Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (25 page)

Unlike Archie, Max always encouraged Agatha in her writing, especially when she became bogged down half-way through a book and felt she could not finish it. She outlined to him in advance the plot of her 1931 novel
The Sittaford Mystery
, in which the heroine cynically uses the romantic interest a journalist has for her to help save her fiancé from the gallows. The surname of Inspector Narrocott’s side-kick Sergeant Pollock was burrowed from Nan’s first husband Hugo Pollock. It became a custom for Agatha to outline each new book to Max and write the opening chapter and the last chapter before completing the rest of the book. In this way she managed to keep a firm grasp on the plot. The 1930s saw the publication of twenty five books.

One aspect of Agatha’s life with Max caused problems in the early stages: this was the amount of time Max spent with Rosalind. No child could have asked for a more considerate and thoughtful stepfather, and Agatha’s envy was both irrational and unjustified. Despite this, when Rosalind was away at boarding-school Agatha found herself missing her daughter. Judith recalls that because of Agatha’s possessiveness the first few years of the marriage were rife with undercurrents of jealousy. Moreover, Rosalind’s letters, written from boarding-school, contained hurtful barbs, and the tension in Agatha’s relationship with her daughter was set to worsen as Rosalind grew older. On one occasion at school she wrote to her mother thanking her for the letter she had sent her ‘although it was very short’. Other missives were more direct. She said she was getting a bit tired of writing to her mother, so she would now compose ‘a short letter to Daddy’. More bluntly still, she instructed her mother not to be late for sports day and to wear an ordinary dress and not her black-and-white one. She was also anxious to know who Agatha would be bringing that year as she would rather it was ‘Carlo’. This was the name Rosalind had given Charlotte Fisher within a month of her entering employment with her mother. Following the publication of
The Mystery of the Blue Train
Agatha had given up calling her secretary ‘Carlotta’, and for the rest of her life she was known to her employer and others as Carlo.

Around this time Nan’s daughter Judith was staying with friends in Cornwall when she was taken ill and rushed to a nursing home in Plymouth where she underwent an operation for appendicitis. Agatha remembered the incident when she came to write her 1932 novel
Peril at End House
in which the heroine Nick Buckley survives an emergency appendectomy prior to a series of attempts being made on her life. There were shades of Nan’s experience from her first marriage to Hugo Pollock in the character of Frederica Rice. Frederica’s husband has walked out on her and she hasn’t heard of him since then, making it impossible for her to locate and divorce him. The surname of Buckley, like that of Cavendish in
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, was taken from branches of the Watts’s family.
Peril at End House
is one of Agatha’s best Hercule Poirot mysteries; the reason it remains underrated by critics is because it was eclipsed by more famous titles from the 1930s. Generally it would take her anywhere between six weeks to three months to write a book.

Despite having fallen temporarily out of favour with Leonard and Katherine Woolley, Agatha remained their friend and dedicated her 1932 collection
The Thirteen Problems
to the couple. The peace of desert life in the Middle East led her to write her 1933 novel,
Lord Edgware Dies
, at Nineveh, a site Max helped his new employer Dr Campbell-Thompson to excavate. In addition to the classic
Murder on the Orient Express
, 1934 also saw the publication of a collection called
Parker Pyne Investigates.
Suggestions in Janet Morgan’s authorized biography that Agatha incorporated from first-hand experience ‘the glorious freedom loss of memory affords’ in ‘The Case of the Rich Woman’ cannot be substantiated. The story concerns a rich woman abducted by captors who try, unsuccessfully, to brainwash her into thinking she is someone else. In her introduction to
Parker Pyne Investigates
in ‘Penguin’s Millions’ series, Agatha revealed that the inspiration for the story came from a woman she saw peering into a hat shop window one day who complained she had too much money.

Agatha’s other full-length murder mystery from 1934,
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
, must have evoked memories of her disappearance for some readers since it involved the staging of a car accident: Bobby Jones puts the vehicle in third gear, then releases the brake and watches as the car, initially impeded by being in gear, moves forward gradually down the steep slope, picking up speed until it crashes at the bottom of the hill. The novel ends with one gossipy member of the Dorcas Society saying to another, ‘Did you see? It was Lady Frances Derwent he was kissing.’ The author continues, ‘In one hour’s time the news was all over Marchbolt.’ This was a private in-joke between Agatha and Nan, because Nan’s grandmother, Lady Watts, had been one of the founding members of the Dorcas Society whose mission was to distribute clothing among the poorer members of the congregation.

Agatha still missed Archie and this led her to re-examine the past in her second Mary Westmacott novel.
Unfinished Portrait
is in many ways an autobiographical novel, tracing Agatha’s life from early childhood through to her marriage to Archie and its painful dissolution. The characters of Celia and Dermot are based on the Christies, and there is a raw emotional quality to it that reflects how close it was to her own experience.

Although the early part of Celia’s marriage to Dermot is marred by poverty, she loves him passionately. Dermot is obsessed by Celia’s looks and asks her to promise him that she will always be beautiful. When she falls pregnant with Judy (based on Rosalind), Dermot worries about Celia losing her figure. As Judy grows older and becomes more like her father, Celia feels neither of them give her the love she requires. She is deeply upset when her mother dies and feels constrained by family, home and possessions. She longs to travel to exotic far-off places such as ‘the wilds of Baluchistan.’

Up to this point the novel is very much a reflection of Agatha’s life until April 1926, then the image is distorted. Rather than delve deeply into the cause of her husband’s eighteen-month-long affair with Nancy, Agatha ties everything up in a neat package: the death of Celia’s mother instead becomes the catalyst for Dermot’s affair. Although Celia has been unconsciously hoping for release from her marriage, when the time comes she reacts with horror and refuses to divorce him.

While
Unfinished Portrait
avoids examining the reasons behind the breakdown of the marriage, it reveals Agatha’s reaction to Archie’s bombshell request for a divorce. Celia’s pain and disbelief after eleven apparently happy years of marriage are genuine. At first it seems to Celia, still reeling from the shock of her mother’s death, as though she has always loved Dermot and done everything he wanted, and then when she had really needed him he had stabbed her in the back. There is no mention of the rows over money that beset Archie and Agatha, nor how her success as a writer had driven them apart.

Agatha tries to persuade her readers that Dermot’s mistress Marjorie (a character based on Nancy Neele) means little to Celia.
Unfinished Portrait
, unlike the short story ‘The Edge’, does not acknowledge the intense feelings of jealousy Agatha felt towards Nancy. Some experiences were simply too painful to explore in her writings again.

Celia is horrified when Dermot suggests a put-up job for a divorce in which his mistress’s name is not to be mentioned. The loss of her religious faith is apparent when Celia tells Dermot that she had believed in him as she had believed in God, and, she opines, ‘That was stupid.’ An unpleasant contest of wills ensues. Dermot becomes the ‘Gun Man’.

In her grief and unhappiness Celia becomes afraid of her husband and locks away the weed killer in the potting shed. At night she fantasizes that Dermot is trying to poison her, although during the daytime she recognizes her delusions as wild ‘night fancies’. As her living nightmare worsens, she decides to take a photograph of her mother to the police in the hope that they will find her. Some commentators have wondered if either of these two aspects of the plot were a fictional depiction of Agatha’s actions on the night of the disappearance. In fact these incidents simply serve to illustrate Celia’s intense loneliness and lack of self-esteem.

There is an uneasy period of reconciliation for husband and wife, in which Celia battles to keep her marriage together by using their daughter Judy as a pawn. But Dermot is unable to keep his promise not to see Marjorie again.
Unfinished Portrait
recreates certain events from the day of Agatha’s disappearance. After Miss Hood (based on Charlotte Fisher) goes to London for the day, Dermot has it out with Celia and admits he has not been able to stop seeing Marjorie. Although he does not reveal he is spending the weekend with her he says he is going away for two days, and Celia tells him that when he returns he won’t find her there. She interprets a ‘momentary flicker – of hope’ in Dermot’s eyes as a suspicion in his mind that she might have committed suicide by the time he returns. She toys with the idea that he will be sorry and suffer remorse if she takes her life, but she knows this is not so, because he will be sure to deceive himself into believing he was not responsible. She will simply have made it easier for him to marry Marjorie. Later that night, after visiting Judy’s room, Celia comes downstairs and pats her dog goodbye before leaving the house.

The tone of the novel changes at this point; it loses its emotional intensity. Celia jumps off a bridge but is saved from drowning by a passer-by, is restrained and forced to appear in court on a charge of attempted suicide. Creatively, Agatha always reworked and used left-over ideas from her fiction; in a similar manner, a remnant of her disingenuous official explanation of the disappearance to the
Daily Mail
found its way into her novel.

She expresses the depth of her love for Archie when she observes of Celia that Dermot was ‘in her blood’ and that she loved him for life. Sadly, however, when Celia had finally stood up to Dermot it was too late.

Writing
Unfinished Portrait
was a painful exorcism for Agatha of her first marriage, and the calm, stabilizing influence of her second marriage enabled her to reflect more calmly on her past. It is indicative of the hurt Agatha still felt that she cast her fictional counterpart as the innocent victim in the marriage, rather than reveal how she had contributed to its breakdown by being inflexible and difficult about money and trying to force Archie to do things against his will.

The sequence of events in the novel is sometimes distorted to omit certain unhappy details, yet Agatha once told Nan’s daughter Judith: ‘If you want to know what I’m like, read
Unfinished Portrait
.’ The writer always called her Judy since she was like a second daughter to her, and it is a measure of the closeness of their relationship that Agatha named the daughter after her in the book. She would also give Judith’s name to a character in
Hallowe’en Party
and to Captain Hastings’s daughter in
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
.

In order to protect Mary Westmacott’s true identity, the contract Collins drew up for
Unfinished Portrait
was in the name of Nathaniel Miller (Agatha’s late grandfather) and amended when she signed it to Daniel Miller. This time Nan received her copy direct from Agatha, inscribed on the flyleaf: ‘To Dear Mrs Kon 1934 from M.W.’ When presenting Nan with this and other Mary Westmacott books, Agatha always disguised her handwriting and never used her real name.

That same year Nan’s second marriage floundered. George discovered she was having an affair with a man called Marcus Turner and left her. She moved with her daughter to a block of flats, Cheyne Court in Chelsea, where Agatha regularly visited her to support her through this period of upheaval. George had never liked children, and Judith was pleased to see the back of her stepfather. Sadly, Nan’s relationship with Marcus Turner did not work out, and she decided against marrying him.

Agatha’s financial commitments were considerable in the first decade of her second marriage, and it was fortunate that she and Max had her royalties to support them. In addition to paying for her daughter’s maintenance and education and subsidizing Max’s archaeological expeditions, Agatha initiated a yearly repair-and-redecoration programme for Ashfield and acquired Winterbrook House in Wallingford for Max so that he could visit Oxford in connection with his work.

Christmas at Abney Hall created tensions. Although Max had been welcomed into Madge’s and Jimmy’s circle of friends after he married Agatha, he had never entirely forgiven the couple for trying to discourage the writer from marrying him. The one member of the Watts family Max did not get on with at all was their son Jack, who was the same age as him. The two men had been at Oxford together and did not like each other. Jack despised what he regarded as Max’s pretence at being a gentleman and suspected he might have married Agatha for her money. For this reason it became impossible for Max to accompany Agatha and Rosalind to Abney Hall to spend Christmases there with Nan and the rest of the family. Agatha adored the festivities at Abney Hall and refused to forgo them on Max’s account.

The sibling jealousy Agatha had felt towards Madge’s literary accomplishments had dissipated as her own stature as a writer grew. Judith recalls it was sometimes necessary, however, for Agatha to stand up to her loquacious sister, who, like an ocean liner, tended to swamp smaller vessels in her wake. One evening Madge entered Ashfield’s candlelit dining-room and turned on the main lights. Agatha, who had gone to a lot of trouble over the meal, was not pleased. ‘Turn those lights off!’ she snapped. ‘This is my house.’ As Madge grew older she became more egocentric, seldom allowing her husband Jimmy to get a word in edgeways. In order to save on trips to the hairdresser she shaved her head and wore a wig. Ultimately Agatha came to regard Madge as ‘really rather funny and sweet’, although she certainly shocked their family by writing a play about lesbians, a taboo subject at that time, which explains why it did not achieve a London production. ‘No one in the family knew what to make of Aunt Madge’s play,’ recalls Judith.