Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (33 page)

The past came back to haunt Agatha when her nephew Jack Watts sold Abney Hall in 1958, just as she had feared he might one day do when she wrote
The Hollow
in the mid-1940s. He was lonely living by himself on the estate, and it was only natural he should move to London since he already had a house in Chester Street, near Buckingham Palace, close to family and friends.

Around this time, according to a letter Rosalind wrote, Agatha got herself worked up in to ‘a terrible state’ when she learned that her daughter was planning to see her father Archie and his family. While Agatha felt no animosity towards her first husband it was apparent to Rosalind that her mother could not accept the idea of a ‘more intimate’ relationship between Archie and his daughter.

Despite knowing it was contrary to Agatha’s wishes, Rosalind and her husband Anthony Hicks socialized with her father on several occasions. Anthony later said of Archie: ‘He was a good chap. Rosalind didn’t want to meet Nancy, so I didn’t meet her very often. She was quite dull. And Archie became duller.’

In August 1958 Archie’s wife Nancy died from cancer at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London. Although Agatha had not seen him once in all the years they had been divorced, she wrote to him expressing her condolences. He, too, was able to put the bitterness of the past behind him when he wrote back to say how deeply touched he was that she had not begrudged him his three decades of happiness with Nancy.

After they had married Archie and Nancy had lived together in Hampstead, north London. A son, Archibald, was born in 1930 and nicknamed Beau. The Christies later moved to Juniper Hill in Surrey to be closer to Madge and Sam James, their hosts on the night of Agatha’s disappearance. Their love survived the unwelcome publicity of 1926 intact, and golf remained an obsession for the couple, their back porch constantly littered with clubs. The events of 1926 were not discussed, and their son Beau did not learn about them until he had reached maturity. According to Beau, his father Archie was not ‘a sociable animal’ although his mother Nancy was.

Archie and Nancy had been holidaying with Madge and Sam James in the south of France just before the outbreak of the Second World War when Sam died of sunstroke. After his friend’s death Archie had looked after Madge’s annual financial accounts and continued to do extremely well in the city as a company director, although he admitted in 1958 in a letter to his daughter Rosalind that his finances had twice been down to zero over the years. He had also at one point suffered a ‘breakdown’ from which he had made a full recovery after receiving treatment of a serious nature in hospital. As a token of the enduring friendship that had sustained Archie and her through an exceedingly difficult time, Nancy bequeathed an aquamarine gold brooch to Madge in her will.

Agatha was shocked when her friend Nan was diagnosed with lung cancer in mid-1959 and told that she only had six months to live. Nan had been a heavy smoker all her life and consequently spoke in a deep, husky voice. She was then aged seventy, and Agatha was sixty-eight. Nan’s reaction to her illness was to continue to lead as vigorous a life as possible, driving around in her car as energetically as ever.

Despite her indomitable spirit, she grew thinner and her condition rapidly deteriorated. She was finally moved to Torquay’s Mount Stuart Nursing Home where she would sit watching the seagulls soaring over the bay. Agatha visited her twice in the last week of her life. They talked of the old days and of the fun they had had. Before the end came there was one last time-honoured ritual. Agatha’s latest book,
Cat Among the Pigeons
, was inscribed on the flyleaf: ‘To Nan, who once went hunting schools with me.’ Nan’s death on 2 December at the age of seventy-one left Agatha devastated. She had lost her best and closest friend.

Chapter Twenty-Five
Accolades and Reminders

Agatha wrote a moving letter of condolence to Judith after Nan’s death telling her that she was glad for Nan’s sake that she had had such a loyal and loving daughter. The writer also said that she would miss Nan very much since she was the last of her friends with whom she could talk and laugh about the old days and the fun they had had together when they were girls. The last time Agatha had seen Nan she had talked of Judith and of how kind she and Graham had been to her. Agatha admitted that she was getting old and feeble herself but that if Judith or Graham ever needed help or anything from an older person she was there and ‘you must consider me a kind of mother’.

Judith and Graham cherished the letter. Nan’s fortune and first editions of Agatha’s personally inscribed detective novels, as well as those written under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott, were all bequeathed to Judith.

Dealing with Nan’s death and other painful aspects of her past was made easier for Agatha when Graham, who shared her fascination with time, gave her a copy of James Coleman’s
Relativity for the Layman
, which he bought for her from what was then the only bookshop in Dartmouth. The book, with its exposition on the relativity of time, helped Agatha come to terms with her loss, and she was further sustained by religion.

In 1958, the year before Nan passed away, her brother Lyonel’s daughter Merelina and her husband Anthony Marlowe had been on holiday in Spain when she contracted polio and was left paralysed from the neck down. When Peter Saunders agreed to produce
Go Back for Murder
, a play Agatha had written based on her novel
Five Little Pigs
, he cast Anthony in the role of Philip Blake. The play opened on 23 March 1960 at London’s Duchess Theatre. The cast took seven curtain-calls on the opening night. This was followed by the most savage reviews of Agatha’s theatrical career. The play closed after just thirty-one performances. She was extremely upset, and Rosalind was enraged on her behalf. Fernanda Marlowe recalls her father Anthony rallied from the disappointing blow and went on to star in thirty-three episodes of the 1960s’ television series
Ghost Squad
for which he is now best remembered.

When the detective novelist Christianna Brand told Agatha that the former cub reporter of the Daily News, Ritchie Calder, intended to write an article about the disappearance to coincide with her seventieth birthday in September 1960, Agatha maintained a philosophical tone when communicating the information to her literary agent Edmund Cork. She told him not to worry about her hearing the news; it was just one of those reminders of the past that cropped up every few years – and, after all, what did it matter after so long? Now she was seventy, she said, she did not care what people said about her. She said the reminder was ‘just slightly annoying’ and that the less notice she took of it the better.

A further reminder of the disappearance came in the form of a letter Agatha received from a friend of her late brother-in-law Jimmy Watts. He told her that Jimmy had written a long letter to him back in 1926 ‘cursing the beastly press reporters’ who had laid siege to Abney Hall after Agatha had been taken there to recover from her ordeal.

That year’s ‘Christie for Christmas’ saw the publication of a collection of short stories called
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
. In her foreword to the book, Agatha paid homage to Nan’s mother and Judith’s grandmother Anne Watts, ‘who worked so hard to make Christmas day a wonderful memory’ and dedicated the book to ‘the memory of Abney Hall – its kindness and its hospitality’.

By now Agatha’s finances were beginning to look much more stable. Her decision to sell the film rights to her work to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had come about after discussions with Graham and her son-in-law Anthony Hicks. She respected the two men’s grasp of business matters, and she had taken each of them aside separately to ask whether they thought she should form a company to handle her literary affairs. She took their advice and discovered that the advantages of being Agatha Christie Ltd were that she received a fixed income in return for producing a manuscript annually and the company became responsible for sorting out her business headaches. Other advisors and accountants had worked hard since the end of the Second World War to sort out her tangled finances, and during the 1960s her money worries eased considerably.

In July 1961 Agatha’s nephew Jack Watts, who was MP for Moss Side in Manchester, broke his leg while dancing at a house-party in Surrey. He died four days later from a blood clot. According to Humphrey Watts’s daughter Sizza, Jack was such an ebullient character that his family and friends half expected him to sit up in his coffin at the requiem mass held at the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer in Cheyne Row, London, and tell them he wasn’t really dead at all. The wake took place at Jack’s home in Chester Street, which he bequeathed to Agatha together with the furniture that had belonged to him and his mother. The other beneficiaries of Jack’s will were Judith, along with Agatha’s daughter Rosalind and grandson Mathew.

On the drive to Jack’s house, Agatha shared her car with Adrian McConnel, who was now married to Humphrey Watts’s daughter Penelope. The two had an amicable discussion about the unsolved murder of the British barrister Charles Bravo which had resulted in sensational newspaper headlines in 1876. It was Agatha’s belief that the killer was Dr Gully. Adrian McConnel, who was Dr Gully’s great-great grandson, refuted the idea, although this didn’t discourage Agatha from pointing the finger of guilt at the physician in a letter she wrote that was published in the
Sunday Times
magazine on 20 October 1968.

At the wake Agatha asked Graham Gardner if he would like to travel to the Middle East the following year to take some archaeological photographs for Max. Although her husband had stepped down as field director after the 1957 season, there was much work to be done to bring to fruition his book
Nimrud and Its Remains
. Graham expressed interest, and this led to talks between him and Max.

Meanwhile Agatha found the process of extracting herself from her tangled financial affairs was not without its pitfalls. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released four Miss Marple films between 1962 and 1964, starring Margaret Rutherford, and the writer disliked them all, considering the actress good but badly miscast. She nevertheless dedicated her 1962 novel
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
‘To Margaret Rutherford in Admiration’. Agatha makes a light-hearted reference to amnesia when one of the characters Miss Knight remarks of Lady Conway that her memory is so bad that she cannot even recognize her own relatives and tells them to go away. Miss Marple suggests that this might be shrewdness rather than memory loss.

In February 1962 Judith and Graham went out to Baghdad for the winter so that Graham could photograph the numerous artefacts Max had unearthed. Max raised the necessary funds for Graham’s trip through a college bursary. Judith accompanied her husband through Agatha’s generosity. Graham recalls that Agatha wanted him and Judith to experience ‘the beauty and romance of the desert’ so she could relive, through them, the early days of her marriage to Max ‘when she had been so happy and in love’.

They stayed in Agatha’s house in Baghdad, which still served as the headquarters of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. Graham spent numerous days at the Iraq Antiquities Department photographing the finds. Meanwhile Judith talked to the local archaeologists and was shown the city sights by Iraqis who shared her love of art. The couple were thrilled by the Middle East; they even enjoyed roughing it in the archaeological camps in the desert, including Mosul, where the best view of the breathtaking terrain was from the seat of the hillside lavatory which had three walls and no door.

Judith and Graham had unexpected confirmation that Max’s relationship with Barbara was as serious as ever when Graham called at the Mallowans’ Swan Court flat in London before leaving for Baghdad. Max was ensconced there with Barbara, having made the mistake of forgetting that he had asked Graham to drop by to receive instructions about photographing the Nimrud collection. Although Judith and Graham knew that Agatha was aware of the affair, they never mentioned the lovers’ tryst to her, because they knew of her anxiety at the prospect of a second divorce.

In March that year Max wrote triumphantly to Agatha’s daughter Rosalind telling her in confidence, prior to an announcement being published in
The Times
, that in October he would be vacating his Chair of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology within London University. He had been elected to a fellowship of All Souls College in Oxford for the following seven years until he was sixty-five. He had answered an advertisement in the newspaper the previous year, and, much to his delight, he was given to understand that he came top out of seventy candidates.

It was not unusual during the week for Max to stay in his rooms in the Old Quadrangle at All Souls, while he worked on his life’s work,
Nimrud and Its Remains
. He took an active part in college life, attending numerous dinners in various august institutions, giving after-dinner speeches and introducing other speakers. On weekends he came home to Agatha at Winterbrook House, where she spent much time writing. Despite living apart during the week, Agatha and Max still led an active social life and went away on holidays together, visiting Baghdad and Nimrud in November.

The couple returned to London in time to celebrate the tenth anniversary of
The Mousetrap
on 25 November 1962. Once again, producer Peter Saunders threw a spectacular party at the Savoy. One of the guests, Lyonel Watts’s granddaughter Fernanda Marlowe, recalls that the legendary singer Shirley Bassey was hired by Saunders to perform a cabaret. The Welsh diva was unhappy when the audience carried on talking among themselves during her performance, and the press accused her of throwing a temper tantrum. Later that night Agatha gave a brief speech in which she confided happily: ‘Don’t let anyone say to you that nothing exciting ever happens to you when you are old. Because it does. And it’s just as nice to be seventy [she was seventy-two] as it is to be young. In fact, tonight couldn’t be more fun.’