Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (23 page)

Agatha’s immediate reaction to the divorce was to tell her publishers that she wished to publish her detective novels and stories under another name. Sir Godfrey Collins, however, dissuaded her from this because he knew that such a change would confuse her readership. Nevertheless Agatha was so upset by the break-up of her marriage that she never saw Archie again.

She was always to regret that he had not cited Nancy as the third party in the divorce case. If he had done so Agatha could have told her daughter that she had had no other choice than to divorce him. By agreeing to the deception she felt she had participated in a lie and irrationally believed she had betrayed her daughter for the man she still loved.

Although the worst of Agatha’s misery was over and she could move on to a new life, the future was not made easier by constant reminders of the past. She was never to forget the man she loved nor the notoriety caused by her disastrous scheme for revenge.

Part Three
While the Light Lasts

Chapter Twenty
Partners in Crime

After her divorce Agatha had to accept the fact that her love for Archie had been no safeguard against his defection. Nor was his passion for Nancy short-lived, as the couple were to live together happily for many years. Agatha soon came to realize that Archie would for ever remain the grand passion of her life – ‘the Man from the Sea’ for whom she had left safe shores and swum into uncharted waters. She never took communion in church again, fearing she would be refused because of her divorced status. Although a number of changes she made in her life were to enrich her creatively, culturally, socially and financially, she was unable to put the past behind her completely, no matter how hard she tried. ‘Agatha never got over Archie,’ recalls Nan’s daughter Judith.

Agatha’s plans to have a holiday in the West Indies underwent a radical alteration in the autumn of 1928 when she met a married couple at a dinner party just two days before her anticipated departure. They had recently returned from Baghdad and spoke so glowingly about their stay that Agatha, on learning that it was possible to travel there on the fabled Orient Express, cancelled her trip to the West Indies and booked herself a ticket to the Middle East.

Rosalind was at school and Agatha decided to travel alone. Her secretary wondered if it was prudent for Agatha to do this, but she found ‘safety at all costs’ a repulsive creed. It was an important decision. She could cling to a life that was familiar and predictable or she could develop her independence.

The journey began badly. On the train Agatha met an experienced and overbearing woman traveller who attempted to take her under her wing. Unfortunately the woman was going all the way to Baghdad and promised to introduce Agatha to the social life of the English community. Agatha was anxious to avoid this. The two parted company, to Agatha’s relief, when the woman left the train at Trieste to continue her journey by boat.

Agatha remained on the train, which passed through Yugoslavia and the Balkans. She found the mountains and gorges awesome and took little interest in her fellow passengers. After the train entered Asia the frantic pace of modern civilization seemed to recede and time became less significant. The train stopped briefly and the passengers disembarked to admire the sight of the Cilician Gates by sunset. In her memoirs Agatha recorded that she was glad she had come, as a feeling of ‘thankfulness and joy’ overcame her.

Her journey continued through Turkey and into Syria. She became feverish after being bitten by bedbugs on the train but soon recovered and was well enough to be shown around Damascus by a Thomas Cook guide and enjoyed visiting the bazaars at Baalbek in the Lebanon.

She then travelled across the desert to Baghdad accompanied once again by the well-intentioned but suffocating female companion from whom she had earlier parted at Trieste. She survived the two-day journey across the desert, however, which she found both fascinating and sinister. She recounted that the desert gave her a curious feeling of ‘being enclosed rather than surrounded by a void’. She was invigorated by the sharp air, the feel of the sand running through her fingers, the beauty of the rising sun and the taste of simple food cooked on a Primus stove. She felt at peace with life and herself.

Once in Baghdad she was introduced to the husband of her travelling companion and was taken off to their home. She had intended to book into a hotel, but it was impossible to fend off their goodwill. Despite being caught up in the social whirl of the English colony in the city, she was still able to enjoy its sights, sounds and smells. She was entranced by the rickety buildings, the beautiful mosques and the gardens full of flowers.

She finally made her escape from her host and hostess. A highlight of her trip was a visit to the famous death pits at Ur, which were being excavated by Professor Leonard Woolley and a team of experts. Visitors to the digs were a constant source of annoyance since they interrupted the work, and Agatha initially owed her favourable reception to the fact that Leonard Woolley’s wife had greatly enjoyed
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

The relationship Agatha forged with the Woolleys was to alter the course of her life. Leonard was a quiet, rather snobbish scholar who tended to defer to his temperamental wife Katherine, whose first husband had shot himself in front of the Great Pyramid. Her friendship with Agatha came about partly because the two women had suffered in love; each recognized the pain through which the other had gone. Although Katherine loved Leonard and craved affection, she was terrified of allowing him, or anyone else, to get too close to her in case she was rejected. This resulted in a tendency in her to lead men on only to reject and humiliate them when they got serious about her. She was to become the basis for the character of the victim in
Murder in Mesopotamia.

Agatha’s readiness to act as a sidekick to the flamboyant and wilful Katherine ensured that their friendship grew; also Katherine had enormous respect for the writer’s literary achievements.

Agatha was never to forget a meeting in Baghdad with a rather solitary man called Maurice Vickers, who lent her a copy of J.W. Dunne’s
Experiment with Time.
The book gave her a sense of her place in the universe, and this trip to the Middle East marked the beginning of Agatha’s lifelong fascination with time.

The novelist returned to England in time for Christmas with Nan and the rest of the family at Abney Hall, having extended an invitation to the Woolleys to stay at her mews house in Cresswell Place if they came to England in 1929.

After the publication of
Partners in Crime
in September that year, Agatha felt able to make light of the disappearance when she added a message to the flyleaf of Nan’s copy of the book in gratitude to her for sheltering her on the night Friday 3 December 1926: ‘To Sweet Nan, of Old Chelsea, from Agatha.’ The book was bequeathed subsequently to Nan’s daughter Judith. Two of the stories from the collection were ‘A Pot of Tea’ and ‘The Case of the Missing Lady’, and the inscription was an in-joke between Agatha and Nan. ‘A Pot of Tea’ had originally been called ‘Publicity’ and in this story the character of Tuppence had arranged for a friend who was engaged to the heir of an earldom to disappear so that her new detective agency could gain kudos in the ‘highest places’ for apparently solving the baffling mystery. The disappearance of Mrs Leigh Gordon in ‘The Case of the Missing Lady’ led to suspicions of foul play, but soon afterwards she was found hiding at a health spa, where she had gone to lose weight.

These two stories, along with ten others, had first appeared in
The Sketch
between September and December 1924 under the title
Tommy and Tuppence: A Series of Adventures.
Agatha often edited her stories before they were issued in collections and a previous mention of events of ‘four’ years ago was updated by her to ‘six’ before
Partners in Crime
was published in 1929, leading many people, including Agatha’s authorized biographer, Janet Morgan, to assume that all fourteens stories were written after the disappearance. This was true only of ‘The Unbreakable Alibi’ which appeared in the December 1928 edition of
Holly Leaves Magazine
, while ‘The Clergyman’s Daughter’ first appeared in the
Grand Magazine
in December 1923 under the title ‘The First Wish’.

The most overt reminder of the disappearance that year came when Sir Godfrey Collins released
The Sunningdale Mystery
. The cover blurb emphasized that it was by the author of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, and fans anticipating a new detective novel from Agatha found it was merely Chapters 11 and 12 of
Partners in Crime.

On 20 September 1929 Monty died of a cerebral haemorrhage, and Agatha was forced to confront her feelings about her estranged older brother. He was buried in France, and his elder sister Madge cried at the funeral. Her patient and long-suffering husband Jimmy, who had footed Monty’s bills and had provided him with a succession of minders for the last few years of his life, greeted the news of his death with a mixture of private relief and concern for Madge. Nan’s daughter and son-in-law, Judith and Graham Gardner, recall that it was Uncle Jimmy’s financial intervention that ensured Monty’s drug problem was hushed up, thus preventing family scandal. According to Judith, by the end of his life Monty was less difficult to deal with because his drug abuse had caused him ‘to get to the stage where he was a bit blank’.

Nan was saddened to learn of Monty’s death, for she had loved him as she might a recalcitrant child. The special affinity they had had for each other had arisen from their mutual recognition that they were, in their different ways, both rebels. Nan always cherished a ring Monty had bought back for her from South Africa.

Nan’s affection for Monty helped Agatha to reconcile her ambiguous feelings towards him. He had never figured greatly in her life and, although she was aware that he had had great charm, she had often found his lack of consideration towards others maddening and frustrating. She had also been shocked by his indulgent and reckless use of illicit drugs.

Agatha’s autobiography makes no mention of Monty’s drug problem, although she does say he was attracted to Nan Watts and took her out to theatres and expensive restaurants after his return to England. Agatha is understandably guarded in the few remarks she makes about Monty, stating only that his various schemes, such as starting a boat-running business in East Africa after the war, had never come to anything because he lacked the ability to apply himself.

Not long after his death, Agatha met a Colonel Dwyer of the King’s African Rifles at the Tigris Hotel in Baghdad. The colonel had known Monty well and spoke at great length of the heroism of ‘Puffing Billy’ and the respect his men had for him. Agatha was forced to reconsider her brother in the light of this conversation. She came to realize that despite his selfishness, his considerable debts and his reckless lifestyle he had done what he wanted to in life because he had seldom cared what others thought of him. He expected people to take him as he was and had never attempted to impose his own lifestyle or morality on others.

The closest Agatha came to depicting her brother in her writings was in the unflattering role of Richard Warwick in her 1958 play
The Unexpected Guest.
Richard, like Monty, was a former safari hunter and invalid, who out of boredom would fire random gunshots out of the window at visitors to the house in order to frighten them.

Archie continued to occupy Agatha’s thoughts, and the October 1929 edition of
Britannia and Eve
saw the publication of an intriguing Mr Quin story, ‘The Man from the Sea’, which reveals the author’s guilt and feelings of inadequacy after the divorce. When the main character, Mr Satterthwaite, wanders into the garden of a neglected villa on a cliff top, he challenges a man he finds there, realizing that he is intending to jump off the cliff into the sea.

The man, Anthony Cosden, confesses that he is terminally ill and that he came to the garden the night before to kill himself, only the presence of a stranger, who, it transpires, is Mr Satterthwaite’s fellow sleuth Mr Quin, deterred him. Anthony Cosden has no idea who owns the villa. He says that his one regret in life is that he has never fathered a son. When Mr Satterthwaite refuses to leave the garden, the young man reluctantly departs.

The owner of the villa appears and Mr Satterthwaite learns from her that twenty-three years earlier she had watched from the cliff top as her cruel and sadistic husband had drowned in the sea. The marriage had begun passionately, but, because of their conflicting personalities, things had soon gone drastically wrong and she had been glad to be rid of him. A year had passed, then a chance night of passion with a stranger had left her pregnant. The offspring of that union, a boy, turned out so like his father that she had learned to love the stranger through his child and she confides that she would instantly know him if she met him again.

The widow is contemplating ending her life because her son is demanding to know about his father to convince his fiancée’s parents that he is a suitable match for their daughter. The widow says that unless she kills herself the truth of her son’s illegitimacy will emerge and wreck his chance of happiness with the girl.

Mr Satterthwaite averts a tragedy when he realizes, through parallels in their stories, that the father of the widow’s son must be Anthony Cosden. He arranges a meeting and the happily reunited couple resolve to marry that very day. When their son comes home they will tell him there was some misunderstanding in the past. The overjoyed widow is confident that her son will marry his fiancée without his being any the wiser about the past. She is also determined to do everything in her power to prevent the man she loves, Anthony Cosden, from dying.