Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  Rosalind’s life again became somewhat aimless. ‘[She] leads the life of a Wandering Jew nowadays,’ wrote Agatha to Max in November 1942, ‘has just been passing through London on her way to join Hubert.’ In January 1943 Rosalind took on an administrative job. ‘I am working quite hard here this week stocktaking, pages and pages of stuff, tinned food, everything in the kitchen,’ she wrote to Max. ‘There still seems nothing to do. I can’t conceive what people find to do in an office all day.’

  In May Agatha informed Max that ‘She has unwillingly let slip the information that she is having a baby in Sept.!! I am so happy about it. . . Secretive litde devil – but I’m glad I didn’t know before.’ Agatha was in fact extremely anxious about Rosalind’s pregnancy. Her letters imply that there had been an earlier miscarriage (and of course Agatha had lost a baby). The two women spent time together at Winterbrook, then travelled to Abney where the baby would be born. ‘I shall be so thankful when the baby has come safely – I get (all mothers seem alike) so panicky sometimes . . . It’s silly, I know, but her lifeline is broken in both hands – and I think of it sometimes. It’s the one thing I want for her happiness. I know she’ll be happy with a child.’62

  Mathew was born on 21 September, ‘looking so like Hubert to my mind that all he needs is a monocle!’. Agatha had ‘chucked’ her first night of the dramatised version of Ten Little Niggers – ‘Plays don’t matter’ – and gone to Abney straight after the dress rehearsal. ‘H. ringing up and asking anxiously “Does she like it?” “Tell him it’s a monster,” said Ros. “Far too big.” “Is she getting cross again yet?” asked Hubert. “I’ll feel she’s all right then!!” Oh darling Max – I am so happy. Thank you for all your help and love,’ she wrote, although it is unclear what he had actually done. After so much talk of her daughter and grandson, Agatha clearly felt her attention should be back on Max. ‘You are all the world to me,’63 she wrote at the end of her letter; an odd phrase, in the circumstances.

  Meanwhile Max was writing his own letters to Rosalind, and in a very different tone from the ‘Mr Puper’ one he adopted with Agatha. With Rosalind he was droll, relaxed; intimate, even. He was still a relatively young man, only three years older than Hubert Prichard. Now that Rosalind was an adult, it was impossible to ignore that he was almost equidistant in age from his step-daughter and his wife. In 1940 he was thirty-six. Agatha was nearly fifty; Rosalind a lush twenty-one.

  Her own letters to Max were those of a pert younger sister, full of bone-dry teases about Max’s ‘conceit’ and the size of his head. ‘I might make you a godfather but am not sure yet,’ she wrote before Mathew’s birth (she did; Max sent a five-pound note saying, ‘You might tell me if it is possible to spend a fiver on Mathew all at one go’). Nor, in his turn, was Max especially fatherly, although there can be no denying that Rosalind meant a great deal to him.

  He did not write very often but, as he put it in 1941: ‘I am more really your friend than you might think from the little action I take to write to you and do things for you . . . The trouble is, you see, that to those of whom I am really fond I find it difficult, really difficult to write, because I want to give them the things I cannot express. But as we are so bloody confused we have to act as humans do.’64 In 1942 he again admitted his laxness: ‘You say you were hurt that I had not written’, then attempted to atone:

  Long may I live to shake you, argue with you, criticise you, eat with you, quarrel with you, laugh with you, exchange ideas with you and find life more and more exciting because of you . . . you are one of the people and things (for you are a thing) that I valued, and found good in life . . . I wonder if this embarrasses you at all. I enjoy trying to embarrass you very much indeed, but I don’t think I ever really succeed. My privilege. Devilish conceit. In that letter I wrote I answered a long tick off of yours about my conceit. What I said I can’t remember.

  At the end of the letter he struck a more paternal note: ‘Keep your philosophy and a metaphysical outlook in life. Don’t be afraid of yourself. Go on loving flowers and green fields.’65

  In 1943 it was Rosalind who had failed to send him a ‘birthday letter’ in May.

  Maybe I didn’t deserve one because I have not written to you for so long . . . Do you ever feel prickly because I don’t write to you, or don’t you mind? This sounds like one of our old arguments. As a matter of fact I am still crackers about you and I think of you surprisingly often, just about every day! . . .

  How are you? What do you feel and think now – I know your pretended answer. ‘Nothing.’ I would like to come along and give you a good shaking. Is your face really as incredibly small as ever and will you ever look any older? . . . I always miss you.66

  Agatha might have been considerably surprised by these letters, having written to Max about her recollection of life at Greenway: ‘you and Rosalind having rows . . .’ Rosalind herself seems to have taken Max in her stride, as she did most things. She was preoccupied now with her husband and baby, about whom Max wrote: ‘I am glad to know you are going to have a brat it ought to be a pretty good type with you and Hubert as ancestors. I can imagine you when you have produced it putting it down by the scruff of the neck like a cat in a box of rusty nails, not unpleased . . .’ The arrival of Mathew was, he wrote,

  the best news from home I have had in this war. Though why indeed there should be cause for jubilation at the birth of an unfortunate brat into this world, handicapped with the prenatal sins of its parents and hidebound with their virtues it is indeed hard to say and I expect that you with your cantankerous and philosophic outlook will already have thought of that . . . I am fearfully pleased about it all, the Lord alone knows why; but there it is.67

  While Max pontificated, Agatha worked herself to the point of exhaustion. She found it strange to have no proper staff; she had enjoyed cooking at Lawn Road Flats, but this was very different. ‘I need a Carlo or two about – a dogsbody, that’s what I need!’ Charlotte was doing war work, living with her sister in a house provided by Agatha. ‘No, I just need Max . . . Yes – I want Max. And I can’t have him.’68 She prepared Campden Street to receive the new mother and baby. Furniture was sent to London from the squash court at Winterbrook, ‘No one to clean or help . . . my hands are like nutmeg graters from soda and soap – and my knees are sore – and my back aches . . . I’m so tired, darling . . . Of course they took these things out of Sheffield Terrace in a rush – Result nothing is together.’69 Agatha stayed with Charlotte, nearby on Ladbroke Terrace Mews, then arrived every morning ‘like a daily’ to help Rosalind. When Mathew’s nurse was recommended to see Ten Little Niggers by Agatha Christie, her reply was I know – she’s our cook.’

  In November 1943 Agatha was laid low with flu, and Christmas at Pwllywrach nearly finished her. ‘I must say, darling, that I am glad not to be a mother – I don’t think I could cope with it!! One needs to be young and strong . . . I have felt very tired and depressed ever since I had ’flu. I shall get over that – shan’t I?’

  In fact 1944 would be a very difficult year. Agatha was now working at a pitch that verged upon the masochistic. Since 1940 she had, much of the time, given a number of days each week to the University College Hospital, where she worked at her old game of dispensing and was described as a ‘tower of strength’.70 She had cleared Greenway for the Admiralty, dealt with the bombing of Sheffield Terrace, cleared Campden Street for Rosalind, moved from Half Moon Street to Park Place to Lawn Road. She had lived through the 1940 blitz and the flying bombs of 1944 (‘I sometimes worry a bit at the thought of your being in the raids in London, and not being with you, because it is lonely being bombed by yourself so to speak!’71 wrote Max). This was what happened in war, of course, but on top of this she had written a staggering amount.

  The first book of 1940 was the undervalued wartime thriller N or M?. She had been promised a good serial sale for it in America, only to be fobbed off with the incredible excuse that ‘editors are afraid that such a strongly anti-Nazi story woul
d upset a substantial section of their readers’; ‘I am FURIOUS,’ she told Edmund Cork, although the book was sold in 1941. In 1940 she also wrote Evil Under the Sun and two extra books, insurance against unforeseen events such as her ‘sudden demise’: Sleeping Murder and Curtain, final cases for Miss Marple and Poirot, given to Max and Rosalind respectively. In 1941 she wrote The Moving Finger, The Body in the Library, Towards Zero (which she also thought might be left in reserve; she was remembering how, after 1926, she had longed for a finished book to throw at her publishers) and Five Little Pigs. In 1942 came Absent in the Spring, in 1943 Death Comes as the End, with much of Come Tell Me How you Live written in between. Fewer books, but more activity: in 1942 she had written her dramatisation of Ten Little Niggers, which, with its new ‘happy’ ending, went into rehearsal in 1943, as did a version of Death on the Nile (later retitled Hidden Horizon). Although her friend Francis ‘Larry’ Sullivan longed to play the part again, she took Poirot out of the script and instead gave him a ‘good part as Canon Pennefather72 – a kind of budding Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir William Beveridge rolled into one’, as she told Max. ‘You sound very much the play Puper,’ he wrote to her.

  A great deal of rushing around was involved with these plays. In January 1943 Agatha was in Dundee with Ten Little Niggers, then involved in a vexing saga as to when – if – the play would open in London. This finally happened in September, at Wimbledon, after a dress rehearsal in which ‘they had altered the whole of the end and made it quite idiotic’. The play moved to the St James’s Theatre in November (where it was attended by none other than the Woolleys). Three months later the theatre was bombed and the play went to the Cambridge Theatre, then on tour, then to New York.

  In between all of this Agatha was also travelling back and forth to see Rosalind who, she wrote, ‘never sits down – and is infuriated if anyone else does. “Now mother, what are you doing just wandering about, singing too!? There’s lots to be done – we must get onl”’73 It was a miracle – perhaps a miracle of politeness – that the vicar who christened Mathew should have said to the exhausted Agatha: ‘You – the grandmother – Impossible!’ Agatha adored her grandson. ‘Ros. is going to be a very jealous mother!’ she wrote. ‘She doesn’t like his looking at anyone else!!’ Max wrote to ask how Rosalind treated the baby: ‘Is she as good to him as she was to her dogs.’ Then, in somewhat appalled sympathy: ‘But by Jove it all sounds like hard work running a house and a baby! Don’t overdo it dear Mrs Puper, till Mr Puper is there to look after you in case you need attention, e.g. cook you an omelette in bed.’74 It has been said75 that Max would have liked children, and felt the lack of them in his life, but his own words seem to contradict this. In September 1942 he wrote to Agatha that he was thinking of Greenway and of ‘the young incoming trees that we planted with our own hands. These are our children, yours and mine . . .’76

  A week earlier Max had written in more prosaic vein. ‘How are your financial affairs,’ he asked. ‘You never speak of them. I hope it isn’t because you don’t want to worry me because I want to share your troubles if you have any. And anyhow one doesn’t worry about money now. Help yourself to anything in my bank if you need it.’ Agatha’s reply was a blithe lie, told to protect Max from alarm and embarrassment. ‘Worries, darling? As long as you are all right and happy I have no worries. My debts get more and more enormous but it doesn’t seem to matter and I don’t care!’

  This was not quite true, however. The fact was that throughout the war Agatha had grappled with another problem, which she chose scarcely to mention, and about which Mr Puper could do nothing. It had all begun in 1938 – ironically, the year Agatha reached the plutocratic heights by acquiring Greenway – when the revenue authorities in America began to probe into her earnings, which had been substantial in the 1930s: in the tax year 1935-6, for example, she earned more than seventeen thousand pounds from American magazines. The serial market was hugely lucrative for her (hence the alarm when N or M? failed to sell), and had formed the basis of a trust for Rosalind. On top of this came advances, fees for translation rights, film and play options; all of this made additionally complex by, for example, the reprinting in new collections of stories that had already been published, and the ensuing multiplicity of contracts.

  Until 1938, Agatha had been classified in America as a ‘nonresident alien author’ and, as such, the tax on the sale of her copyrights was payable only in Britain. This changed, however, when what became known as ‘the Sabatini case’ was heard in the US Court of Appeals. Rafael Sabatini was a British subject, a successful author living in London but making a large income from American sales. The court’s judgment was that he was liable to pay American tax on the sale of his American copyrights. The same judgment, if applied to Agatha – as seemed inevitable – would cost her thousands in back tax, although at the time it was not established how retrospective it would be.

  Harold Ober, her US agent, employed a tax lawyer, Howard E. Reinheimer, to handle the enquiries and prepare statements for the US Revenue Board. This was no easy task. Many of the relevant records were missing, and it did not help that both Hughes Massie, Agatha’s London agent, and Collins, her publisher, had suffered bomb damage; although, in a sense, the lack of material evidence was helpful to the case. Reinheimer was expected to plead that Agatha and her advisers had taken all possible steps to fulfil the tax authorities’ requirements, as known at the time. This sounds like a reasonable defence; but when government officials have a scent they are reluctant to let it go. ‘The tax people here are being very active in looking up tax payments of English authors and they are now demanding to see Agatha Christie’s accounts from the very beginning,’ Ober wrote to Edmund Cork in June 1940. ‘I’m going to stall on this as long as possible . . .’

  Ober stayed cool throughout. Cork remained gentlemanly; but he found it hard to conceal his alarmed revulsion at the rapacity of the tax authorities. He was quietly fond of Agatha, he respected her and knew how extraordinarily hard she worked. What she had, she had earned. When it transpired that she would not receive any revenue from serialisation sales in America until the situation was settled, he relieved his feelings by writing to Ober (‘rather a warm letter’, he later admitted).

  The point is that owing to the necessity of paying for the war, Mrs Christie will have to pay during 1941 in British Income Tax and Surtax alone an amount equal to four-fifths of her total receipts during the twelve months ending 6th April last, and as you know, more than four-fifths of her income comes through you . . . The obvious reply is that she is a wealthy woman, and should have no difficulty in borrowing the income, but war conditions have altered all this . . . in any event Mrs Christie’s assets, apart from her copyright, are in real estate, which is a drag on the market now.

  I entirely agree with you that this is a most unfortunate time for the US government to try to get back tax out of people in England, and I do think the strongest possible appeal ought to be made on every ground . . . I am sure Mrs Christie would be the last person to evade improperly any taxation that was rightly due, but this desperate state of affairs can only be met by desperate remedies. I really feel very badly about this. It is against all our ideas of justice that anyone should be penalised to this extent . . .77

  The ‘extent’, according to a letter that Cork sent to Agatha in August 1940, could be as much as $78,500,78 assuming the ruling backdated her liabilities to 1930. ‘I really don’t think this could happen,’ he wrote, stressing that, anyway, $42,000 was owing to her from serial payments. Nevertheless the sums involved must have shaken her badly. Certainly they shook Cork rather more than he showed Agatha; how, he asked Ober, could Agatha possibly pay these sums as well as her British tax? ‘It is just like a nightmare having to produce for the Tax gatherer no less than three-quarters of those very monies you have to retain for American taxation.’79 Naturally enough, the authorities at home had started to get busy, and were making their own trouble about the money that was being held
in America. Cork wrote drily to Ober: ‘I can quite understand your finding it hard to believe that Agatha will have to find money for Income Tax on monies she has not received . . .’80

  Agatha was working like a demon so she continued to receive an income, even though she was unsure how much of it was actually hers. Her advance from Collins was £1,150 per book (increased to £2,000 in 1945), from Dodd Mead $4,000 (an attempt to reduce this went down very badly with Cork). A typical British serialisation fee was the £300 paid for The Moving Finger. The plays also generated money: Ten Little Niggers was a solid source, bringing in an average £200 a week on tour: ‘but alas! How much shall I get out of it?’ she wrote to Max.

  In her uncertain situation Agatha felt the absurdity of owning both Winterbrook and Greenway (as well as two London houses). In August 1942 she told Max: ‘We must decide sometime which house we’re going to stick to – I don’t believe we can keep both.’ Max’s advice was that she should sell one if it would get her ‘absolutely clear’. The next year she wrote of the ‘great relief’ of not having to run Greenway, then in the hands of the Admiralty – ‘no rates, repairs or gardens!? – but the thought of actually selling it made her very sad. However, as no buyer was likely to come along in the middle of the war, nothing could happen to resolve the situation.