Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (32 page)

Seventeen years have elapsed, and the sisters’ parents have died in a plane crash. Laura has long acted as a mother to Shirley and has no personal life of her own. One of Shirley’s admirers is a ruthless, care-free young man called Henry, who turns up unexpectedly on a motor cycle. Romance blossoms. By marrying Barbara’s fictional counterpart, Shirley, off to Henry – plainly based on Archie – Agatha was reinforcing her conviction that if Barbara had ever known the true joys and agonies of being in love she would never have dreamed of usurping Max’s affections.

Shirley soon discovers what it is like to be married to an unfaithful husband who is constantly in debt. After Henry is crippled by polio, he takes his frustrations out on his wife. In a moment of selflessness Laura gives her brother-in-law an overdose of sleeping tablets in order to free her sister Shirley from the marriage. His grief-stricken widow subsequently discovers that her much-longed-for escape with the attractive and considerate Sir Richard Wilding has been a mistake.

Shirley becomes an alcoholic. After being married for three years to the doting Sir Richard and living in luxury with him on an island, she discovers this is not what she wants from life. She confides to Llewellyn Knox, a former American evangelist, that while she was never very happy with Henry their marriage had been, in a way, all right; it had been a life she had chosen.

She mourns Henry’s premature death, and her sentiments come straight from Agatha’s heart in describing the man she still loves as selfish and ruthless in a gay and charming kind of way. She says she loves him still and would rather be unhappy with him than ‘smug and comfortable’ without him. Shirley says she hates God for letting Henry die, and Llewellyn assures her that it is better to hate God than our fellow man because God has always been our scapegoat, shouldering the burden of our joy and our pain.

In the final part of the book, where the action becomes absurdly compressed, Laura learns from Llewellyn that Shirley has been killed after drunkenly stepping in front of a passing vehicle. Laura is devastated by her sister’s death and questions whether it was suicide, but Llewellyn insists it was an accident. Laura confesses to her hand in Henry’s death and explains how she has attempted to absolve her guilt by running an institution for ‘subnormal’ children. Llewellyn tells her that he has fallen in love with her, and Laura accepts his proposal of marriage within less than twenty-four hours of having met him. Although Agatha had a dislike of commercialized religion, the retired evangelist is cast as the perfect husband for Laura because he has retained his humility and belief in God. The story ends happily with Laura feeling loved for the first time.

This Cinderella-like ending represented a wish fulfilment on Agatha’s part. The extraordinary courtesy Max always displayed towards her helped to sustain the marriage, despite his continuing affair with Barbara. Her pet dogs, those most faithful of companions, and cats were a constant source of comfort to Agatha during her bouts of agitation and depression and recurring outbreaks of psoriasis.

There was cause for celebration that same year when Agatha was awarded a CBE in the New Year’s Honours List for her contribution to detective fiction and the stage. ‘One up to the Low-Brows!’ she triumphantly wrote to Edmund Cork from Baghdad, where she was helping Max in his work. Despite her elation, fame never went to her head, and by now she was an extraordinarily famous woman.

Inevitably there were allusions to her disappearance from time to time. Once when she was in Baghdad someone asked her about it, and she never spoke to that person again. She was also very upset about an article on the elusive best-selling novelist Rowena Farre that appeared in the
Daily Mail
on 19 February 1957, in which Kenneth Althorp passed the comment: ‘I’m sure she’s not doing an Agatha Christie on me.’ Although Agatha’s secret remained safe with Nan, Edmund Cork was dispatched to have lunch with one of the
Daily Mail
’s top executives to point out the newspaper’s bad taste in bringing up the subject of his client’s disappearance. While the innocuous article did not warrant such a response, constant reminders of the incident made Agatha more anxious to avoid the limelight than ever. She also remained exceptionally modest.

Judith Gardner has stated that Barbara made herself such an indispensable factotum to Max and Agatha that she regularly came to Greenway. Barbara and Max often spent long periods together in the library, leaving her shoes outside in the hall as a sign to the rest of the household that they did not wish to be disturbed. Another unusual aspect of Barbara’s visits is that she never sat down to meals with Agatha and Max and their guests; instead her food was sent upstairs to her on a tray. She was obviously more than just a secretary. Max’s and Barbara’s passion for each other led them to become indiscreet. Once Graham encountered them embracing by the boat-house and, on another occasion, on the Greenway ferry around dusk. It became a habit of Max’s to rise from the table after lunch and announce that he was ‘just going upstairs to get on with a paper’. While Max and Barbara were upstairs together, Agatha and Nan did crosswords together in the library.

By this time Judith and Graham were living at 10 Branksome Close in the nearby village of Paignton. Nan had left London for good and was residing in the same street at number 16. Judith visited her mother constantly. Graham got on so well with his mother-in-law and Agatha that he put two and two together while he was reading
Unfinished Portrait
. One day, when he raised the subject of the disappearance with Nan, he asked her if she had helped Agatha disappear. She admitted her involvement in the affair and added with admirable aplomb: ‘What does it matter after all this time?’

Judith’s Uncle Jimmy died in June 1957 shortly after he and Agatha had visited his sister Nan in Branksome Close. For many years Jimmy had run the family textile business, S. and J. Watts, after taking it over from his father James Watts II. Jimmy was seventy-nine and had been unwell for some time. His death was a sad loss to his family, especially for Agatha who had received an enormous amount of moral support from her brother-in-law after her disappearance. Calm, prudent and slow of speech, Jimmy had always advised her to the best of his ability and encouraged her to stand by her convictions even when he didn’t entirely agree with her. Agatha had loved him dearly and, in addition to
The ABC Murders
and
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
, she had officially dedicated her 1953 novel
After the Funeral
to him ‘in memory of happy days at Abney’. Jimmy’s fortune and Abney Hall passed to his son Jack; a clause in the will stated that if Agatha’s and Nan’s nephew Jack should predecease his father then Agatha’s grandson Mathew Prichard was to inherit everything.

During summers at Greenway Agatha went to Churston Church every Sunday. The east window was considered rather plain, and she gave some money towards a new one of stained glass. She asked if the design could include pastures and sheep; she felt children would relate to this idea as it harked back to her own childhood vision of Heaven. After the window, depicting the life of Christ, was installed in July 1957 Graham photographed it at her request.

By October that year Agatha had begun work on her new detective novel
Ordeal by Innocence
. Usually she liked to finish a project as quickly as possible, but she temporarily set it aside to write a supernatural story called ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ in which she vented her feelings about Barbara Parker. The life-sized velvet and silk doll is a puppet, a decadent product of the twentieth century that lolls in a dressmaker’s studio, limp yet strangely alive, next to the telephone or among the divan cushions, looking sad but at the same time rather sly, determined and knowing. The women who work in the studio are never able to work out how she got there, and they feel a sense of menace when the doll assumes a macabre life of its own. Believing it to be evil, one of the women throws it out of the window. An overwrought colleague insists that she has ‘killed’ the doll, when to their horror an urchin in the street makes off with it. The frightened women follow, but the child refuses to give up her find, exclaiming that she loves it and that being loved is all the doll ever wanted. Pitiful yet menacing, the creature was an expression of Agatha’s deeply ambivalent feelings towards Barbara.

November 1957 saw the publication of
4.50 from Paddington
. This absorbing mystery involves the ingenious disposal of a body from a passing train down a railway embankment into the grounds of a family mansion and was inspired by the railway line that abutted the corner of Abney Hall’s grounds.

One day Agatha was at Paddington Station looking for something to read at the W.H. Smith bookstall when she was accosted by a bookseller who recommended the book to her. He said all his regular customers had bought a copy and spoke highly of it, but Agatha’s response was non-committal. Finally he asked incredulously: ‘Don’t you want to read it?’ Agatha informed him she was not really interested. She was amused by the incident, because, as she later told family and friends, if the man had looked at the back of the book he would have immediately spotted her picture.

‘The Night of a Thousand Stars’, the lavish party theatrical producer Peter Saunders threw at the Savoy on 13 April 1958 to celebrate
The Mousetrap
’s achievement in becoming the longest-running play in the history of the British theatre, was a fraught occasion for Agatha – and not just because the press turned out in force. As the most important star of the party Agatha agreed, with some reluctance, to arrive early to pose for some publicity pictures, only to be told by an officious doorman that no one would be admitted to the ballroom for another half an hour.

Agatha’s response to the rebuff was extraordinary. She went away, although she need only have said who she was and why she was there to have been let in. She was eventually admitted, however, and the pictures of her cutting the cake were taken and the party proceeded. The story that the crime writer was so self-effacing and shy that she allowed herself to be turned away appeared in the newspapers the following day, and it had the beneficial effect of helping to keep at a distance journalists and admirers who might have wished to intrude on her privacy and ask too many personal questions.

Agatha was reluctant to appear in the publicity pictures because her looks had faded and she disliked seeing photographs of herself taken alongside attractive younger celebrities. Yet she loyally stood next to Peter Saunders and greeted the guests on their arrival. Later she agreed to make a short speech in which her still girlish, fluting voice shook with genuine emotion when she admitted: ‘I’d rather write ten plays than make one speech.’

Although Agatha was proud of her theatrical achievements, especially
The Mousetrap
, she regretted her rashness in giving away all the royalties to her beloved grandson, Mathew, now fourteen years old. ‘Oh, why did I give the royalties to Mathew?’ Agatha lamented to Nan on one occasion. ‘It’s the only play I’ve ever written that’s ever made any money.’

By now, Agatha’s marriage had survived almost a decade of infidelity, and she had persuaded herself that she had less reason to be anxious that Max might abandon her than she originally thought. She had entered into a phase she liked to think of as her ‘second spring’, and she convinced herself that physical passion between a man and his wife was not necessary to the overall well-being of a marriage. She rejoiced in the fresh sap of creative ideas that rose up in her, stimulated by her travels with Max, her visits to the theatre and opera and her reading. Nevertheless she still grieved over the loss of Max’s love for her.

By way of affirming what her marriage to Max meant she wrote the play,
Verdict
. She had wanted to call it
No Fields of Amaranth
, after the lines from Walter Savage Landor’s
Imaginary Conversations
quoted in the play – ‘There are no fields of amaranth this side of the grave’ – but the title had already been used by another playwright. Although a murder is committed in full view of the audience at the end of Act One,
Verdict
is essentially a love story with the message that the cost of living with an idealist can often be high. Max provided the inspiration for the central character of Karl Hendryk, a university professor who sacrifices the women he loves for his ideals and his work. His physically disabled wife Anya criticizes Karl for neglecting her for his work. When Anya dies after one of her husband’s besotted female students, Helen, administers a drug overdose to her, an unsuspecting Karl is devastated by her apparent suicide. He turns to his secretary, Lisa, for sympathy; the two have always loved each other but never openly acknowledged the fact while Anya was alive. In a desperate bid to secure Karl’s affections, Helen confesses that she killed his wife. Karl is shocked and stunned, but he decides not to go to the police because he pities Helen and recognizes that revenge will not bring his wife back.

His decision leads to Lisa being wrongly arrested for the murder, and afterwards, when he tells the police of Helen’s confession, they do not believe him, because Helen has been killed in a road accident and they think he is trying to save Lisa from the gallows. After she is acquitted, she has to choose whether to start life afresh or to spend the rest of her life with an idealist who causes pain to those who love him. There is never any real contest in her heart. Her reason for staying with the man she loves comes straight from her creator’s heart: ‘Because I’m a fool.’

Agatha reveals her philosophy about relationships when one of her characters says that the young are mistaken in thinking love is just about glamour, desire and sex appeal. ‘That’s nature’s start of the whole business. It’s the showy flower, if you like. But love’s the root. Underground, out of sight, nothing much to look at, but it’s where the life is.’

Verdict
failed at the box office because the title and the writer’s name led her many mystery fans to expect a tense courtroom thriller that would have them on the edge of their seats. Although she rebounded from this setback within a month by writing the successful stage thriller
The Unexpected Guest
, Agatha was deeply upset over
Verdict’s
reception. She later claimed that, with the exception of
Witness for the Prosecution
, it was the best play she had ever written. Albeit underrated,
Verdict
remains Agatha’s most elegiac play about human relationships. It might have been hailed a success if it had been staged under a pseudonym.