Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (31 page)

The Wattses’ ancestral home Abney Hall was described as ‘a vast Victorian mansion in the Gothic style’ and renamed Enderby Hall in
After the Funeral
which was published by Collins in May 1953. Agatha’s notebook cites the names of three members of Nan’s family who became forerunners of characters in the novel: James (Nan’s brother) became Richard Abernethie; Judy (Nan’s daughter) became Susan Abernethie; and Miles (Nan’s brother) became Timothy Abernethie. Judith’s photographer husband Graham was the forerunner for Susan Abernethie’s husband Gregory Banks, who underwent a change of profession from photographer to chemist’s assistant, thus making him a more likely suspect in the suspected poisoning of Richard Abernethie. Agatha was always at her best when writing about family tensions and
After the Funeral
is one of Hercule Poirot’s most intriguing investigations.

Of all the mysteries Agatha wrote one of the most personally revealing is
Witness for the Prosecution
, which opened at London’s Winter Garden Theatre in Drury Lane on 28 October 1953 and a year later appeared on Broadway, where it achieved the rare distinction for a thriller of winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best foreign play of 1954. The 1925 short story on which it was based, ‘Traitor Hands’, was written when Agatha was young, romantic and inclined to idolize Archie, and in this story she had, unusually, allowed a ruthless killer to escape justice owing to the duplicity of a besotted female. Agatha was under pressure from the play’s producer, Peter Saunders, and the cast to adhere to the original ending, but she resolutely refused to allow the play to go on unless the killer experienced full retribution. Archie’s betrayal and Max’s furtive affair with Barbara had brought home to her the belief that the innocent ought never to suffer at the hands of the guilty. Her conviction became more evident in her detective fiction as she got older, and after hanging was abolished in the late 1960s her killers almost invariably received punishment and retribution from the gods.

Nan saw all of Agatha’s plays – sometimes more than once. She had a special affinity with her brother Lyonel’s granddaughter Fernanda Marlowe that was entirely reciprocal. Fernanda enjoyed being spoilt by Nan, who took her to the matinées of Agatha’s plays and invariably revealed the identity of the killer to her in the interval. Fernanda was aware Nan and Agatha were ‘great friends’ and often enjoyed taking tea together in the cake shops in King’s Road in Chelsea in London.

A Pocket Full of Rye
quickly sold in excess of 50,000 hardback copies when it was published by Collins in November 1953. This was by now the norm for all of Agatha’s books. Miss Marple upstages an Inspector Neele by solving a series of brutal murders based on the childhood nursery rhyme
Sing a Song of Sixpence
. Agatha’s naming of the police officer after her former rival Nancy Neele is intriguing because she must have been thinking about her when she wrote the book. Miss Marple echoes her creator’s experience when she tells a married woman who has no idea that her husband has been unfaithful to her: ‘If I might venture to advise, if anything ever – goes wrong in your life – I think the happiest thing for you would be to go back to where you were happy as a child.’

Before the publication of
A Pocket Full of Rye
Agatha had tried the story out on her family at Greenway by reading aloud two or three chapters each night after dinner. After the second or third session those present were invited to guess the identity of the killer. Rosalind guessed correctly and opined that the solution was crystal clear to anyone with a grain of intelligence and the novel was not worth inflicting on Agatha’s reading public. This remark, coming from someone who had never worked for a living and who constantly benefited from her mother’s generosity, was both hurtful and unnecessary. When it came to speaking her mind Rosalind was very much her father’s daughter, as Agatha was only too well aware.

Chapter Twenty-Four
No Fields of Amaranth

The first five seasons at Nimrud were so successful that Agatha and Max did not return to the Middle East in 1954. Max had got behind in keeping his archaeological reports up to date, and he devoted the year to writing. The couple divided their time between their London flat, Winterbrook House and Greenway.

Agatha’s outlook was calm and serene at this time because her husband’s mistress Barbara Parker was out of reach in Baghdad, writing up her epigraphic finds and running the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. When Agatha filled in a private family confessional album on 19 April that year she cited her state of mind as ‘deeply happy’. Agatha’s daughter Rosalind also took part in the activity of writing in the confessional album; assisted by her stepfather Max she gave an accurate assessment of her character when she described her favourite occupation as ‘sitting in the sun and doing nothing’. Her chief characteristic was ‘criticising others’, and the fault for which she had the most toleration was stated as ‘none’.

Agatha’s notebook shows that in May she was working on ideas to enlarge and improve what became her 1955 book
Hickory Dickory Dock.
One of the characters, the elegant and sarcastic Valerie Hobhouse, works in a beauty parlour. The physical model for her was almost certainly Barbara Parker, since one of Agatha’s notes reads, ‘Valerie rather like Barbara!’

The weather that summer was glorious. Rosalind and Anthony bought Agatha’s grandson Mathew, now aged nine, to Greenway. Whereas his mother was inclined to moodiness, Mathew had a happy disposition, and a close bond had formed between him and his grandmother because they were both optimists at heart. Max taught Mathew cuneiform signs and played cricket with him; in fact, he became so involved for a time with Mathew’s upbringing that this led to ill feeling on Rosalind’s part and she eventually felt the need to reassert her rights as his mother.

Other visitors to Greenway included Humphrey Watts’s daughter Penelope (Nan’s niece) and Adrian McConnel. The couple worked on his father’s farm near Newton Abbott and planned to marry that September. In 1928 Adrian’s godfather Sir Gerald du Maurier had directed Michael Morton’s stage play
Alibi
based on Agatha’s novel
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
. Adrian thought Agatha was marvellous. She was effervescent with happiness and bonhomie, telling jokes and playfully patting others on the shoulder. Meanwhile Max topped up people’s glasses and remained in the background. He struck Adrian as polite and rather dull. He wondered why Agatha had married a much younger man. ‘People couldn’t figure him out,’ Adrian recalls.

An avid lover of flowers, Agatha was delighted to see the garden in full bloom, and she spent much time that summer swimming in the sea. There was an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables from the kitchen garden, and her gardener Frank Lavin carried off numerous prizes at the Brixham Flower Show.

There were echoes of the aftermath of Agatha’s disappearance in
Destination Unknown,
which was published in November 1954. The heroine Hilary Craven’s marriage has failed. Moreover the death of her daughter, Brenda, after a long illness, has left Hilary without religious hope or optimism for the future. After her husband has defected into the arms of another woman, Hilary escapes ‘the fog, the cold, the darkness of England’ in search of ‘sunshine and blue skies’. But on arriving in Casablanca, Morocco, she discovers ‘with a horrible, stricken coldness’ that she has not left her problems behind: ‘it was from Hilary Craven she was trying to escape, and Hilary Craven was Hilary Craven in Morocco just as much as she had been Hilary Craven in London.’ Agatha had made the same discovery about herself when she visited the Canary Islands after her disappearance. Hilary decides to commit suicide with sleeping tablets, but a secret agent intervenes and asks her to put her life in danger by impersonating the wife of a scientist who has mysteriously vanished; she is advised that the best way of impersonating someone is to feign concussion, because this excuses apparent memory lapses and unpredictable behaviour. Although a conventional thriller in many respects, the book deals with the causes and consequences of defection and assumed identity and makes the point that in the face of major problems there can be no escape and running away solves nothing.

When Agatha gave producer Peter Saunders permission to take a touring version of
The Mousetrap
to Germany to play to the English troops in 1954, he cast Anthony Marlowe in the role of Sergeant Trotter. The actor was married to Merelina Watts, whose father Lyonel was Nan’s brother. The couple’s daughter Fernanda recalls that before
The Mousetrap
tour left England Peter Saunders released her father from the production when he was offered another acting job – this one closer to home.
Sailor, Beware!
, a three act comedy by Philip King and Falkland L. Cary, opened at the Strand Theatre in London in February 1955.

Early that year Agatha and Max returned to Nimrud for the sixth season. The excavations unearthed by his team far exceeded his expectations, but working conditions were harsher than usual; there was a severe drought and high winds whipped up dust storms that alternated with thunderstorms. The expedition house featured a kitchen, a large living-room, an office used by Max with a window through which he paid the workmen, and two large workrooms, one of which featured a darkroom where photographs were developed. At the end of the house was a writing-room that had been built especially for Agatha, in which she kept her typewriter as well as her clothes. The expedition team slept in tents, pitched at right angles to the south end of the house, with Max and Agatha heading the queue and his mistress Barbara Parker occupying the tent next to theirs. Baths were a once-a-week luxury for members of the expedition; the water was heated on a primus stove and poured into a large Victorian hip-bath installed in a mud-brick bathhouse. A jug of hot water was delivered to each tent every morning and before dinner at night.

Agatha loved flowers and would often wander into the fields and pick them for the expedition house. She enjoyed observing birds, particularly the colourful bee-eaters and rollers, and strolling about the dig photographing the workers, local children and stray dogs. After Agatha’s death her son-in-law Anthony Hicks said of her interest in archaeology: ‘Max liked it, so Agatha liked it.

More than one archaeological colleague has stated that Max was ‘very conceited and competitive’. He was not one to hold back when it came to asserting his opinions, stating the worth of his own work and taking the intellectual high ground. It was felt by some who worked on the Middle Eastern digs that he would have been harder to get along with if Agatha had not been there. Max could be volatile and flare up easily when things didn’t go his way, but Agatha knew how to calm him down. ‘Now, Max,’ she would say quietly. This would pull him up, and his rage would quickly dissipate.

Agatha, now in her sixty-sixth year, fell ill with a severe chill at the end of March and was driven to hospital. Following her recovery she returned to Nimrud but spent a considerable amount of time writing in her room. At the end of April a hurricane flattened the tents of the expedition team and tore the roof off the expedition house. It was apparent to everyone that the rigours of desert life were becoming increasingly hard for her. Back in England, when Judith Gardner visited Greenway on one occasion, Agatha greeted her with a hug and the heartfelt words: ‘Max is wearing me out. I can’t keep up with him!’

Sometime during the 1950s Max and Barbara were indiscreet enough to be photographed together in what may have been the sitting-room of her London flat. At one end of the sofa, attired in a shabby suit, a complacent Max is stretched out comfortably, reading a book, his elbow resting on the arm of the sofa, his right hand pressed against the side of his face, his feet encased in grubby slippers. Sitting within an inch or two of him, rather than at the opposite end of the sofa, is his mistress. Barbara’s tired, lined face is wreathed in a cat-like smile, and she is looking directly at the camera, holding up a bottle of Gordon’s gin. The mood of the picture is one of relaxed intimacy. Each has their right leg crossed over the left, unconsciously mirroring the other’s body-language as lovers often do. They are sitting so close together that it would have been awkward for Barbara to get up without either asking Max to move or brushing against him.

On 9 July 1956
A Daughter’s a Daughter,
the play Agatha had written about Nan and Judith in the late 1930s, was performed for the first time at the Theatre Royal in Bath. Although Mary Westmacott was billed as the author, word leaked out that it was by Agatha Christie, thereby ensuring that the eight performances were well attended. The play did not début in London’s West End until 14 December 2009 where it was well received critically with a limited run of thirty-one performances at the Trafalgar Studios. The advance publicity claimed it was based on Agatha’s relationship with her daughter, presumably in a bid to stimulate public interest.

Agatha sublimated her ambivalent feelings for Barbara in her last and most unusual Mary Westmacott book,
The Burden
, published in November 1956. Its sketchiness arises from its uneven style and the cramming of too many ideas into a slim novel.
The Burden
is essentially a reworking of the Cinderella theme: the noble, long-suffering sister ultimately finds love while the self-indulgent, immature and selfish sister perishes.

Laura Franklin is a repressed child who yearns to be loved by her parents. She is unable to bear the thought of her younger sister Shirley getting more affection from their parents, and so she lights a candle of intention in the hope that her sister will die. When the house catches fire that night Laura is horrified by God’s apparently brutal response. After her courageous rescue of Shirley, Laura vows always to care for her.