Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (5 page)

Archie had trained at the Royal Woolwich Military Academy after leaving Clifton and was a lieutenant stationed at Exeter in Devon. He encouraged Agatha to cut several partners so that she could dance with him on their first meeting, but Agatha wistfully assumed theirs had been a passing encounter. Much to her surprise he turned up at Ashfield several days later on a motor cycle.

Agatha was quickly drawn out of herself by Archie’s charm, intelligence and impetuosity. Here was someone who promised romance and adventure in equal proportions and could challenge her reticence and seek out her hidden depths. Archie was that romantic figure of whom she had dreamed, her ‘Man from the Sea’. His profession was as adventurous as it was exciting: he was one of a small band of qualified aviators who had joined the elite ranks of the recently formed Royal Flying Corps.

Archie, in turn, was mesmerized by Agatha’s radiant attractiveness, as well as her femininity and her reticence, which made him feel even more decisive. A whirlwind courtship ensued. Archie tipped the scales in his favour and set Agatha’s heart lurching two and a half months into their relationship when he said he wanted to marry her straight away. Despite recognizing they were poles apart in many ways, Agatha desperately wanted Archie to be her husband.

She knew that, in part, her fascination for him derived from the fact that he was still a stranger to her, and around this time she woke from a disturbing dream, distractedly murmuring: ‘The stranger from the sea, the stranger from the sea . . .’ She was so affected by this that she wrote a poem, ‘The Ballad of the Flint’, in which Archie was cast as the Leader of the Vikings whose fleet raids the peaceful inhabitants of Dartmoor in Devon. She cast herself as the Priestess of Dartmoor, and her feeling of helplessness over their circumstances was measured in the fact that after the Leader of the Vikings claims the Priestess as his own they both die tragically.

One person Archie was unable to win over completely with his confident manner and his charm was Agatha’s mother. It was not just possessiveness of her much-loved daughter that led Clarissa to oppose the idea of their marrying straight away but the practical concern of how Archie might support a wife. Archie earned a modest subaltern’s pay, and beyond this the only money he had was a small allowance from his mother. The £100 Agatha received each year from the legacy of her paternal grandfather, Nathaniel Miller, was clearly not a sufficient supplement to Archie’s income.

Clarissa recognized, too, a certain ruthlessness in Archie’s character which gave her forebodings; she knew also that her younger daughter’s sensitive temperament made her vulnerable in the face of misery and hardship. Furthermore, Clarissa’s instincts – which could at times amount to something like clairvoyance – told her that Archie would not be a faithful husband. But Clarissa loved Agatha too much to cause her pain, and confronted by her daughter’s stubbornness she allowed the couple to become engaged.

Agatha plucked up the courage to write to Reggie Lucy to tell him their engagement was off. She would later ponder, after Archie had turned against her, that she might have been secure and happy with Reggie, although she knew she would never have loved him as much as she loved Archie. Quite early in their relationship Archie made it clear to her that he could not bear it when people were unhappy or ill, and an adoring Agatha only appreciated the significance of this matter later.

Their tempestuous engagement, which lasted a year and a half, was filled with ups and downs, with both Agatha and Archie often despairing as to whether their adverse circumstances would ever allow them to marry. No man in love, certainly not one of Archie’s temperament, likes to feel he is playing second fiddle to his prospective mother-in-law, but Clarissa’s precarious health was another reason the engagement was called off several times by Agatha.

Agatha’s love for Archie continued to grow, because in some ways he remained a stranger to her. Everything he did or said seemed somehow exciting and unfamiliar, and he felt the same about her, exclaiming once, ‘I feel I can’t get
at
you.’ In moments of uncertainty Agatha had the feeling of ‘wanting to go back’, to have ‘a safe foot on the shore’. But, where Archie was concerned, the lure of the ‘Man from the Sea’ was too strong, and she was aware that she had of her own accord swum out into deep water.

The advent of the First World War provided them with an incentive to grasp at happiness while they could. Archie was on three days’ leave and they were staying with his mother in Clifton. The decision to marry was undertaken so precipitously that they had to apply for a special licence. Archie’s stepfather, William Hemsley, proved fatherly and supportive as usual and helped the couple to finalize their plans.

The same could not be said of Agatha’s future mother-in-law, Peg Hemsley, who had once been described by her other son, Campbell, as a dangerous woman, for hers was the sort of gushing affection that could rapidly change into hate. While at the beginning of their relationship she had warmly received Agatha into the family circle for Archie’s sake, Peg had never considered Agatha a suitable spouse for her son. Agatha wore the new Peter Pan collars – then considered very modern and daring – and Peg regarded her son’s fiancée as ‘fast’. Peg had consoled herself with the thought that Archie was too young to marry and that nothing would come of the unhappy alliance. She had not reckoned on her son’s determination. There were many occasions when Peg alternated between demonstrating ostentatious displays of affection towards Agatha and making her antipathy clear to her future daughter-in-law. Agatha suspected rightly that there would be trouble from Peg over their decision to marry.

However, not even Peg’s attack of hysterics and refusal to attend the ceremony at the parish church of Emmanuel, Clifton, could sway Archie or Agatha, who were married on Christmas Eve 1914. Agatha’s initially angry and disappointed family only learned afterwards that she had become Mrs Archibald Christie. Thus the marriage got off to a bad start, and Agatha later recalled of their wedding day that all the people she and Archie were most fond of had been annoyed with them.

Two days later Archie was posted to France. Agatha returned to her mother. Ashfield’s upkeep had become increasingly difficult for Clarissa, but a second source of income improved matters, since Agatha’s aged and increasingly infirm grandmother from Ealing was now living with them. When Agatha was not helping with the running of the household she devoted her energies to the war effort as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse at the Torquay Town Hall Red Cross Hospital.

She found that reading detective stories eased her worries about Archie, for beneath the conventional elements of menace and sudden death there was always a comforting morality tale. Towards the end of the war Archie was prevented from flying in further combat owing to worsening sinus problems, and he was given a desk job in France. Agatha passed her apothecaries’ examination and went to work in the Torquay hospital dispensary.

Agatha’s decision to write her first detective story was rooted in her complex feelings about Madge. Agatha both admired and felt a strong undercurrent of jealousy for the elder sister who was dubbed ‘the clever one’. Madge had married into an extremely wealthy family, her looks and wit were widely praised, and she and her husband Jimmy had travelled to such exotic places as the Italian Alps and St Moritz. While frequently argumentative, Madge could be highly entertaining. The fascinating stories she told about herself and others were often heavily embellished but always contained a grain of truth. Much to Agatha’s awe and chagrin Madge had had a series of short stories published in
Vanity Fair,
making Agatha’s own literary rejections even more disappointing and humiliating.

After this, around the time of Agatha’s romance with Reggie Lucy, the sisters had got into a heated discussion on what made a good detective story. Madge made a bet with her sister that she could not write a detective story where the reader was not able to guess who was responsible for the crime that had been committed, despite having the same clues as the detective.

Goaded by jealousy, Agatha planned
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
during idle moments in the dispensary. The ingenious murder method for her story was inspired by her newly acquired knowledge of poisons, while the many Belgian refugees proliferating in Torquay suggested to her the background of her little detective with the egg-shaped head, Hercule Poirot.

Her married life really only began in September 1918, two months before the war finally ended. Agatha gave up her war work in Torquay and moved to London to be with Archie. Her husband had been posted to the Air Ministry in Covent Garden where he served as Chief Technical Officer of the South-Eastern Area. He had returned from France a much decorated war hero, for in addition to having been mentioned in five dispatches he had received three medals: the DSO, the CMG and the Order of St Stanislaus Third Class with Swords. Archie no longer intended pursuing a career in the Royal Air Force, because he had become convinced there was no future for him in the armed forces, and he was determined to find a job in the City of London in order to make a lot of money.

Agatha’s weekends were lonely, and initially she avoided her well-off friends in London. She was embarrassed by the financial gulf that separated her and Archie from them. Nan Watts had recently moved to 10 More’s Gardens in Chelsea, and after Agatha had plucked up the courage to get in touch she regretted not having looked her up sooner.

Nan’s marriage to Hugo Pollock in 1912 was not a success. She had borne him a daughter, Judith, four years later, but he had had no time for the child and often told her to ‘hop it’ in Arabic. Shortly before Agatha visited Nan he had gone off on a walking holiday and had not bothered to return. Rather than brood, Nan had moved to London in search of a more cosmopolitan lifestyle. Agatha was so impoverished that one of her greatest pleasures when visiting Nan was to be invited to examine the contents of her affluent friend’s wardrobe.

It was while Archie was looking for the right opportunity to come along in this difficult post-war period that Agatha discovered that she was pregnant. Archie was subdued on hearing the news and he expressed a desire for a daughter, saying he would be jealous of a son. His reaction was not altogether surprising, for after their marriage much of his boldness and audacity had evaporated to reveal a diffidence and boyishness that met the child in Agatha. Archie also was very concerned that his wife should regain her physical attractiveness after the birth. On 5 August 1919 they became the proud parents of a daughter, Rosalind, whom they nicknamed Teddy.

That same year Archie resigned his commission when he received an offer to join the staff of the Imperial and Foreign Corporation, deeming this to be the stepping-stone for which he had been looking. In the joy and excitement of being reunited with Archie and starting their life together – in a succession of cramped flats across London – Agatha had given up on
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, which over the previous few years had been rejected by five publishers. When the Bodley Head publishing house wrote towards the end of 1919 requesting a meeting it seemed a promising omen.

Agatha met John Lane of the Bodley Head in January 1920 and, after agreeing to alter the last two chapters, she eagerly – too eagerly – signed a contract there and then to have her manuscript published. What she did not realize was that the terms of the contract were very much in the Bodley Head’s favour. Nor did she take in the fact that she was obliged to offer her new publishers a total of five books.

After fulfilling her agreement to alter the courtroom setting of the book’s dénouement to a drawing-room bristling with tension, she received a rare distinction for a début novelist of having
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
serialized in the Friday supplement of
The Times Weekly Edition
from February to June that year. Agatha’s real desire, however, was to see her story published in book form. The Bodley Head had advertised that the book would come out in August. When it had still not appeared by October Agatha was disappointed and frustrated. In a letter to her publishers she expressed the desire to see her book released before Christmas in order to coincide with the Greenwood trial. In November there was much press interest when the Kidwelly solicitor, Harold Greenwood, was acquitted of poisoning his wife. It was Agatha’s hope that her tale with its poisoning and courtroom drama would strike a similar chord of interest in the public.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles
eventually appeared in America at the end of 1920 and in Britain at the beginning of 1921, selling just over 2,000 copies, which was then considered a good sale for a first detective story. But since the contract she had signed was so much in her publishers’ favour all she made was £25, which was her half-share of the serial rights.

Agatha’s next book,
The Secret Adversary
, would earn almost twice as much and introduced an idealized version of Archie and herself in the characters of the recently demobbed Tommy Beresford and Prudence ‘Tuppence’ Cowley, two bright young things whose decision to place an advertisement in
The Times
hiring out their services – ‘No unreasonable offer refused’ – would lead them into an espionage conspiracy involving missing papers and a mysterious girl who eludes her enemies by faking amnesia.

Agatha was hoping to succeed at her writing to alleviate the financial constraints of her married life and also because, once again, it had become difficult for her mother to maintain Ashfield on only one source of income following the death in 1919 of Agatha’s grandmother from Ealing.

Once Agatha realized that the Bodley Head had taken advantage of her, she determined to fulfil her contract with them as quickly as possible so that she might find a new publisher. Her contract did not stipulate that the five books she owed the Bodley Head had to be detective stories, and she seized on this loophole, after delivering the manuscript of
The Secret Adversary
, to offer the Bodley Head a long mystical story she had written some years previously called
Vision.