Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  Agatha grew up in a matriarchy. The strength was all on the female side: Clara, Margaret, clever sister Madge, Nursie, Jane the cook. Her father and brother never stood a chance. Frederick didn’t mind a jot about this; Monty undoubtedly did.

  Agatha was never a feminist but she knew perfectly well the value of women, which she considered feminism helped to devalue, as shown in an interview she gave to an Italian magazine in 1962. How, she was asked, had it happened that women now played a more active role in public life? Her answer is not what had been expected: ‘Probably due to the foolishness of women in relinquishing their position of privilege attained after many centuries of civilisation. Primitive women toil incessantly. We seem determined to return to that state voluntarily – or by listening to persuasion, and therefore forfeiting the joys of leisure and creative thought, and the perfecting of home conditions.’23

  Agatha believed that femaleness had its own power, entirely separate from the male: ‘Surely, we are the privileged sex.’ Yet as on most subjects her beliefs were fluid, complex, honestly uncertain. In her detective novel set in Ancient Egypt, Death Comes as the End, she wrote of

  the rich, varied noises of the kitchen, the high, shrill note of old Esa’s voice, the strident tones of Satipy and, very faintly, the deeper, persistent contralto of Kait. A babel of women’s voices – chattering, laughing, complaining, scolding, exclaiming . . . And suddenly Renisenb felt stifled, encircled by this persistent and clamorous femininity. Women – noisy, vociferous women! A houseful of women – never quiet, never peaceful – always talking, exclaiming, saying things – not doing them!

  And Khay – Khay silent and watchful in his boat, his whole mind bent on the fish he was going to spear . . .

  Female life, in this book, is seen as something powerful – ‘What are men anyway? They are necessary to breed children, that is all. But the strength of the race is in the women,’ says Kait – but also limited and limiting. There is another, more difficult kind of happiness to be found, when a woman can grow up, and still touch her own childlike simplicity.

  Renisenb had got into the habit of going up to the tomb almost every day . . . She would sit in the shade of the rock chamber entrance with one knee raised and her hands clasped round it, and stare out over the green belt of cultivation to where the Nile showed a pale gleaming blue and beyond it to a distance of pale soft fawns and creams and pinks, all melting hazily into each other.

  When Agatha travelled to the East, as she did with her second husband, she too would look out on transcendent landscapes and find this kind of demanding, almost troubling peace; a return, in a way, to what she had found years before, when she had seen other worlds in the garden at Ashfield. ‘You are lucky, Renisenb,’ says her wise old grandmother Esa. ‘You have found the happiness that is inside everybody’s own heart. To most women happiness means coming and going, busied over small affairs . . . It is made up of small things strung together like beads on a string.’

  To Clara, the woman to whom Agatha was always closest, happiness was an elusive thing. She loved her home, although she was too restless to find absolute contentment in it. She sought artistic outlets for what were, in fact, indifferent artistic talents (even her embroidery was inept). Her spiritualism was both profound and unsettled, as if she felt its importance but did not quite know what to do with it. She cast around with different religions, seriously considering conversion to Roman Catholicism and flirting with Unitarianism, Christian Science and Zoroastrianism. She did find happiness in her family: the depths of her adoration were not always answered by Frederick’s calm, gentlemanly, uxorious smiles, Monty was ‘difficult’, but Madge and Agatha were exceptional girls whose creativity gave an outlet to Clara’s own. It was her youngest daughter, though, with whom Clara had her strongest bond. As Agatha was to write in Unfinished Portrait, she had inherited something from her mother: ‘a dangerous intensity of affection’. For a time, Agatha and Clara would be the sole recipients of each other’s devotion.

  ‘Receipts for Agatha’, it says, in Clara’s rounded well-schooled hand-writing, on the first page of an exercise book.

  Poulard à la crème: Choose a good fat pullet. . . Eggs à la Monte Cristo . . . Mushrooms à la Henri IV . . . Grannie’s Plum Pudding .. . Salad dressing: 2 yolks of hard boiled eggs made into a smooth paste add a teaspoonful of made mustard and also of salt a few grains of cayenne pepper. Then a teaspoonsful of vinegar. To this add 2 tablespoonsful of best oil, then after mixing put in 2 tablespoonsful of cream . . .

  Friday night: Sole, Roast Pigeons, Fried potatoes and salad, Cherry tart, cream . . .

  What dreams for Agatha lay within these painstakingly copied recipes; what visions of a perfect life, as ordered and kindly as childhood? One hundred years on, the exercise book in which they were written lay upstairs at Greenway House, in what had been Agatha’s bedroom, in a tall and handsome chest of drawers. A green leather case embossed with the name ‘Clarissa Miller’ contained the book of recipes, with many other things. A wallet made of gold-coloured material, embroidered ‘To Frederick from Clarissa’, containing a dollar bill. A purse embroidered with the entwined initials F and C, and the line ‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart, for love is strong as death’. An envelope containing a piece of Pears soap, used by Frederick, still faintly fragrant. Clara’s album of poems. Pieces of edelweiss kept from her honeymoon in Switzerland, crumbling within the pages of a letter to ‘F.A.M,’. Her marriage certificate. A green wallet containing letters. A programme for the 1894 Harrow School speech day. A picture of Agatha as a child, sitting on a wicker bench under a little palm tree. A picture of Frederick as a boy, looking like Agatha. A picture of Clara herself, wearing an embroidered robe at the dinner table at Ashfield. A letter to Agatha sent from Ealing: ‘My darling wee Babsie, I am sure you must be very cold, with so much snow about Ashfield . . . Darling little girlie, Mother is longing to kiss and love her sweet pea again. Auntie-Grannie sends you much love . . . Tell Jane to please get a partridge to make you some potted meat for tea or breakfast.’ A letter from Madge in London to Agatha: ‘My dear little chicken, how are you getting on? I hope you are conducting yourself in a highly respectable way, and not forgetting me.’ A letter from Frederick to Agatha in Ealing, dated 15 June 1894:

  I am longing so much to see you and dear mother again. Ashfield is looking very lovely and I think you will find your room nice and pretty with new furniture and paper. Scot24 looks very miserable when I talk about you and seems to say to me, ‘Will my dear little mistress never come back! I do miss my walks with her and nurse so much.’ I hear your Grannie is going to have your picture painted. I think it is a most lovely idea and I want you to put your little arms around Grannie’s neck and give her a hug and kiss for me. You must always be good and gentle to her and I am pleased to think you are . . .

  So many things kept, so many passions folded into papers, so strong the desire to hold memory within envelopes and miniature boxes and embossed cases. Every separate thing inside the case held, still, the breath of the instinct that had been moved to keep it.

  There were other things, too, in the cupboards and drawers of Greenway. Christening gowns like heaps of soft snow. Birth certificates: Clara born in Belfast, Agatha born at Ashfield, Agatha’s daughter Rosalind born at Ashfield. A framed menu of Clara and Frederick’s ‘Déjeuner du Mariage: Palace Gardens Terrace, 11 April 1878’. A bill dated 17 June 1940: ‘Sale of Ashfield, Barton Road, Torquay – £2,400.00. Furniture and fittings – £21. 19. 6d.’

  Box after box of photographs: Ashfield; Primsted Farm, the childhood home of Margaret and Mary Ann; Clara with Agatha’s little dog Tony; Margaret Miller seated imperiously in a three-wheeler; Monty, dressed in coachman’s regalia, sitting behind a harnessed goat in Truelove the toy cart; teenage Madge in her long skirt, her smile clever and confident; Agatha and a friend, aged around seven, peeping charmingly over the backs of the raffia chairs in the garden. A white fan, still in its long slim case, given by Freder
ick to Margaret. A scrapbook that belonged to Madge, in which she had stuck some of her dance-cards, and cut-outs of carriages full of flowers: ‘Switzerland 1878. Souvenir of Mother’s wedding journey’. Clara’s copy of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, on whose flyleaf Agatha had written, ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’

  And, in another leather case, an ‘Album of Confession’, in which every member of the family wrote their replies to a list of questions: favourite virtue, favourite colour, heroes, heroines, present state of mind and so on. Imagination works easily upon this book. Its thin pages, scratched with slanted writing, conjure the Millers in the drawing-room at Ashfield: one sees them through the tall windows that stretched down to the garden, sitting within their magically enclosed world, fir-cones burning cleanly on the fire as they sipped cherry brandy and pondered their answers. The women of the family – sincere, high-minded – played the confession game very seriously. In 1871 Margaret Miller wrote that her favourite virtue was ‘selfdenial’, her chief characteristic was ‘obstinacy’, and to the question ‘If not yourself, who would you be?’, her reply was, ‘A better individual.’ Mary Ann Boehmer refused to be drawn on this question: ‘I envy no-one.’ She named her chief characteristic as ‘want of caution’ and her present state of mind as ‘anxious’. Her idea of misery was ‘to be in debt’. Her hero, she wrote carefully, was ‘Nathaniel Frary Miller’, the brother-in-law whose money had paid for Clara’s upbringing.

  Meanwhile Clara, then seventeen, described her present state of mind as ‘wishing for a long dress’, although she would have had no occasion to wear it, since despite her wealth Margaret had no plans to give her adopted daughter a social season. Perhaps Clara was aiming an oblique shaft at her aunt and mother when she wrote that her chief characteristic was ‘a great love for children’. Her idea of happiness was ‘always doing the thing that is right’. The fault for which she had most tolerance was ‘reserve’: her own lies heavy on the page.

  What godly creatures these women were! And how Victorian their tastes: their love of Mendelssohn, Landseer, Prince Albert and ‘Miss Nightingale’, their dislike of ‘deceit and affectation’. Naturally Frederick took the game far more lightly. In 1872 he wrote – perhaps with a cousinly wink at Clara – that his chief characteristic was ‘doing nothing’ and his pet aversion ‘getting up in the morning’. Present state of mind? ‘Extremely comfortable, thank you.’

  Agatha first played the confessions game at the age of seven. Some of her answers were absolutely her own: her pet aversion was ‘bedtime when you are wide awake’; if not herself she would be ‘a fairy’. But her heavy eyes were in search of approval when she wrote that her idea of happiness was ‘to be good’, that her hero and heroine were ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’, her favourite painter the family portraitist ‘Baird’.

  She meant these things, of course. Nevertheless this was the public Agatha, who kept something of her real self withheld; a little girl who sought to please and draw loving nods from those around her. A ‘serious little girl’, as she wrote in Unfinished Portrait, who ‘thought a good deal about God and being good and holy . . . alas! undoubtedly a prig’.

  Agatha was being hard on herself, but perhaps she knew that her childish religiosity was not wholly real: it was essential to her dream world that she be clean in clothes and soul. She liked to see herself as a good girl, a character in a Victorian novel with her sashed waist and her hoop and her book of Bible stories by the bed. She liked to believe in duty. Such were the times in which she lived, the milieu in which she was raised. But it was also her nature.

  Her imaginative wanderings were always in the land of virtue; morality, security and happiness were all bound up together. If Agatha was good she would be safe. If she was safe she would be happy. All of which she was; heartbreakingly so, because it could not last: the sweet structures of her life protected her too much. She was wrapped as carefully and precariously as Clara’s edelweiss flowers. Somewhere inside herself she knew this, even at seven. Her happiness was complete; yet she wrote in her confession that her idea of misery was for ‘someone I love to go away from me’. She had suffered, then, when her parents went on their little holidays to New York (‘Home, with Mummy in it. . . Oh, Mummy – Mummy . . .’). And she dreamed, regularly, about evil.

  In the ‘Gun Man’ nightmare, places that Agatha knew and loved – like the tea-table at Ashfield – were invaded by a spectre with a murderer’s eyes and no hands. At first the Gun Man was a person in his own right. He wore a French uniform and had powdered hair in a queue. Then the dream changed.

  It would be a happy dream – a picnic or a party [she wrote in Unfinished Portrait]. And suddenly, just when you were having lots of fun, a queer feeling crept over you. Something was wrong somewhere . . . What was it? Why, of course, the Gun Man was there. But he wasn’t himself. One of the guests was the Gun Man . . .

  And the awful part of it was, he might be anybody . . . It might be Mummy or Daddy or Nannie – someone you were just talking to. You looked up in Mummy’s face – of course it was Mummy – and then you saw the light steely-blue eyes – and from the sleeve of Mummy’s dress – oh, horror! – that horrible stump. It wasn’t Mummy – it was the Gun Man . . .

  Agatha was eleven when her father died, at his step-mother’s house in Ealing. ‘A hospital nurse came out and spoke to Grannie, who was coming up the stairs. “It’s all over,” she said.’

  In the green wallet inside her leather case, Clara kept the letters sent and received in the year of her husband’s death. ‘Darling Daddy, I am so sorry you are still ill, we miss you very much,’ Agatha had written to him at the start of 1901. ‘I had a nice afternoon as Jane let me make cakes in the kitchen. I made some with sultanas, and some with ginger. I had Devonshire cream for tea!’

  In May Clara went to Ealing with Agatha, who had not been well. Frederick himself was, by then, very ill indeed, but like the true gentleman he was he turned his thoughts outward. ‘I was very much distressed to learn by your letter this morning that Agatha was not doing as well as you could wish . . . Madge is having ten girls for Ping-Pong tomorrow; she is quite proud of this . . . I still keep all right.’25

  Meanwhile, throughout 1901, he was keeping a list of ‘Heart Attacks’. Fie recorded thirty between June and September: ‘Slight attack. Good night’ was a typical entry. Clara may not have seen this list until after her husband’s death, as he would not have wanted to worry her. In October he wrote from his club – the Windham in St James’s Square – to tell her about a visit to a specialist in London: ‘I saw Sansom this morning and he told me very much the same thing as last time. He insists that my trouble has more to do with the nerves of the heart than anything else . . . I have felt wonderfully better the last two days . . . I am now, please God, done with doctors.’ Which was true, in a sense: a month later Frederick was dead. He was fifty-five and had been staying in Ealing to be close to London, where he had intended to look for a job.

  Financial concerns, so long dismissed, had played their part in his early death. His heart and his fortunes weakened together, and he had not a clue what to do about it. ‘I have had no letter from America since my return – which I try to think is good news,’26 he wrote to Clara.

  By that time there was nothing to do but endure the knowledge: of the New York properties that cost so much more to keep than they earned in rent, of the trustee who had gone into an asylum, of the other trustee who had shot himself, of the lurking suspicion of embezzlement. Back in 1896, when the nature of the crisis first became apparent to him, Frederick had taken action of sorts. He had let Ashfield, with its servants, and moved with his wife and daughters to France for a year. This was a familiar economy made by the straitened gentry. Different things were cheap in those days: to stay in hotels on the continent cost less than it did to run a big house in England, and one could always take letters of introduction to ensure a social life. For the first six months the Millers stayed in Pau, consider
ed healthful with its clear mountain air. They went on to Cauterets – also in the Pyrenees – then to Paris, and finally to Brittany. Agatha was too excited by the experience to miss Ashfield. Anyway she was always happy in the company of her mother. She did not, though, live an imaginative life in France: from the moment of her arrival she felt a certain disappointment that here was a world much like any other. Having longed to see mountains, she was hit by ‘a disillusionment I have never forgotten. Where was that soaring height going up, up, up into the sky, far, above my head – something beyond contemplation or understanding?’27

  So she lived contentedly in the realm of reality, for the first time in her seven years behaving like any other normal, lively little girl. She made friends easily and ‘discovered . . . the joys of mischief’, playing tricks on other hotel guests like hiding under the stairs with a peacock feather and tickling people’s legs as they passed. She learned to swim: a lifelong pleasure. She watched the sexual blossoming of her sister Madge, had a crush on a saturnine lift boy and yearned for the day when she would fill out a ‘striped blouse and collar and tie’. She grew fond of the young Marie Sijé, whom Clara had whisked from her job at a dressmakers’ to become Agatha’s companion and French conversationalist; like most of Clara’s instinctive decisions, this was a success.

  Agatha had no conscious sense of the reasons behind the family’s removal to France. But Unfinished Portrait shows that she had understood more than she realised at the time. There is a scene in the book in which her parents meet friends from England, the Grants, at a hotel in Pau: