The Christie Affair (31 page)

The two other girls worked in obedient silence, pulling weeds and cleaning lichen from the headstones. I kneeled and pulled the bar into place, lodging it in so the cracks wouldn’t be visible unless examined closely.

That afternoon Sister Mary Clare sat down beside me in the sewing room, where I worked alongside a group of girls, mending old uniforms. Other girls – who unlike me were handy with knitting needles – worked on the tiny matinee coats the babies would wear to keep warm. I prayed my baby would never have one of these. I’d get out of here too soon for the nuns to dress her. Whatever clothes my child wore, they would not be manufactured at this convent.

‘Dear Nan,’ Sister Mary Clare said, perched on the same backless stool the rest of us used. ‘You don’t seem yourself.’ She patted my arm. Two nuns came in carrying babies, and the girls they belonged to put their knitting aside to nurse them.

‘What would you have been,’ I asked Sister Mary Clare, as I executed a clumsy stitch, ‘if you hadn’t been a nun?’

‘Why, a mother, of course.’ She smiled over at the nursing babies then quoted Coleridge, though at the time I believed they were her own words. ‘
A mother is a mother still, the holiest thing alive.
’

I let my work drop into my lap and covered my face with my hands, thinking of Bess. Was she still the holiest thing alive, now that her baby was dead? ‘Bess,’ I said. ‘Poor Bess.’

‘There, there. Don’t you worry about Bess. Why, she’s a wife now. She can have another baby, one that can be baptized
properly. She can have ten babies, all fat and happy, gathered round her feet.’

I broke down sobbing, and Sister Mary Clare rubbed my back in gentle circles. She would have been a good mother. ‘Take heart. Bess’s young man turned up for her. Could be yours will too. He’ll have read the letter I sent him by now.’ She handed me a handkerchief and I blew my nose.

‘Here,’ she said, reaching into her sleeve. ‘I’ve brought you a treat.’ She pressed a piece of soda bread into my hand, still warm, and slathered with fresh butter, a luxury I hadn’t seen since I left home. I looked at the other girls apologetically.

‘Go ahead and eat,’ she said. ‘Your friends don’t begrudge you a treat, do you, girls?’

None of them looked up to meet her challenging gaze.
I should have seen it.
But I couldn’t afford to. I bit into the soda bread, butter melting on my tongue. It tasted so good I had to stop myself telling the nun I loved her.

That night I dreamed of Father Joseph’s jowly face hovering over mine. His veiny hands pawing at me. His groans and snorts.

‘No, no, no!’

I woke already siting up. My hands, covering my face, smelled like they belonged to someone else. This place was wholly foreign. Fiona sat next to me, patting my back, not asking. We all had identical dreams, good and bad. In this way and perhaps only this way, Father Joseph’s theory of our sameness was correct.

‘Tell me,’ I whispered. She recited my parents’ address in London, her voice light and cheerful as a fairy’s.

There were so many more of us than there were of them.
What if we’d banded together? An uprising? A hundred girls rising up against the handful of nuns and one lecherous priest? We had more to fight for than any soldier in the IRA. We could have taken our captors down and marched back into the world, our youth and our children reclaimed.

Bess and her American were married before travelling across the Atlantic, by an Anglican priest in London. They settled in Philadelphia. Did her parents back in Doolin weep when she never returned? Or did they rejoice at being done with her sin and shame?

She didn’t care about that anymore. She missed her brothers and would always love her little sister, but the only sins she still believed in were the ones that had been committed against her. She’d never set foot in any church again as long as she lived.

At night she clung to her new husband. She never blamed him for arriving too late. They were a single unit in this, their loss, and the crimes that had been done to them both. But one crime done to Bess she bore entirely alone. She bore it daily, and nightly, unable to expel the memory of the priest’s invasion.

And then there were her arms that ached the way only a mother’s can, when they’re empty of her child and always will be.

‘Ronan,’ she said, throughout the day, mostly when no one could hear her. In different tones. Fondly. Scolding. Laughing. Proud. As if his ghost accompanied her, the way he himself would have, had he been there, beside her, the reflection of all the emotions she should have experienced, rather than the ones she did.

The Disappearance

Day Seven
Friday, 10 December 1926

I
T RAINED IN
Sunningdale on Friday morning. The temperature had warmed. Teddy stood in the window of the nursery, holding a stuffed rabbit Agatha had named Touchstone. She’d given it to Teddy before she and Archie left to travel around the world. ‘Some of my love is stored inside him,’ she’d told Teddy, tying a blue ribbon around its neck. ‘As long as you hold him, my love is always with you. Whenever you hug him, I’m hugging you back.’

‘Touchstone is a girl, not a boy,’ Teddy insisted. She didn’t much care for men. It was women who took care of her. Every toy with a face was a she. Sonny, the little whittled dog, was a she.

Despite the rain, Sunningdale crawled with people. Teddy watched the pelting rain clutter her window. She saw scattered people in raincoats but didn’t find them alarming; she was used to fusses on the property that had nothing to do with her. She put Touchstone down. Her mother’s dog stood at her ankle and she lifted him up so he could look out the window, too. Peter yapped twice at the sight of strangers then settled into a resigned cuddle. Usually, when Agatha travelled, she took the dog with her. Teddy was glad she’d left him behind this time, it was fun
to have him all to herself, always right beside her. He barked, his funny little
arf
, as someone new trudged up the drive.

‘There, there,’ Teddy said to Peter. ‘There’s no need to bother about all that.’ She turned from the window and set to dressing for school. Likely, she and Honoria would drive instead of walk, considering the weather.

The press had dubbed the search for Agatha
The Great Hunt
. As if it were a novel or a film. A sporting event, a national pastime. Or a war. Police officers and civic-minded citizens spread out all over England, doing their part.

‘Rather grand of you to dub this hunt
great
,’ Archie raged at Thompson, holding up a newspaper with the phrase emblazoned in a giant headline. ‘You haven’t turned up so much as a thumbprint.’

Thompson crossed his arms and regarded Archie, who had marched into his office at Berkshire Police Headquarters as if to scold an underling. Thompson certainly hoped Agatha Christie was found alive but that seemed more unlikely with every passing day. Living people turned up quickly. Dead people took their time, especially if a murderer had taken pains to hide them.

‘You’re finding every dead woman in England,’ Archie went on, unfairly. Only one dead woman had been found, poor Miss Annabelle Oliver. ‘Except the one you’re actually searching for.’

Thompson attempted to raise an eyebrow and failed. A gesture Archie had in his repertoire and it galled the officer to realize he’d tried to imitate it.

‘Searching for a dead woman, are we?’ Thompson’s tone meant to remind Archie of who was in charge of whom, and who knew what.

‘No,’ Archie insisted. ‘She’s alive. I know she is.’

‘You’re right to know we’re not awfully good at finding women. You know who else we haven’t managed to locate? A Miss Nan O’Dea. She seems to have gone missing from her place of employment as well as her flat.’ He didn’t tell Archie that he wasn’t worried about my wellbeing. An officer had stopped in to the Imperial British Rubber Company and learned that I’d phoned to say my holiday would last a few days longer than expected. It would do just as well, Thompson thought, to wait on interviewing me until after a murder was confirmed.

‘There’s no need to trouble Nan,’ Archie said. ‘No need at all. She’s the last person to know where Agatha’s disappeared to.’

‘And who would you say is the first?’

A dark, sorrowful look crossed Archie’s face and he disappointed Thompson by breaking down in tears. Even if Archie Christie turned out not to be behind his wife’s disappearance, the constable wished to waste no sympathy on him. Yesterday Archie had given a rather unfortunate interview to the
Daily Mail
, insisting his wife would never do harm to herself but adding that if she did, it would most certainly be with poison. Like so many men who believed themselves above reproach in deed and word, the manifest destiny of mattering in the world, Archie had no inkling of how to edit himself. Thompson, like so many men in positions of power who nonetheless found themselves tacitly subordinate to the Archies of the world, enjoyed imagining his downfall. He did not wish to feel a drop of kindness towards him, so it was most inconvenient that Archie Christie’s tears appeared to spring from genuine, uncontrollable agony.

Archie drove to his mother’s through the rain, shivering. He’d left Styles without his coat, most unlike him. He’d broken down in tears in front of another man and he didn’t feel shame, or embarrassment, or anything except the nagging, overriding, maddening question.
Where is she?

He regretted the interview he’d given to the
Mail
. As if the police weren’t looking at him sideways already. No more press, Archie vowed, thinking not of himself but his wife. She was shy.
Shy
. The idea some of the officers floated, that this might be a publicity stunt, was utterly preposterous. His wife would never do such a thing. If she were alive, how could she possibly avoid seeing the newspaper articles, splashed across England – the world! – screaming her name? She would be horrified. At first glance of a headline – blaring her age! – she would ring Archie, or turn herself into the police, or simply board a train and come home. This was what worried him most. Where could she be that the publicity had not reached her? The only place he could think of was dead.