Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  She handed over Rosalind to the care of her mother and sister. Clara had encouraged her daughter to accompany her husband (‘Remember, a man forgets . . .’), although Madge tried to persuade Agatha that her duty lay at home: not so much with Rosalind as with Monty, who was coming home from Africa. ‘You ought to be with your brother,’ she said. Perhaps aware that Madge’s motives were tainted with pique, Agatha was upset but in the end did as she wanted. On 20 January 1922 the Christies left England on the Kildoncm Castle, and did not return for almost a year.

  The Empire Tour provided most of the material for Agatha’s next book, The Man in the Brown Suit, which she wrote on her return. It overflows with Agatha’s love of travel: her craving for new sights, configurations, sensations that stretched her very soul to its limits.

  I don’t suppose that as long as I live I shall forget my first sight of Table Mountain [she wrote, in the voice of Anne Beddingfeld]. It made me catch my breath and have that curious hungry pain inside that seizes one sometimes when one. comes across something that’s extra beautiful . . . I knew well enough that I had found, if only for a fleeting moment, the thing that I had been looking for ever since I left Little Hampsley . . .

  ‘This is South Africa,’ I kept saying to myself industriously. ‘You are seeing the world. This is the world. You are seeing it.’

  Anne – the ‘gypsy girl’, as she is called – is a version of Agatha. She is the girl who danced beneath the drifting ghost of Unfinished-Portrait, the one who strode the seven hills of Torquay with her hand clasped to her hat and the sea air fresh on her face, the one who could seize life without fear.

  ‘Starting off alone with practically no money . . . I couldn’t do it, Anne, and I’ve plenty of pluck in my own way,’ [says Suzanne, her shipboard friend]. ‘I couldn’t start off gaily with a few pounds in my pocket and no idea as to what I was doing and where I was going.’

  ‘But that’s the fun of it,’ I cried, thoroughly roused. ‘It gives one such a splendid feeling of adventure.’

  She looked at me, nodded once or twice, and then smiled.

  ‘Lucky Anne! There aren’t many people in the world who feel as you do.’

  Anne falls for a man on the ship that takes her to Africa, and this too is a version of Agatha’s story. Harry Rayburn is the Archie of her dreams: lean and beautiful, daring almost to the point of murderousness, helplessly passionate in the face of Anne’s bold gypsy spirit. ‘Damn your French frocks,’ he says to her. ‘Do you think I want to put frocks on you? I’m a damn sight more likely to want to tear them off. . .’

  This love affair is the most vital and sexy that Agatha ever described. It is full of abandonment, pleasure, optimism, and it thrives within the wild poetic world of Africa. The Mem in the Brown Suit considers the nature of love, rather as the Westmacotts would do later, but unlike those novels it does so from a position of strength; so sure is Anne that love will make her happy, even when it makes her suffer. So sure is she of Harry.

  ‘I shouldn’t dream of marrying anyone unless I was madly in love with them. And of course there is really nothing a woman enjoys so much as doing all the things she doesn’t like for the sake of someone she does like. And the more self-willed she is, the more she likes it . . . Women like to be mastered, but they hate not to have their sacrifices appreciated. On the other hand, men don’t really appreciate women who are nice to them all the time. When I am married, I shall be a devil most of the time, but every now and then, when my husband least expects it, I shall show him what a perfect angel I can be!’

  Harry laughed outright.

  ‘What a cat and dog life you will lead.’

  ‘Lovers always fight,’ I assured him. ‘Because they don’t understand each other. And by the time they do understand each other they aren’t in love any more.’

  This meant nothing, really, beyond Anne’s delight in saying it, although it was true that Archie remained a mystery to Agatha, true that she did not understand him, and true that she was still in love with him.

  (Closer, O heart of mine . . .

  Closer yet . . .

  Your lips . . .

  In the Forest the leaves are on fire,

  Spendthrift and reckless their joy!

  Riot of life!)24

  Of course the Christies were not like Anne and Harry, who end the book living in Africa, their son crawling happily between them and their passion for each other undiminished. Archie crossed London to the City every morning; Agatha pushed a pram, chatted to shopkeepers and servants, bashed at her typewriter. At weekends they took trains out of London. Occasionally they had a round of golf at East Croydon. Agatha had not played since her days on the Torquay course with Reggie Lucy, and had never been much good, but she liked the walk, and it pleased her to see Archie enjoying himself so much (‘At weekends Celia got her comrade back’). It was all very typical, very ordinary. Normal life, beneath which lay powerful emotions. A photograph from the early 1920s shows Archie sitting on a wooden bench – possibly outside Ashfield – with a pipe in his right hand. To one side of him is Rosalind, serious-faced beneath her abundance of dark hair, and on the other Peter the dog, attentive to the click of the camera. The tableau could not be more conventional but it is entirely beautiful, because of the beauty of its subjects. There is love in the picture too; love, as Agatha wrote in one of her poems, which ‘for a while, made magic common things . . .’25

  A companion photograph shows Agatha in a similar tableau, with her daughter to her right, her dog to her left. Again the picture is charming – Rosalind smiles her father’s smile, Peter lifts shining eyes to the camera – but Agatha, by this time, seems some years older than Archie. Here she is again, embarking upon the Kildonan Castle with the travelling dignitaries of the mission, photographed for The Times, looking assured and social in her hat and furs. Who would have guessed what imaginings lay within?

  There is no Empire Tour in Unfinished Portrait, because it was a different Agatha who went round the world: free and bold and confident. Celia merely dreams ‘that if the chance were to be given her she would leave Dermot and Judy and Aubrey [the dog] and everything and dash off into the blue . . .’

  Of course the reality of the Empire Tour was a disappointment in many ways. Ordinary life continues, even in unknown continents, and human nature does not necessarily transform itself. To an extent, Agatha was at the mercy of Archie’s job, not that there was any real point to it, or indeed to the whole trip. It had been organised by a man named Major Belcher, assistant general manager of the 1924 Empire Exhibition, who was leading a mission to the Dominions to promote the exhibition among political leaders and businessmen. This sort of thing was very much to Belcher’s taste; so much so that the trip was probably conceived as a promotional mission for himself.

  Belcher’s presence dominated the tour, to an extent that Agatha could not have imagined, that she found insufferable at the time and comical in retrospect. He was a very modern type, for all his oldschool-tie manner. He would have thrived on quangos or talking impressive-sounding nonsense on television; he was one of nature’s politicians, although not from any sense of public duty: again, his sense of duty was directed towards his own advancement. In the First World War he had had the non-job of Controller of Supplies of Potatoes, which he did extremely badly before sailing on to his new post with the Empire Tour. He was childish, mean and somehow addictive as a personality: ‘Never, to this day, have I been able to rid myself of a sneaking fondness for Sir Eustace,’ wrote Agatha of the fictionalised Belcher, whom she put into The Mem in the Brown Suit. ‘I dare say it’s reprehensible, but there it is.’26

  Belcher liked Agatha too, although this was not always apparent. He had known Archie for years, having taught him when he was briefly a master at Clifton, and held him in such high regard that he had offered him the role of financial adviser to the tour (or, as Archie was billed in an overseas newspaper, ‘Governor of the Bank of England’). Again, this sounds like a post that could ea
sily not have existed. In fact Archie’s chief job was to handle Belcher through his moods, and to defuse the situations they might create. For this he was far from overpaid, since Belcher was as difficult as a fractious two-year-old. Meanwhile Agatha bandaged Belcher’s septic foot while he shouted at her like an aged Henry VIII, bought him socks and linen for which he never reimbursed her, and generally kept him as soothed as possible (the nurse in her now came in handy). He was tremendous material, of course. Although Agatha always claimed not to put real people into her books this was not completely true: Sir Eustace Pedler was Belcher to the life. It was Archie’s suggestion that Agatha should give him a title, and Belcher’s own that he should be the murderer.

  Agatha had wanted to make him the victim. His behaviour was a constant nightmare, particularly to someone who, as she did, valued manners. ‘We went into the Town Hall,’ she wrote to Clara from Melbourne in May, ‘and were kept waiting a few minutes while they looked for the Mayor. Fresh explosions from Belcher. When found, he genially asked Belcher who and what he was – I thought he would have apoplexy! He really does think he is a King, or Lord Northcliffe . . ,’27 Later, when he found himself sitting surrounded by notables in the Governor’s Box at the races, he became ‘complacent’ and started to purr with snobbish pleasure. Later still his temper disintegrated again: ‘I console myself by the thought that I have had nearly £200 of free railway travel, and one must put up with something for that! I speak to him as little as possible now, am just quietly polite!’28

  This was all very well, but not every day for almost ten months. The itinerary, too, was exhausting. The mission spent February to April in South Africa, at one point becoming caught in the middle of a revolution.29 ‘They hoisted a red flag and proclaimed a Soviet government,’ Agatha wrote to Clara, as she might have described a music-hall turn. Remembering that she must disdain fear, she refused to be alarmed when the mission was trapped in Pretoria (although Clara might well have been when she read the letter). Martial law was proclaimed, bombs fell and trains ceased to run, but Agatha’s sole admitted concern was that she might ‘miss the [Victoria] Falls after all with this strike trouble’.

  The mission left Africa in May, travelled to Australia then Tasmania, and spent July in New Zealand. August was the holiday month in which Agatha and Archie went to Hawaii (this annoyed Belcher a great deal, even though they were paying for themselves). September and October were spent touring Canada – Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg and Toronto, with two days in each city – culminating in a visit to Niagara Falls. From Ottawa Archie continued on northwards with Belcher and his secretary, Bates,30 while Agatha went south to stay with her godmother Cassie in New York. ‘Home on November 30th!’ she wrote to Clara, with the air of one who could scarcely wait.

  It was not so much the travelling, more the relentless socialising that had taken its toll. A constant procession of people joined and met the mission. Agatha kept a diary of activities for her mother, and this was a typical week in South Africa: an evening spent in the tedious company of Mrs Hiam, whose rich husband was a friend of Belcher’s – ‘they are quite attached to me. I iron their clothes for them . . . deal and shuffle for them when we play cards’; a day’s surfing; a tour of a museum in the company of its director, who explained to her in detail about early human skulls ‘from the Pithecanthropus downwards’; a tour of fruit farms – ‘I was by then rather weary of seeing fruit dried, it’s the same everywhere, and it was scorchingly hot. The Hiams were so done to the world that they wouldn’t get out of the car’; the Opening of Parliament ceremony ‘to which we went dressed in our best’, followed by more battles with surfboards – ‘I believe one could have great fun with them at Paignton on a rough day’; an archbishop’s garden party; a climb up Table Mountain; a foursome of golf with another couple; an evening of bridge; and so it went on, and on.

  Agatha’s stamina was always remarkable (which she attributed to the fact that she had spent her youth doing nothing), and she would never need it more than on this tour, which required her to be continually chatting, smiling, dressing up and taking an interest in things that must often have been intolerably boring. ‘Companionship is not a thing that one needs every day,’ she had written in her autobiography, adding that it ‘sometimes becomes as destroying as ivy growing round you’. Here she had it unceasingly. She described, for instance, having to talk to unidentified royalty at a Government House lunch in Cape Town: ‘A terrible five minutes ensued during which the Princess and I tried to keep up a conversation. She is known through South Africa as being only capable of saying ‘oh, yes . . .’ Later, Archie had charge of the princess and ‘quite cheered her up. She and Archie agreed that they both hated getting up early and could never remember people’s names, to which Archie added cheerily, “But that must be rather awkward for you in your line of business.”’ Meanwhile Agatha was coping with the prince, admiring his ‘rather ill bred Sealyham’ and laughing politely as he defined an optimist as ‘a man who runs away with someone else’s wife’.31

  In later life Agatha would claim to be paralysingly shy, and to hate parties and conversation with people she did not know. Yet she showed no sign of this on the Empire Tour. She even made a speech, ‘hanging on firmly to Mr Pecksniff’s advice “Take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself.”’ On the whole she was a highly successful social animal. Duty, of course, kept her going. She was there to represent her country, the mission, her husband. She would therefore be as charming, cheerful and groomed as she could be; she needed to be, as she was under considerable scrutiny. A cutting from a newspaper in Canterbury, South Africa, described a ‘delightful little impromptu morning tea’ given in Agatha’s honour: ‘Mrs Christie, who is the author of several successful detective stories, wore, over her mole coloured marocain frock, a charming loose Paisley wrap, with mole collar and a small mole hat of hatter’s plush . . .’

  Agatha was also intensely grateful for the chance to make this trip, so she was never going to be anything other than gracious. And she was a good-humoured woman, not a complainer like Mrs Hiam; as she had written in the Album of Confessions at the age of thirteen, she would always seek ‘to make the best of everything’. She must, in fact, have been a consoling presence on this long tour. Even when her passion for surfing brought on neuritis – ‘like toothache all down your arm’ – she tried very hard to keep up appearances. ‘I’m getting the pain much less often now,’ she wrote to her mother, in between the usual round of dinners, bridge tournaments and endless chat.

  The compensations were immeasurable. She was seeing the world in the company of the man she loved and, as she later wrote in The Man in the Brown Suit, this was a wondrous thing. ‘We have arrived!’ she wrote to Clara from South Africa on 6 February. I had no idea there were so many mountains.’ Lake Louise was ‘the loveliest place we’ve been to yet’. The Victoria Falls were so beautiful ‘I can’t bear to leave’. On the Zambezi ‘we saw a crocodile straight away, which cheered us very much’. In New Zealand, ‘I have never seen anything in my life as beautiful as Wellington Harbour’. So it went on. She poured her enthusiasm on the many pages she wrote to Clara and, like an earnest schoolgirl, made determined attempts to describe everything:

  All Australian scenery that I have seen has a faintly austere quality, the distance is all a soft blue green and sometimes almost grey – and the white trunks of the blue gums give a totally different effect, and here and there great clumps of trees have been ringbarked and have died – then they are ghost trees, all white with white waving branches. It’s all so – virginal – if there were nymphs in the wood, they would never be caught . . .32

  Agatha was not a natural descriptive writer: as in this letter to Clara she became self-conscious, touchingly effortful. In her books she could give a sense of place in a phrase or detail, although there is a translucent quality to her descriptions that leaves them imprecise and generic. ‘She was by nature remarkably unobservant,’ she wrote o
f herself in Unfinished Portrait, and despite her acute ear it was true that she saw imaginatively rather than accurately. But with these letters from the Empire Tour she was trying to pin down her memories with words (she also took a good many photographs): she would not have expected to return to these places, and she did not want to forget them.

  She also wanted to bring them alive for Clara. Despite her mother’s blessing she felt guilt at being away, and she tried to assuage this by keeping her mother informed about all that she did. Ostensibly the guilt was over Rosalind: ‘my little Teddy’, as she and Archie called their daughter. ‘I think of my little Poppet such a lot and get more and more homesick for her,’ Agatha wrote to Clara, and a good deal more in similar vein. ‘My baby must be so sweet. I’m dying to see her – so is Archie.’ From Pretoria Agatha wrote to her daughter, then staying at Abney with Madge (or ‘Punkie’, as Rosalind called her). ‘I suspect you love Uncle Jim and Auntie Punkie very much now, but if anyone asks you “who do you love?” you must say “Mummy!”’ This was equally for Madge’s benefit, as Rosalind was as yet too young to read.