Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  (‘Suicide needs a lot of courage.’

  Vivien flinched back as though she had been struck.

  ‘You’ve got me there. Yes, I’ve got no pluck. If there were an easy way—’

  ‘There’s an easy way in front of you,’ said Claire. ‘You’ve only got to run straight down that green slope.’)2

  A woman on a train with a face like that of a ghost.

  So many stories.

  ‘Harlequin’s Lane’, for instance, in which the woman flung herself into the moonlit pit.

  And Mr Satterthwaite, who found the woman’s body at the end of the lane, which leads either to love or to death. He ‘had a vista of something at once menacing and terrifying . . . Joy, Sorrow, Despair’. He knows that he will never, now, experience these emotions. ‘But I see things,’ he cried. ‘I may have been only a looker-on at Life – but I see things that other people do not.’3

  That evening after dinner she sat in the Winter Garden Ballroom with her head bent to a crossword. The room was emptier than it had been since she arrived. Quiet, calm, soft piano music. The light was dim and forgiving, gleaming low.

  Perhaps she could live this way for ever. Without love, without grief.

  She smiled at Mr Pettelson as he came across and asked if he might join her for coffee. He had heard that she might be leaving, also? Was this true? It had been Mrs Findlay, he thought, who had told him this.

  She did not know where Mrs Findlay had got that idea. She did not know when she would be leaving, in fact, she had no plans at all.

  Might he interest her later in a game of billiards? He had heard that she played. Too well for him, no doubt!

  The band did not play that night but earlier in the day two of its members had gone to the police. They suspected, as did other members of staff at the Hydro, that the nice lady who called herself Mrs Neele was, in fact, Agatha Christie. It was almost over.

  She smiled at Mr Pettelson and said that would be delightful. Monday, the thirteenth. Rosie looked at her a little shamefacedly as she brought in breakfast.

  Are you all right this morning, she asked. Oh yes, ma’am. Your newspaper as usual, ma’am.

  Five thousand people had looked for her yesterday.

  She felt somewhat tired today.

  A man named Max Pemberton gave his expert theory to the Mail that she was dead. ‘Should happily I be wrong, then I will bow to her as to a great mistress of a staged drama. But I should still think it very wicked of her to have awakened so much public sympathy in so poor a cause.’

  She felt unusually reluctant to go out. She sat in her room and read for a while. When Rosie came back to do the room she apologised for being still in her dressing-gown. Always make life easy for servants, her mother had said.

  Oh Mummy. What would you have thought of all this. The journalists had gone to try to find her at Ashfield, had walked up to the dear front door and poked around the garden. She should not really have let that happen.

  Downstairs the papers were full of the Sunday hunt.

  Another woman had disappeared. Miss Una Crowe. She had walked out of her home in Chelsea and not been seen since. A girl really, poor thing, suffering from a nervous breakdown after the death of her father. How pitiful it sounded.

  Meanwhile it was suggested that she herself was living in London, disguised as a man like Ethel le Neve. How ridiculous it all was.

  She heard a newspaper rustle in the corner of the room. Quite a handsome man. So many people were leaving, she had seen Miss Findlay saying goodbye to Miss Corbett and had felt a certain relief at the thought of no more sidelong looks from Mrs Findlay. Not that she had minded so much. In fact she would miss the Findlays, their inevitable presence at the corner table of the Winter Garden Ballroom. Mrs Findlay guiding her husband in a well-trained waltz and their daughter’s faintly resentful gaucheness. She had enjoyed them.

  She smiled at the new guest and went out into the streets. Hat down, collar down. Tuesday, the fourteenth, and Mrs Taylor smiling more brightly than ever as she broke off her conversation with Mrs Robson and said, Good morning! How well you are looking, Mrs Neele. Harrogate seems to agree with you.

  Are we still going to the dance at the Prospect Hotel tonight, asked Mrs Robson, I do hope so. Oh yes, of course. They had discussed this a few evenings ago. Mrs Robson had suggested it and she had thought, why not.

  Well, do enjoy yourselves, ladies, said Mrs Taylor.

  Pleasant, polite, utterly normal. Yet in the Daily Mail an expoliceman had written this about her: ‘One great difficulty is that the search is for a woman with certain attributes that are not common to the ordinary individual. She is talented. She is a woman who by the very nature of her work would have an exceptionally elastic brain. Consequently one would expect her, consciously or subconsciously, to do something extraordinary.’

  Well that, she thought, was really rather nice.

  ‘Soon some most interesting development must occur, but its nature cannot yet, in my opinion, be even guessed at.’

  She smiled at that. Everything else was more nonsense. On and on it went. How very famous Mrs Christie had become. How absurd it was when she was here, simply here, as she had told them. They were going to send divers to search all those pools she had driven past. So apparently she was no longer living in London in her musical-comedy male-impersonator costume, well that was good to know.

  This girl, this Una Crowe, she was surely dead. Poor young thing. She had lived at Elm Park Road, how odd, that was just by her friend Nan Watts. Why, they might have passed each other in the street.

  She went out for her walk, through the Valley Gardens today. Past the Majestic Hotel, a vast red-brick building, unusual for here. She looked at it, at the people inside drinking their morning coffee and smoking. Contained within their lives.

  How lovely it all was. How safe she felt.

  She enjoyed her lunch. It was quiet in the dining room and she read some poetry she had taken out from the library. Later she had a massage. Afterwards she played billiards again. She signed a piece of sheet music for Mr Pettelson of the song ‘Angels Guard Thee’, which he had sung to her piano playing. Teresa Neele, she wrote. He was a charming man, certainly. Perhaps a little smitten with her? A pleasant thought, no more. My dear Mrs Neele, how very kind. I shall treasure this always.

  Afterwards she went for her bath and changed for dinner. She put on the georgette dress she had bought when she first arrived, heavens, more than a week ago now. She glanced at her newspaper again in the darkening room. A woman with certain attributes that are not common to the ordinary individual.

  She looked out of her window. The sweep of the drive, the road that led to the town, the trees, the stone houses, the fallen light.

  She looked at herself. Pale hair, pale eyes. She smiled.

  As she did every night at this time she walked down the corridor, which creaked a little, then down the short flight of stairs that turned and led to the lobby. Outside the hotel doors something seemed to be massing in the black air. New arrivals? She went to glance at a copy of The Times.

  Archie was in the lounge, sitting by the fire.

  They looked at each other. Archie and Agatha again.

  She sat down opposite him.

  Then an extraordinary thing, Mr Pettelson came up to her with his little bow, and she was saying, look, do you see, my brother has arrived. And then suddenly there was a small bustle of activity, and she saw how tired and sad Archie looked, and she knew that she loved him now, always, for ever, that she had done this for him and he was here too late, too late.

  He was touching her arm to lead her into dinner.

  Yes, that is my wife, she heard him say, to the man she had seen in the lounge the day before. The man was talking to her. He was a policeman. A nuisance. What had policemen to do with her? She explained to him that she remembered nothing of what had happened since she left her home eleven days ago, was it really so long? and that only now was she beginning to regain her m
emory. Yes, my wife remembers nothing, said Archie.

  They were going into dinner together. On the way she saw Mrs Robson, oh, she was so sorry about tonight, my brother has arrived unexpectedly, would she forgive her? Of course, Mrs Neele, how very nice for you.

  They sat. Archie again, opposite her at a table. How white his face was.

  But could it not, now, be just all right? The menu, the food, perhaps even a glass of table wine?

  How was Teddy, she asked.

  She knew nothing about any of it, he said, so she was perfectly all right.

  Missing me?

  At that moment the waiter came up and he turned his head away to give their order.

  Are you all right, Agatha? he said, when he had finished.

  I don’t know, she said, am I?

  He looked at her.

  She had gone away but she knew that it was he who eluded her, then, now and for ever.

  She had grown up at last.

  But ten slow mornings past, and on the eleventh

  Her father laid the letter in her hand,

  And closed the hand upon it, and she died.4

  She smiled at the waiter and began to eat.

  From that point on, she became public property.

  The journalists poured into the Harrogate Hydro. Mr and Mrs Taylor were powerless against them. Agatha was what the press wanted but she had gone up to her room after dinner. Archie, who had taken a separate room for himself, was left to cope. Although he wished to say nothing he took the advice of Superintendent McDowell of the West Riding Police, the man who had spoken to Agatha before she went in to dinner, and agreed to speak to one newspaper. In a statement to the Yorkshire Post Archie put forward for the first time the official line on Agatha’s disappearance, which for many years her family stuck to resolutely.

  ‘There is no question about her identity. She is my wife. She is suffering from complete loss of memory and identity. She does not know who she is. She does not know me, and she does not know why she is in Harrogate. I am hoping to take her to London tomorrow to see a doctor and a specialist, and I hope that rest and quiet will put her right. Great credit is due to the police for their untiring efforts in the matter, and for the inquiries which have led to her discovery.’

  The idea that this would put an end to speculation is, in retrospect, almost comical. But Archie did not have a clue about what he was doing, what he had become mixed up in. He could only dimly understand the mysterious motives of a wife who was, as he had told the Daily Mail, ‘very clever’: far cleverer than himself. He had been through pretty good hell during the past week or so, suspected of adultery at best and murder at worst, and his relief that it was over was complicated by anger, anxiety and guilt. As always, his instinct was to bury his feelings. It was a good idea, but he did not do it very well. He held himself on a rein so tight it was always liable to snap, and the reporters knew it. He had something to hide. ‘Mrs Neele’ indeed! They knew all about what that meant. If Archie was covering up for his wife, he was also covering up for himself.

  After giving the statement Archie sent a telegram to Charlotte Fisher at Styles. He suggested that she arrange for his Delage to be driven from Sunningdale to King’s Cross, where he and Agatha could pick it up before going home. Charlotte had been rung at around midday by the Surrey police, who gave her news of the possible sighting that they had received from Yorkshire. She was asked to travel to Harrogate but could not go, as Rosalind was in her care. Instead she contacted Archie at his office and he caught the one forty from King’s Cross, the same train that Agatha had taken.

  Charlotte too had gone through hell. She had been under a certain degree of suspicion: not just that she knew more than she was telling, but that for some unknown motive she had murdered her employer. Reporters had clustered round Styles, lurking beneath the little black windows, taking her photograph every time she emerged. For support she had had her sister, Mary, to stay with her, and between them they had looked after Rosalind, Under intense pressure, Charlotte’s loyalty to Agatha had remained absolute.

  Now she rang family and friends, giving them the official ‘amnesia’ line. Meanwhile Archie changed his mind about the arrangements for getting Agatha away from Harrogate. It was obvious that they could not catch a train to London tomorrow then go on to Sunningdale: the journalists would simply follow them and camp outside the house. So he contacted Madge and James Watts and made a new arrangement. The pretence would be maintained that the Christies were going to Styles; at Leeds, they would change trains and travel to Abney. There Agatha could hole up. No reporter could get past those vast iron gates.

  Accordingly the Wattses arrived at the Hydro early on Wednesday morning, where they were met by Archie. Madge had known absolutely nothing of Agatha’s thoughts before she had left her home on 3 December, although she might have made a better guess than most at her sister’s state of mind. James, who was fond of Agatha and a practical, competent man, took charge of the arrangements to get her away.

  At around 9.15 a.m., Agatha left the hotel that had been her home for ten days. How reluctant she must have been to drag herself back from the forgetful depths. The sheer number of journalists made escape very difficult so a decoy car had been arranged, a landaulette, which drew up at the entrance and attracted a crush of photographers. Meanwhile a taxi had arrived at the goods entrance, around the side. The Mail, having guessed the ruse, was there to take a picture of Agatha as she walked down the few steps to the car: beneath the brim of her hat her face is entirely blank.

  At Harrogate station she again used the goods entrance. There were too many people on the platform for the journalists to identify Agatha with certainty. She and Madge managed to hide in their compartment – taken for ‘Mr Parker’s party’ – while their husbands kept discreet watch outside. Meanwhile some reporters were running across the tracks to reach the King’s Cross train. At Leeds the whole performance was repeated, when it was realised that Agatha was changing trains rather than going on to London. Her photograph was taken by many of the newspapers as, smiling bizarrely, she led the way towards the Manchester train. By the time it arrived, a vast crowd of journalists had amassed to meet them. Archie lost control briefly when he pushed away a man who tried to talk to Agatha, saying, ‘This lady is ill.’ Madge’s chauffeur-driven Wolseley was waiting outside the station and more photographs were taken as Agatha got into it. Again, she was smiling. She also appeared to be wearing her wedding ring.

  A convoy of press chased the Wolseley all the way to Abney Hall, where the gates were padlocked. The crowd at King’s Cross, waiting for the arrival of the Harrogate train, sighed and shoved as Agatha failed to appear; then the train driver shouted, ‘We have not got her!’ and they went home disappointed, clutching their newspapers, talking of Mrs Christie.

  Something of the mystery will always remain. The blank face of the quarry will never give up all its secrets. The facts may now be known, and much of the intention behind them, but in the end what is left is a story. A mystery story. Her finest, because it cannot be solved.

  Of course there have been many attempts to do so, but these fail, because the mystery Agatha created was so much more than merely a puzzle. Questions can be asked. Did she plan it all? Did she lose her memory? Was it a publicity stunt? Was she after revenge, or pity, or an end to it all? Indeed these questions have been asked repeatedly, in the hope of a simple answer. But such a hope is not relevant: it is reductive. Her eleven days in the wilderness are a myth, a poem. They exist in a different sphere from that of theories and solutions.

  The eleven days are the creation of an artist, a writer; and writers live life differently. Their motives are always mixed, because to them everything is a story. That is their escape, their freedom. That is their way.

  But because the story is that of Agatha Christie, the temptation has been to treat it as a detective story: to work it out. Oh for Poirot! Somebody who could simply take the facts – the letters, the abandoned car, th
e train journeys, the Times advertisement – and by a miracle of reasoning make them cohere.

  In a sense, they do cohere. As has been shown, there is a solution that clears the tangle from the forest. But it can only do so, in honesty, by acknowledging the dark areas, the ambivalences, the unknowable. Agatha herself barely understood what she had done throughout those eleven days: how, then, can they be rendered, except as a story?

  All biography is story-telling. No life is a code to be deciphered: there will always be gaps and inconsistencies, and it is stories that make the missing connections. Omniscience is for Hercule Poirot. Real life knows less; it has the beauty of mystery; and this, despite the books that she wrote, was something that Agatha understood very well. She must have known she had created a puzzle of a different order, with all the geometric complexity of Roger Ackroyd – how to work it out? Turn it this way? That way? – and yet with this twist in the tale: it was true, and therefore it could never be solved. It was perfect, in fact. The perfect metaphor for human mystery. What could be more impenetrable than the woman who moved through Harrogate like a smiling ghost, reading newspaper reports about her own vanished self?

  And so the story endures, infinitely fascinating; and those who would lay it to rest, who would destroy its beauty by ‘solving’ it, are defeated at every turn.

  Perhaps the best comment of all was written on 16 December, two days after Agatha had been found at Harrogate, when the newspapers were still simmering about the affair and the faintly foolish part they had played in it. It came from a columnist in the Daily Sketch, who wrote as ‘The Man in the Street’.

  Many citizens who, like me, have neither met Mrs Agatha Christie nor read any of her novels must have felt immensely relieved when the police at last ascertained her new address . . . Whether such facts as were available regarding this matter from the start ever justified the subsequent efforts at fiction in which so many people indulged, not to mention the resulting impressive expenditure of energy and money, is a little doubtful.