Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  The prescience of Philpotts’s letter was extraordinary, although not quite in the way he intended. The blissful state in which life and art co-existed would indeed come to an end for Agatha, when her world changed so completely in 1926. After that, there would be separation. Her dreams and imaginative delights would no longer weave through the whole of her life, but only through her work. Like Vernon Deyre in her first Westmacott novel, Giant’s Bread – or like Pearl Craigie, whose marriage broke down hideously – Agatha would tread the ‘hard road of art’. She would become, definitively, a writer; and, incidentally, a working woman of independent means, with a life entirely transcendent of her calm and closeted upbringing.

  The girl who longed to marry Archie Christie foresaw nothing of this; not a shred. ‘I had the normal comfortable ideas about a married life,’ she said in an interview almost sixty years later. And in her autobiography she described her longing for Archie in simple terms. A young girl like any other, on the prowl for a mate, had found ‘The Man’: a charming and commonplace story.

  But the soft meandering prose of Unfinished Portrait shows Archie to have touched deeper nerves. He was Agatha’s dream come true, in every sense: the living expression of her ineffable yearnings: ‘Something you want so much that you don’t quite know what it is.’17 He was the unknown, the dark, the free. She fell in love with him so deeply because she sensed that life, with him, would be like a piece of music or a poem. She would be an Isolde, an Elaine (‘. . . he kissed her face/At once she slipt like water to the floor’).18

  The sensible part of her wanted the daily life of marriage, the housekeeping and the ‘receipts’ book; but in her artist’s mind these were hallowed by the extraordinary fact of Archie himself. Such a contrast between the ordered breakfast table – folded copy of The Times with its personal columns on the front page, polished silver teapot, Cooper’s Oxford marmalade – and the man who sat behind it; between the immaculate corners of the fresh linen bed and the mysteries that took place within. The way he looked, long and loose-limbed and unconsciously romantic; his air of doomed vulnerability; the strange purity of his desire, so unlike the practised urgency of Bolton Fletcher: these things ranged around Agatha’s imagination, which in essence had not grown up at all. Despite her womanly craving for Archie, something in her remained childlike. ‘Then to her tower she climbed . . . and so lived in fantasy’.19

  Clara knew her daughter’s nature, and intuited what Agatha saw in Archie. ‘That young man – I don’t like him’ is the thought attributed to her in Unfinished Portrait, it was not completely true, but his powerful appeal alarmed her because she realised – as Agatha did not – that other women would see it too (‘He is attractive to women, Celia, remember that. . .’). However much Clara had wanted a happy marriage for Agatha, she had dreaded this kind of attachment. Reggie Lucy was one thing; Archie was quite another, and he made her fearful: for Agatha and herself.

  She had recognised the situation immediately, when he turned up at Ashfield on his motorbike. ‘She did not tell herself that this all might come to nothing. She believed, on the contrary, that she saw events casting their shadows before them.’20 And it was selfishness, in a sense, that made her uneasy. To be supplanted in Agatha’s affections was alarming, painful. She recognised that Archie was as strong a character as she herself was, and that he had sex on his side. Nevertheless her sustained opposition to the marriage means that she surely believed she could win the day. It was extraordinary, unprecedented, for Agatha to go against Clara’s counsel, but she was so deep in desire that the mother she adored was almost ignored. Her guilt at this periodically showed itself, as when, for instance, she broke off with Archie on account of Clara’s failing eyesight. It was easy, though, for Archie to talk her round with reassurances. Clara could only look on and hope that the delays outlasted the passion.

  Her misgivings were not just about her own jealousy, or even Archie’s lack of money. Nobody knew Agatha as Clara did: she knew her innocence, her childiike confidence in love, her ‘dangerous intensity of affection’, and she believed that her deep emotional capacity should be left unplumbed, fulfilled only in the realm of imagination. Was she right? ‘It is never a mistake to marry a man you want to marry – even if you regret it,’21 Agatha would later write, but such a thing is easily said and less easily endured. She also wrote this, in a letter to her second husband: ‘Mere love is rather an idiotic business – approved of by Nature, but capable of inflicting a lot of unhappiness on individuals.’22 As always, she was honestly uncertain: years after her marriage had ended, the artist in Agatha would continue to ponder the mystery of it.

  Certainly she would have been spared a vast amount of anguish had she allowed Clara to prevail against Archie. She would, though, have missed much else beside; things of incalculable value. In her last Westmacott novel, The Burden, she describes how the protective older sister, Laura, tries with all her might to dissuade Shirley from marrying a man who will hurt her. Yet Shirley would not have lived without that love, for all the misery it brings her. ‘I think he’s utterly selfish and – and ruthless,’ says Laura to her clever old friend, Mr Baldock. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if you weren’t right,’ he replies.

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘Yes, but she likes the fellow, Laura. She likes him very much. In fact, she’s crazy about him. Young Henry mayn’t be your cup of tea, and strictly speaking, he isn’t my cup of tea, but there’s no doubt that he is Shirley’s cup of tea . . .’

  Later, Shirley accuses Laura of jealousy. ‘You don’t want me to love anyone but you,’ she says. ‘You’ll never want me to marry anyone.’’ And she takes on Laura’s accusation of Henry’s ruthlessness: ‘It’s one of those things that attracts me in him.’ Agatha would never have said – or thought – any of this at the time; as always in the Westmacotts she is uncovering the perceptions that had lain within, understood in a way that went beneath acknowledgement. ‘Don’t worry about Henry,’ Shirley says to Laura. ‘He loves me.’ Which is what Agatha undoubtedly believed back in 1913; and rightly so; although forty years later she realised that love was not so simple. ‘“Love?” thought Laura. “What is love?”’ Not an immutable entity, as Agatha had once thought, but the possession of two separate people; who, however much they ‘love’ each other, have a different capacity for feeling.

  Meanwhile Clara clung to the hope that this was ‘not love: but love’s first flash in youth’, as Lancelot says to Elaine. Again, might she have been right? Elaine dies of love but it is absurd that she does so; she did not know Lancelot; she could not really have loved him. Normality could have broken through and told her that this was ‘illusion – nothing but illusion’, as Agatha later wrote as Mary Westmacott. ‘The illusion that mutual attraction between man and woman breeds. Nature’s lure, Nature’s last and most cunning piece of deceit . . ,’23

  But Elaine’s imaginative capacity was such that this, for her, was love. And the pressure of Tennyson’s poetic world ensures that escape is not possible, that youthful passion must push itself towards a fateful intensity. Thus in 1913: when opposition to the marriage, rupture and reunion, made the love between Agatha and Archie ever more precious and necessary. And the following year: when the thick feel of death in the air, terrible and almost glamorous, helped twine love so tight around Agatha’s soul that she would never quite be free of it.

  So this was love, then. ‘I do really love you,’ wrote Archie to Agatha. ‘No one else would be the same to me. Never desert me darling and always love me.’24 His letters were kept in one of the leather cases in the chest of drawers at Greenway House: the case marked with Agatha’s initials, which among other things contained the notebook in which Archie recorded the events of his life, his Royal Flying Corps badge, and a card sent from No. 3 Squadron, Netheravon, Wiltshire, on which he had written ‘To Miss Miller in memoriam Christmas 1912’. There was also a photograph of Archie in uniform, on the back of which Agatha had written: ‘There shall no evil happen unt
o thee; Neither shall any plague . . .’

  When war broke out it was as Agatha said in Unfinished Portrait: ‘War, for most women, is the destiny of one person.’ She did not notice the curtain fall upon the world she had known: the afternoons on croquet lawns, the tea-tables and picture hats casting their shadows, the scent of rose in the air. Simply she knew that the man she loved was going to France and might never come back. Thus the hot, sultry summer of 1914 ended, for Agatha, on 3 August, when she and Clara took a train journey to Salisbury to say goodbye to Archie, who left for France nine days later.

  Dermot in khaki – a different Dermot – very jerky and flippant, with haunted eyes. No one knows about this new war – it’s the kind of war where no one might come back . . . New engines of destruction. The air – nobody knows about the air . . .

  Celia and Dermot were two children clinging together . . .25

  Agatha had moved from her bedroom window at Ashfield, down the steep hill of Barton Road, towards the gleaming bay of Torquay. She had tripped on her high heels to garden parties, house-parties, racing parties. She had wandered through the sunlit gardens and dark forests of her imagination. Beyond that, there was nothing; and she had felt the need for nothing. She had smiled and tonged her hair, danced and dreamed, and that life was all the life there was. The campaign for women’s suffrage; the birth of the Labour Party; Lloyd George and his People’s Budget; the Parliament Act, which rendered the House of Lords essentially impotent; the movements of the great imperial powers, like lumbering chesspieces on a vast board: these passed over her. ‘A murdered archduke, a “war scare” in the newspapers – such things barely entered her consciousness.’26 Through her father, the haunted look she had seen in his eyes when the family returned from France at the end of the century, she had felt the first intimations that told her society was changing, that it would no longer be owned by the leisured, the easeful, the disengaged. But she was never a political animal. She absorbed the world by more instinctive means. ‘No civilised nations went to war’ was the thinking of the time, as she wrote in her autobiography; until, all of a sudden, they did; and Agatha, whose life up to that point had been wrapped as tenderly as a baby in its swaddling, was dropped like a stone into this stark new world.

  As ever, the Westmacotts lay bare the fear she had felt, without expressing it, at the time. ‘Oh, God, let him come back to me . . ,’27 Meanwhile the autobiography shows the Agatha who could face facts squarely. It describes the dreadful parting with Archie at Salisbury – ‘I remember going to bed that night and crying and crying until I thought I would never stop’ – but then passes on to describe her hurrying off, full of energy, to begin service as a VAD in Torquay. The impression is of a young girl taking her changed circumstances in her stride, uncomplaining and unquestioning. This is reinforced by the recorded interview that Agatha gave, in vibrant old age, to the Imperial War Museum. ‘I thought oh well I’d like to become a VAD. And so I started orf on that . . . I was engaged then, to the young man who became my first husband, and he had just been accepted in the RAF [in fact the RFC] . . . so that I felt, you know, mixed up in it completely and wanted to have a part in it.’

  More than fifty years’ distance lent a degree of objectivity to Agatha’s spoken reminiscences of the war. Nevertheless she described her nursing duties in a peculiarly realistic, pragmatic way; it is hard to grasp that this girl had emerged from so utterly protected a life, that she had gone with such a lack of fuss from her silly, jolly garden parties into the death-scented hospital wards. Of course no other kind of behaviour would have occurred to her. What had to be, had to be. Only Mary Westmacott thought to cry out in protest.

  On attending her first operation, for example, Agatha described in the Imperial War Museum recording how she ‘began to shake all over. And Sister Anderson took me outside and she said, “Now listen to me. You know what really makes you feel faint is the fact that you’re going into an atmosphere of ether – you can’t help but feel faint. But everything in life, one gets used to. Look in a different place – at somebody else’s toe. And in the end that will be quite all right . . . Similarly with amputations: ‘I went into one or two . . . If there had been an amputation and there had been things lying around – the legs or the arms – some of the youngest girls had to take these things down and put them in the furnace.’ One of those girls, aged around eleven, had been grievously upset (although ‘she got all right by the end’). So Agatha helped her ‘clean up the floor down there – and stuck it in the furnace myself. There are so many odd things that you have to do in hospital.’

  So complex was Agatha that, despite her extreme sensitivity, she could take the necessary attitude towards nursing – efficient, sensible, kindly, detached – and enjoy what she was doing. After the war she said that she would have liked very much to become a nurse, and might have done so had she not got married – ‘I would have been very good at it.’28 Again she suffered none of the frustrations shown in Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, which portrays VAD work as innately, pointlessly horrific: wasting one’s own life looking after young men whose lives had been wasted. Agatha, conversely, saw nursing as ‘very satisfactory’. She did her duty, smilingly. She found humour in her days: in the love letters that she helped her young men to write to their girlfriends – ‘they usually had three’ – and in the trips to the X-ray unit at the other hospital across town. ‘They said to me, “Mind you keep an eye on your little bunch, when you take them out. You do realise what they’re looking for, don’t you?” And I said, “Well, what are they looking for? One of them was looking at shoes.” “That wouldn’t have been next door but one to the Goat and Compass?” I said, “Well, I think there was a public house!” They learned very soon where all the pubs were . . ,’29

  If she was tormented by the wreckage, the beautiful boys with their missing limbs, the dirt and blood and phlegm, she did not say so. She must have been shocked, not least because she was plunged into intimacy with male bodies at a time when, as a young virgin, her knowledge of men would have derived from reproductions of Michelangelo’s David. Suddenly she was dealing with bed-baths and bed-pans (‘There was a special thing, you know, that they pushed on that’) and, because she had a fiancé, was regarded as sufficiently worldly to handle the more harrowing tasks. ‘They said, “It’s better for you, because you’re married” – I said, “No, I’m not married yet,” but they said – “It’s better, really”.’ The fact is that nobody could have been more innocent than the Agatha of late summer 1914. And she dealt with it easily, that sudden transition into reality; in some mysterious way, she remained untouched by it.

  Stella stood meekly by the side of Sister [she wrote in a fragment of an early unfinished novel]. Her hands, freshly scrubbed, held the pile of sterilised dressings . . . What would it be like, Stella wondered, to have someone belonging to you out there? Most girls had, she supposed. She herself was one of the exceptions. She had been studying music in Paris when war broke out . . . Stella was a solitary creature. Her mind fed on itself to a large extent. She read a great deal and thought profoundly. She was serious – with the pathetic earnest seriousness of the young.

  For all that she saw and experienced, Agatha still lived in her dreams. In Unfinished Portrait she does not work as a VAD but stays at home, looking after her grandmother (Margaret Miller did come to live at Ashfield, having almost lost her sight), and remembering her imaginary childhood friends: ‘How keep herself from thinking of Dermot – out there?

  ‘In desperation she married off “the Girls”! Isabella married a rich Jew, Elsie married an explorer. Ella became a schoolteacher . . .’

  Of course the real Agatha grew up a good deal. Walking every day to the hospital set up in the old town hall; hearing every day of the death of some former dance partner, wondering every day if this would be Archie’s last; making the long, lonely walk home to Ashfield, either heavy with thoughts or plagued by ‘rather drunken’ soldiers. ‘My grandmother didn’t like it
– “Not at all suitable,” she said, “you ought to have someone to come down and meet you and chaperone you.” I said, “Well, they can’t spare anyone to do things like that . . .”’30

  It was a desperate time for Agatha, yet she did not feel it as entirely desperate. Eventually it would be over and her world restored. Not the world around her – that, she Knew, would be changed – but her world. As long as she was young and pretty, as long as Archie was writing letters of adoration, as long as Ashfield bloomed safe and home to Clara, then life would still be Agatha’s plaything. Like Nell Vereker in Giant’s Bread, who becomes a VAD, she would still be ‘Nell – Nell with her golden hair and her sweet smile’.

  Nell marries Vernon Deyre just after the outbreak of war.

  Lots of girls were doing it – flinging up everything, marrying the man they cared for no matter how poor he was. After the war something would turn up. That was the attitude. And behind it lay that awful secret fear that you never took out and looked at properly. The nearest you ever got to it was saying defiantly: ‘And no matter what happens, we’ll have had something . . .’

  And so Agatha married Archie, on Christmas Eve 1914. He was on his first leave and Agatha told Clara that she thought now was the time to get married; Clara, no doubt recognising that control had been wrested from her by circumstances – she supported Agatha’s VAD work, for instance – said that she would feel exactly the same in Agatha’s situation. It was Archie, this time, who was against the idea. He was flippant, which Agatha failed to realise was his way of dealing with fear, and fed her what was then the RFC line on marriage: ‘You stop one, you’ve had it, and you’ve left behind a young widow, perhaps a child coming – it’s selfish and wrong.’ Agatha did not care for this. Nor did she care for Archie’s Christmas present to her: not a ring or even any kind of jewellery, but a luxuriously impersonal dressing-case, which she refused, somewhat hysterically, to accept. Then, on the night of 23 December, everything changed again. Archie strode assertively into her bedroom at Peg Hemsley’s house in Bristol, where they were staying for Christmas, and said they must get married the next day. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ It frightened Agatha a little, this sudden decisiveness of Archie’s, the way it could override a different view of which he had previously been equally sure. ‘But – but you were so certain.’