Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (36 page)

The unhappy experience led Agatha to write a long ranting letter to her daughter in which she defended all her plays in general. Although she said she knew Rosalind had her best interests at heart, Agatha was clearly in denial about how bad her play was. Plainly unable to forget Rosalind’s ‘long, intimate lunches’ with Max at the Savoy, Agatha tried to defend her dramas by taking a sour and somewhat hypocritical pot-shot at her daughter to the effect she would have missed out on forty years of happiness with Max if she had taken the advice of her sister Madge and refused to marry him. The letter ended bitterly: ‘If one doesn’t take a few risks in life one might as well be dead!’

Agatha’s self-esteem received a boost that year when Madame Tussaud’s expressed a desire to model a wax effigy of her. She gave her permission with pleasure, as she had always enjoyed visiting London’s waxworks museum as a child.

In 1972 Michael Parkinson, the television chat-show host, compiled
Michael Parkinson’s Confessional Album – 1973
, in which famous people were asked to record their likes and dislikes. It was unusual for Agatha to respond to a public questionnaire, but she was happy to oblige on this occasion because filling in family confessional albums had been an enjoyable pastime in her youth. She gave her ideal of beauty in nature as ‘a bank of primroses in spring’, cited Elgar, Sibelius and Wagner as her favourite composers and named T.S. Eliot’s
Murder in the Cathedral
as the play she most admired. Her favourite quotation came from Sir Thomas Browne: ‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us’; while she gave as her motto Dr Johnson’s ‘The business of life is to go forwards.’ She stated that the qualities she most liked in men were ‘integrity and good manners’. When asked who her heroes were in real life, she wrote, ‘None. I am not a hero-worshipper.’ This complete
volte-face
from her intensely romantic outlook during her first marriage revealed how much she had changed over the years. She did, however, cite her favourite heroines in real life as the ‘Little Sisters of the Poor’.

When the publishers of the
Guinness Book of Great Moments
wrote asking for her permission to reproduce a corrected proof of a page from
Nemesis
, she agreed. It was a distinct feather in her cap for a woman whose grammar and literary style had often been, with some justification, derided by her critics. They usually made the mistake of judging her as a prose stylist when, really, she was a great story-teller. She was particularly good at writing about children and had the ability to be equally convincing when using the first person as either a man or a woman. In fact, Agatha frequently belittled her writing, calling herself ‘a good, honest craftsman’. What is not in doubt is that she had become a literary legend in her lifetime.

Max continued to worry about his finances. On 17 July 1972 Agatha wrote to her literary agent Edmund Cork asking him to send her a copy of the unpublished Miss Marple novel she had written during the Second World War and a copy of the deed of gift assigning ownership of the copyright to Max, as she felt it was only right that he ought to have copies of them. So long had passed that she was unable to remember if the novel’s current title was
Cover Her Face
or
She Died Young
.

Originally the manuscript was entitled
Murder in Retrospect
after one of the chapters in the book. Agatha’s royalty statement for 15 March 1940 shows that the secretarial agency Edmund Cork hired to type the manuscript charged £19 13s. 9. On 7 June that same year Edmund Cork had written to Agatha advising her that he would have the necessary deed of gift drawn up for the Miss Marple novel. Agatha had eventually visited her literary agent’s offices at 40 Fleet Street, London, four months later on 14 October and signed the document transferring ownership of the copyright of
Murder in Retrospect
to her husband in consideration of what was termed her ‘natural love and affection for him’. This was before Agatha’s American publishers had appropriated the title for
Five Little Pigs
in 1942 (a year ahead of the release of the UK edition that retained the nursery-rhyme title). Agatha duly renamed the novel
Cover Her Face
. In one of her notebooks there are references to
Cover Her Face
under ‘Plans for Sept. 1947’ and ‘Plans for Nov. 1948’, suggesting she was considering revising the unpublished manuscript. But these alterations did not occur until early 1950. After drafting most of the book that became
Mrs McGinty’s Dead
and thinking about plans for another Mary Westmacott novel, Agatha wrote to Edmund Cork from Nimrud saying that, as she was well ahead of her normal writing schedule, she had gone over the Miss Marple novel thoroughly, ‘as a lot of it seemed to have dated very much’. She had removed all the political references and remarks that emphasized the period, although she stressed that the story must remain set in the 1930s, as so much of the action depended on houses with plentiful servants, ample pre-war meals and so on. She observed that it was especially catchwords and particular phrases that seemed to make a book old-fashioned. On rereading this one she thought it was quite good, and she added, somewhat facetiously, she was not sure her writing talents hadn’t gone downhill since then. Following the publication of P.D. James’s début crime novel
Cover Her Face
in 1962, Agatha became aware of the need to think up yet another title for her Miss Marple book, hence her confusion in July 1972 as to whether it was still known by this title or
She Died Young
.

John Curran speculates in his 2009 book
Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making
that the reference to ‘Plans for Sept. 1947’ and ‘Plans for Nov. 1948’ indicate Agatha was still plotting
Cover Her Face
and did not write it until much closer to 1950. But his theory is not endorsed by the evidence of the Agatha Christie–Edmund Cork and Harold Ober correspondence files currently held at Exeter University, which also includes a copy of Agatha’s deed of gift to Max. In her autobiography Agatha had this to say about the last Poirot and Miss Marple novels:

‘It is only now that I fully realise, looking back over my wartime output, that I produced an incredible amount of stuff during those years . . . I had written an extra two books during the first years of the war. This was in anticipation of my being killed in the raids, which seemed to be in the highest degree likely as I was working in London. One was for Rosalind, which I wrote first – a book with Hercule Poirot in it – and the other was for Max – with Miss Marple in it. Those two books, when written, were put in the vaults of a bank, and were made over formally by deed of gift to Rosalind and Max.’

The publication in 2010 of a CD of Agatha dictating portions of her autobiography confirms that the essentials of this passage was faithfully transcribed.
Cover Her Face
was eventually published in 1976, several months after Agatha’s death, as
Sleeping Murder
. Nowadays most editions have dropped the subtitle
Miss Marple’s Last Case
presumably because its setting is so evidently rooted in the 1930s unlike
Nemesis
, the last Miss Marple book she wrote in 1971.

As Agatha’s health began to deteriorate, her daughter made increasingly frequent visits to her mother’s side. In Rosalind’s absence Agatha’s most devoted companion was a Manchester terrier named Bingo, who had been so terrified as a puppy that he used to bite everyone on sight. The one person he did not attack was Agatha. Mistress and dog adored each other, and Bingo slept at the end of her bed. Max’s ankles became a mass of scars, and visitors to Winterbrook soon fell victim to Bingo’s jaws, for he was adept at lying in wait. Agatha would joke with Max that the reason Bingo bit him every time he picked up the telephone when it rang was because he thought the devil was inside it. Notwithstanding, he was a good guard dog, for he gave the alarm one day when a burglar erected a ladder outside Agatha’s bedroom window and escaped with just two rather moth-eaten fur coats.

Agatha’s 1972 novel,
Elephants Can Remember
, concerned a love triangle that ended in triple tragedy. There is a veiled reference to Agatha’s alter ego in Harrogate when one of her characters remarks that the ill-fated Lady Ravenscroft had spoken before her death about starting a new life connected with St Teresa of Avila, the nun who became a saint through her reform of the convents. The remark is intriguing for it in no way propels the plot or leads to an explanation of Lady Ravenscroft’s death.

Agatha felt tired and worn out, and her last book,
Postern of Fate
, which was published in October 1973, was written in a mood of resentment and defiance. She wanted to be left in peace but felt obliged to deliver her annual manuscript to Agatha Christie Ltd on time. She complained to Mrs Thompson, her housekeeper at Greenway, that her publishers were waiting on every word she wrote. As is common with elderly people, Agatha’s thoughts turned increasingly to the past, and the home into which Tommy and Tuppence Beresford move in
Postern of Fate
is modelled on her beloved Ashfield.

While the exposition is a gem of inspiration, the rest of the novel was disappointing since Agatha had started off without a preconceived conjuring trick with which to dazzle her readers. Max determined to salvage the novel by editing it himself, with the help of Agatha’s then secretary, Daphne Honeybone. His editing and that of Agatha’s publishers lacked due care and attention: the ages of the Beresfords’ grandchildren are given as fifteen, eleven and seven – despite the fact that two of them are meant to be twins. Judith and Graham recall Max cajoled Agatha into completing
Postern of Fate
because he was worried about their finances ‘and that Parker woman’.

The writer’s most significant publication that year was
Poems
. The volume includes nearly all the poems that had appeared in 1924 in
The Road of Dreams
, as well as more recent ones. ‘A Choice’ shows the author’s futile attempt to put the regrets of the past behind her in order to live in the present. Significantly, not one of her love poems celebrates the unqualified joys of love. They express the darker side of yearning, trepidation, despair, abandonment and loss. In ‘What Is Love?’ Agatha bemoans the fact that love is not a tree, ‘rooted in time – for all eternity’.

Written in anticipation of the fact that she might die before Max, Agatha seems to suggest in ‘Remembrance’ that he will forget her, although her love for him would remain undiminished after her death.

She also recorded a number of private thoughts on scraps of paper never intending them for publication, claiming the past was with her always – she had only to ‘open the secret coffer that all of us carry within us’.

For some time Rosalind had noticed that her stepfather Max was no longer as attentive to her mother’s needs as he had once been. It had fallen on Rosalind’s husband, Anthony, who was devoted to Agatha, to help her with all her business affairs and the running of the gardens at Greenway, since, in Rosalind’s words, ‘Max could no longer be bothered.’

When it became apparent that there would be no new novel for 1974, Collins released
Poirot’s Early Cases
, which was a collection of short stories Agatha had published in
The Sketch
in the 1920s.

In October that year the writer had a heart attack and was confined to bed. She passed the time by rereading her Mary Westmacott novels. ‘
Unfinished Portrait
I think is one of the best after
Rose and the Yew Tree
,’ she told Edmund Cork. When once asked by the detective novelist and critic Julian Symons why she had used a pseudonym for her romance novels, she replied: ‘I think it is better to keep the two sorts of book separate. I like keeping them to myself, too, so that I can write exactly what I like. You can write a bit of your own life into them in a way, if nobody knows it’s you . . . I would like to have written all sorts of different books, tried all kinds of different things. But of course detective stories supported me and my daughter for many years, and they had to be written.’ It was an extraordinary epitaph for a writing career the success of which was based on detective stories. Agatha also reread her autobiography and had copies sent to Max and Rosalind, two of her sternest critics, for approval.

The medication Agatha took for her heart left her frail and thin. She regressed more and more into the past. She was more lucid some day’s than others; sometimes she would get so confused she would panic because she thought she had to pack for Baghdad, recalls Judith. Agatha was under no illusions that she was nearing the end of her life, and one day she pinned all her brooches on her dress to wear one last time. Max and Rosalind meanwhile looked after her as best they could with the help of a night nurse. Millie Bush, who was in domestic service at Winterbrook, recalls Agatha was too weak to get up some days and was washed in bed by her carers; the indignity of her condition clearly distressed her. Judith and Graham felt that Max was impatient for Agatha to die so that he could marry Barbara.

Agatha was outwardly uncomplaining when Max’s mistress came each weekend to relieve Max of his caring duties. But one day Agatha took up a pair of scissors and cut off her locks of white hair. When someone mutilates their appearance it is often a sign of deep emotional disturbance. Agatha had every reason to feel resentful at being nursed by her husband’s mistress. Her act may have been a calculated cry for help or a deliberate attempt to shock and startle Max and Barbara into a belated sense of guilt. I would suggest Agatha most likely was reminded of the fact that she was no longer a young beautiful woman and cut off her hair in preparation for meeting God. She had, after all, had a strong religious faith for many years. At any rate Max and Barbara behaved more distantly to each other in Agatha’s presence after this and treated her even more attentively.