Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (6 page)

Agatha was quite rightly convinced that the company would not accept it, but because her publishers had treated her so unfairly she felt no compunction in the matter.
The Secret Adversary
was brought out by the Bodley Head in 1922 and fancifully dedicated ‘To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure’, by which time the Christies had embarked on their own adventure.

Agatha accompanied Archie in his capacity as Financial Adviser on the British Empire Mission of 1922, which took them to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States to promote the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition to be held in 1924 at Wembley on the outskirts of London. It was one of the most exciting experiences of their lives. Although the tour turned out to be an arduous publicity campaign that involved meeting numerous government officials from each country, it offered moments of respite such as when Archie and Agatha spent two weeks together in Honolulu, where their fascination for each other and their delight in surf-board riding resulted in a mood of companionable playfulness all too often dampened by Archie’s struggle to create a niche for himself in the business world. On the negative side, there was the irascible Major Ernest Belcher, whose fierce temper tantrums made him a volatile leader of the tour, and separation from their daughter Rosalind, who was being looked after by relatives. Their major problems, however, were to come on their return to England.

Chapter Three
Adversity and Prosperity

As soon as the Christies returned to their London flat things started to go wrong. The Imperial and Foreign Corporation had not kept Archie’s position open, and he found himself unemployed and unable to get a job. The couple had known before they started on the tour that it was highly likely that this might happen, but they had never believed in playing safe and had been determined to see the world and risk the consequences.

May 1923 saw the publication of
The Murder on the Links
, a new Poirot tale about a millionaire found stabbed on a golf course in France. Before the book’s publication Agatha won a major row with her publisher, resulting in some ill feeling, over the proposed book jacket, which was to have featured a misleading illustration. Despite their continued financial hardship and Archie’s dark moods Agatha was convinced he would eventually find the right job since he was fiercely ambitious and had a drive she had always admired.

A minor boost to their finances came in the second week of May when she won a small prize by correctly identifying the killer of Hugh Bowden in the seven-week-long newspaper serial
The Mystery of Norman’s Court
. Had hers been the first correct entry received by the
Daily Sketch
the first prize of £1,300 would have resolved their financial difficulties, but it was not, and the second prize of £800 was divided among twelve runners-up, of whom Agatha was just one.

Shortly before the British Empire tour, after many years’ absence, her elder brother Monty had returned to England. In her autobiography Agatha does not reveal the secret shame concerning her brother and the reason her mother found it so difficult to cope with his erratic behaviour. In fact, Monty had become a drug addict. He had been expelled from Harrow because of his failure to apply himself to his studies and then served in the army in South Africa and India. He quickly squandered the legacy left to him by his paternal grandfather, Nathaniel Miller, and seems to have resigned his commission when his debts became too embarrassing. He moved to Kenya and took up farming and safari-hunting. His elder sister Madge – with money provided by her husband Jimmy – eventually financed Monty’s ill-fated plans to run small cargo boats on Lake Victoria in East Africa, but this venture had to be aborted on the outbreak of war in 1914. Monty served in the King’s African Rifles until he was discharged with a wound to his arm. The wound became infected and, although he resumed hunting, his health deteriorated. Finally, his doctors gave him six months to live because of the infected limb. Remarkably, however, he began to recover on his return to Ashfield. Like many charming people Monty was often economical with the truth, and it is not clear whether he became addicted to the morphine that would have been prescribed to relieve the pain of his injury or whether he became a habitual drug user for other reasons.

The worst of Monty’s behaviour saw him firing pistol shots out of a window at visitors and tradesmen who called at Ashfield. His intention was not to hit or maim but to scare the wits out of his hapless victims. Madge was absolutely terrified when her brother turned his cruel game on her. Incredibly, Monty bluffed his way out of the situation to the police by insisting he was a crack shot and that there had been no real danger to his victims. The stress of dealing with her son’s irresponsible behaviour put further strain on Clarissa’s fragile health.

Agatha swiftly united with Madge to avert further scandal and distress to their mother. Their rather drastic solution involved installing Monty temporarily in a bungalow at Throwleigh on Dartmoor, where he was looked after by a doctor’s widow. Nan’s daughter and son-in-law, Judith and Graham Gardner, recall that Madge’s much put-upon husband, Jimmy – who disliked Monty as much as Monty disliked him – paid his bills for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile, the strain of living with an unemployed husband became so great for Agatha that she contemplated taking Rosalind home with her to Ashfield or Abney Hall while Archie sorted himself out. Being sensitive to failure, he hated being unable to get a job. If Agatha attempted to take his mind off their worries by indulging in light-hearted chat she was accused of having no sense of the gravity of their situation; while if she was silent she was censored for not trying to cheer him up.

By November 1923 Agatha had completed
The Man in the Brown Suit
, a fast-moving thriller, set mainly in South Africa, involving the murder of a Russian dancer, the disappearance of some jewels and a mysterious arch-criminal known only as ‘the Colonel’. The characters of Sir Eustace Pedler and his secretary Guy Pagett were based on Major Belcher and his put-upon secretary Francis Bates from the British Empire Tour.

Agatha injected her own feelings and experiences about marriage into the character of Anne Beddingfeld, the attractive and fiercely independent heroine. She says she would not dream of marrying anyone unless she was madly in love with him and insists that sacrifices are worth it for the man one loves. She claims that the reason so many marriages are unhappy is because husbands either give way to their wives all the time or else cause resentment in their wives by being utterly selfish. She maintains that women like to be mastered but hate not to have their sacrifices appreciated, while men do not really appreciate women who are nice to them all the time. She concludes that the most successful marriages occur where a man is able to get his wife to do precisely what he wants then makes an enormous fuss of her.

As if recognizing where her own subservience had landed her, Agatha has the heroine add defiantly that when she is married she will be a devil most of the time but will occasionally surprise her husband by behaving angelically. When the hero remarks what a cat-and-dog life she will lead, she assures him that lovers always fight because they don’t understand each other and that by the time they do they aren’t in love any more. The hero asks if the reverse is true, whether people who always fight each other are lovers? The heroine is lost for a reply.

This exchange suggests that, while Agatha had reason to feel unappreciated by Archie, she considered that discord and confusion were acceptable in a marriage because it indicated that the couple still loved each other and that the woman’s suffering was all part of the greater, nobler cause of love.

Meanwhile, Archie’s professional difficulties had at last ended; he had found a job with a somewhat disreputable firm. While he knew that he would have to be careful not to get caught up in anything shady, he was finally able to smile again. Agatha was delighted in the change in him and was relieved to find her marriage back on a seemingly even keel.

By now the Bodley Head had recognized Agatha’s commercial worth and suggested scrapping her old contract for a new one, also for five books but with more favourable terms. Agatha declined the offer without giving a specific reason.

She had reason to feel confident about her decision on account of the popular reception of some Hercule Poirot stories she had written for
The Sketch
and the accompanying star treatment she had received. The first series had appeared between March and May 1923 and had been heralded by a portrait taken by Boorthorn that showed a poised Agatha wearing a string of pearls. She had by now cropped her long blonde hair into a stylish red-tinted bob and had been proclaimed by
The Sketch’s
publicist, with reference to
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, as ‘Writer of the Most Brilliant Detective Novel of the Day’. In March another page of
The Sketch
had been devoted to photographs by Alfieri, taken at the author’s home. Finally, ‘A Family Portrait’, in which Archie was conspicuously absent from Marcus Adams’s charming studio photograph of Agatha and Rosalind, had appeared in April. The second series of Hercule Poirot stories appeared between September and December that year.

The Sketch’s
publicity had not gone to Agatha’s head – she had given no personal interview to accompany the photographs – but the acclaim gave her a sense of self-worth that was noticeably absent in her increasingly combative dealings with the Bodley Head. Although Archie had encouraged her to write for money at the beginning of her career, he had begun to resent the attention she was starting to receive. He constantly undermined her, when she tried to engage him in conversation, by snapping: ‘Must you always keep nattering on?’

Agatha was shaken by this but did not let him see that he had upset her. Inwardly, however, she was upset when he put her down. She compensated by becoming increasingly high-handed in financial matters: what money she made was hers and hers alone, and she never ceased to remind Archie of this fact. It made her increasingly uneasy that he appeared to want a wife only as a lover and housekeeper, rather than a friend and confidante. As a result she sought to control him with her money. This exacerbated Archie’s nervous dyspepsia and his growing feeling of being confined by work. She received an unpleasant jolt from an inquiry from the Inland Revenue that year, which brought home to her the fact that her earnings could no longer be regarded as pocket money, and at that point she found herself a literary agent – Edmund Cork, a benign young man from the firm of Hughes Massie.

Throughout November 1923 Agatha wrote regularly to the Bodley Head urging the company to publish a collection of Hercule Poirot stories while the publicity from the second series that was appearing in
The Sketch
was still fresh in people’s minds. She agreed that this collection of short stories was not to be considered one of the books covered by her existing contract but insisted that the Bodley Head agree that
Vision
had been submitted as her third book. Had the Bodley Head agreed that this was the case, then
The Man in the Brown Suit
would have counted as Agatha’s fifth book and she would not have been obliged by the terms of her five-book agreement to offer them any further novels.

But the Bodley Head now needed Agatha more than she needed them, and
Vision
became a bitter bone of contention between author and publisher. Both were on uncertain ground and a permanent state of stalemate could easily have followed, but Agatha capitulated over
Vision
, so
The Man in the Brown Suit
counted as her fourth novel instead of her fifth.

It was an annoying setback, but at least the London
Evening News
offered her the substantial sum of £500 to serialize
The Man in the Brown Suit
from November through to January 1924 under the rather improbable title of
Anne the Adventurous
. The cost of a Morris Cowley (half of all cars on the road at the time were Morris Cowleys) was £225, and she immediately acquired a four-seater model. Since Agatha’s money had paid for the car she often annoyed Archie by reminding him that it belonged to her.

Archie’s prospects improved when a friend of his, Clive Baillieu, returned from Australia and offered him a position on the board of directors with the City firm of Austral Ltd. He now felt his own man once again, back in control of his career and his abilities appreciated.

Control was one thing, freedom another. The feeling of confinement he had felt towards city life before the British Empire Tour had continued unabated on his return, and he had recently taken to relieving his frustrations by playing golf in East Croydon at weekends. Agatha, a competent player but with no real enthusiasm for the sport, had introduced him to the game and had begun to regret it. Golf was just the distraction Archie was looking for: an unimaginative man of action, he enjoyed the outdoor exercise, the camaraderie of his male friends and the physical skills and challenges demanded of him. What Agatha had originally conceived of as a mildly diverting distraction for her and Archie was now becoming an obsession with him.

Following the rise in their fortunes, Agatha unwittingly set the seal on their future relationship when she suggested they fulfil their dream of living in a cottage in the country. They finally seemed to have overcome adversity, but she was to discover, within a year, the downside of that dream.

Chapter Four
Conflicting Desires

The romantic ideal of a cottage in the country was one thing. The reality was another. Archie needed to be able to commute to London for work each day. He had recently been elected to the Sunningdale Golf Club, and he suggested that they move near by.