatha, however, was determined to stay. She made herself use
ful by cooking and cleaning – they now had no maid – and the rough patch passed. A firm in the City, thought to be slightly shady, took Archie on, and within a year an old friend, Clive Baillieu, returned from Australia and offered Archie the post he had long wanted.

  Agatha’s own view of life from 1923 to 1925 is a wry, good-tempered picture of marking time, expending quantities of energy, intelligence and ingenuity in entertaining a small child, keeping the flat in order, cooking, cleaning and tidying, and at the same time trying to write. Of the series of nurses she engaged to help look after Rosalind, two out of three were hopeless, being well-intentioned but lacking imagination and authority. Agatha was constantly distracted by the importunate lamentations of the first of these, ‘Cuckoo’, a well-meaning but exasperatingly incompetent woman, who survived only because Rosalind swiftly took her in hand. Cuckoo’s successor, Miss White (‘Site’), was a success. Only seventeen, she was capable, dignified, masterful and young enough to enjoy Rosalind’s games. When Site left to take a post abroad, she was succeeded by a Swiss nursery governess, recommended by Madge. Marcelle was shy, nervous and ineffectual and Rosalind, unchecked, became rebellious and naughty. Marcelle did not last.