Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  Clara, of course, was unsurprised when Agatha told her what she was doing. Why not a detective story? What couldn’t her girls do? It was Clara who told Agatha to go away to Dartmoor for her fort night’s holiday and finish the book quite undisturbed; she wrote all morning then, in the afternoons, tramped the moors blissfully, becoming one character after another as she muttered dialogue out loud. This became a lifelong habit. ‘My sister used occasionally to say to me, “You really look like an idiot walking along the street talking to yourself,”’ Agatha recalled in an interview in 1974.38 ‘But when you first start to think out a book, the nicest thing to do is to go for a long walk somewhere. The Mysterious Affair at Styles I wrote going along and talking as I went . . . You can’t do anything until you have thought of the characters and you can feel they are real to you. Not necessarily to anyone else but to you. And you can go walking about the garden with them.’

  Chief among the characters of Styles – and central thereafter to Agatha Christie’s life, an additional husband of sorts, albeit demanding in a very different way – was Hercule Poirot: the mythical Belgian with his fanatical neatness, his egg-shaped head, his grey cells and inkblack moustache. Unreal, unbelievable, yet mysteriously alive from the moment of his irruption on to the page, and with that indefinable literary quality of connection with the reader. This was Agatha’s writerly instinct in action: pure, unteachable, defiant of analysis. She herself did not really know how she had come to create this extraordinary little being. In her autobiography she tried, rather helplessly, to elucidate the thought processes that were the building blocks of Poirot. ‘I remembered our Belgian refugees . . . Why not make my detective a Belgian, I thought? . . . Anyway, I settled on a Belgian detective . . . Hercule – Hercule Poirot. That was all right – settled, thank goodness.’

  Quite possibly her thoughts had run very much along these lines, but in the end this does not explain why they did so, why other thoughts were rejected along the way and the right thoughts alighted upon: this is the mystery of creativity, after all. Far less creative was the relationship between Poirot and his friend Captain Hastings, which is straightforwardly that of Holmes and Watson and downright harmless theft. But Poirot solus resembles Holmes only in his absolute individuality. Both characters are like fabulous line drawings: always themselves and always recognisable.39 Provenance can be pondered but is, in the end, almost meaningless.

  Doubtless fashion led Agatha to make Poirot a foreigner like Poe’s Dupin or Leroux’s Rouletabille, and it has been said that he was created in direct imitation of Marie Belloc Lowndes’40 Hercules Popeau. The name hints, again, at larceny but the characters were not alike. More similar was the conceited Eugène Valmont, who appeared in stories in the early twentieth century: a would-be biographer, who made a polite nuisance of himself in the 1960s, suggested to Agatha that Poirot might have been part-inspired by Robert Barr’s creation, to which she replied, ‘I think nothing of Valmont . . . Significance has been found in Poirot’s physical resemblance to a dandified Satan; in the fact that Agatha, the lover of food, gave him a name so similar to the French word for ‘leek’ (poireau), and in a good deal else besides, this being the kind of benign madness that surrounds celebrity of the magnitude achieved by Poirot. The strange and beautiful truth is that he was created in a way that not even his creator perfectly understood: a felicitous stew of things she had heard, things she had read, things she remembered, things she invented: mixed and dreamed in the spaces of Agatha’s life, among the medicine bottles in the Torquay dispensary, along the uphill roads to Ashfield, over the Devon moors.

  And although Poirot would develop, acquiring certain depths as and when Agatha felt the need of them, he is true to his own creed of character in that he never really changed. Here he is, scuttling neatly around Styles Court in Essex (a county of which Agatha knew next to nothing), utterly and instantly himself, although at this point he needed the wretched Hastings to show it.

  ‘We have found in this room,’ he said, writing busily, ‘six points of interest. Shall I enumerate them, or will you?’

  ‘Oh, you,’ I replied hastily . . .’

  And:

  ‘It is certainly curious,’ I agreed. ‘Still, it is unimportant, and need not be taken into account.’

  A groan burst from Poirot.

  ‘What have I always told you? Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory – let the theory go.’

  The moment in the book when Poirot’s shaking hands ‘mechanically’ straighten a pair of candlesticks – in which a vital piece of evidence has been hurriedly hidden, hence the crookedness – is essence of Christie. This is no mere clue: its unearthing is absolutely rooted in Poirot’s obsession with symmetry. At her very first attempt Agatha had understood – or intuited – that a clue based upon character has double the value. She also gave Poirot the rather charming sexlessness that allows him to be wise in a manner that is almost feminine, albeit disinterested in a way that women rarely manage to be. Here, for example, he responds as Hastings clunks his way to the wrong conclusion:

  ‘I happen to know for a fact that, far from being in love with her, he positively dislikes her.’

  ‘Who told you that, mon ami?’

  ‘Cynthia herself.’

  ‘La pauvre petite! And she was concerned?’

  ‘She said that she did not mind at all.’

  ‘Then she certainly did mind very much,’ remarked Poirot.

  ‘They are like that – les femmes?

  The original ending of the book – scrawled in excitable pencil in one of Agatha’s many writing notebooks, all of which were kept at Greenway House – shows the naivety she had hitherto kept so admirably at bay: perhaps for the last time she is back in the amateur land of Snow Upon the Desert, writing a court scene in which Poirot gives the entire solution of the murder in the form of sensational evidence. ‘M. le juge, the temperature that day was 86 in the shade’; ‘Read it, M. le juge, for it is a letter from the murderer . . .’ All the lines that would later appear in the revised version of Styles are written as dialogue between Poirot and the court judge: impeccably worked out, absolutely unfeasible. ‘I think in Styles I wrote a court scene out of my head which just could never have taken place,’ she said much later.41

  It was a minor flaw. In every other way the book was supremely sophisticated; not least in its blithe treatment of marital boredom. Without feeling the need to moralise or even comment, Agatha presented a couple – John and Mary Cavendish – whose love for each other is foundering on his dalliance with a pretty village gypsy, and her sombre flirtation with Dr Bauerstein (‘I have had enough of the fellow hanging about. He’s a Polish Jew, anyway,’ says John, to which Mary replies, ‘A tinge of Jewish blood is not a bad thing. It leavens the’ – she looked at him – ‘the stolid stupidity of the ordinary Englishman.’) Hastings himself is half in love with Mrs Cavendish, loathes Bauerstein on this account, and seeks at every turn to be in a married woman’s company. This, too, is presented as normal behaviour. Twenty years of listening to the worldly whispers of Margaret Miller had done their work. But Agatha – like many writers before and since – was more astute in her art than in her life; and saw a good deal more clearly with the eyes of her mind.

  According to her autobiography she showed The Mysterious Affair at Styles to Archie, who liked it very much, and encouraged her to send it to a publisher. They had not seen each other – she wrote – for two years since that first, unsatisfactory leave in July 1915, when he was so nervy and she so tense. This time all was happiness: they went to the New Forest for a week. ‘We walked together through the woods and had a kind of companionship that we had not known before.’ Archie said that he wanted to follow the path that led to ‘No Man’s Land’, so they did. It took them to an orchard full of apples, which they ate as they wandered through the trees.

  All around and below her were trees, trees whose leaves were turning from gold to brown. It was a world incredi
bly golden and splendid in the strong autumn sunlight.

  Henrietta thought: ‘I love autumn. It’s so much richer than spring.’

  ‘And suddenly one of those moments of intense happiness came to her – a sense of the loveliness of the world – of her own intense enjoyment of that world.

  She thought: ‘I shall never be as happy again as I am now – never.’

  She stayed there a minute, gazing out over that golden world that seemed to swim and dissolve into itself, hazy and blurred with its own beauty.42

  In fact Agatha had remembered it wrong. As Archie’s notebook makes clear, the New Forest leave was in October 1915, before she had even begun to write Styles, and there was at no time a separation of two years during the war. This, though, was how she had remembered that particular week. ‘One of the oddest things in life, I think, is the things one remembers. One chooses to remember, I suppose. Something in one must choose.’43

  The Child

  ‘To love anyone,’ I said, ‘is always to lay upon that person

  an almost intolerable burden’

  (from The Rose and the Yew Tree, by Mary Westmacott)

  ‘I’amour est une réalité dans le domaine de l‘imagination’

  (quotation from Talleyrand, written on slip and kept by Agatha Christie)

  In autumn 1918 Archie came home from the war to take up his post at the Air Ministry, and Agatha’s real married life began. Her husband had been a creature of fantasy since they met, they had lived at a distance for six years, so her ideas about marriage were ‘limited in the extreme’, as she wrote in Unfinished Portrait. ‘When people loved each other they were happy. Unhappy marriages, and of course she knew there were many such, were because people didn’t love each other.’

  The book describes the brief and hallowed months before the Armistice. ‘Celia and Dermot were so happy together.’ Their life had a fresh, young ecstasy. They explored their new world of rented flats and legitimised passion like two children in a garden. ‘Married life to them was a game – they played at it enthusiastically.’ After dinner the two would ‘sit in front of the fire before going to bed, Dermot with a cup of Ovaltine, Celia with a cup of Bovril’, and these were the happiest times of all. Having been – as Celia put it to herself – a little afraid of the stranger in her husband, she now found he was her perfect companion. He was not demonstrative, but she knew he loved her. Sometimes he would clutch her to him and stammer: ‘Celia – you’re so beautiful – so beautiful. Promise me you’ll always be beautiful.’

  ‘You’d love me just the same if I weren’t,’ she replied.

  Married life began in London. Agatha had gone house-hunting as soon as Archie came back to England. At the age of twenty-eight she left Ashfield at last for a flat in Northwick Terrace in St John’s Wood, with a bed ‘full of large, iron lumps’ and a rent of two and a half guineas a week. Although the Christies had so little money it did not occur to them to live without staff: they were looked after by Archie’s batman, Bartlett, and the general caretaker Mrs Woods, who did the ‘serious cooking’ and handed out advice. She was one of those competent, confident women whom Agatha always found impossible to resist. ‘Fishmonger done you down again, love,’ Mrs Woods would say sadly as Agatha – who had never shopped for food in her life – returned with her ladylike basket of sub-standard groceries.

  She learned quickly, though. It was fun to learn: fun to scour the shops for fresh fish and juicy oranges, fun to take her classes in shorthand and book-keeping (which might, in some unspecified way, prove useful), fun to be a wife. Even poverty was fun, in a way. Agatha saw herself and Archie rather like the couple she would portray in her second novel, The Secret Adversary, who end the story engaged to be married. Tommy is an ex-soldier, Tuppence an ex-VAD. Their bright spirits are undimmed by the fact that he is out of work and she, whose appearance represents ‘a valiant attempt at smartness’, must sate her ‘thundering good appetite’ on dinners of buns.

  In 1918 there was no thought of a second book, however, as the first – The Mysterious Affair at Styles – had been swiftly rejected. Various publishers turned it down, including Methuen and Hodder & Stoughton,1 and what they thought about this later can only be imagined; certainly somebody might have seen past the immaturities and picked up on this young woman’s unusual facility for making plot so accessible, so readable. But Agatha’s deceptive simplicity would always cause her to be undervalued. In her autobiography she wrote that she ‘hadn’t expected success’ and, in her usual way, made light of the writing lark. It is true that she had no acknowledged thought of being anything other than an amateur who wrote whatever took her fancy: a poem, a little piece of music, a detective story. Nevertheless she did not give up on Styles, and eventually sent it to John Lane at the Bodley Head.

  But first and foremost she was Archie’s wife. Gentlemen, as she had been taught all her life, required a good deal of looking after. Food was not plentiful at the tail end of war – in her autobiography, Agatha remembered Archie’s surprise at her greed when he brought home a vast joint of rationed beef – but she tried hard to replicate the kind of delicacies that had been written into the ‘Receipts’ book (‘the orange and lemon are placed on hot rashers of bacon, which have been cooked in the meantime’ . . .). She went to cookery classes, and learned to prepare meals for her husband. It was unfortunate that the long, lean Archie could not face Agatha’s food when he came home from the Ministry in Whitehall: the soufflé would slump as he succumbed to stomach pains, writhing on the bed in agony then suddenly demanding golden syrup or treacle. Agatha had always been strong, and attracted to the fragility in Archie, but she was baffled by the forms it took. He had come home looking the same as ever. The post-war realities were not something for which she was prepared.

  And she was a little lost, away from Torquay. Almost everyone she knew lived in Devon, and her one friend in London – Nan Watts, Madge’s sister-in-law, who had married in 1912 but whose husband, Hugo Pollock, had walked out – was so much richer than she that it seemed impossible to socialise with her, although eventually she did visit Nan at her Chelsea home.2 It was not that Agatha particularly craved friends. She was not the kind of woman to sit and chat with other wives: despite her pleasure in playing at home-making she ‘scorned “domestic women”’, as she wrote in Unfinished Portrait, ‘absorbed in their children, their servants, their house running’. She wanted her companionship with Archie, which was magical and precious. But he worked all day and the days had to be filled. Agatha had always loved the slow stretch of free time, the growth of her imagination within silence and space. But she had been used to thinking and dreaming within the arena of Ashfield, with the hills and sea around her, not on the war-dulled streets of NW8.’3

  This was a very different London from the one she had known as a child, visiting her grandmothers in Bayswater and Ealing. Like ‘Jane Marple, that pink and white eager girl’, she had trundled through the streets in a four-wheeler and gazed at the china displays in the Army and Navy Stores. Now she no longer looked out from behind a protective screen. Just to walk the streets and go shopping were new to her. So too were the impersonality, the anonymity, the crowds of people and the harsh voices. Torquay life had been warm, familiar, structured; Agatha had known everyone, or known people who knew them; she had been ‘Miss Agatha’, ‘Miss Miller’, with all that that entailed. ‘Mrs Christie’ was somebody else, unknown even to herself, part of a couple but also – as a married woman – out on her own. The freedoms were unnerving. Agatha later wrote about the day that peace was declared; she left her shorthand class and

  went out into the streets quite dazed. There I came upon one of the most curious sights I had ever seen – indeed I still remember it, almost, I think with a sense of fear. Everywhere there were women dancing in the street . . . One felt that if there had been any Germans around the women would have advanced upon them and torn them to pieces. Some of them I suppose were drunk, but all of them looked it.4

>   Lack of control always terrified Agatha. She hated it more than almost anything, having not yet experienced the lethal chill that came when control was absolute, impenetrable. She had seen wayward behaviour during the war when, at the end of her shifts at the hospital, she had had to walk alone at night past the drunken soldiers. But then she had been going home to Ashfield and, once through the garden gate, she had been safe.

  She was powerfully homesick at the start of her life with Archie. For all that she was deep in love, and treating marriage as a grand adventure (‘a damned good sport’, as Tommy calls it in The Secret Adversary), she yearned for ‘dear home’. She dreamed of ‘the beech tree – and the grass – growing – growing – against her cheek’5 as she lay in the garden, gloriously idle, her head full of thoughts and possibilities and imaginary worlds. ‘I was slightly lonely’ is how she described her feelings in the autobiography. It was in Unfinished Portrait – as always – that she roamed the dreamscape of memory and touched the deeper truths.

  After the Armistice, she and Archie went back to Ashfield. ‘It was lovely to be home – home looked so much lovelier than she remembered. It was so clean – the spotless cloth for lunch, and the shining silver and the polished glasses. How much one took for granted!’6 She was like a schoolgirl going home for the holidays: chatting excitedly about her life in London, sitting on her mother’s bed as she told her about Mrs Woods and the joint of rationed beef, turning her loneliness into something small and distant. Probably she had never been happier. Such was her delight in being with her husband, for whom she felt a dark and disturbing passion, in this place of sanctuary.

  She wrote poems at this time. They would be published in 1924 as The Road of Dreams collection, together with earlier works like ‘A Masque from Italy’, the youthful verse sequence on the characters of the Commedia dell’Arte. Among the later poems was ‘Progression’, which began: