by Jared Cade
Increasingly the most vital link between the Christies was their daughter Rosalind. Archie’s indifference to fatherhood before she had been born had been transformed into a special kind of mutual love, based on a shared practical outlook and sense of humour; this often left Agatha feeling excluded. Archie spoke to Rosalind as if she were an adult and expected her to respond in kind. When he gave her a task to perform, such as cleaning his golf clubs, he expected her to do the job properly, and Rosalind appeared to enjoy the challenge far more than her mother’s imaginary games. Archie had developed into a wonderful father, happily playing games with pennies on the floor for the amusement of Rosalind and Nan’s daughter Judith. The two young girls were virtually raised together since their mothers were such good friends, and Judith, a quiet, introverted child, developed quite a ‘pash’ on Archie and thought he had the most ‘lovely blue eyes’.
Agatha’s feelings for her daughter ran deep, and she was saddened to find that she had not been able to reproduce the same mother–daughter relationship that she, as a child, had enjoyed with Clarissa. Agatha’s attempts to play make-believe games with Rosalind were undermined by the latter’s practical nature, and she was disappointed to find that her daughter did not share her enthusiasm for the activities and fairy books that Agatha had enjoyed as a child. Agatha found in Rosalind the same cool, judgemental qualities apparent in Archie and was secretly rather alarmed by her child.
June 1925 saw the publication of Agatha’s last book for the Bodley Head. The Secret of Chimneys was dedicated to Agatha’s and Nan’s 22-year-old nephew Jack Watts (Madge’s and Jimmy’s son) ‘in memory of an inscription at Compton Castle and a day at the zoo’. It was a light-hearted thriller involving the murder of a prince in the council chamber of an English stately home. The novel included a crack at the Bodley Head’s failure to adhere to its publishing schedules when she makes one of her characters observe of a book written by another character that it would be at least a year before it was brought out, as publishers sat on manuscripts and hatched them like eggs.
The publication of The Secret of Chimneys was eclipsed that same year by a more significant literary event. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the plot of which had been partly inspired by two similar suggestions put to her by Nan’s brother, Jimmy Watts, and a young fan, Lord Louis Mountbatten, first appeared in the London Evening News as a serial that ran from July to September under the title Who Killed Ackroyd?
The unsuspecting public was taken aback by the unexpected identity of the killer: what Agatha had done amounted to colossal cheek or nerve, depending on whether or not one approved of her audacity. Agatha had reached a significant artistic plateau in her career, for she now had the satisfaction of knowing she could write detective stories and that she could make money out of them.
But Agatha’s success as a writer continued to overshadow Archie. The financial divide between them widened throughout 1925, and this led to heated arguments. Another factor contributing to the ultimate breakdown of their marriage was Agatha’s battle with weight, which had begun after Rosalind was born, Archie felt the slim young girl he had married was becoming matronly and loquacious, rather like his mother whose emotional excesses he preferred to ignore. Archie continually asked Agatha to lose weight, but she was unable to do so, and she became the victim of his cruel taunts about her figure.
Agatha’s and Archie’s marriage looked increasingly shaky, and at first it was easy to blame this on the confines of their upper-floor flat at Scotswood. Agatha was hoping to escape the obsessive golf and bridge fraternities in Sunninghill by moving further into the country, but the decision to buy a large house a short distance from Sunningdale Station was Archie’s. He was secretly anxious not to move further from London because this would make it difficult for him to continue his clandestine relationship with Nancy Neele. But in their furtive affair the couple had been skating on thin ice for some time – and the ice was about to crack. Owing to an unexpected twist of fate Archie was to find himself under the same roof as his wife and mistress at the beginning of 1926, the year all three would look back on as the worst in their lives.
Chapter Five
The Gun Man Reincarnate
The scene for the tumultuous breakdown of Agatha’s and Archie’s marriage in 1926 was Styles, a large mock-Tudor house ten minutes’ walk from Sunningdale Station. Screened by tall trees, the back of the house gave on to Charters Road, while the front overlooked a long, narrow lawn, bordered by a stream in which it was safe for Rosalind and her friend Judith to play, and beyond this was a garden with rhododendrons and azaleas, a kitchen garden and wild gorse bushes. The house had a reputation for being unlucky, since the last three owners had all come to grief in various ways. Styles had formerly been known as ‘Sans Souci’, not an apposite name, meaning, as it did, ‘carefree’.
The move to Styles at the beginning of the year was not a happy one. Sunningdale society – conventional in its attitudes and with a strong emphasis on sporting and outdoor pursuits, especially golf – had become stultifying and restrictive for Agatha. Rosalind was now attending Oakfield, a private school, and Agatha found it impossible to escape golfing associations even when she took her daughter to dancing classes, because they were often held at Dormey House, an annexe of the Sunningdale Golfing Club.
Despite her disdain for her husband’s obsession with golf, Agatha duly filled out a banker’s order on 16 March instructing Lloyd’s Bank of Torquay ‘to pay Wentworth Club £8 8s. every year’ in order to keep up her golfing membership. Her favourite form of exercise – away from Torquay where she loved swimming in the sea during the summer months – was walking her two dogs, Peter and Billy, for an hour or more each day. Her mind was fertile with ideas for her stories, and it was not uncommon for residents of Sunningdale to see her talking to herself as she worked out her plots. According to Mrs Tregurtha, a neighbour who sometimes played bridge with Agatha and who was aware of her growing reputation as a writer, the residents of Sunningdale regarded Mrs Christie as ‘a very clever woman’.
Agatha’s loneliness increased, and Archie would sulk if she invited married friends down from London, because he was obliged to entertain the husbands – the only place he really wanted to be at weekends was on the golf course with his mistress. The one couple to whom Agatha could extend hospitality at Styles without incurring Archie’s wrath was Nan Watts, recently divorced, and her second husband. George Kon was a distinguished cancer specialist and lecturer at the Imperial College in London, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. He spoke seven Chinese dialects as a result of a passion for beetles which led him to travel to China on hunting expeditions. Both Nan and George were good at golf; they had won the Prince of Monaco Cup for mixed foursomes at Le Touquet in France.
Nan and Agatha would often sit in the Sunningdale clubhouse, watching their young daughters play together while sipping their favourite drink of milk and cream, as they patiently waited for their husbands to finish their game of golf. It was through George that Nan learned of Archie’s affair with Nancy Neele. Nan instructed George to ‘try to calm it down’, but George instead provided an alibi for Archie. Nan said nothing to her friend, not wanting to be the bearer of such crushing news.
Most of the Christies’ friends now knew about the affair, and Nan was becoming alarmed at Agatha’s preoccupation with her fiction writing, since she seemed to be losing contact with reality as her career really took off. A photograph that Nan took on the golf course at Sandwich in Kent of George, Archie and Nancy, in which the latter two gazed uneasily into the camera lens, was a portent of the deception to follow.
In an attempt to alleviate her loneliness an unsuspecting Agatha invited Nancy Neele to spend the weekend at Styles. Archie was appalled, being justifiably apprehensive at having his wife and mistress under the one roof. It would have seemed odd for Nancy to have declined the invitation. She came down from London to Sunningdale every weekend to play golf, and they had mutual friends in Major
Belcher and his Australian wife, with whom Nancy had stayed on holiday in France the previous year.
The tension at Styles was exacerbated by the fact that Agatha genuinely liked Nancy. Agatha admired her for many of the reasons that Archie did: she was cheerful and bright, a lively conversationalist, good at telling stories and capable of maintaining a companionable silence – a quality that Archie particularly liked in a woman. Nancy professed to be an admirer of Agatha’s books, and, as Agatha gave an account of Belcher’s irascible antics as leader of the British Empire tour, she was oblivious to the fact that she was offering her friendship and hospitality to the usurper of her husband’s affections.
Agatha extended several irregular invitations to Nancy throughout the first half of 1926, and the other showed no hesitation in accepting. Archie, uneasy about this, told Agatha that having Nancy to stay spoiled his golf. When they went to a nearby dance, the 27-year-old Nancy thanked Agatha for acting as her chaperone, since her parents, who lived at Croxley Green in the small town of Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, would have been worried by her going out socially on her own.
Around this time Agatha suggested to Archie that they might try for another baby. Her request prompted him to do some serious thinking. He stalled for time by suggesting to Agatha that first of all they get another car, and he duly became the owner of a second-hand Delage.
That spring Archie turned down Agatha’s proposal that they take a short holiday in Corsica together with the excuse that he could not get the time off work. Agatha went instead with her sister Madge, unaware of the opportunity she was offering her husband and his mistress. Agatha had begun The Mystery of the Blue Train and needed a break from work. She had reason to feel tired and drained, for her literary output in the previous six years had been phenomenal. She was by now more widely known to the magazine buying public through her seventy-odd short stories than for her handful of novels. Agatha had long forgotten the advice her mother had offered before the British Empire tour about it being a wife’s duty always to be by her husband’s side, and she was set to suffer the consequences on her return.
The first crisis came when Clarissa fell ill with bronchitis at Ashfield a few weeks later. In her memoirs Agatha reveals that Madge had removed their mother to Abney Hall in Cheadle. In fact Madge and Jimmy were living at Cheadle Hall next to the village church. The 72-year-old Clarissa appeared to get better, then took an unexpected turn for the worse. Agatha was sent a telegram but could not get to Cheadle Hall in time. Clarissa died on 5 April with Madge by her side. At the moment of death Agatha was travelling by train to Manchester when she was suddenly overcome by a feeling of cold desolation, and her strong sense that her mother had died was soon to be confirmed.
Agatha attended Clarissa’s funeral without Archie, who was away in Spain on a business trip for Austral Ltd. Clarissa was laid to rest in the same burial plot in Ealing Cemetery as her husband. Agatha needed Archie more than ever before and longed to be comforted by him. When he returned to Styles a week later he was ill-equipped to console her. Agatha felt as if the bottom had dropped out of her world, for Clarissa had always made her feel loved and able to deal with things, no matter what she said or did, and the certainty of her mother’s unconditional affection had enabled her to cope better with being the sensible, independent wife Archie required her to be.
‘My grandmother was a dangerous woman,’ Agatha’s daughter Rosalind said decades later about Clarissa. ‘Strong and dangerous. My mother never thought she was wrong.’ The statement was not without irony since Rosalind had inherited her father’s ruthlessness and sided with Archie over her parents’ ensuing marital problems.
Archie handled his reunion with Agatha badly. He attempted to console his wife by appearing bright and cheerful, but his jollity had the opposite effect to that intended. Agatha was horrified by his apparent callousness and proceeded to berate him. Archie had further business to transact in Spain, and in her desire to come to terms with her grief Agatha turned down his suggestion that she should accompany him.
She was feeling no better by the time he returned, and she fell in with his suggestion of renting out Styles for the summer while she sorted out Ashfield. She needed time to mourn her mother, and she believed that Archie would find it hard to be around while she did. Archie escaped the pall of her grief by spending the summer months at his club in London, which made it easier for him to see Nancy, frequently taking her out to dinner and to the theatre.
Under the terms of Clarissa’s will, Agatha inherited Ashfield, and she stayed there with Rosalind. Charlotte Fisher, the secretary-cum-governess whom Agatha had hired to help her take care of Rosalind, did not accompany them because she had been recalled home to Scotland since her father was thought to be seriously ill. Agatha asked her sister to help her clear out Ashfield, but Madge was too busy. The future of Ashfield was uncertain. Agatha was faced with the option of either renovating the house and renting it out or selling it off.
Agatha came across a letter her father had written to her mother shortly before he died, telling Clarissa how much he loved her and how she had made all the difference to his life. Agatha kept it, still convinced that her own marriage was as loving and as durable as her parents. Yet going over the past led her to contemplate her future. While she loved Archie and Rosalind unreservedly, Agatha felt that neither of them gave her the love she required. Archie’s short emotional tether made it impossible for him to be as intimate with Agatha as his late mother-in-law.
Agatha felt stifled and misunderstood, her life dictated by the routine of Archie’s work, and she longed to travel. But she still felt her future lay with her family. Archie contributed to Agatha’s loneliness by making excuses about being too busy at work to come down from London to Torquay at weekends. He used the General Strike, during which he drove a lorry to deliver essential supplies, as a further excuse to stay away.
The chore of sorting out Ashfield was alleviated by the knowledge that Agatha’s latest book was her most successful to date: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was dedicated to her sister Madge, had been published by Collins in May. However, the marriage was put under further strain when Agatha proposed that she and Archie take a holiday in Alassio in Italy after Rosalind’s seventh birthday on 5 August and then left Archie burdened with the task of making all the practical arrangements for the trip.
When Archie arrived at Ashfield Agatha was struck by the fact that he seemed a stranger to her. She became convinced he was holding something back.
Agatha asked him what was wrong and found her world turned upside down. Archie informed her that he had not booked their proposed holiday. He then explained that he had been seeing a lot of Nancy. Agatha responded by denying the obvious. ‘Well, why shouldn’t you?’ she asked. He told her that he had fallen in love with Nancy.
Agatha’s shock and horror were compounded when Archie admitted the affair had been going on for eighteen months. He said he wished to protect Nancy’s reputation by making it appear that he had committed adultery with an unknown third party – since admitting adultery was the usual way of initiating divorce proceedings.
Agatha had previously admired Archie’s strong desire to be considered respectable, but his wish to hush up Nancy’s part in the break-up of the marriage made her see that there was a disturbing side to his conventionality. The man she loved so much, the man whom she had put on a pedestal, suddenly became the ‘Gun Man’ to her.
The two made a pretence of celebrating Rosalind’s birthday, then Archie returned to his London club and a distraught Agatha attempted to carry on with her life. Madge, who had come to Ashfield to celebrate Rosalind’s birthday, was shocked to hear what had happened. She attempted to calm her sister down by insisting that Archie would come back to her, but nothing from Agatha’s past experience had prepared her for the blow he had delivered, and she could not be consoled.
Agatha felt totally alone. All she had left to cling to was the hope that Archie would return; she convinc
ed herself that his liaison with Nancy was just a passing affair, inflated in importance because he had felt neglected in the months after Clarissa’s death. Agatha determined to return to Styles to save her marriage.
On the way she stopped her car for a rest. To her horror her wire-haired terrier Peter wandered into the middle of the road and was knocked unconscious by the undercarriage of a hit-and-run vehicle. Agatha, presuming him to be dead, lifted him on to the back seat of her car and frantically resumed her journey. She failed to notice that by the time she reached Styles Peter was regaining consciousness. Agatha ran into the house crying out that Peter was dead. When Charlotte Fisher, who had returned from Scotland, reassured her that the dog was alive Agatha refused to believe her. In fact Peter made a full recovery and was his usual self within a few days. Agatha later incorporated aspects of Peter’s accident in her stories ‘The Edge’ and ‘The Man from the Sea’ and in her novel The Rose and the Yew Tree, which was published under the nom de plume of Mary Westmacott.
A fortnight after his defection Archie returned. Agatha felt as if she had received a direct reprieve from God when Archie suggested that he had perhaps made a mistake and ought not to break up the marriage for the sake of their daughter. It had not been an easy decision for him to make, and Agatha was not only conscious of this but of her own needs as well. She wondered whether she could face the pain of further betrayal if he broke his promise to be faithful.
