Agahta Christie: An autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  I thought it was a good idea, and considered it for a long time. It had enormous difficulties, of course. My mind boggled at the thought of Hastings murdering anybody, and it was anyway going to be difficult to do it in such a way that it would not be cheating. Of course, a lot of people say that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is cheating; but if they read it carefully they will see that they are wrong. Such little lapses of time as there have to be are nicely concealed in an ambiguous sentence, and Dr Sheppard, in writing it down, took great pleasure himself in writing nothing but the truth, though not the whole truth.

  Quite apart from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, it was success all along the line at this period. Rosalind went to her first school, and enjoyed it enormously. She had pleasant friends; we had a nice flat and garden; I had my lovely bottle-nosed Morris; I had Carlo Fisher, and domestic peace. Archie thought, talked, dreamt, slept and lived for golf; his digestion improved so that he suffered less from nervous dyspepsia. All was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as Dr Pangloss so happily says.

  There was one lack in our lives: a dog. Dear Joey had died whilst we were abroad, so we now purchased a wire-haired terrier puppy whom we named Peter. Peter, of course, became the life and soul of the family. He slept on Carlo’s bed, and ate his way through a variety of slippers and so-called indestructible balls for terriers.

  The lack of worry about finances was pleasant after all we had under-gone in the past–and possibly it went to our heads a bit. We thought of things we would not have thought of otherwise. Archie electrified me one day by suddenly saying that he thought he would like to get a really fast car. He had been excited, I think, by the Strachans’ Bentley.

  ‘But we’ve got a car,’ I said, shocked.

  ‘Ah, but I mean something really special.’

  ‘We could afford another baby now,’ I pointed out. I had been contemplating this for some time with a good deal of pleasure.

  Archie waved aside another baby. ‘I don’t want anyone but Rosalind,’ he said. ‘Rosalind is absolutely satisfactory, quite enough.’

  Archie was mad about Rosalind. He enjoyed playing with her, and she even cleaned his golf clubs. They understood each other, I think, better than Rosalind and I did. They had the same sense of humour, and saw each other’s point of view. He liked her toughness and her suspicious attitude of mind: the way she would never take anything for granted. He had been worried about the advent of Rosalind beforehand, being afraid, as he said, that nobody would take any notice of him any more. ‘That’s why I hope we have a daughter,’ he said. ‘A boy would be much worse. I could bear a daughter; it would be very hard with a son.’

  Now he said, ‘If we were to have a son it would be just as bad as ever. And anyway,’ he added, ‘there’s lots of time.’

  I agreed that there was plenty of time, and rather reluctantly gave into his desire for the second-hand Delage which he had already seen and marked down. The Delage gave us both great pleasure. I loved driving it, and Archie naturally did, though there was so much golf in his life that he had little time for it.

  ‘Sunningdale is a perfect place to live,’ said Archie. ‘It’s got everything we want. It’s the right distance from London, and now they’re opening Wentworth golf course as well, and developing that estate there. I think we might have a real house of our own.’

  This was an exciting idea. Comfortable though we were in Scotswood, it had a few disadvantages. The management were not particularly reliable. The wiring of the electricity gave us trouble; the advertised constant hot water was neither constant nor hot; and the place suffered from a general lack of maintenance. We were enamoured of the idea of having a home of our very own.

  We considered at first having a new house built on Wentworth Estate, which had just been taken over by a builder. It was going to be laid out with two golf courses–probably a third later–and the rest of the sixty-acre estate was to be covered by houses of all sizes and kinds. Archie and I used to spend happy summer evenings tramping over Wentworth looking out for a site which we thought would suit us. In the end, we decided on a choice between three. We then got into touch with the builder in charge of the estate. We decided that we wanted about an acre and a half of ground. We preferred a natural pine and wooded area, so that we should not have too much upkeep of a garden. The builder seemed most kind and helpful. We explained that we wanted quite a small house–I don’t know what we thought it would cost us: about, I suppose, £2000. He produced plans of a remarkably nasty-looking little house, full of every unpleasant modern ornamental feature, for which he asked what seemed to us the colossal price of £5,300. We were crestfallen. There seemed no chance of getting anything built more cheaply–that was the bottom limit. Sadly, we withdrew. We decided, however, that I should buy a debenture share in Wentworth for £100–which would entitle me to play on Saturdays and Sundays on the links there–as a kind of stake for the future. After all, since there would be two courses there, one would be able to play on at least one of them without feeling too much of a rabbit.

  As it happened, my golfing ambitions got a sudden boost at this moment–I actually won a competition. Such a thing had never happened to me before, and never happened again. My L.G.U Golf handicap was 35 (the limit), but even with that it seemed unlikely I should ever win anything. However, I met in the finals a Mrs Burberry–a nice woman a few years older than myself–who also had a handicap of 35, and was just as nervous and unreliable as I was.

  We met quite happily, pleased with ourselves for having reached the point we had. We halved the first hole. Thereafter Mrs Burberry, surprising herself and depressing me, succeeded in winning not only the next hole, but the hole after that, a further hole, and so on, until, at the ninth, she was eight up. Any faint hopes of even putting up a good show deserted me, and having reached that pitch I became much happier. I could now go on with the round without bothering very much, until the moment, certainly not far off, when Mrs Burberry would have won the match. Mrs Burberry now began to go to pieces. Anxiety took over. She lost hole after hole. I, still not caring, won hole after hole. The unbelievable happened. I won the next nine holes, and therefore won by one up on the last green. I think somewhere I have still got my silver trophy.

  After a year or two, having looked at innumerable houses–always one of my favourite pastimes–we narrowed our choice down to two. One was rather a long way out, not too big, and had a nice garden. The other one was near the station; a sort of millionaire-style Savoy suite transferred to the country and decorated regardless of expense. It had panelled walls and quantities of bathrooms, basins in bedrooms, and every other luxury. It had passed through several hands in recent years and was said to be an unlucky house–everybody who lived there always came to grief in some way. The first man lost his money; the second his wife. I don’t know what happened to the third owners–they just separated, I think, and departed. Anyway, it was going cheap as it had been on the market for some time. It had a pleasant garden–long and narrow, comprising first a lawn, then a stream with a great many water plants, then wild garden with azaleas and rhododendrons, and so on to the end, where there was a good solid kitchen garden, and beyond it a tangle of gorse bushes. Whether we could afford it or not was another matter. Although we were both making fair incomes–mine perhaps a little doubtful and uneven, Archie’s well assured–we were lamentably short of capital. However, we arranged for a mortgage, and in due course moved in.

  We bought such additional curtains and carpets as were necessary, and embarked on a course of living that was undoubtedly above our means, though our calculations looked all right on paper. We had both the Delage and the bottle-nosed Morris to keep up. We also had more servants: a married couple and a housemaid. The wife of the married couple had been a kitchenmaid in some ducal household, and it was assumed, though never actually stated, that her husband had been the butler there. He certainly did not know much about being a butler, though his wife was a most excellent cook. We discovered in
the end that he had been the luggage porter. He was a man of colossal laziness. Most of the day he spent lying on his bed, and apart from waiting rather badly at table that was virtually all he ever did. In the intervals of lying on his bed he also went down to the pub. We had to decide whether to get rid of them or not. On the whole the cooking seemed more important, however, and we kept them on.

  So we proceeded on our course of grandeur–and exactly what we might have expected happened. Within a year we were getting worried. Our bank account seemed to be melting in a most extraordinary way. With a few economies though, we said to each other, we should do all right.

  At Archie’s suggestion, we called the house Styles, since the first book which had begun to bring me a stake in life, had been The Mysterious Affair at Styles. On the wall we hung the painting which had been done for the jacket of Styles–which had been presented to me by The Bodley Head.

  But Styles proved what it had been in the past to others. It was an unlucky house. I felt it when I first went into it. I put my fancy down to the fact that the decorations were so flashy and unnatural for the countryl When we could afford to have it done up in a country style, without all this panelling and paint and gilt, then I said, it would feel quite different.

  IV

  The next year of my life is one I hate recalling. As so often in life, when one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong. About a month after I got home from a short holiday in Corsica my mother had bronchitis very badly. She was at Ashfield at the time. I went down to her, and then Punkie replaced me. Soon afterwards she sent me a telegram to say she was moving mother up to Abney, where she thought she could be better looked after, Mother seemed to improve, but she was never the same again. She moved very little from her room. I suppose her lungs were affected, she was seventy-two by that time. I did not think it was as serious as it turned out to be–I don’t believe Punkie did, either–but a week or two later I was telegraphed for, Archie was away in Spain on business.

  It was going up in the train to Manchester that I knew, quite suddenly, that my mother was dead. I felt a coldness, as though I was invaded all over, from head to feet, with some deadly chill–and I thought: ‘Mother is dead’.

  I was right. I looked down at her as she lay on the bed, and thought how true it was that, once dead, it is only the shell that remains. All my mother’s eager, warm, impulsive personality was far away somewhere. She had said to me several times in the past few years, ‘Sometimes one feels so eager to get out of this body–so outworn, so old, so useless. One longs to be released from this prison.’ That is what I felt about her now. She had been released from her prison. But for us there was the sadness of her passing.

  Archie could not come to the funeral, because he was still in Spain. I was back at Styles when he returned a week later. I had always realised that he had a violent dislike of illness, death, and trouble of any kind. One knows these things, yet one hardly realises them, or pays much attention to them, until an emergency arises. He came into the room, I remember, acutely embarrassed, and it made him put on an appearance of jollity–a kind of ‘Hullo, her we are. Now then, we must all try and cheer up’ attitude. It is very hard to bear when you have lost a person who is one of the three you love best in the world.

  He said: ‘I’ve got a very good idea. How would it be–I’ve got to go back to Spain next week–how would it be if I took you out there with me? We could have great fun, and I am sure it would distract you.’

  I didn’t want to be distracted. I wanted to be with my sorrow and learn to get used to it. So I thanked him and said I’d rather stay at home. I see now that I was wrong. My life with Archie lay ahead of me. We were happy together, assured of each other, and neither of us would have dreamed that we could ever part. But he hated the feeling of sorrow in the house, and it left him open to other influences.

  Then there was the problem of clearing up Ashfield. For the last four or five years all kinds of rubbish had accumulated; my grandmother’s things; all the things that my mother had been unable to cope with and had locked away. There had been no money for repairs; the roof was falling in; and some of the rooms were dripping with rain. My mother had lived at the end in only two rooms. Somebody had to go down and cope with all this and that person had to be me. My sister was too embroiled in her own concerns though she promised to come down for two or three weeks in August. Archie thought it would be best if we let Styles for the summer, which would give us a large rent and put us out of the red again. He would stay at his club in London, I would go to Torquay to clear up Ashfield. He would join me there in August–and when Punkie came we would leave Rosalind with her and go abroad. We decided on Italy–a place we had never been to before, called Alassio.

  So I left Archie in London, and went down to Ashfield.

  I suppose I was already run down and slightly ill, but turning out that house, with the memories, the hard work, the sleepless nights, reduced me to such a nervous state that I hardly knew what I was doing. I worked for ten or eleven hours a day, opening every room, and carrying things around. It was frightful: the moth-eaten garments, Granny’s old trunks full of her old dresses–all the things that nobody had wanted to throw away but had now got to be disposed of. We had to pay the dustman extra every week to take everything. There were difficult items such as the large wax-flower crown which was my grandfather’s memorial wreath. It lay under an enormous glass dome. I did not want to go through life with this enormous trophy but what can one do with a thing of that kind? You can’t throw it away. Finally a solution was found. Mrs Potter–mother’s cook–had always admired it. I presented it to her and she was delighted.

  Ashfield was the first house that father and mother had lived in after their marriage. They went there about six months after Madge was born, and had stayed there ever since, continually adding fresh cupboards for storage. Little by little, every room in the house had become a store-room. The school-room, which had been the scene of so many happy days in my youth, was now one vast box-room: all the trunks and boxes that Grannie could not cram into her bedroom had gone up there.

  A further blow dealt me by Fate was the loss of my dear Carlo. Her father and step mother had been travelling in Africa, and she suddenly heard from Kenya that her father was very ill and that the doctor said he had cancer. Though he did not yet know it himself, Carlo’s stepmother knew, and apparently he was not expected to live longer than about six months. Carlo had to go back to Edinburgh as soon as her father returned, and be with him during his last months. I bade her farewell tearfully. She hated to leave me in all this confusion and unhappiness, but it was one of those priorities that cannot be evaded. Still, another six weeks or so, and I would get it all finished. Then I could begin to live again.

  I worked like a demon, I was so anxious to get through. All the trunks and cases had to be examined carefully: one could not just throw things out. Among Grannie’s things you were never sure what you would find. She had insisted on doing a good deal of her packing herself when she left Ealing, considering us sure to throw away her dearest treasures. Old letters abounded I was about to throw them all away; then a crumpled old envelope turned out to contain a dozen £5 notes! Grannie had been like a squirrel, hiding away her little nuts here and there so that they might escape the rigours of war. On one occasion there was a diamond brooch wrapped up in an old stocking.

  I began to get confused and muddled over things. I never felt hungry and ate less and less. Sometimes I would sit down, put my hands to my head, and try to remember what it was I was doing. If Carlo had been there I would have been able to go to London for an occasional weekend and see Archie, but I couldn’t leave Rosalind alone in the house, and I had nowhere else to stay.

  I suggested to Archie that he should come down for a weekend occasionally: it would make all the difference. He wrote back pointing out that it would be rather a foolish thing to do. After all it was an expensive journey, and, as he could not get off before Saturday and would have to go ba
ck Sunday night, it would hardly be worth it. I suspected that he would hate to miss a Sunday’s golf–but put that aside as an unworthy thought. It was not for long, he added cheerfully.

  A terrible sense of loneliness was coming over me. I don’t think I realised that for the first time in my life I was really ill. I had always been extremely strong, and I had no understanding of how unhappiness, worry and overwork could affect your physical health. But I was upset one day when I was just about to sign a cheque and could not remember the name to sign it with. I felt exactly like Alice in Wonderland touching the tree.

  ‘But of course,’ I said. ‘I know my name perfectly well. But–but what is it?’ I sat there with the pen in my hand feeling an extraordinary frustration. What initial did it begin with? Was it perhaps Blanche Amory? It seemed familiar. Then I remembered that was some lesser character in Pendennis, a book I hadn’t read for years.

  I had another warning a day or two later. I went to start the car, which usually had to be started with a starting handle–in fact, I am not sure that cars did not always have to be started with the handle in those days. I cranked and cranked, and nothing happened. Finally I burst into tears, came into the house, and lay on the sofa sobbing. That worried me. Crying just because a car wouldn’t start; I must be crazy.

  Many years later, someone going through a period of unhappiness said to me: ‘You know, I don’t know what is the matter with me. I cry for nothing at all. The other day the laundry didn’t come and I cried. And the next day the car wouldn’t start–’ Something stirred in me then, and I said, ‘I think you had better be very careful; it is probably the beginning of a nervous breakdown. You ought to go and see someone about it.’