Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  ‘Did you love your husband?’

  He left it in the singular, and she answered without quibbling.

  ‘I loved him more than anything in the world.’

  It is often said of Agatha that from middle age onwards she never touched alcohol; the official line was that she hated the taste, but it would be truer to say that she disliked the way it made her feel. ‘All it did, she said, was make her sad. Weepy. So that’s why she didn’t drink.’1 In drink the emotions are no longer resolute. They shift into dangerous new positions, which sometimes have a clarity and beauty that sobriety does not see. Shirley is a brandy drinker and it is in a bar that she says to Knox, of her first husband: ‘I loved him more than anything in the world.’

  Agatha did not drink, but she reached an equivalent, state in her Mary Westmacott novels. They have an emotional looseness, a poetic sweep, a recklessness that is not wholly controlled; they inhabit a highly adult state of confusion that she avoided everywhere but in her most private self.

  ‘It’s so hard to explain [Shirley tells Knox], I wasn’t very happy, but yet in a curious way it was all right – it was what I’d chosen, what I wanted . . . Of course I idealized him one does. But I remember now, waking up very early one morning – it was about five o’clock, just before dawn. That’s a cold, truthful time, don’t you think? And I knew then – saw, I mean – what the future would become, I knew I shouldn’t be really happy . . . and that I loved him, and that no one else would do, and that I would rather be unhappy, married to him, than smug and comfortable without him . . .

  ‘Of course I didn’t put it to myself as clearly as all that. I’m describing now what was then just a feeling. But it was real. I went back again to thinking him wonderful and inventing all sorts of noble things about him that weren’t in the least true. But I’d had my moment – the moment when you do see what lies ahead of you, and you can turn back or go on . . .’

  He said very gently: ‘And you regret – ?’

  ‘No, no!’ She was vehement. ‘I’ve never regretted. Every minute of it was worthwhile! There’s only one thing to regret – that he died.’

  That Agatha still had powerful feelings towards Archie is made clear in a letter written by Rosalind. ‘I planned to see him and his family some years ago, but my mother got in a terrible state and although she felt no animosity towards him she just couldn’t seem to accept anything more intimate between us.’ This referred to a time soon after 1958, the year that Nancy Christie died and two years after publication of The Burden. By then the events of 1926 were long distant, and Agatha herself was immersed in her life with Max.

  ‘Deeply happy’ was how she described her state of mind in 1954, when she again filled in the Album of Confessions, which she had last done at Ashfield aged thirteen (in answer to the same question Max described himself as ‘well contented’). But this simple statement is again thrown into doubt by The Burden, which asks what ‘happiness’ really means. Shirley had chosen unhappiness, in the knowledge that she would prefer life that way. Her sister Laura’s attempts to make her happy, by letting Henry die, in fact destroy Shirley too. According to Llewellyn Knox, happiness is ‘one of the foods of life, it encourages growth, it is a great teacher, but it is not the purpose of life, and is, in itself, not ultimately satisfying’.

  A large part of Agatha’s life operated in the everyday world of happiness: family, routine, travel, pleasures, the companionship and freedom of her second marriage. She knew that she had been given a second chance at life, and she always strove to delight in her magical good fortune. This, for her, was almost a question of duty. Not to do so would have been a sin – committed once only – against her deepest belief: that to be alive was a joyful thing.

  But in her private imagination she allowed herself to wander through the darkness. She remembered. She dreamed other lives. Did she sit in the garden at Greenway – that place of incomparable beauty, with its brief-flowering camellias and the Dart gleaming like a mirror through a tangle of trees – and picture Archie at her side?

  (‘When you look back on your life with him, what are the things that come first to your mind, the moments that you will always remember? Are they of the first time you slept together – or are they of something else?’)2

  What did she feel when she wrote to him in sympathy after Nancy’s death? An odd thing to do, in the calamitous circumstances.

  (‘His hat,’ she said. ‘On our honeymoon . . . I put it on, and then he put on mine – one of those silly bits of nonsense women wear, and we looked at each other and laughed. All trippers change hats, he said, and then he said: “Good Lord, I do love you . . . Her voice caught. ‘I’ll never forget.’)3

  Did she wonder what he thought, when he received her kind and magnanimous letter? If he regretted anything? He wrote back thanking Agatha for her generosity in giving him those years of happiness with Nancy; but then, what else could he say? He also wrote to Rosalind after Nancy died, saying, ‘It did make me realise more clearly that death often comes unexpectedly’, and that he had therefore gone to buy a present by which his daughter would remember him.

  What I should do conventionally is to leave you a small reminder of old father. But then I thought you would rather have your reminder now.

  So I went back to the ruby ring. You would have laughed to see me hurrying off to inspect those offered. Small, queer shapes, some like bits of pink glass. Perhaps in murder stories or if you are a maharajah you get them. Last week I gave up and picked a small one I had seen earlier and liked and as it was rather small, even for me, I threw in a diamond one as well.

  . . . Tearing up other letters, to prevent anyone seeing yours to me I read all that I had saved, from school, finishing places abroad, war work etc. Some were very good, with new ideas, and some were quite affectionate!

  So with all best wishes for the future you will get two small reminders and lots of love from Old Dad.4

  Four years later, in December 1962, Rosalind attended Archie’s funeral, and for the first time met her half-brother, Nancy’s son. Did Agatha grieve that day, not just for Archie but the fragile, tenacious memory of their happiness? Did she wonder if he had ever grieved, for the life he had chosen to leave?

  I cannot say [Agatha wrote, as her sober self, in reply to a series of questions posed to her in 1971] that I have ever reflected on whether I regret anything in life or not. Probably there are hundreds of things I regret but as one cannot go back and do anything about it it is not worth thinking about them. There was a charming play . . . where a man bitterly regretted the fact that once he had not managed to catch a train. He was allowed to go back and catch the train and lived his life through again and came to terrible grief through doing so. ‘The fate of every man have we hung about his neck.’ Do not let us forget that definition of Karma . . .

  So her life from middle age onwards was with Max Mallowan, and she knew that it was better that way. She had security and she had freedom. She traversed countries, continents, ideas, civilisations, the span of her own century. Her energy and curiosity gave fullness to almost every year of her mature life. She saw India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, the West Indies, America; she saw the past brought back to life in Iraq; she listened to Wagner at Bayreuth, attended a passion play at Oberammergau, watched the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II from a splendid vantage-point at 145 Piccadilly; she socialised with people of intellect, who respected her and with whom she could discuss any subject she chose, exercising the muscles of her powerful mind; she revelled in her comfortable Winterbrook and her glorious Greenway, the summers spent in her beloved Devon with its moors, its coasts, its hills, its English wildness: it was a good life, a magnificent life in truth, the kind that can scarcely be lived any more. And married to Archie she would not have had it. (‘. . . they’d go on and on and on . . . She’d never see things – faraway things . . .’)

  Agatha was conventional: she always wanted marriage. At the same time she wanted a life of her own. During he
r years with Archie she had, in effect, confronted a dilemma familiar to many intelligent women, who almost always believe that love and independence can be reconciled and find, so often, that they cannot. In Agatha’s case, reconciliation came about in her second marriage for two reasons: she was so outlandishly successful that she could make her own design for living; and her husband had the sense not to mind about this. Max Mallowan had a career of his own, less lucrative but with unassailable prestige and dignity. He was not bothered by being married to a phenomenon: hooray for it, was what he generally thought, not least because it was so immensely helpful to him. And he understood the depth of Agatha’s appaliing vulnerability, which redressed any imbalance caused by her wealth and fame. What really maintained the equilibrium in the marriage was that both parties wanted it like that. In their different ways they both wanted the marriage to succeed; and, paradoxically, this is far more likely to happen when neither partner is in love with the other. For love, as Agatha wrote over and over again, is ‘the devil’.

  ‘I think they were very good friends,’ says Max’s nephew, John, who stayed at Greenway for summers in the 1950s and 1960s. ‘They genuinely liked each other, they enjoyed each other’s company. They didn’t kiss and cuddle all the time, but they always spoke affectionately. I don’t remember them having rows. I don’t think Agatha liked rows. I do remember my uncle having some tremendous arguments with Rosalind, but in a way later on she was closer to his age . . .’

  The marriage was also observed by Agatha’s friend Joan Oates, who worked with Max after the war on his dig at Nimrud. ‘It was an odd marriage really. Odd. But very successful.’5

  Nimrud, near Mosul in the north of Iraq, which Max and Agatha visited every spring from 1949 until 1959, was the heart of Max’s lifework. He directed the excavation of the dig until the 1958 revolution in Iraq, when the Hashemite King Faisal II was assassinated and the republic established. Afterwards the dig was led by David Oates – Joan’s husband – then by Jeffrey Orchard, until the cessation of work in 1963.

  In 1966 Max’s Nimrud und Its Remains, which he dedicated to Agatha,6 was published in two volumes by Collins. The negotiations were handled free of commission by Hughes Massie: ‘So glad you are going to help Max,’ Agatha wrote to Edmund Cork. Max himself told Cork that ‘Agatha is just as keen to see the book published as I am, never having missed a season at Nimrud,’ and that the book was ‘one to which prestige will be attached, for no richer or more spectacular discoveries have been made in ancient Western Asia during the last decade, and this will be the authoritative work on the subject’.7 (Cork replied, in his gentlemanly way, that it was ‘an honour’ to handle the project. Obers in New York took a somewhat different tone, saying, ‘Collins are publishing a book called Nimrud and something or other, I didn’t get the rest of it, which I gather is on archaeology . . . Dodd Mead are agreeing to take 500 copies from Collins’.)8

  Nimrud was a beautiful place, rippling stretches of green with the Tigris a ribbon of blue beyond. It had been one of the great cities of Assyria, inhabited from at least the thirteenth century BC, In the reign of Ashurnasirpal II (883-59 BC, a little after King Solomon) it became capital of the Assyrian empire, the all-conquering power that would stretch from western Iran to the Mediterranean. In the Bible it was called ‘Calah’ and, according to Agatha, it was ‘a sort of Assyrian Aldershot, the military capital’.9 Destroyed in 614-12 BC, when the Babylonians took control of Mesopotamia, Nimrud had been excavated in the mid-nineteenth century by Sir Henry Layard, although he had mistaken it for Nineveh. Since 1879 no archaeologist had really gone near it. A vast deal of potential therefore lay waiting for Max Mallowan, who knew Nimrud from his work with Campbell Thompson in the 1930s, and who in 1949 applied for permission to reopen the excavations there.

  By this time Max was director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, and also professor of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the London University Institute of Archaeology, which had started up in 1934 and, from 1937, been based at Bute House in Regent’s Park. At the end of the war Max had been concerned as to what he might do, and how he would pick up the threads of his career, although he must have felt secure in the knowledge that Agatha was behind him all the way. ‘I hope we get plenty more archaeology after the war,’ he wrote to her from Tripolitania in 1943. ‘That is the only pursuit that really matters.’10 Sensitive as ever to what Max wanted to hear, Agatha frequently reassured him that he should continue with his work. ‘You are right about the future,’ he replied in 1944, ‘clever Mrs Puper knows Mr Puper only wants to dig really.’11

  In 1947 Max and Agatha went to the East together for the first time in ten years: ‘It is obvious that there are hundreds of plums waiting to be pulled out of the rich Iraqi mud pie,’ he wrote home to Rosalind. He was also writing up his report on the dig at Tell Brak, where he had spent one season in 1937, and Sidney Smith – to whom it was submitted, and who himself gave tutorials at the institute – set about trying to find him an academic post. As usual, things fell Max’s way. Regent’s Park suited him very well. It involved a certain amount of lecturing – at which he was said to be very good – and postgraduate teaching, but it allowed five months away every year for field work. Colleagues included Kathleen Kenyon, an expert on Palestine, Mortimer Wheeler, ‘the last figure of the heroic age of British archaeology’,12 and Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop, a recent graduate of the course in western Asian archaeology, who covered for Max when he was away. At the end of the day he could return to the wonderfully comfortable flat in Chelsea that Agatha had newly acquired.

  I am now here and addressed as Professor Puper [he wrote to Rosalind in May 1947]. Hundreds of persons, mostly women, prostrate themselves to the ground as I enter the building . . . I think I am very lucky to have hooked this job. I will try to be a good professor by which I take it you mean that I must be in London, Wallingford, Pwllywrach and Greenway lecture and write books all at the same time . . . My head has definitely shrunk since I got here; my hats are positively spinning round my head as I realise how much my brain needs to expand if I am to cope adequately with all I am expected to do.

  In fact it was said at Max’s memorial service that his appointment to the institute had ‘caused some misgivings; fears, that is, that, as was said at the time, it might prove to be like harnessing a racehorse to a plough’. Although in the circumstances Max was obviously eulogised, this speaks highly of the way his abilities were viewed. At any rate he had the confidence to seek to lead the excavation of a huge and neglected site. He visited the Director of Antiquities of Iraq, and wrote in his memoirs that ‘any thought of caution which I may have had, left me, and I was moved to ask if we might return to Nimrud’.

  Permission was given by the Iraqi authorities, but of course money was needed. Archaeology was a different game by this time, still a world of its own although not so clubbish as it had been before the war; it was more professional, its practitioners were better trained, its attitudes towards the East were less imperialistic and it was funded, on the whole, by public institutions rather than private fortunes. Max was not especially in favour of these developments. ‘I conclude that at its best archaeology is a private pursuit, not to be shared with the masses,’ he wrote to Agatha, and it was lucky for him that she agreed. She gave a lot of help to the British School of Archaeology: ‘What she gave didn’t go into the accounts,’ says Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop.13 ‘There was a fund, but nobody quite knows how much she put in.’ What is certain is that in 1953 her book, A Pocket Full of Rye, was offered to the school as a gift. Edmund Cork wrote to Harold Ober that ‘The Metropolitan Museum in New York have discontinued their support of the BSA in Iraq, which means that Agatha’s husband’s life work is threatened by lack of funds. Consequently we have devised a scheme by which Agatha – who cannot support the School directly because of her tax position – gave Pocket Full of Rye to the School, and I have bought it from them [for £7,500],14 The royalties also supported the BSA and, in part, the book
on Nimrud. It was a difficult deal for Cork to pull off. ‘With all this scrapping over legal technicalities,’ he wrote to Agatha, ‘probably no one has told you how wonderful your magnanimity appears to the average man.’15

  Work at Nimrud began in March 1949. In what became their routine, Max and Agatha travelled first to Baghdad, where they arrived in January and where she, having taken much of the previous year off, applied herself again to work. This, too, became routine. Iraq was where she did much of her writing. In the mornings at Nimrud she would work in the dig house and, eventually, at a cost to herself of fifty pounds, had her own room built on the side. Square, mud-brick, with a chair and a table, two paintings by young Iraqi artists and her floppy-sleeved fur jacket for when she grew cold; this was ‘Beit Agatha’, or Agatha’s House. In it she produced much of her 1950s work and began, in pleasurable and sketchy form, to write her autobiography.

  Outside this little room there was constant noise of shouting, barking, braying: ‘The roar of London’s traffic was nothing to it.’16 The focus of attention for the dig was the citadel mound. Although much ground was eventually covered – temples, a governor’s palace from the eighth century BC, a complex of private houses, a fort – work began with what was called the North-west Palace, founded by Ashurnasirpal II and partly excavated by Layard. In it was a stela, covered with a cuneiform inscription that detailed the king’s titles, works and military victories, with a description of a great banquet organised to celebrate these achievements: a remarkable find. Wells as deep as twenty-five metres were cleared and excavated with the help of equipment lent by the Iraq Petroleum Company, and these yielded unexpected treasures, such as a pair of ivory horse blinkers, decorated with sphinxes. In 1952 the Illustrated London News pictured on one of its covers a ‘Mona Lisa of 2600 Years Ago’, a female face carved from ivory tusk with slanted, sensual eyes and lips. Another ivory female had bulbous eyes and a mouth like a slit: ‘the Ugly Sister’.