Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  After Agatha was found, it was said – rather debatably – by the Westminster Gazette that ‘Perhaps the chief sufferer has been Mr Kenward, a responsible and reliable officer.’ In 1927 Kenward was obliged to make a report to the Home Office, explaining his much-criticised handling of the case. ‘I submit,’ he wrote, in a tone of muted defiance, ‘that the circumstances fully justified me in taking the action that I did.’ He denied the claims about large numbers of police being diverted from other duties. Only three dozen regular police were employed in the search, he said. There were also ‘innumerable Special Constables’, who were unpaid, and a great many ‘civilian helpers’. Inquiries in other parts of the country were made by Berkshire Police.17 No other forces were used and, contrary to rumour, Scotland Yard was never called in. The expenses amounted to about twenty-five pounds, ‘made up chiefly of hire of conveyances, and refreshments for the Special Constables’, a sum which Colonel Christie had been asked, and refused, to pay. This sum is double the one quoted in the House of Commons but it still seems very low; as does the number of officers involved in the case.

  Kenward’s chief defence, for having stuck to the belief that Agatha was dead, was ‘the disquieting nature of certain information that had come to my knowledge’. Many years later Kenward’s daughter would state that this referred to a fourth letter, written by Agatha, in which she said that she was in fear for her life.18 This assertion has been roundly discredited. In fact the letter that had influenced Kenward was the one written to Charlotte, which was hysterical, suicidal and accusatory towards Archie. It is not surprising that it loomed large in Kenward’s mind, and he was quite right to say that, had he taken insufficient notice of its contents, he would have been vilified.

  But in a long interview with the Surrey Advertiser, he went further still. He had, he said, believed that this was a murder case because ‘It was suggested very freely by people who knew her, including some of her own relations, that perhaps something of this nature had occurred.’ Now, this remarkable statement may well have been the words of a man trying to justify himself, knowing full well that he could say rather more outlandish things to a newspaper than he could to the Home Office, Nevertheless it gives pause for thought about the role of Madge, Agatha’s sister, in all of this. It was unlike her to keep quiet, yet she seems to have done nothing until she gave Agatha sanctuary at Abney Hall. Surely, though, she would have had ideas of her own about what had happened? It is impossible to imagine her telling Kenward that she suspected Archie of murder: for all her confident eccentricity, she was as reticent as Agatha in the public sphere. But she must have realised that Agatha had disappeared – possibly killed herself – because of Archie’s behaviour; in other words, that this was all his fault; and she would have been staunchly on Agatha’s side. She might, therefore, have said something to Kenward that helped lead him towards his wrong-headed theory.

  In the end, though, there can be little excuse for the fact that Kenward ignored the clues that did not fit his own ideas: notably, the letter to Campbell Christie. He was guilty of forcing facts to fit a theory. He had been a good officer, but this particular case had done for him. Five years later he retired from the force, and died, aged fifty-six, in 1932.

  As late as February 1928 Agatha’s disappearance was still in the news, her behaviour having become a byword for duplicitous conduct. During a libel action (issued, coincidentally, by the same Mr Mitchell-Hedges who had criticised Agatha back in 1926), reference was made by the prosecuting counsel to ‘a woman who played a foolish hoax on the police’.

  Deeply hurt and provoked by this, Agatha gave an interview to the Daily Mail that purported to give her version of the disappearance: that is to say, the ‘official’ theory. She also instructed her lawyer to make a statement on her behalf at the libel trial. Accordingly Mr Stuart Bevan, KC, asked the indulgence of the judge to present, in defence of her reputation, the medical certificate that had been issued at Abney Hall. The exchange between lawyer and judge was reported in The Times. The Lord Chief Justice stated that there was not time to spare ‘to hear applications about persons who happen to be referred to in the course of cases’. Mr Bevan replied that ‘When reference is made to a woman who is not here, is not represented here, and is unable to protect herself grave injustice is done unless the full facts are known.’ To which the judge said, ‘I think that, having said so much, Mr Bevan, you have probably accomplished your purpose.’19

  But Agatha had failed to accomplish hers. The actions that had been taken out of love for Archie had, by cruelly uncontrollable means, become the surest way to kill any love he had for her: she had wanted him back, she had dreamed that he would come to Harrogate and be restored to her, and instead she had ensured that he would want never to lay eyes on her again. The ending of the story had been wrenched from her grasp.

  When she saw him at the bottom of the stairs at the Harrogate Hydro, hope must have raged in her heart. Yet that night she had gone to bed alone to lie sleepless, facing the wreck of her dreams that she herself had brought about. The next morning she had left the hotel with Archie, she had travelled with him, they had walked side by side, he had defended and protected her against the terrifying assaults of the press. .And yet it had meant nothing. He was doing it for himself, for his future life with Nancy Neele. He wanted more than anything not to be with her. Having, as she thought, helped to destroy her marriage by leaving Archie alone while she grieved for her mother, she had now delivered its death blow by making herself an object of public ridicule, and Archie an object of public loathing. They were both private people, intensely so. How had she let this happen? How had it happened?

  She was back to herself now: the drifting, smiling ghost of Harrogate was gone. She was in the real world. She stayed at Abney and watched the contempt in Archie’s eyes, the disdainful exhaustion after he had spoken to the press. And then he left.

  Those days were the worst of all.

  You were a king, my love, and I

  In the far North lie nightly down to die . . .20

  ‘It was an appalling, not just distress, but a shock to her – so much so as to mentally unhinge her. There is a woman whom life has treated very well. Very loving mother, handsome and loving husband, and psychologically she could not take this upsetting. I don’t think she ever did get over it. I think that the breaking down of any relationship in which a woman has invested so much, it’s one of the universal griefs. And, therefore, she took pleasure in doing books in which, although there is a complete upsetting of normality, in the end order is restored. It was a psychological need to bring order out of disorder, which may have mirrored her own life. I think maybe every one of them is a kind of catharsis. All of them, a little catharsis’ P. D. James

  ‘People still think there’s an ulterior motive. Having known her, there’s no way she would have done anything like that’ John Mallowan, nephew to Agatha

  ‘She was in shock, and she was driving her car, and she’s got the most inventive mind. She says: Sod this. I’m going to disappear’ Charles Vance, producer of Agatha’s plays

  ‘It was the unspoken subject. Agatha refused to talk about it. To anyone. It was a real no-go. I was told once in Baghdad that someone had broached the subject, and she wouldn’t speak to that person again’ Joan Oates, friend of Agatha

  ‘I think we all operate on a secret, and if we were to let that secret out, we’d no longer be able to live – at least not in the way that we’re used to living’ Kathleen Tynan, author of Agatha, in an interview with Woman’s Wear Daily

  ‘I was stupid. I lived in a world of my own. Yes, I was stupid’ Agatha, writing as Mary Westmacott in the autobiographical novel Unfinished Portrait ‘She continued to love him throughout it all, but it shattered the world of fantasy in which her spirit – her genius – lived. This is what led to her breakdown’ A. L. Rowse, friend of Agatha, in Memories of Men and Women

  ‘Christie was a shit’ Charles Vance

  ‘You mean detectiv
e stories have to end with everything explained? Part of the rules?’

  ‘The unreality.’

  ‘Then if our story disobeys the unreal literary rules, that might mean it’s actually truer to life?’ John Fowles, The Ebony Tower

  ‘I know what happened, because I was there’ Rosalind Hicks, daughter21

  ‘Although I am now quite well and cheerful, I have not quite that utter happiness of Mrs Neele’ Agatha Christie, in an interview with the Daily Mail, 16 February 1928

  The Second Husband

  ‘For it is not an open enemy, that hath done me this dishonour:

  for then I could have borne it.

  Neither was it mine adversary, that did magnify himself against me: for then peradventure I would have hid myself from him.

  But it was even thou, my companion: my guide, and mine own familiar friend’ (from Psalm 55, copied and kept by Agatha Christie)

  ’. . . from then on it was as though a knife fell, cutting my life into two halves’ (from Endless Night by Agatha Christie)

  From this point the deepest mystery was Agatha herself. She had grown up at last, and with adulthood came concealment: a new self worn like protective colouring. She had lived in the world of her dreams, had been the heroine of her life and books for more than thirty years. Now she merely dreamed her dreams. Youth and beauty had gone, as had love and contentment. In their place came something else: the life of a writer.

  In the dark year of 1928 Agatha wrote her first Mary Westmacott novel, Giant’s Bread. The protagonist, Vernon Deyre, serves in the war and is reported killed. A mistake has been made but, believing the news, Vernon’s wife remarries. It is when he reads the notice of this wedding that Vernon tries to kill himself in earnest. He walks out into the road and is hit by a lorry. When he recovers from his injuries he has become a man called George Green, as whom he is completely happy.

  Later he is brought back to the old self he wanted to escape. ‘It’s been rather hell – getting back, remembering things. All such beastly things. All the things that – really – I didn’t want to face.’ He thinks vaguely that life as Vernon Deyre might be the same as it was before he went away. But his wife no longer wants him, and eventually he is free of emotional ties.

  ‘There was nothing now to come between him and his work.’ Vernon realises that his calling is that of a musician – an artist – and that the life he has lived, however real and absorbing, is nothing but material. ‘That was what it meant to be a creator.’ Having lost his old identity, having travelled through the happy limbo period as George Green, he has finally come to the place where he is supposed to be.

  Similarly, Henrietta Savernake in The Hollow is an artist – a sculptress – who cannot help but experience life at one remove. When her lover is murdered she turns her deepest feelings into an alabaster work entitled Sorrow. ‘I cannot love – I cannot mourn – not with the whole of me.’ She asks what the word ‘integrity’ means, wondering if she herself can possibly possess such a quality. She considers the quotation from Peer Gynt that haunted Agatha all her life:

  ‘Where am I myself, the whole man, the true man? Where am I with God’s mark upon my brow?’

  This was what Agatha had become: a Vernon, a Henrietta. The dream period spent as Mrs Neele rearranged her personality in a fundamental way, and through the dark years of 1927 and 1928 she became the person she would not otherwise have been. She became a writer. Her dreams became her work, and her work became everything. She wrote too much, and too compulsively, for anyone to doubt that this was where the real Agatha now lived.

  It was the way to survive the great rupture of 1926: either that or go under. The life she had had before no longer existed, so she became an onlooker, an outsider. It was not what she had wanted, but it was the right thing. As her friend A. L. Rowse wrote, the wound left by that nightmare year was ‘so deep . . . it left its traces all through her work. It also made her the great woman she became.’1 Why else did she begin to write Giant’s Bread, if not as a sombre celebration of a new beginning?

  Without the burden of normal female expectations, she found herself free. There was no longer an obligation to be a certain kind of woman: slim, pleasing, feminine. She could absent herself from these restraints. She could formulate a persona and wear it like a suit of armour – present it to the world in place of herself – and inside she could be whatever she chose. This was the freedom of the creator. She had lost everything and found everything: because everything was material.

  As ‘Agatha Christie’ she could write as much as her facility would allow, and from the end of the decade the books poured forth: seventeen full-length novels between 1930 and 1939, shaped with the geometrical perfection she had first shown in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The murderer who pretends to be the victim; the murderer who pretends to be a serial killer; the murderer who is the investigating policeman; the cast of suspects who are all innocent; the cast of suspects who are all guilty: magnificent, bold ideas that did not merely reinvigorate detective fiction but redesigned it as a gleaming hall of bright new mirrors. So impregnable was the construct that, although the world of the books was Agatha’s to create, she never had to reveal anything of herself. That, never again. ‘Agatha Christie’ wrote the books: the clever, controlled, sensible woman who knew all about human emotion but who dealt with it, every time, and kept chaos at bay. Agatha herself was ‘Mary Westmacott’, the sensitive, secret creature who had been born of the drifting ghost of Harrogate; and who could never have existed without the strange freedom that came from using another woman’s name.

  Mary Westmacott wrote about love and its mysteries. She wrote about Archie Christie; he was her primary inspiration. In Giant’s Bread she pondered the idea of love at first sight, its absurdity and its peculiar power. Vernon is in love with his wife, Nell, because he always sees her as she first appeared to him: magical and moonlit. She is also weak-natured, but this does not stop Vernon loving her. He is unable to separate the force of his emotions from the person towards whom they are directed.

  Similarly with Agatha and Archie. She wrote about their marriage in her second Westmacott, Unfinished Portrait, and her conclusion is simple. Whether or not her husband – ‘Dermot’ – is worthy of her love, that love exists. In order to keep it alive for herself, she should have recognised the truth about Dermot. ‘I loved Dermot – and I didn’t keep him. I ought to have seen what he liked and wanted, and been that . . . I ought to have known and been on my guard and not been so cocksure and pleased with myself. If a thing matters to you more than anything in life, you’ve got to be clever about it . . . I wasn’t clever about it . . .’

  She had been brought up to believe that marriage mattered more than anything to a woman, and that a man had to be held by a wife. Her grandmother, her mother: they had both told her so. Yet she had failed to keep her husband. Her flight to Harrogate, which had been her last desperate throw of the dice, had ensured that he would never return. Every day she had spent as Mrs Neele had banged another nail into the coffin of her marriage. This was the knowledge she now had to live with: that by her own actions she had brought about these terrible consequences.

  This was what she went through in 1927 and 1928, all the time turning her agony into material, all the time wishing that she simply had her husband back.

  Of course she could say to herself that Archie would have left anyway, in the end, and possibly this was true. But there would always be the doubt that, if she had behaved differently, he might have stayed.

  Throughout the bleak months Agatha had to bear public opprobrium and mockery. These were bad enough in themselves. Worse, though, was that this public attention – which it was widely believed she had sought – was the thing she had least wanted: the thing that had destroyed her private, precious world. It was a ghastly, shaming irony. She did not know what Archie thought, how much he blamed her for the wreckage of his own life, but obviously she feared the worst. This, then, was another irony: that the guilty p
arty in all of this was now causing Agatha to feel guilt on his behalf.

  A small part of her still hoped, faintly, that he might come back. She had moved to a flat in Chelsea with Rosalind and Carlo; Archie was living at Styles while trying to sell it, and the thought of him in the house – a hated place, but it had been theirs – must have taunted her. ‘It’s all the little shared intimacies of life that hold you so with a husband and tear you to pieces when you part,’ she wrote in Unfinished Portrait. She knew, really, that even if he did come back, they could never be happy again. She was not the kind of woman – wry, adult, realistic to the point of cynicism – to live with a man who longed to be elsewhere. Her kind brothers-in-law, James Watts and Campbell Christie, both helped her to understand this. But later in 1927 she saw Archie again, a polite and dreadful meeting at which ‘we talked of ordinary things’, and she asked one last time if he might not be persuaded to stay: for Rosalind’s sake. ‘I said once again that he knew how fond of him she was,’ wrote Agatha in her autobiography, ‘and how much she had been puzzled by his absence,’

  The answer was no. He still loved Nancy and Nancy, despite having been away for the last ten months, still loved him. Of course he owed a debt to Nancy – albeit far smaller than the one he owed his wife – for the damage to her reputation. Being the man he was, decisive and sudden and unwilling to admit mistakes, he was always going to stick with the woman who had caused all this in the first place; to have said to Agatha, ‘Yes I was wrong, yes I should stay with you,’ would have been impossible. So Agatha accepted it was over. She never saw Archie again, although she kept his love letters and photographs. She went to court on 20 April 1928, listened to the fake evidence of adultery with an unknown party in the Grosvenor Hotel and, in October, was granted her divorce. Two weeks later Archie married Nancy.