Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  (newspaper advertisement for Murder is Easy, 1939)

  ‘I am not very young, darling, and three years is a big gap’

  (from a letter sent to Max Mallowan in December 1944)

  The years around the war, between 1937 and 1949, were the most I fertile period of Agatha’s writing life. A handful of her books had an emotional content, shadowed by their author’s experience, which put them in a subtly different class: Death on the Nile, Sad Cypress, Five Little Pigs and The Hollow. Others have an unusual depth beneath the surface cleverness: Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, Murder Is Easy, And Then There Were None, Evil Under the Sun, N or M?, The Body in the Library, The Moving Finger, Towards Zero, Taken at the Flood and Crooked House. Within this period Agatha also wrote her finest collections of short stories, Murder in the Mews and The Labours of Hercules. Finally she produced two superb Westmacotts: Absent in the Spring and what is probably her best book of all, The Rose and the Yew Tree.

  It cannot be said too often: Agatha was a writer. To say otherwise is, as Poirot would have put it, to deny the evidence. (Who else wrote so much? Blyton? Wodehouse? Both of whom, like Agatha, created a world of solid artistic reality.) At the same time there is no denying that she was under intense pressure to produce books throughout the war. Her financial situation changed and, for a time, she was effectively living hand-to-mouth. Yet this does not fully explain the insatiable creativity of her middle years: the brilliance of these books produced under duress, the fact that when she had a bare few days at her disposal – a precious holiday during the war – she completed Absent in the Spring. She had to write for money; but she also had to write. It was as simple as that.

  ‘Do you think of me as successful? How funny,’ says Henrietta Savernake in The Hollow.

  ‘But you are, my dear. You’re an artist. You must be proud of yourself; you can’t help being.’

  ‘I know,’ said Henrietta. ‘A lot of people say that to me. They don’t understand – they don’t understand the first thing about it . . . Sculpture isn’t a thing you set out to do and succeed in. It’s a thing that gets at you . . . so that you’ve got, sooner or later, to make terms with it. And then, for a bit, you get some peace – until the whole thing starts over again.’

  The way in which Agatha wrote – with apparent ease – and the kind of books she produced – mostly lightweight – have led commentators to take her extraordinary output for granted. But what she did was extraordinary, and although she herself did not choose to see it that way it was the most important thing in her life. ‘One never saw that in life, she was so modest,’ wrote her friend A. L. Rowse. ‘[But] her persona as a writer was something quite different, almost as if there were two personalities.’1

  Two, yes: because Agatha wanted her ordinary life as well. She fed off it. She enjoyed it for its own sake, and it was essential to her writing; her drug, in a way, since unlike most writers she used no others. As Rowse wrote, ‘Outwardly she had a full and normal social life, family, two marriages, friends, hospitality, entertainment, housekeeping (at which she was very good), shopping (which she much enjoyed) . . . All ministered to Agatha’s life of the imagination.’

  ‘[Henrietta] had learned the trick, years ago, of shutting her mind into watertight compartments. She could play a game of bridge, conduct an intelligent conversation, write a clearly constructed letter, all without giving more than a fraction of her essential mind to the task.’2

  In the 1930s Agatha’s life acquired a pattern that then fragmented into war, separation, anxiety, death. There was not the intensity of suffering she had known in 1926, but her determined joy of living might have been shaken had she not, in some inner part of herself, been insulated against reality. The easy answer is that her marriage had brought security. In fact it was not quite that simple. More subtly, her marriage allowed her to be the person she had been when she truly felt secure: a child, in other words, whose imagination now roamed through adult lands, and dealt in adult mysteries.

  There were real things in her past that she did not want to lose, but in the 1930s they both quit the scene. Peter was immortalised in Dumb Witness (‘brave chien, va!’) and died the following year, 1938. ‘My little friend and loving companion in affliction,’ Agatha had written to Max in 1930. ‘You’ve never been through a really bad time with nothing in the world but a dog to hold on to.’ Peter had been her ‘child’, and later in a letter she remembered him ‘jealously pushing between us’. Max liked dogs, but Agatha adored them: for their goodness and loyalty, the qualities she valued above all others.

  Max also liked Ashfield, or so he had said in the early days. ‘You need not worry as to whether I shall find Ashfield like home for any abode will be home with you and I shall like to think that you have not lost the older memories that you love.’3 Yet Agatha was sensitive to Max as she had not been to Archie, and she knew that he was uncomfortable with the weight of memory in that house.

  There were other reasons why she sold Ashfield at the end of the 1930s. ‘Once it had been all countryside out of Torquay,’ she wrote in her autobiography, ‘three villas up the hill and then the road petered out into country. The lush green fields where I used to go to look at the lambs in spring had given way to a mass of small houses. No one we knew lived in our road any longer. It was as though Ashfield had become a parody of itself.’ Perhaps it would have been too painful for Agatha to see these changes inflicted upon her home: it had lived so powerfully in her memory. But when Max said, ‘You’ve been getting worried about Ashfield, you know’, this was a coded message, and she knew it. She sold. At the time it felt like the right thing, but when the house was finally demolished in the 1960s she cried like a child. ‘Sometimes I feel very homeless,’ she wrote to Max in 1944. ‘I find myself thinking “I want to go home” and then it seems to me I have no home – and I do long for Ashfield. I know you didn’t like it – but it was my childhood’s home and that counts.’4

  She had bought a very different kind of house – Max’s house, as she called it – at the end of 1934. Winterbrook House at Wallingford (convenient for Oxford, described in Dumb Witness as Market Basing) was an elegant yet homely building, with a very lovely long garden that stretched down to the Thames. The façade was Queen Anne, close to the main road but screened by thick dark holly; the back of the house was Georgian; a staff flat and stables were seventeenth century, and there was a walled kitchen garden. The main bedroom overlooked the lawn with its spreading cedar tree and deep, calm shadows. Max also had this view from his library, a double-length room thick with cigarette smoke, comfortably piled with archaeological journals and volumes of Herodotus: ‘the best gossip in antiquity,’ in Max’s phrase.

  A. L. Rowse often went to lunch at Winterbrook: ‘a cosy, warm, hospitable, upper middle-class interior’, as he wrote in his diaries, ‘with all the comforts and amenities, the pretty china and good furniture that Agatha’s prosperity has bought . . . that sunny house where the living rooms at the back look over their flat water-meadows to the river’.5

  The essence of middle England, like Wallingford itself, and surely the perfect home for Agatha Christie, But Agatha was about to acquire the house of her dreams.

  Greenway House, that magical white box set above the gleaming Dart; Greenway, with its wild romantic gardens; Greenway, rooted in its Devon history and yet, with its ghostly pallor, looking as if it might at any moment vanish into the air. I sat on the seat overlooking the house on the river,’ wrote Agatha to Max in 1942. ‘It looked very white and lovely – remote and aloof as always – I get a kind of pang over its beauty . . . “Too dear for our possessing” but what excitement to possess it! I thought tonight, sitting there – it is the loveliest place in the world – it quite took my breath away.’6

  The house she had dreamed into life at Ashfield – the river at the end of the garden, the vast unknown rooms that opened out from familiar doors – was now a reality. Agatha bought Greenway in 1938 for six thousand pounds: an unbelievable sum
, it would seem, equivalent to not much over £200,000 in today’s values, but not everybody wanted to take on such a property and its thirty-three acres. With the help of architect Guilford Bell (nephew of her friend, Aileen, with whom she had stayed in Australia during the Empire Tour), Agatha rediscovered the perfect Georgian proportions of her new acquisition. Wings had been added in 1815 but Guilford took them down, leaving the house symmetrical and exquisite. The main rooms opened out from a central hall: library, dining room and sitting room, which itself led to a drawing room with long, white windows giving on to a small, secret lawn. The first floor had five main rooms, with a large handsome master bedroom and a vast lavatory with a wooden surround, the kind that Agatha favoured. Above were more bedrooms and a bedsitting room for Rosalind; behind was a complexity of servant quarters, a pantry downstairs and a huge high-ceilinged kitchen. Everything was high, deep, rightful. Everywhere was secrecy, enchantment, mystery. A glamorous house on the grand scale, yet relaxed and full of ease, even if its beauty was too great for it to be a home of the kind that Ashfield had been.

  The original Greenway House was built around 1530 and destroyed, probably by fire, around two hundred years later. Agatha kept notes on the history of her possession (her mother had had a similar habit of scrawling down facts on scraps of paper): ‘Named because on the “grain way” across the Dart. Belonged to Gilbert family. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, discoverer of Newfoundland, born there c. 1537. His mother’s second husband was a Raleigh . . . Rebuilt 1780s . . .’ It was a famous house, like glorious Ugbrooke near Exeter, where Agatha had met Archie Christie. It was her Devon past, where her soul lived. As a girl she had seen it from the Dart; Clara had pointed it out to her; now it was her own. Agatha was too intelligent to take for granted that she was living in a house her imagination might have conjured. She tramped around the gardens, an overgrown tangle of rare plants that she and Max had begun to cultivate, and felt that she was, indeed, inhabiting a dream.

  She would write about this in later books, the place that seemed too beautiful to be real: it was there in Endless Night (‘The house isn’t enough, you see. It has to have the setting. That’s just as important’) and in Hallowe’en Party (‘If you wished, what could there not be?’ ‘A garden for gods to walk’). Yet in both these books the desire to create beauty leads to evil. Beauty alone is not enough: it needs humility and warmth and humanity. ‘But, alas, there would be no garden blossoming on an island in the Grecian Seas . . . Instead there would be Miranda – alive and young and beautiful.’

  Earlier she had used literal representations of Greenway in Five Little Pigs and Dead Man’s Folly, and in both books it is the setting for a murder. One victim dies on the battery overlooking the Dart, another in the rather sinister boathouse.7 The house is portrayed as incredibly beautiful, although there is no sense whatever of Agatha’s own relationship with it. ‘It was a gracious house, beautifully proportioned,’ is her simple description of ‘Nasse House’ in Dead Man’s Folly. ‘Mrs Folliat went through a door on the left into a small daintily furnished sitting room and on into the big drawing-room beyond’: precisely the configuration of Greenway.

  Nasse House is the family home of the Folliats and, although the former lady of the house now lives at the lodge, she has a relationship to Nasse that Agatha could not share with Greenway. Poirot comments on the ‘superb and noble mansion’, and Mrs Folliat nods ‘in a matter of fact manner. “Yes. It was built by my husband’s great-grandfather in 1790. There was an Elizabethan house previously. It fell into disrepair and burned down in about 1700. Our family has lived here since 1598.”’

  A part of Agatha envied Mrs Folliat this casual grandeur. ‘Mrs Folliat of Nasse House, daughter of a long line of brave men . . .’ She herself was more like her clever little detective, standing and gazing in half-bewilderment: ‘It is a beautiful place,’ said Poirot. ‘A beautiful house, beautiful grounds. It has about it a great peace, great serenity.’

  Agatha took a deep, quiet pride in having acquired this miracuious home by her own means. Yet she remained fascinated by those who did not need to buy, to work, to strive; those who do not change or doubt, who cannot be other than themselves. Mrs Folliat belongs at Nasse House as surely as the trees in its grounds, yet she is the same person living in the lodge as she would be in the big house. This was the idea at the heart of The Rose and the Yew Tree.

  ... it was nevertheless a sordid room. In the middle of it, sitting with her feet tucked up under her, and embroidering a piece of silk, was Isabella . . . She and the room had, I felt, nothing to do with each other. She was here, in the midst of it, exactly as she might have been in the midst of a desert, or on the deck of a ship. It was not her home. It was a place where she happened, just at the moment, to be.

  As a child, Agatha had longed to be ‘Lady’, and now in a sense she was. Later she would become ‘Lady Mallowan’ through her husband’s knighthood, then ‘Dame Agatha’ in her own right.8 Now she was mistress of Greenway House. But her idea of aristocracy was something different: it could not be acquired, achieved or learned. This is the spell exerted by Isabella, the ‘Princess imprisoned in the ruined castle’, over John Gabriel, the dynamic and brilliant man who falls in love with her.

  ‘I didn’t want to be a common little boy. I went home and said to my father, “Dad, when I grow up I want to be a Lord. I want to be Lord John Gabriel.”

  ‘“And that’s what you’ll never be,” he said. “You’ve got to be born that kind of a Lord. They can make you a Peer if you get rich enough but it’s not the same thing.” And it isn’t the same thing. There’s something – something I can never have – oh, I don’t mean the title.’

  The Rose and the Yew Tree is complex: it deals with class, but more than that it deals with the mystery in human beings. In middle age Agatha was still in love with the ineffable, the numinous. She grew older and coarser, grander and greedier, contented and assured. But her dreams did not change.

  Meanwhile Max’s life was going according to plan. After his season at Arpachiyah, the first in charge of his own dig and officially paid for by his sponsors, the British School of Archaeology,9 in 1935 he went with Agatha to Chagar Bazar in Syria. Two years later they also began to excavate Tell Brak, around twenty miles away. ‘He worked alone and his talents were given full rein,’ it was later said of him. ‘Success followed success.’10 To say the least: full charge of his workforce through the winter months then home to Greenway, or Winterbrook, or the new house that Agatha had acquired at 58 Sheffield Terrace in Kensington (the only house, she claimed, in which she ever had a designated room for writing). Yes, it was a grand life for young Max Mallowan.

  It has been said that he was not an especially good excavator, but he had other gifts. He had had the sense to keep his mouth shut and learn on the dig with Woolley, and now he had the confidence to take charge. ‘He played the role,’ says Joan Oates, who worked with him after the war. As might have been expected, he was a terrific handler of his workers: Arabs mostly, also Kurds, Turks and Armenians. These were the days of cheap labour when as many as two hundred men might be employed simultaneously. ‘He was very good with the workmen. Shouting at them. There was a strike at the beginning of one of the seasons, they wanted more money. And Max actually got up on a large wooden packing case and harangued them – and they all stood there, and in the end they all nodded their heads, and off they all went to work! I mean, he really enjoyed that.’11

  Agatha too enjoyed herself. ‘She liked being at Chagar Bazar,’ says Joan Oates. ‘She liked the flowers. If you look at the films she made on digs,12 they are full of wild flowers, which she had a passion for.’ She did, indeed, photograph fields of soft, luscious marigolds swaying in the wind; also, at Tell Brak, a little dog wagging its tail as it watched a lorry being laboriously unloaded. ‘Yes, dogs and children, and the lovely house they lived in at Chagar Bazar. But the dig, no. Her interest was in being there, being the devoted wife, enjoying the countryside, which she did e
normously.’ In a letter to Max written during the war, Agatha remembered Chagar Bazar: ‘that fresh untouched feeling of the empty smiling country. How lovely it all was . . ,’13

  It was also, often, extremely uncomfortable, but Agatha was tough and healthy, and always despised complaining women. In her memoir of life in pre-war Syria, Come, Tell Me How You Live,14 she wrote of terrible heat, sudden rains that weighed as heavy as coins, nights spent in tents that ‘look drunken, a little out of true’, meals ‘swimming in grease’ and sleep interrupted by

  mice across one’s face, mice tweaking your hair – mice! mice! MICE! . . . I switch on a torch. Horrible! The walls are covered with strange, pale, crawling cockroach-like creatures! A mouse is sitting on the foot of my bed attending to his whiskers! Horrible crawling things are everywhere!

  Max utters soothing words. Just go to sleep, he says. Once you are asleep, none of these things will worry you.

  The endless difficulties – getting about the desert, finding accommodation, communicating with the houseboys and cook – sound frankly oppressive; but in her book, at least, Agatha’s good humour is relentless. She also emphasised the joy of archaeology, the spell that bound her still.

  These autumn days are some of the most perfect I have ever known [she wrote of her life in 1935], Here, where nowadays only the tribesmen move with their brown tents, was once a busy part of the world. Here, some five thousand years ago, was the busy part of the world. Here were the beginnings of civilisation, and here, picked up by me, this broken fragment of a clay pot, hand-made, with a design of dots and cross-hatching in brown paint, is the forerunner of the Woolworth cup out of which this very morning I have drunk my tea . . .

  A different view comes across, however, in Death in the Clouds, which she wrote in 1934, probably while staying in Beirut (or ‘Beyrout’, as she spelled it) en route to Syria. She allowed one of her characters to take a sceptical view of her husband’s profession: