The Christie Affair (30 page)

Certain elements of the world had fallen away. She was writing as she always did, without thought of readers or agents or editors. Agatha wrote to entertain herself, the same way she’d made up stories in her head as a child, spinning her hoop round the monkey puzzle tree at Ashfield and inventing characters. Writing a book was a different world to live in. And she dearly needed a different world.

These past days, she dressed herself from the same collection of men’s clothes she’d taken from the previous house, plus Miss Oliver’s warm and well-worn coat. Vanity, gone. She still wore her pearl necklace, it had belonged to her mother, but her pearl ring she had pushed to the back of an empty drawer in the servants’ room where she was bunking. This morning she had glanced at herself in the mirror, hair unwashed, man’s clothing, and thought she could walk right by nearly any of her acquaintances and only those who knew her best would recognize her. And who were those people who knew her best? She couldn’t come up with a single person, not even Honoria – a paid companion, if she was honest – who understood her as well, or with
whom she had such ease, as the Irishman who’d spirited her away.

Even in this house, large as it was, Agatha could hear Finbarr’s nightmares. Every night since they’d run off together, until Nan showed up, she had left her own bed to place her hands on his shoulders.
Finbarr, darling, wake up.
All at once his eyes would open, taking her in, and breathing in gratitude. Twice he’d put his arms around her and held her close. It was a shock to find herself clasped against him and at the same time it wasn’t. She didn’t believe in reincarnation but if she did, she would have thought they’d known each other, Finbarr and she, in a previous life. An unlikely pair in theory but in practice perfectly likely. It made her realize how large her husband had loomed. He had somehow become to her the face of all men, and the way he looked upon her reflected how she appeared to all men. Finbarr represented an entirely different species, and here she had fallen into this strange but perfectly natural step with him.

Which meant that she could fall in step with another. Her mother wouldn’t have liked the thought of her married to a police inspector. But her mother wasn’t here to object, was she? Agatha found herself laughing – horrifying and such a relief, to laugh so quickly on the heels of remembering her mother’s death.

‘Something funny?’

It was me, standing there in the doorway. Flushed from lovemaking, my hair amiss, my chin raised in near defiance. The sight of me hardly moved her at all. She didn’t envy me, or want to hurt me. She didn’t even find my presence a particular intrusion. Another fugitive. So long as I agreed to keep my silence, I might as well come aboard. She seemed to have
forgotten already – the mission for which Finbarr had enjoined her.

‘Hello, Nan,’ she said.

‘Hello, Mrs Christie.’

I didn’t feel as sanguine about her, in this moment, as she did about me. It made me furious somehow. To see her at the servants’ table. She who’d grown up in cavernous houses that had names. Whose idea of financial hardship was a hundred pounds a year for doing nothing. A five-room flat with a butler and a maid. A life of wanting things – a writing career, a husband, a child – and having them delivered to her, as if the wanting naturally equalled the having. For the sake of a woman like her a hundred more always suffered.

‘Come now,’ she said. I couldn’t account for her cheery disposition. ‘Call me Agatha, would you. Surely at this point we can dispense with formality. Both of us on the lam.’

‘I’m not on the lam. I’m on holiday.’

‘It’s rather an unusual holiday. I wonder what Archie would say about it?’ When I didn’t answer she said, ‘There. I knew you didn’t love him.’

I sat down at the table as Agatha stood to get another teacup. ‘I’m afraid there’s no milk,’ she said, pouring for me.

‘I don’t suppose Archie would have any right to say anything about it, would he? Not yet.’

‘True enough.’ She could have told me about her last night with Archie but she didn’t. It was the first time she and I had been together since the artifice had finally lifted for good. I suppose she liked having a bit of her own artifice. I expected her to start straight in on demands that I relinquish Archie
but she just sat there, sipping tea, watching me do the same. It softened me towards her somehow. Perhaps if I didn’t begrudge her good fortune, I’d finally be due some of my own.

‘What are the provisions like here?’ I asked. ‘Would they last a while?’

‘There’s tinned fruit. Tinned tongue and kippers. Sardines. Loads of wine, if that’s what you’re about. Finbarr’s been on some scavenges in town for fresh food. Apples and cheese. We have enough to last a while. But not forever, of course. And we don’t know when the proper owners will return.’

‘It doesn’t look like they intend to any time soon, does it?’

‘No. But there’s no predicting what people will do.’

‘There’s a part of me,’ I confided, ‘that could just go upstairs. Never eat or drink again. Wither away to a skeleton in his arms.’

‘Like Elvira Madigan and Sixten Sparre? Terrible story. If we could talk to their ghosts, I’m sure they’d tell us it hadn’t been at all worth it. I never did go in much for romances. Especially not the tragic ones.’

‘Neither did I,’ I lied. If the idea of me dead in Finbarr’s arms – dead anywhere – pleased her, paving the road back to her husband, her face did not betray it.

‘Finbarr tells me you want to be a writer.’

‘Does he?’ How humiliating. I wondered what else he’d told her. ‘That used to be true, I suppose.’

Finbarr bustled in just then. Full of business and energy. ‘Good morning, Agatha,’ he said, as if they were absolute equals, the best of friends.

‘Good morning, dear Finbarr,’ she said with authentic warmth, and I remembered how everyone always loved him. I
used to think it was because of his insistent happiness. But now that was gone and still the love he inspired remained.

Several minutes of domestic exchanges transpired. Finbarr produced a loaf of bread from the pantry, and Agatha found some marmalade and poured him some tea. It was a remarkable thing to witness. I sat, not helping, and eventually food was placed before me.

‘Have you heard from our man, then?’ Agatha asked me, when all was settled again.

I glanced at Finbarr, whose face refused to darken, or to acknowledge anyone else as my man.

‘I haven’t,’ I said. ‘Not for days. He doesn’t know where I am.’

‘That makes two of us.’

‘He’s terribly worried about you,’ I said.

‘How do you know, if you haven’t heard from him?’

‘Well, he was, last time we spoke.’

‘I might have considered that good news a few days ago. Now I find myself not much caring, if I’m to be honest.’

I had no way of knowing the smile on her face owed itself at least in part to last night’s kiss with Chilton. I only thought, Poor Archie. Last week with two women intent on his attentions, this week with none.

‘Finbarr has some things he’d like me to say to you,’ said Agatha.

‘Does he?’

‘Before I begin, I’d like to remind you. In my whole life no one’s hurt me as much as you have.’

Partly because I couldn’t bear Finbarr watching this interaction, I brought my hands up to cover my face. Agatha reached across the table and pulled them away. ‘We’re not going to do that,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to have me comforting you for all the wrongs you’ve done me.’

I looked at Finbarr. He had his eyes focused on Agatha, counting on her to say what he wanted and set everything to right.

‘There’ve been some wrongs done to me as well.’ I knew my voice sounded ominous but I didn’t care. ‘I lost something much more valuable than a husband.’

‘Finbarr’s filled me in on some of your history. Things I didn’t know. I daresay Archie doesn’t even know. Does he?’

Was this a threat? I moved to shoot an accusing glare at Finbarr, for telling Agatha what so few people knew. Then she said something that surprised me: ‘I’m sorry about what happened to you in Ireland.’ She still had her hands over mine. ‘Dreadfully sorry. A travesty. Abhorrent. An outrage.’

It occurred to me this was the first apology I had ever received, from anyone, regarding my stay at Sunday’s Corner. And I knew, and know still, it wasn’t connected to what she said next.

‘You won’t tell anyone where I am?’

‘No,’ I promised. ‘I won’t.’

In all the years since Agatha Christie disappeared, amidst all the conjecture about her state of mind, and her activities, and her motives, not one single person has ever come to me for answers. People like to follow a very particular script. It never occurred to anyone that she and I might, after all, be friends. That the reason she stayed quiet, forever and always, was not to protect herself, but me.

Eventually, she would move beyond all this. She would marry again (a significantly younger man) and become successful beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings. Things would work out for her in ways they never would work out for me. In ways they seldom work out for anyone.

For now we sat, staring at each other across the narrow table, the fire in the stove crackling cosiness. Refusing to say what the other most wanted to hear. While Finbarr sat with us, thinking his mission well on its way to accomplished, not knowing that one day soon, no matter what was said and done, my name would be Mrs Christie, too.

Here Lies Sister Mary

F
ATHER
J
OSEPH LOVED
England. In 1919 this made him an unusual Irishman. That June a small British patrol was attacked in Rathclaren and during his sermon he interrupted his usual screed against lust to bellow his opposition. ‘Crown and country,’ he said, pounding the podium. ‘It’s what we went to war to defend, and now these ninnies are trying to upend it all.’

‘It’s a relief, isn’t it,’ Sister Mary Clare said to me one afternoon, ‘that they don’t hold being English against us. I’ve sometimes thought about going home, to an English order. But with Father Joseph in charge it hardly seems necessary.’ She smiled more to herself than at me. ‘In truth I believe it makes me his favourite. My being English.’

She was walking beside me as all the girls filed through the corridor for Holy Hour, a ritual that took place on the first Friday of every month. Sister Mary Declan looked back at me and frowned, but it was a nun talking to me, not another girl, so I went ahead and answered.

‘Does it?’ I tried to make my tone sound idle, but felt the blood leave my face, worried that being English might draw his attention to me.

‘It’s just a flash in the pan, all this IRA business,’ Sister Mary
Clare went on, not noticing my discomfort. ‘I’ll be shocked if it lasts another month. You’d think these boys might have had enough fighting, mightn’t you, seen enough horror, to be causing more of it in their own country.’

‘Does Father Joseph know about me? Being English?’

‘I’ve never heard him say a word about you one way or the other.’

Her words should have given me relief. And I did seem to be invisible to Father Joseph – as if a magic cloak protected me from his notice – but I remained terrified this would change.

Sister Mary Clare squeezed my hand and walked away before we entered the chapel, humming her usual, eerie tune. She had a pretty voice, even though she never attached words to her songs. I could hear her as I stood with my fellow penitents, still as could be, for fifteen minutes, our arms outstretched at our sides as if we were hanging on the cross. If anyone twitched, Sister Mary Declan made us start again. On this day we were in the chapel for a full hour. It was hard work not to tremble, thinking of the priest’s love of England. I could feel my baby’s little hands, pressing against the walls of my womb, and I was grateful she hadn’t ever glimpsed the world outside.

A new girl arrived on a Tuesday and on the Friday she escaped, exactly how nobody could say. She simply vanished from our midst without a confiding word to anyone. The bells clanged and the nuns flurried. I took heart when she never returned. The next day, working in the nuns’ graveyard, I looked through the bars to ascertain the route she’d taken. Through the fence that surrounded the graves I could see the entrance to the convent, the wrought-iron gate that opened to let in visitors. And I
noticed at the corner, where the gate met the cement wall, one bar had rotted away and fallen into the high grass. The space it left was still too small for my pregnant self to slip through. But I wouldn’t be pregnant forever.