Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (27 page)

Just how innocent was Rosalind’s and Max’s relationship? There is no doubt that Rosalind was exceptionally fond of her stepfather. She was pessimistic by nature, and, while this often had the effect of rubbing her optimistic mother up the wrong way, Max was not in the least fazed by his stepdaughter’s critical or cynical attitude to life. Unable to forgive Agatha for divorcing her father Archie, Rosalind certainly found it easier to confide in Max, who was closer to her in age than her mother. Max could make Rosalind laugh at the contradictions in her own nature, and the two enjoyed arguing and matching each other’s bluntness of speech. It may well be that if one or both of them had romantic feelings for the other they never openly acknowledged or acted upon them. There is no doubt that Agatha resented the intimacy of their relationship, and her jealousy simmered. During her last talk on the subject with Nan the latter advised her that the best way to keep Rosalind and Max apart was to marry her daughter off.

Judith’s birthday fell on 16 September, the day after Agatha’s, and it was customary for them to enjoy their birthdays together with family and close friends. The last birthday they celebrated at Ashfield was in 1938: Judith was twenty-one and Agatha was forty-eight. Agatha would decorate the dining-room chairs with flowers, and on the appropriate day the one whose birthday it was took her place at the head of the table. ‘Agatha always made our birthdays such special occasions,’ recalls Judith.

Encroaching suburbia was spoiling the tranquillity of Ashfield, and, encouraged by Max, Agatha sold the small estate in 1938 to raise £6,000 to acquire Greenway, a white Georgian house, with over ten bedrooms, set in thirty-three acres of grounds overlooking the River Dart in Devon. Greenway became her summer residence for the rest of her life.

On the advice of Guilford Bell, who spent the summer in Devon with her family, Agatha had the ugly Victorian wing pulled down in order to restore Greenway to its former symmetry. At her request Guilford took charge of the project. A large sitting-room and bedroom was set aside for Rosalind on the second floor, while Agatha’s and Max’s private quarters were situated on the floor below.

Judith recalls that Agatha was especially fond of Guilford, since he was tall and fair and reminded her of Archie. Agatha came to regard him, in her own words, as ‘almost like a son’ and for a while hoped that he and Rosalind might marry. However, this was never on the cards because he was a homosexual. Years later, after her mother’s death, Rosalind would write to him to say: ‘You were one of her favourites.’

Not long after Agatha and Max moved in to Greenway Peter died and was buried in the grounds behind the house, a white cross bearing his name marking the site of his grave. She was greatly saddened because her beloved companion had sustained her through many difficult periods in her life, most notably the weeks before and after her disappearance. Although she was offered another dog, she could not bear to replace him at that time.

Nan’s friendship sustained Agatha; indeed, she was the first to sign Greenway’s visitors’ book: ‘Good luck to Greenway and Agatha and Max, lots of love Nanski.’ Agatha made light of Nan’s illness when she inscribed her 1939 novel,
Murder Is Easy
: ‘To my old friend B. Hinds from Agatha.’ (‘B. Hinds’ was a play on words following the surgery on Nan’s rectum.) Officially dedicated to Rosalind and Susan North, ‘the first two critics of this book’,
Murder Is Easy
is an underrated detective story because it does not feature Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. It was also overshadowed by the release that year of the brilliant tour-de-force
Ten Little Niggers
, which has since become the world’s best-selling mystery with sales in excess of 100 million copies.

The start of the Second World War in September 1939 heralded the end of a decade that had brought both personal and professional happiness to the writer. It also led indirectly to the disappearance returning to haunt her once more.

Chapter Twenty-Two
Darkened Skies

As the war escalated and the skies over England darkened with enemy planes, Agatha came to rely on Max to provide love and consolation, despite their lengthy separations from each other. The fact that he wrote such loving and tender letters to her reassured her that she had not been a failure in life and that she had succeeded as a wife. She marvelled how she had changed from the forlorn, unhappy person he had met in the Middle East. She told him in a letter that he had done everything for her. For much of the war Max served abroad as an adviser on Arab affairs.

Agatha longed to join her husband, but official hurdles prevented her from acquiring a position as a wartime correspondent. Unlike some of her compatriots who took flight from England for the duration, she moved to London to dispense medicine at University College Hospital, denying herself the financial advantages she would have gained from living in a foreign tax haven.

In June 1940 Agatha’s daughter Rosalind, then aged twenty, married 33-year-old Captain Hubert Prichard of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers at a register office in Denbigh in Wales. A born soldier with a bent for poetry, Hubert was a friend of Jack Watts, Agatha’s and Nan’s nephew, and had been introduced to Rosalind at Abney Hall. Agatha liked Hubert and hoped he and Rosalind would enjoy many years of lasting happiness together. Their marriage eased Agatha’s worries over Rosalind’s close relationship with Max.

Life was difficult for Agatha’s sister Madge and brother-in-law Jimmy, especially after the Luftwaffe began a series of bombing raids on Manchester’s military and civilian sites that culminated in the Christmas Blitz of 1940. Gone were the affluent pre-war days when there had been an indoor staff of sixteen at Abney Hall. Agatha once described her sister as ‘the most indefatigable woman I have ever known; a human dynamo’. Madge now ran Abney Hall with the help of a former kitchen-maid, who came in to cook the meals each day. When Agatha stayed at Abney Hall she would hear Madge start the housework around half-past five in the morning. She dusted and swept, made up the fires, cleaned the brass and polished the furniture. It was an enormous house with fourteen bedrooms and numerous sitting-rooms. Occasionally Madge would disguise herself as a maid when she brought breakfast to the officers billeted there. By half-past ten in the morning she would have finished all the housework and would turn her attention to the kitchen garden, where a large quantity of vegetables were being cultivated.

One morning Madge entered the billiard room and saw her dog sitting quietly in his basket near an unexploded bomb. There had been much noise and confusion the previous night while everyone was up on the roof helping to put out the incendiary bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe. No one had heard the bomb fall into the billiard room. Alerted by Madge, the bomb disposal experts arrived and advised everyone to evacuate the house in twenty minutes: ‘Just take anything essential.’ A thoroughly rattled Madge removed her billeted officers’ personal belongings, her toothbrush and sponge bag and a bouquet of wax flowers from the green malachite table in the drawing-room. The bomb was duly removed, and Agatha later used the wax flowers and the green malachite table as clues in her 1953 mystery
After the Funeral.
The local firm of S. and J. Watts was also struck by bombs at this time. The fire brigade and police, overwhelmed by the demand on their services, intended to let the warehouse burn to the ground. But Jimmy’s employees managed to put the fire out and saved the building.

As a child Agatha had loved playing with her doll’s house, and during the course of her adult life she enjoyed acquiring real houses and doing them up and, quite often, renting them out. At one point she owned eight houses. One of her properties, 58 Sheffield Terrace on Campden Hill, where she lived briefly at this time, was bombed during the London Blitz. Fortunately she and the other occupants were away at the time. She later incorporated this incident into
Taken at the Flood.

Agatha’s main concern throughout the war was for the safety of her loved ones. She was also worried that if anything happened to Rosalind and Max she would be in a similar position to that in which she had found herself before her disappearance when she had wanted to write in order to consolidate her finances but had been prevented from doing so by her deteriorating marital situation. In 1940 she produced two novels that were not published until the 1970s:
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
and
Murder in Retrospect
, which was retitled
Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case
before its release
.
Both manuscripts were secured in a bank vault and made over as deeds of gift to Rosalind and Max. (Max’s deed of gift was dated 14 October 1940; see
Chapter Twenty-Six
for further details.) Her intention was that the books were to be published only in the event of her death so that her bereaved daughter and husband would at least have some kind of financial nest-egg. Other books Agatha wrote during the war years were quickly published in order to alleviate her cash-flow problems.

Shortly before the outbreak of the war the US tax office had begun making inquiries about her financial affairs. Her literary advisers had hired a prominent tax lawyer to sort out the complicated tangle resulting from her prolific literary output. Wartime legislation meant that during this period she was prevented from receiving most of the large US royalties due to her, despite being forced to pay massive taxes on them in advance in England. What money she received after tax on her British income was not always sufficient to cover the deficit, and there were periods when she lived very much hand to mouth.

The thriller
N or M?,
in which the intrepid sleuths Tommy and Tuppence Beresford foil an attempted invasion of England by Hitler’s fifth column, was serialized by the American magazine
Redbook
in March 1941. Its patriotic message struck just the right note of optimism for Americans eager to combat Nazism. For the most part Agatha avoided specific references in her novels to the war and other current events, partly because she did not wish to dwell on them and partly because she realized her stories would date once the war was ended.

Whenever trouble had loomed in the past work had been Agatha’s best distraction, but as her financial situation became more parlous she felt as if she had been deprived of this crutch. What was the point of writing if she got no royalties? she wrote to her literary agent Edmund Cork. He consoled her with the news that Milestone, an American film company, had made an offer for the film rights to
N or M?
that were ‘world-wide in their scope’, which meant the money she earned would be paid directly to her in England. The film was in fact never made. Crippling taxation nearly forced Agatha into bankruptcy twice during the war, and in a desperate bid to prevent this she tried unsuccessfully on two occasions to sell Greenway, which at the outbreak of the war had become a home for evacuee children before being taken over by the Admiralty for the US Navy. She was terrified of drying up creatively and desperate to keep afloat financially.

She confided to Edmund Cork that it was nerve-racking to feel unable to write when one needed to do so to keep the money coming in. She bitterly recalled how during the breakdown of her first marriage she could have done with a manuscript up her sleeve instead of having to produce ‘that rotten book’
The Big Four
and having to force herself to complete
The Mystery of the Blue Train.
Her remarks were not without irony given
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
and
Murder in Retrospect
were being held in reserve, but this nevertheless reflects the acute misery and anxiety of day-to-day living during that period.

After the outbreak of the war Nan and Judith became locked in conflict. Nan had been anxious to move from London to the country in the hope it would be safer there. Judith had refused to go, saying she would be bored. She knew she would miss London’s night life, and Nan had reluctantly agreed that she could live for a year with her Uncle Lyonel and his second wife Joan in Victoria Road, off Kensington High Street. (By this time he had divorced his first wife Jean, who remained good friends with Nan and Agatha.) Judith had no fear of bombs, her one thought being to have a good time. ‘When you’re young you never think it will be you.’ Judith recalls that in her determination to enjoy London’s nightclubs there had been many an occasion when she used the sounding of the air-raid sirens as an excuse not to return to Victoria Road until the early hours of the morning.

A major cause of conflict between mother and daughter was that Nan wanted Judith to train to become a nurse. Nan, like Agatha, had been a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment during the First World War, and it worried her that her daughter had no career. Judith confided her problems to Agatha and ended up weeping uncontrollably, since nursing did not appeal to her in the least. Agatha, who regarded Judith as a second daughter, knew that she loved children and found her a position near Greenway as a voluntary assistant at a crèche in Paignton for evacuee children. This solution satisfied everyone and enabled Judith to live first with Nan at Tor Close in Churston and later at Penhill in Brixham, both villages near Greenway.

Nan had no desire to return to London at that time; she preferred the quiet of country life. When the warehouse where she had stored her furniture from Cheyne Court was bombed in London Nan felt justified in her decision to move to Devon. It worried her that Agatha had moved to blitz-ravaged London to work in the hospital, but, as Judith put it, ‘Agatha was a woman of enormous courage and loved England too much to ever leave.’

There were happier, more relaxed times for Agatha when the bombing abated. Nan would occasionally come up to London. She found running Penhill difficult and would stay at London’s exclusive Hyde Park Hotel, where most of the guests preferred to sleep in the passageways, believing themselves to be safe from bombs that might fall during the night. On one occasion the hotel was so badly shaken, Nan later told Agatha, that she returned to her bedroom to find her wardrobe-door mirror had cracked from side to side. When Agatha met up with her friend she invariably asked: ‘For half a pound tell me who’s your latest?’