Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  With Mathew, Agatha was very different. She had adored him from the first, for the happy optimist’s nature to which the death of Hubert lent poignancy. Her effusive delight in ‘the lovely boy’ contrasted starkly with her cool, joshing relationship with Rosalind (‘Mummy won’t have got writer’s cramp from writing to me,’ she wrote to Mathew. ‘Tell her this’).

  Subconsciously, this emphatic adulation of Mathew may have been aimed at Rosalind. Agatha would not be the first to use a beloved grandchild in this way: women who have been semi-detached mothers quite often become devoted grandmothers, almost as if to prove to their children that they can be maternal. And there is no doubt that Agatha found Mathew more congenial than she did Rosalind.

  As a cheerful boy at Eton, as a handsome young man at Oxford, she loved his company: she took him to school in her Rolls-Royce, watched him play cricket at Lord’s, whisked him off to Stratford (‘I’m going to take Mathew,’ she wrote to Rosalind; ‘I’m TELLING you this – not asking – because you’ll make a fuss and say no’), and indulged their shared love of Wagner at Bayreuth. In many ways he resembled Agatha far more than his mother (although physically he took after Rosalind and Archie). Rosalind did not exude joy of living. She could not help but be sardonic with her son: ‘my poor little halfwit’, as she called him in a 1944 letter to Agatha. She was not overtly maternal. ‘Agatha was afraid that Rosalind would love her dogs more than Mathew,’ says John Mallowan – somewhat ironic, considering that Agatha had called her own dog Peter ‘my child’ – but in fact, like many people with a demonstrative love for animals, Rosalind had strong emotions towards humans that she found difficult to show. As a child she had longed for her father but had been obliged to keep this to herself. She had tried to get her mother’s attention with her droll, sad letters but had lost out to Max. Now, in adulthood, she continued to play a strange role within the family: a still young and highly attractive woman, living in what was – however agreeable – a marriage of convenience, with a father whose name could not be mentioned and a mother to whom she must act as perpetual handmaiden. Where, in the midst of all this, was Rosalind’s own life?

  At the same time she was an absolute pragmatist (another difference between her and her mother). She knew very well that Agatha’s writing had bought them all a magnificent existence. If she and Anthony had the problems of Greenway, they also had Greenway; if they had the worry of how to deal with the money, they also had money. So the handmaiden existence was the only one possible.

  But Rosalind’s resentment glinted dangerously when it came to Agatha Christie Ltd, which had been brought into being for her own benefit (and that of her husband and child). The way the trust worked was for Agatha to be its employee and to be paid a yearly salary. In letters to Rosalind, Edmund Cork referred to ‘our servant’ in a joking way, as if thereby to emphasise that Agatha was still in fact her own mistress. Rosalind, however, had no such scruples. ‘I am glad that Agatha Christie Limited is gathering some money and sincerely hope it won’t all be paid to our Wage-Slave!’52 This also reads like a joke, but it was not. ‘I hope you won’t pay too much of the £14,000 in salary to my mother!’53 she wrote to Cork, who had told her that the company had collected this sum during its first year of operation. By 1958 the company had accumulated £45,000; Cork suggested that Agatha’s salary be raised from £5,000 to £7,500. ‘I think, of course, it is a very bad idea indeed – but if you think it won’t be acceptable to the Income Tax at £5,000 with the £3,000 a year expenses it will obviously have to be considered . . .’54

  It was true that, in a sense, the yearly salary was a formality paid to fulfil the conditions of the tax-avoidance scheme. Agatha still had the money from the sale of her copyrights although this, like everything else she owned, was potentially up for grabs by the Inland Revenue. But Rosalind’s attitude was extraordinary, nonetheless, and Edmund Cork was baffled by it. When Agatha was paid £10,000 for her draft script of Bleak House, he wrote cautiously that ‘It would be nice to show [the company’s] appreciation by paying her, say, another £5,000.’55 Back came the reply: ‘I am not sure about my mother having extra money as I think Anthony told you on the telephone and will have to think about it – I’m glad you have got £10,000 though!’56

  Rosalind did agree that Agatha might have a new car; Collins had previously given her a huge Humber which had been nothing but trouble. But it was quite some time before Cork prevailed about the additional £5,000.

  And yet, for all this, Rosalind was powerfully protective of Agatha. In February 1957 she wrote to Cork about an article that had appeared in the Daily Mail: ‘I was most upset to see a reference to her disappearance – It said [of a missing woman] “I’m not sure she’s not doing an Agatha Christie on us.” I don’t know whether you can make some complaint about this – it makes me very angry and I know it will not please my mother . . . I really do feel very strongly about it.’ The events of 1926 were always extremely sensitive for Rosalind; for mixed reasons, of course. She herself had a good deal to forgive about the behaviour of both her parents, and she was also obliged to maintain the semi-fiction of the ‘official’ theory. At the same time her instinctive reaction, when the subject arose, was to rise to her mother’s defence. She could not bear Agatha to be defamed or ridiculed; she knew something of the agony that her mother had endured at that time, and it literally pained her to have this belittled. ‘The unspoken subject’, as Joan Oates calls it, was a test to be passed in order to be admitted over Rosalind’s personal threshold. Anyone who regarded Agatha’s behaviour as deceitful or attention-seeking would have the door shut upon them. Judith Gardner had been a childhood friend of Rosalind; her mother, Nan Kon, had been Agatha’s friend, and when Nan died in 1959 Agatha wrote to Judith to say, ‘If ever you need help or anything from an older person, I’m always there and you must consider me as a kind of mother.’ Yet in 1996 Judith collaborated with Jared Cade on the book that purported to have solved the disappearance, unequivocally calling it a stunt. Rosalind – who viewed Judith’s behaviour as a personal vendetta against her family – was distressed and disgusted. Oddly enough, Agatha herself had learned in 1960 that the journalist Ritchie Calder was preparing to write a book containing his ‘memories’ of Agatha’s discovery at Harrogate; her reaction, as expressed to Edmund Cork, was sanguine. ‘You may worry it’s coming to my ears,’ she wrote, ‘but after all it’s only what crops up from time to time every few years, and what does it matter after all this time?’ This may, of course, have been partly bravura. At any rate Rosalind would have sought to keep such stories from Agatha.

  She was also, perversely, protective of her mother’s work. She reacted fiercely to attacks upon the books, of which there were many after Agatha’s death, although such was their success that she could easily have left them to speak for themselves. But she felt that Agatha Christie was much misunderstood; as in the Channel 4 J’Accuse programme, which upset her greatly.57 Until her own death in 2004, Rosalind felt an obligation to stand up for her mother’s books. When she was no longer a power within Agatha Christie Ltd, and raged at some of what was done in its name, she would protest against what she saw as absurd, inappropriate, or insufficiently faithful adaptations. The accomplished BBC television series starring Joan Hickson as Miss Marple earned her delighted praise; the ITV series of Poirot was accepted, on the whole, but she could not understand its occasional lack of fidelity. The closer the adaptations stuck to the originals, the better, was Rosalind’s belief, and on the whole she was right. But her belief was held out of loyalty, as well as conviction: she believed it because she knew that it was what Agatha herself had wanted.

  She remembered, for example, the real misery that the MGM adaptations had caused her mother. Agatha had tried not to take this to heart, but she had minded very much indeed, and in March 1964 Rosalind wrote to Cork:

  I feel personally most discouraged and ashamed about the dealings with MGM. Larry Bachmann knew he had been wrong both legally and morally o
ver this film . . . You may say as you have done constantly over the last few days that it is all good money – but I do feel and I was really genuinely dismayed to see you did not share my feelings – that we have really let my mother down very badly over this whole deal.

  The following year she wrote again: ‘m am very worried about my mother’s tax . . . the chief concern is for my mother. She is not looking very well and I know this is bothering her a lot.’58

  It was as though Rosalind felt guilt about Agatha: not just about how hard her mother had to work for them all but about her own resentment of this work, for which she knew she had to be grateful. In order for Agatha to write, Rosalind had to help run the rest of Agatha’s life. This was the way things were; and it aroused in Rosalind a complexity of emotions that, being the kind of person she was, she did not voice or even acknowledge. But the protectiveness that she showed towards Agatha was partly connected to her feelings of guilt: a way to expunge them, in fact, and to prove to herself how wrongful they were.

  As Agatha grew older so Rosalind became more protective. After her mother’s death she became as fierce as a lioness in Agatha’s defence, and never wavered in her staunch support of both the woman and the writer. ‘Even if I am her daughter, I think she was an exceptional person!’59 she wrote. Like her mother, Rosalind was the product of an age that did not pity itself in public; unlike her mother, she had the unusual ability to accept whatever life threw at her and deal with it as simple fact. She was the daughter of Agatha Christie, and that brought with it things that were both good and bad. Fact.

  She has been called ‘damaged’, ‘difficult’: terms that she herself would not have recognised, and that bear little relation to the warm, highly intelligent, straight-talking woman she was in old age. It is true that her childhood would nowadays be regarded as blighted – no regular contact with her father; left for months on end while her mother went travelling; sidelined in favour of a step-father of an age to be her own husband – and it is also true that her adulthood, after Hubert’s death, was not really her own to enjoy. But it was also true that she had a glorious life through her mother’s success. This, then, was the way things were. Rather than discussing them, it was better to have a large gin (unlike Agatha, Rosalind was no abstainer; it was said that life at Greenway revolved around drink) and get on with it.

  For her part, Agatha found her feelings hard to express when it came to Rosalind. The letters that she sent from the East during the 1950s took their usual tone. ‘It will probably make you gnash your teeth to read it, but I am having a very pleasant life’, she wrote from Baghdad; and, after a visit to Tunis, ‘Lucky for you you weren’t born in the days of Carthage. They sacrificed all their first born children! There are thousands and thousands of holes full of little bleached bones!!’ At the same time she wanted to hear from her child. ‘Severe shock for the postman, bringing a letter from you’; ‘Over three weeks here and not one word from you YOURS TRULY FED up’.

  In 1955 Agatha was taken ill on the dig, with what Max described to Rosalind as ‘an internal chill’ – in fact a very unpleasant infection – and driven for three and a half hours to hospital at Kirkuk. From there she wrote, ‘What a rotten correspondent you are! I take it very poorly. Now that I’m only the servant of the company I shall have to be kept in a good temper and induced by a great deal of kindness to do some work!!! . . . Lots of love to you really, you horrid girl.’60

  Agatha knew the debt she owed to Rosalind. She too felt a good deal of guilt: since 1926 her actions had influenced her daughter’s life, by no means always in the way that Rosalind would have chosen. She still believed that her divorce was a very wrong thing, and that in some way she was to blame for it; she knew that Rosalind saw Archie, and was grateful for the discretion with which this was done; she realised that her second marriage had relegated Rosalind to a minor role, and that her daughter stoically stoked the home fires while she and Max lived pretty much as they chose.

  At the same time Agatha was aware – as how could she not be? – that it was her money which paid for everything, and this made her autocratic. Although her façade was modest, she could be grand; not with everyone, but often with Edmund Cork, and sometimes with Rosalind. In the years of her great fame she tended to conduct her affairs with a rather irritable airiness, thus: ‘Do go to Greenway sometimes to see how it’s all going. (But don’t go out of your way to ‘make trouble’ . . . !) The great thing is nobody writes and bothers me? She left Rosalind and Anthony to deal with Greenway (‘Tell Anthony bending the back to pick lettuces is the best cure for those aches and pains and stiffness,’ she wrote from Nimrud), and a part of her thought that this was right and proper. Another part of her felt differently. On a visit to Pwllywrach a row erupted about Greenway, and Agatha, as she put it, ‘blew her top’ in its defence. Afterwards she wrote to Rosalind to apologise.

  The truth is I’ve got a guilty conscience about Greenway – you and Anthony and Mathew have Pwllywrach – a lovely home and garden and Max has his Winterbrook and its books and its river – and it’s really only I who cling on to Greenway because I love it so . . . I feel a bit better since the Garden’s done so well, thanks to Anthony, but of course I suppose it is pure selfishness on my part.

  There is no doubt that, far from being a rum baba, I am a Bloody old Bitch.61

  She loved the house with a deep and private passion. It absorbed some of the feelings she had had for Ashfield. It could never quite replace that home: Ashfield would always be the place where she had been most entirely at ease, and most entirely happy. But Greenway laid a sharp, exquisite touch upon her imagination. In the summer it was often filled with people – names in the visitors’ book include members of the Mallowan family, Allen and Lettice Lane, Billy Collins, Peter Saunders, Stephen Glanville and his daughter Lucia, Charlotte Fisher, Nan Kon, Edmund Cork, Stella Kirwan (from the 1950s Agatha’s secretary and friend), A. L. Rowse – and filled with activity: tennis, croquet, clock golf, boats on the Dart, children playing in the sun, dogs scurrying everywhere. Yet it was a place where solitude could become something magical. The walled gardens, the tangled paths, the brief-blooming camellias, the sunlit shadows within the shuttered rooms, the lawn outside the front door dropping away to the Dart, a scene of configurative stillness rustled by trees. There was a serenity to the whole that was nonetheless disturbed by its beauty, a beauty so extreme that it did not quite permit restfulness. It demanded imaginative response. This was Agatha’s dreamscape, and through it she walked, a fat and wrinkled lady with shrewd eyes and a black-and-tan dog at her heels; a country gentlewoman, it might be said; but in her head what mysterious thoughts.

  So she was intensely grateful to Rosalind – and to Anthony, whom she adored – for the help with the house and, indeed, with everything. ‘Oh! dear Rosalind – what a relief,’ she wrote in April 1953, after hearing that the Hickses were taking charge of her affairs while she was at Nimrud. ‘I can now apply myself to the important development of After the Funeral.’ Beneath the dry surface of their relationship Agatha recognised Rosalind’s worth; increasingly so, as she grew older. ‘I feel you really must have a proper letter thanking you for the lovely Xmas you gave us . . . I know, too, that a lot of work and planning and thought has to be done to make everything seem so right and so effortless. And I appreciate it . . .’

  At Nimrud she began to miss her English life: ‘Days of whirling dust storms . . . have been sitting gasping and longing for home, crocuses, snowdrops, camellias at Greenway, river at Wallingford – You and Mathew at Pwllywrach – somewhere green where there is a flower or two. Can’t think why I ever wanted to come to this stupid country . . .’ In 1957 she wrote describing her attempts to type Max’s catalogue with a tornado hurling itself against the door and panes of glass smashing into the dig house, then going to a bed partly protected by a mackintosh.

  That, visitors, sandflies, peculiar beetles and now mosquitoes have curbed my enthusiasm a good deal. And to read of your d
affodils makes me long for Pwllywrach and you and Anthony and possibly a Japanese poem or two!

  Well, not long now.

  But Agatha went to Nimrud to be with Max, as well as to escape the oppressions of England; there would no leaving Max alone out east. She would never leave a husband alone again. Rosalind knew the depth of Agatha’s loyalty to her husband, the extent to which she used her own career to support his, and this played a part in her desire to protect her mother. It may, too, have influenced Rosalind’s desire to cap the salary that Agatha Christie Ltd paid to her mother every year. This money, after all, was spent on Agatha’s life with Max: the travel, the trips to Rome and Paris, the nights at the Hôtel Bristol and sumptuous French dinners (‘a Château Latour 1924, bang on’, as Max wrote to Rosalind in 1953, ‘complete with Chateaubriand, sauce Béarnaise and all the French cheeses. Price of wine 1,600 francs . . .’). The more salary Agatha was given as spending money, the more she would do this kind of thing.

  It is usually said that Rosalind was very fond of Max, although there is no particular evidence one way or the other. ‘He didn’t beat me, or my mother, not that I remember,’ she said of him.62 Certainly he had a liking lor her, as shown in his letters during the war, and he got along very well with Anthony: both were intellectual men with a shared love of good conversation and wine. Rosalind’s own feelings were more opaque. Her aunt Madge, who died in 1950, had never trusted Max; neither did Madge’s son Jack, a tricky character but highly intelligent. They were wary of a young, impoverished man (and Catholic) who had sought to marry a much older woman of considerable means. There is no evidence that Rosalind shared their view. ‘Arguably she might have resented the fact that Uncle Max took her mother off on digs, and she got popped into school and got looked after by Agatha’s secretary, things like that,’ says John Mallowan, although in fact she coped very well with the considerable upheaval of her mother’s second marriage. But it does seem that she came, in later years, to distrust one particular aspect of Max’s behaviour.