Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  This was Agatha’s considered opinion. There was nothing in her of the sentimental mother, although through her communion with Clara’s emotions she could feel sentimental about herself. Such was her complexity that she could be in love with her own childhood, yet turn a cool eye upon children in general, and her own daughter in particular. At the age of thirteen she had written in the Album of Confessions of her desire to be ‘surrounded by babies and cats’. As an adult she believed – or so she wrote in her autobiography – that an honest mother would treat her offspring as a cat does: take satisfaction in giving birth, nurture for a little, then move back into her own life. ‘Is it really natural to go on caring about your young once they’re grown up and out in the world? Animals don’t.’15 The idea was in The Moving Finger, which has a character disliked by her own mother. ‘Only mothers can’t say they don’t want their children and just go away. Or eat them. Cats eat the kittens they don’t like. Awfully sensible, I think. No waste or mess. But human mothers have to keep their children . . .’

  This is a continual refrain in her books, so much so that it takes on a faint note of defiance. ‘Lots of mothers don’t like their children,’ she wrote in The Moving Finger, and, in Crooked House, ‘Again and again a mother takes a dislike to one of her children.’ She consistently refuses to take the orthodox line, as expressed by this character in Hallowe’en Party. ‘I like all children. Most people do.’ Agatha agrees with Hercule Poirot, who replies: ‘Ah, there I do not agree with you. Some children I consider are most unattractive.’

  The person who likes ‘all children’ has, in fact, murdered a girl of twelve by sticking her head in a bucket full of water; in Agatha Christie there is no shirking the fact that children are killed, even by their own mothers. ‘There was Mrs Green, you know, she buried five children – and every one of them insured. Well, naturally, one began to get suspicious.’16 They can also kill. Agatha created two child murderers, a child suspected of murder and, in Peril at End House, a child who happily tells Captain Hastings that ‘I seen a pig killed. I liked it.’

  In other words she sternly refused to see children as different from adults: their character was formed at an early age, it did not really change and it was just as likely to be nasty as nice. ‘We are all the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old,’ as she put it in her autobiography. If a child was as charming as Miranda Butler in Hallowe’en Party, then both she and Poirot said so. If not, not. The haze through which Agatha saw her own young self cleared instantly when she looked at other children; her views on motherhood remained utterly separate from her feelings for Clara. Exemplary maternity is as thin on the ground in Agatha Christie as it is in the plays of Shakespeare. ‘Julia’s quite an ordinary sort of child,’ says a mother at the girls’ school in Cat Among the Pigeons. ‘I think she’s got reasonably good brains, too, but I daresay mothers usually think that about their children, don’t they?’

  ‘Mothers’, said Miss Bulstrode grimly, ‘vary!’

  In fact Julia Upjohn’s mother is one of the few of whom Agatha approves. ‘Mummy’s gone to Anatolia on a bus,’ Julia tells Miss Bulstrode – ‘The child said it exactly as though she were saying her mother had taken a seventy-three bus to Marshall and Snelgrove’s’ – when Mrs Upjohn disappears on a tour of the East. This was very much the sort of thing that Agatha herself would later do (‘when are you coming home’ the ten-year-old Rosalind wrote, resignedly, from her boarding-school). So Mrs Upjohn is presented as perfectly normal, a refreshingly sane contrast to the kind of mothers who loom too large in the lives of their children. ‘I think, when your children have grown up, that you should cut away from them, efface yourself, slink away, force them to forget you,’ says a character in Crooked House. Her view is portrayed as extreme but not completely unacceptable, since Agatha makes clear that the family in Crooked House has been damaged by its stifling closeness.

  ‘Motherhood – unrelenting!’ she wrote in N or Mi, in a tone not unlike that which described her deep unease at the street celebrations on Armistice Day. Motherhood, too, implied a lack of control, a lack of rationality; as her own mother-in-law had proved. Agatha had nearcontempt for the way in which biology could take over personality. Bella Tanios in Dumb Witness is despised as ‘definitely a dreary woman. Rather like an earwig. She’s a devoted mother. So are earwigs, I believe’; Gerda Christow in The Hollow is equally devoted and equally dull. They are like the women described in The Man in the Brown Suit, who ‘talked for hours of themselves and their children and of the difficulties of getting good milk for the children . . . they were stupid – stupid even at their chosen job’.

  In the Westmacott novels, Joan Scudamore in Absent in the Spring is a ‘perfect’ mother, the kind that would be admired today: she involves herself in every aspect of her three children’s lives, and not one of them can wait to escape her well-intentioned clutches. ‘She’d wanted her children to have the best things – but what was the best?’ Then there is Ann Prentice in A Daughter’s a Daughter, who turns down her chance at a second marriage because her daughter, Sarah, dislikes the man. Ann makes the sacrifice for Sarah but finds herself filled with uncontainable resentment:

  Why do you hate me, Mother?’ . . .

  ‘I’ve given up my life for you – given up everything I cared for. You were my own daughter, my own flesh and blood. I chose you.’

  . . . ‘And ever since then, you’ve hated me.’

  Women who sacrifice their own lives for their children fail to understand, as the infinitely wise (and childless) Dame Laura Whitstable says in A Daughter’s a Daughter, that a sacrifice is not merely a gesture. It is something ‘you have to live with afterwards - all day and every day’. This can only lead to unhappiness. Detachment is therefore the better choice. ‘Mother are the devil! Why have they got to brood over their children? Why do they feel they know all about their children? They don’t. They don’t!’17 Perhaps the supreme example of this is Rachel Argyle in Ordeal by Innocence. She is haunted by her own infertility and adopts five children in an attempt to sate her longings. ‘Mrs Argyle had been blinded by her intense maternal possessiveness,’ thinks her housekeeper, Kirsten Lindstrom, who had seen the adopted children not as angels of innocence, or extensions of her own egotism but as individuals – as themselves – with all their faults and virtues. ..

  Women like Mrs Argyle were difficult for her to understand. Crazy about a lot of children who were not her own, and treating her husband as though he were not there! . . . a kind of living walking embodiment of MOTHER KNOWS BEST. And not really even a mother! If she had ever borne a child, it might have kept her humble.

  This last sentence shows Agatha’s sombre respect for the realities of motherhood, and for those women who recognised them: like Renisenb in her ancient Egyptian novel, Death Comes as the End, who says of her daughter: ‘She is not me and she is not Khay – she is herself. She is Teti. If there is love between us we shall be friends all our life – but if there is not love she will grow up and we shall be strangers. She is Teti and I am Renisenb.’

  What enraged Agatha was the diffuse emotionalism that mothers tended to throw around the subject, the pretence that fulfilling a biological function somehow turned them into so many Virgin Marys. Even worse were the Rachel Argyles who thought that they could buy into these feelings from the outside, as it were. ‘I know heaps of mothers who hate their daughters like poison,’ says Sarah in A Daughter’* a Daughter, her defiant petulance is Agatha’s, too.

  But the real anger went deeper, and was to do with Agatha’s own self. She was no longer the child. She was no longer at the centre of her own life. And she wanted to be, although the sensible side of her knew this was absurd. So she was enraged, too, by what she knew to be her own shortcomings. She was unable to be the kind of mother that Clara had been to her. Her insistence upon objectivity was, in a sense, self-justification: it was right not to be blinded by love for one’s children, right not to give up one’s life to them
, right to see them objectively. So her books kept telling her. They also, of course, told her that Clara’s adoration of herself and Madge was wrong-headed, even dangerous; but the paradox did not bother her. Her relationship with Clara was perfect. Her relationship with Rosalind was compounded of love, regret, bafflement and jealousy – ironically, the jealousy that Archie had expected to feel – and no maternal instinct arose to resolve these ambiguities. The emotional capacity that lay within Agatha could never quite direct itself towards her daughter. In 1930 she sent a letter from Ashfield to her second husband, Max, full of news about Rosalind and Peter, her wirehaired terrier. ‘Peter is my child, you know!’

  Agatha’s second book, The Secret Adversary, was written for money at Archie’s suggestion. He was not the kind of man to object to a wife who wrote books, although this was really very unusual in 1920. He did not interfere in Agatha’s private thoughts and doings; in fact in Unfinished Portrait she wrote that she wished he had interfered more.

  ‘Do you mind very much, Dermot, my being dreamy and fancying things and imagining things that might happen and what I should do if they did?’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind, if it amuses you.’

  Dermot was always fair. He was independent himself, and he respected independence in other people . . . The trouble was that Celia wanted to share everything.

  This was not absolutely true of Agatha, who had her own cravings for solitude. But she loved her companionship with Archie and did not want to lose it, even as the layers of self-sufficiency grew around the man who had written, in 1913, of ‘feeling so lonely. I miss you more than ever this time and feel so lost without having you near me.’

  But in Unfinished Portrait, after the birth of their child, Dermot takes Celia to bed and says in his old, diffident way, I – I still love you frightfully, Celia.’

  ‘Lovers – yes, they were still lovers,’ thinks Celia.

  A photograph taken at the end of 1919, on the day of Archie’s investiture at Buckingham Palace, shows the Christies walking down a London street together. Agatha is in a dark suit, Archie in a long overcoat; both are tall and slim and rather glamorous. They look alike, in the way that close couples do, although they walk some distance apart.

  (Flame!

  Flame in the Forest!

  Flame in my heart!

  Lover of mine

  Never was love such as ours

  Ecstasy . . .

  Joy . . .

  Passion . . .

  Pain . . .)18

  So if Archie had become more controlled, less emotional, this was merely inevitable in the course of a marriage. As ‘Grannie’ reminds her in Unfinished Portrait, it was unreasonable to expect too much: ‘“the men” were not like that’.

  Agatha remembered Margaret Miller’s phrases, her robust wisdom, long after she died, aged ninety-two, soon after the birth of Rosalind; Mary Ann Boehmer had died in 1916. The deaths of these two women may not have caused Clara much grief, but without Margaret’s presence Ashfield seemed very empty. Archie was probably justified in telling Agatha that her mother would do better to sell the house, and spend the extra few hundred she had inherited on something other than household bills. As always, Agatha was appalled by the idea. And in Unfinished Portrait her mother is equally determined to hold on to her home: ‘“You may need it yourself one of these days – when I am gone. I should like to feel it was there to be a refuge to you.” Celia thought refuge was a funny word to use, but she liked the idea of someday going to live at home with Dermot.’

  In which case – said Archie – why did she not write another book, and earn some money? She had made twenty-five pounds from The Mysterious Affair at Styles when it was serialised in the Weekly Times; hardly a fortune, but she was sure to make more this time, and yet more the time after that. Agatha was flattered, encouraged, and pleased to have a husband who took pride in her talent. John Lane, who had wanted another detective story rather than a comedy thriller, did not much like The Secret Adversary but it made fifty pounds in serial rights and sold better than Styles, thus proving Archie right. ‘“Now,” thought Celia, “I’m pretending to be a writer. I think it’s almost queerer than pretending to be a wife and mother.”’

  The Secret Adversary had the quality peculiar to almost everything that Agatha ever wrote: readability. The hero and heroine may send some readers for a metaphorical shotgun but Agatha’s delight in them is evident. She especially loved her ex-VAD Tuppence, every bit Tommy’s match in courage and resourcefulness, although the feminist angle would not have occurred to her creator. Tuppence is a sunny-natured little pragmatist – as was Agatha, at times – with a childlike greed for both food and money. Money, indeed, is the real theme of the book. The lack of it was much on Agatha’s mind. ‘Money, money, money!’ says Tuppence. ‘I think about money morning, noon and night! I dare say it’s mercenary of me, but there it is!’ Agatha was never penniless like Tuppence but she gets under the skin of her heroine’s poverty – the cheap cheerful clothes, the tea-shop meals – and shares her ecstasy in spending a windfall on a sumptuous lunch at the Piccadilly Hotel.

  Yet Tuppence, like Agatha, prefers love in the end. She turns down a millionaire in order to marry Tommy: ‘What fun it will be,’ she says, accepting his proposal. He is her soulmate and will be until the very last book is written. Postern of Fate, published just before Agatha’s death, showed Tommy and Tuppence still in love in vigorous old age, having moved to a house full of Ashfield’s furniture and with the Millers’ rocking-horse, Mathilde, in the conservatory.

  Agatha did a good deal of writing in the years after Rosalind’s birth. Although she had Jessie Swannell and a maid, Rose, she still had a home to run; yet she always possessed the gift of switching instantly from everyday life to the world of her books. She never fussed about it. There was nothing of the method actor in Agatha. She could think at the washing-up bowl and write at the kitchen table. The only thing that distracted her was motherhood. In her autobiography she would tell of the irritable horror of trying to write The Mem in the Brown Suit while a subsequent nanny, Cuckoo, chirped outside the door that ‘We mustn’t disturb Mummy, must we little dear?’ and of struggling on a beach with The Mystery of the Blue Train while Rosalind demanded her constant attention (‘I can stay here, can’t I? I can just stand here. I won’t interrupt’).

  But in the early 1920s Agatha’s productivity was gathering apace: she wrote The Secret Adversary, then Murder on the Links, then a clutch of short stories. ‘It was by now just beginning to dawn on me that perhaps I might be a writer by profession. I was not sure of it yet. I still had an idea that writing books was only the natural successor to embroidering sofa-cushions.’19 In fact her amateurism showed most in her style, which was professional in itself but not yet that of ‘Agatha Christie’. She felt no obligation to give her public what it expected, since she still felt that she was writing for herself. Therefore she continued ‘trying things, as one does’.

  Murder on the Links was as different from its predecessor as that had been from Styles. It is very French; not just in setting but in tone, which reeks of Gaston Leroux and, at times, Racine (‘Paul! Husband!’). Agatha admitted that she had written it in a ‘high-flown, fanciful’ manner. She had also based the book too closely upon a real-life French murder case, which gives the story a kind of non-artistic complexity. A highly remarkable sub-plot has Hastings in hot sexual pursuit of an auburn-haired acrobat; this, though, can be forgiven since it has the effect – greatly desired on Agatha’s part – of parcelling off Hastings to wedded bliss in the Argentine.

  But Poirot is magnificently himself. What originality there is in Murder on the Links comes straight from his thought processes. For example he deduces the modus opemndi of the crime because it is a repeat, essentially, of an earlier murder; this proves his favourite theory that human nature does not change, even when the human in question is a killer: ‘The English murderer who disposed of his wives in succession by drowning them in thei
r baths20 was a case in point. Had he varied his methods, he might have escaped detection to this day. But he obeyed the common dictates of human nature, arguing that what had once succeeded would succeed again, and he paid the penalty of his lack of originality.’

  The singularity of Poirot was beginning to be noticed, and Agatha was asked by the editor of the Sketch magazine to produce a series of twelve short stories with him at their centre. ‘At last I was becoming a success.’ At last she was doing as Madge had done years earlier when she had sold her clever, funny ‘Vain Tales’ to Vanity Fair. Now it was Agatha (‘So terribly slow!’) who was being chased by a publisher and a magazine; she may not have intended to be a success but, now that she was one, she realised that she had wanted it. As Eden Philpotts had said back in 1909, ‘A little print is very encouraging.’ These first Poirots21 were nothing like as good as the short stories she would later produce, but it was remarkable that Agatha was able to construct twelve plots to order, and probably a very good exercise for the development of her talent.

  Some of these first stories were sent for publication from abroad. Throughout 1922 Agatha and Archie did a remarkable thing together: they embarked upon what was then called an ‘Empire Tour’, travelling to South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. The opportunity had arisen when Archie was offered a job as financial adviser to the tour, whose purpose was to promote the Empire Exhibition22 planned for 1924. The Christies had always wanted to travel but due to lack of money – no cheap flights in those days – they had managed just two short European holidays since their marriage. Now they grabbed at this chance.

  It was a risk, of course (‘a sport!’). Archie would almost certainly have no City job when he returned, and his thousand-pound fee for the trip would only just cover Agatha’s expenses and a month off together. In fact they were probably about ten years too old for such a gloriously irresponsible venture, but Archie was willing to do it – his job was not advancing him as far as he had hoped – and Agatha was set on fire by the thought of cutting loose, leaving family life behind, roaming unknown continents hand in hand with her husband. Not to go would have been agony. She was like her heroine Anne Beddingfeld in The Mem in the Brown Suit, who so despises those ‘stupid’ women who, despite their wealth, want only to stay at home and talk about ‘the difficulties of getting good milk for their children’. ‘The whole wide beautiful world was theirs to wander in and they deliberately stayed in dirty dull London and talked about milkmen and servants!’23