Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (41 page)

It is Laura Thompson’s contention that Agatha was wearing shoes with high heels and would have found it difficult to walk along ‘unfamiliar roads’ in the dark to the station. But the composite photograph of Agatha on the missing person’s poster issued by the Berkshire police shows her in sensible walking shoes. Agatha was familiar with the location of West Clandon Station because it was on the same stretch of road between Sunningdale and Newlands Corner that she had travelled along on the many occasions when she had driven to mother-in-law’s house at Dorking.

Laura Thompson goes on to say that even if one accepts Agatha arrived at the station in time to catch the 10.52 train, why didn’t she leave home earlier in the night – perhaps around nine o’clock – to make things easier on herself? Agatha could have left sooner, of course, but she wanted to give Archie every opportunity to come home. When he didn’t she was determined to teach her philandering husband a lesson he would never forget. It would have made no sense for Agatha to abandon her car by the Silent Pool, which is a quarter of a mile away from Newlands Corner, down the steeply embanked A25 Dorking Road, as this would have made her walk to the station a longer one, although Laura Thompson obliquely suggests to the contrary. Also the narrow lane leading to the Silent Pool might have proved difficult to find in the dark compared to the wide open space of Newlands Corner. Moreover, the Silent Pool is surrounded by a thick belt of trees, and the vehicle might have gone unnoticed for several days.

Laura Thompson also contends that in early 1927 Agatha went to an unnamed psychiatrist in Harley Street ‘in order to maintain the fiction that she had lost her memory and needed to regain it’. Agatha was, in fact, in the Canary Islands completing
The Mystery of the Blue Train.

Critical of anyone whose opinions or theories do not coincide with her own, Laura Thompson does not hesitate to airbrush Agatha’s image when it suits her. On 23 April 1947 Officer Fris, a survivor of the German concentration camp at Buchenwald during the Second World War, wrote to Agatha via her literary agent explaining how he became the author of a three-act play based on her splendid thriller
Ten Little Niggers
after it was smuggled into his camp from the other side of the barbed wire. The prisoners’ performance of the play was a great success thanks to the cunning plotting of her novel. He asked Agatha’s permission to stage his play for a forthcoming reunion of the Dutch prisoners of war on 20 May 1947.

Laura Thompson states that Agatha gave her permission for the play to be performed since it ‘was clearly a very special request’. But this is incorrect. Agatha’s agent Edmund Cork instead dealt with the matter on her behalf, and permission was refused. In a letter dated 2 May 1947 Edmund Cork advised Officer Fris that rights had been granted that would preclude any professional performance of
Ten Little Niggers
in Holland based on his dramatic version of Mrs Christie’s play and that no exception could be taken to the planned performance on 20 May.

According to Anthony Martin, director of the centenary celebrations, throughout her career, Agatha’s literary advisers were of the opinion that if they granted free favours where her copyrighted material was concerned others might seek to take financial advantage of her work without first acquiring permission to use it and paying the appropriate fees. It might seem harsh in the case of Officer Fris, but it was an entirely consistent line from their point of view.

Laura Thompson’s attempt to diminish the importance of Nan and Judith in Agatha’s life is strange. Quite early on in her biography she states that Nan ‘remained close’ to Agatha ‘all her life’ and that ‘Judith, too, was close to both Agatha and Rosalind.’ However, the biographer later contradicts herself when she alleges, ‘although Agatha wrote to Judith “I shall miss her very much” after Nan’s death in 1959, there is no sense that she was an intimate friend’. This, of course, is absurd.

At no time did Laura Thompson approach the Gardners or anyone else connected with my own book for assistance in her research. The fact that Agatha always gave Nan signed copies of her Mary Westmacott books, years before her pseudonym was publicly exposed, as well as copies of all her detective novels, is irrefutable proof of their long and enduring friendship for those outside their family circle.

During my research many reliable sources stated that Nan and Judith were great friends of Agatha’s all her life, including Rosalind herself during my visit to Greenway in 1994, Anthony Martin, Humphrey Watts’s daughter Dame Felicity Peake and his granddaughter Jane Davies, as well as Mathew Prichard, who confided as much to me over lunch at his home in Wales in 1995. Moreover, Janet Morgan acknowledged in her biography that the relationship Agatha described in
A Daughter’s a Daughter
had nothing to do with herself and Rosalind, but to those who knew them ‘there were touches of Agatha’s old friend from Abney, Nan, and her daughter Judith’.

Other aspects of Laura Thompson’s book betray a degree of censorship, such as Max Mallowan’s relationship with his mistress Barbara Parker. Laura Thompson takes the view that Agatha’s and Max’s marriage was unblemished by adultery. Even so, she admits that one friend of the couple came close to admitting to the affair and said of those who deny it: ‘What people say may be the truth in their eyes. Which may have involved a certain amount of turning a blind eye.’

In a bid to persuade her readers that the Mallowans’ marriage was happy and monogamous until Agatha died in 1976 Laura Thompson quotes from the letter Max wrote to Agatha forty years earlier, some two days prior to their sixth wedding anniversary. This is one in which Max said he thought that sometimes, but not very often, two people find real love together as they had, and then it was something that lay deep and intangible, not to be shaken by the wind. The document was found after Agatha died in a secret drawer of a little desk at Greenway. Laura Thompson intimates that this is proof that Max was a faithful husband throughout the couple’s marriage, but of course the letter is dated 9 September 1936 and Max’s liaison with Barbara did not start until the early 1950s. While the affair might have been considered explosive back then, it seems oddly quaint and unnecessary to continue hushing it up.

Encouraged by the Christie family, Laura Thompson’s biography also takes a somewhat naïve view of the crime writer’s financial affairs and, in particular, Agatha’s testamentary dispositions, claiming ‘the fact that she left only £1,000,600 was in fact no mystery at all. Everything else had been taken from her.’ However, after Agatha’s battles with the Inland Revenue had been resolved in the 1960s she was a very rich woman. The reason she left just over £1 million in her will is because the bulk of her fortune had been disposed of in elaborate tax avoidance schemes in the form of family trusts.

Anthony Martin has stated, after consultation with the literary agent Brian Stone, that Rosalind’s wealth from her mother’s writings was estimated in 1990 to be in excess of £600 million. Greenway was evaluated at £6 million, and around this time she bought Lower Greenway Farm, which consisted of 270 acres. The Christie family have always been secretive about their financial affairs, so Laura Thompson’s wholly unrealistic appraisal of Agatha’s legacy is hardly surprising.

A source close to Agatha’s grandson Mathew Prichard alleges that he was greatly offended by Laura Thompson’s claim that his step-grandfather Max Mallowan ‘found it easier and more congenial to fall in love for the first time with a man’ called Esme Howard prior to becoming Agatha’s second husband.

Laura Thompson alleges that the affair between Max and Esme Howard was not consummated, although, in the absence of proof, her opinions amount to speculation. Mathew Prichard and Laura Thompson allegedly had a crisis meeting in which he asked her to make certain alterations to her manuscript, but she declined, and he is said to have retaliated by refusing to grant her permission to publish in her book any precious photographs of his grandmother from the Christie family’s private albums. Its original title
The Fully Authorized Biography of Agatha Christie
was changed before publication to the more prosaic
Agatha Christie: An English Mystery.
All the photographs of Agatha that appear between the covers of Laura Thompson’s biography are well-known publicity shots from press agencies which are readily available upon the payment of reproduction fees.

Despite disagreeing with Mathew Prichard over certain aspects of her biography, Laura Thompson has never acknowledged the fact in public or fully explained the reasons why. Instead she gave thanks to Mathew Prichard for his ‘infinitely generous support’ and ‘permission’ to reproduce the photograph of Agatha on the dust jacket. In fact the photograph in question is a well-known publicity shot; it first appeared on the back covers of the English first editions of
Death in the Clouds
and
The ABC Murders
during the 1930s. Since then Laura Thompson’s and Mathew Prichard’s professional association in public has been one of guarded neutrality
.

In order to promote Laura Thompson’s biography, which was commissioned as damage control in the wake of my book
Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days
, Agatha Christie Ltd’s publicity machine went into overdrive, citing her as a lifelong addict of crime fiction and, in particular, of Agatha Christie’s work. Laura Thompson was a guest speaker at the Dorothy L. Sayers annual convention in 2008. She confessed to having no knowledge of detective fiction before she began work on her biography and to knowing precious little about Agatha Christie before this. When a member of the audience made an unflattering remark about Mathew Prichard, instead of defending him she maintained a diplomatic silence and, in the words of someone present, ‘it was not hard to see that she agreed’. Asked about relations with the Christie family, Laura Thompson replied that ‘like all things’ this came down to ‘big money’ and the family were doing their best ‘to cash in on the Christie legacy’.

If Rosalind Hicks had lived to see the publication of
Agatha Christie: An English Mystery
she would have perceived Laura Thompson as a loose cannon, since her main reason for commissioning the biography in the first place was to reinforce the amnesia explanation of the disappearance. Given her fondness for Max, Rosalind would also have been furious at Laura Thompson’s claim that he had had an unconsummated homosexual love affair and would doubtlessly have refused to give the biographer permission to reproduce any precious photographs of her mother from the Christie family albums. In short, Rosalind would have hated Laura Thompson’s biography.

Epilogue
A Realm of Her Own

The publicity that arose from the disappearance shook Agatha until her dying day and, although her continued friendship with Nan helped to sustain her in its aftermath, Agatha always regretted having staged it with her help. Moreover she never got over the loss of Archie. Walter Savage Landor’s lines perhaps most poignantly encapsulate her lifelong heartbreak: ‘While the light lasts I shall not forget, and in the darkness I shall remember.’

After Agatha’s death, her writing case was opened and found to contain her wedding ring from Archie, together with letters from him, some mementoes and a cutting of Psalm 55, verses 12, 13 and 14:

For it is not an open enemy, that hath done me this dishonour: for then I could have borne it.

Neither was it mine adversary, that did magnify himself against me: for then peradventure I would have hid myself from him.

But it was even thou, my companion: my guide, and mine own familiar friend.

Love was the most important thing in Agatha’s life: she had been raised to ‘await her fate’ and for her the true symbol of success in life was being a married woman. It is indicative that when she booked into the Harrogate Hydro she accorded herself the title of a married woman. How important this status was to her was reinforced when she created her fictional counterpart Mrs Ariadne Oliver, since there was never any mention in the books of Mr Oliver or what had become of him. Marriage, for better and for worse, was essential to Agatha’s existence, for, as she once told Max, she was like ‘a dog that needs to be taken for walks’. Moreover, as a result of the humiliating public scrutiny she endured in 1926, the extraordinary fame that later came her way never went to her head.

By not mentioning the disappearance in her autobiography Agatha’s intention was not to mislead or confuse her fans. She simply wanted to forget the episode, something she had unsuccessfully tried to do all her life. If Max had not been unfaithful to her she would have been less afraid of her future. Agatha loved Archie far more than she ever did Max, and so Max was never able to hurt her as deeply as Archie. One of the most painful lessons Agatha learned from the breakdown of her marriage to him was to love others as much for their faults as for their virtues. The reason her autobiography omitted the unpleasant episodes in her life was because she intended it as a hymn to God for all the good things that had befallen her.

Agatha spent much of her life hiding from her public. This makes it all the more important to know what happened during the disappearance, because only then can one appreciate how she exorcized her pain over the episode and her subsequent divorce in her writings. She used her poetry to reveal her anxieties about whether she was loved or would ever find love. The short stories ‘The Edge’, ‘Harlequin’s Lane’ and ‘The Man from the Sea’ reveal the chaotic aspects of her marriage to Archie. Her Mary Westmacott novels include some of her most eloquent expressions of Archie’s impact on her life. ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ and
The Burden
reveal her mixed feelings about Max’s mistress Barbara, while
Verdict
was a brave, if unsuccessful, attempt to reconcile herself to Max’s infidelity. When the love of both the men in her life failed her, Agatha was not without hope for most of the time because she found forgiveness and love in the eyes of God.