Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  In her novel A Pocket Full of Rye, Agatha described the home of her murder victim:

  This place, this pretentiously named Yewtree Lodge was just the kind of mansion that rich people built themselves and then called it ‘their little place in the country’. It wasn’t in the country either, according to Inspector Neele’s idea of the country. The house was a large solid red-brick structure . . . with rather too many gables, and a vast number of leaded paned windows. The gardens were highly artificial – all laid out in rose beds and pergolas and pools, and living up to the name of the house with large numbers of clipped yew hedges.

  Thus she remembered the house in Sunningdale – ‘Styles’, as she and Archie renamed it – to which they moved from Scotswood at the start of 1926. Yewtree Lodge is similarly set in the commuter belt. ‘Baydon Heath was almost entirely inhabited by rich City men. It had an excellent train service, was only twenty miles from London and was comparatively easy to reach by car.’10 It also had ‘three well-known golf courses’. Sunningdale had two, having newly developed the course at Wentworth, in which Agatha bought a debenture share so that she could play there at weekends.

  Despite her authorial control she cannot help giving a dark quality to A Pocket Full of Rye, which derives from its setting and the smart, vulgar, ‘very unpleasant people’ who live there: a ruthless City man with a sexy young wife, the wife’s lounge-lizard lover whom she meets when pretending to play golf. Agatha can scarcely hide her contempt for Baydon Heath. This was how, thirty years earlier, she increasingly felt about Sunningdale. At first there was intense pleasure in walking among trees and feeling clean air on her face, although in fact there were so many cars in Sunningdale that the air was positively choked compared with the high, fresh breezes of Torquay. Archie had suggested that they buy a second car – something glamorous like a Delage – as their finances continued to improve. Agatha suggested instead that they have another baby, but to this Archie replied that there was plenty of time (although Agatha was coming up to thirty-five) and that anyway he did not need another child, Rosalind being ‘perfect’. They bought the Delage.

  Perhaps Agatha had thought that another child – a son? – would arouse in her the maternal instincts that as yet remained dormant. Perhaps she thought that she would have ‘her’ child, Rosalind being indubitably Archie’s.

  ‘Judy was so aloof – so unattached – she was like Dermot.’11

  The mere fact that Agatha could write this about her daughter shows her own detachment. She knew that Rosalind would read the book, after all. She would learn that her mother had seen her as ‘a complete puzzle’, full of ‘depressing’ common sense, with an almost repellent love of her father’s ‘rough’ games. But Unfinished Portrait was written by somebody unable to stop themselves, heedless of pain or shame or damage, and, half hidden as she was behind her pseudonym, Agatha felt compelled to write the truths of that time as she saw them: the growing subterranean despair, the creeping sense of disengagement.

  They had a good many neighbours there – most of them with children. Everyone was friendly. The only thing that made a difficulty was Dermot’s refusal to go out to dinner.

  ‘Look here, Celia, I come down from London tired out, and you want me to dress up and go out and not get home and to bed till past midnight. I simply can’t do it.’

  ‘Not every night, of course. But I don’t see that one night a week would matter.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to. You go, if you like.’

  ‘I can’t go alone. People don’t ask you to dinner except in pairs. And it sounds so odd for me to say that you never go out at night – because, after all, you’re quite young.’

  ‘I’m sure you could manage to go without me.’

  But that wasn’t so easy. In the country, as Celia said, people were asked in couples or not at all . . . So she refused the invitations, and they sat at home, Dermot reading books on financial subjects, and Celia sometimes sewing, sometimes sitting with her hands clasped . . .

  This was not the whole truth, of course. It was the underside. Agatha had a successful and fulfilled life: her books were admired, her family was healthy and handsome, her future prospects were good. In fact it was all most enviable. Agatha felt this herself. But beneath it lay Celia, fearful and questing and unable to make this grown-up life her own: desperately in love with Dermot yet only truly herself with her mother (‘She could say “I am so happy” without having to catch back the words at Dermot’s frown . . .’).

  Nobody would have believed Celia to exist within the confident, clever woman of substance (a little too much substance, by then) whose stories and photograph appeared in the Sketch, whose The Murder of Roger Ackroyd would soon be published to acclaim and controversy (there was a body of opinion that considered the novel a cheat, although in fact it plays entirely fair).12 Celia writes just one book – not a detective story – purely as an outlet for her powerful imagination; she never becomes a professional at anything. She remains a dreaming, drifting girl. She does not grow up in any way. ‘She didn’t look like a writer – this young creature with her Scandinavian fairness,’ thinks the man who publishes her book. She remains young, not just emotionally but physically.

  Inside that was how Agatha still thought of herself, as the lovely nymph who had danced through Torquay and into the arms of her husband. She is Jane in The Secret Adversary, who has ‘a wild rose quality about her face’; she is Anne in The Man in the Brown Suit, with the beauty that ‘drives men mad’; she is Flora in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, who with her ‘real Scandinavian pale gold hair’ has exactly the looks of the young Agatha. But Flora Ackroyd was dreamed into life by a woman who, only in her thirties, had become middle-aged. She was not unattractive – her smiling charm did not show itself in photographs – but she had lost her particular quality of beauty. Her masculine features needed lightness and youth to offset them; these had disappeared with the birth of Rosalind. So she created lovely girls, whose looks she had once shared, and although there was pleasure in doing so it also caused anguish. Meanwhile Archie remained lean, intense, attractive as ever. Perhaps Agatha should have done more about this physical disparity. ‘I hope I am getting thinner with all this walking!’ she wrote to Clara, from an Italian holiday in 1924.

  Agatha’s tone on this trip was very much that of the Empire Tour, enthusiastic and blithe: ‘We got ourselves to Milan, spent the afternoon of Wednesday there, and on to Bologna . . .’ As he had on the tour Archie fell ill, ‘had a temperature and went to bed whilst I jeered at him and said it was liver!’ They would be home soon, Agatha told her mother. ‘Archie has an “Autumn Meeting” of golf at Sunningdale the first week in October . . ,’13

  The golf was becoming a nightmare for her, although she pretended it was not. So trivial was it, in itself, she could never quite believe the extent to which it asserted its importance: it was as if her life were dominated by train-spotting or kites. But any childlike optimism that Archie’s passion would blow itself out was misplaced. His obsession continued to grow. She was unable to invite friends from London to stay unless the man played golf, otherwise Archie resented giving up his free time. This meant that Agatha herself was often left alone, having scarcely seen her husband during the week. She had her writing to think about, of course, and did so increasingly. One of the stories published during the Sunningdale period was ‘Philomel Cottage’,14 which appeared in Grand magazine in November 1924. It is the story of a woman, Alix, who throws over a devoted suitor in order to marry a man of whom she knows nothing and who, she gradually realises, is planning to kill her.

  A solution of sorts came to Agatha’s solitary weekends. Nan Pollock, sister to James Watts, was now on her second marriage to a man named George Kon: a golfer. Nan and Agatha had liked each other from Madge’s wedding day. Now they would sit and chat while Rosalind and Judy (three years the elder) played together in the garden, or they themselves played a few incompetent holes on the ladies’ course. Afterwards they met their
husbands at the club house for drinks. Agatha chose not to take alcohol, although the official line that she was a lifelong teetotaller is not quite true: on the Empire Tour she had enjoyed the odd glass of burgundy. But despite her weight gain – and, perhaps, Archie’s embarrassment – she now preferred the comforting glasses of mixed cream and milk that she had drunk, as a girl, when staying with Nan at Abney.

  By this time Agatha got on better with Nan than she did with her sister, although she was intrigued to have Madge stay for weekends at Scotswood in 1924, during the rehearsal period for The Claimant. Although by then Agatha was decidedly the more successful, her sister still fascinated and irked her. She was so wildly assured, so appallingly charming. ‘The head of the Press Bureau approached me for an interview,’ wrote Madge to her husband, ‘and I said I didn’t want to be known . . . All I told him was that I was Mrs Agatha Christie’s sister. And he simply revels in Styles and has read all her books! So perhaps we’ll have to be the Dolly Sisters after all!’ This easy generosity – of which Agatha herself would not have been capable – was even more annoying, since it somehow implied that Agatha’s acceptance by the press was within Madge’s gift. Of course she and Archie attended a performance of The Claimant. And it was fun, in a sense, to be writers together with Madge; particularly when it became clear that The Claimant was not quite the work of genius she had been led to believe. Madge planned to write a play about Warren Hastings but despite the enthusiasm of her producer, Basil Dean, this did not happen. Agatha remembered it, though. In Absent in the Spring Joan Scudamore meets an old schoolfriend, Blanche, and asks – somewhat condescendingly – if her husband ‘ever wrote his book on Warren Hastings?’ He had; it was never published.

  Archie was on perfectly friendly terms with Madge, although he may have had his fill of Agatha’s family by the mid-1920s. Monty continued to be a nuisance. On his return from the Empire Tour, Archie had found a flat for his brother-in-law and offered to install him in it; instead he ended up escorting him to a favoured hotel in Jermyn Street, saying to Agatha, ‘It seemed so reasonable, the way he put it.’ Then Agatha had helped Madge buy the cottage for Monty on Dartmoor: James Watts was always annoyed by the way his wife threw money at this problem, but in Agatha’s case the money was her own and there was nothing Archie could say.

  Meanwhile Clara was just along the corridor, no doubt encouraging the purchase of the cottage. She was not permanently at Sunningdale, as she still had Ashfield (and Abney), and to preserve her sense of independence Agatha arranged for her to stay in rooms with some friends in London. But she was often at Scotswood and in her frail old age she had become – as even Agatha admitted – ‘difficult to get on with’. Not that Archie had ever found her especially easy. Although he had expected to be jealous when Agatha had a baby, this had not in fact been the case. Yet he remained jealous of Clara. Agatha’s devotion to her mother, her near-obsession with Ashfield, the letters she had written from abroad to her ‘precious mummy’: it was hardly usual behaviour in an adult woman. And Clara’s adoration of Agatha was another irritant. Of course Peg Hemsley thought the same way about Archie (and was similarly hard to avoid, having moved to Dorking in Surrey). The difference was that Archie took no notice of his mother while Agatha remained under Clara’s spell. Now Clara was taking a hand in the education of Rosalind. She was a natural teacher, and Rosalind responded well to her. ‘She knows and understands her Grandma and her Grandma loves and understands her Rosalind,’ Clara wrote from Abney in early 1926. It was not quite interference. But from Archie’s point of view Clara was always too much of a presence in his life, with her unnerving quickness and penetrating eye.

  ‘I was wrong about Dermot’ [says the mother in Unfinished Portrait]. ‘When you married him, I didn’t trust him. I didn’t think he was honest or loyal . . . I thought there would be other women.’

  ‘Oh, Mother, Dermot never looks at anything but a golf ball.’

  At which Miriam smiles; then says:

  ‘He’s very attractive – he’s attractive to women, Celia, remember that . . .’

  ‘He’s a frightfully stay-at-home person, Mummy.’

  ‘Yes, that’s lucky.’

  It was true that, aside from his golf, Archie had no wish to be out and about: he liked a normal, controlled family life. He craved a wife who bestowed constant reassurance with a light, quiet touch. Agatha’s success was not particularly intrusive – although it had gone beyond what either of the Christies had expected – and she still put Archie first, even if he did not think so. Her marriage was by far the most important thing in her life. That was why she had moved to Sunningdale, bought her debenture at the golf club, agreed to the plan of building a house on the Wentworth Estate when, in her heart, she yearned to leave this tight little gin-drinking society behind her and live somewhere large and free.

  (‘Let me see.’ Shirley’s eyes half closed. She spoke dreamily. ‘I’d like to live on an island – an island rather far away from anywhere. I’d like to live in a white house with green shutters . . .’)15

  Archie knew her longings: he knew that there was a wildness in Agatha that did not belong in Sunningdale. He had fallen in love with her dreamy poetic aspect, although he had not fully understood it. He had seen bliss and safety in the girl with whom he had danced amid the pink stone of Ugbrooke. How sweet she had been, how soothing, with her cool hand in his. How beautiful, too, his Elaine, with her slim body in its long skirts, her magical quantities of pale hair that she took down at night for his eyes alone (‘You are lovely and perfect in every way’).

  But what had been adorable in a young girl was now faintly repulsive. Agatha’s artistic soul had once expressed itself with discretion; now there was something uncontrolled about her eagerness, her zest for life, her childishness (‘Dermot hated you to say what you were feeling. He felt it, somehow, to be indecent’). The Agatha of 1912 was the same woman as the Agatha of 1926, but to Archie she seemed a different person. Louder, larger, uglier. ‘Yes, more difficult to disguise that you were silly as your looks left you.’ (A sudden flash of memory: ‘Don’t ever grow less beautiful, will you, Celia?’)

  ‘Yes, but that was all over now. They’d lived together long enough for such things as the beauty of a face to have lost its meaning. Dermot was in her blood and she in his.’

  ‘Styles’ was not the house that either Agatha or Archie had wanted, but they were tired of the flat at Scotswood and felt it was time to buy. The plan to build a new home on the Wentworth Estate came to nothing, although according to Agatha’s autobiography the Christies had spent ‘happy summer evenings tramping over Wentworth looking out for a site which we thought would suit us’. The quality of the numinous, so essential to Agatha, bloomed on those walks as she dreamed a house – her house – into life. But in the end it was deemed too expensive (£5,300) and too complicated. Easier to take on something ready-made, with a nice garden for Rosalind, conveniently near to the station for Archie. The Christies looked around for a year or so before they took out a mortgage on Styles, and had plenty of time to find something they really liked. Instead they acquired the house described in A Pocket Full of Rye: large, modern, red-brick, with leaded windows like small black eyes and a thick shroud of trees.

  It is impossible to imagine Agatha living in this place. Compared to Ashfield, which had light and magic and homeliness, Styles was as immutable as a stockbroker’s fortress. Inside it was ‘decorated regardless of expense’, with panelling, gilt and ‘quantities of bathrooms’, although the plan was to change all this when it could be afforded. Outside could not be changed. Styles was handsome but it had a cold, dead look. During the war a woman had been murdered in the copse behind it. Agatha hated the house, Rosalind liked it for its garden, Archie was indifferent to it.

  ‘I am sorry for you settling in,’ Clara wrote to Agatha from Ashfield. ‘It is always so full of unexpected worries.’ Chief among these was money: the Christies had overstretched themselves and were running two cars
and three servants. There was also Charlotte Fisher, employed to look after Rosalind and to act as Agatha’s secretary-typist. Rosalind had previously had an excellent nanny – Miss White, known as ‘Site’ – and a hopeless Swiss governess, Marcelle. She now attended Oakfield School in Sunningdale but Agatha felt the need for help with her daughter, and so it was that Charlotte, or ‘Carlo’,16 as she was later known, came to live with the family. She was young, highly intelligent, the daughter of an Edinburgh chaplain and – as one of her nieces later described her17 – ‘a very splendid person’. There was in her something of Katherine Grey in The Mystery of the Blue Train, the novel that Agatha began to write after Roj-jer Ackroyd. Katherine has both judgement and humour, despite being obliged to earn her living as a companion; as Charlotte did Clara, she handles old ladies with patient kindness. Charlotte also commanded instant respect from Rosalind and, despite the ten-year age gap, got along very well with Agatha. She was the kind of person with whom Agatha felt comfortable. Like Katherine Grey, she said little and listened a good deal. She could size people up with her cool Scottish eye, and she thought the world of her employer.

  Styles was bought by Archie and Agatha together. His income was obviously more stable than hers, although she was earning quite well. The suggestion has been made18 that Agatha had become possessive about her own money, spending it on herself and her blood relations rather than sharing it with her husband. But even if that were true – which it was, in the case of Monty – what would it mean? Men supported the home in the 1920s; Archie would not have expected to do otherwise, and would certainly not have wanted money from his wife unless in real need of it.

  Nevertheless it is true that Agatha’s earnings were giving her the appearance of an independent being. The Christies shared a home and a child, but in other ways their lives had become quite separate. Archie had his golf and his City friends like Sam James, a smiling, successful businessman who lived with his wife, Madge, at Hurtmore, near Godaiming. Agatha had Nan, Carlo, her family. Archie loved to stay where he was; Agatha yearned to travel again. In 1925 they went on holiday together to Cauterets in the Pyrenees, where she had stayed as a child with her parents; happy memories had made her want to return. No doubt the shadow of Agatha’s family cast itself upon Archie’s willingness to enjoy himself, and he did not especially do so. As on board ship during the Empire Tour, he went to bed at ten thirty while Agatha stayed up, watching the music-hall show at the Kursaal, her mind half on her husband. The next year she wanted to go away again, but Archie did not, so she went with her sister for a short break to Corsica. Her relationship with Madge was not perfect but there was a level of understanding between them that Agatha craved. They could talk together about the past, about Monty, about their parents. They could share the delight in life they had both felt before marriage, motherhood and housekeeping had claimed them. They could alleviate each other’s concerns about Clara, whose health had been precarious for some time now.