Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (35 page)

It will probably never be known if Rosalind’s and Max’s close relationship led to adultery. However, it is abundantly clear that in 1967 Agatha had no wish to compete with her attractive daughter for her younger husband’s attention at Greenway.

In the end, after several appeals from her daughter and son-in-law, Agatha reluctantly compromised and let Rosalind and Anthony live on the edge of Greenway’s 33-acre estate in Ferry Cottage, a small thatched dwelling by the quay overlooking the River Dart. Ironically, Agatha had assigned ownership of Greenway to Rosalind and Mathew in 1959 to ensure that her daughter and grandson did not have to pay inheritance taxes on the estate after her death. But since Agatha still held the deed of gift papers Rosalind was not in a legal position to move herself and Anthony into Greenway.

Around this time Judith and Graham Gardner sold their house and were temporarily homeless. At Agatha’s invitation the couple stayed at Greenway for a month while they looked around for a suitable property to rent or purchase. The Gardners were given the use of one of the newly renovated luxury flats in the stables a couple of minutes’ walking distance from the main house. Agatha’s favouritism did not go unnoticed by Rosalind and Anthony, who resented being exiled from the main house and the lavish lifestyle enjoyed there by Agatha and Max.

Judith and Graham, who were firm friends of the Hickses, were invited to Ferry Cottage for dinner on a number of occasions, but it was apparent that Rosalind and Anthony were unhappy living in such cramped conditions. The cottage also suffered badly from damp owing to its proximity to the river. Agatha determinedly kept her distance from her daughter, preferring to keep her marital problems to herself. What the writer wanted more than anything was peace of mind. She knew she would not get it around Rosalind; the two had a tendency to rub each other up the wrong way and resort to hurtful barbed comments. Rosalind and Anthony kept themselves busy during the day by attending to the running of the estate and, in particular, to the large market garden that sold produce locally.

Graham recalls: ‘Agatha preferred Judith to her own daughter.’ He and Judith were always welcome by Agatha and Max at the main house, often lunching there with the couple and their guests in the dining-room and taking coffee outside on the drive overlooking the lawn and the magnolia tree. Other guests of Agatha and Max included Max’s brother Cecil and two nephews, John and Peter, and various archaeological colleagues who had excavated Nimrud, such as Jeffrey Orchard and Diana Kirkbride, whose mother Judith and Graham had heard playing the cello at a recital at Dartington Hall in Totnes.

Agatha often took Graham aside from the others and had long talks with him. The range of her interests fascinated him; she was a woman who embraced new ideas and could converse authoritatively with him on such divorce topics as art, poetry, music, theatre, archaeology, horticulture and photography.

The Gardners were members of the Torquay Yacht Club and owned their own yacht. Agatha’s grandson Mathew accompanied them on their sailing excursions off the coast of Torquay and, to a lesser extent, so did Rosalind and Anthony.

After renting a property in Paignton for a short while Judith and Graham purchased a former water mill known as Higher Bickleigh Mill in the valley of Stoneycombe near Newton Abbot in Devon. The move coincided with Judith’s birthday and a card from her aunt-once-removed: ‘With all good wishes for happiness on your birthday and all through the year. Success to life in the Mill House, with love from Agatha.’ When Graham fixed the name of the dwelling in gold letters on the front gate he only had enough to call it Bickley Mill, and it has been known by this name ever since.

One afternoon Judith and Graham were at Bickley Mill when they got a telephone call. Agatha had invited six or seven guests to Greenway and wondered if she might bring them over to the couple’s house. The Gardners assented, and a short while later Agatha and her party arrived for cocktails. Rather uncharacteristically she asked Judith and Graham if she might take a look around on her own. The couple gave their permission since she was such a trusted old friend. Upstairs in the large studio the writer saw a painting on an easel depicting a pink house next to a canal spanned by a hump-backed bridge. Agatha later incorporated the painting into her 1968 novel
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
; the secret room in the canal house, where the character of Tuppence Beresford confronts the killer, was based on one of the rooms in Bickley Mill. When Agatha came back downstairs half an hour or so later she amused everyone by remarking enthusiastically: ‘What a wonderful place for a murder.’

In 1967 Gordon Ramsey, an American academic, produced
Agatha Christie: Mistress of Mystery
, a complete bibliography of her work and an affectionate assessment of her writings. Agatha’s literary adviser had urged her to cooperate with him since they were having considerable difficulty keeping up with her prolific output. Initially she had allowed him to visit her in London and had also welcomed him to Greenway, but she had restricted their talks mainly to her books so that there was very little discussion of more private aspects of her life. Agatha had soon tired of helping him with his research and had become so acutely defensive that she had even objected to him mentioning the two unpublished murder mysteries she held in reserve from 1940.

Her reaction to his raising the subject of the novels was extraordinary, since she had already mentioned their existence to Francis Wyndham in a rare interview for the
Sunday Times Weekly Review
on 27 February the previous year:

‘One is Poirot’s last case, and one of course is Miss Marple’s. I wrote them during the war, just after The Body in the Library, when I was in London working in hospitals [sic]. I had plenty of time in the evenings; one didn’t want to go out in the blitz . . . I gave one to my husband and one to my daughter – definitely made over to them by deed of gift. So when I am no more they can bring them out and have a jaunt on the proceeds – I hope!’

What Agatha was most unhappy about was a reference in Gordon Ramsey’s bibliography to when she went missing in 1926, although he summarily dismissed the notorious episode in half a page by explaining the author had amnesia at the time of her disappearance.

In June 1968 Max was knighted for his services to archaeology. Agatha had the satisfaction of knowing that he would never have achieved such success if she had not financed his expeditions. Moreover, becoming Lady Mallowan meant she had achieved her own childhood ambition of becoming ‘Lady Agatha’, and her title helped her mask her identity from her fans even more effectively than had ‘Mrs Mallowan’. Meanwhile Barbara remained in the background, making herself as indispensable as ever to Max, and Agatha stoically turned a blind eye to their relationship.

The author remained acutely sensitive to references to the disappearance. For instance, when an American publisher asked her to complete an outline for a plot begun by Franklin Roosevelt about a man who successfully plans his own disappearance, she refused to cooperate on the project. Stella Kirwan, who became Agatha’s secretary from the 1950s onwards after Charlotte Fisher retired to Eastbourne suffering from arthritis, had enormous difficulty persuading the producer of the television series
This Is Your Life
that there was nothing Agatha would hate more than to have her personal history presented to her on television in front of an audience. Privacy was paramount to Agatha, and she was greatly distressed at being shown unauthorized aerial photographs of Greenway that had been taken for a magazine.

By this time Agatha and Max had befriended A.L. Rowse, a fellow of All Souls College. The historian subsequently wrote about them at length in his 1980 memoirs
Memories of Men and Women
: ‘After my stimulating lecture to the Royal Society of Literature about Simon Forman and the sex life of the Elizabethans, Agatha did say, “I hope it won’t start Max up again.”’ Although love appeared frequently in Agatha’s books, Rowse pointed out ‘there is nothing about sex’, and this led him to wonder if this might have been one of the reasons her marriage to Archie had failed.

The closest Agatha ever came to discussing the breakdown of her first marriage with the press was when she relaxed her guard with the sympathetic journalist Marcelle Bernstein in a much-publicized interview that appeared in the
Observer
on 14 December 1969.

‘I married at 24; we were very happy for 11 years. Then my mother died a very painful death and my husband found a young woman. Well, you can’t write your fate: your fate comes to you. But you can do what you like with characters you create.’

Agatha had good reason to idealize her first marriage. During the painting of her portrait that year by Oskar Kokoschka, the famous artist noticed her habit of tapping her fingers, which were then badly afflicted with psoriasis, on the arms of her chair. She was still upset over Max’s relationship with Barbara, which showed no sign of abating. To make matters worse, an anonymous journalist – unaware of her marital problems – had attributed the following quote to Agatha: ‘The advantage of being married to an archaeologist is that the older you get the more interested he is in you.’ Agatha hated the quote and always denied having said it.

Chapter Twenty-Six
The Twilight Years

Agatha was at the peak of her fame in the 1970s, and to those fans who eagerly awaited each new ‘Christie for Christmas’ it seemed as if she had brooked no serious rival for yours. The decade began with the publication of
Passenger to Frankfurt
, which became a best-seller in Britain and the United States. Initially, however, her UK publishers had hesitated over whether to publish it at all and had only done so on condition that she subtitle it ‘An Extravaganza’ and include an introduction to explain why she had written it.

In
Passenger to Frankfurt
Agatha had produced an international thriller involving terrorism, hijacking and an attempted resurgence of Nazi Germany by the son of Adolf Hitler. Although the plot was extremely unusual for a Christie novel, it is interesting to note that the book centres on the successful hunt to recover Project Benvo, the code-name for a drug, which, when injected into a person, effectively eradicates violent impulses by inducing a permanent state of benevolence. Readers who do not like this book often fail to realize just how concerned she had become about the violence she felt she saw, initially in Britain, and latterly as a world epidemic.

Despite Max’s continued relationship with Barbara, the author’s self-esteem rose when she heard she was to be made a Dame of the British Empire in the 1971 New Year’s Honours list. Agatha was an ardent monarchist, so she was delighted by such a title bestowed by the Queen. Not even the attention of the press could prevent her from attending her investiture at Buckingham Palace, although she declined to be interviewed by journalists.

Her new book,
Nemesis
, which marked a return to the domestic whodunits for which she was famous, was begun in January 1971, and next to her name and the title in her notebook she added the initials DBE. The plot deals with the depravity that can result from thwarted love and supplies one of the most emotionally compelling motives for crime in Agatha’s literary canon.

In June she was treated for a broken hip at Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital in Oxford after falling at Winterbrook and hobbling about painfully for a week. Judith and Graham had advised her to get her injury examined straight away. Agatha dismissed the idea, thinking she was just bruised, but it turned out to be more serious. Graham also had the misfortune at this time to injure his leg while he was cleaning his and Judith’s outdoor swimming-pool. Max wrote to the couple on Agatha’s behalf expressing her concern at Graham’s accident and sending them her best love; he expected it would be about another fortnight before Agatha left the hospital with her new metal hip.

Max was concerned about their finances at this time. In addition to Greenway and Winterbrook, there was the upkeep of his new Mercedes and the Swan Court flat in London where he would spend time with Barbara. It angered Judith and Graham that he did so little to ensure Agatha’s comfort: the hall light at Winterbrook came crashing down one day, the roof leaked and the house was in urgent need of general maintenance and repair. Although Agatha was a wealthy woman, much of her money had been distributed in trusts for her family in anticipation of her death. The only immediate money at hand came from Agatha Christie Ltd. The fact that Max was keeping Barbara added to his financial anxieties, recalls Graham.

One day when there was a passing reference in the conversation to Max and Barbara, Agatha alluded to the couple’s affair by saying in Graham’s hearing, ‘It doesn’t matter about Max because he’s too old now. There’s no need to worry about anything with him.’

During the previous decade Max had suffered two strokes, one in 1961 and the other at the end of 1967, and these had aged him considerably. It was impossible to discern he was fourteen years younger than Agatha, for they now looked around the same ago. His decrepit appearance owed itself to a love of rich food and alcohol that had left him pot-bellied; he also stooped and walked with a shuffle. Agatha’s attitude towards his relationship with Barbara had altered: she no longer feared he might divorce her for his mistress, and this led to her adopting a more forgiving and philosophical attitude towards Barbara’s liaison with Max. Love was at the root of a flower for Agatha. She also felt a sense of gratitude toward him for standing by her all these years.

Agatha’s relationship with her daughter remained prickly. Rosalind disapproved of her mother’s latest play,
Fiddlers Five
, and she was right to do so. Producer Peter Saunders was unable to find a West End theatre that would take the play and it was not well received in the provinces. Determined to salvage her creation, Agatha met the director Allan Davis who agreed to redirect the play the following year after it had been rewritten and whittled down to
Fiddlers Three
.