The Christie Affair (42 page)

To join the party, I had but to follow the music. Finbarr lounged on the floor against one of the big pillows, a goblet filled with wine in one hand. Chilton and Agatha were dancing, her face aglow from the firelight and the day in the baths, looking as lovely in her trousers and jumper as she ever had wearing any gown in any ballroom.

Three faces turned towards me, fondly, withholding the
devastating information. Tomorrow. It could all be saved until tomorrow. For now we would let our disappearance extend a little longer. It would continue into the night and small hours of the morning. One thing we’d learned since discovering this place: there was nothing in the world that couldn’t wait.

‘Oh, Nan,’ Agatha said, as Chilton dipped her, her head thrown back, her tone joyful, as if I were her best friend in all the world. ‘Come and have some wine and cheese, come and have a dance. For who knows what tomorrow will bring?’

Remarkably, my ears did not hear this as ominous. It sounded like an invitation. If I had been a different sort of person, raised in a different time and country, I might have told her I loved her. And she might have said it back. Instead, the two of us smiled at each other. Not rivals but landsmen. A shared sorrow can create unexpected warmth, even as it illuminates all the ways our world is ruined.

The Disappearance

Days Nine and Ten
Sunday, 12 December and Monday, 13 December 1926

T
HE MACHINERY OF
the world had already started grinding against our remaining undiscovered. The Harrogate librarian, Miss Barnard, picked up newspapers with increasing fervour, looking at every new photograph and thinking that she knew – she absolutely knew – the woman she’d seen was the missing mystery writer. Finally, she telephoned the police department in Leeds. The officer who answered, hearing the emotional certainty in her voice, utterly dismissed her concerns. But still. A seed had been planted.

Inside the Timeless Manor, though, everything was beautiful.

That night we stayed up past dawn, the records singing, the wine flowing, the four of us twirling and laughing and dancing. Agatha felt young again. Truly young – once again the girl who had slid off her horse when her hair flew off into the wind, to collect it with gales of laughter. All the house parties she’d attended as a girl, jumping from one to the next – sometimes out of necessity, because the money had run out and Ashfield was let. Without society Agatha would have had nowhere to go. But when she was a guest, everything was taken care of, everything
was bright and gay and fun. But never so much fun as this. Nobody, ever, like Finbarr. Nobody like Chilton, certainly, with his hand at her waist, travelling at will. A strange, gorgeous echo of her old life but with the oddest most unlikely people, and no rules at all.

What would her mother say? Liberating to have that question melt into the air, unanswered, unimportant. How it used to hover over her every move. How she had watched herself, even in her youth. Never too much to drink, if anything at all. Don’t say this. Don’t say that. Don’t wander upstairs into a bedroom with a man not your husband to do whatever the two of you please. Now her mother was gone but life did go on in new ways. Humane ways. That was the thing. To be sensible and to be humane. Even if it appeared at the moment she wasn’t particularly sensible anymore. For what seemed the first time in her life – and only for this short window – Agatha owned her own virtue, and thereby her own fate.

When she and Chilton had disappeared upstairs, Finbarr and I stayed behind, dancing a while longer. So I forgot to return to the Bellefort Hotel, my room there empty yet again. Kitty and Carmichael would have left by now. The ruse of their misery had gone on long enough to fool everyone; nobody would ever think back and recognize it as a diversion. They didn’t return to Ireland, but headed to America, to stop in Philadelphia with Lizzie and Donny, then on to New York, both of them destined for the stage. Before they left they made sure my room was paid for a few more days. Mrs Leech would never give them up as my benefactors. And she wouldn’t send anyone hunting for me, at least not yet. She knew about Finbarr, young lovers. She’d shake her head with a secret smile, remembering a time when her romance had seemed impossible, too.

Morning light had long since arrived by the time we went to sleep. All our heads fuzzy with wine and giddy with love. Nobody got around, that day, to accusing me of murder.

On Monday morning in Sunningdale, Teddy woke, horrified to find her father sleeping beside her, on top of the covers, still wearing his suit and even his shoes, his mouth open, spittle winding its way from his mouth to the pillow. She jumped out of bed, quick as she could, collected Touchstone and held her close to her chest.

‘Colonel Christie!’ she exclaimed, deciding only the most formal address would do.

Archie started awake and swung his feet to the floor. ‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘I must have fallen asleep.’

‘Indeed.’ The little girl’s face looked dark with rebuke.

Archie lifted a hand to his brow. Unruly curls loose on his forehead. Reflected in Teddy’s glare, he had no way of knowing he’d never been handsomer, in all his undone vulnerability. He had no interest in being vulnerable. Over the past ten days he’d become everything he most detested – melancholic, sickly, ineffectual.

‘I only want to be happy,’ he told Teddy, hanging his head, hating the pathetic sound of his voice.

Because she was a kind child, Teddy patted the top of his head.

‘And so you shall be,’ she promised.

Like Miss Barnard, the woman who worked at the Karnak gift shop had been thinking about Agatha Christie. But she waited
until Monday to say anything, Sunday not being a proper time to cause any kind of upheaval.

‘I’ve seen that missing lady novelist with my own eyes,’ Miss Harley announced, when she walked into the Leeds Police Headquarters. She was a middle-aged lady, unlucky in love, always rheumy with remembering the man who should have proposed before he left for the Boer War, never to be heard from again.

The young fellow at the front desk called Lippincott over.

‘Are you quite sure?’ Lippincott demanded, assessing Miss Harley to no particular advantage. ‘I’ve got a man reporting daily on that case.’ In fact, he realized, he had not heard from Chilton in several days. ‘He says he’s not seen head or tail of her.’

‘Well, I’ve seen the head and the tail.’ The wattle on Miss Harley’s neck became tremulous with indignation. ‘She was in the hotel gift shop, staring right at me, looking just like her picture. She bought a bathing dress and picture postcard. I thought I might be imagining things but I saw another photograph of her in the papers today and it was her. I just know it was.’

That’s what you get when you don’t take matters in your own hands, thought Lippincott. He headed over to the library to question Miss Barnard.

‘Oh, I’m quite sure it was her,’ Miss Barnard said, thankful to be heard finally. ‘She went awfully pale when I pointed out the resemblance. Can you say someone has a resemblance to herself?’ Miss Barnard laughed, then stopped abruptly when she saw Lippincott was unamused. ‘Took some books out, too. Detective novels, mostly.’

‘What name did she give?’

‘Mrs O’Dea. Said she was staying at the Bellefort Hotel and Spa.’

‘The Bellefort!’

The thought of Agatha Christie right under Chilton’s nose this whole time – not to mention Lippincott’s own family – was more than any man could bear. Fond of Chilton though he was, Lippincott marched out of the library with his fingers twitching, ready himself to do everything that needed to be done.

That evening, the phone rang at Styles. The maid Anna found Archie at the dining table, his food before him uneaten, a tumbler of Scotch in one hand. His eyes, persistently, on the window. Dark now, only returning his own sad reflection.

‘Colonel Christie,’ Anna said, ‘there’s a police officer on the telephone. Says he’s calling from Leeds.’

The Disappearance

Our Last Night
Monday, 13 December 1926

O
VER THE YEARS,
since our time in Yorkshire, Agatha and I have managed to steal a private moment or two, when our paths crossed – accidentally, in London, or at a family function. The funeral of Archie’s mother, for example. Teddy’s wedding. Times the blending of families past and present could not be avoided.

She and I agreed that although we’d spent not even a week in the Timeless Manor, in the dead of winter – bare branches and foggy windows – we remembered the house in every season. We could see the glorious canopy, dripping with moss and green, arching over the drive. The lawn where we played tennis soft with recent rain, so our feet left divots in the earth as we played. Birds making a racket when we woke, sun arriving too early and pouring through the curtains. The fields that rolled behind the house carpeted with dahlias, lily of the valley and primula. We remember Teddy running through the flowers, picking the brightest ones, hem of her skirt stained with mud and grass, though truly she was never there at all.

‘To call it amnesia never quite feels like a lie,’ she once told me. ‘Because it all still seems a marvellous dream. The kind you create to take the place of something terrible.’

We should steal away together
, I suggested at least once.
We should go back.

Agatha admitted she’d thought of finding the owner and buying the house. But she never did, and neither of us returned there, not together or apart. The house lived on only as a place we visited in conversation and memory, no more visible to the outside world than we had been, inhabiting it, undetected.

Sometimes at night I have a marvellous dream of my own: a party. The manor’s not dusty or spare of furnishings, but bright and fully appointed. Genevieve, and my little Rosie, and my sister Louisa’s children, and even Colleen’s: they sit in the upstairs hallway peering down through the banisters long after they were sent to bed. Finbarr is there, and Chilton, and my parents. Fiona and her son, the raspberry birthmark faded. Bess and Donny and Ronan – plus the three girls they’d go on to have. All three of my sisters. The Mahoneys and Uncle Jack and Aunt Rosie. Seamus, grown to a man, laughing as though he never knew a moment’s sickness. Alby, black and white fur gleaming, a perfect gentleman, exactly at Finbarr’s side. Sparkling lights, and trays of brimming champagne flutes, and the most cheerful music – not scratchy from an old Victrola, but a live orchestra. It’s the happiest moment in the world. It’s everything I’ve ever wished for, finally bestowed.