Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  Then there is the matter of the car. If the lady Mr McAllister helped was Agatha, the car was obviously behaving erratically. Until comparatively recently motor cars had works that were temperamental, cumbersome and precarious. It was not unusual, particularly in cold weather, to have to start the engine by cranking a handle. Reports of Mr McAllister’s story differ as to whether the engine was hot or cold when he restarted it. The car was later found further down the hill, its headlamps still burning, according to Superintendent Kenward’s report, or its headlamps extinguished, because the battery had run down, according to the newspapers. Press accounts also described the car as, variously, covered all over with frost, or partly covered with frost, and there were at least three different reports of its position. There is no hope of reconciling or clarifying these contradictions.

  Careful examination of the spot at Newlands Corner suggests the following explanation. Coming from the direction of Guildford, the Morris climbed to the top of a steep, winding hill. The weather was cold, the car’s engine unhappy. At the top of the hill, where the ground levels out, it stalled. Agatha tried vainly to crank the engine, perhaps taking off her coat, since it was hot and awkward work. Mr McAllister came to her rescue and Agatha then drove over the crest of the hill and down the other side, where the road is, if anything, even more steeply inclined and bending. The Morris was equipped with a ‘crash gear box’ – to change gear the driver would have to gauge the exact moment when the engine revolutions were at the appropriate speed for the gears to mesh. Agatha, taught to drive at a time when no official tests were necessary, notoriously unmechanical, cold, despairing and exhausted, might easily have missed the gear. The car, out of control, could have started to slide and, either deliberately guided by Agatha or carried by its own weight and momentum, skidded away. On the left-hand side of the hill, about half-way down, there is a small quarry, now greatly overgrown. Although the landscape has changed as the road has been widened, the ground is so steeply embanked that this seems to have been the only spot where a car might have run off the road into the side. The mishap could perfectly well be explained in this way.

  Carlo later told Rosalind that the psychiatrist believed Agatha had concussed herself and Agatha, as we have learnt, remembered having blood on her face. The chambermaid recalled that ‘Mrs Neele’ had shielded her forehead when she was disturbed in the morning before her hair had been dressed. Agatha may well have banged her head during the accident; in any case she would have been shocked and chilled.

  There is also the question of the ‘trail’ of letters Agatha is said to have left. One, which did exist, was the letter to Carlo, asking her to cancel the booking at the hotel in Beverley. This was the letter Carlo gave the police, which was returned, after Agatha was found. Carlo refused to discuss its contents with the press, saying only that ‘There were moments when I did not know what to believe.… That letter gave us no idea where she might have gone … it was a personal letter, and only told us that she felt she must leave this house.’

  Years later Carlo gave this letter to Rosalind, who showed it to her husband. It was exceedingly distraught, saying that in the circumstances Agatha did not believe she could go to Yorkshire, that she was going away and would let Carlo know where she was. Its underlying theme was that Agatha had been treated unjustly; the letter ended ‘It just isn’t fair.’ It was not, it seems, the sort of letter that would be left behind by someone intending to kill herself but, rather, something written by a person who felt that, though she had been badly treated, she was still in control of her own fate, as long as – and this Agatha stressed in the letter – she could ‘get away from here’. This was the ‘disquieting information’ that led to Superintendent Kenward’s gloomy conclusion that Mrs Christie must be dead.

  There was also the letter Agatha posted to her brother-in-law. How and when it was sent we do not know. Agatha may have left it at her club, earlier in the week. Carlo may have posted it but she does not say so. Agatha may have posted it as she made her purchases at Whiteley’s on Saturday morning. If she had it in her handbag, which she took with her from the car, she might well have done so. In that case, it might be asked why the name and address on the envelope did not jolt her memory. We will consider this when we look at the various manifestations amnesia can take.

  According to the newspapers, another letter, for Archie, was also left by Agatha, saying that she intended to go to a Yorkshire spa to recover her health. Archie did not mention this to the police but, in any case, it would not have been surprising if Agatha had left such a letter for her husband, as well as sending word of her plans to Campbell Christie. We know she had intended to go to Yorkshire; indeed, she had mentioned it to her publisher, who, when she disappeared, mentioned it to someone else, who, decades later, recalled that he had been told that Agatha had deliberately disappeared to Harrogate; such is the way in which explanations of Agatha’s disappearance have been distorted with hindsight. The reasons for Agatha’s flight have been more seriously misreported in another account, The Mystery of Agatha Christie, by Miss Gwen Robyns. This author declares that Superintendent Kenward’s daughter, the late Mrs Dobson, revealed to her, when pressed, that there was ‘a fourth letter’ addressed to her father, marked ‘private and confidential’ and posted on the Friday night on which Agatha left home. ‘He received it in the 10 a.m. mail on Saturday and brought it to our home nearby to show me before going over immediately to inform the Sunningdale Police Station and begin investigations.’ Miss Robyns adds, in a sequence implying that she also learnt this from Mrs Dobson: ‘the letter was from a woman who told how she feared for her life and that she was frightened what might happen to her. She was appealing for help. The signature on that letter was Agatha Christie.’

  There is little we can do with such unsupported statements, save to ask why Superintendent Kenward failed to refer to this letter in his confidential Home Office report, why he would have behaved so unprofessionally as to show it to his daughter, why Agatha would have written to the police when she hesitated to confide even in her sister, and why she would have sent it to a policeman in the Surrey Force, when she lived in Berkshire. No theories may be based on this fragile tissue.

  There are, after all, puzzles enough. Inaccuracy, wishful thinking, zealous speculation and irrelevance dog the whole of this unhappy story, and persist in the various theories which have been and will doubtless continue to be advanced to explain Agatha’s behaviour. One view, extraordinary though it may be to those who knew her and knew the events that preceded her flight, is that Agatha was not alone when she ran away; another that she fled to Harrogate in order to join an accomplice or companion. We know enough to dismiss this theory.

  A further view is that Agatha fled in order to spite Archie. This opinion derived initially from Edgar Wallace’s diagnosis of the case and has been bolstered by loose interpretations of professional psychiatrists’ writings on hysterical behaviour. Agatha did feel deeply resentful towards Archie; even so, her actions were hardly well thought out. The Morris was left by the chalk pit and Agatha brought to Harrogate more by a series of accidents than by design.

  Others believe that Agatha was experimenting with a plot for one of her own books. This theory gained currency as a result of Archie’s unwise remarks and Superintendent Kenward’s incautious speculation. It not only sits uneasily with the fact that Agatha’s flight and the events that befell her were hardly a course anyone would choose to follow, in mid-winter, let alone anyone as reluctant as Agatha to draw attention to herself. It also sounds highly implausible to anyone who knows how Agatha devised and developed her plots. That was essentially an intellectual process; she did not go about practising or even, in the modern fashion, deliberately ‘doing research for a book’.

  Related to this theory is another: that Agatha disappeared in order to attract public attention. From what we know of her character, nothing could have been further from her mind. Sam James, Madge James’s husband, is partly to blame fo
r this notion. From the lack of other motive – and never having met Agatha – he seemingly formed this theory, in order, one imagines, to protect his friend Archie, who, after all, was suspected or felt himself to be suspected of murder. Sam James was not the only one to seize on this explanation. It seemed obvious to those who were themselves fascinated by the power of the press to generate interest in an individual – that is, to the press themselves. Those whose lives are spent in manufacturing ‘publicity’ find it difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate that to many people self-advertisement is anathema. A tremendous shout went up from the press when Agatha disappeared. A major press story is a glorious thing but it is like a snowball, rolling along, increasing in size, picking up speed, gathering bits and pieces of clutter along the way, looking more impressive by the minute, until it suddenly melts into a trickle. The newspapers were carried away. The simple and natural explanation – ‘she lost her memory’ – left them disappointed. They had to find something more complicated, or all the fuss was unnecessary. A ‘stunt’, too, fitted in with other preconceptions. Much had been made of Agatha’s skill as a writer of detective fiction, of the trick she had played on her readers in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been presented as a woman of devilish ingenuity and the press had to believe that they had been outwitted. It flattered their vanity to conclude that Agatha should want so to use them.

  Amnesia is, moreover, hard to understand. There are many ways of forgetting, as many as remembering, and even the most up-to-date research has produced more questions than answers in the attempt to understand how memory works. People may lose their memory wholly or partly, they may jumble recollections, make or fail to make connections and associations, put themselves on automatic pilot when they are tired and distracted. Physical pain can be entirely forgotten and, similarly, emotionally painful memories be blotted out. It can take careful psychotherapy – in Agatha’s case, hypnosis – to restore them even partially. A rarer and more complex manifestation of this anaesthesising process is the sudden loss of memory known as an ‘hysterical fugue’, in which a person experiencing great stress flees from intolerable strain by utterly forgetting his or her own identity. Some psychiatric experts believe this probably happened in Agatha’s case. Her experience is also illuminated by recent work in which psychiatrists and neuropsychiatrists have explored the nature of ‘somnambules’, people who are extremely susceptible to hypnosis and who act, or appear to act, rationally in their sleep. It appears that there is a type of person who can induce independently experiences of the kind produced by hypnosis: hallucinating, amnesia, and so on. Hitherto only women have been examined in this research; all to whom such findings apply have a strong propensity to fantasise. They can recall their childhood in detail and as adults claim to spend much of their everyday lives in the world of the imagination, even when their normal daily tasks require concentration.

  This suggests a useful line of thought for those who are interested in Agatha’s case. A prolific and ingenious fantasist, she was also a person for whom the border between the real and the dreamt was thin. Agatha dreamt vividly, remembered and talked of her dreams, relished them – dreams of flying and even the terrible Gun Man dream. By way of her dreams she perceived the world; some of her most persuasive writing is of the boundary between sleeping and waking: ‘The Stuff of Dreams’, for example, The Hound of Death, Sleeping Murder and the opening passages of The Body in the Library. Agatha was, too, exceptionally sensitive to what was happening about her. She did not give the impression Clara conveyed of being able to read people’s thoughts but there are many examples of her awareness, though nothing had been said, of her friends’ need for comfort and help. She herself described her apprehension of Clara’s death. Some call this quality ‘psychic’; others describe it as an instinct for noticing and putting together information from many sources. Agatha depicted it in Unfinished Portrait, when Larraby the painter intuitively recognises Celia’s intentions. It is what Hercule Poirot does when he studies ‘the psychology of a criminal’, or Miss Marple when she matches new problems with remembered experience. Imaginative, shy, intuitive, Agatha had all the characteristics of those who are capable of hypnotising themselves at will. It was perfectly possible for her to have lost her identity and yet to have gone about the business of catching trains, shopping, and the like. Under unreasonable strain, deeply unhappy with herself, she might have induced a loss of memory. Rather than ‘making up her mind’ to disappear, it might have been that she ‘unmade’ it.

  For many years Agatha was worried by her failure completely to reconstruct the events of that dreadful time. After the War she visited the Regius Professor of Pastoral Theology at Oxford, a well-known psychoanalyst, who did not practise professionally but regarded it as part of his University duties to help people who approached him voluntarily. He is said to have told Agatha that her experience had been extremely serious and, though he was unable to help her replace those missing hours, he tried to help her overcome her self-reproach.

  In the half-century since Agatha’s disappearance the idea that she disappeared as ‘a stunt’ has persisted, particularly since it was revived by Lord Ritchie-Calder (as he became) at the time of her death, in an article in the New Statesman. Ritchie-Calder has frequently been misreported as declaring that, just before she was recognised by Archie, he encountered Agatha at the Hydro and challenged her, and that to his question, ‘You are Agatha Christie?’ she replied, ‘Yes, but I’m suffering from amnesia.’ Ritchie-Calder made no such statement. He did not say that he himself asked Agatha this question, nor that she spoke to him. He only says he ‘met’ her; at its mildest, this would refer to his seeing Agatha from across the room and, at its strongest, to his approaching her and making his challenge. Miss Robyns cites Ritchie-Calder’s story, whether as quotation from the New Statesman article or directly from Ritchie-Calder’s lips is impossible to tell, since she does not distinguish between reported speech, quotation from published sources, and her own theorising. Ritchie-Calder’s own memoirs (as yet unpublished) do not describe a meeting with Agatha but only, oddly, quote Miss Robyns’s account. One of two conclusions may be drawn. Ritchie-Calder may be allowing us to infer more than actually happened, or, on the other hand, he might have spoken to Agatha but decided at the time to keep the matter to himself (curious, for a journalist with his reputation to make). Even if he did address Agatha as Mrs Christie and she did respond as he said, that does not take us very far. Agatha may have remembered by that time who she was. She may have been puzzled. She was, as he described her, ‘self-possessed’, when confronted with people behaving in an embarrassing fashion. ‘Self-possession’ does not imply ‘deception’. In his New Statesman piece, Ritchie-Calder wrote: ‘Emotionally disturbed, yes. Amnesia, no.’ This is impertinent and silly, for on such a slight encounter, if there was an encounter, it was not for him – and is perhaps not for us – to establish where the distinction may be drawn.

  The story as it developed and was sustained in the press gives us a neat case-history of the way in which an event becomes an issue, a private matter public property. The real story, as it can be pieced together from actual witnesses, brings home the degree to which, after her discovery, Agatha was harried at a time when she could least bear it. It also shows that there were people who behaved discreetly and with dignity and that there was much indignation at the hounding of an unhappy woman and the revelation of her private affairs.

  Some maintained that, by entangling so many people in the search for herself, Agatha forfeited respect for her privacy. There were, indeed, questions in Parliament and in the press as to the costs of the investigation, reported as nearing £12,000 and as having incurred substantial increases for Surrey and Berkshire ratepayers. The episode was described, by Members who had been carried away by what they had read in the papers and by, in some cases, dim remembrance of the trick in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, as ‘this cruel hoax’. The Home Secretary told the House that the cost of the searc
h was, ‘so far as I can ascertain, about £12.10s.’, mostly, his officials had discovered, for cups of tea for the police. Privately, Superintendent Kenward was asked for an explanation, the Home Office view being that, though the cost of the search had been exaggerated, ‘there must have been a very considerable diversion of the police force from their ordinary and proper duties to prosecute a search whose justification was somewhat problematical.’ Superintendent Kenward, not Agatha Christie, was to answer for that – more charitably, the Superintendent as he had been egged on by the press, for in that heady atmosphere even the most phlegmatic officer might have been carried away.

  In summary, then, the press was greedy, sensational and importunate. Superintendent Kenward was unwise. Mrs James, as she later admitted, should not have encouraged Archie to see so much of Miss Neele without knowing more about Agatha and the state of the Christies’ marriage. Mrs James was, however, punished enough by the reproaches of her formidable mother, aghast at what she read in the newspapers. Miss Neele herself might have been more circumspect but it is hard to see what she could have done. She promptly departed on a voyage round the world, while the Christies sorted themselves out. Carlo behaved well throughout. She had been in a difficult position, entrusted with too much knowledge and forbidden to pass it on to Madge Watts. She never ceased to reproach herself for going to London on that Friday night; thereafter she devoted herself to Agatha and Rosalind. Archie had been inconsiderate, impetuous and naïve. But he was not a wicked man, nor a philanderer, nor brutal to his wife. Agatha had been stubborn and, in a way, cowardly, too proud to look for help, allowing herself to become more and more troubled and ill until she cracked. The price Archie and Agatha paid for what was, after all is said and done, fairly usual naïvety and folly, was to have their lives and characters become the object of widespread, intense and lasting public interest. It was not easy to bear. Archie surmounted it in the course of a happy marriage to Nancy Neele. Though the shock was deep and lasting, Agatha reassembled her life.