Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  AGATHA CHRISTIE

  A MYSTERIOUS LIFE

  LAURA THOMPSON

  To Vinny, my friend, O.F.D.

  1992–2006

  Contents

  The Villa at Torquay

  The Young Miss Miller

  The Husband

  The Child

  The Secret Adversary

  The Quarry

  The Second Husband

  War

  English Murder

  The Late Years

  God’s Mark

  Illustrations

  The Works of Agatha Christie

  Endnotes

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  ‘The one thing people never forget is the unsolved. Nothing lasts like a mystery.’

  from The Ebony Tower, by John Fowles

  The Villa at Torquay

  ‘Between the ages of 5 and 12 years old, I led a wonderfully happy life’

  (from a letter written by Agatha Christie in 1973)

  ‘I remembered another thing – Robert saying that there had been no bad fairies at

  Rupert St Loo’s christening. I had asked him afterwards what he meant and he had

  replied, “Well, if there’s not one bad fairy – where’s your story?”

  (from The Rose and the Yew Tree, by Agatha Christie writing as Mary Westmacott)

  It is a steep climb up Barton Road in Torquay, and at the top there is nothing to be seen. Here stood the house in which Agatha Christie was born. Now only imagination can bring it back to life.

  All her life Agatha was in love with her own childhood, and her family home Ashfield was the arena of her childhood dreams. She continued to dream about the house all her life. When it was demolished in the 1960s, twenty years after it had been sold – perhaps as proof that she had finally grown up? – she cried like a child.

  Walking up the road it is hard to grasp the past, because there is so little of it left. Barton Road is out of the town proper, but this has not protected it from modern England: gimcrack college buildings, a wholesale and import warehouse, a school and a block of council flats now line the hill that led to Ashfield. A couple of bungalows stand on the approximate site of Agatha’s house. A path beside them leads to a secret triangle of earth, bounded by a rocky wall; might it once have been an edge of her garden? It is possible. Here, in the cool dark corner around a tree stump, may have been the Dogs’ Cemetery in which the family pets – including Tony the Yorkshire terrier, Agatha’s first dog – were buried beneath little headstones.

  So imagination works on this hidden piece of Torquay, and on the scratchy cry of seagulls, which would have been as familiar to Agatha as her own name, and on the unchanged shape of Barton Road, the sense of her walking up and down with the breeze in her hair and her ribs heaving joyfully. As a child, hand in hand with her nurse; later, laced tight into corsets and trailing a handsome skirt whose hem was thick with dirt. To climb that hill, in a corset! It was here that her first husband, Archie Christie, came chugging on his motorbike in search of the cool, slim girl he had fallen for at a dance near Exeter; he sat and took tea with Agatha’s mother and waited for her to trip home from across the road. She had been playing badminton at Rooklands, one of the handful of houses that stood, like her own, within its own relaxed grounds. That was her world then. Those were the years of Edwardian serenity. Summer followed summer in a long haze: sloping lawns were shadowed with tea tables, with the arch of croquet hoops, with the soft droop of picture hats. The air smelled rose-sweet, and happiness was an easy business. Agatha Christie never lost the sense of those years; they always remained inside her.

  From the top of Barton Road one looks down at Torquay, the rise and fall of its seven hills, the curved sweep of bay with the sea gleaming beyond. This is the view – part revealing, part hidden – that Agatha would have known and loved, so well that when she travelled the world with Archie, in the 1920s, she wrote back to her mother that South Africa was ‘like all really beautiful places, just like Torquay!’.

  That place no longer exists. The Torquay of Agatha’s youth was configurative, complete; an elegant land of its own with its crescents and terraces, its huge pale villas shrouded amid trees and hills, its rituals and structures and distant wildness. It was a watering-place, gently restorative, the kind of town at which people arrived carrying letters of introduction. In summer the local newspaper published weekly lists of the names of holiday visitors, and it was said that these read like the Almanack de Gotha. The resident families were of Agatha’s own class: middle, tending towards upper. This homogeneity was precious. Around her, all was protection and stasis. Within, therefore, her imagination could go free.

  Could it have conjured the Torquay of the twenty-first century? In the years after the war Agatha had a respectful terror of social change and, in some ways, she was as much of a realist about life as her old lady detective, Miss Marple, who always expects the worst and is usually right to do so. But Agatha was also a woman of deep faith, in God and human nature. Could she, then, have foreseen the gleeful rupture within England that would rip the heart from her birthplace?

  Torquay’s handsome Fleet Walk splashed with lurid shop fronts; the proud Strand colonised by bare-chested inebriates; the 1851 town hall now a branch of Tesco; the old bank, with its pale gold stone façade, now Banx Café Bar; the elegant 1912 seafront Pavilion now a shopping mall; the palm trees shrivelling outside Mambo nightclub; the calm creamy villas advertising Vacancies and Cantonese food; the junkies and asylum-seekers lurching along Higher Union Street, where Agatha’s father had bought china for Ashfield . . . modernity blurring every proud shape, the change in England writ large here because Torquay is a place of pleasure, and pleasure is what now defines us. Agatha believed in pleasure too: she loved ease and respite and idleness. But she would have doubted Miss Marple’s other creed – that ‘the new world was the same as the old’, that ‘human beings were the same as they had always been’1 – when she saw the holidaymakers and their urgency for sensation, their burgers belched into the sun and their bottles swung like lances. She had begun to doubt the future in one of her last books, Passenger to Frankfurt, which she wrote in her late seventies:

  What a world it was nowadays . . . Everything used the whole time to arouse emotion. Discipline? Restraint? None of these things counted for anything any more. Nothing mattered but to feel.

  What sort of a world . . . could that make?

  It made the England of today: bored, violent, decadent. It made a society with no sense of order, of cause and effect, of history. And Agatha had foreseen this, although she had not entirely believed that it would come to pass: ‘Can this be England? Is England really like this? One feels – no – not yet, but it could be.’2 In fact Passenger to Frankfurt ends with an affirmation in ‘hope’, ‘faith’ and ‘benevolence’. So Agatha would have been shocked and grieved by the twenty-first century. She would have mourned the town in which she had dreamed, loved, run up hills with Tony the dog, lost her virginity to Archie Christie, become a writer. Above all she would have been saddened by the new English joylessness, for life to her was a sacred gift.

  In Torquay Agatha is everywhere – the shops, the museum – and yet she is nowhere. What she was, what made her, no longer exists. Only in flickering moments does one glimpse a girl in a white dress, skipping through shadowy sunlit streets, her head full of mysteries. No mystery greater than this one: that in an England apparently bent upon destroying everything she believed and embodied, Agatha Christie remains never more popular. The paradox would have intrigued her.

  Then she would have contemplated her dinner and her garden, and retired to the world of her mind.

  That was where she lived, throughout much of her ch
ildhood: in her imagination, within Ashfield. The two were indissoluble. Every corner, every shadow of her home was magical to her. She loved it with a child’s directness; but also with an adult depth, seeming to intuit the sadness in love, the knowledge of impermanence that makes happiness so intense. She had an elegiac instinct. Unusually for a child, she had an overview. Even as she was steeped in their warm stillness, she sensed the ending of the eternal summers; and turned every moment of them into instant memory.

  ‘There is no Joy like Joy in dreams . . .’ wrote the adult Agatha Christie,3 surely remembering how Ashfield had been hallowed by the visions that came to her in sleep:

  the dream fields at the bottom of the garden . . . the secret rooms inside her own home. Sometimes you got to them through the pantry – sometimes, in the most unexpected way, they led out of Daddy’s study. But there they were all the time – although you had forgotten them for so long. Each time you had a delighted thrill of recognition. And yet, really, each time they were quite different. But there was always that curious secret joy about finding them . . .

  This is from Unfinished Portrait, published in 1934, one of the six novels she wrote under the name of Mary Westmacott. It is as close to her own story as the autobiography that was published posthumously. Many of the same childhood tales are told in both books, yet Unfinished Portrait feels closer to the truth of that time. It is written with a yearning quality, suffused with the love she felt for a past that had been wrenched from her eight years earlier; the wounds still weep on the page.

  Agatha never lost the ability to experience the world through a child’s eyes (‘. . . in a great many years time, when you are still a child, as you always will be . . .’ wrote her second husband, Max Mallowan, in a letter of 1930).4 She retained both her memories and her direct sense of how these memories felt. Nothing was ever more alive to her. The first Westmacott, Giant’s Bread (also 1930), has a boy, Vernon Deyre, as its protagonist, but much of his early life is a replication of Agatha’s.

  A new nursemaid came, a thin white girl with protruding eyes. Her name was Isabel, but she was called Susan as being More Suitable. This puzzled Vernon very much. He asked Nurse for an explanation.

  . . . ‘There are people who when they christen their children set themselves up to ape their betters.’

  The word ‘ape’ had a distracting influence on Vernon. Apes were monkeys. Did people christen their children at the zoo?

  As Agatha did, Vernon has waking dreams; like this one, which flourished in the infinity of the garden at Ashfield.

  Mr Green was like God in that you couldn’t see him, but to Vernon he was very real . . . The great thing about Mr Green was that he played – he loved playing. Whatever game Vernon thought of, that was just the game that Mr Green loved to play. There were other points about him. He had, for instance, a hundred children. And three others . . . They were called by the three most beautiful names that Vernon knew: Poodle, Squirrel and Tree.

  Vernon was, perhaps, a lonely little boy, but he never knew it. Because, you see, he had Mr Green and Poodle, Squirrel, and Tree to play with.

  Agatha never thought of herself as lonely. Such an idea would not have occurred to her. She treasured solitude and the space it gave her for other lives. She also treasured privacy; when she overheard her nurse discussing one of her earliest imaginary games with a housemaid (‘Oh she plays that she’s a kitten with some other kittens’), she was upset ‘to the core’. She had cast a delicate spell over her home. Secrecy preserved the magic, and a photograph of Agatha as a child shows a face full of secrets: a stubborn little fairy girl, seated on a wicker chair in her enchanted garden.

  ‘I was to know every tree in it, and attach a special meaning to each tree . . .’5

  All her life she saw Ashfield through those child’s eyes. Her detective novel The Hollow describes a house, Ainswick, that represents vanished happiness to the characters in the book and has a garden filled with Ashfield’s trees.

  There was a magnolia that almost covered one window and which filled the room with a golden green light in the afternoons. Through the other window you looked out on to the lawn and a tall Wellingtonia stood up like a sentinel. And to the right was a big copper beech.

  Oh Ainswick – Ainswick . . .

  What did Ashfield look like? A large villa, comfortable, not grand, with a fine lawn leading to a small wood. A family home. Photographs, pink-tinged and poignant, show it to have been a mass of harmonious accretions. Part two-storey, part three-, it had several chimneys, generous windows that reached down to the garden, and a porch shadowy with creeper. A conservatory, filled with palm trees, was a sultry hothouse in those days of heavy clothes. There was also a green-house – ‘called, I don’t know why, K.K.’ – which housed a rocking-horse named Mathilde, and a small painted horse and cart named Truelove. Agatha wrote about these in her last book, Postern of Fate, in which she lets the conventions of detective fiction slip away and walks, free as a ghost, into her past. As with all her late writing the book was spoken into a Dictaphone;6 her voice, in a brief recording, is cracked and vibrant with memory. Mathilde is described as ‘looking forlorn and forsaken’, with her mane fallen out and one ear broken, but when a character in the book jumps on her back she races back and forward in the same old way. ‘Got action, hasn’t it?’ ‘Yes, it’s got action.’

  A few years before she wrote Postern of Fate, Agatha received a letter from an old Torquay friend. ‘Our gardens, yours and mine, were magical places . . . How sad that Barton Road is so changed, and that houses have been built over Ashfield.’7 And yet, for all its charm, Ashfield did not compare with the home that Agatha would later make her own in Devon. The white Georgian perfection of Greenway, set like a pale jewel above the river Dart, was as magical in truth as the dream house that she had made of Ashfield. And for all that the child Agatha loved her home, she was always looking beyond its limits. ‘I wanted’, she wrote in her autobiography, ‘above everything in the world, to be the Lady Agatha one day.’ Within this lay a desire, not to do with snobbery, to inhabit the numinous place that hovered at the edges of her imagination. ‘Something you want so much that you don’t quite know what it is,’ she wrote of the perfect house in one of her last novels, Endless Night. ‘The thing that mattered most to me. Funny that a house could mean that.’

  In Giant’s Bread the young boy does not live at Ashfield: he is heir to a house called Abbots Puissant, which is of ineffable, ancient beauty. In another of the Westmacotts, The Rose and the Yew Tree, the heroine Isabella is as one with her home, St Loo Castle: ‘medieval, severe and austere’. Agatha longed to walk through a world of that kind and call it her own. With Greenway she would do so, in a sense; but not the Isabella sense. She was at once too middle-class and too much of a thinker. The very mind that could dream up a St Loo Castle would prevent her, always, from losing herself in its reality.

  No doubt her inner life would have developed less freely had she been born into a different kind of family. Perhaps it would not have existed at all. But the Millers of Torquay were not as conventional as their appearance suggested, and the dynamic of the family left Agatha protected yet separate, which was ideal for the growth of her particular personality.

  Agatha Mary Clarissa was the last of three children, born on 15 September 1890, eleven years after her sister Margaret (Madge) and ten after her brother Louis Montant (Monty). Her father, Frederick, was far too much the gentleman to interfere in his children’s inner lives. Clarissa, her mother, whose inquisitiveness would have been far greater, had the instinctive wisdom of knowing just how much of this interest to show. Clara – as she was known – was like the nurse who attends Vernon in Giant’s Bread, to whom ‘he was able to speak of Poodle, Squirrel and Tree, and of Mr Green and the hundred children. And instead of saying “What a funny game!” Nurse Frances merely inquired whether the hundred children were girls or boys . . .’

  Clara was, in fact, an original. Her influence upon Agatha – bot
h by omission and involvement – was almost absolute. A distinguished-looking little person, with the near-black eyes of a clever bird, she was the centre of the Ashfield world, the person who made imagination both possible and safe. She was also, probably, the love of Agatha’s life.

  Written eight years after Clara’s death, Unfinished Portrait is a testament to that love: a hymn of desperate loss. Agatha spares herself nothing in the book. ‘Oh, Mummy – Mummy . . .’ she writes, missing the mother who is on holiday abroad; and the pathos of eight-year-old Celia is also that of Agatha in her forties, longing still for Clara.

  ‘In the evening, after Susan had given Celia [Agatha’s fictional self] her bath, Mummy would come into the nursery to give Celia a “last tuck”. “Mummy’s tuck”, Celia would call it, and she would try to lie very still so that “Mummy’s tuck” should still be there in the morning.’

  Clara’s understanding of her daughter – the ‘queer, luminous, searching look’ that she would bend upon her – is almost total; certainly in Agatha’s eyes. This is shown by a story, also told in the autobiography, of an episode in France in 1896, when Agatha was on an expedition with her father. A guide, thinking to please her, had pinned a live butterfly to her straw hat.

  Celia was miserable. She could feel the wings of the butterfly fluttering against her hat. It was alive – alive. Skewered on a pin! She felt sick and miserable. Large tears gathered in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.

  At last her father noticed.

  ‘What’s the matter, poppet?’

  Celia shook her head. Her sobs increased . . . how could she say what was the matter? It would hurt the guide’s feelings terribly. He had meant to be kind. He had caught the butterfly specially for her. He had been so proud of his idea in pinning it to her hat. How could she say out loud that she didn’t like it? And now nobody would ever, ever understand! The wind made the butterfly’s wings flap more than ever . . .