The Christie Affair (23 page)

Three years ago, when I set my sights on Archie, I knew it would never do to approach him. Instead, I placed myself in his line of vision. I found out what he liked and became that, looking away instead of allowing our eyes to meet. The perfect golf swing, the shyest smile. Like following a recipe that results in a beautiful cake, each step worked out just as it was meant.

Chilton didn’t seem the sort of man who’d require that sort of game. He was approachable. Humble, but not in a lowly way. In a likeable one. He smiled almost sheepishly as he unfolded his napkin. Everything about him seemed frayed – his clothes, his face and his hair, which needed combing rather badly. He took tea instead of coffee.

‘Jitters,’ he explained, holding out his one good, slightly trembling hand, ‘since the war.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Finbarr had no tremors. Each man carried the war differently.
I liked that Chilton announced his weakness rather than attempted to hide it.

He said, ‘I see your friend has left.’

‘My friend?’

‘The American lady, Mrs Clarke.’

‘Yes, she did say she was leaving. But we’re not particular friends. I only just met her the other day.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. I’ve never been to America.’

‘And her first trip to England?’

‘I don’t believe we discussed it.’

Chilton looked at me in a way I found unsettling. It was a full, unabashed examination. Not a leer, not at all, but searching, and then assessing what he found. I did not love his questions about Lizzie Clarke but at the same time I found him endearing and, faced with his gaze, I couldn’t help but bestow a small smile, as if I needed to comfort him.

The waitress approached our table but he waved her away.

‘How do you know I don’t want to order something?’ I asked. Something I would never say to Archie. Or Finbarr, only because he would never dismiss a waitress without first finding out if I were hungry.

‘Do you?’

I shook my head.

‘It’s an astonishing business,’ Chilton said.

‘You mean the disappearance? That lady novelist?’

‘Why, no. That’s not what I meant. Though surely that’s astonishing as well.’

‘Have they found her?’

‘No indeed. Her whereabouts are still very much a mystery.’

‘I think it’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘For a lady to become an author.’

He looked surprised by this change in subject. ‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘I think so too.’

‘I used to dream of becoming one myself,’ I said. ‘But life got in the way.’

Chilton nodded. He wasn’t surprised at my confiding. It’s the sort of thing that happened, at these hotels, away from the usual world. People told each other things. It’s why my fast friendship with Lizzie Clarke was not suspicious.

‘But you’re still young,’ he said. ‘Surely you’ve time to write a hundred books, if you like.’

‘Surely.’ I clattered my teacup back to its saucer.

‘What’s astonishing to me,’ he said, returning to his purpose, ‘is the Marstons.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Astonishing. Would you excuse me, Mr Chilton? I’ve finished here. I do wish you a good day.’ I put my napkin on the table and stood. ‘If you don’t mind, Mr Chilton, I must say, you don’t seem at all the type to holiday at a spa.’

‘Have I said I’m on holiday?’ He tilted his head and for just a moment he did not look unassuming. In fact, he looked rather shrewd.

‘No, of course. You’re searching for Agatha Christie. I wish you good fortune in that endeavour, Mr Chilton. Good day.’

I left the dining room, unsure of what to do with myself next. The conversation with Mr Chilton left me exhausted. How difficult it is to walk through the world with your insides intact.

Looking back on this stretch of time, not just my days in Harrogate but all the years between the two Great Wars, I often think how fine it should have been. We allowed ourselves to believe evil had been defeated, as if evil never did rise twice. We had so many of the modern conveniences – telephones, automobiles, electric lights – but not
too
many of them, and not too
readily available. Later there would be an overabundance of noise and glare. We could all be too easily reached. The very stars dimmed from the lights reflected on earth, and you could never do what I’d just done, escape from your ordinary life and fade away, undetectable.

I went up to my room and sat on my bed, picking up
The Great Gatsby
to read its final chapters. My eyes scanned the text but it was my own story that filled my mind. The Clarkes had packed up and gone away. What if I did the same? I could never go back to Ireland. But what if I said to Finbarr,
Forget Ballycotton. Let’s go away somewhere else. Anywhere but Ireland. Anywhere but England.
I could leave Agatha and Archie Christie in the past and take hold, finally, of my own future. Begin anew. As if such a thing were possible.

A distinct sound reached me through the window I didn’t remember opening. Perhaps my imagination. Certainly it couldn’t have come from the hotel. It might have come from a pram ambling down the road. But I felt certain I heard a baby crying. That sharp, insistent mewl of need and hunger. A pain struck my breasts, stinging, as if they wanted to express milk. I threw my book aside, stood and pulled the window closed. I could never leave England. Not even with Finbarr.

Chilton knew it would not do to let Mrs Christie go undiscovered for long. Resources were being lost. People were worried. He thought it might be less embarrassing to her – that she could rectify everything more quietly – if she allowed him to deliver her home. He decided to go to her straight away and make this offer. The two of them, driving through the countryside. He found himself thinking less about the moment he appeared with
her in Sunningdale – a hero – and more about the journey itself. What would they find to talk about, as they drove the country roads?

But when he arrived at the house where he’d discovered Agatha, intent on convincing her of his plan, there was no smoke spiralling from the chimney. Where the car had been hidden there were only the tyre marks it left behind, the branches that had covered it neatly stacked on the grass. Chilton pushed the front door gently, not even touching the knob. It swung open without resistance or complaint. The rooms he walked through were empty of occupants. The ash sat cold in the fireplace. In one bedroom a light scent of lavender lingered. Atop the dresser was a crisp five-pound note.

Chilton sat on the bed and pressed a pillow to his face. Inhaled. By the time the home’s rightful occupants returned, there’d be no discernible trace of it, but the next person to sleep on this pillow would dream inexplicably of fields filled with purple flowers.

He might not care for his career anymore, but he still had a modicum of pride, plus Lippincott to consider. Unless he managed to find Agatha a second time, he couldn’t possibly reveal, to anyone, the first.

Here Lies Sister Mary

W
E SLEPT IN
a dormitory on the second floor of the convent, narrow beds in a row, close together. During the day the room was locked so nobody could steal upstairs to rest. At night, once we were in bed, the doors were locked again, the nuns the only ones who had the keys. Sometimes, I still dream about the convent catching fire, all of us locked inside that room with no escape.

It was a restless place to sleep, even in our exhaustion. The nursery was just below us, and we could hear babies wake and cry. When Susanna last stayed here there had been a different Mother Superior. At night the nuns would pin the babies’ gowns to their cots and leave them till they could be nursed in the morning. ‘It was the worst agony I ever felt,’ Susanna said, ‘hearing my baby cry with no way to get to her. Of course it’s no accident they have us sleeping where we can hear them.’

Punishment, wherever it could be found. The new Mother Superior was kinder, at least when it came to the babies. I’d only ever glimpsed the woman at Mass, so far across the chapel that I had no sense of her colouring, age or features. During her reign, two girls were chosen to work as night attendants. When inconsolable wails reached us, at least we knew the children weren’t
all alone, but held and rocked. Every morning, the most recently delivered mothers’ gowns would be soaked with milk, expressed for their out-of-reach babies.

Of course, the girls cried too, at night. Not just the nursing mothers but girls who’d just arrived, mourning their austere fate. Girls whose babies had been adopted or fostered out, or moved to the adjoining orphanage even though they were not orphans, their mothers mere yards away, longing and toiling and hoping against all expectations. We were a desperate lot, and the desperate seldom sleep well.

Bess’s bed was next to mine. I woke one night to hear her sobbing, and sat up to squint through the darkness, making sure it was her. My hands went immediately to my burgeoning belly, the little child kicking and rolling, dancing and thumping. I didn’t yet think of my baby as ‘her’. But that’s how it is in memory. Her, my baby, my little girl. I see her, smiling at me and waving. I wave back. I blow kisses.

‘Bess,’ I whispered. ‘Is that you?’ I put my thin blanket aside and went over to her. She startled like a war veteran when I put my hand on her shoulder. ‘Hush now, Bess, it’s only me. Nan.’

She put her hand over her mouth, shaking, trying to pull herself together.

I sat on the edge of her bed. ‘You don’t have to stop crying on my account,’ I said, and stroked the strands of her cropped hair off her forehead. She had a sweet face, fresh and pretty. It was easy to imagine a young soldier falling in love with her. She should have been out in the world, wearing long hair and fetching clothes. Laughing.

‘I can’t bear it,’ Bess said. ‘I thought once I got bigger he’d leave me alone. Move on to someone else. But he won’t. He won’t.’ She pushed herself up on her elbows. Eight months
pregnant, at least, but one of those women who carries very small. Her whole figure was slight and spare except for the globe of her belly.

I gathered up Bess’s hand and kissed it, searching my mind for something helpful or comforting. ‘We could tell Sister Mary Clare.’

Bess didn’t have the heart to tell me. Sister Mary Clare already knew.
Come now, it’s nothing you haven’t done before
, she’d say in a singsong voice. Other times she’d change her tune as if Bess wouldn’t remember anything she’d said before.
Of course Father Joseph would never do such a thing. He’s a man of God.

How I wish she had told me but it was kindness that prevented her. She wanted me to hold on to whatever comforts I’d managed to find. Instead, she said, ‘And what can Sister Mary Clare do? She’s only another woman. None of them can do anything. I should’ve been brave enough to throw my body off a cliff before they could ever bring me here.’

‘Don’t say that.’ I told her, in a few quiet sentences, about Colleen.

‘She was a smart girl, your sister.’

‘Please. I mean it. Don’t say that.’

‘I’m sorry, Nan. I am. I have five brothers and a sister back in Doolin. Every day I think about my little sister Kitty. For all she knows I did throw myself off a cliff. Whatever Da told her, it wasn’t that he brought me here.’ Bess lay back down on her side. She placed her hands in a ‘V’ and lay them between her pillow and cheek. ‘Kitty wants to be in pictures,’ she said. ‘She’s pretty enough, too. Only twelve years old. I hate not being there with her. I wish I could write to her and say, if you ever get in trouble, don’t tell the priest, don’t tell Da. Don’t tell anyone. Just get yourself away.’

Away to where? I thought, but didn’t say. If there was a place in this world that welcomed pregnant, unmarried girls, I hadn’t heard of it.

‘I hate to think of Father Joseph touching Kitty,’ Bess said fiercely. ‘I’d have to kill him. I would.’

She started to cry again. I hated myself for feeling terrified that Father Joseph’s attentions would turn towards me if he ever lost interest in Bess. A few days earlier I had hid from him, ducking into the kitchens when I saw him walking down the hall with Sister Mary Clare. ‘All girls are the same,’ I heard him say to her. He sounded as if it made him angry.

‘Father, you can’t say that,’ the young nun replied, with her light and cheerful trill, I would have thought it flirtatious, if I hadn’t known that’s how she always spoke. ‘Why, we nuns are nothing like these girls, are we?’

Father Joseph stopped and touched her arm. ‘Surely no,’ he said. ‘You’re the purest angels, tending to the most wretched devils. Snow-white lilies alongside ragwort. A wondrous thing to behold.’

We girls, identical devils. And the nuns, identical angels, each with the same grave awaiting.
Here Lies Sister Mary
. I had seen Sister Mary Frances strap the palms of girls not much older than Bess’s little sister Kitty. In the months I’d been here, nobody had touched my palms. I hadn’t received a single lash. I kept my head down and did what I was told. Obedience seemed the safest plan. I hadn’t learned yet. In this world it’s the obedient girls who are most in danger.

Bess moved a hand from under her cheek and I held it. If we were all the same, and if Father Joseph could choose Bess, when indeed she did grow too large, he might choose me. I persisted in that way of thinking, even though it amounted, in my mind,
to turning her over to him for the sake of myself. One of the worst aspects of this prison life was the way it could make us ruthless mercenaries, fighting in an army of one.