Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  This sense of the past became slowly stronger, filling her mind like-calm waters. In her last book, Postern of Fate, she moved Tommy and Tuppence Beresford into a new home, and filled it with her old possessions. The only thing in Postern of Fate that belongs to 1973 is a Manchester terrier, ‘Hannibal’, who follows Tuppence like a fierce little shadow.

  ‘I read at five years old,’ says Tuppence at the start of the book, as she sits in her comfortably disorganised new library.

  ‘Everybody could, when I was young. 1 didn’t know one even had to learn . . . if somebody had taught me how to spell when I was about four years old I can see it would have been very good indeed. My father did teach me to do addition and subtraction and multiplication, of course . . .’

  ‘What a clever man he must have been!’ says Tommy.

  ‘I don’t think he was specially clever, but he was just very, very nice.’

  In the library are the books of Agatha’s childhood: Mrs Molesworth, The Cuckoo Clock, Four Winds Farm. ‘She couldn’t remember Four Winds Farm as well as she could remember The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room.’ Tuppence looks through them all, enraptured: ‘Oh, here’s The Amulet and here’s The Psamayad. . . The Prisoner of Zenda. One’s first introduction, really, to the romantic novel . . .’ Finally she settles into a chair, curled up like a young girl, and loses herself in Stevenson’s The Black Arrow.

  The garden outside Tommy and Tuppence’s house is the garden at Ashfield. There is ‘K, K.’ the greenhouse, Mathilde the rocking horse, Truelove the painted horse and cart. There is the monkey-puzzle tree. Tuppence rides Truelove down the garden and remembers playing a game, ‘River Horses’, for which ‘you took your hoop out. Her hoop represented the horses. White horses with manes and flowing tails . . .’

  ‘It’s pretty ghastly, isn’t it?’ wrote Dorothy Olding to Edmund Cork. ‘Much worse than the last two. I won’t try serial even if there is time, unless someone requests it violently. Poor dear, I wish there was a way for somebody to tell her that this shouldn’t be published – for, her sake.’19

  Since the 1960s the books had required a certain amount of polishing, partly because the Dictaphone made Agatha more prolix, but no editing could make Postern of Fate into a tight piece of detective fiction. Max tried to help; Rosalind did not want the book published at all. It contains the odd, sudden gleam, as when she describes Hannibal’s ‘extraordinary knack of altering his size when he wanted to [so that] instead of appearing somewhat broad-shouldered, possibly a somewhat too plump dog, he could at any moment make himself like a thin black thread’. But the plot is barely fathomable, indeed it is scarcely existent, and by now Agatha’s voice on the Dictaphone meandered like that of an old, old woman as she crept along the distant paths of her life. ‘Children nowadays who are four, or five, or six, don’t seem to be able to read when they get to ten or eleven. I can’t think why it was all so easy for us. We could all read. Me and Martin next door and Jennifer down the road and Cyril and Winifred. All of us . . .’

  In one of her notebooks she wrote: ‘October 1973 – Possibilities and Ideas. A cookery story. About: a meringue?’ ‘House said to be haunted. Ghost is a dog? A cat? Both – ’.

  She also had an idea about the ancient chalk horses that are carved into hillsides:

  The White Horses – ideas for same. Alice and her friend Helen . . . go on tour to examine the various white horses of England. Alice stretched her neck and raised her chin so that her field of vision would include her view to the top of the hill. The outline of the White Horse was clearly defined. I love it, she said to her friend Helen, who stood beside her – I remember the first time I saw it . . . All the white horses on the hillsides are going to be done away with – it’s a wicked shame. They’ll scrap them all away and they are going to produce a picnic spot at each place. Our beautiful English white horses . . .’

  And then her mind took flight one last time in the old, sure, questing way.

  Jeremy – discusses with friends – murders. What difference would it make to one’s character if one had killed someone? . . . No motive. For no reason. Just an interesting experiment. The object of the crime – oneself. One would have to commit homicide – observing all the time oneself – one’s feelings – keeping notes. Do I feel fear? Regret? Pleasure?

  What a marvellous book this might have been; yet it was obvious, to those around Agatha, that Postern of Fate would be her last. So it was that in 1974 a collection of stories, Poirot’s Early Cases, was published instead of a new book. Every year had to have its Agatha Christie, after all. And in 1975 it was finally agreed that Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, which had been intended for posthumous publication,20 should be published, prompting the famous New Tork Times obituary of the Belgian detective.

  It has been said that there is an oddity about Curtain, deriving from the fact that it was written so many years before publication and has therefore no sense of real time, all references to period having been erased: it has ‘a kind of historic weightlessness’, as John Sutherland wrote in his essay ‘Poirot’s Double Death’.21 This is true. For all that it was written when Agatha was in her glorious prime, Curtain is filled with the sense of the circumstances in which it was created: in the belief that it would only be seen when Agatha herself was dead. It has an air of displacement, of floating melancholy.

  Poirot is dying, shrunken, with a wig on his head as black as a raven’s wing. Hastings grieves for his diminished friend, for his dead wife, for the daughter whom he does not understand. Styles, the setting of the book, is a sad and sinister place. ‘I don’t like this house – there’s some malign influence about it. Things happen here.’ It was in 1940 that Agatha wrote this, when the memory of driving away from Styles on a December night was still near to the front of her mind; as perhaps it always was.

  But the terrible sadness of Curtain lies, above all, in its lack of resolution. The murderer is a man who can never be accused and never be caught. He has perfected the technique of inducing other people to commit murder: he has perfected evil. Hastings’s daughter, Judith, and the married man she loves, Dr Franklin, talk a good deal about how worthless lives should be brought to an end. ‘I don’t hold life as sacred as all you people do,’ says Franklin. ‘Unfit lives, useless lives – they should be got out of the way. There’s so much mess about.’ This is a motif that runs through Curtain. Almost every character in the book judges another to be supremely dispensable, and feels that the world would be better without them.

  Yet the person who is called upon to enact this theory is Poirot. His life has been spent in the service of justice; now, in order to prevent murder from being committed, he must commit murder. There is no other way. He knows this, but in the letter he leaves behind for his friend, he writes:

  ... I do not know, Hustings, if what I have done is justified or not justified . . . I do not believe that a man should take the law into his own hands . . .

  But on the other hand, I am the law! . . .

  By taking Norton’s life, I have saved other lives – innocent lives. But still I do not know . . . It is perhaps right that I should not know. I have always been so sure – too sure . . .

  But now I am very humble and I say like a little child, ‘1 do not know . . . ’

  Early in her marriage to Max Mallowan, Agatha had written, ‘I think it would be very nice if at the end of our lives we could feel that we’d never done anyone any harm – don’t you?’22 As a child she had found comfort and safety in virtue: she believed that goodness had power, despite what the world was now telling her to the contrary. ‘Remember that you have always a real job of work to perform in this world as you are one of the good and kind persons that matter,’23 Max wrote to her during the war. He did, indeed, value her generosity, not just for what it gave him but for itself: despite everything, he had a profound regard for his wife.

  At her memorial service, her publisher Sir William Collins said: ‘Agatha knew what true religion means. The world is the
better because she lived in it.’ The son of her friends Sidney and Mary Smith wrote that she ‘tried always to do good by stealth’.24 The daughter of Stephen Glanville says: ‘I know nothing about her that was not kind.’25 And Joan Oates: ‘She was a very, very nice person.’26

  It was not that simple, of course. She was too clever for straight-forward virtue, although she was clever enough to know what it ought to be. She had a sense of duty that helped her to live again after 1926, but it was a duty to life itself rather than to other people: she did not, as her mother had done, feel that she must recover for the sake of her child, Agatha’s virtue lay in her vitality. That was what led her to cover the century with such zest and curiosity: hers was a life that refused to waste itself, and that is a noble thing. As an artist, too, she was on the side of virtue: her detective fiction dealt in justice and her Mary Westmacotts sought the humanity in her characters, not a single one of whom is dismissed as unworthy of consideration. But as an artist she was, in the end, a solitary being, for whom the concept of virtue is secondary.

  She spent her last Christmas at Greenway in 1973. Magical Greenway, where Bingo ran around the chilly white house like a wind-up toy, and where the gardens had a different beauty in winter, bare, tangled trees shivered outside the bedroom window, and the Dart was a rustling grey ribbon. Devon was much in Agatha’s mind. She received occasional letters from old ladies who had been childhood friends at Torquay. ‘I remember you very well, and your dear mother,’ wrote the daughter of Eden Philpotts. ‘I remember quaint candle-lit tea parties with the Misses Ormerod . . . Torquay is much changed’27; ‘I have often thought of you and the happy times we had in the old Torquay,’ wrote another friend. ‘Those guessing games we used to have at Mellis House! I am 87 now and am the only one left of my generation.’28

  Agatha, now, was the only one left. As a vigorous sixty-year-old she had written this in A Murder is Announced, when an elderly woman says of her dead friend: ‘She was the only link with the past, you see. The only one who – who remembered. Now that she’s gone I’m quite alone.’ She had written it, too, after the death of Nan Kon in 1959. ‘She was the last of my friends – the one remaining person with whom I could talk and laugh about the old days – and the fun we had when we were girls.’29 But fifteen years on Agatha had withdrawn so far into the past that she was no longer alone.

  She attended the première of Murder on the Orient Express, arriving in a wheelchair but standing to greet the Queen;30 it was one of her last outings. In October 1974 she had a heart attack, but not long afterwards made her final public appearance at the annual party for The Mousetrap.

  I had heard [wrote Peter Saunders to Rosalind] that you were a bit upset at me getting your mother to come . . . I asked either Agatha or Max whether she would like to be on the invitation as co-hostess. It wasn’t just for publicity which was there in any case, but I felt that it would look nicer for her to be one of the “inviters” . . . I get her news from Edmund which one day is that she is very ill and the next that she has been presenting the Mousetrap trophy at the Exeter races. What a lady!31

  But Agatha was, in truth, very ill. Rosalind’s desire to keep her from events like the Mousetrap party was intense. In December she fell into the French window at Winterbrook and split her head badly. She was thin now, shrunken like her little detective by the drugs she took for her heart, and her head loomed enormously above her body. Her eyes, behind their vast spectacles, were clouded, searching towards other worlds. ‘Between you and me she is very frail,’ Edmund Cork wrote to Dorothy Olding in July 1975.

  She stayed at Winterbrook now. Her last Christmas was bleak (‘Mrs Belson leaves on Tues December 23rd and is replaced by Barbara who would leave on Sat 27th,’ wrote Max to Rosalind. ‘Sat 27th we hope you would arrive and stay with us until Wed 31st’). Bingo sat at her side like a tiny black lion, while Max wrote his memoirs in the library with the view down to the Thames, and Barbara came to stay. Agatha was not always happy. One day, as if in a fit of desperate rage, she took up a pair of scissors and cut off her hair. A friend who came to lunch remembers that she talked about Jeremy Thorpe, then leader of the Liberal Party, but that what she said made no sense. On another occasion she suddenly offered: ‘I wonder what has happened to Lord Lucan? ’ Her beautiful brain was fragmenting; or perhaps it was merely remaking itself in different shapes, sharp and sunlit in the darkening world.

  . . . that day is MY day – it comes to me – I am alive and here – waiting – . . .

  I might be a sculptor – or I might be a pianist – or I might train to be an opera singer. Perhaps I could compose music. So many things might come to pass. Most of them, of course, won’t – One is coming to know that . . .

  As the light faded Agatha held serenely to her faith. ‘I’m joining my Maker,’ she was heard to say, not long before she died at Winterbrook, on the afternoon of 12 January 1976. Bingo barked confusedly as the doctor arrived: he alone had not known the imminence of this death.

  Four days later Agatha was buried at St Mary’s Church, Cholsey, a few miles from Winterbrook, surrounded by calm and silent fields. According to her requests the burial service began with Psalm 23 and included a reading from the Faerie Queene: ‘Sleep after Toyle, Port after Stormie Seas, Ease after Warre, Death after Life, Doth greatly please.’ This was also engraved on her headstone. Agatha was laid in the still heart of England, many miles from the wild country of Devon, whose deep green slopes, winter mists and silver waters nonetheless hold her essence.

  A few years before her death she had been asked her opinion on a vexed literary question. Kafka had requested that his works be burned after his death; did Max Brod do right in not destroying them, as requested? ‘The literary output of an author is definitely his own possession and indeed part of himself, until the moment when he offers it to the world by asking for it to be published and offered for sale’, she replied. ‘I would agree that if some of the writings were creative works the destroying of them is a very unhappy thought. The destruction of the private personal correspondence, notes, diaries or letters I should do without regret.’32

  Yet she had kept everything: she died, but her life was left behind. Not just the books, the fame, the indestructible London play, the autobiography that awaited posthumous publication, and that told her story in a manner both truthful and disingenuous. Her life was left in her houses, filling every cupboard, every attic, every secret drawer. The notebooks with their agonised jottings. The fur coats that smell still of distant scent. The soft pools of christening lace. The heavy satin robes, the jewelled bags. The attaché case that contained Archie Christie’s love letters, and the wedding ring he gave her. The letter written by her mother, in which Clara folded sprigs of edelweiss from her honeymoon. The book with its carefully copied ‘Receipts for Agatha’. The sheaves of elegant bills paid by her father for the chairs and china at Ashfield, some of which still furnish the rooms at Greenway. The photographs of Peter the dog, of Monty sitting in Truelove with a goat in harness, of her grandmother Margaret in a four-wheeler. She would have preferred – almost certainly? – that none of it be disturbed. But the immense and mysterious life is here; and out of it an elusive shadow, as carefree as a ghost.

  She looked back from the door and she laughed. Just for one moment Mr Schuster . . . had a vague impression of a young and pretty girl shaking hands with the vicar at a garden party in the country. It was, as he realised a moment later, a recollection of his own youth. But Miss Marple had, for a minute, reminded him of that particular girl, young, happy, going to enjoy herself.33

  Illustrations

  Clara Miller

  Archie (2nd left) as an officer in the RFC

  Agatha and Rosalind

  The newspapers were ingenious in their search for new angles on the ‘disappearance’

  The searchers of the North Downs on a lunch break

  Dredging the mill pond at Albury

  Agatha’s flight from Harrogate was on the front page
of almost every newspaper; here, on the left, she is pictured with her sister Madge

  The hotel in Harrogate where Agatha was discovered

  Agatha and Max in 1933, outside her house in Cresswell Place and about to leave for the East

  Max and Barbara Parker

  The house in Baghdad where Agatha stayed

  Excavations at Nimrud

  Agatha and Max on site at Nimrud. Behind them are the tents in which they and their colleagues slept

  Agatha and Max outside Greenway (and below). The lawn at Agatha’s left slopes down to the river Dart

  In the library at Greenway, 1946. Above Agatha’s head is the frieze painted by officers of an American flotilla, who occupied the house during the war

  In the kitchen at Winterbrook, 1950

  In the library at Winterbrook. This was Max’s favourite room, in which he wrote his book on Nimrud; he would scarcely have noticed the state of the ceiling

  Agatha and Max, 1969

  St Mary’s Church, Cholsey, where Agatha is buried

  Max following Agatha’s coffin, 1976

  Max and Rosalind at Agatha’s funeral

  Agatha’s grave

  The young Agatha: ‘I was a lovely girl’, she wrote in her autobiography

  In Paris in 1906, when she dreamed of a career in music

  During her first marriage; and (inset) in 1932

  In 1924; the bizarre object on the desk was probably acquired on the Empire tour she had undertaken the previous year