Love passes out into the silent night,
We may not hold him who has served our will
And, for a while, made magic common things . . .
Now, like a bird, he spreads his wings in flight,
And we are left in darkness – listening still
To the faint far-off beating of his wings . . .
The poem ‘Love Passes’ was in the Road of Dreams collection. As this was published in 1924, the possibility that Archie was no longer in love with her may have occurred to Agatha some time earlier, before he had even met Nancy. She may have thought that she, too, had fallen out of love.
Of course the poem is not a factual record, although outside her detective fiction (and, occasionally, within it) Agatha wrote from the heart.
Love passes! On the heart dead embers lie
Where once there burned a fire of living flame,
Where we, starved children, sheltering in shame,
Stretched out our hands, and let the world go by . . .
The truth is that Agatha was playing with her very real emotions: pushing her fear to the point of exorcism, to the point where she no longer believed it. She must have been thinking these things, in however deep a part of herself. For all her obtuseness, something in her had sensed change. While she was bringing life to the merry love affairs in The Man in the Brown Suit and The Secret of Chimneys – those ecstatic pairings between the Archie she wanted and the Agatha she wanted to be – she was also writing her own future in poems like ‘Love Passes’ and ‘Progression’.
Springtime will come again,
The almond trees blossom once more . . .
And yet I weep,
For never again shall I tread love’s way with you . . .
Farewell, O Lover of mine,
Our day is done.
But she did not really think that the Christies’ day was done: she had played with fear, in her art, in a way that was almost a luxury, until the moment the truth came out of Archie’s mouth. Agatha knew Nancy Neele. She quite liked her. Nancy was twenty-six, still living at home with her parents in Hertfordshire, working as a secretary in the City.26 Her great friend Madge Fox, with whom she had trained at the Triangle secretarial school in South Molton Street, later married Archie’s friend Sam James. Thus Nancy had come into Archie Christie’s orbit.
At some point in 1925 she stayed a weekend at Hurtmore Cottage, the James’s home near Godalming and found Archie there alone. He needed a golf partner, as Sam did not play. Nancy did, rather well. In the course of things she came to know Agatha, who chaperoned her at a dance and asked her to stay at Styles for a weekend. It seems, although there is no absolute proof of this, that Nancy accepted at least one invitation. According to the autobiography Archie ‘objected to my asking her down to stay, he said it would spoil his golf’. Which was, of course, a remark that could be interpreted in two very different ways.
Agatha took the view that this meant he had had no particular interest in Nancy until after April 1926. At that point he was left alone in London; he did not wish to visit his wife at Ashfield because he could not cope with her uncontrolled grief; his boredom and solitude had driven him into Nancy’s arms. As Agatha put it, her own absence ‘left him open to other influences’.27
This was the view also held by Rosalind, whose loyalty to her father was staunch. ‘He wasn’t that kind of man. They’d been married a long time. But my mother went away. Naturally he wanted someone to play with, play golf with.’28
‘Well, that’s a generous interpretation,’ says Rosalind’s half-brother, Archie.29
Because the more cynical view, of course, is that Archie Christie did not want Nancy Neele at Styles because he had an interest – to say the least – in her, and would have found it both embarrassing and distasteful for his wife to receive her at their marital home.
There is no way of knowing exactly when Archie fell in love with Nancy, neither is there any proof that they had an affair. Indeed Madge James was ‘absolutely adamant’ that Nancy was never Archie’s mistress, writing in a letter in the 1980s that ‘In those days we did not pop into bed at the “drop of a hat” as they do today – I was Nancy’s most intimate friend and I am prepared to swear that nothing of this occurred.’ Another source30 states that the affair had been going on – and off – for eighteen months before Archie visited Ashfield in August 1926. But this information is at three removes, coming as it does from Judith, daughter of Agatha’s friend Nan Kon. It assumes that Archie told the details of his affair to Agatha, who then relayed them to Nan – both of which are unlikely in the extreme – and that Nan repeated every single detail to her daughter (who was only ten at the time of these events).
Judith’s account states this timetable. Archie was sleeping with Nancy from the time he met her in early 1925. In the summer he went to Cauterets with Agatha, having broken off the affair. On his return from the holiday he resumed with Nancy, and led a double life until August 1926. His obsession with playing golf was, in fact, an excuse to be with his mistress; his weekends were for her and her alone; and the Jameses, who knew that he was unhappy with Agatha, provided a useful bolthole at Godalming. Archie refused to go to Corsica with Agatha because he wanted to be with Nancy. During his months alone in London after Clara’s death, he took the opportunity to consolidate the relationship.
Such a version of events is completely uncorroborated, and cannot possibly be taken as fact. Nevertheless Nan Kon might have known something. She was on the Sunningdale scene and her husband George was a friend of Archie’s: a photograph taken by Nan on a golf course in 1926 shows George with Archie and a slightly defiant-looking Nancy. It seems reasonable to think that there was gossip, which does not necessarily mean there was also a love affair. People are quick to see attraction between others – to scent scandal in the air – and close societies, which Sunningdale was, thrive on rumour.
Yet the fact that Archie chose to buy a house with Agatha at the start of 1926 suggests that he had no serious thought then of leaving her. It would have been insane to move from rented accommodation into that large place, with its huge mortgage, if he had been planning to get away. Even if the urge to buy had been Agatha’s, the Christies had already delayed doing so for a year or more before they took Styles. Perhaps this was due to Archie’s friendship with Nancy; perhaps he was thinking of her when he trod the Wentworth Estate with Agatha, pretending to plan a new home. That is pure conjecture, though. What is certain is that it would have been easy to wait a little longer, to stay at Scotswood until Archie had finally made up his mind to leave.
More likely he was attracted to Nancy from the first and, to some unknowable degree, the two became close throughout 1925. Certainly Archie was not happy during the holiday to Cauterets, so he may well have wished himself back on the golf course with another woman. But by 1926 he had taken the view that his responsibilities lay with Agatha and Rosalind. He was prepared to stick with the life he had; possibly with the addition of a mistress on the side.
Then, during the summer in London, he grew close enough to Nancy to want to marry her. To that extent, Agatha was right in her analysis of the situation. It is entirely possible that Archie began an affair while Agatha was at Ashfield. It is equally possible that Nancy held out for marriage, in the manner of an Anne Boleyn. But some sort of pressure was brought to bear upon Archie – who was, undeniably, willing to be pressurised – to make him want to leave his family. The removal of Clara from the scene, which left Agatha with nobody to fight her corner and shame her husband, would have made it easier for Archie to announce his decision.
How could Agatha possibly have remained ignorant? Because her intuition was not quick when it came to real life; it worked only in her art. The shock of Archie’s betrayal was absolute. That is beyond question.
Yet Unfinished Portrait makes clear the changes in her husband, evident since the birth of Rosalind. According to that book, he had become withdrawn, unemotional, cold. Contemptuous of Aga
tha’s eager, childlike ways, which seemed so inappropriate in a grown woman. Controlled to an extent that was worse, even, than the lack of control she so disliked. Such detachment from his wife might be seen to indicate earlier, less serious affairs; as might the growing obsession with golf, which took Archie so completely away from his wife; and, of course, the poems in The Road of Dreams. In fact there is no evidence whatever of Archie’s infidelity. But something in Agatha intuited the death of love, the death of the fervent young man who had returned so apparently unchanged from war. ‘I will always love you more than anything on earth,’ he had written to her in 1914. ‘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’; ‘One day we will have our cottage which will be heavenly happiness and will never say goodbye again.’ She had kept these letters: kept them until she died. This was the Archie she had loved, still loved, still saw within the man who had looked at her with that furtive, shifty-eyed expression, which meant he was about to betray her. He was not just taking away the life she had hoped to have. He was taking everything: the dances at Ugbrooke House, the honeymoon night at the Grand Hotel in Torquay, the wartime fear and passion, the foolish things they had written.
(Q for the Quarrels that end so ‘demurely’
Each apology binds them together securely!)
She knew, of course, that they had not been ‘in love’ with each other for some time now. But in her obtuse and childlike way she did not grasp the reality. Her vision of Archie was so deeply fixed in her imagination that she did not see how incomplete it was: the beautiful soldier Lancelot, ‘bruised and bronzed’, with his air of romance and fragility, was no more than a man. Like Elaine, Agatha had lived in fantasy. Having spent six years dreaming an illusory Archie into solid life, she had played, with complete sincerity, at being a wife. She had lovingly cooked food he could not eat; had accompanied him round the world, then had more fun without him; had tried to ‘share’ his life while failing to understand him. He was vulnerable in ways both more complex and more banal than she had realised. The war had left terrible marks. The fear he had felt during Agatha’s pregnancy showed his need for undivided love. His nerves were bad: and, throughout the 1920s, Agatha had made them worse. Her work as a writer gave her assurance that expressed itself as a kind of excitable talkativeness, unlike her previous quiet serenity. Her enthusiasms – for books, music, travel, Devon – were not his. And her growing independence was a threat because it made Archie feel she could do without him. Perhaps Agatha herself sometimes felt this way. Perhaps the problem was that she was a writer, and he was not.
. . . they’d go on and on and on – probably at Dalton Heath or somewhere like it . . .
Little shivers ran over her . . . If one could be free – quite free – nothing, no belongings, no houses, or husband or children, nothing to hold you, and tie you, and pull at your heart . . .31
The desire for freedom was always there, and the prison of Sunningdale had pushed it to a pitch; Archie might have been falling out of love but he did so, partly, because he feared Agatha would do so. He saw in her the need for something more than he could give. He had once stretched out his hands to her, like a little boy, knowing that she would hold them. Now she was clothed in the accoutrements of success, and he could no longer reach her. He did not know that she felt the same way about him: that she was chilled to the bone by his self-control, which had grown like a skin over the heart of the man she loved.
There was another factor, though: the oldest one in the history of betrayal.
The golden green light, the softness in the air – with them came a quickened pulse, a stirring of the blood, a sudden impatience.
A girl came through the trees towards him – a girl with pale, gleaming hair and a rose flushed skin.
He thought, ‘How beautiful – how unutterably beautiful.’
Nancy Neele was beautiful. She did not look at all like Agatha, being dark, with a face full of sweet, seductive curves, but she had what Agatha had once had and had now lost.
‘That’s what I remember about her,’ said Sam James’s daughter. ‘As a child, I remember that Nancy was so beautiful.’32
Thus Agatha wrote, in her detective novel Sad Cypress, of how Elinor Carlisle is taken away from the man she loves by a young girl, Mary Gerrard, whose beauty renders him helpless. ‘They would have been together here – now,’ thinks Elinor, ‘walking side by side in gentle proprietary pleasure, happy – yes, happy together – but for the fatal accident of a girl’s wild rose beauty . . .’
Left alone in London with this lovely girl, while his wife wept her heart out down in Torquay, Archie was unable to resist. Why had Agatha allowed her looks to go, after all? Did she not realise that a man wanted beauty in his wife? And why must she mourn her mother so wildly? Had she not heard him say that he could not bear illness or distress, he simply could not cope with it? Why could she not have remained the girl with whom he had fallen in love, slim and fair, the steady smiling presence who made him feel safe? (‘I miss you more than ever this time and feel so lost without having you near me.’)33 Nancy seemed like everything Agatha had ceased to be. She was lively in a way that did not irritate, she consoled and reassured with a light touch, she played golf, she did not write, she was grown-up, she was beautiful, she needed him: she was the wife and the woman Archie wanted.
‘I must in some way have been inadequate to fill Archie’s life,’ wrote Agatha in her autobiography. ‘He must have been ripe for falling in love with someone else, though he perhaps didn’t even know it himself. Or was it just this particular girl?’
With love, who knows? There is always illusion, the illusion that makes one person seem more magical than any other in the world. The question is of degree: is there enough reality within to sustain love when it can no longer feed upon ‘Nature’s lure, Nature’s last and most cunning piece of deceit’?34
When Archie no longer felt passion for Agatha, it was just a matter of time before love evaporated. ‘Archie was a good chap,’ said Agatha’s son-in-law, ‘but you could never have imagined two people who were less compatible.’35
And yet. Although Agatha knew that Archie was not the man she had believed him to be – he was not Harry Rayburn or Anthony Cade, not Tristan, not Lancelot – she felt for him a passion that refused to die, however much she might wish it to. ‘O lover of mine that I loved, Farewell . . .’36 She simply could not believe that the letters Archie had written to her belonged to another time, a time that was as dead now as her mother. They seemed as real and alive as ever. ‘Never desert me darling and always love me . . .’ What had that meant when Archie wrote it? Had it meant something then, but not now? How could that be?
For Agatha – who spent the rest of her life trying to understand what love means – the illusory Archie did not die: he was fixed in her imagination at the very point of his leaving. Had the marriage lasted longer, she herself might have fallen out of love. As it was, she would never do so. A part of her would always be stuck at the moment when she had sat at Ashfield with Clara’s things around her, and heard Archie’s voice telling her that he loved another woman.
‘He loved Celia, I think, for her beauty and her beauty only . . .’ says the narrator of Unfinished Portrait. ‘She loved him enduringly and for life. He was, as she once put it, in her blood . . .’
Agatha begged Archie to stay, if not for her sake then for Rosalind’s. She was tormented by the thought that she had lost him through her own fault, and she begged for another chance. Knowing that he ought to stay, he gave in. After a couple of weeks at his club he returned to Styles, and Agatha’s heart soared: he had not really meant it. Everything would be all right again. Archie had just been looking for a fling. Hadn’t her grandmother always told her what ‘the gentlemen’ were like? Agatha simply had to be more realistic, more adult.
She made plans for the future. She would take a house in town to be nearer her husband, they would
let Styles, they would take the holiday that had been deferred (the Pyrenees again, perhaps?). They would spend a wonderful Christmas at Abney, where the sight of the stockings, the magnificent table, Rosalind’s starlit face would make Archie realise how much he was abandoning. Madge reassured her. Yes, Archie would get over it. But James Watts never thought he would; neither did Charlotte Fisher. This quiet, clever girl watched events at Styles and, as she burned in sympathy for her employer, saw how wrongly Agatha was behaving with Archie. Her distress made him feel guilty, and guilt made him cruel. She drove him quite mad and filled his head with thoughts of young, fresh, beautiful Nancy. According to the Nan Kon version of events the Christies rowed continually at the time and, on one occasion, Agatha threw a teapot at Archie. But it is hard to see how Nan could have known this (she was not there, after all, and the deeply private Agatha would hardly have confessed to such behaviour, particularly as – according to Nan’s daughter – she had ‘cast herself as the innocent victim’).37 Far more convincing is Charlotte’s testimony, later offered to Rosalind, that Agatha was tearful, depressed, passive to a degree that alarmed Charlotte and played desperately on Archie’s nerves.
‘Everybody can’t be happy,’ he said to Agatha. ‘I can’t stand not having what I want, and I can’t stand not being happy.’
He had not, perhaps, understood that Agatha would mind so much; he might have believed that her independence would sustain her. She had money, a career, Rosalind, Carlo, Madge. She could travel if she wanted to. She had so much more in her life than a husband. That was part of the problem for him, after all: that she had so much else besides him.
Yet here she was, white and distraught, as if losing him were a death blow. If only her mother were still alive. Then she would have been all right, perhaps.
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