Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  Mummy would understand. But she couldn’t tell Mummy. They were all looking at her – waiting for her to speak. A terrible agony welled up in her breast. She gazed dumbly, agonisingly, at her mother. ‘Help me,’ that gaze said. ‘Oh, do help me.’

  Miriam [Clara] gazed back at her.

  ‘I believe she doesn’t like that butterfly in her hat,’ she said. ‘Who pinned it there?’

  Clara, too, had a wildly vital inner life. But hers, unlike Agatha’s, was born of insecurity rather than protection.

  She was born in 1854 to a glamorous army captain, Frederick Boehmer, who at the age of thirty-six had fallen for a beautiful girl of not quite seventeen, Mary Ann West. After twelve years of marriage and four children, Captain Boehmer, then stationed in Jersey, was killed in a fall from his horse, leaving Mary Ann a young and impoverished widow. At almost exactly the same time, Mary Ann’s older sister Margaret made a less romantic, more lucrative marriage to an American widower, much older than herself, named Nathaniel Frary Miller. Mary Ann was in dire straits; Margaret immediately offered to take one of the four children off her sister’s hands. Clara – the only girl, then aged nine – was handed over.

  Agatha was fascinated by the story of these West sisters, orphan girls who were taken in by relations, the Kelseys, in the early nineteenth century, and raised on their farm in Sussex. As a child she was told lots of tales about her ancestry. She loved to hear about ‘the Kelseys at Primsted Farm’ and the rich Crowder cousins, of whom the Wests were jealous ‘as they always had real lace on their drawers’.8 Particularly alive to her was the story of Mary Ann and Captain Frederick. Perhaps because it had become for her a poignant ideal of faithful romance, she wrote her own version of it to her second husband, Max Mallowan, in a letter of 1944:

  [My grandmother] was married at 16 (‘They say you’re too young to marry me, Polly’. ‘I’ll run away with you tomorrow if they won’t let me marry you’) to a handsome Army officer twenty years older than she was . . .

  She was exceptionally lovely – people stopped to stare after her in the street – she was left with hardly any money and had to do fine embroidery and sewing to support and educate her children. At least three of her husband’s brother officers wanted to marry her – two of them well-off men. Economically it would have been desirable. But she refused everybody – certainly never had a lover – and up to the age of seventy steadfastly declared it was her wish her body should be taken to Jersey when she died and buried with her husband there . . ,9

  In fact her three sons – Harry, Ernest and Frederick – prevailed in their wish for Mary Ann to be buried in England, so that they could visit her grave. What her daughter thought on the subject is not known. It is a modern freedom to criticise one’s parents, and it would not have occurred to Clara – in some ways very typical of her era – to shun the mother who had given her away. She was a buttoned-up little girl, solitary like Agatha but lonely with it, wandering through her sickly uncle’s house clasping a copy of her favourite book, King of the Golden River. She had suffered a good deal, being sent away. Yet her behaviour towards Mary Ann was always utterly correct. In her twenties she wrote a poem ‘To Mother’ full of irreproachable sentiment: ‘Love is the angel who . . . guards the path to Heaven’. It could have been written to anybody, though. The poem for her aunt Margaret is a little more personal, and dutifully praises ‘A character of worth, Beloved by all around . . ,’

  Agatha writes in her autobiography that Mary Ann could scarcely be blamed for what she did, that she probably gave Clara away because she thought a girl needed help in life while boys could make their own luck. Yet Clara always believed that her mother simply loved her less. She was too sensitive to withstand the rejection.

  I think the resentment she felt, the deep hurt at being unwanted, coloured her attitude to life. It made her distrustful of herself and suspicious of people’s affection. Her aunt was a kindly woman, good-humoured and generous, but she was imperceptive of a child’s feelings. My mother had all the so-called advantages of a comfortable home and a good education – what she lost and what nothing could replace was the carefree life with her brothers in her own home . . .

  This is a recurring theme in Agatha’s writing, the need for children to be brought up in their own surroundings, the damage that is done to them when they are given away (or, as in Ordeal by Innocence, sold for a hundred pounds: ‘The humiliation – the pain – he’d never got over it’). It lies at the heart of The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side and The Mousetrap; it is touched on elsewhere; and it is always treated with the same seriousness. It was Agatha’s nature to feel Clara’s emotions as if they were her own. Indeed, such was her love for her mother, she may have experienced greater agony than Clara herself ever did when, many years later, she wrote this speech for a female character in Mrs. McGinty’s Dead:

  ‘There was a woman writing in the paper the other day . . . A really stupid letter. Asking what was best to do – to let your child be adopted by someone who could give it every advantage . . . or whether to keep it when you couldn’t give it advantages of any kind. I think that’s stupid – really stupid. If you can just give a child enough to eat – that’s all that matters.

  ‘. . . I ought to know . . . My mother parted with me and I had every advantage, as they call it. And it’s always hurt – always – always – to know that you weren’t really wanted, that your mother could let you go . . . I wouldn’t part with my children – not for all the advantages in the world!’

  These are Agatha’s thoughts, of course, and they would never have been voiced in this way by Clara. But there is no doubt that Clara’s childhood experience affected her, in particular her relationship with her daughters.

  It also played its part in her marriage. Margaret and her husband had no children of their own but Nathaniel, from his first marriage, had a son named Frederick. He was eight years Clara’s senior and a real New Yorker, albeit with a Swiss education, a Frenchman’s worldliness, an English sense of protocol and an entrée into the wildly select Union Club. He was an American straight out of The Age of Innocence, that is to say one who aspired to sacred Europeanism; but he was an American all the same and had something free within – an openness, a ribaldry, a refusal to take himself seriously – that was not of the Victorian world. Agatha was proud of her American blood and, as an old woman on a visit to New York, was adamant that she should visit the Brooklyn graves of her Miller relations, even though she had never met them. She, too, would prove to have a more open spirit than Torquay might have allowed: there was fresh air in her blood as well as her lungs.

  The Miller fortune had been made in America but it had interests in Manchester. So after their marriage Nathaniel and Margaret settled in Cheshire, where Frederick – a fond son – would visit them, trailing a haze of cosmopolitanism and frankly dazzling the sad little Clara.

  That she should have married him, in 1878, is a fairy story; a romance to rival that of Mary Ann Boehmer, except that there is a very faint air of patronage about the way in which Frederick abandoned his gay flirtations (with Winston Churchill’s mother, among others) and proposed to his dear faithful cousin, whose soul he had set on fire years earlier with his careless praise for her ‘lovely eyes’. Shades of Sonia in Uncle Vanya? ‘When a girl is plain everybody says, you have lovely hair, you have lovely eyes . . .’ Clara was not a beauty; indeed she turned down Frederick’s first proposal because she felt herself to be ‘dumpy’. But she had a remarkable character – far more powerful than that of her charming husband – and this, in the end, would redress the imbalances in their marriage.

  During her engagement, though, she wrote poems to ‘F.A.M.’ (Frederick Alvah Miller), which show her brimful of passionate, anxious gratitude.

  God in Heaven listen to me, Listen to my whisper’d prayer Make me worthy, though so lowly, All his love and life to share.

  There is also an odd, frequently struck note of fear: ‘Keep him safe from every evil, And tem
ptation’s treacherous power.’ Clearly she was aware of her husband’s rakish past – ‘He quickly loved o’er face and flower, With careless listless will’ – and alert to the possibilities of repeat performances. Her poems, written in a conscientious hand in an ‘Album’ bought at Whiteleys, return continually to the apprehension of betrayal:

  Oh God! was it only a fancy

  That dream of my maiden life

  Is this the once wonderful hero

  Who won me for his wife?

  In fact there is no reason to think that Frederick – who made occasional little changes to the poems, so knew perfectly well their serious substance – was anything but a faithful husband. But the loss of certainty as a child had prepared Clara to expect the worst; in this she was utterly unlike Agatha, the happiness of whose early life prepared her for nothing. ‘Some people are wise – they never expect to be happy. I did,’ she wrote later, in The Hollow.

  A good deal of her childhood happiness came from Agatha’s sense that her parents’ marriage was serene and stable. Yet Unfinished Portrait, as always, understands more about the realities than she knew at the time. ‘It isn’t always wise – to care too much. It’s a thorn in your side always,’ says ‘Miriam’ to her daughter. And, later:

  ‘Don’t ever leave your husband too long alone, Celia. Remember, a man forgets . . .’

  ‘Father would never have looked at anyone but you.’

  Her mother answered musingly.

  ‘No, perhaps he wouldn’t. But I was always on the look out. There was a parlour maid – a big handsome girl – the type I had often heard your father admire. She was handing him the hammer and some nails. As she did it she put her hand over his. I saw her. Your father hardly noticed – he just looked surprised . . . But I sent that girl away – at once.’

  Frederick, meanwhile, had all the unassailable self-confidence of his class, which was subtly above that of Clara (the girl in Mrs. McGinty’s Dead is also enabled, by her adoption, to marry a gentleman). He was no oil painting: photographs show him to have been a fat, bearded man looking years older than his real age, with the heavy, sleepy eyes inherited by Agatha. But he seems to have been liked by everybody who knew him. In her autobiography Agatha writes, of the happy atmosphere at Ashfield, that it was ‘largely due to my father’.

  He spent his life doing nothing. As a young man he was a socialite, in middle age a gentleman of leisure. ‘He never was in business, having inherited a very comfortable fortune from his father,’ read a testimonial sent from the Union Club to the American ambassador when Agatha was eighteen, about to come out in society. ‘That I can vouch for him in the highest terms, is putting it mildly, and it would seem as if the daughter, Miss Agatha Miller, was in every way entitled to be presented.’

  For all that she worshipped her quick, clever mother, Agatha had an irresistible admiration for Frederick’s easy charm. His was the class to which she always felt herself to belong, although in adulthood she had neither his social manner nor his gift for indolence. But ‘I cannot see what is morally right about working,’ she pronounced in an interview in 1964.10 ‘My father was a gentleman of substance, and never did a hand’s turn in his life, and he was a most agreeable man.’

  He was also a fool, although not intellectually stupid by any means. He knew exactly the worth of the people around him, but it was not in his nature to present to them anything other than his ‘agreeable’ front. No doubt to show willing to his family he produced a couple of short stories; these had something of his daughter’s instinctive insight into human nature. They also proved him a far better writer than Clara. Her bedtime tales danced with invention – Agatha was both frustrated and entranced by the way Clara would be unable to return to a story on the following night, so simply made up a new one – but her laboured writing drowned ever more deeply in Victorian convention (‘So, I was dead! This then must be my spirit, which had consciousness . . .’).11

  Frederick’s story entitled Henry’s Engagement is a variation on his own courtship of Clara. Henry, a womanising dandy, is worshipped by Marian, who is ‘religious and high-principled’ and – like Clara – has absolutely no sense of humour. ‘Henry was very much in love, but with characteristic indolence displayed no unseemly haste in putting the momentous question. After all, there was really no hurry.’

  Frederick waited until he was thirty-two before he abandoned his gay-dog life and proposed. Henry never does marry Marian, instead telling her that he has fallen for another girl whose ‘tiny hands excited Henry’s admiration. Marian’s were well-formed – but large.’ Hearing this, Marian nobly renounces him. ‘She had behaved splendidly, he would always think of her as one of the sweetest women he had ever met. The phrase pleased him . . .’ Frederick was kind where Henry is cold, but the story hints at the same undercurrents that run through Clara’s poetry.

  Beneath her liveliness, there was always anxiety inside Clara. She burned with the passionate piety of a nun painted by Holman Hunt. Frederick took life lightly, merrily. Another story, Why Jenkins Gave a Dinner, is set in the kind of New York club that was his natural habitat: ‘the toast – “The Ladies, God Bless them!” was drunk for the 27th time’. It has Frederick’s own charm, and it also shows a certain self-knowledge.

  Jimmy spent every bit of his yearly income and a little over with a sublime disregard for the future. He was greatly liked by his club associates . . . It is true that one of his ‘best girls’ had said that it was a pity that he had more money than brains. When this was repeated to Jimmy by some kind friends, as of course it was, that youth remarked with great good humour that the lady was perfectly right and immediately went out and sent her a costly bunch of cut roses . . . Although hardly a heroic character, Jimmy was an affable and lovable one.

  Like Jimmy, Frederick would squander his inheritance. He did so more through laziness than wilful profligacy. Perhaps if he had returned to America with Clara, as he had intended to do after their marriage, he would have had an eye on the mismanagement of his New York investments and properties. But that was not how things happened. Instead, after a long honeymoon in Switzerland, the newly-wed Millers came to stay at the fashionable resort of Torquay, where Madge was born in January 1879. Monty followed in June 1880 on a subsequent visit to New York, then Clara returned to England while Frederick ‘attended’ to business matters. When he rejoined her at Torquay – for a year or so, as he thought – he discovered that she had bought Ashfield with the £2,000 left her by her uncle Nathaniel. It was a better use of the Miller fortune than Frederick ever made. It was also a bold, independent action that turned Clara, at a stroke, from supplicant into equal partner.

  Frederick had sown his wild oats in New York; in only his mid-thirties, he settled comfortably into middle age. In this he was much encouraged by Torquay. During the Victorian era it was an even more refined place than it would become in Agatha’s youth: there was as yet no mixed bathing, no Princess Gardens in which to stroll, no Pavilion in which to hear concerts. It was a town full of the well-behaved rich and well-to-do invalids (Napoleon III had restored his health while staying at the Imperial Hotel; Elizabeth Barrett Browning had taken the waters at the Bath House on Victoria Parade). To some, it was overpoweringly genteel. ‘Torquay is such a place as I do desire to upset by dancing through it with nothing on but my spectacles,’ wrote Rudyard Kipling, not known for his Bohemianism. ‘Villas, clipped hedges, fat old ladies with respirators and obese landaus . . .’

  But all of this suited Frederick perfectly well. He had his family home and children, whom he adored in a frank, unVictorian manner: ‘God bless you, my little Darling,’ he wrote to Agatha from New York in 1896, ‘I know you are a dear, good girl . . .’ Beyond that his life consisted of large meals, walks to the Royal Torbay Yacht Club, and shopping: a thick sheaf of bills shows the ease with which he spent what he believed to be a limitless income. As one now knows that the money was draining away, the exquisitely written bills have a queasy look. One pictures Frede
rick, perfectly dressed and shaved, smiling his way along the streets every morning to the club, unable to resist the lure of Donoghue’s or the Fine Art Repository on Victoria Parade. When in London he spent with similar abandon. There are many bills for the jewellery shops of Wl, including one for £810. He also bought good furniture – five mahogany Chippendale chairs in Union Street – and rather less good paintings: clusters of oils jostled upon the walls at Ashfield, although the rooms themselves were airy and elegant. A local artist, N. J. H. Baird, was commissioned to paint Frederick, the three children, Monty’s dog and Agatha’s nurse; these pictures still hang at Greenway House. They have no great merit – ‘All of you look as if you hadn’t washed for weeks!’ was Clara’s judgement, but then of course her own portrait had not been painted – although the picture of‘Nursie’, as she was called, has a soft Flemish warmth. ‘A really lovely painting I think,’ wrote Agatha in 1967, in reply to a woman who was cataloguing Baird’s pictures. ‘My father always thought very highly of [Baird’s] work.’12

  So Frederick ambled through his life, leisurely and largo, a regal Torquay personage with his Saxe-Coburg appearance and unshake-able bonhomie. He and Clara entertained friends frequently to sumptuous dinners. He was involved in charitable amateur-dramatic performances – had a ‘most cordial reception’, according to a local newspaper, in his role as Felix Fumer in The Laughing Hyena – and acted as official scorer for the cricket club, whose ground was beyond Ashfield on Barton Road. In 1943 Agatha received a letter that began:

  When ten years of age my parents lived near the Torquay Cricket Club Ground and to me there was, nor could be, any place on earth like it. I venerate its memory . . .