Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (24 page)

The story concludes when Mr Satterthwaite meets his enigmatic friend, Mr Quin, in the garden. Mr Quin states that he is ‘an advocate for the dead’ and that on instructions from ‘the other side’ he had come to prevent Anthony Cosden from taking his life. He tells Mr Satterthwaite that he is here on behalf of the widow’s cruel, but now repentant husband who wishes to make sure his widow finally gets the happiness she deserves. Mr Quin points out that love can make men into devils as well as angels. She had had a girlish adoration for her husband, but he could never reach the woman in her and it drove him mad, he says. The husband tortured her because he loved her. The story ends with Mr Quin – the woman’s husband reincarnated – walking towards the cliff to return to the sea, from whence he came.

Although aspects of Archie’s character would appear several times in Agatha’s writings, along with allusions to their ill-fated love, Mr Quin’s final remarks are the closest she ever came to admitting that she had contributed to the breakdown of her marriage. She never shook off the feeling that she had failed her daughter, and ‘The Man from the Sea’ gave expression to her belief that a child needed to be raised by both parents to feel properly loved and that for a child to be denied his or her parents is to be denied potential happiness. Agatha cited ‘Harelequin’s Lane’ and ‘The Man from the Sea’ as her two favourite Mr Quin stories; together, with ten others, they formed the 1930 collection
The Mysterious Mr Quin.

The Woolleys extended an invitation to Agatha to stay with them during 1930 at Ur, and her decision to take them up on the offer would alter the course of her life and lead to her becoming Mrs Max Mallowan. The decade that followed was to be one of the happiest of her life.

Chapter Twenty-One
The Golden Decade

In a letter Agatha wrote in 1930 to her friend Allen Lane, the nephew of her former publisher, she stated that it had been a marvellous year. She was very happy because in March she had been introduced to her future husband at the archaeological site at Ur.

Max Mallowan had been ill with appendicitis when Agatha had met the Woolleys the previous season. But when Katherine Woolley asked her husband’s quiet 25-year-old assistant to take the 39-year-old novelist sightseeing the stage was set for romance.

Max was dark-haired with a fashionable pencil moustache. His outward placidity and even temperament belied an inner idealism and determination. He had been raised in England by a tyrannical agnostic Austrian father and a French mother with a passion for romantic novels and painting. His parents’ stormy relationship cultivated in him a deep desire for peace and calm. The bullying regime of his public school had left deep scars on his psyche, and later, at Oxford, he had delighted in the feeling of camaraderie that he felt from being treated as a gentleman.

When Agatha met him he was a budding scholar and, as she had inherited Clarissa’s enormous appetite for learning and history, they connected intellectually, aesthetically and artistically in a way that Agatha never had managed with Archie. She was still a very attractive woman, and her growing fame and prosperity meant she was not uninteresting to men.

Agatha was forced to return to England sooner than she had hoped. Her daughter Rosalind had fallen ill with pneumonia at Abney Hall. Rosalind was out of danger by the time her mother reached her side and Agatha took her to Ashfield to recuperate. Max arrived as a guest soon afterwards and asked Agatha to marry him. She found that she was taken with the idea. She was not without qualms, after the experience of her first marriage, and she admitted to Max that she was afraid of being hurt. He refused to be put off and finally persuaded her to accept his proposal. Determined to heed the lessons of the past she accepted him on two conditions.

First, she insisted that they must divide all their money and possessions down the middle; what was hers was his. Given that Agatha was much better off than Max this desire to learn from her mistakes with Archie spoke volumes. Secondly, she extracted a promise from Max never to play golf. Although he was somewhat taken aback by this stipulation he had no difficulty agreeing to it – cricket was the sport he most enjoyed.

Nan’s daughter Judith recalls that Madge, who was considered within family circles ‘a funny, crafty devil’, did her utmost to prevent the alliance since she suspected Max was attracted to her sister because she was well off. Madge refused to go to the wedding although in the end she did send a gift of handkerchiefs. Her husband Jimmy, who also shared her fears, urged Agatha to consider whether she had fallen in love with Max or his way of life. Meanwhile Katherine Woolley, a shrewd judge of character despite her temperamental nature, told Agatha she should make Max wait two years before they married because she thought it would be bad for his character if he assumed he could have anything he wanted while he was still so young. Unwisely, Agatha did not heed their advice.

Her own doubts about the marriage arose only when she was apart from him. With Max around, she said, she felt safe and happy. She begged him to be patient with her because she had become secure in her distrust of life and people and needed time to adjust to the idea of marrying again. The tone of her early correspondence to him is reminiscent of an excited young girl bubbling over with joy. Despite being younger than Agatha, it is clear that Max adopted the parental role in their relationship, and Agatha acknowledged this in one of her letters to him. One of Max’s letters openly challenged her with the suggestion that her eleven-year-old daughter Rosalind was more grown up than her. He told Agatha he didn’t love her with merely the glorious eyes of the blind but that he saw her as she was. He said that Agatha was like a child and would always remain a child. One of Agatha’s letters to Max stated when they were together she felt they were ‘companion dogs’, the world seemed a wonderful place and there was no feeling ‘of restraint or captivity’.

There were further problems for the couple: Clarissa had raised Agatha as an Anglican and Max was a practising Roman Catholic. She offered to be converted to Roman Catholicism, but because Max’s religion would not sanctify his marriage to a divorcée, he left the Catholic Church. Meanwhile the person with the greatest influence on Agatha gave her blessing. Ten-year-old Rosalind, who treated the idea of her mother marrying again as a huge joke, approved of Max.

In May that year Agatha and Nan were delighted when their nephew Jack Watts publicly announced his engagement to Lady Rosemary Bootle-Wilbraham, the youngest daughter of the second Earl of Lathom. The wedding was scheduled to take place on 11 June at Westminster Cathedral. Rosalind, who agreed to be one of the bridesmaids, looked forward to walking up the aisle in a sprigged muslin frock and carrying a posy of feather and glass flowers. But within weeks Jack was left broken-hearted when Lady Rosemary jilted him in favour of a former flame.

Despite the ill-omen of Jack’s broken romance, Max invariably knew what to say to Agatha to reassure her about their own impending nuptials. After the publicity over the disappearance Agatha was fearful the press would hear of her wedding plans and spoil her happiness. For this reason, accompanied by Peter the dog, Rosalind, Charlotte and Mary Fisher, Agatha travelled to the secluded Scottish island of Skye at the end of August and lived there while her banns were read out in church. In her autobiography Agatha asserts that she married Max in ‘the small chapel’ of St Columba’s, Edinburgh (St Columba’s is, in fact, a cathedral). The couple actually took their vows, seven months after they met, on 11 September at the Edinburgh church of St Cuthbert’s. By getting married in Scotland, with Charlotte and Mary Fisher acting as witnesses, they successfully eluded journalists. In order to minimize their fourteen-year age gap Agatha gave her age on their marriage certificate as thirty-seven, while Max gave his as thirty-one. In fact Agatha was four days off her fortieth birthday and Max was twenty-six. Rosalind did not attend the ceremony. Immediately afterwards the newly-weds parted at the church door. Max, who had come up by the overnight train, went back to London to finish his work on Ur. The following day Agatha and Rosalind returned to Cresswell Place in London. Two days later Max turned up in a hired Daimler and whisked her off on their honeymoon

Before their departure to the Continent, Agatha excitedly wrote to Allen Lane that she was off to Venice and Greece with her husband. She said she did not quite know how it had happened as she had been determined not to be so foolish as to marry again. Still, she felt that safety at all costs was a ‘repulsive creed’.

On Wednesday 17 September the London press broke the story of their secret wedding. A picture of Agatha and a smaller one of Max appeared on the
Daily Mirror’s
front page. It was one of several newspapers to remind the public about her sensational disappearance four years earlier.

The couple’s honeymoon ended in Athens in mid-October when Max was obliged to return to the dig at Ur. He was reluctant to leave Agatha because she was sick with food poisoning at the time, but she urged him to prioritize his work. The Woolleys had made it clear to him that there was only room for one wife at the dig – and that was Katherine. Max’s employers felt that women were an encumbrance to their activities at the site. In fact, the Woolleys returned a week late from their summer break, and Max, furious at being parted unnecessarily early from Agatha, took his revenge by erecting a new wing to the house on the site of the dig, in which he intentionally made Katherine’s bathroom so cramped that it later had to be pulled down and rebuilt.

After the honeymoon Agatha found that the usual dread occasioned in her by memories of the disappearance was absent when she returned to England. She wrote to Max from the Paddington Hotel that for the first time in several years she had felt London, even in the rain, was a pleasant place after all. She added that he had lifted a great weight from her shoulders and that the wounds were slowly healing. She admitted that it would take little to open them up again, but she was convinced they would heal once and for all.

One of the pleasures of returning to England was being reunited with her dog Peter. In a letter she wrote soon afterwards from Ashfield detailing her activities, she described Peter as her child. She referred to him in another missive as ‘my little friend and loving companion in affliction’. Rosalind, true to form, continued to blame her mother for her father Archie’s absence. Agatha was also concerned about her second marriage, writing to Max that she couldn’t bear it if he was ever less nice than he was now. She said men often are at their best at about Max’s age since they have a finer vision and a bigger ideal of life. She added shrewdly that very often life narrows them and they become egotistical, self-centred, petty, self-indulgent and censorious. ‘You mustn’t,’ she urged him; ‘you must always be Max.’

By 1930 the sales of her latest mystery,
The Murder at the Vicarage
, were a mere 5,500; as far as her books were concerned the publicity bonanza from the disappearance had ended.
Giant’s Bread
appeared in April that same year under the secret pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Nan immediately realized the novel was by Agatha. The two friends were sitting down to lunch one day at Abney Hall when Nan remarked that she had been sent on loan an interesting book by
The Times
Book Club: ‘Now what was it called? Dwarf’s Blood, I think.’ Agatha knew that her secret was out, and the two women laughed. Knowing Agatha as well as she did the style of writing, together with a poem and a childhood incident in the book, convinced Nan of the certainty that Agatha had written the novel. Nan used to tease Agatha at intervals by saying mischievously, ‘Dwarf’s Blood . . . Dwarf’s Blood!’, although the writer’s secret remained perfectly safe with her. Agatha, in turn, gave her a copy of the book inscribed on the flyleaf: ‘Nan from Mary Westmacott with love. Dwarf’s Blood ha ha!’

Max’s quiet devotion to Agatha and their shared mutual interests went a long way to healing the wounds of her previous marriage. So much so that she began to reassess her faith in God, badly shaken by the collapse of her first marriage.

The reawakening of religious beliefs stemmed from her fascination with time. Sir John Jean’s book
The Mysterious World
made her consider the evidence for a divine plan, and she began to contemplate a future that included God once again. ‘How queer it would be if God were in the future,’ she told Max in a letter, ‘something we never created or imagined but who is not yet – supposing him to be not Cause but Effect. The creation of God is what we are moving to – and is one goal – the aim and purpose of all evolution.’

In December 1930, Agatha was delighted when an original play she had written,
Black Coffee
, débuted at the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage, London, prior to transferring to the West End the following year. Her literary agent Edmund Cork had advised her against having the play put on since it contained too many clichés, but she had not heeded his advice. Madge attended the opening along with Nan and George Kon. Agatha approved of Francis L. Sullivan’s portrayal of Hercule Poirot, which made him more loveable than Charles Laughton’s performance in the role two years earlier in
Alibi.

On Christmas Eve Agatha wrote to Max that it was the day of her wedding anniversary to Archie. Since her divorce from him, it had always been a sad day for her – but not this year. ‘Bless you, my darling, for all you have done and given back to me.’

A residual effect of the publicity from the disappearance saw the release in 1931 of talking cinematic versions of her plays
Alibi
and
Black Coffee
starring Austin Trevor as Hercule Poirot. The actor reprised the role for a third film,
Lord Edgware Dies
, three years later.

Despite Agatha’s newfound contentment there were moments of despair. In 1931 she had a miscarriage while staying at Abney Hall and she and Max decided not to try for another child. Then when her wire-haired terrier Peter developed a growth on his shoulder Agatha, fearing the worst, pointed out to Max that, unlike her, he had never been through a really bad time with nothing but a dog to hold on to. Fortunately Peter recovered.