Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  In a letter to Max she imagined the man himself. ‘I don’t believe he had much what you call “personality”,’ she wrote, which was true of Agatha herself. ‘A quiet little man, I see him – rather vain – eaten up with longing to play the lead – but with some disability – did he stammer?’ She pictured him drinking in the tavern with Ben Jonson and the rest, not saying much, then leaving: ‘and in the tavern they wouldn’t notice he had gone. But he would walk home in the moonlight with words singing and dancing in his head – lovely sequences of them and he would see them being said on stage . . . Why aren’t you here to talk to?’33

  Max was impressed – perhaps a little surprised – by Agatha’s knowledge, which has the slight air of being offered to a teacher for approval. In February 1943 he wrote to suggest that she ‘write a short and simple book on Shakespeare the Man. You have the imaginative penetration of the writer and creative artist yourself, and the solution of the many problems in his life and his work is partly if not largely detective work! So put old Poirot on the job and get down to it. If you want any help on the scholarship side I will do what I can to keep you on the straight path.’

  If this struck Agatha as condescension, she showed no sign of it. Nor did she accept Max’s suggestion: ‘No I couldn’t write a book on Shakespeare, all my remarks are just Mrs Puper and for you only!!’ (She and Max addressed each other in private as ‘Mr and Mrs Puper’; as with most intimate nicknames, the origin of this is unfathomable.) She was annoyed when Max’s mother told her that she should deploy her talents in writing more serious books, like ‘biographies’. Yet Max’s remarks about her work – which occasionally verge upon interfering – seem not to have bothered her. He was not jealous of her success, and in this he was probably unusual: most men (Archie?) would have found it difficult to act as consort to a woman of Agatha’s renown. ‘Well, Max was very conceited,’ says Joan Oates. But his self-assurance also made him competitive. He liked to assert his opinions, the worth of his own work, his claims to the intellectual high ground. This, for example, was the critique that he sent of The Murder at the Vicarage back in 1931:

  Ange I think you are terribly clever. I think my only objection to the story was that it was too clever . . . I think your manner of writing is perfectly adapted to a detective story because one forgets the printed page and is transported straight into real life and breezy life at that, rather like a whiff of ange, and one feels that the narrative and conversation is all spoken and not written – exactly as it should be, it seems to me; I understand now why you don’t bother about semi colons. Well done!

  Later he took Agatha to task for a grammatical error in Five Little Pigs, which he nonetheless considered to be ‘in a class with some of your special masterpieces’. If only she had not used the word ‘like’ as a conjunction! ‘Wrong: He doesn’t know him like I do. Right: He doesn’t know him as I do. This is a very usual mistake to make . . . But you see I read it carefully and enjoyed it’ (in fact, as she told him, he had read it already in manuscript).34 In his next letter he praised Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise, which he was reading and loving for its ‘highbrow style’. Agatha fired back, telling Max that she had been typing in his library at Winterbrook: ‘Heresy! Lowbrow stuff in the highbrow sanctuary of Mr Puper!’ But on the whole she took absolutely no notice of her husband’s patronising tone. Indeed, when it came to her work, she took no notice of Max whatsoever, and almost nothing of him appeared in her writing. Only with Come, Tell Me How You Live, did she seek his opinion: this, after all, was his territory.

  Max read the manuscript at the end of 1944.

  I confess at first I thought it might be a shade embarrassing to publish such a book and perhaps there is rather a lot about us in it, but I don’t think it matters really and the main thing is that it will I believe give pleasure and amusement to quite a lot of people. Also it is perhaps better that it should come out now during the war, than when I am actively at work, digging.

  Max then told Agatha that she had

  become a very good writer, I mean descriptive writer, quite apart from your graphic conversational style at which you were always an adept . . . There are of course a number of mistakes or rather misspellings in the book on which I must try and send you a special letter tomorrow, MOHOMMED is consistently misspelled and should be MOHAMMED throughout . . .

  Agatha wrote to Max how much she had loved writing the book, so much so that it had been an almost painful experience: ‘I’ve been living all those days over again – and now it’s like waking up in a cold and lonely world – what did I do before you were there?’35 Living without her husband for more than three years, the buried fear of being alone and abandoned came to the surface, and the shared past became hallowed. Their letters are full of exchanged memories. ‘I am doing a lot of writing just now – It’s going well – but when I am tired and my back aches I would like to find a cushion . . . and put it on your lap and lay my head on it as I used to do long ago at Cresswell Place. Do you remember?’36

  In turn, Max wrote: ‘I like to think of you with the woolly Jaeger’s dressing gown I gave you before leaving England. Do you use it often? My woolly bear! Do you remember the woolly bear coat you were wearing in the cab at Baghdad that day in March was it when we were on the way out to dig at Arpachiyah?’37 More than once he reminded Agatha of an evening at Lawn Road when she was ill, and ‘I cooked the meal while you issued instructions from the bed! Great fun that was.’ He also hit an occasional lyrical vein, a legacy of his youth, perhaps, when he had written the occasional, rather laborious poem.38

  Odd things that come back to me . . . planning the garden at Greenway, sitting under the limes and looking over the green lawn at Wallingford, my books in the library, talking archaeology. These are only a few of the things that flash across the mind like the yellow marigolds that are specially yours, gleaming in the sun . . . What I treasure in you is your imagination, that has been a continual stimulus to me, needful to the scholarly side, your love and affection without which life is a drab thing, your enthusiasm, freshness and vitality, your capacity for sharing my interests and enjoyments . . .39

  This was a wonderful thing for Agatha to read: that Max appreciated in her all the things that Archie had shunned. ‘I am so glad that you can write that to me darling.’ Her insecurity wras almost palpable, nonetheless. However much Max reassured her, the fact of physical separation unnerved her. Perhaps she remembered what had happened when she spent those weeks at Ashfield sorting through her mother’s things. ‘Oh! darling – I hate these November days,’ she wrote in 1942. ‘I want to be with you – I feel so afraid sometimes that we shall grow outwards’ (she drew two lines moving apart) ‘instead of a nice parallel track . . . Think of me a good deal, please, and write often, because I need cheering when there are no sunny days.’

  Small wonder Max had confidence in himself. This woman had given him so much, yet she was the supplicant for his affections. He could write to her ‘of course use our joint account for anything you want’, and get away with it. He could count on the fact that she would visit his mother – and subsidise her through the ‘joint account’ – even though Agatha and Marguerite were now rather ragged with each other. ‘I was very tired when I went there and your ma’s criticism of England got me on the raw and I flared up – I daresay it will all blow over!! . . . Don’t be cross with me – I really have been very nice all these years.’ (‘Hope you will try and patch it up,’ he replied). He could answer in all seriousness when Agatha asked his opinion as to whether she should accept an offer of four thousand pounds for Winterbrook, pretending that the decision was in any way his to take. He could tell Agatha to write more legibly (it was true that her handwriting sometimes resembled ‘hieroglyphics’); to number her letters (‘Lazy Puper!’ he wrote, when she forgot); to consider a certain actress for a part in one of her plays, because he happened to know the girl’s fiancé (this, Agatha only pretended to go along with); to remember, when she dramatis
ed her books, ‘not to make the detective part of a play too difficult for the man in the street’. He could do all these things, because he had the power to make Agatha happy or unhappy.

  Sometimes he revelled in this. ‘Wouldn’t you have been a very foolish Mrs Puper if you hadn’t married me and aren’t you pleased you did and do you remember how A.P. [Madge]40 tried to dissuade us and what a foolish thing that was to do’, he wrote in February 1945.

  Yet there can be no doubt of their real closeness. ‘In many ways we are so unlike,’ Max wrote in March 1943, ‘but our hearts are the counterpart of each other.’ For their different reasons, each wanted the marriage to work. Their private world together had therefore been a careful construction, not an evolution, but for that reason it was all the more solid.

  In March 1944, Agatha conjured it to express her longing for Max.

  Sometimes my need for you is worse than others. It’s a feeling like an ache in one’s middle going round and round – Do you ever feel like that? Or it is purely a Puper reaction? I have had all sorts of dreams of you lately – really very erotic and rude ones!! Extraordinary after all the years we’ve been married! I wouldn’t have believed it! Nice – except that it’s annoying to wake up – I miss your nice coarse conversations too!

  Yes, Puper dear, I do miss you a great deal [Max replied], but the corkscrew motion you speak of is definitely a Puper motion – with me, it is a feeling of emptiness, of being unfilled, not unlike being hungry – I want to eat and hug Mrs Puper; but then one fine day that will happen . . . and there will be a great deal of wagging of tails, continuously. I am glad that you miss nice coarse conversations! I have plenty of that saved up for you – rude Mr Puper!

  This was what Agatha would have thought of as ‘being herself’. ‘You do love your funny Puper as she is,’ she wrote. She could tell Max to ‘think of your porpoise Puper every time you are in the sea’, and write about eating so much she ‘almost burst’, knowing that he would not shudder in horror. Similarly she wrote to him about the joy of their reunion:

  What lovely times we will have when we are together again and how we shall eat!! There will be your socks with holes in them!! and things strewn everywhere and chairs covered with books and a lot of laughing – And we will talk and talk and talk. And you will pick your nose and I shall yell at you – and you will say ‘Puper’ to me very sternly when I . . . ??!! . . .41

  This was a long way from the slender, fairy-like girl who had married Archie Christie: between those two there had been the mystery of physical allure, which Agatha still conjured in her books but had deliberately destroyed for herself. She had, indeed, coarsened. She did not merely hide behind the public persona of‘Agatha Christie’; she sheltered within a shroud of flesh, dense and unwieldy, a symbolic defence against the sharp agonies of the past. Her fatness also made her sad, although she made light of it. She described in Come, Tell Me How you Live the embarrassment of trying to buy clothes for the Syrian heat (‘Oh, no, Modom, we do not keep out-sizes’) and of being asked by Max to sit on their overfilled trunks (‘If you can’t make them shut, nobody can!’). But she had grown resigned to the loss of her looks, and she truly loved to eat. She also loved the fact that she could do so with Max, who had been thin when they met (‘That was before I fattened him up,’ she told Joan Oates) but who now described himself as ‘an awful gourmandiser’.

  It was childlike behaviour again, in a way: the gleeful tearing away of adult protocol. It was the equivalent of the absolute relaxation she had felt at Ashfield, lying beneath the beech tree, knowing that Clara was somewhere nearby, ‘The years we have had together have been the happiest of my life since I was a child.’ But no man could ever be quite what Clara had been. At times Max’s letters became far less frequent. In October 1943 he went on leave and did not write for a month. ‘You are a dirty dog . . . I can see your face saying: “Naughty Mr Puper!” and then I should have to laugh if you were here. You are not really contrite you just know you can make it all right.’ In July 1944 she was unable to stop herself writing repeatedly. ‘Still no letter from you, damn your eyes – or damn somebody’s eyes!’ Three days later: ‘It’s hell not hearing from you – What are you dooomgV And four days later: ‘Please, darling, don’t leave me without a word – I know you get lazy fits – but just a word or two would do . . .’

  ‘I feel very guilty dearest at my lapse in not writing to you,’ he wrote eventually. She had tried to be sanguine about what Max might do, left so long to his own devices. ‘I ought to be able to share your leave,’ she wrote in October 1943. ‘Have a good time, darling, and do anything you want and that you need – just so long as I am held in your heart in deep friendship and affection and very close . . .’ But in 1944 she tried to get herself sent out east. ‘When exactly do you get your two months’ leave?’ she asked, several times. ‘I still think it possible that I might do a writing job in Egypt . . .’ This plan did take tentative shape – ‘Prospects of Middle East good,’ she wrote in August – although Max did not encourage it particularly. ‘I think I ought to get home first for as you know my time is up at the beginning of April next year,’ he replied; then, in September: ‘You don’t want to risk getting stuck out there for a long time and Mr Puper back in England and you in Egypt!’ This was undeniable, although Agatha might have preferred it if Max had been desperate to see her immediately. She would not be reassured until they were in the same country. ‘I had a horrid dream that I had come to visit you somewhere abroad . . . they told me that you no longer cared or wanted me and had gone away and I woke up in a panic and had to say over and over – ‘It’s not true – it’s not true – I’ve got his letter.’42 The terrors of 1926 did not go away.

  This desperation was odd, as Agatha wrote about it at a time when her friendship with Stephen Glanville was deepening in intimacy.

  Stephen was ten years her junior, and had been a friend of Max since 1925. An intellectual through and through, his career as an Egyptologist had taken him first to the British Museum, thence to London University, then back to Oxford where he had taken his degree. He served in the Air Ministry during the war, working in Whitehall and living in Highgate, near Lawn Road Flats. After the war he took up a professorship at Cambridge; it is testament to his abilities and popularity that he became the first Oxford man to become provost of King’s College, a position to which he was unanimously elected in 1954. A person of great substance, he nonetheless had a gift for lightness. Like Agatha, he had a joy for living.

  He was bespectacled, not handsome, but he had immense charm and was attractive to women. It was said of him that ‘Stephen fell in love with every woman he met.’ Certainly he was unable to resist a close friendship with somebody like Agatha, whom he found intelligent, humorous, splendid and above all sympathique. In this relationship she was the grown-up, he the troubled and unhappy party who sought reassurance. ‘Of course, he isn’t really adult like you,’ Agatha wrote to Max. But something in Stephen’s vulnerability may have reminded her, distantly, of the early days of her courtship by Archie Christie, when he had loved her soothing voice and sweetness.

  Agatha and Stephen became friendly because both were alone. His wife, Ethel, and the two daughters he adored were in Canada, so he and Agatha began to see a good deal of each other. In 1941, she dedicated Five Little Pigs to him. From overseas Max gave his blessing to Agatha’s new friendships with his old colleagues: ‘How nice of Stephen and the Smiths – Sidney (not Sydney!) to have been so kind,’ he wrote in August 1942. In fact they were not being kind at all; but Max always had a slight air of condescension when imagining his wife in the sphere of academia (‘Clever Puper!’ he wrote, after she told him that she had caught out Sidney Smith in a conversation about free will. ‘You had him nicely there . . .’).

  In November 1942 Agatha went to hear Stephen lecture – ‘Didn’t realise what an attractive voice he has,’ she wrote to Max – then invited him to Greenway, which she was in the process of clearing. ‘Stephen
seems to have revelled in Greenway,’ wrote Max. The two men were in regular contact, although occasionally Agatha had to push Max to write. ‘The one person you must keep up with is Stephen, Max – he really is very fond of you and I think will be really hurt if you don’t keep in touch with him – He’s a sensitive person and minds about things – And he has been endlessly kind to me – always tells me when he has heard from you and news about you.’43

  The friendship between Agatha and Stephen intensified in 1943, when he used what she called his ‘serpent’s tongue’ to persuade her to write a murder mystery set in ancient Egypt. ‘Rather a fascinating idea but can I do it?’ Max’s reply was that it sounded a ‘most interesting experiment, and, as you say, if Rosalind can’t see anything wrong with it, then it must be pretty good! Stephen I am sure must be much intrigued.’44 It would have been surprising, however, if Max were completely happy about it. He would not have thought Agatha likely to betray him: he was too sure of himself – and of her – for that. But Glanviile was his friend, whom she had appropriated, and Agatha was his wife, with whom Glanviile was intending to collaborate; moreover, it was almost unprecedented for her to accept a suggestion about her work. She had used James Watts’s idea about the narrator-murderer in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but this was very different. She knew almost nothing about ancient Egypt, so the book would necessarily be a joint enterprise.

  When Death Comes as the End was finished, Max wrote to both Agatha and Stephen, expressing concern about the book in a manner that suggested more general perturbation. ‘I am not clear,’ Glanviile replied, ‘whether you are afraid that the book will damage her reputation as a detective story writer, or whether you think that archaeology should not demean itself by masquerading in a novel.’ The tone softened thereafter – ‘It was an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, and she’s brought it off. Incidentally, it’s a damn good murder story’ – but the rivalrous note had briefly flared.