Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  The ivories were very much Agatha’s business (so too were photographs and typing the catalogues). She had a woman’s good sense about these things, which most of Max’s team did not, and advised – for example – that the Mona Lisa be kept under damp towels for several weeks, thus accustoming the ivory by degrees to a dry atmosphere. She did much of the cleaning:

  I had my own favourite tools [she wrote in her autobiography] just as any professional would: an orange stick, possibly a very fine knitting needle . . . and a jar of cosmetic cold cream, which I found more useful than anything else for gently coaxing the dirt out of the crevices without harming the friable ivory. In fact there was such a run on my face cream that there was nothing left for my poor old face after a couple of weeks!

  In 1953 she reconstructed, almost single-handedly, more than thirty ivory and wood writing boards, which were recovered from a well in tiny fragments. This was ‘her greatest contribution to archaeology’, wrote Joan Oates, who had first met Agatha the previous year when, as a research student at Cambridge, she had stayed at the BSA house in Baghdad, ‘which was basically a home for Max and Agatha when they were there’.17

  The house was right on the Tigris, with a paved courtyard and a balcony above on which Agatha would eat her breakfast. It was a charming place, and by comparison Nimrud was truly roughing it, but into her sixties Agatha remained game about the leaking roof of the dig house, the nights spent in a tent through which rain would drop as if from a giant bucket (‘no worse really than a burst hot water bottle’),18 the water that had to be carried by two donkeys from the Tigris, the Thursday night bath (‘in that Victorian hipbath, which still exists somewhere in Iraq’),19 which might contain a frog or a fish. The weather, though, was difficult: the soft green calm of Nimrud could snap in a sudden fury.

  I am sitting writing this in the middle of the fiercest hailstorm I have ever seen – cascading down [she wrote to Rosalind in April 1957], Scene resembles a Channel steamer – buckets everywhere! Catching the drips from the roofs – Max’s office would make quite a good swimming bath! No fine weather at all until ten days ago – then so stifling hot you really feel nearly dead and perspiration drips into photo developing and on to ivories – then two days terrific thunderstorms – the track washed away . . .

  As for finds, however – Just masses of fine ivory carvings tossed in heaps into the rooms of this building . . . Joan and I exhausted – work on them all day – frightfully short of time – and they were so near the surface that they’re in a very perishable state. My back – my back! (always something wrong – one’s feet, one’s teeth, one’s back, one’s blindness etc etc!)

  Did she enjoy this? Yes, in a way; but it also served a purpose. ‘She was relaxed on the dig,’ says Joan Oates. ‘She loved the flowers, she loved the scenery – and she never said, that’s too much for me. That always impressed me. She was extremely friendly and generous, but she was very much in the background.

  ‘She was a sort of mother figure, but not in any interfering way. Without her there it would have been a totally different sort of life. And Max would have been much more difficult to live with.’ Max was in his element in every way, and success brought out the autocrat in him. On the dig he could be confrontational – ‘Max was very volatile, he used to flare up’ – but the presence of Agatha acted as a balm. ‘All she ever did would be to say “Now Max”, a very quiet voice, and he would pause for a moment, and whatever he was raging about would drop.’

  The presence of Agatha Christie was a draw, of course, bringing attention and prestige to the dig, and this suited Max very well. ‘Max loved entertaining. They would have all sorts of archaeologists, ambassadors, government ministers – it was extremely interesting. But I remember Agatha on those occasions, she would retire into the corner somewhere and she would just sit. I don’t think she was excluding us, she just didn’t take part in the conversation. Max took care of all that. . . That was the life that Max was attracted to. I think she found it very difficult.’20

  This, then, was evidence of Agatha’s ‘shyness’, of which there are so many stories from her later life (including the famous example of when she allowed herself to be turned away from the Savoy for a 1958 party to celebrate The Mousetrap). Certainly she did become extremely retiring as she grew older, although her unwillingness to mix at social gatherings was not always in evidence. There was a lively embassy life in Iraq at that time – according to Joan Oates, this was what Max missed after the 1958 revolution – and Agatha was a part of it. ‘We are going into Society tonight – Cocktails at the French minister’s and dinner with one of the British Council people,’21 she wrote to Rosalind from Baghdad. And: ‘We dined at the Embassy last night and met the new Ambassador – very dynamic and amusing. They had taken their entire family, ranging in years from 79 to 11 to Spider’s Web [her 1954 play]22 on Boxing Day and had loved it . . ,’23 Perhaps she did these things for Max: the world-famous Agatha Christie was his calling-card, after all. Or perhaps her shyness was a tool, as much as an affliction. It was useful to be shy, sometimes. Particularly if a person is subject to the kind of attentions that Agatha had to endure; as when, staying a few nights in Cairo (taking in ‘two enormous dinner parties at the Embassy’), she was told by her hosts that three girls were visiting ‘because, you see, they want to see Mrs Mallowan! When we said we had Agatha Christie staying with us, they wouldn’t believe it!’ She described the scene in a letter to Rosalind: ‘They silently filed in after tea and more or less stood in a row to attention, their eyes fixed on me. Very embarrassing . . .’24

  Out east, however, there was still a sense in which Agatha was at a remove from her fame. ‘I think she probably was happy to be away from the pressures of England,’ says Joan Oates. ‘I remember once – we all hated taking visitors around – this car was sighted coming, and Agatha always went into her own little room and locked the door. And there were two young men from Finland. They’d come to see Agatha Christie, and they weren’t being told no. They knew she was here, and they were going to see her. They went into the house and realised that there was this other room, and they actually went and banged on the door. And Agatha was on the other side. So if that sort of thing happens to you, you can imagine how nice it is to be in a place where it doesn’t happen that often.’

  This, indeed, was the point. Throughout the 1950s, the pressures on Agatha at home grew so intense that the East acquired an almost spiritual allure. ‘It’s lovely to crawl out into the sun on the terrace every day and look at the Tigris,’ she wrote to Rosalind, ‘rest – sit in the sun – think up a few fancy murders to keep the home fires burning and eat a good deal of rather rough meat!’ For all the ambassadorial trappings, it was a simpler life. It had the primitive quality that Agatha had conjured at the end of her early novel, The Mem in the Brown Suit, which ends with her ‘gypsy girl’ heroine living close to the gorgeous South African earth and caring not a jot for the cool, over-civilised West. Something in Agatha craved this: the sharp air, the forceful weather, the smiling Arabic fatalism. (‘Sarah admired the easy swing with which he walked – the careless proud carriage of his head. Only the European part of his costume seemed tawdry and wrong.’)25

  She had responded to it when she first visited Baghdad in 1928, when it helped remake her after the death of her old life. Now it represented a different kind of escape. It brought clarity. When England threatened to overwhelm her she could pack her trunks and head east. The lunacies of fame had grown to the point that they could even follow her to the banks of the Tigris. But there were other things that she longed to leave behind every year; and it was lucky that she had acquired, by this time, a team of people at home who could look after her affairs in return for the financial protection she afforded them. The quid pro quo was that she was left free to do the work that earned their keep.

  Edmund Cork now devoted the greater part of his life to running Agatha’s life. He maintained what she called ‘the Cork service’: as well as managing
Agatha’s career he dealt with her tenants, arranged her travel and currency transactions, booked hotels, bought theatre tickets for a good many London shows (second row stalls, for preference), put on her bets for the Grand National (and for the Derby, if she was away in June), paid her bills and attempted – a near over-whelming task – to handle her tax problems. ‘I’m relying on you, Edmund,’ was the refrain. Looking after Agatha inevitably meant looking after Max too; not just his work on Nimrud but some of his personal affairs. When Max had business in Paris, for example, Cork booked him into the Hotel Montalembert. ‘I don’t particularly recommend it,’ he was told for his pains.

  Rosalind, too, was in her mother’s service. In 1949 she had married again, a man of great charm named Anthony Hicks, who had been called to the Bar but now effectively worked for Agatha; an arrangement that suited them both. Anthony thought Agatha ‘a wonderful mother-in-law’ and, it was said, worshipped Max (in later life, when he and Rosalind had possession of the master bedroom at Greenway, Anthony insisted on sleeping in Max’s narrow old bed at the side of the sumptuous double). He became an easy presence in the family with his light, dry humour, his ability to get along with everybody, his extreme cleverness which he kept, on the whole, to himself. He had withdrawn from the world, to an extent, and concentrated his considerable intellect on studying Tibetan; this was the way he liked it.

  It was not a love match. Rosalind had written in her usual tone to inform Agatha of the ceremony at Kensington Register Office:

  I don’t suppose anyone will enjoy it much but you have got to be there and Max and then we will have to come back to look after the dogs. You mustn’t look too smart . . . but I hope you are pleased. I think we will have rather a nice time here [Pwllywrach], He has some money (more than me!) and he will give me £10,000, but he can’t afford to live in two places at once . . . I think you will find Mathew will be pleased too. He is always pressing him to stay a long time and I don’t think really he will be jealous.26

  After the tragic experience of her first marriage, Rosalind had decided to marry for more pragmatic reasons. In this, as she perhaps realised, she was behaving very much as her mother had done. It had been a relief to find a relaxing companion – Rosalind herself was not a relaxed person – to share the burdens she had shouldered since Hubert Prichard’s death in 1944: caring for Mathew, Pwllywrach and, increasingly, her mother. Agatha’s attentions were always directed towards Max, what she saw as the necessary business of keeping her husband happy. Max, in his turn, allowed Rosalind and Anthony to keep Agatha happy. They were both sensible enough to see that this brought them considerable benefits, and that there was really no alternative to the arrangement, although for all her pragmatic acceptance Rosalind knew exactly what was going on. ‘Anthony devoted himself to my mother,’ she wrote towards the end of her life, ‘helping her with all her affairs and taking over the running of the gardens because Max couldn’t be bothered to do it.’

  Throughout the 1950s, the problems that went with Greenway fell with increasing weight upon Rosalind and Anthony; only the financial side remained Agatha’s worry.

  While she was in Iraq it was left to the Hickses to run the house and gardens, which in practice meant trying to find decent staff who could be trusted. This was easier said than done. Agatha disliked the head gardener at Greenway, Frank Lavin (‘Hitler-Lavin’), but he knew his job, and usually walked off with every prize at the Brixham Flower Show. Other staff, however, came and went. No doubt this was partly why Agatha conjured the housekeeper of her dreams, Lucy Eyelesbarrow, when writing The 4.50 from Paddington at Nimrud in 1956. Her letters home constantly revert to the problem of servants, which fifty years on she still saw in the beatified image of the pre-war staff at Ashfield: Jane the cook, calmly presiding in her kitchen, the maids moving about the house with quick discretion. ‘I am really very sorry about Maisie,’ Agatha wrote in 1948 when Rosalind lost her own housekeeper at Pwllywrach. ‘I really did hope she would be with you more or less for life – what a weary world it is.’

  Winterbrook also required looking after: ‘I must say it’s nice to feel the Smiths are there,’ she wrote in February 1953, ‘she’s so fat and comfortable and loves people coming – I think he does and will do some gardening in the intervals of talking.’ But in the same letter she wrote: ‘I do wish I could get Greenway settled.’ In around 1954 she acquired a trustworthy couple called the Gowlers – cook and butler – but only after a period of upheaval, indirectly caused by Agatha herself. In 1952 she had employed a Mrs MacPherson to oversee both house and garden in her absence, and to take charge of the Brisleys, who had worked at Greenway for the past three years. Mrs MacPherson got along extremely badly with Brisley, who disliked being told what to do and let the garden go to such an extent that Rosalind was obliged to give notice to him and his (admirable) wife. Then she had to cope with Mrs MacPherson. ‘I have been down to Greenway to help Rosalind deal with the nasty situation that developed there,’ Edmund Cork wrote in April. ‘Mrs MacPherson was not at all what you wanted. Her idea of her stewardship was that she should just play the lady of the Manor . . .’ A month later Mrs MacPherson tried to kill herself in her home, Ferry Cottage, in the grounds at Greenway. When the police arrived it emerged that she was a full-blown con-woman who had reached a pitch of despair over her losses on the horses, and had meanwhile amassed bills totalling more than eight hundred and fifty pounds. ‘The police want to know what Mrs MacPherson owned in the cottage,’ Cork wrote to Rosalind. ‘In view of the bills it is our opinion that she owned absolutely nothing apart from personal attire . . ,’27 Among the bills was a substantial order for drink, ‘which is clearly a personal liability of Mrs MacPherson’s’. Everything else was paid by Agatha. Quantities of ‘Mrs Mallowan regrets . . letters were sent to Devon suppliers, together with cheques.

  It was after this débâcle that Rosalind and Anthony took proper charge of Greenway, which had to be put on a commercial footing in order to offset taxation. In fact it was the terrible tax demon that had led Agatha to employ Mrs MacPherson in the first place. ‘I have told her we must make money,’ Agatha had written to Rosalind when the problems first began. ‘How can I pay three men [garden assistants] out of income taxed at about 19 shillings in the pound with no income tax relief?’28 Edmund Cork told Agatha that ‘The Inspector of Taxes persists in asking awkward questions, obviously with the intention of showing that the Gardens are nothing more than a hobby.’29 Eventually this particular problem was solved, and Anthony took charge of the Greenway Gardens Trust on which tax relief was allowed. Agatha actually sold Greenway to Rosalind in 1959 as a means of avoiding tax, although she continued to use it as her own home while the Hickses lived at Pwllywrach. But the Greenway problem was a side-show compared to the main event: the pursuit of Agatha for tax arrears in both America and the UK, which had begun in 1938 and which continued, more or less unabated, deep into her old age.

  It was a bizarre and rather horrible business. The strength of character she showed, living and working for so many years beneath this massive shadow, was remarkable. Possibly Edmund Cork should have dealt with the problem more promptly, or more aggressively; but the fact was that he had been overtaken by the sheer sweeping success of his client, whose sales grew to staggering levels even as he was trying to cope with pre-war taxation demands which had come pretty much from nowhere.

  Not until 1948 was a settlement reached upon the American tax arrears: a sum of more than $160,000 for the years 1930 to 1941. This was paid, with ten years’ worth of legal and accountancy bills, but it was nothing like the end of the matter. The UK government staked a claim to the residue of Agatha’s American income, frozen for a decade and now returned to her; she needed that money desperately, but the tax authorities fought her for it untii the end of 1954.

  Through the 1950s the same problem recurred, over and over again. There was simply no getting clear of it. Surtax was appallingly high at this time and in March 1954 Agatha wrote to Cork fro
m Nimrud: ‘An income tax return sent to me by Heaven [this, almost unbelievably, was the name of her accountant] has shattered me to the core! Did I really make £30,000 in one year? Where is it all?!!!’

  ‘It is terribly shocking’, he replied, ‘to think that one can earn £30,000 and retain so little. It is not the sort of fact that encourages an author to get on with a book that the publishers are clamouring for [she was writing Destination Unknown]. The short answer to the question where is it all is Mr Butler . . . For the current year the tax would amount to £25,100 and for the two previous years £25,800 per year.’ That year saw the settling of the UK end of the drawn-out American tax dispute; this meant that, although the tax paid in America was finally regarded as ‘deductible expenses’ – a considerable relief – there was still a good deal outstanding at home. In September 1954 Cork informed Agatha that she owed around £70,000 to the UK authorities. Sensibly, considering her innate lack of thrift, he had stowed away just about this much in what he called her ‘No. 1 Deposit Account’. ‘It relieves my mind of a great deal of worry,’ she wrote to him, especially as she had believed the account to contain about twenty-seven pounds. ‘Did you conceal riches of the No. 1 account for me on purpose? I wouldn’t put it past you. And probably very wise too! I might have bought a racehorse and started a Racing Stable.’30

  This was all quite cheerful, and despite the vast sum of money involved Agatha was happy enough to pay, in the belief that this would get the Inland Revenue off her back. Of course it did not. At the end of 1954 she wrote to Rosalind from Swan Court, saying she had just heard from Cork: ‘I’m worried, Agatha, terribly worried! I’m terribly afraid you’re going to make £100,000 next year!!’ In the governmental climate this was, indeed, a serious worry. ‘I think something ought to be done and quickly – and actually I’ve been saying so for years,’ Agatha’s letter concluded.