Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  The book was by no means one of Agatha’s best, as the solution was so easily guessed. In that sense the setting limited her. Her source material was a series of letters by an Egyptian landowner – discovered at Luxor in the 1920s and known as the Hekanakhthe Papers – and understandably she stuck to them very closely. But the evocation of Egypt was well done. She had a talent for finding the present in the past, for grasping the ideas of a distant civilisation and finding in them a core of relevance. It was, in effect, her talent for the ordinary. She wrote, for example, about the spread of literacy within Egypt: ‘The writer and the scribe will come to despise the man who ploughs the fields and reaps the barley and raises the cattle – but all the same the fields and the cattle are real . . . when all the records and all the papyrus rolls are destroyed and the scribes are scattered, the men who toil and reap will go on, and Egypt will still live.’

  Perhaps the most interesting part of the book was Agatha’s depiction of the Egyptian home: the ‘houseful of women – never quiet, never peaceful – always talking, exclaiming, saying things – not doing them!’. Through this close community – wives, grandmother, concubine – she explored her own ideas about femaleness, its power and pettiness and mysteries. ‘What are men anyway? They are necessary to breed children, that is all. But the strength of the race is in the women,’ says one of the wives, who is blind to everything except her children. This, of course, was not Agatha’s way. She spoke through the character of Renisenb, a subtle creation, a young widow who seeks a life beyond the constraints of the home. Renisenb likes to sit in thought, doing nothing, ‘drowsily content with the men’s murmuring voices as a background’.

  Agatha wrote a letter of thanks to Stephen Glanville at the front of Death Comes as the End. She had sent him several painstaking ‘models’ of this letter to ask which he preferred. ‘I was very touched,’ he replied, ‘and am a little embarrassed in my conscience . . . for, as you know, just as well as I do, the “fun” was equally shared between us.’ He ended: ‘I am very proud that a suggestion of mine should have resulted in a book by you. (If I had a coat of arms I would like to choose for my motto: ‘By Agatha out of Stephen’ – despite the physiological improbability implied).’

  Throughout 1943 the two saw a good deal of each other. In March 1943 Agatha told Max that she had given Stephen dinner at Lawn Road to celebrate the publication of Five Little Pigs, standing the wine ‘by your photograph to give it luck and prestige . . . You were duly toasted in it by Stephen.’ Another dinner elicited this letter of thanks: ‘Charles Sorley’, wrote Stephen, ‘has a verse, in a pleasant description of Homeric days, “And then the grandeur of their mess!” The phrase has been gently calling – like the spring notes of one of the rarer warblers! – in my head ever since I left you on Friday night . . . What a meal! What hospitality!’ He had told friends, he said, about the wonderful food she offered, ‘but have found myself shy of undertaking to convey the subtler delight of the talking that completed our evening’.45 This was a lovely letter, full of its writer’s own charm; as was this, in July, after a visit to Winterbrook. His wife and children were now back in London and Agatha had invited them all to her home. ‘Yours is a quintessential hospitality’, he told Agatha, praising her ‘personal charm, great kindness, tolerance, catholicity of interest . . . all added to the physical delights, comfort, ease, idleness and lovely things to touch and see in and out of doors. It was a banquet . . .’46

  In November Stephen accompanied Agatha and Rosalind to the West End first night of Ten Little Niggers. From the Athenaeum he wrote:

  Agatha darling – Last night was really something to remember . . . The whole thing was FUN – it was delightful to make a party with so many altogether enjoyable people . . . But best of all was the diverse experience of Agatha: Agatha really nervous (as she must be until the show is over) – not just shy – even in the midst of close friends: Agatha in the moment of triumph, quite radiant, but still asking only for her friends, and incredibly unegotistical; at last, and perhaps most precious, Agatha still quietly excited, but beautifully poised and content, balanced between the success of the immediate achievement and the purpose to achieve more . . .47

  If not exactly a love letter, this comes very close. Reflected in it is the image of a very different woman from the Mrs Puper conjured by Max: this Agatha is infinitely more attractive, more adult and, indeed, more natural. It is not surprising to learn that Stephen confided to one of his friends that he was in love with Agatha, or that Agatha kept his letters with those from her husband. In his letters to Max, Stephen made semi-serious references to his attraction to Agatha. For her own part, she told Max about their meetings, qualifying her open fondness for Stephen with adoring references to Max himself: ‘Just back from first night of Niggers – I felt awful of course – It is an agony – but Stephen came again and was very kind and soothing and he and Rosalind pulled me through. I do wish you had been there.’48

  In 1944 Stephen helped Agatha again, this time with Arab dialogue for her play Hidden Horizon. He was, she told Max, ‘really longing to come to Dundee himself and have a finger in the pie’. He did not go as he was looking after his sick father: ‘Mrs G. is apparently “afraid of nursing” (convenient! ) – one doesn’t expect anyone as plain as that to be bone idle,’ wrote Agatha with unusual cattiness. Then she returned to the familiar refrain. ‘Oh! Max, how I would like a good laugh with you. I use Stephen a good deal – but it’s not quite the same thing. No Max. Boo hoo.’49

  Later that year, Stephen moved to a flat in the Lawn Road block. Agatha had predicted that the return of his family would ‘cramp his style a little!!’. In fact it precipitated a crisis; he decided to leave his wife. He had one extra-marital affair going already but now, living on Agatha’s doorstep, he talked a great deal about his unhappiness and confusion. When Agatha was out of London he wrote her loving and impassioned letters. Meanwhile he was conducting an affair with his designated mistress (about whom Agatha was also critical: ‘Margaret’s way of life and friends and background are not Stephen’s.’).50

  The situation made Agatha extremely uneasy, as it rekindled memories of Archie Christie. She wrote to Max in a state of near-turmoil: ‘I keep thinking of the wretched Ethel . . . She has been, I think, a very inadequate wife to him – but then he had known her all his life and must have realised her mental inadequacy. It is hard after eighteen years to find your husband can no longer stand having you in the house.’ Of the children, she wrote:

  It seems so sad for them – yes – and wrong – that their home should be broken up. Stephen is a most lovable person – so very sensitive and vulnerable in many ways – and yet with an odd streak of cruelty . . . Oh darling – life is cruel – cruel and separations are the most cruel things of all . . . seeing other people’s lives break up frightens me. Not us – not us . . .51

  Insecure as she was with Max – whom she must have known in her heart would never leave her – Agatha could not have coped with a man like Stephen, who was bound by his nature to hurt her. She would never have embarked on an affair with him, even if he had really wanted it. She was an innately moral woman, deeply attached to her husband and wary of attractive men. By the end of 1944 her relationship with Stephen had lost its intensity: his mistress spent more time at Lawn Road and Agatha was anticipating the return of Max (who was badgering Stephen for a job in the Air Ministry). Once again Stephen became a friend of the Mallowans, remaining so until his premature death in April 1956. His obituary in The Times was succeeded for some days by contributions from colleagues, who had loved him for ‘the generous magnetic warmth of his personality’.52 He had burned out, it was said: his nature was always to do too much – work, socialising, acts of kindness – but this was what Agatha had admired in him most. After his death she wrote to his daughter, Lucia, saying that Stephen had had ‘the art of living’ more than anybody she had ever known.

  In The Hollow, written in the summer of 1944, there is a character called John
Christow: a man of deep vitality and personal magnetism, dedicated in the sphere of his career, with a dull wife and a complex love life. He is entangled with three women at the same time, although the one with whom he is most relaxed, because she understands him best, is the sculptress Henrietta Savernake.

  The Hollow is charged with an unusual depth of feeling, and its central characters feel peculiarly alive. Their love affair is intense, moving, utterly believable in its unsatisfactory nature. The character of Henrietta is possibly the most interesting in any of the detective novels; she is rendered with authorial sympathy and, insofar as this is possible, the story is seen through her eyes. She is not Agatha, but she is an Agatha who might have existed, had she retained her emotional independence and her looks. ‘Henrietta is a very lovely and satisfying person,’ it is said in The Hollow, which was exactly what Stephen thought of Agatha.

  Only very rarely in her detective fiction did she write from life, and she certainly did not do so in this book. Yet there is a shadowy sense of the relationship that might have been, if almost everything had been different.

  Agatha’s guilt about Rosalind had come out in her letter about Stephen’s children: the emphatic declaration that what he was doing was wrong. Yet her own daughter continued to take second place. The pattern of their relationship had been set when Agatha went on the Empire Tour with Archie back in 1922. Her mother and grandmother had said, ‘Don’t leave a man alone’; but she had ignored their advice, although not on Rosalind’s account, and she knew that she could not pay that price again. After marrying Max she never doubted what she should do. Rosalind was sent to Caledonia, then to Benenden (which she disliked, although Agatha used it as the basis for the estimable Meadowbank school in Cat Among the Pigeons). Agatha was left free to travel with her husband.

  ‘Where are you?’ wrote Rosalind in 1931. Then: ‘I am glad you have arrived safely at Nineveh. What are you going to do . . . will you go on somewhere else, do write and tell me.’53 Meanwhile a typical letter from Agatha began, ‘I suppose you are back at dear old Benenden – We got shot up last night – at least not quite as exciting as that – a couple of roving bandits were trying to rob the house next door’:54 hardly reassuring reading. It was Carlo who filled the gaps, sending Rosalind a regular stream of what were called ‘Bonzo’ postcards55 and checking that she was informed about Agatha’s activities. ‘Missus has written to you today so I expect you have heard about the new house!’ she wrote in 1934, referring to Winterbrook. ‘You will see me next weekend, isn’t that a treat for you?’

  By 1936 Rosalind was living in Paris with a French family, the Laurins, having begged to be rescued from two Swiss pensions.

  If I meet some nice people I think it may be alright, if not I don’t know what I shall do [she wrote to Agatha in her familiar dry tone]. I expect I shall see quite a lot of good theatres. Otherwise I can’t help feeling that it is an awful waste of money, my being in Paris. Give my love to Max and tell him they still think he is my father. They asked me what he was like, meaning Max and I said he was tall and like me. They will get muddled soon.56

  This was the kind of thing that Agatha found difficult in Rosalind. She refused to recognise what was going on beneath Rosalind’s brusquerie: the desire to be, if not the centre of her mother’s attention, then at least somewhat further from its outer edges.

  ‘Do hurry up and spend all your money and come home,’ she wrote from Paris. ‘You don’t know what kind of brains these people have got, the silly ideas they have.’57 (Madame Laurin was driving her mad: ‘Poor woman she is having nearly as bad a time as I am except that she is making some money,’ she wrote to Carlo. ‘She didn’t know my name was Christie until the day before yesterday and she speaks of Daddy always in the past as though he were dead.’)58 Rosalind wrote to ask if Agatha was ‘staying a few days in Paris on the way home? I hope so as I have got a good many ideas as to what you could do.’59 But Agatha did not come to Paris: instead she arranged for her daughter to go on to another family in Munich. In May Rosalind wrote to Max, her tone of fake rage barely concealing her real emotions:

  Before I forget, tell Mummy she is really a pig!! I have just had a letter from Carlo in which she says Mummy has let Ashfield until March. How could she! It makes me absolutely miserable. This will be the first time I haven’t had my birthday there. I believe it is all your fault too with your archaeological conferences and things. I just hate you all but perhaps I shall get over it.

  Also tell Mummy that I went to a good tea party at the Baronne’s today. The Baronne was awfully nice and told everyone how marvellous Mummy was: ‘ I’intelligence rayonne d’elle’ (I don’t think so!) . . . Don’t spend all June touring about out there. Just remember you have got a stepdaughter dying of heat, shut up in this Town.

  And, to Agatha: ‘Would you mind telling me when you are coming home. You seem to tell Carlo and not me.’

  The next year, 1937, was Rosalind’s débutante season: as a divorced woman Agatha was unable to present her at court (her friend Dorothy North did the job in her stead), but in the spring she brought her daughter out to Tell Brak, where Rosalind did some drawing on the dig. Both she and Agatha viewed the ‘season’ as somewhat absurd,60 but it would not have occurred to them to bypass it. ‘No good saying you don’t want to go to Ascot now,’ wrote Agatha from Sheffield Terrace. ‘Everything is in full swing – Missis has been really active! Your dance is fixed for May 10th . . . I suspect you will live a gay and hectic life and by July will only pray to be allowed to sit at home with your knitting!! Whether you enjoy it or not I think it will be an interesting experience and you’ll probably find it quite funny!!’ In fact Agatha had gone to a certain amount of trouble for Rosalind, but she could not drop the jaunty tone that kept affection at bay. She had bought her daughter two dresses, she wrote: ‘If you don’t like them I shall GIVE THEM TO CARLO!’61

  Rosalind was amazingly beautiful. This must have caused Agatha pain as well as pride, not least because her looks were Archie’s: long lean body, chiselled little face. Her portrait picture appeared at the front of Tatler, which described her as ‘very attractive’. She was photographed by Lenare, posing like a mannequin, but these gorgeous shots also show the vulnerability in Rosalind’s cool dark eyes. Like her mother she was sensitive, she formed powerful attachments, she had a deep love of her home and her animals but, unlike Agatha, she had no creative outlets. She could not, or would not, show her feelings. They had to be divined in her, and in this Max did a better job than Agatha. From the first he made sincere efforts with his step-daughter, despite her occasional gibes about ‘tall’ fathers. When she was a child he took pleasure in teaching her, and introduced her to the rudiments of philosophy.

  She had a quick and penetrating intelligence, although she does not seem to have considered any particular career. After her season she was at a loose end. She became great friends with Dorothy North’s daughter, Susan, and together they thought they might become models (an idea instantly vetoed by Agatha, who viewed it as déclassé, although this was as nothing compared to the scandal when, in 1942, Susan went to live in sin with ‘a doctor down in Bourne End’. Agatha’s sympathy for Dorothy was boundless; in some ways she was very conventional.) The two girls spent a lot of time lounging around Agatha’s London home: ‘Do you remember Sheffield Terrace with Ros and Susan in the drawing room?! The chaos? she wrote to Max in 1944.

  Something of Rosalind was written into the Westmacott novel, A Daughter’s a Daughter. Beautiful Sarah – ‘a tall dark girl’ who resembles her father – is a ‘tempestuous influence’ upon her mother’s calm flat, which she strides around with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. Sarah’s attitude towards her mother, Ann, is also familiar: ‘The one thing that Sarah – and all the other girls of her age – seemed to insist upon was an attitude of casual indifference on the part of their parents, “No fuss, Mother,” they said urgently.’

  Sarah is a destructive force in her mother’s li
fe, coming between Ann and the man she wishes to marry. Ann is unable to forgive this: she encourages Sarah to marry a man who cannot possibly make her happy, and goes through a phase of actually hating her daughter. Sarah is indeed a ‘creature of temperament’, but what Agatha also shows is that she is intensely vulnerable and terrified of being displaced in Ann’s affections. ‘I don’t want to be on my own. ‘I want to be with you. Don’t send me away, Mother.’ As always when she wrote as Mary Westmacott, Agatha saw what she chose to ignore in real life; not least the intrinsic value of her daughter’s character. ‘She’s got backbone,’ says wise old Dame Laura Whitstable. This, by the time the book was written, Rosalind had been called upon to prove.

  She was at Greenway when war broke out and looked around vaguely for work. The first inkling that something else was in the air came in the spring of 1940, when Agatha noticed the vast number of cigarette butts beside the upstairs telephone, where conversations could be held in privacy. Nevertheless it came as a shock when Rosalind announced, in her usual nonchalant way, that in a few days’ time she was going to marry Hubert Prichard of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. She had met Hubert, who at thirty-three was twelve years her senior, when he was attached to the regiment of her cousin, Jack Watts. He had visited Abney, and had also come to Greenway in the company of Madge. He himself had a large and lovely home, Pwllywrach in Glamorgan (although his mother was firmly ensconced in it at the time), and by all accounts was a remarkably nice man. It has been suggested that Rosalind married him so suddenly because she had no idea what else to do with herself; it has also been said that she fell in love and anticipated a life of great happiness. Perhaps there is truth in both these suppositions. At any rate she had her quiet, quick wedding on 11 June 1940, and Agatha wrote to Edmund Cork from the Grosvenor Hotel, Chester, that ‘he is very nice and I am very happy about it’.