Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (7 page)

Sunningdale was stockbroker-belt territory, twenty-six miles out of London on the border of Surrey and Berkshire, and in January 1924 the couple moved into a rented upper-floor flat in a large Victorian house called Scotswood in the older area of Sunningdale known as Sunninghill. In the first flush of excitement of leaving crowded London it was easy to overlook the flat’s constant plumbing and electrical problems.

On 27 January 1924 Agatha signed a three-book contract with Collins, which promised a lucrative £200 advance on each title and a generous royalty, even though she had one more book to deliver to the Bodley Head. When Agatha’s agent Edmund Cork informed John Lane of the offer he grumpily responded that anyone who was prepared to pay that much for her work was welcome to it.

Agatha was now an established writer, but with success came new problems. Archie and Agatha constantly fought over money; she resolutely refused to share her earnings with him. The income from the books and short stories had gone to her head – it was the first time she had an income of her own – and she turned Archie down every time he asked for money, unaware that it was leading to a rift between them. Agatha’s financial independence led to her installing her mother in an adjacent flat at Scotswood. As Archie had always been secretly jealous of his wife’s relationship with Clarissa this had the unintended effect of making him feel even more excluded from Agatha’s life.

Clarissa was happy with the arrangement, since it enabled her to be near her granddaughter. Rosalind was an intelligent five-year-old, and her grandmother’s pleasure in teaching revived. The new lease of life Clarissa experienced was not without its drawbacks, however, since she was as jealous of Archie’s relationship with her daughter as he was with hers and she was becoming distinctly set in her ways. It was fortunate that Clarissa divided her time between Ashfield and the home of Madge and Jimmy in Cheshire. Agatha would later opine that living in close proximity to a mother-in-law is enough to wreck most marriages – it is unclear to which mother-in-law she was referring.

After the war Archie’s mother had moved to the market town of Dorking in Surrey, just twenty-five miles from Sunninghill. His stepfather, William Hemsley, now had a post as a schoolmaster at Rugby School. During term time he did not commute the 113-mile journey to his home every day, as he was required to live at the school. This led to Peg having a good deal of spare time on her hands, and Agatha found she coped best with her in small doses. Agatha’s volatile mother-in-law was only too happy to tell other people their business and had never rid herself entirely of the belief that Agatha was not good enough for her eldest son. Relations between Peg and Agatha would undoubtedly have been more strained if the latter had been less tactful and outwardly compliant.

One activity that united Agatha and Archie was looking for a home of their own to buy, since Scotswood needed continual maintenance. House hunting was always one of Agatha’s great pleasures in life, and their protracted search for a suitable property had the effect of bringing them closer. But the stability of their union was illusory, as events would reveal. For all her meddling ways Peg was more clear-sighted than she was given credit for when she intimated to friends that her son and daughter-in-law were beginning to lead separate lives.

Following the publication in August 1924 of
The Man in the Brown Suit
, Agatha immersed herself in the world of London theatre. At this time her sister Madge had a play,
The Claimant
, produced by Basil Dean at the Queen’s Theatre.
The Claimant
opened on 11 September and ran for five weeks. During the British Empire tour, when Agatha had first heard of Madge’s impending success, she had confided her excitement in a letter to her mother and had added that she would be furiously jealous if Madge made it into films first with her writing.

During rehearsals of the play, Madge was carried away by her own self-importance and conducted herself like a dowager-duchess. She became convinced that the cast were captivated by her and that Basil Dean, in particular, considered her a ‘genius’. ‘They can’t do without me’ became her catch-phrase. She relished the experience so much she planned to write a play about Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, but despite Basil Dean’s encouragement it was never produced. Agatha was keen to see a rehearsal of
The Claimant
, and Madge spent some weekends with the Christies at Scotswood in Sunninghill, which enabled Agatha to keep up with all the theatrical gossip.

Given her sister’s airs of grandeur, it is understandable that Agatha much preferred the company of her friend Nan to Madge’s. By this time Agatha’s daughter Rosalind appeared to be much closer to her Aunt Madge, whom she called Punkie, than her own mother, which is not altogether surprising since Madge and Jimmy had looked after Rosalind while her parents where on the British Empire tour. Decades later, Rosalind would say of Madge, ‘My aunt was more entertaining than my mother. She was great fun. Slightly buried in Manchester.’

Agatha contented herself that year by publishing, at her own expense under the imprint of Geoffrey Bles,
The Road of Dreams
, a series of rather mystical love poems she had written, several of which were based on the mythical figures of the
commedia dell’arte
, which in the form of the china figurines on her mother’s mantelpiece had fascinated her ever since she was a child. Although Agatha was never more than a pedestrian poet, publishing the collection enabled her to express the repressed romantic side of her nature she was unable to give rein to in her marriage. While she and Archie still took intermittent pleasure in shared activities – golf permitting – he had always been reluctant to reveal his innermost feelings. He considered discussing emotions to be indecent. This disinclination to confide his feelings, while initially surprising and hurtful to Agatha, had resulted in her attempting to repress her own feelings and had led her to conclude that Archie probably loved her more than she loved him, since he apparently needed less expression of love to satisfy him.

One of the advantages of having a Morris Cowley was that Agatha could drive her mother to Ashfield whenever they wanted a break instead of taking the train to Torquay. Clarissa loved being driven by Agatha to the homes of friends and other interesting places she had had difficulty getting to in the past. Agatha’s friend Nan and daughter Judith, now aged eight, were regular house guests at Ashfield. The writer would begin each day by having a cup of tea in bed. It was Judith’s habit to wake early and go to Agatha’s room and chat to her while Agatha played with her two dogs, Peter and Billy. Of the two dogs, Peter, a wire-haired terrier, was her favourite. ‘Come to missus,’ Agatha would say to him.

A popular activity for Agatha and Nan was to pack themselves, their daughters and the two dogs in the Morris Cowley and go for picnics on Dartmoor. The writer stated in her autobiography that ‘rough country held no terrors’ for her because she did so much walking and exploring in the region. One of the things Agatha’s family and friends had to suffer out of affection for her was her optimism about the weather and her belief it would be better on the moor than in Torquay. Judith recalls that the weather could be treacherous and it would often bucket down with rain on Dartmoor.

On one occasion Peter attacked and killed a farmer’s hen. There was nothing Agatha could do except apologize and offer to pay the farmer for the loss of his livestock. On the drive home Judith and Rosalind sat in the back of the car with the two dogs. The only way they were able to survive the journey was to lean their heads out of the windows because Peter and Billy stank after spending the day foraging around in the mud and undergrowth.

By now Rosalind had developed into a bright, affectionate, direct and hyper-active child. ‘She was the kind of child,’ Agatha once said of her daughter, ‘who was never still for a moment, who, if you returned from a long and gruelling picnic, would say brightly, “There’s at least half an hour before supper – what can we do?” It was not unusual to come round the corner of the house and find her standing on her head.

By March 1925 Agatha was hard at work on
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, unaware that Archie had been introduced at the golf course to a brunette typing clerk who worked at the Imperial Continental Gas Association in London. Nancy Neele was vivacious, had plenty of time for socializing and was down to earth and practical; more significantly, her passion for golf equalled Archie’s. Romance blossomed.

Agatha remained in total ignorance of Archie’s affair while she was busy writing. Given that her tastes were literary and Archie’s sporting, Sunninghill was clearly not the place for them to regain what she believed was the temporary lost footing in their marriage. Somewhere altogether different was required. Following the completion of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
they went abroad in the summer of 1925 to Cauterets in the French Pyrenees. The holiday could not have come at a better time: Archie had stopped seeing Nancy because he was convinced that their affair was sure to lead to further complications and unhappiness. It seemed Agatha and Archie might be able to unite their lives once again.

The decision to visit Cauterets was Agatha’s, since she had happy memories of staying there with her family as a young child. At first, the couple found it disappointing. Their holiday soon acquired momentum, however, with walks up the mountains where they drank the sulphurous waters, which in a letter to Clarissa they described as ‘
la douche nasale
’
.
There were charabanc expeditions (Archie wrote scathingly about their fellow passengers to Clarissa) and games, including boules, before they moved on to San Sebastian, where they indulged in one of Agatha’s favourite passions: swimming. The evenings were spent at the Kursaal, where Agatha found Archie sadly lacking in spontaneity. The cabaret show started at 10.30 each night, and Archie, who was used to going to bed early at home, duly retired at the first interval. Agatha, who took pleasure in being as impulsive and capricious as her mother, considered her husband was becoming rather stuffy. Their holiday ended on a more carefree, frivolous note when, having endured the outward journey to France sitting upright in a second-class compartment all night for reasons of economy, they decided to travel home first class. What Agatha was unaware of was that Archie’s moodiness during the holiday was caused by his mixed feelings about Nancy, and soon after their return home Agatha began to feel like a golfing widow once more – and with good reason. The abandoned wife was more abandoned than she knew, for Archie was once again seeing Nancy.

Archie’s preoccupation with furthering his career intensified, and this meant that Agatha was obliged to attend a number of business dinners, every minute of which she hated. When he came home from work in the evening he often immersed himself in a book or in business matters after dinner. By working so hard through the week Archie was deliberately contriving to ensure his weekends were free to spend with Nancy.

Agatha loved him too much to displease him by complaining and looked forward instead to the weekends when she could reclaim him from his work. But the country walks and picnics Agatha and Archie had enjoyed earlier in their marriage had become things of the past. The strain of Archie’s double life took its toll: he became tired and listless, the routine of City life dragged him down, and his work-day often began with him arriving at Sunningdale Station so late that he had to run across the tracks in front of the approaching train to reach the far platform in order to catch it.

Increasingly the most vital link between the Christies was their daughter Rosalind. Archie’s indifference to fatherhood before she had been born had been transformed into a special kind of mutual love, based on a shared practical outlook and sense of humour; this often left Agatha feeling excluded. Archie spoke to Rosalind as if she were an adult and expected her to respond in kind. When he gave her a task to perform, such as cleaning his golf clubs, he expected her to do the job properly, and Rosalind appeared to enjoy the challenge far more than her mother’s imaginary games. Archie had developed into a wonderful father, happily playing games with pennies on the floor for the amusement of Rosalind and Nan’s daughter Judith. The two young girls were virtually raised together since their mothers were such good friends, and Judith, a quiet, introverted child, developed quite a ‘pash’ on Archie and thought he had the most ‘lovely blue eyes’.

Agatha’s feelings for her daughter ran deep, and she was saddened to find that she had not been able to reproduce the same mother–daughter relationship that she, as a child, had enjoyed with Clarissa. Agatha’s attempts to play make-believe games with Rosalind were undermined by the latter’s practical nature, and she was disappointed to find that her daughter did not share her enthusiasm for the activities and fairy books that Agatha had enjoyed as a child. Agatha found in Rosalind the same cool, judgemental qualities apparent in Archie and was secretly rather alarmed by her child.

June 1925 saw the publication of Agatha’s last book for the Bodley Head.
The Secret of Chimneys
was dedicated to Agatha’s and Nan’s 22-year-old nephew Jack Watts (Madge’s and Jimmy’s son) ‘in memory of an inscription at Compton Castle and a day at the zoo’. It was a light-hearted thriller involving the murder of a prince in the council chamber of an English stately home. The novel included a crack at the Bodley Head’s failure to adhere to its publishing schedules when she makes one of her characters observe of a book written by another character that it would be at least a year before it was brought out, as publishers sat on manuscripts and hatched them like eggs.

The publication of
The Secret of Chimneys
was eclipsed that same year by a more significant literary event.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, the plot of which had been partly inspired by two similar suggestions put to her by Nan’s brother, Jimmy Watts, and a young fan, Lord Louis Mountbatten, first appeared in the London
Evening News
as a serial that ran from July to September under the title
Who Killed Ackroyd?