The Ageless Agatha Christie

by Bernthal, J. C. ;

  Nevertheless, the real danger lies in attempting to recover the social order damaged by the war. The brutal murderer Miss Gilchrist, the contemporary of Richard and Cora, is a woman from inside the glass casing, whose obsession with the past is a warning about holding onto it and its artefacts.

  Miss Gilchrist and Cora live in a cottage crowded with paintings and objets d’art. Some paintings are by Cora’s deceased husband, some are sketches by Cora herself and some are “horrible daubs” picked up by Cora at farmhouse sales.27 Cora’s furniture is “spurious cottage oak and some arty painted stuff”—the cottage is a cracked mirror of the family portraits and authentic drapes and furniture of Enderby Hall, including the “small green table painted with large purple clematis”28 that echoes the malachite table with waxed flowers. Clues are concealed amid this insistence on clutter and inauthentic pieces of art and furniture; we are told that among Cora’s messy personal possessions lie “two false fringes”29 which Miss Gilchrist uses to impersonate her, and we later learn that the “horrible daubs” and landscapes concealed a genuine Vermeer. This Vermeer is Miss Gilchrist’s motive, as she needs the money to equip her teashop. Miss Gilchrist’s dreams are fueled by recollection of past glories, but rather than the comfortable Victorian days and family life of Enderby Hall at its height, she yearns for a specific place in the social order; a period and environment somewhere between the shoddy modernity of Cora’s cottage and moneyed splendor—a thoroughly bourgeois interwar teashop called the Willow Tree.

  Miss Gilchrist, possibly one of the “surplus women” left by World War I,30 poured her life into the teashop, and its loss is her constant refrain. As Merja Makinen points out, Miss Gilchrist’s position as a paid companion involves “poverty and paucity of experience” as well as “years of dependent drudgery.”31 Miss Gilchrist has compensated for her lack of independence and poverty not only by fixating on her pre-war life as a teashop proprietor but also by allowing the shop and its objects to replace her personality; she is as obsessed with things as Pye is in The Moving Finger, but with practical and pretty everyday objects rather than antique decorative pieces. Readers get several versions of the following litany:

  When my little teashop failed—such a disaster—it was the war, you know. A delightful place. I called it the Willow Tree and all the china was blue willow pattern—sweetly pretty—and the cakes really good—I’ve always had a hand with cakes and scones. Yes, I was doing really well and then the war came and supplies were cut down and the whole thing went bankrupt—a war casualty, that is what I always say, and I try to think of it like that.32

  Miss Gilchrist finds comfort for her loss by subsuming its individuality into a collective national disaster. Nevertheless, the idea of the teashop, her specificity about its accouterments, is embedded into her character as the only authentic thing about her—the Abernethy family lawyer Mr. Entwhistle realizes that “Miss Gilchrist had a Spiritual Home—a lady-like teashop of Ye Olde Worlde variety with a suitable genteel clientele.”33 When she offers Susan tea, “the ghost of the Willow Tree hung over the party.”34 Miss Gilchrist finally cracks under Poirot’s cross-examination and her motive and plans for the Palm Tree in Rye or Chichester are revealed.

  “Oak tables—and little basket chairs with striped red and white cushions…”

  For a few moments, the tea-shop that would never be seemed more real than the Victorian solidity of the drawing-room at Enderby…

  It was Inspector Morton who broke the spell.35

  The uncanny nature of the remembered and imagined tea-shop and its objects serves as a warning about the power of the past—and the imagined—to cast a spell. Richard Abernethy’s young relatives are able to move on with their lives, aided by their legacies, and the “Victorian solidity” of Enderby is broken up. However, there is also a mournful tone; England has no pockets for everyday women who want everyday things like Miss Gilchrist.

  “A dangerous world”

  Both The Moving Finger and After the Funeral are set primarily in the countryside; London is a site for luxury shopping and dining in the former, and comforting anonymity and bustle in the latter. In her rural novels, Christie invokes the claustrophobia of people knowing too much about each other, and the anxiety of not knowing quite enough, as well as using figurative and actual objects to explore the disturbing side of disconnection from the modern world. In her post-war urban novel The Pale Horse (1961), Christie navigates the uncertainties of anonymity and lack of community and connection. Objects remain crucial in supplying the material texture of the plot, however; their presence or absence shape the form of the clue-puzzle narrative, as well as the identities of the characters. If Miss Gilchrist was driven by the desire to possess material comfort and objects, in The Pale Horse, death itself is commodified and modern technology not only enables evil acts, it embodies evil itself. In The Pale Horse, the motifs of theatre and performance that recur throughout Christie’s oeuvre become a framework and driving force for the entire plot—with appropriate props. This theatricality is central to the genre of detective fiction; as Birns and Boe Birns write, “In detective fiction, the world is to some degree a stage, and the people in it merely players, deceiving those around them and sometimes even themselves as to their true motives and actual deeds.”36 The focus of critical study so far has been on the double nature of people and characters, the hidden sides of communities. We certainly see these aspects in novels discussed here—we also see the extent to which these double lives and hidden passions are staged through objects and setting.

  In The Pale Horse, the evil witches of pantomimes, and somewhat more seriously, the staging of Macbeth, form a leitmotif. Narrator and eventually amateur detective Mark Easterbrook, a historian of the Mogul Empire, sits in a coffee bar in Chelsea, musing “on the sinister implications of present-day noises and their atmospheric effects”37 and reflecting that the smoke effects and trapdoors of pantomimes suggest that “it came to me suddenly that evil was, perhaps, necessarily always more impressive than good. It had to make a show! It had to startle and challenge! It was instability attacking stability.”38 This “show” of evil is repeated throughout The Pale Horse on two different levels, both manifested through objects, or props; ones is the evil potential of modern technology, and the other the evil of witchcraft in the traditional paranormal, supernatural, possibly Satanic sense. The first chapter opens with Mark in the Chelsea coffee bar, situated firmly within urban modernity:

  The Espresso machine behind my shoulder hissed like an angry snake. The noise it made had a sinister, not to say devilish, suggestion about it. Perhaps, I reflected, most of our contemporary noises carry that implication. The intimidating angry scream of jet planes as they flash across the sky…. Even the minor domestic noises of today, beneficial in action though they may be, yet carry a kind of alert. The dish-washers, the refrigerators, the pressure cookers, the whining vacuum cleaners—“Be careful,” they all seem to say. “I am a genie harnessed to your service, but if your control of me fails…”

  A dangerous world—that was it, a dangerous world.39

  York suggests that these opening paragraphs illustrate a “seriously felt tension between conservatism and the recognition that the world, like the individual, cannot go back”40 as well as “a very strenuous effort of the part of the elderly author to grasp the changing world of the 1960s.”41 He goes on to comment that “there is already something a little absurd in this fear of the espresso machine.”42 I would suggest that there is more than a fear of progress evident here. The “silent life of things” has been transformed into noise; the “angry scream” of the airplanes, in particular, may be designed to evoke the Blitz. Even in the early 1960s, a time of relative peace and plenty, memories of the war and anxieties relating to the potential danger of machines persist. This unease about science and technology is infused with a more visceral fear—the “devilish” and hissing Espresso machine evokes Satan-as-serpent and the Garden of Eden in Genesis—or indeed the Apocaly
pse of the Book of Revelations. As Mrs. Dane Calthrop (presumably the same vicar’s wife as in The Moving Finger) comments at the end of the novel, “Revelation, Chapter Six, Verse Eight. And I looked and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with Him.”43 The fundamental fear in the novel is that technological developments validate the beliefs in the supernatural, and in the dark figures of the Bible; as Mark comments later, “The science of tomorrow is the supernatural of today.”44 The fears of the past may come true via the methods of the future. Finally, being afraid of an espresso machine is absurd, but Mark is not—this comment fits in with the musing on pantomimes and special effects designed to suggest evil.

  The Pale Horse in the novel is a fourteenth-century inn in the village of Much Deeping that has been converted into a home for three women; the only note of its former purpose is a grimy sign of a horse and rider. Thyrza Grey, Sybil Stamfordis, and Bella are the archetypal three witches; they are known in the village to organize séances and possess second sight. On ordinary occasions, their house is furnished with “chintz and Chippendale,” even if they do have the Malleus Maleficarium on their shelves.45 When Mark, his fellow investigator Ginger and their allies in the police force deduce that the three women are involved with a sequence of inexplicable deaths, he consults the women in their professional capacity, pretending to accept their promise to be able to kill people far away. The pleasant everyday library has been transformed; Mark finds “purple cloth, embroidered with various cabbalistic signs,” “a small brazier, and next to it a big copper basin.”46 During the proceedings an upside-down crucifix and holy water are used. Although Mark tries to tell himself that these traditional, even clichéd accessories of witchcraft are “mise-en-scene…. Meretricious trappings,” he is uneasy.47 When an “electrical contrivance of some complicated kind” is included in the ritual, and “the big box-like machine had started to emit a low hum, the bulbs in it glowed” his anxiety is compounded48; the sinister potential of everyday electronic objects, the dangerous world, seems too real.

  The deadly ritual, which was supposed to harness both science and magic to murder, is, as Mark realizes, all play-acting. The robes and holy water, even the sacrificed cock, are all what Jerry in The Moving Finger would call a “smoke screen” and, indeed, Christie herself has in this novel performed something of a smoke and mirrors trick by hiding a straightforward detective story amid paranormal trappings. The solution does rely on objects, however, if not mystical ones; the real murders are committed by dangerously egotistical chemist Mr. Osborne, who substitutes the poisonous substance thallium for an everyday lotion or medicine used by the intended victim. These murders are bought by desperate or greedy customers via a middle-man; Mr. Osborne has recruited an army of “consumer researchers” to interview intended victims and find out what products they habitually use. One of these researchers is dying at the beginning of the novel, and confesses her suspicions to a priest, who is also murdered. When the police investigate the dead woman’s lodgings, they find that she lived under a false name, and that “the dead woman had had curiously few personal possessions. No letters had been kept, no photographs.”49 The lack of objects here, the lack of personality, show not only the rootlessness and isolation of modern urban living, but also suggest a contrast to the women at the Pale Horse inn with their entrenched history.

  The connection between consumerism, modern beauty products and medications and the practice of buying murders—euphemistically framed in terms of placing a bet—suggest that the real evil is capitalism. Death and murder are commodified, and by extension so are the victims whose deaths form part of the transactions. While the purchasers of murder have a connection to the victim—one girl is killed by her stepmother who inherits her money, for example—the visceral connection that murder ignites between killer and victim that is usually present in Christie’s earlier work is outsourced to the efficient killing team of the witches, the chemist and the middle-man, and mediated and diluted via the objects used. Christie’s Golden Age murderers are often despicable and sometimes sympathetic, but they are human enough to plunge the knife, pour the poison, or pull the trigger themselves. This sanitized system of murder leaves the hands of the guilty blood-free, and indeed implicates the victims themselves in their own demise, as they use the face-cream or lotion into which the thallium has been inserted.

  This system works because of urban environment that Christie portrays in the novel; not only is it one of potential danger around every corner, it is one where roots and connections have been erased. The London of The Pale Horse shows the beginnings of the Swinging Sixties; the Chelsea coffee bar scene is full of aristocratic girls who discard their family heritage and social conventions, café owners named Luigi who speak flawless Cockney and workers without permanent jobs or homes. In a village, even in Christie’s 1960s, life is regulated enough that anything, or anyone out of the ordinary, could potentially be noticed. In London, everyone is used to strangers everywhere. Evil is located in the banal, innocuous-seeming man, the shopkeeper, who wants too much power over his fellow-men and the empty people who work for him; Mr. Bradley, the middle-man who organizes the connection between the customer and the witches, sits in an anonymous office in Birmingham and wears “a dark business suit and looked the acme of respectability.”50 As a complete opposite to the antiquity, ritual and paraphernalia of The Pale Horse inn, Mr. Osborne lives in Bournemouth in a street that is “very, very new”51; his house is named Everest and his “small bungalow” is the “acme of neatness, though rather sparsely furnished.”52 “Everest” turns out to be a pun on “ever rest,” a cheap joke worthy of a pantomime. If people in Christie’s villages kill people they know, people in Christie’s cities kill people they don’t—and this is why it is a dangerous world.

  “Somehow, that was the most frightening thing of all”

  It is hard to plot a linear trajectory of development or definitive message in the use of material culture and atmospheric textures in Christie’s later work, partly because of the sheer volume of her output—anxieties that can be read in Christie’s post-war work range from the erasure of heritage and identity to the dangers of obsession with the past. This essay has attempted to illustrate and illuminate some of these contradictory anxieties and their implications, by moving from examining the poisonous undercurrents revealed when the metaphorical glass shade is lifted from a peaceful village, to the disintegration of tradition and the concomitant dangers of nostalgia embodied in a poor lady-companion’s yearning for a place and things of her own, to the mass production of murder enabled by people’s gullibility and acceptance of isolated, technologically-driven and disconnected urban existence.

  Christie’s use of objects to reinforce themes of stagnated communities and households and fluid or performed identities is evident throughout these novels, in the ladylike Mr. Pye and his collection of objets d’art, the detachable hair and padding assumed by Miss Gilchrist and the theatrical trappings of the three witches in The Pale Horse. Performance and props figure prominently throughout Christie’s work; as York and others have observed, “theatricality is one of the basic concerns and one of the basic mechanisms of the Christie novels.”53 In these novels, the dramas become wider in scope; Mr. Symington consistently assumes the intellectual and emotional persona of a stunted, embittered middle-aged woman, Miss Gilchrist borrows Cora’s mannerisms and childhood as well as her costume and false hair, and the three witches performance is a crucial link in a widespread criminal organization.

  Conversely, the lack of personal objects and the resulting identity and atmosphere they lend is also a signal of danger and anxiety: an indication of a hidden and dangerous self, a negation of humanity, or an absence of a recognizable code for placing and dealing with that person. This is an aspect of Christie’s work that also intensified as the century moved forwards. While detective fiction traditionally invokes atmosphere to reflect ideas of dark heritage, warped family or communal life
or emotional charge—we see this in Peril at End House, Death on the Nile and Nemesis, for example—the anxieties related to a lack of atmosphere and the objects that created is a “structure of feeling” that Christie links specifically to modernity. In And Then There Were None (1939), a group of diverse and unrelated people are lured to an island off the coast of Devon:

  If this had been an old house, with creaking wood, and dark shadows, and heavily paneled walls, there might have been an eerie feeling. But this house was the essence of modernity. There were no dark corners—no possible sliding panels—it was flooded with electric light—everything was new and bright and shining. There was nothing hidden in this house, nothing concealed. It had no atmosphere about it.

  Somehow, that was the most frightening thing of all.54

  It becomes apparent that these people are on the island to die in increasingly ludicrous ways in order to atone for crimes they had committed but without facing legal consequences. It is fitting that this novel that plays a complicated trick on reader expectations uses the lack of atmosphere in a generically inappropriate way; rather than an ominous setting that foreshadows, having the characters aware of the uncanny nature of a place that does not fit its feeling heightens the tension for the reader. This sinister lack of atmosphere becomes incorporated into the more conventional novels discussed here. Mr. Pye’s queerness is directly linked to his home: “Mr. Pye was an extremely ladylike plump little man, devoted to his petit point chairs, his Dresden shepherdesses and his collection of bric-a-brac…. It was hardly a man’s house.”55 But the danger inherent in his queerness is expressed via Jerry’s observation that “it seemed to me that the curious thing was that [Pye’s home] hadn’t any atmosphere.”56 Mr. Pye is all poisoned tongue and Dresden china; he lacks a defined, solid identity even as he lacks a stable gender. Miss Gilchrist’s own possessions are either destroyed by the war or in storage; she spends her life in someone else’s house, surrounded by the artefacts of someone else’s past. Forced to hide herself, she becomes driven to commit brutal murder. When Mr. Entwhistle meets her he decides that “she had one of those indeterminate faces that women of fifty so often acquire”57; indeed, her identity is indeterminate enough that she is able to easily slip into the identity of Cora Lansquenet. It is not until Miss Gilchrist mentions her teashop that she gains a past, although even so, Entwhistle thinks, “There must be hundreds of Miss Gilchrists all over the country [in teashops].”58 In some ways her obsession with things makes her the converse of Mr. Pye; he has things but no identity, whereas she has nothing but carries her own atmosphere around with her. Mr. Osborne in The Pale Horse combines Mr. Pye’s lack of atmosphere and attachment to his community with Miss Gilchrist’s obsession with being recognized, attaining a suitable social position. His humanity is negated by his empty home. The “silent life of things” reinforces and affirms life in general, even if this life is bitter and murderous; without it, there is only empty, mechanical murder and an empty, mechanical society.