Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  As I look at it an archaeologist is a poor kind of fish. Always burrowing in the ground and talking through his hat about what happened thousands of years ago . . . Well, there they are – liars, perhaps – though they seem to believe it themselves – but harmless. I had an old chap in here the other day who’s had a scarab pinched – terrible state he was in – nice old boy, but helpless as a baby in arms . . .

  This, of course, would be reiterated by Nurse Leatheran in Murder in Mesopotamia, although in Clouds there is a trace of real contempt. In other words, despite the easy temper with which Agatha treated Max’s colleagues, she was in fact noting every quirk of their behaviour. In Come, Tell Me How You Live she describes a young architect called Robin Macartney (‘Mac’) whose air of taciturn superiority reduces her, she says, to a state of ‘nervous idiocy’. She makes polite conversation and is rebuffed at every turn:

  ‘I expect you’d like to explore the town,’ I suggest. ‘It’s fun poking round a new place.’

  Mac raises his eyebrows gently and says coldly: ‘Is it?’

  Agatha is portrayed as a socially inept twitterer; but in fact it is Mac who looks bad. Similarly with the ‘odes’ that Agatha would later write on digs for members of the expedition. They were very jolly and clever, and meant to amuse but, as Joan Oates says, ‘There was often a sting in the tail with them.’

  But Come, Tell Me How You Live reads as if it was written to please one person, at least: her husband. It has a slightly manic style, as different as can be from that of her fiction, although in its way the book is equally artful. As with her letters, it has the air of a performance: what fun, Max! Oh! I am enjoying myself! She was not going to lose touch with him as she had with Archie, that was for sure. She had a profound desire to make this a happy marriage. The power in it was hers, but so was the willingness to please; and she wanted to prove to Max how much she enjoyed sharing his life.

  She did have a genuine love of the East, and a genuine liking for some of Max’s colleagues, from whom she could, if she chose, withdraw herself mentally. Perhaps the greatest attraction of all was that, when the pressures of her life in England grew too much, she could simply jump ship and escape every year. ‘Mrs Mallowan is in Syria/Iraq’ became Edmund Cork’s constant refrain, when asked if Agatha would appear on the BBC, or answer a mad fan letter, or allow an amateur playwright to adapt one of her books, or agree to Miss Marple appearing on American television.15 It was another layer of protection. On the dig she was not ‘Agatha Christie’, she was not even Agatha: she was ‘Mrs Mallowan’, wife of the man in charge, the smiling figure who kept to the background and kept life sweet. Yet the impression given by her book, that she devoted her every waking thought to Mesopotamian pottery, is false; she did a good deal of writing in Syria. She had her little typewriter and her blissful solitude. As war in Europe drew near, as the dogs barked and the workmen shouted, ‘Yallah, yallah!’ she sat at her sharp-lit table in the desert and dreamed into life the world of Murder is Easy. ‘England! England on a June day, with a grey sky and a sharp biting wind . . .’

  And then: September 1939. Agatha was at Greenway when war was declared and she realised that her delightful life would be put on hold. There was not the desperate anxiety of the first war, when Archie had been on active service, although now she understood what he had gone through. But there would be upheaval, deprivation, loneliness and – remarkably – a creative outpouring of work of the very highest quality. Agatha was almost compulsively occupied during this period, which sat at the centre of her life and was as important, in its way, as the years around 1926.

  The last book she wrote before the war was Sad Cypress, that sombre story of love and loss. Elinor cannot live without Roddy, but Roddy has fallen for Mary. ‘Tell me, honestly,’ says Elinor, ‘do you think love is ever a happy thing?’ To which her dying aunt replies:

  ‘To care passionately for another human creature brings always more sorrow than joy; but all the same, Elinor, one would not be without that experience. Anyone who has never really loved has never really lived . . .’

  The girl nodded.

  She said:

  ‘Yes – you understand – you’ve known what it’s like –’

  Elinor is a cool, aloof creature who hides her feelings, while Jacqueline de Bellefort in Death on the Nile is an impassioned little hot-blood, but they are sisters under the skin: hopelessly in love with men who cannot quite return their feelings. Jackie loves Simon Doyle, who is ‘dazzled’ by the rich and glamorous Linnet Ridgway. Jackie behaves badly, makes a public spectacle of herself. Linnet complains to Poirot, who says, ‘There are times, Madame, when pride and dignity – they go by the board! There are other – stronger emotions.’

  Poirot has an intense sympathy for both Jackie and Elinor. He is on their side. When Simon, in the authentic voice of Archie Christie, asks, ‘Why can’t Jackie take it like a man?’, Poirot says, ‘Well, you see, M. Doyle, to begin with she is not a man.’ In Sad Cypress Elinor says that she has always loved red roses, while Roddy preferred white; and that, says Poirot, is the difference between them. ‘It explains Elinor Carlisle – who is passionate and proud and who loved desperately a man who was incapable of loving her.’ Poirot does not approve of murder. He says so all the time. Yet he feels for these women: if despair has blinded them to morality he will not condone, but he will understand.

  Then there is Bridget Conway in Murder is Easy, thrown over by a man whom she loved so much ‘that it hurt’; and Vera Claythorne in And Then There Were None, who murders for the love of a man (‘So you did drown that kid after all? . . . There was a man in it probably. Was that it?’). Love, as the doctor says in Sad Cypress, is the devil. He himself is in love with Elinor, who is on trial for the murder of Mary Gerrard. ‘She might have done it, yes! I don’t care if she did’ he says to Poirot. ‘I don’t want her hanged, I tell you! Supposing she was driven desperate? Love’s a desperate and twisting business.’

  These were the books – interspersed with more straightforward fare, like One, Two, Buckle My Shoe16 – that Agatha was writing before the war, and in 1942 came the best of them all. Five Little Pigs, the story of Caroline Crale, whose painter husband Amyas takes his beautiful young model, Elsa, as his mistress, is not that of Agatha’s first marriage,17 but it is perhaps the closest she came to telling it: in her detective fiction, that is. It has an intimacy, a ‘felt’ quality. It gives a very real sense of the disrupted household: the quarrelling couple, their neglected daughter, and the governess who is totally loyal to Caroline.

  ‘I’m a very primitive woman,’ Caroline says. ‘I’d like to take a hatchet to that girl.’ Meanwhile the girl, Elsa, tells Amyas Crale that his wife should let him go. ‘If she loved him, she’d put his happiness first, and at any rate she wouldn’t want to keep him if he wanted to be free.’ To which he replies: ‘Don’t you realise, Elsa, that she’s going to suffer – suffer? Do you know what suffering means?’

  Five Little Pigs is a masterly piece of writing: its motivations are complex, intertwined and, in their resolution, entirely satisfying. At the centre of the book is the relationship between art and real life. Amyas sees the world differently from his wife and mistress: like Vernon Deyre in Giant’s Bread, he sees it through the prism of his art.

  ‘With women, love always come first . . . Men, and especially artists – are different.’ So says Poirot. But Agatha was a woman and an artist. She understood the artistic sensibility, the fact that Amyas Crale has fallen in love not with Elsa herself but with the subject of his painting. At the same time she understood Elsa, the depth of her feelings for the real man; and, of course, she understood Caroline. In this book, as in Giant’s Bread, she set the claims of art against those of ordinary life, and was able to give them equal weight. Rare stuff for a book that also works on another level entirely, fitting the template of the detective novel as neatly as a lid on a jar. In fact Five Little Pigs has a fair claim to being Agatha’s finest; its chief rival is The H
ollow which, through the character of the sculptress, Henrietta Savernake, has a similar central theme.

  But what an extremely complicated woman Agatha was; because, even as she was shaping these really quite beautiful books, which were both perfect geometric puzzles and perfectly distilled meditations upon human nature, even as she was writing back into life the memories of lost love; even as she was letting the shadows of the past drift across her imagination; even as she was dedicating Five Little Pigs to another man: so, at the same time, she was writing to Max Mallowan like an eager little girl, telling him how much she was longing to see him again. Oh! Max . . . !

  Max, for whom the war came as a wretched interruption to his career, seized the opportunity to obliterate the fact of his lineage by serving his country. His father’s Austrian military career hampered him in his early attempts to get war work, as did his age (thirty-five), and at first he joined the Home Guard at Brixham, near Green way (‘One of my companions in arms’, he wrote to Rosalind, ‘is Professor of Greek at Bristol University . . . our experience in Hellenic warfare is second to none’).18 Not until 1940 did he find occupation, helping to organise an Anglo-Turkish Relief Committee. In 1941 – after constant pressurising of the authorities19 – he joined the Air Ministry with his friend, the Egyptologist Stephen Glanville, in what became the Directorate of Allied and Foreign Liaison. Finally, in early 1942, he got a job that made use of his abilities. He went to Cairo as a squadron leader, there to establish a branch of the Directorate, moving to Tripolitania in 1943 and working in administration. As an Arab linguist he was very useful. He ended the war ‘number three’, as he put it, ‘on the civil side out here’, and attained the rank of wing-commander.20 ‘Administration is probably rather bad for one and you would say I am getting pompous,’ he wrote to Rosalind at the end of 1944, ‘but I try not to be.’

  In fact he enjoyed the work. ‘I know that I am doing a man’s job, pulling my weight and not wasted,’ he wrote to Agatha in October 1943. ‘It has been a leavening for my life, which always tends to take the easy path.’ He was, nonetheless, very nicely set up. At first he shared a flat with his brother, Cecil, who, coincidentally, was in Egypt. I often imagine you sitting here,’ he wrote to Agatha. ‘One particular armchair is yours. Do you eat as much as I do when you are alone or are you wasting away?’ Then, in Tripolitania, he lived in ‘a house on the sea, a beautifully built Italian villa’, which by comparison with England at that time must have sounded like heaven (‘Who likes the sea? I do. Oh! the unfairness of life,’ wrote Agatha). ‘My room,’ wrote Max, ‘is snug and cosy and somehow it has become full of books.’ Rather charmingly, he added: ‘That is what you have done for me – given me a feeling for making a room homely and comfortable.’21

  Meanwhile in 1942 Greenway had been requisitioned by the Admiralty, and Agatha was braving the bombs in London. Not that Devon had been much of an oasis: in September 1940 she wrote to Edmund Cork that ‘We had a good invasion scare last week – house swarming with soldiers so dressed up they could hardly move!’ She had also coped briefly with a number of evacuated children, two of whom came under fire from a fighter plane when sailing on the Dart. It seemed reasonable for Agatha to join Max in London. Cresswell Place and Campden Street were let; Sheffield Terrace was bombed in October 1940. Despite Agatha’s giant property portfolio she became itinerant, living in Half Moon Street, then at a service flat in Park Place, then in the Bauhaus block at Lawn Road22 in Hampstead (whose windows were broken by a blast in 1940). ‘But how odd,’ Agatha wrote, ‘to think that as I pass a funny old building like a liner I shall always look up at it and say to myself, “I was happy there!” No beauty to speak of . . . but oh darling I did have so much happiness there with you.’23

  She stayed at Lawn Road Flats for much of the war. It might seem an unlikely setting for cosy, chintzy ‘Agatha Christie’, with its contemporary philosophy of designed living in near-identical flats. But Agatha was a more daring creature. She rather liked her fashionable block. She took little part in the life of the Isobar dining club – something of a social centre during the war, also used as a bomb shelter – although she would occasionally go down in search of company. She liked to be near Hampstead Heath, where she walked the Sealyham, James, that she had semi-appropriated from Carlo Fisher.24 She also enjoyed the convenience of living in a furnished flat – found the modernist ‘Isokon Long Chair’ strangely comfortable – where tenants were looked after by the management (‘Will you please look into the question of these knickers which have not been returned,’ they wrote on Agatha’s behalf to the local laundry. ‘If they have been lost, send Mrs Mallowan the necessary coupons’). Some years later she recalled that her ‘chief memories are of the fascination of finding a place where, like the wood in Dear Brutus, trees really seemed to have moved close up to the windows. That, meals in the garden, and one particularly beautiful white blossoming cherry tree are the things I have never forgotten.’25

  No wonder her possession of Greenway seemed barely real: she had lived there less than two years before clearing it for the Admiralty. ‘My heart sinks, darling, at the thought of more turning out, packing etc. However I hope I shall have Ros to help me. Run her down there by the scruff of the neck if necessary!’26 (‘It makes me quite tired to think of all the work you have done moving,’ wrote Max, ‘and that devil Rosalind mainly thinking of how to unlock the tantalus!’)27 It was a huge job. ‘The two garden boys have been a godsend. They practically never see the garden but live in the cellar carting up dinner services and silver etc – It was in such an awful state that I started to clean it,’ she wrote in October 1942. Then, two weeks later: ‘Goodbye to wonderful Greenway. I have used the last colour film so that we shall have a remembrance of it in case anything happens.’ In fact the house was in very good hands, those of the officers on an American flotilla, who treated it with great respect and painted a blue and white frieze around the cornices of the library ceiling in memory of their wartime exploits.

  And London had its compensations: friends, theatres. Agatha had a large acquaintance – the Hon. Dorothy North; Sybil, Lady Burnett;28 Allen Lane of Penguin Books and his wife Lettice; Max’s colleague Sidney Smith and his wife Mary; Max’s friend Stephen Glanville – and she maintained a determinedly active social life. She went to the ballet, seeing contemporary productions like Robert Helpmann’s Hamlet, and she indulged her passionate love of Shakespeare. In 1942 she saw Othello at the Old Vic; this provoked a long correspondence with Max who announced his intention of reading all the plays (a task he gave up half-way through). Agatha’s attitude towards Shakespeare was an interesting one. It was typical of its time, but it was also typical of her: she saw his characters as psychological studies, looking for clues in the poetry, rather than viewing Hamlet or Iago as an unparalleled accretion of words and rhythms. Iago, in particular, obsessed her. For Agatha he was a fixed entity, almost a reality; she took little account of the way the pressure of the play magnifies his initial intent, but her analysis of what she saw in the character was brilliant. ‘lago suffered, poor devil,’ says John Gabriel, in The Rose and the Yew Tree, who understands exactly what it feels like to ‘hate the human being who’s up amongst the stars’ (in his case, Isabella; in Iago’s case, Othello). Iago features too in Curtain, where he is described as the perfect murderer because he instils in others the desire to kill. Poirot – in the voice of Agatha – says this:

  ‘I have always been of the belief that already present in Othello’s mind was the conviction (possibly correct) that Desdemona’s love for him was the passionate unbalanced hero worship of a young girl for a famous warrior and not the balanced love of a woman for Othello the man. He may have realised that Cassio was her true mate and that in time she would come to realise the fact.’

  This is terrific stuff, true to the spirit of Shakespeare, whose poetry allows characters to be and feel more than one thing at the same time. What she wrote in August 1942, after her visit to the Old Vic, was closer to the F
reudian school of literary criticism:

  Iago and Emilia are really a couple of common swindlers, or confidence tricksters. That is borne out (I am now being Hercule Poirot!) by the opening of the play when Iago enters with the present fish that he is playing and Rodrigo is saying, ‘Thou, Iago, who hast my purse’ . . . On this theory where comes Iago’s intense hatred of the Moor? I think that plain sexual jealousy is the crux . . . He has suffered through Emilia again and again. The joy of seeing Othello suffer as he has suffered – and finally the sex maniac’s suggestion ‘strangle her’. That is what he would like to do but hasn’t ever had the courage . . .

  Later Agatha discussed Ophelia,29 offering to Max the real aperçu that Shakespeare, with his female characters, ‘was feminine enough himself to see men through their eyes’. Then she asked the impossible question: ‘ Why does she go mad?’30 A little later she believed she had her answer. After a performance of Henry TV part II she dined with Robert Graves and met a friend of his, a doctor. ‘I said I found Ophelia the most difficult to understand. He said, “Oh! no, you would find Ophelia in any schizophrenic ward of a mental Hospital.”’31

  Agatha was, at this point, almost in love with Shakespeare: ‘I cannot think of anything else.’ (By comparison she found Greek drama disappointing: ‘What astounds me in these dramas is the lack of any ideas – or concepts,’ an opinion that would not have gone down well with Max). Shakespeare’s sonnets featured in The Moving Finger and Absent in the Spring (‘From thee have I been absent in the spring ...’), while the title of Taken at the Flood is from Julius Caesar. Later she hinted at a Lear reference with the name ‘Edgar’ in They Do It with Mirrors, and used Macbeth as a base for the plot of The Pale Horse,32 which also contains an inspired disquisition on how the play should be staged. By the Pricking of My Thumbs is, of course, a direct quotation.