Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  As usual, Clara had gone to the heart of things. Reggie had proposed to Agatha during ten days’ leave, after which he knew he would not return to Devon for some time; two years, as it happened. And he insisted that she should, throughout that time, consider herself free. It was an attitude with which, again, she was comfortable so unlike the disturbing persistence of Bolton Fletcher – but which left her annoyed (should a man not be more assertive, more jealous?) and a little scared. It was as if she knew that somebody else would come along; that she would choose the unknown man over Reggie; and that this would be the wrong thing to do.

  Hercule Poirot said softly:

  ‘. . . Can you not accept facts? She loved Roderick Welman. What of it? With you, she can be happy.’7

  In Unfinished Portrait Agatha thought a good deal about Reggie, or ‘Peter’ as she called him. She considered the results of his folly in not marrying her instantly, as she had begged him to do. Women often think about the men of their youth, wondering if they have let go the one with whom they would have been happiest; but Agatha did, in this case, have cause. Why did Reggie back off? Because of his nature: he had the Lucy trait of laissez-aller and, in his decent humility, he felt he did not have the right to keep Agatha from other offers. Hence the letter ‘Peter’ writes when Celia tells him she is going to marry ‘Dermot’, as Archie Christie is called (‘It was exactly like Peter. So like Peter that Celia cried over it’).

  ‘Don’t blame yourself, Celia. It was my fault entirely . . . The truth of it is you feel he’s got more guts than I had. I ought to have taken you at your word when you wanted to marry me . . . He’s a better man than I am – your Dermot . . .’

  Agatha did not think that Archie was a better man than Reggie. In her early letters to her second husband, written not long before Unfinished Portrait, she thanked him over and over again for his ‘kindness’, the quality in which Reggie had been abundant and Archie was not. ‘Not considerate,’ Clara said of him; ‘ruthless.’ Nor did he have any money, which caused the one moment of bitterness in ‘Peter’s’ letter. ‘And now you’ve fallen in love with someone poorer than I am.’

  Archie had eighty pounds a year, and no prospects of family inheritance. Agatha’s hundred-pound annuity, meanwhile, was to be given up to Clara. Chaflins in New York, of which Frederick’s father had been a partner, had finally collapsed in 1913, taking with it Clara’s tiny income (Margaret Miller had moved her money out some time earlier). Mr Chaflin himself guaranteed Clara three hundred pounds a year from his personal fortune and, with help from Agatha and Madge, this would allow her to stay at Ashfield; by now Clara was determined to keep her home, which she saw as a magical protection against change.

  Of course Agatha wanted to give her money in support of Ashfield. But she was in a difficult position: without her income, marriage to Archie seemed impossible. ‘I told Archie that I could never marry him, that we should have to forget each other,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘Archie refused to listen to this. Somehow or other he was going to make money. We would get married, and he might even be able to help support my mother. He made me confident and hopeful. We got engaged again.’

  On other occasions it would be Archie who said that marriage was impossible, and Agatha who talked him round. Clara, though, was consistently against the idea: there was not enough money, she said, and that was that. In fact her misgivings went deeper. But this was her best argument, the hardest for Archie to counter; although the two maintained a wary cordiality, Clara remained obdurate.

  Leaving aside her more complex emotions, it must have frustrated her to see Agatha reject a procession of eligible men in favour of this penniless pilot. Marriage was the conventional route, but Archie was by no means a conventional choice. Madge, for all her ‘daring’, had played it infinitely safer when she accepted James Watts, and there would have been far less risk attached to rich Bolton Fletcher, stolid Wilfred Pirie or kindly Reggie Lucy. Life in the RFC, while it held prospects for promotion, was almost ludicrously precarious. There was also a more subtle point. The Piries and Lucys were family friends; Fletcher was a friend of friends; the Christies were not ‘known’ to the Millers, and had it not been for his soldiering career Archie would have been unlikely to come into Agatha’s orbit. She was, in fact, of a slightly higher social class. Clara, who had similarly married above herself, may well have pondered the outcome of a meeting between her late husband, the refined Frederick, and Archie’s Irish mother Ellen, known as ‘Peg’.

  Peg had made a good marriage, to a judge in the Indian Civil Service (Archie was born in Murree). But when her husband died after a fall from his horse she had settled in England, where life was not easy. At the turn of the century, while the Millers were living with their servants at Ashfield, Peg was lodging with Campbell, Archie’s brother, in a house in Bristol;8 Archie was at prep school in Godaiming. She was good-looking – as were her sons – and later married a man named William Hemsley, who proved her saviour: he was kind, solid and – most usefully – a schoolmaster at Clifton College, where Archie later became head of school. But this was some distance from the world of the Union Club on New York’s Fifth Avenue, in which Frederick had been so very much at home.

  Of course Archie was wholly gentlemanly. There is no doubt, though, that Agatha was thrown by Peg’s manner, a mixture of gush, dislike and jealousy. It was ironic that Campbell Christie should have warned Agatha that his mother was ‘dangerous’: an identical judgement to the one that her granddaughter later made about Clara. There were, indeed, similarities between the two women. Peg was as possessive a mother as Clara and equally, though not consistently, opposed to the marriage. The difference – which, in Agatha’s eyes, was the fundamental difference between a lady and a non-lady, a distinction she never shied from making – was that Clara could hide her feelings. Peg hid nothing. This, for Agatha, was an entirely new experience. She had seen her mother lose control briefly after Frederick’s death, but decorum had been restored as a matter of principle, and all her life Agatha would value the ability to maintain a façade. ‘I remember my dear mother9 telling me that a gentlewoman should always be able to control herself in public, however much she may give way in private’, was how Miss Marple put it.10

  Archie paid no attention whatever to his mother and her oddities. ‘True to temperament,’ wrote Agatha in her autobiography, ‘[he] was not particularly interested in what she thought of me or I of her. He had the happy attitude of going through life without the least interest in what anyone thought of him or his belongings: his mind was always entirely bent on what he wanted himself.’

  Which, in 1913, was Agatha. This beautiful and mysterious man wanted her so badly that he demanded they marry instantly, without waiting and without seeking to please anybody but themselves.

  To Agatha it was ‘fate’: her female destiny. Having been brought up to express herself in any way she chose, she expected only to marry. This was her upbringing, which she had no urge to question. Girls of her sort did not have careers. They had husbands. Her father had been horrified by the thought of his lovely, lively Madge among the earnest bluestockings of Girton, and his wife did not disagree with him: the care with which she had had to tread through her own early life had left her, in some ways, deeply conventional. She wanted happiness for her daughters, and to her that meant marriage. Agatha believed this too; or so she believed. In Evil Under the Sun Poirot discusses the question with the successful clothes designer, Rosamund Darnley.

  ‘To marry and have children, that is the common lot of women. Only one woman in a hundred – more, in a thousand, can make for herself a name and a position as you have done.’

  Rosamund grinned at him.

  ‘And yet, all the same, I’m nothing but a wretched old maid!’

  The book ends with Rosamund blissfully abandoning her business for love. And Agatha, despite her extraordinary achievements, would always assert that a career was a man’s job – ‘Men have much better brains than women, d
on’t you think?’11 was a typical comment – and that the true value of a woman lay within the personal arena. ‘It makes me feel that, after all, I have not been a failure in life – that I have succeeded as a wife,’ she wrote to her second husband, Max, in 1943.

  So as a girl she never chafed against the limits of her life: the conventions, the corsets, the need to speak low or to sing to a teddy-bear. Unlike her near-contemporary Dorothy L. Sayers – who, at the time of Agatha’s entry into the marriage market, was chewing the intellectual fat over cocoa at Somerville – she had no desire to break free. She felt free anyway. Her imagination was infinite; her creative fires burned within a brazier of contentment. There was nothing of the Shavian ‘new woman’ in Agatha, striding towards a future of sexual equality. For all that she loved the novels of May Sinclair, she shared none of her feminist concerns. The frustrations of a girl like Vera Brittain, then at Oxford with Sayers, whose Testament of Youth rages against the male-dominated conventions of the time, would have been utterly remote to her.

  The truth is that she liked a man’s world. She saw beyond it, although not in a political sense; later she would live beyond it, with her success and self-sufficiency; yet she loved being female, and never felt circumscribed by her sex. She had grown up in a matriarchy, after all. And she understood – as ‘cleverer’ girls, perhaps, do not – that female strength could show itself in many different ways: that a Margaret Miller, indomitable within her well-run ménage, had at least as much power as a woman in the public sphere. She also knew that women need not appear strong in order to be so. The fragile little Mrs Franklin in Curtain is despised for her wiles by the grave young scientist, Judith. ‘She’s a very stupid woman,’ says Judith, but Poirot wisely replies: ‘She uses her grey cells in ways that you, my child, know nothing about.’ Agatha never despised femininity, even in its most foolish form, although sometimes she pitied it. All her life she valued what she had had – beauty, attraction, natural physical allure – and then lost. ‘What’s the good of a woman like that?’ asks a character in Dead Man’s Folly of the gorgeous, empty-headed Lady Stubbs. Again, Poirot defends her. ‘One needs roots as well as flowers on a plant . . .’

  Agatha always defended the right to leisure – ‘Without it, where are you?’ – and held that sensible women knew when they were well-off, controlling the home with an authoritative finger and their men with a compliant smile. But it was a profound contradiction in her, that she put so high a value on doing nothing yet became so compulsively industrious. In fact she had a deep regard for working women. Not the strident ones who waved the feminist flag, like the politician Lady Westholme in Appointment with Death, proclaiming that ‘If anything is to be accomplished, mark my words, it is women who will do it.’ No, Agatha admired the servants like Jane the cook, producing five-course dinners without turning a hair; the poor girls like Midge in The Hollow, battling through the days in her terrible dress shop; the impoverished ladies like Miss Carnaby, the paid companion in The Labours of Hercules (‘I’m not a clever woman at all, and I’ve no training and I’m getting older – and I’m so terrified for the future . . .’); the women who pursued a vocation, teachers in particular. As Dorothy L. Sayers made clear in her Oxford novel, Gaudy Night, this tended to be a celibate life, which made it alien to Agatha. But she always portrayed it as worthy of absolute respect: ‘Miss Williams’ life had been interesting to her,’ she wrote of the governess in Five Little Pigs. ‘She had that enormous mental and moral advantage of a strict Victorian upbringing . . . she had done her duty in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call her, and that assurance encased her in an armour impregnable to the slings and darts of envy, discontent and regret.’

  Later came the headmistress Miss Bulstrode in Cat Among the Pigeons, full of ‘cosmopolitan aplomb’ who, when murder comes to her school, sits ‘cool and unmoved, with her lifework falling in ruins about her’. A version of this character appeared in Third Girl, Hallowe’en Party and, finally, as the doomed Miss Temple in Nemesis. ‘A handsome woman, and a woman of personality. Yes, a thousand pities, Miss Marple thought, a thousand pities if the world was going to lose Elizabeth Temple.’

  Agatha had not been taught by this kind of woman. But she had known one as a friend. Eileen Morris was a very different type from the charming, carefree Lucys. A natural and unresentful spinster, who lived in a big house overlooking the sea with her five maiden aunts, she was a few years older than Agatha but by around 1909, the age difference had ceased to matter and the two became close. At Greenway House there is a folded copy of one of Eileen’s poems, ‘Darnley to the Queen’, which has little artistry but much controlled intelligence. Eileen told Agatha to send her own work to the Poetry Review, to whom she sold the odd thing – including her Commedia dell’ Arte poems – for a guinea.

  ‘Eileen was rather plain, but she had a remarkable mind.’12 Her brother was the schoolmaster, but Eileen herself was the very model of one of Agatha’s sharp-brained, distinguished, energetic teachers. ‘She was the first person I had come across with whom I could discuss ideas.’ Agatha herself had a different type of mind, more fluid and diffuse; although she held strong opinions, it was her writerly strength to be able to doubt them. Nor did she trust concepts, theories or ideologies, being always of the opinion that human nature did not fit easily into them. Yet with Eileen she liked to talk about these things. It was perhaps the unaccustomed freedom within their friendship that led to this speech, in Agatha’s first novel Snow Upon the Desert. Rosamund Vaughan, who measures her worth solely according to male values, suddenly speaks with a new and wholly honest female voice.

  ‘It seems to be an accepted idea that every woman will strive to live up to a man’s ideal of her – that she will be grateful for his idealisation of her. It’s not a bit true! One has, if anything, a contempt for people who can’t see you as you are! . . .

  ‘Oh! One gets sick, tired, bored of being admired for impossible imaginary qualities! I’m not a cross between an angel and a hospital nurse. What respect can I have for the brains of anyone who thinks I am? I’ve got some good points. Why don’t they admire those?’

  Those thoughts had lurked somewhere within the nineteen-year-old Agatha, as she danced in her pink dresses and made dutiful, decorously flirtatious conversation; somewhere she felt the desire for a different kind of life, a true liberation. But she was too happy, as a young girl, to care about it. She had no urge to ‘be herself’ in the modern sense. ‘You are lovely and interesting and sweet to everyone,’ Archie wrote to her, and this was what she wanted to hear. ‘You are lovely and perfect in every way.’ If he thought this because Agatha presented herself to him as an impossible ideal, that was fine by her: she knew he would not have written such things to a girl who looked or expressed herself as Eileen Morris did. Agatha was glad of her superior attractions, her success as a female, however strong the lure of Eileen’s superior mind.

  The irony is that, of the two, it was Agatha who forged the career; this despite her lack of formal education, her indifference to the notion of sexual equality, her complacent contentment with the status quo. But it was Agatha’s very imperviousness to the way she ought to be thinking that, in the end, made her such a surprising and singular talent.

  Of course she absorbed, she observed, she listened. She was susceptible to the powerful personalities of her mother, of Madge, of Eileen. Her early writings bear the imprint of what she had been reading: Poe, Sinclair, D. H. Lawrence.13 ‘I was trying things, like one does.’14 Yet in some way she was always proof against outside influence. All her life she would – with only the most occasional exceptions – ignore any suggestions made about her writing. She followed her instincts with a rare certainty.

  Agatha herself would probably not have understood what she was doing; or why, as a merry young girl leading a life of infinite pleasure, she was at the same time seeking the solitude in which to write stories, poems and a full-length novel; why, when deep in love with a young
man whom she longed to marry, she was pursuing the ambition of publication. She saw no contradiction in any of this. Women today are tormented by the separation between work and life, between private and social fulfilment, between individuality and biology; it did not occur to Agatha to think in such a way. She had a simplicity that resolved her complexities.

  But a letter from Eden Philpotts – who had been so generous about Snow Upon the Desert – hinted at the conflicts that might later arise. Agatha had shown him a further story entitled ‘Being So Very Wilful’, a quotation from the Elaine section of Idylls of the King. The story no longer exists but Philpotts was impressed by it, so much so that he dignified it with this remarkable reply:

  All is going exceedingly well with your work and should life so fall out for you that it has room for art and if you can face the uphill fight to take your place and win it, you have the gifts sufficient. I never prophesy; but I should judge that if you can write like this now you might go far. However life knocks the art out of a good many people and your environment in the time to come may substitute for the hard road of art a different one. The late Mrs Craigie15 was about the only woman I know who stuck to hard work for love of it. But then circumstances combined to make her do so.16