Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  Max himself was an extremely assured person, despite his lack of apparent advantages: he was short, physically unimpressive, and his background would not have been considered comme il faut by the people with whom he wished to mix (the Woolleys, as he wrote in his memoirs, were both snobs).24 Yet people of this kind tend to work harder at making themselves liked, and this was Max’s great gift. He could handle anyone. ‘I foresee that you will always be able to manage me!!!’ Agatha wrote to him in 1930. He took the trouble to understand what every situation required, then supplied it. When he first met Agatha he perceived that she was raw and bruised and, without being in any way obvious about it, soothed her. He made himself indispensable, although he never made himself cheap. His nephew, John, has described him as ‘a lucky person, in general’;25 but, as the cliché has it, he made his own luck. Unlike those who are more naturally attractive, who tend to assume that luck will come their way, he set himself to do the right thing with the right people and thus rose high.

  As an adult Max was very much the Englishman, with his membership of Boodle’s and collection of eighteenth-century silver, but his lineage was wholly continental. His clever manners were not those of a typical Englishman, neither were his instinctive tastes: he had, for example, a passion for Prokofiev and Rachmaninov. He also had what A. L. Rowse called ‘Austrian charm’. His grandfather – also named Max – was ‘of Slav origin’, and lived as a refugee in Vienna until 1879, when he was naturalised. By this time he had married a Czech girl and become a mill-owner, but when the mill burned down the family was left nearly destitute. In 1897 his son Frederick – Max’s father – cut his losses and came to London. He had served in the Austrian army, from which he only obtained his certificate of release in 1913, but by that time he had become entirely British in his loyalties.

  In 1902 he married a French girl, Marguerite Duvivier, who had come to London as a companion. Her background was also unusual: her mother, Marthe, had been an opera singer, performing Salome in the first production of Massenet’s L’Hérodiade. The Mallowans were not, in fact, especially well suited. Marguerite was an emotional woman, religious and highly devoted to her three sons: Max the eldest, Cecil and Philip. Frederick was far more disciplined in his attitude to life. He had a duelling scar on his skull and, although he became a businessman, he remained very much the foreign soldier.

  Max was extremely close to his mother, as Agatha had been to hers (later she would envy him his relationship with Marguerite – ‘I went away horribly jealous of you having a mother to meet you’26 – and later still be somewhat irritated by it). But he certainly did not enjoy the childhood that would support – and occasionally torment – Agatha with its idyllic memories. He grew up in London and his life lacked what he termed ‘domestic peace’. His parents argued a great deal. ‘I am indebted to both father and mother,’ he wrote, ‘for inclining my temperament towards peaceful companionship.’27 Just as the happy marriage of Agatha’s parents had led her to take her own for granted, so Max learned by example that marriage required courtesy and effort.

  He went to Lancing, where he was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and Tom Driberg (‘a very exceptional generation’, Waugh later wrote), then read Greats at New College. ‘The transition from Lancing to Oxford University where I spent four years, 1921-1925, was a step from purgatory to paradise.’ Max belonged to the Brideshead era, and within his means he behaved accordingly. He got a fourth in mods and a third in finals; he threw what he called ‘Derby Winner Parties’, backing the right horse three years in succession; and he met his own Sebastian Flyte, a glamorous and aristocratic Catholic with whom he had a deep, powerful friendship.

  Esme Howard, eldest son of Lord Howard of Penrith, was not Max’s lover, but he was the closest that Max came to this relationship before he met Agatha. ‘I feel’, he wrote to her in 1930, ‘that my love for you is the perfect continuation of that friendship with Esme that I thought I should never recover.’ Like many clever, inexperienced young men, he found it easier and more congenial to fall in love for the first time with another man. Certainly Esme was a far more romantic figure than the average female undergraduate. He was brilliant, sweet and fatally sick; he died aged twenty-five of Hodgkin’s disease. Max visited him for the last time at Portofino, ‘in the Dowager Lady Carnarvon’s villa’, as he wrote in his memoirs. Coincidentally he endured a dark night of the soul at around the same time as Agatha – Esme had died five days before Agatha disappeared from Sunningdale – and found the same remedy for grief in intensely hard work. He also made a deathbed promise to Esme that he would take on his friend’s religion. Technically Max was a Catholic through his French mother but he had never taken communion, and refused to be confirmed when a pupil at Lancing. Now love overcame rationality. Having seen the strength that Esme – ‘the true saint’ – derived from his religion, Max was convinced that he too should seek faith in God. The irony was that Agatha, who had always attended church, would no longer take communion after her divorce; the further irony was that Max reneged on his promise to Esme when he learned that the Catholic Church would not recognise his marriage to Agatha.

  In fact his nature was never that of a devout Catholic. ‘I always have a feeling that God is good and giving me his divine protection,’ he wrote to Agatha during the War, and that was the extent of his religious feeling. He was a questioner, a lover of high-table talk rather than contemplation, a ‘lover of beauty’28 in art, history, flesh, rather than in the spiritual realm. He was also ambitious. Like Charles Ryder, he had to use chance and connections to get on in life. When his casually expressed interest in archaeology led, via the Dean of New College and the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, to an interview with Leonard Woolley in the summer of 1925, he determined to make as much as possible of the meeting. With Woolley that day at the British Museum was Katherine Keeling. Max was sharp enough to realise that he had to impress them both; his gift did not let him down, and he began work at Ur in the autumn.

  Four years later, he had the sense to make friends with the lonely, likeable, well-to-do Mrs Christie. He did not move too fast. He simply established himself as the companion Agatha needed. He told her she had a ‘noble’ face: a charmingly tentative compliment of the kind that clever young men offer to older women. After a hurried parting at Paris, where Max met up with his mother and Agatha went home to Rosalind, she found herself – as he had intended – unable to forget him. In the spring of 1930 Max was working with Woolley at the British Museum. He wrote to Agatha at Ashfield, asking her to visit London (the pretext being that objects excavated from Ur were on display at the museum and she might like to see them). Her reply was intriguingly passionate, flustered and childlike.

  My Rosalind was much worse than they had told me – it wrung my heart to see her – skin and bones and pitifully weak . . . Oh! Max – everything has been beastly – like coming back into the worst kind of unquiet dream! . . . Can’t you come down here some weekend, Max? I can’t have parties or ask ordinary people – but you’re such an angel.29

  The letter ended with an invitation to breakfast at Cresswell Place; Agatha was visiting London for a series of meetings. In her autobiography she wrote calmly about the reunion with Max, saying that she felt shy seeing him again but was very pleased not to be ‘losing touch’. The tone of her letters, however, is different. ‘I feel quite homesick for you,’30 she wrote, and gave away secrets that she told nobody else; for example about the Mary Westmacott pseudonym (‘Don’t tell anyone, will you? Not even your mother. [Giant’s Bread] has been awfully well reviewed which is rather marvellous for me, isn’t it?’).31 Quite plainly she had feelings for this young man, although she might not have been aware of them. She purported to have felt absolute surprise when, not long after the London meeting, Max visited Ashfield, and – just as Archie had done almost sixteen years earlier – marched into her bedroom and proposed to her. ‘It had never occurred to me that Max and I would be or ever could be on those terms. We were friends’ Ye
t within no time at all she had accepted the idea of a second marriage.

  She had not been without male attention since the split with Archie. Her husband might have wanted youth and unblemished beauty, but other men were less fussy; indeed the sexual culture as a whole was, in some ways, more robust than it is today. It was less obsessed with physical perfection, more with straightforward availability. As a divorced woman, Agatha was assumed to be in the market. A male acquaintance made a remark to her that found its way into Unfinished Portrait. ‘You’ll have either to take a lover or lovers. You will have to decide which it’s to be.’ In the book, Celia thinks that ‘Lovers would be best. You’d be – almost safe – with lovers!’ In other words a procession of men could not get close enough to hurt her in the way that Archie had done. That must never happen again.

  There is no evidence, however, that Agatha succumbed to any of the passes that were made in her late thirties. It is as certain as it can be that she slept with only two men in her life. Unfinished Portrait says that after ‘Dermot’ she ‘tried to learn to be alone’, and the book would not lie about such a thing; if there was an affair to confess, this would have been the place to do it. In her autobiography Agatha wrote, very openly, that she was pleased about the passes (she always had an uncomplicated liking for men, and got along with them easily so long as there was no real emotional attachment). She told a rather charming story about a Dutch engineer whom she met on her first journey on the Orient Express. After they had had dinner together one night, he looked at her and said: ‘I wonder now . . . No. I think it will be wiser if I do not ask.’ To this she replied: ‘I think you are very wise, and very kind.’ But the question had been in the air. It was like the hotel scene in Destination Unknown: ‘A good looking young Frenchman came out of the bar and across the terrace, cast a swift discreet glance at Hilary which, thinly disguised, meant: “Is there anything doing here, I wonder?”’ Agatha took all this on board; in some ways she was very worldly, utterly unlike the grandmotherly image she later cultivated. ‘You know, you’re the sort of woman who ought to be raped’ is a line spoken to the prim Joan Scudamore in Absent in the Spring. ‘I’d rather like to rape you myself – and see if you looked the least bit different afterwards.’ Agatha (or Mary Westmacott) could write this kind of thing without embarrassment and – more to the point – without inducing embarrassment in her reader.32

  Yet with Max Mallowan, fourteen years her junior – Agatha was almost as senior to him as he was to Rosalind – she became as defenceless as a child. ‘I think you will marry me, you know,’ he said when he left her bedroom at Ashfield, after what Agatha described in her autobiography as hours of talking. He had made the running and prepared the ground, and he was fully confident as to the outcome. ‘Of course I’m wise,’ he wrote to her soon afterwards; ‘wisdom is my chief defence and that’s why I’ve yanked you out of the stalls as you put it.’33

  For her part, Agatha began writing to Max like an excitable young girl. She seemed instantly seized by the idea of spending her life with him: an idea that had, according to her autobiography, come as a complete shock.

  ‘Dearest – Do I really mean what you say to you? I’ve just got your letter – oh! my dear. I would love to mean that to you. And I, too, feel the same – that being with you is a kind of freedom.’34

  This was an example of Max’s extreme cleverness at providing Agatha with what she needed from a putative relationship: something utterly unlike her first marriage (luckily for Max, as he could not have competed with Archie in the romance stakes). She wanted to feel both liberated and reassured. ‘When we are companion dogs the world seems a wonderful place . . . a rich freedom . . . there is no feeling of restraint or captivity or being “tied down” – I would never have believed anything could be like it.’35 Her willingness to write these things was desperately touching, in the light of the terrible betrayal she had suffered. Yet there was a sense in which she was writing for Max, as a thank-you; it is almost impossible that he should have unleashed such intense feelings so incredibly quickly. The love letters that lead up to the marriage are, in fact, a performance on both sides. ‘It is obviously decreed that you should be my sunflower’ was the kind of thing that Max wrote to Agatha. Not exactly insincere; but not the usual tone of love letters (such as the ones that Archie wrote, which labour under an exquisitely male sense of strain).

  Of course Agatha and Max were not usual lovers. Nothing about this courtship was normal. The most interesting irony was that the dominant partner should have been Agatha – she had the money and the experience, Max had not a penny and was almost certainly a virgin – yet it was he who took charge. He assumed the parental role. He did not need a mother figure, having a perfectly devoted mother of his own; but this was exactly what Agatha needed, and Max knew it. He was not so much an emotional substitute for Archie as for Clara, the person whom Agatha missed more than any other. With Clara she had been completely herself, free of any demands to restrain her nature, able to let her imagination take flight in the secure knowledge that her mother was there, at Ashfield, the centre of the real world. With Max she recaptured something of this feeling: the sense that fife was safe. He enabled her to behave like a child again. This suited him very well, as he was a natural teacher and delighted in telling Agatha that she should learn Greek, read Gibbon and take drawing classes to help on the dig. He wrote to her about Rosalind, saying, ‘She is more grown up than you isn’t she ange?’ And, knowing very well what she most wanted to hear: ‘Agatha, I don’t love you merely with the glorious eyes of the blind, but I see you as you are.’

  ‘I do believe you love me for what I am,’ she replied, before adding this note of sobriety. ‘Mere love is rather an idiotic business – approved of by Nature, but capable of inflicting a lot of unhappiness on individuals. But you are my friend, Max . . .’36

  In a strange way the age difference made Agatha better able to cope (even though it was minimised to six years on the marriage certificate: Agatha was ‘37’, Max ‘31’). She lamented it loudly – ‘your damnably silly age!!’ – but in fact it rendered Max less threatening. Nothing about him would resemble her marriage to Archie, who would never have written to say ‘If you feel serious my ange remember that life together will be a glorious joke if only we choose to make it so’. She was anxious, however, that the joke should not be on her. She had already been made to look ridiculous in the eyes of the world. Her sister was adamantly against the marriage and did not hesitate to tell Agatha so (Max never really forgave the Wattses for this).37 Two weeks before the wedding Madge sent a present of handkerchiefs: ‘It is not suggested that they will be useful for mopping tears let it be clearly understood.’ She hoped that Max would take care of her sister; if not, ‘one of his old mummies will arise and deal with the matter which I have been led to understand that the said mummies thoroughly understood’. Jack Watts, who was very fond of Agatha, had never liked Max at Oxford; both he and Madge were suspicious of Max’s motives and viewed him as a fortune-hunter. This thought must have occurred to Agatha herself, particularly when she read his letters about their honeymoon, which he was planning and for which she was paying. They were heading for Venice (‘I am having a white blazer made in anticipation of a warm séjour’) through what was then Yugoslavia, and on to Greece (‘I wish I had time to learn to play the shepherd’s pipe’). Meanwhile Max wrote to Agatha about the registrar’s fees for the actual wedding, ‘because it’s right that I should pay for all that’.

  The ceremony was due to take place in September, at St Columba’s Church in Edinburgh. The religious question was resolved, quite easily on Max’s side, less so on Agatha’s: ‘You are still sure of yourself, aren’t you? I mean about the religious side. You’ve no qualms of conscience or guilty feeling?’ She continued to dither through the summer of 1930. ‘One moment a bit of blind panic . . . I feel “I won’t – I won’t – I won’t marry anybody. Never again” . . . But it’s Max. It’s being with Max and having him alw
ays – to hold on to when I feel unhappy.’38

  This pattern was repeated even as plans for the wedding advanced. At the end of August, she went on holiday to Skye with Rosalind, Carlo and Mary Fisher (who would be witnesses), then moved down to Edinburgh. From Skye she wrote of ‘the madness of exchanging mediocre but safe happiness for great happiness but possible disaster. You see, Max dear, I do so hate being unhappy . . . Oh! my dear – be very very sure – We could always be friends, you know, even if we didn’t marry.’39

  Again this has the slight air of the performance, although the feelings beneath it were genuine. But it was designed to get a response of the type at which Max excelled: ‘You are to go on being brave for another fortnight so that you may be the happiest ange in all the world.’ In fact, Max never really doubted that Agatha would go through with the wedding. The one time that she did seem to want to call it off he played the man’s trump card and withdrew contact. ‘You are a pig – Max – three days since you left and not one word from you . . . You know – you can’t really care, Oh! Max.’40 Which resolved the situation.

  Max’s greater worry before September was probably the Woolleys’ reaction. He still needed their patronage, even if only for one more season; and he craved the goodwill of Katherine, however much he disparaged her to Agatha. It is impossible to know what he felt towards her during the years at Ur. But the portrait of Louise Leidner in Murder in Mesopotamia is of a deeply alluring woman, and an inexperienced young man such as Max might well have been susceptible. Agatha had had an inkling of this after her first sightseeing tour with Max: she returned to Baghdad, longing for a hot bath; Max drew one for her then offered it to Katherine. As late as 1943 Agatha would write to him on 14 February, saying, ‘Have you remembered to send your Valentine to K. Woolley?!!!’ She made a joke of it, but was Max’s behaviour really so funny?