Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  A similar scene of a traveller returning to London from the tropics opened Murder Is Easy, on which Agatha worked in the following year, 1938, while the expedition finished its work at Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak. In the autumn, anticipating trouble from some local Sheikhs determined to persuade the Mallowans’ workmen to strike, they moved a hundred miles west to the marshy country of the Balikh Valley, where, with the help of John Rose, they quickly examined five mounds before the winter rains began. Max had continued to spend the months between digging seasons writing his account of their procedures and discoveries; Agatha now decided that she might tell the story of the expedition from her own perspective. In July 1938 she suggested this to Edmund Cork, proposing a book that would ‘Roughly … deal with life on the dig. Not at all serious or archaeological.’ Though Cork encouraged Agatha to start, she did not in fact begin until the nineteen-forties. But already she was keeping voluminous notes to draw upon – occasional anecdotes, a long account of what she learned of devil-worship, sections of diary:

  … Dinner with the Hudsons – they had real plumbing. Most enjoyable. Accounts by the Hudsons why the French differ utterly – as to weather – malaria – and drinking water. Started the ABC Murders.…‘Le camping’ – rose at dawn. Cold sausages but hot tea.… Got back in the lorry – very perilous as none of the doors are reliable.

  It was nearly ten years since Agatha had made her first visit to a dig and five since she had begun to come out on expeditions with Max. This had been a happy time, a regular annual cycle of summers at Ashfield with Rosalind, Christmas at Abney, the late autumn and spring in the desert and the rest of the year in London and Wallingford. As a rule she had produced two or three books a year, Edmund Cork managing the complicated details of contracts, serial rights, translations and so on, and Harold Ober, his American associate, looking after her interests in the United States. They were smooth and even years, one book appearing after another in a flow that, as far as anyone could tell, would continue uninterrupted. (As Max once instructed a younger colleague, ‘There are two sorts of people in the world, ladies and gentlemen, and both work till they drop.’) It was therefore appropriate that in mid-1938 Agatha, now in her late forties, should wish to draw these years together by writing about her expeditions with Max in the Near East.

  In some ways Agatha seemed to be drifting on a warm and comfortable tide, but there were signs of change in the familiar pattern of her life. For one thing, Rosalind was now grown up. Caledonia had been stimulating – like Archie, she was head of the school – but at Benenden she was bored. Though she did not want to go on to university, her headmistress insisted that she take her School Certificate, in which she did well, before leaving just before her seventeenth birthday. After an exhaustive search she was installed in Switzerland at a pension in Gstaad, which she disliked intensely. Rescued, she went to a pension at Château d’Oex at which she learnt no French. Agatha then sent her to a family in Paris, who spoke no English, so that Rosalind was obliged to learn the French language, habits and history, much as her mother had done, by experience. This was followed by several months with another family near Munich, before she came home to be launched officially into the world with a London ‘season’. Agatha was fortunately spared the demands of organising her daughter’s attendance at luncheons, tea parties, dinners and dances, managing her wardrobe and scrutinising her friends, for Rosalind shared her season with another debutante, Susan North, whose mother supervised them both. Agatha did, however, scribble an idea in her notebook: ‘Debutante teas etc. Mothers killed off in rapid succession.’ Agatha had not herself been presented as a girl, her own season being spent quietly in Cairo, and now, having been divorced, she could not present her daughter at Court. Rosalind, in ostrich feathers and train, was therefore taken to the Palace by their friends the Mackintoshes. Ernest Mackintosh, who had been a companion of Monty’s and had danced with Madge at balls in Torquay, was now Director of the Science Museum in London and the families saw a great deal of each other. Agatha and Marion Mackintosh would go to matinees, without the men, who, according to Max, found many of the plays ‘unsettling’.

  Mrs North also became a good friend, with whom Agatha went to exhibitions, opera and the ballet. Allen Lane was another. Agatha had first met him when she called at The Bodley Head to protest to his uncle, John Lane, about the jacket for Murder on the Links. In 1935, when Allen, now chairman of the firm, started a series of sixpenny paperbacks, Agatha was among the first to offer her own work to Penguin Books, despite her break with The Bodley Head, and Max edited the archaeological series. Allen Lane’s venture was successful – indeed, he was able to wind up his uncle’s firm – and he thanked Agatha for her support by giving financial help, as well as an annual Stilton, to Max’s expeditions.

  Rosalind’s season was a success. She was tall, good-looking and forthright. It was difficult to settle on what she and Susan would now do with themselves. Their first idea was, as they put it, ‘to take up photography’. When Agatha realised that they meant that their pictures should be taken, in bathing dresses, for advertisements, she was horrified, persuading them instead to take photography classes. As she enquired about courses, however, she became so interested that she booked for herself instead, assiduously practising taking pictures of buckets and spades, flowerpots and balls of string, for she thought her new skills would be useful on the dig. Artistically placed shadows were the vogue but, when Agatha showed her efforts to Max, he thoroughly disapproved. He wanted objects shown clearly, with a scale rod in each picture to indicate their size. Agatha revised her technique for archaeological purposes but her experiments with camera angles and coloured filters provided ideas for her plotting books.

  Meanwhile the question of Rosalind’s future was settled, for the time being. Mrs North offered to take her and Susan to South Africa, to visit her son, who was at Simonstown with the Navy; Rosalind’s photograph album did, after all, display fetching pictures of the two women in bathing dresses, sunning themselves on the ship’s deck, but for private enjoyment only.

  Agatha had never felt herself constrained by Rosalind, leaving her with Clara during the Empire tour and afterwards regularly consigning her to Punkie’s and Carlo’s care. Agatha loved her daughter and was proud of her but it was not the demanding close relationship she had had with Clara. Those who knew Agatha and her daughter offered various explanations, some believing that Agatha’s memories of happiness with Archie and the later pain of her first marriage had put a gap between her and Rosalind, others suggesting that Agatha felt guilty for divorcing Archie and placing Rosalind in a position where her loyalties would be torn and her childhood complicated. At any rate, both Agatha and Rosalind were strong characters; each cared for the other, in turn, without smothering her or losing too much independence. So it was not that the late nineteen-thirties brought Agatha freedom from maternal duties, for she had never regarded them as fetters; more, that the shape of her year was now no longer influenced by the timetable of Rosalind’s school and holidays.

  There had been another break with the past. Ashfield, to which Agatha had so relentlessly clung after her father’s death and again after Clara’s, was no longer a peaceful retreat. Torquay was spreading, its lanes and fields swallowed by small houses, and the large villas of Agatha’s childhood had been broken up, converted into nursing homes or demolished. When she and Max had bought Winterbrook, it was, she said, ‘Max’s house’; Ashfield she regarded as hers, ‘and, I think, Rosalind’s’. Agatha thought, too, that Max had never liked Ashfield, as being part of her life before their marriage. Rosalind’s childhood was over – and Agatha herself, as much as Ashfield, had greatly changed. Her childhood there had shaped her but so, and more immediately, had her work and marriage to Max. She was free to leave Ashfield behind.

  Doing so was easier because she had fallen for a large Georgian house, built in the late seventeen-eighties in thirty acres of woodland on the bank of the Dart, some ten miles from Torquay. This was G
reenway House. It looked down the estuary towards Dartmouth.

  Agatha bought Greenway in October 1938 for £6,000. The purchase was arranged by her solicitor in Torquay, whose father had looked after Clara’s and Frederick’s affairs; it was not easy to-raise the money, even with the sale of Ashfield, but somehow she managed it. Agatha showed the house to Guilford Bell and gave him one of his first major commissions; he boldly recommended that she pull half the existing house to the ground. She did – removing among various unsightly additions a large billiards room. Guilford tidied up the place, bringing back its lovely proportions, added a cloakroom with a round window, and helped Agatha instal several bathrooms. On one side of a wide pillared porch was an airy morning-room, giving on to a drawing-room with a curved window and steps to the garden, on the other the library, light and square, and next to that a rectangular dining-room, with two distinctive curved mahogany doors. A square hall led to the back doors and to kitchens, sculleries and pantries. A narrow hall connected the front porch to the stairs, wide and easy. There were five main rooms on the first floor; one became a study, one a dressing-room for Agatha and another one for Max, and the fourth, at the front of the house, the bedroom she shared with Max, her large bed in the middle of the room and his smaller one at the side. There was a fifth bedroom on that floor, the rest being taken up by bathrooms and a room for keeping medicines and arranging flowers. The top floor had a big bedsitting-room for Rosalind, whose windows overlooked the river and the woods, a double room and three smaller rooms with two bathrooms, and various deep cupboards and storage places. At the back of the house, above the kitchen quarters, was a warren of rooms for staff. Agatha was a splendid client, interested but trusting, and not unexpectedly she took special care over the plumbing arrangements. ‘I want to come with you, Guilford,’ she said, before one expedition to choose basins, baths and lavatories, ‘I want a big bath and I need a ledge because I like to eat apples.’ To London they went, whereupon Agatha stepped into the showroom window and the bath displayed there, drawing an admiring crowd, for she insisted she could not possibly choose a bath unless she sat in it first.

  The choice of paint and fabrics was Agatha’s and she planned what was to be done with the garden. It had been at one time extremely beautiful. A house had stood here in the sixteenth century and originally the estate had been parkland almost to the river banks. In the late eighteen-sixties new trees were added and in the early years of the twentieth century another owner continued the planting. A garden magazine for 1899 considered the Liriodendron, or tulip tree, growing near the house, to be one of the finest specimens in the country. Early in the First World War the house passed to Charles Williams and his wife, both from famous West Country gardening families, and for the next twenty years there was much new planting, particularly of rhododendrons, magnolias, rare trees and unusual shrubs. In 1937 the house was sold to the father of a childhood friend of Agatha’s, Sir Alfred Goodson. The Goodsons did not live at Greenway and by the time Agatha bought it the gardens were in disarray. She set about planning their replanting; some of her outlines for plots are interrupted by lists of roses and bulbs.

  Surprises lay among the tangled paths: a landing-place for boats, with a covered swimming-pool for decent but spooky bathing, inside what now became a boathouse; a battery, with ancient mortars, at the spot where Sir Walter Raleigh was reputed to have landed, bringing the first tobacco and potatoes from the New World. There were extensive kitchen gardens, stables and a grass tennis court. Under a nearby farm ran the tunnel of the main London to Dartmouth railway line.

  Devonshire was the scene for the other full-length novel Agatha wrote in 1938, Ten Little Niggers, whose setting ‘Nigger Island’ was modelled on Burgh Island off the coast at Kings-bridge. The form of the story is like Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony, in which different sections of the orchestra gradually steal away at the end. Agatha took her title from the children’s chant – where one by one, each of ten small boys disappears until none is left. The words of the song – which is different in the United States – and its anachronistic idiom were to give Agatha’s publishers interminable trouble when the book came to be published in America and in later British editions.

  Another work Agatha completed in 1938 was set nearer Greenway, the title story in The Regatta Mystery (a collection published in the United States in 1939), in which Hercule Poirot discovers the perpetrator of a robbery at ‘The Royal George in Dartmouth Harbour’. Parker Pyne appeared again in this volume, too, as did Miss Marple, telling a story whose solution depended as always on her ‘special knowledge’, in this case what Agatha had noted years before as ‘Housemaid Idea’: ‘One of party dressed as housemaid – so no one ever looks at her. Or man has an idea he has seen the housemaid before.’ (In another set of notes she described it as ‘G.K.C. Idea’, for Chesterton’s story The Invisible Man turns on the fact that no one thinks it worthwhile to mention the postman’s visit to the scene of a crime.) Agatha’s device has since been stupendously misunderstood, for some critics have alleged that it indicated lamentable arrogance, a disposition to regard servants as automata, not individuals. This misses the point entirely. Agatha (and her creation Miss Marple) was thoroughly familiar with the fact that gardeners, cooks and parlourmaids – and Colonels, vicars, doctors and maiden ladies – are each a prey to special obsessions, adopt idiosyncratic habits of speech and dress and follow an eccentric personal routine. She also knew how easily human beings fall into a professional role, performing certain tasks as they have been trained to do, assuming an appropriate style, speech and demeanour: doctors behaving in a doctor-like manner, fishmongers as fishmongers are expected to do, detectives and policemen – and archaeologists and lady crime novelists – each with their déformation professionelle. Uniforms help, encouraging the wearer to behave aptly, evoking certain expectations in onlookers and reinforcing these effects by inducing the wearer to conform to them.

  This was the trick Agatha’s criminals were playing. Dressing up as a housemaid was not a way of being anonymous, but of becoming a housemaid – and, in a later development of this device, Agatha noted the idea that the same trick might be played by a fake policeman. A housemaid is remembered as a housemaid, not as a murderer. But, Agatha’s critics complain, why does she believe ‘no one ever looks at a housemaid?’ The answer is that, unless there is exceptional cause, one doesn’t, while the housemaid is carrying out her professional duties. Far from being inconsiderate, it is respectful to allow the housemaid – or the postman, waiter, or any professional person – to continue with whatever service she is performing without intruding into her personal affairs. That is partly why she wears a uniform, as a sign saying ‘busy’, and why it is so convenient for a criminal to borrow it.

  Agatha would have been amazed at the need for an explanation. Her attitude had less to do with the class and background from which she came or with the age in which she lived than with common sense. Further, readers know that she uses such a device in many of her books. Her ‘stock’ characters – as she sets them out in her lists: ‘twittery companion’, ‘prim, irritable, respectable gentleman’, even ‘BBC type’ – are designed not only to carry the story but to fox the reader, whom she knows will have certain expectations and will thus be more easily deluded into overlooking the clues that eventually reveal the criminal beneath the camouflage.

  Agatha also wrote most of another detective story, Sad Cypress, in 1938, finishing it in July. Her American publishers were uneasy about the title, feeling that readers might confuse the cypress tree with the island of Cyprus. Agatha suggested as an alternative ‘I Am Slain’, from the same song in Twelfth Night that gave her the first title; in the end the Americans kept the original. Agatha later told Francis Wyndham, in an interview for the Sunday Times in 1966, that she subsequently realised that Sad Cypress was spoilt by having Poirot in it. By the end of the ’thirties she was occasionally irritated because Poirot was such a favourite of her readers and publishers – partic
ularly of the American magazine publishers at Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post, which took most of her work and paid high prices. ‘Poirot is rather insufferable,’ she wrote to Cork. ‘Most public men are who have lived too long. But none of them like retiring! So I am afraid Poirot won’t either – certainly not while he is my chief source of income.’ For, surprising though it may seem (in 1938, for instance, her earnings from Collins alone came to nearly £2,500), Agatha was again anxious about money. Her worries, moreover, had not come singly.

  17

  ‘Things all seem to come at once’

  The erosion of Agatha’s idyll began in the summer of 1938. Faithful Peter died and, though Cork offered to send her a dog, Agatha felt that for the time being she ‘could not bear to have another’. The next intimation of trouble came at almost the same time, in a letter from Cork announcing that the American revenue authorities were asking such detailed questions about her financial affairs that his New York counterpart, Harold Ober, had engaged a prominent tax lawyer, Howard E. Reinheimer, ‘who deals with the affairs of many important authors’, to handle their inquiries on Agatha’s behalf. Mr Reinheimer’s work was to occupy him for the next decade. As far as Agatha was concerned, there was nothing she could do but wait – and work. After their last efforts in the Balikh Valley in the autumn of 1938, she and Max did not go abroad again, for by the spring of 1939 the European political situation was so delicate that it was unwise to travel, let alone dig in the Near East territories, each with its web of relations with different European powers. Max also refused an invitation to attend, with Agatha, the Archaeological Congress in Berlin in late August, sensibly, for by September, after months of holding back, Britain was at war with Hitler.