Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  ‘What does that matter? I’ve changed my mind.’

  The following day was exciting, unnerving, a confused rush upon fate. The marriage seemed impossible. Peg wailed in horror at the idea; nobody could perform the ceremony without notice; and all of this made Agatha and Archie all the more determined to do it. Finally they were married in Archie’s local parish church, at a cost of eight pounds for the licence. Agatha wore her street clothes. The music was played by an organist who happened to be practising. The witness was a friend who – in what must have seemed a benign coincidence – was passing the church at the time. ‘It made us both laugh,’ wrote Agatha, of this odd wedding. She told Clara about it only when it was over. The news was accepted, as of course it had to be, and in the light of Peg’s reaction it was agreed that Agatha and Archie would spend Christmas Day at Ashfield, after their one night of honeymoon. It was late by the time they took a train to Torquay. Agatha held her new dressing-case in one hand, Archie’s hand in the other as she walked the few yards from the station to the Grand Hotel, perched high above the seafront, overlooking the calm, dark bay.

  Christmas was a happy day spent with Clara and Madge (who had been furious with Agatha over her bombshell – ‘You are absolutely unfeeling!’ – but got over it). On Boxing Day Agatha went to London with Archie, there to say goodbye to him for another six months, before returning to the hospital and a good deal of teasing from her patients. ‘I heard some little knot of soldiers saying, Well, I think Miss Miller’s done very well for herself. She’s married an officer in the RFC.’31

  Archie went back to France. His notebook logged his movements throughout the war, beginning: ‘2nd August First day of mobilisation. Dined in Salisbury on 3rd and 4th.’ Then: ‘21st December Went on first leave. 24th to Bristol later Torquay. 26th Back to London. 30th Went to 1st Wing Headquarters.’ This was the controlled side of Archie, who – like Major Despard in Cards on the Table, decisively crossing out his bridge scores as he goes – ‘likes to know at a glance where he stands at every moment’. There was another Archie though, fragile and childlike, who touched Agatha’s soul in a way that was not maternal but something more complex and poetical. Later in the war he wrote to her:

  Back again. The train journey was alright. I lay dazed in my corner . . . I got here about five had a cup of tea at the county cottage and am now facing war. I feel weak as a kitten but will go to bed straight after dinner.

  I am sure you don’t know, my darling, how I love the way you cheered me up especially yesterday. If I had not had you I should have quite broken down.

  Write often. I would have loved to have found a letter here from you tonight.32

  In Giant’s Bread Nell wears Vernon’s wartime letters against her heart: ‘the indelible pencil came off on her skin’. So Archie’s words had rubbed into Agatha beneath her crisp VAD uniform. ‘It was so wonderful, so very wonderful, to be loved.’ And Archie did love her: ‘I love you much too much – more than ever now – to take any risks, for death only means to me being separated from you.’ He loved her air of unassailable serenity, her sweet voice, her long pale hair and cool fresh slimness. He loved the way she held his hands when he stretched them out towards her like a lost little boy. He felt that she understood the Archie who lay beneath the Clifton head of school, the glamorous officer pilot; she knew his weak stomach and poor nerves, his neediness, his fear; she would always be there to help him.

  The letters sent before the war show Archie’s innate vulnerability. ‘My dearest Angel,’ he wrote in March 1914, from his RFC base in Netheravon, ‘Your letter and the violets were most consoling though I am still unhappy inwardly – despite the fact that I have finished a bottle of tonic since you finished the dregs of the last bottle. You are full of pluck and courage . . .’ Later he asked Agatha: ‘What I want most is a letter from you to say you are quite well and not worried about all this flying.’ This was to reassure Archie himself, of course, that he had nothing to worry about. More than obviously he did – photographs of his Cody biplane show it as insubstantial as one of the houses that Poirot would later build from a deck of cards – but the pragmatist in him was still determined on success in a piloting career.

  For your sake, more than for my own, I am taking no risks and feel perfectly confident that no harm can come to me. That poor fellow who was killed was not safe in any machine. He hated flying the Cody but did not like to refuse when he was asked to; showing a lack of moral courage. I am terribly sorry for his family – so much so that I will give up the Corps if you are really very unhappy about it but I know I am perfectly safe – I always carry St Christopher with me.

  Before the war Agatha was not, according to her autobiography, particularly worried about Archie’s job. ‘Flying was dangerous – but then so was hunting, and I was used to people breaking their necks in the hunting field.’ This may have been true, but at the same time Agatha had a rather self-conscious attitude towards physical risk: she thought it aristocratic to take it on. She liked the idea of Archie as a daredevil. It was grand; it was as it should be. ‘That disposition to take risks wras what she admired most about Dermot,’ she wrote in Unfinished Portrait. ‘He was not afraid of life.’ She always attacked the bourgeois doctrine of ‘Safety First’ (‘In my opinion all the people who spend their lives avoiding being run over by buses had much better be run over and put safely out of the way. They’re no good.’)33 And she applied this philosophy to women – the best kind – as well as to men. She herself had gone up in an aeroplane at an exhibition in 1911, when planes ‘were crashing every day’. Her books, particularly the early ones, are full of girls who show class by refusing to show fear. ‘Just a moment she paused, then, with a little gallant toss of the head, the same toss of the head with which her ancestors had gone into action in the Crusades, she passed through . . .’34

  But, for all this, Archie’s letters show that Agatha did worry about his flying; how could she not? ‘There is no machine for me to fly at present (Don’t say hurrah or words to that effect because I am going to take more care than ever now),’ he wrote to her from Netheravon, He continued with an expression of his own concern. ‘Do take care of yourself. You hate being told this I know but you are so very precious to me that I can’t bear to think of you being ill or unhappy or wanting anything you could possibly have.’ In fact Archie hated the realities of misery, as he had told her early on in their relationship: ‘It spoils everything for me.’ Because of this Clara had feared his lack of consideration, his ruthlessness.

  ‘But he was not ruthless to her,’ Celia says of herself in Unfinished Portrait, thinking how wrong her mother had been. ‘He was young, diffident, very much in love, and Celia was his first love.’

  The first leave after the wedding – logged in Archie’s notebook: ‘July 1915 London’ – was naturally a let-down. Too much pressure on too little time made relaxation impossible. ‘It was like some queer delirious dream,’ wrote Agatha of the same situation in Giant’s Bread.

  They were in some ways like strangers to each other. He was offhand when she spoke about France. It was all right – everything was all right. One made jokes about it and refused to treat it seriously . . . When he asked her what she had been doing she could only give him hospital news, and that he didn’t like. He begged her again to give it up. ‘It’s a filthy job, nursing. I hate to think of your doing it . . .’

  This was not entirely Archie’s view. He did not interfere to that extent in Agatha’s business. But he probably liked to think of her as a precious dream of home, untouched by war: the open-hearted girl who at the start of the year had sent him ‘The A A Alphabet for 1915’.

  A is for Angel, by nature (?) and name And also for Archibald, spouse of the same.

  B is his BATH!!! Most important of matters . . .

  Z, for the Zest of that wonderful pair

  The Archibald Christies, who make their bow here!

  Her heartrending lack of embarrassment was matched by Archie’s in 1
916, when he sent to Agatha an analysis of her character by – as he called himself – ‘The Omniscient One’:

  A kindly and affectionate disposition

  Fond of animals except worms and cockchafers, fond of human

  beings except husbands (on principle)

  Normally lazy but can develop and maintain great energy

  Sound in limb and eye, wind not good up hill

  Full of intelligence and artistic taste

  Unconventional and inquisitive

  Face good, especially hair; figure good and skin excellent.

  Can wheedle well.

  Wild but if once captured would make a loving and affectionate wife.

  By the time of his first leave Archie had been seconded into the Royal Field Artillery, where he was promoted to captain. His sinuses – which had played him up from the first and caused intolerable pain in the air – eventually prevented him continuing as a pilot. Later he moved into administration, at which he was able: a 1917 letter described how he was

  glued to a telephone till 11pm last night and my temper is not so sweet in consequence. I sentenced a man to 28 days of what the Daily Mirror used to call ‘crucifixion’ i.e. being tied to a tree, and undergoing other punishments and fatigue, because he refused to work, went absent without leave, and pretended to be sick when he was not.

  The only person I care about today is you. And I do really love you . . . Never desert me darling and always love me.

  Agatha worried less about Archie when he was no longer flying, probably believing that his sinuses had saved his life. But as one military historian wrote: ‘The war of 1914-1918 was an artillery war: artillery was the battle-winner, artillery was what caused the greatest loss of life, the most dreadful wounds, and the deepest fear.’34 And Archie was a determined soldier, as his record shows. His notebook logged his ‘Promotions etc’, which included being mentioned in despatches four times (by General Sir John French in October 1914), receiving a DSO and the Order of St Stanislaus 3rd Class (‘So beautiful I would have liked to have worn it myself,’ wrote Agatha), and ending the war as a colonel.

  He had been through it, in other words. But when he came home in September 1918 – a little early because he had been posted to the Air Ministry – he was alive and sound and apparently the same as ever. For Agatha, it was a simple miracle (‘O the Ovation that husbands receive/From affectionate wives when they come home on leave’). She did not need – or want – to think about it. Only after the Second World War, with which she was far less intensely engaged, did she consider what the first had actually meant to men like Archie. Taken at the Flood, 4.50 from Paddington and the Westmacott novel The Rose and the Yew Tree ponder the question of the soldier’s post-war life. The fiercely tormented David Hunter; the lost boy Bryan Eastley; the charming pragmatist John Gabriel: they were all created by Agatha after 1945 and they all have something of Archie in them: they all knew what it was like to sleep and wake with death, to live with it as intimately as with a wife, then come home to a world that expects them to return, gratefully, to their former selves. By then Agatha understood the terrible energy that these men carried with them. In 1918 she had scarcely a clue.

  Her creation Captain Hastings had been invalided home in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, but in fact the war made scant appearance in the book. Agatha wrote it in 1916, between Archie’s leaves and her hospital work. That she should have done so is a great and glorious mystery in itself. But there it is: out of almost nowhere, almost the complete article.

  One can explain it, up to a point. Agatha had been writing all her life. She had already completed a novel, Snow Upon the Desert, which hinted at the themes of her detective fiction (although it was poorly structured, which augured badly). She had enjoyed Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Tellow Room, Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin stories and, of course, Conan Doyle: the genre was modish in the early twentieth century, so it is perhaps not so hard to imagine that a clever girl might have a shot at it. And then there was the factor of Madge, always a thorn in Agatha’s competitive side. According to the autobiography, the sisters had discussed the recently published The Mystery of the Tellow Room and Agatha had said she would like to write a detective story; to which Madge replied that she, too, had thought of doing so, and did not believe that Agatha could pull it off. ‘I should like to try.’

  ‘Well, I bet you couldn’t.’

  Leroux’s novel was published in 1908 so, if this was indeed how the seed was sown in Agatha, it waited eight years before flowering. But in all probability this was the starting-point. To do something that Madge could not; how sweet that would be.

  Then there was the job at the Torquay dispensary, which kicked Agatha’s imagination to a new and more decided place. After a bad bout of flu in 1916, she found on her return to the hospital that a dispensary had opened, with her friend Eileen Morris in joint charge. It seemed sensible to take a job there, on a salary of sixteen pounds per annum, as the hours were shorter than on the wards and as Agatha’s home duties were considerable (her grandmother was quite a handful, and there were now only two elderly maids in the house). In fact she preferred nursing to dispensing. Eileen’s organised and scholarly brain left Agatha way behind when it came to the theory of chemistry, and in 1917 she received just 50/100 – ‘average’ – in her practical pharmacy exam with the Society of Apothecaries in London.

  But dispensing, for all that Agatha found its principles elusive and its practice monotonous, interested her in other ways. The people interested her. She immediately saw that doctors prescribed according to their own ideas rather than the individual needs of their patients (her books were often unflattering to doctors: she had seen too much of them to be impressed).36 And she was appalled, although again fascinated, by the arrogant little Torquay pharmacist who made a serious error – misplacing a decimal point – in Agatha’s presence. She knew he would refuse to acknowledge this, so ‘What was the young student to do? I was the merest novice, he was the best-known pharmacist in town. I couldn’t say to him: “Mr P., you have made a mistake.” Mr P. the pharmacist was the sort of person who does not make a mistake . . .’ In the end Agatha pretended to stumble and upset the tray of suppositories that Mr P. had made so toxic, then squashed them firmly with her shoes. ‘That’s all right, little girl,’ said the pharmacist, patting her shoulders ‘tenderly’, as was his horrible habit (‘I had to put up with it because I was being instructed,’ wrote Agatha in her autobiography: an interesting throwaway). This man – who carried a lump of curare in his pocket because it made him feel powerful – reappeared more than forty years later in her book The Pale Horse, transmuted into the chemist Mr Osbourne.

  What she also absorbed was the fascination of poison: the beautiful look of the bottles, the exquisite precision of the calculations, the potential for mayhem contained within order. The original idea for The Mysterious Affair at Styles was a method for murder. It came from Agatha’s dispensing work and could not have come to her otherwise, as it entirely depends upon a knowledge of poisons. In fact it is impossible to reach the solution to Styles without this knowledge: the reader may guess right as to the culprit, but the guess cannot be proved without knowledge of the properties of strychnine and bromide. So Agatha’s first detective novel was, in a sense, her only ‘cheat’. But as it is, in every other way, so typical, so instinctively marked with her particular genius – so nearly the finished article – this seems to have gone unremarked.

  Right from the start she realised the potential of the idea that she would always use to such effect: that of fastening suspicion so firmly to one person that the reader eliminates him or her, only to find that here, indeed, is the culprit. She deployed this device as no other writer has since, with the utmost logic and liberality: the murderer is absent from the scene of the crime (as in Styles), or appears to be the intended victim, or is the narrator of the story, or a person incapacitated by a gunshot wound, or is a child, or a polic
eman; the key, with Agatha, being that blessed element of the ordinary which gives the device an illusion of reality. That she had a gift for plotting coups was undeniable. The genre had a magical effect upon her ability to structure; although this was not achieved without a great deal of work, which interested her in the manner of wrestling with an intricate mathematical equation, as she had done as a child with her father.

  But plot, for Agatha, meant distillation of character. It did not exist in a vacuum. It is not enough that the husband in Styles should be suspected because he is sinister, and rejected as a suspect because he has an impregnable alibi. What lies at the root of her solution is character: the truth about men who marry rich elderly wives. It was the people who interested her, always. ‘Human nature. That, I think, is perhaps the real answer as to why I am interested in this case,’ as Poirot later said.37