The Christie Affair (37 page)

Archie’s mother is a Catholic. And please don’t ever think to tell me what nuns wouldn’t do.

That face. Finbarr had kneeled in front of Teddy when he’d given her the whittled dog. His own eyes, looking back at him. How could he not have seen it?

A person does adhere to the mission at hand. We believe what furthers our own cause. I don’t blame Finbarr for this. What was stolen from me was stolen from him, too, even more completely, so that he never understood what he had to fight for. He thought he only had to fight for me.

‘That’s why you’ve got to convince her,’ he said to Agatha. ‘You haven’t even tried.’

Agatha looked away, off into the dark distance. Frustratingly silent.

‘Tell her, then, how it’s hurting you,’ he said. ‘To lose your husband.’ I never heard Finbarr say Archie’s name, not once. ‘Nan’s not cruel. Tell her you can’t live without him.’

‘But I think perhaps I can live without him. You can live without her, too.’

‘I know I can. I’ve done it all this while, haven’t I? But I don’t want to, Agatha. Don’t you want your husband anymore?’

‘I can’t say that I do. Not entirely.’ And then, she wasn’t sure
if it was to assuage him or if it were true: ‘I don’t know, Finbarr. I’m sorry, I just don’t know.’

He let go of her elbow and touched her cheek with the coarse, lovely flat of his palm. And then he turned and walked away. She hated the sag of his shoulders. She wanted to give him hope, she did. But not enough to relinquish her own.

When daylight arrived, the first thing Agatha felt was a rush of happiness. How wonderfully foreign it all was, and what a release. Casting all propriety aside could almost eliminate the question: What would she do now? Having left the world so publicly, how could she return privately?

‘Can one woman cause such a fuss,’ she said to Chilton that morning, lying in his arms under a mountain of scratchy wool blankets, ‘and then just return without any explanation?’

‘Absolutely not.’ Chilton had a complicated way of wrapping both arms around her, using the good to hoist the bad. In this way he managed to clasp too tightly for her to sit up and look at his face. ‘It’s quite clear you can never go back. You’ll have to stay with me.’

She touched her fingers to his lips, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

‘I’ve had a murder to solve, you know,’ Chilton told her.

She broke free from his grasp and sat up so she could face him. This was the first she’d heard of it. Chilton told her about the Marstons.

‘How sad,’ Agatha said, and tears did come to her eyes. She’d forgotten the wider world and its inhabitants in the midst of her various conundrums.

‘What do you think?’ Chilton asked. ‘You write detective novels. Should I agree with Lippincott’s theory and call it a day?’

‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly solve a crime I hadn’t invented. The point of a good detective story is to make it all obvious. You throw in enough variables so the reader doubts his own solution, and then at the end he can be pleased with himself for figuring it out. In life I imagine Occam’s razor applies. The simplest solution is usually correct.’

Chilton smiled. It pleased him enormously, to listen to her.

‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Do you suppose your man Lippincott is right about the wife? There’s no reason to suspect anyone else, is there?’

‘To be perfectly honest I find myself not caring as I should.’

She kissed him.

‘I’d like to read your books,’ he went on. ‘I’d like to read every word you’ve ever written.’

Agatha smiled and pressed her forehead to his. ‘I’m not at all ready to go home,’ she said, and their kissing recommenced in earnest.

Who would have known it was possible to make love so rapturously and still entertain so many thoughts? Agatha kept her eyes open. Taking in the Spartan room and the man who’d been a stranger mere days before. She thought she would always be grateful for this span of time, and then she thought she might make it last forever. She could start calling herself Mrs Chilton today, and the two of them could go off somewhere together where nobody knew either of them. She would never have to associate herself with that terrible word, divorce, or face the music from running away and causing such a brouhaha. Back in Berkshire, Teddy would bear a scar, but we all acquire those along the way, don’t we, despite anyone’s best efforts. Nan would take up the mother mantle with a fervour few daughters had ever seen.

Eventually, if Agatha remained hidden, the world would
forget she’d ever gone missing, or existed in the first place. She imagined herself shedding everything. Her old life scattered to the wind, melting into the air as mist off the sea. Nan could claim it all – the house, the husband, the child. Of course, this would prove terrible for Finbarr. But sometimes a person had to think of herself.

She could sidestep into a new existence, taking nothing but the writing with her. She could start fresh under a new name. She could change her hair, starve or stuff herself till she was unrecognizable, the woman she’d been before nothing but an unsolved mystery. While Mrs Chilton clattered away on the typewriter, and took long walks on the beach, and rolled under the covers with her gentle husband who adored – who
worshipped
her.

‘Darling Agatha,’ Chilton said, lips against her ear.

It felt so good to be darling, being lost didn’t matter.

A little while later, Chilton drove back to the Bellefort through the damp, late morning, his frayed woollen coat on the seat beside him, one chapped hand on the steering wheel. The rain from Sunningdale had made its way north, falling gently. A smile contoured his face, twitching at his lips. He didn’t know the turn Agatha’s fantasies had taken – running away with him and becoming Mrs Chilton. But he would have agreed to it in a heartbeat.

For the first time since the war he felt as though he might have recovered something of himself. Not his innocence, never his brothers, but something wonderfully important. A will to live beyond the need to spare his mother further pain. Only a few days prior, if he’d heard word of his mother’s death, he might have boarded a train home, kissed her corpse’s forehead, then
turned his father’s old Purdey shotgun on himself and drawn the trigger with relief. At last.

Now, though. Now he felt like he might stick around another few days, just to see what happened. When he held Agatha in both his arms, good and bad, Chilton believed, the way a person does in that first miracle of reciprocated ardour, that one night of passion could translate to forever. And why not run off with her now? As far as the whole world was concerned, she was already gone.

When Chilton parked his car at the hotel, he saw Mr Race, smoking and pacing out front, thin curls of smoke followed by thicker exhalations of breath. The sight made Chilton realize he’d forgotten to smoke himself, for hours, even for an entire day. He reached into his inner coat pocket for his cigarette case and then stopped himself. He wanted nothing in common with Mr Race, whom he imagined to be the same breed as Archie Christie. The kind of man for whom Chilton felt nothing but disdain. Not that they’d care or notice. They considered disdain their own particular province. Belligerent and concerned only with themselves, even at their most generous.
Men who served in the trenches and men who served in the air.
Race may have been too young to belong to either group but Chilton placed him firmly in the latter.

I must say, Chilton’s opinion of Archie was unfair, having never so much as laid eyes on him, let alone having spent the better part of the night and morning making love to his wife. He knew that. But clinging to his bad idea of the man was part and parcel of clinging to the woman.

As Chilton stepped out of the car, he saw Race do something that surprised him. He dropped his cigarette to the dirt, ground it up with his foot, then scooped up the remains, tucking it into his palm as if he meant to throw it away later. Chilton hadn’t
pegged him as the sort to clear away his own mess. Mrs Race emerged from the hotel a moment later, bundled up in a hat and coat. Upon seeing her husband, she broke into the happiest smile and stepped immediately into his arms, looking up at him with profound delight.

Chilton knew enough of the world not to be surprised by a woman returning to a beastly husband. But something about this did not look right. They might have been two entirely different people. Mr Race, who had seen Chilton, seemed aware of the discrepancy. He placed his hands on his wife’s shoulders, and she looked over to see Chilton. Whereupon she stepped back rather abruptly.

‘Good day, Mrs Race,’ Chilton called out, trying his best to be jaunty. ‘Mr Race.’

They murmured hello, newly subdued.

Inside the hotel, Chilton waited a moment. Then he stepped back outside. The Races were gone. He walked quietly round the back, where they stood together, quite close, holding on to each other’s elbows. They appeared not only loving, but trusting and intimate.

He didn’t dare creep close enough to hear what they were saying, or they surely would have seen him. But from where he stood, observing in secret, he tried to listen. And although no words became distinct, he could have sworn they both spoke with Irish brogues.

Earlier, Finbarr and I had driven back to the hotel in the grey winter dawn.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said. ‘Can’t a person train dogs in England as well as Ireland?’

He pulled the car over to the side of the road and turned towards me. ‘What are you saying, Nan?’

I saw I’d given him false hope. I couldn’t offer him precisely what he wanted. But I could offer him a version of it. ‘I’m saying—’ I stopped trying to think how to word it. ‘My plan could stay in place. And you could be a part of it. Think, Finbarr. Archie travels. He works all day. Why, just two years ago, he left England for an entire year. We could be together often as not. I could even bring Genevieve to you sometimes.’

‘Good Lord, Nan, what have you become?’

The pilot light of shame, always ready to be struck into full flame, flickered inside me. I doused it with anger. ‘I’ve become what I’ve been since August 1919. A mother who loves her child. And a woman who’s ready to do what’s necessary. That’s what I’ve become.’

He didn’t move for a long moment. ‘We could take her, then,’ he finally said. ‘The two of us. Out of England, to anywhere you like, and raise her as our own.’

‘How can I do that to her, Finbarr? Kidnap her? If she were still a baby, fine, but now? What would that do to her? And if there’s an army searching for Agatha Christie, what will there be to search for her child? I’ve no way to prove she’s mine. It’s too late for that kind of justice. I wish it weren’t, but it is.’

‘And what if you discover a month from now you’re carrying my child again? What will you do, then?’

(Oh, Finbarr. Oh, Reader. Must I know and provide an answer for everything?)

I closed my eyes against tears and he gathered me up in his arms. Holding me tight, he spoke into my ear. ‘How can you stand that man touching you, if you truly believe he stole our child?’

I was silent a while, as if reasoning it out in that moment,
though in truth I’d thought it through a long time ago. I didn’t blame Archie, not fully. He’d availed himself of something readily on offer, without considering how it came to be so. The way all men like him do. He might inhabit the world unthinkingly, in the manner men of his station were allowed. But Archie hadn’t invented the world; he’d only been born into it like the rest of us.