Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  Celia overheard Mr Grant say to her mother: ‘It gave me a shock to see old John [Frederick], but he tells me he is ever so much fitter since being here.’

  Celia said to her mother afterwards: ‘Mummy, is Daddy ill?’ Her mother looked a little queer as she answered: ‘No. No, of course not. He’s perfectly well now. It was just the damp and rain in England.’

  Celia was glad her father wasn’t ill. Not, she thought, that he could be – he never went to bed or sneezed or had a bilious attack. He coughed sometimes, but that was because he smoked so much. Celia knew that, because her father told her so.

  France was a help to Frederick; nevertheless the years of content were over for him. In the Album of Confession he had written that his idea of misery was ‘consciousness of guilt’, and he may therefore have suffered to know that he was leaving his beloved family with so little money, that he had let it all go through his gentlemanly negligence, that Clara would be forced to sell the Chippendales and Sheratons bought with such smiling abandon, that probably Ashfield itself would have to be sold. Yet he would have been comforted by the fact that there was no reproach in Clara’s nature. She had viewed it as happiness beyond prize to be married to Frederick. In the confessions he, too, had described his idea of happiness, which was ‘to be perfectly loved’: many people might wish for this but for Frederick the wish had been granted, and he knew it. ‘No man ever had a wife like you,’ he wrote to Clara, shortly before the end.

  More than a hundred years on this letter was still in her leather case, with the order of service from Frederick’s funeral and leaves from trees in the cemetery at Ealing where he was buried. ‘I see thee not, dear heart, and yet I see/As though mine eyes drew solace from thy face’, Clara had written on the envelope containing the last piece of Pears soap her husband had used.

  From then on, until Clara’s death twenty-five years later, Agatha would be the heart of her mother’s life. ‘You’ve got to live for your children, remember, my dear,’ said the nurse who had looked after Frederick at Ealing and who tended, afterwards, to Clara. ‘Yes, I’ve got to live for my children. You needn’t tell me that. I know it.’ But it was really Agatha for whom she now lived. Madge was soon to be married, Monty was abroad with his regiment and anyway Agatha had always been special to Clara: her inexpressive depth of emotion, her secretive imagination, her heavy adoring eyes, her serene confidence in the love that, nonetheless, she constantly sought. Like Clara, she had understood the fear of loss, although she had never experienced it until Frederick’s death; and so it was with Agatha that Clara made the bond she had never had with her own mother. The closeness between the two became as powerful as electricity. It was the light within Agatha and in later years it would sometimes blind her.

  ‘My grandmother was a dangerous woman,’ said Agatha’s daughter Rosalind, many years later. ‘Strong and dangerous. My mother never thought she was wrong.’28

  The death of her father did not mean the end of Agatha’s idyll. In Unfinished Portrait she is sent a letter by each of her parents, when they are abroad and she is staying with her grandmother at Ealing: ‘Two lovely, lovely letters,’ she writes; but it is her mother’s that causes her agony. ‘Home, she wanted to go home. Home, with Mummy in it . . .’

  Although Agatha had loved her father dearly, so long as she was with Clara she could be happy without him. But until he died she had known only control and decorum. Suddenly, for a time, her life became unstable. ‘I stepped out of my child’s world . . . to enter the fringes of the world of reality.’ She glimpsed raw and fearful things. Like a good Victorian girl she went to her mother’s bedside to tell her that ‘Father’ was happy now in heaven. Clara wouldn’t want him to have to leave Paradise, would she? ‘Yes, I would. I would do anything in the world to have him back – anything, anything at all. I want him back here, now, in this world with me.’ Clara was wild with grief, so much so that she too became ill. Her heart was weakened; she slept with sal-volatile beside her and, for a year or so, Agatha would stand outside her bedroom door at night, listening for her breathing, sometimes waiting for hours until she heard a sound.

  In her kind but unimaginative way, Margaret Miller tried to share with Clara her own grief for her step-son. Unfinished Portrait shows her reading letters of condolence at the breakfast table:

  ‘Mr Clark is a truly good man,’ she would say, sniffing a little as she read. ‘Miriam, you really should hear this. It would help you. He speaks so beautifully of how our dead are always with us.’

  And suddenly roused from her quiescence Miriam would cry out: ‘No, no!’

  It was the last thing that Clara wanted. Frederick was hers and hers alone (‘I could gladly die for thee,’ she had written to him in 1877; how could Margaret understand that she had meant exactly that?). His removal from within the family had taken away its essential balance: the civilised, easy presence within that knot of complex women. All her life Clara had had to be grateful to Margaret. ‘I am sure you are very very happy with dear Grannie,’ she wrote to Agatha at Ealing in 1897. ‘Dear little Agatha what a happy home you have with darling Grannie. You must be good to her and love her very much.’ But Clara did not love Margaret, Margaret had never really loved Clara, and with Frederick gone the matriarchy was laid briefly, angrily bare. Clara’s resentments slid out: towards both the mother who had given her away and the aunt who had offered to take her.

  ‘Celia wondered whether Grannie really liked Mummy and whether Mummy really liked Grannie. She didn’t quite know what put the idea into her head.’ This was the real aftermath of death, a confused stir of emotions that were not necessarily to do with grief. Adult emotions, ambivalent and irrational.

  No wonder Agatha retreated to the world of her imagination and created a new world for herself: The School, attended by The Girls.

  First there was Ethelred Smith – who was tall and very dark and very, very clever . . . Then there was Annie Brown, Ethel’s great friend . . . Isabella Sullivan, who had red hair and brown eyes and was beautiful. She was rich and proud and unpleasant. She always thought that she was going to beat Ethel at croquet, but Celia saw to it that she didn’t, though she felt rather mean sometimes when she deliberately made Isabella miss balls . . .29

  Among the seven girls there was one who refused to take on reality for Agatha: this was Sue de Verte, fair-haired with pale blue eyes, ‘curiously colourless’ in character. While the other girls chattered, engaged with each other, had definite pasts and futures – Elsie Green had grown up terribly poor, Sue’s sister Vera de Verte was to become one of the world’s great beauties – Sue remained the observer.

  In old age Agatha still thought occasionally of The Girls. ‘Even now, sometimes, as I put away a dress in a cupboard, I say to myself: “Yes, that would do well for Elsie, green was always her colour” . . . It makes me laugh when I do it, but there “the girls” are still, though, unlike me, they have not grown old.’30

  The Young Miss Miller

  ‘Pierrette dancing on the green, Merrily, so merrily!’

  (from ‘A Masque from Italy’, written by Agatha Christie in around 1907)

  ‘Where will one be next year or the year after? How wonderful it is that

  ONE DOESN’T KNOW’

  (from notes made by Agatha Christie in 1973)

  After the death of her husband Clara faced the fact that Ashfield would have to be sold. Her children – Agatha in particular – were less realistic. They had not seen the letters from Frederick’s executor in New York, Auguste Montant,1 explaining that there was almost no money left: Clara had nothing except a tiny income from H. B. Chaflins, the firm at which Nathaniel Miller had been a partner. Running a big house like Ashfield would be a continual strain. ‘To have kept it on was not a wise thing, I see that now,’ wrote Agatha, in her autobiography. Nevertheless she begged for it, and Clara bowed to her daughter’s wishes:

  ‘Oh Mother, don’t let’s ever sell it . . .’

  ‘Very well, darling.
After all, it’s a happy house.’

  After losing her husband, a woman may find that the children who are supposed to help her through her loss do the opposite. They take away her rightful desire to think only of herself. Nobody could have cared more about Clara than Agatha did, yet with a child’s innate selfishness she was determined to have her way and make her mother yield. To Agatha, staying at Ashfield meant that nothing had changed; but for Clara, everything had changed. The house was full of memories and bereft of so much else. Had she moved, as she briefly hoped to do, to a different life – she liked the idea of a cosy little house in Exeter – her relationship with her daughter might have been different too.

  But perhaps she would not have wanted that. She, too, loved Ashfield with a passion – her own house, after all – and staying there was an expression of fidelity to Frederick. The oils he had bought still hung in clusters on the walls; the smell of his cigarettes still hovered, just within imagination, in the flower-scented air. Clara had become like her own mother, Mary Ann, who after the death of Captain Boehmer never thought to look at another man. But Clara was unlike Mary Ann, in that she would now make her daughter the centre of her life.

  Ashfield was materially changed, of course. It became emptier and shabbier. The staff was reduced to ‘two young, inexpensive maids’, although Jane the cook refused to go. ‘I have been here a very long time,’ she said. When she eventually left, to keep house for her brother, she did so with two silent tears rolling down her cheeks. She was completely unable to get to grips with the loss of status that went with Clara’s new poverty. It had been her great delight to telephone orders in her deep Devonshire voice – ‘Six lobsters, hen lobsters’ – and to create dishes for the gourmand Frederick, who would later step down to the kitchen with a word of graceful, private thanks. Now Jane, suffering intensely, found herself tipping avalanches of rock cakes into the bin and cooking macaroni cheese for two. She had to be reminded of the realities, but there was something magnificent in her refusal to admit them. She was like the servant Dorcas in Agatha’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, with her lament to Poirot for older, grander days:

  ‘Five [gardeners] we had, before the war, when it was kept as a gentleman’s place should be. I wish you could have seen it then, sir. A fair sight it was. But now there’s only old Manning, and young William, and a new-fashioned woman gardener in breeches and suchlike. Ah, these are dreadful times!’

  ‘The good times will come again, Dorcas. At least, we hope so . . .’

  For Clara the good times were now held in her green leather case, repository of memories: of the young Frederick’s smiling visits to the Miller household; of his miraculous proposal; of his arm through hers as they walked the New York streets; of his last letter to her. By the fire in the upstairs schoolroom, or while they were filling the house with ‘great tall bouquets of white flowers’ from the garden, Clara told Agatha all these stories of her life.

  And so they found equilibrium again, mother and daughter at Ashfield.

  At the end of Barton Road Agatha could wind her way downhill through the leafy lanes that led to All Saints’ Torre, the grey Victorian church where she had been baptised, and say prayers for her father. She was a religious girl, ‘firmly and strictly orthodox’. On the way to the church she passed Vansittart Road, whose name, many years later, she used for a character – Eleanor Vansittart – in her detective novel Cat Among the Pigeons. Elsa Dittisham, Colonel Luscombe, John Christow, Jean Instow and Mildred Strete bear other place names she remembered from her Devon childhood.

  She began writing as a young girl. Her earliest surviving poem is carefully inscribed in an exercise book and dated April 1901.

  There was once a little cowslip,

  And a pretty flower too

  But yet she cried and petted,

  All for a robe of blue.

  In the same book there is a poem about her cat, ‘Ode to Christopher Columbus’, written just after the death of her father.

  There was a little kittiwinks,

  Whose name (for short) was Cris.

  His fur stood out an inch all round,

  His tail: a dream of bliss.

  She also had a poem published in an Ealing newspaper, whose first verse began:

  When first the electric trams did run,

  In all their scarlet glory . . .

  This was Agatha Christie’s first appearance in print.

  Subsequent poems made it into the Poetry Review but it was Agatha’s sister, Madge, who had more striking early success as a writer, and showed far more early ability. Before her marriage in 1902 she had had several stories – ‘Vain Tales’ – published in Vanity Fair. ‘There is no doubt that Madge was the talented member of our family,’ wrote Agatha in her autobiography. Both girls were encouraged to write, indeed to express their personalities in any way they chose. At the same time there was no thought that doing so would impugn their femininity. In that sense Clara was more enlightened than many women today, who would be quite capable of viewing Madge’s Vanity Fair successes as off-putting – ‘threatening’ – to potential husbands.

  It is a quirk of parenting, more often than is realised, to treat one’s children in the opposite way to which one was treated oneself. Clara had been ignored, had had her sensitive individuality swept aside by her upbringing. Now she shone a powerful searchlight on to her daughters’ lives. She exerted herself to empathise with every aspect of them and believed there was nothing they could not do. She would probably have been a terrible mother for an ordinary girl. As it was, she had two bright sparks – effulgent, in Madge’s case – and she kindled them to their utmost. The close influence of Clara, her high-minded literary style, lies heavy upon the poems that Agatha wrote aged around thirteen.

  Have ye walked in the wood today?

  Have ye trodden the carpet of gold?

  Have ye heard the wind stirring the leaves at your feet?

  Have ye felt the mists rising tonight?

  Have ye wept for the world’s disarray?

  Have ye counted the days that are told? . . .

  Madge was freer, and always knew her own mind. She was as like Frederick as she was her mother, very much the half-American with her dry and limber wit, her lax disregard for convention. Unlike Agatha, she felt no need to behave like a ‘good’ girl, and nobody thought the worse of her for it. She was Bess Sedgwick in At Bertram’s Hotel – impatient, adventurous, compelling – whereas Agatha was Bess’s daughter Elvira: quiet, compliant, infinitely complex. Sent to Paris to be ‘finished’, Madge took a dare to leap from the balcony on to a table in a stately tea-room. Like her father she acted in amateur dramatics and loved to dress up, once meeting a visitor in the garb of a Greek priest: this may have given Agatha the idea, often used in her books, that being an actor makes a person an automatic master of disguise (‘To assume the make-up and part of Pedro Morales was child’s play to an actor . . .).2 Late in life Madge came down to a family dinner in full cricket gear. Like her mother, she had something restless in her personality, but her abundance – excess? – of confidence meant that in her youth this turned to jokes and creativity.

  She was magnetic, sexy, quick as a fox. Not beautiful, but that did not matter: she had personality. Agatha was dazzled by her and, as a young girl, she must have been a wonderful audience to whom Madge could show off her new dresses, flaunt her beaux and get laughs with her most throwaway remarks. ‘Agatha is terribly slow!’ Madge would say, but with affection: she was fond of her silent little sister. In 1903 Agatha made a second entry in the Album of Confessions, and named ‘Mother and Madge’ as her heroines.

  As she grew older, however, she became jealous. ‘I shall be furious if she arrives “on the film” before I do!’3 wrote Agatha to her mother in 1922, by which time she herself was a published author but Madge, without warning and apparently without effort, had written a play for which she casually sought a West End producer.

  She was also, at
that point, a good deal richer than Agatha. Her marriage to James Watts – one of many suitors, who won her interest by appearing uninterested – was as lucrative as her namesake grandmother’s had been. James was heir to Abney Hall near Manchester, a vast Victorian mansion where Prince Albert had stayed and which Agatha used as the setting for several of her books. In After the Funeral the modern young cook calls the house a ‘proper old mausoleum’ and complains ‘of the immense area of the kitchen, scullery and larder, saying that it was a “day’s walk to get round them all”’. In They Do It with Mirrors Abney – or ‘Stonygates’ – is mocked outright as a ‘sort of Gothic monstrosity . . . Best Victorian Lavatory period.’ In fact the house was hugely impressive, as Agatha was only too aware.

  As a child she had loved to visit what was then the home of James Watts’s parents (‘And how is our dream-child?’ Sir James would say to her). Abney had the dimension for which she yearned: it was a world of its own, with a life of its own, seemingly infinite with its ‘quantities of rooms, passages, unexpected steps, back staircases, front staircases, alcoves, niches’.4 Although Agatha loved sunlight and airiness she was compelled by Abney’s Stygian quality, shrouded as it was from floor to ceiling in brocade curtains and tapestry hangings. Its rooms were shadowy, filled with richness and heaviness: green satin walls in the drawing-room, woodwork painted vermilion and ultramarine, oak furniture like miniature battleships. It had a magic made of depths, recesses, mysteries. Its very solidity seemed not quite real; in They Do It with Mirrors Stonygates is likened to a stage set, although ‘the illusion is in the eye of the beholder, not in the set itself’.