Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (28 page)

Being cut off at Penhill, Nan did not have as many admirers as before the war, although beneath her demure, lady-like appearance she had a challenging risqué sense of humour that men adored. Agatha loved listening to news of her friend’s latest conquests, and Nan became the prototype in Agatha’s novels for the rich, attractive often divorced femmes fatales, most noticeably Ruth Van Rydock in
They Do it With Mirrors
, and Lady Sedgwick in
At Bertram’s Hotel.

In recognition of their friendship, Agatha officially dedicated her 1942 novel
The Body in the Library
‘To My Friend Nan’. The second body in the story is found in a burnt-out car in ‘Venn’s Quarry’, and the disused cart-track leading to it was Water Lane and Newlands Corner thinly disguised. The hotel in the novel is not based on the Harrogate Hydro, as some might suppose, but on Torquay’s Imperial Hotel.

Ironically, the publication of
Five Little Pigs
in the UK in 1943 has led some readers mistakenly to read veiled references to the disappearance in it. This is because the victim, Amyas Crayle, shares Archie’s initials and was murdered, apparently by his wife, sixteen years earlier for having an affair with a young woman. Despite the coincidence of the victim’s initials, Agatha in fact based the dead husband loosely on Amyas Boston with whom she had a teenage flirtation during the amateur production of
The Blue Beard of Unhappiness.
One of Agatha’s notebooks from this period – ‘Girl – 15 at time (now 30 odd) (a Judy?)’ – indicate the writer had Nan’s daughter Judith in mind for the character of the independent and strong-minded Angela Warren. Another entry, alluding to the character of Cecilia Williams – ‘Housekeeper – woman – reserved – practical – another Carlo’, is a reference to her secretary Charlotte Fisher. Nan’s copy of
Five Little Pigs
was inscribed on the flyleaf with the heartfelt words: ‘With best wishes for the New Year. Love from Agatha.’

Despite her financial worries, Agatha maintained her literary output, publishing twelve books during the war years. She found comfort in her strengthening religious convictions. Although the war seemed endless, her belief in the transitory nature of things sustained her. She found an additional source of income throughout the war by adapting for the stage three of her books,
Ten Little Niggers, Appointment with Death
and
Death on the Nile
, with varying degrees of success.

Her Mary Westmacott novel,
Absent in the Spring
, which was written in just three days in 1943, was both an exorcism of some of the more painful aspects of the writer’s first marriage and a projection of her fears about the durability of the second. In her autobiography she admitted that the book had been gestating for six or seven years before she wrote it.

Absent in the Spring
tells the story of Joan Scudamore who experiences a crisis when she comes face to face with herself after being stranded at a railway rest-house in the desert. The book is about emotional insecurities and religious faith. Agatha’s journey towards spiritual peace of mind had been hindered by the fact she had never considered herself a sinner, so when she had needed religion to sustain her during the breakdown of her marriage to Archie she had felt forsaken by God. Likewise one of the characters tells Joan that her trouble is that she is not a sinner, which effectively cuts her off from the solace of prayer.

Joan recalls coming across a letter her father had written to her mother before he died, telling her that her love had been the crowning blessing of his life. Joan reflects that her husband Rodney has never written to her like this and wonders why. She intuits that Rodney has had an unconsummated affair in the past.

Joan remembers how Rodney successfully prevented their eldest daughter Averil from going off with a married man by pointing out to her that the scandal would undermine her lover’s promising career in medical research. Rodney had claimed that no woman’s love could compensate a man for losing his ability to do the work he was intended to do.

Joan belatedly realizes that Rodney would have been happier if he had pursued his ambition to become a farmer instead of training to be a solicitor to please her. She is forced to confront the fact that she has not always been the considerate wife she imagined herself to be. It also dawns on her that their three children do not love her, because she has been a rigid, inflexible mother who smothered them with her love and her desire to organize their lives.

As she comes face to face with these unpleasant realities she discovers she has wandered too far and is lost in the desert. She believes that God has forsaken her, and it is only when she sees the rest-house on the horizon that she realizes that this is not the case.

Unlike Agatha’s childhood nightmare of the Gun Man,
Absent in the Spring
recognizes people’s need to look within themselves to acknowledge their frailties so that they never need fear censure by anyone else. The story makes the point that the best one can do for one’s loved ones is to let them get on with their lives and simply be there when one is needed. Since the personal themes in
Absent in the Spring
were so close to her heart, Agatha was never able to articulate clearly why the book was so important to her. The conclusion she reaches in the novel is that one is never alone if one has established a relationship with God.

Significantly, the novel was written at a time when Agatha was deeply worried about whether Max would be able to resume his archaeological excavations at the end of the war. Max admitted in a letter that archaeology was an uncertain profession and he was worried about Agatha’s financial position and her ability to help finance his digs. Agatha feared he would be destroyed if he was separated from the work he loved, and the thought of how this might affect their relationship filled her with trepidation.

The plot line involving Averil’s affair with a married man was inspired by Rosalind’s friend Susan North, who in 1942 had gone to live in sin with a doctor in Bourne End. The scandal had horrified her mother Dorothy, and Agatha had offered her copious amounts of sympathy.

Nan’s copy of
Absent in the Spring
was inscribed by Agatha: ‘
To my dear Mrs Kon from M.W. in memory of SS. Marama Honolulu
.’ The two friends both shared a love of travelling, and this was an allusion to a boat each had sailed on many years earlier when she visited Australia – Agatha with Archie in 1922 and Nan with her Uncle George and Aunt Helen in 1910.

On 21 September 1943 Agatha was delighted when Rosalind’s and Hubert’s son Mathew was born at a nursing home in Cheshire near the Watts family estate. After mother and child rested at Abney Hall for about three weeks, Agatha arranged for them to have use of a property she owned in Campden Street in London. At this time Agatha’s secretary, Charlotte Fisher, was undertaking war work and living with her sister Mary in a house on Ladbroke Terrace Mews provided by the writer. Agatha resided with the two sisters, and like ‘a daily’ she visited Rosalind in the mornings to prepare breakfast and again in the evenings to cook dinner. Rosalind treated her mother in a high-handed manner and worked her to the bone. On one occasion Agatha was alluded to by Mathew’s nurse as the family ‘cook’, which angered Nan and Judith when they found out. The bombings on London grew more intense and frequent, and night after night Agatha sat anxiously with her daughter and grandson. When the sirens sounded they pushed him in his carry-cot under the heaviest piece of furniture they had: a papier-mâché table with a thick glass top. It was a relief to Agatha when Rosalind took Mathew back to the relative safety of his father’s home Pwyllwrach in Wales. The strain of day-to-day survival meant Rosalind’s close relationship with Max was all but forgotten by Agatha.

Agatha’s pleasure at becoming a grandmother was diminished by her husband’s absence. She missed Max terribly, telling him she was afraid that they would grow apart instead of continuing on a nice parallel track. Agatha longed to be with him, partly because she was haunted by the spectre of the First World War and its detrimental effects on her first marriage. Would prolonged separation change her relationship with Max? she asked herself. In October she wrote to him complaining her knees were sore, her back ached and she was ‘so tired, darling’.

In Max’s absence Agatha kept in touch with the archaeological world through a mutual friend of theirs, a married man called Professor Stephen Granville. Theirs was an unusual friendship, for Stephen had a tangled private life, and Agatha, in becoming his mother-confessor, learned much about the complexity of human relationships. Stephen’s extra-marital affairs led her to ponder in a letter to her husband whether she and Max had a tendency to idealize each other while they were apart. If so, she said she would be heartbroken.

The couple frequently addressed each other in their letters as Mrs Puper and Mr Puper. Given Agatha’s fondness for dogs the nicknames were a play on the words: pup and papa. In March 1944, Max wrote to Agatha saying he missed her a great deal and that he wanted to ‘eat and hug Mrs Puper’; he looked forward to the fine day that would happen and envisaged there would be ‘a great deal of wagging tails’. A letter he wrote in May that year reiterated that his interest in archaeology had not diminished. He told her she was right about the future and that clever Mrs Puper knew that Mr Puper only really wanted to dig.

On Whit Sunday Agatha wrote to Max thanking him for all the love and beauty and sweetness he had brought into her life. She remembered a day in Aleppo in northern Syria when he had comforted her on the anniversary of her mother’s death. What a friend you are, she concluded, so staunch, so true. She was missing Max so much that around this time she raised her spirits by writing a nostalgic and light-hearted domestic account of the excavations on which they had worked in the 1930s,
Come, Tell Me How You Live
.

Agatha’s newfound religious convictions were reinforced when the war came to an end. Being reunited safely with Max in May 1945 made Agatha feel closer to God than she had ever been before. They were immensely saddened, however, by the fact that Rosalind’s husband Hubert had been killed in action shortly after D-Day during the invasion of Normandy, and although her daughter’s stoicism and disinclination to discuss the matter had left Agatha feeling helpless and anxious she let Rosalind know she was there if she needed her.

Agatha had always been self-conscious about being older than Max, and it pleased her that he had turned forty, as she considered that it closed the gap a little. They were so happy that they failed to realize that they had both changed during their four years of separation. By this time Agatha was more mature and philosophical in outlook than before. The most obvious change in her was her appearance: she was now in her mid-fifties; her hair had turned grey and her figure was stouter.

Max’s friends now joked that he behaved more like an English gentleman than the genuine article, and this secretly pleased him. He was no longer the untried young man Agatha had married. His war experience had toughened him, and he was now able to look back on his unhappy public school days philosophically. His passion for archaeology had been strengthened by his lengthy separation from it, and he was fiercely ambitious to prove himself in his chosen field.

It comforted Agatha to know that Nan and Judith – together with her sister Madge and brother-in-law Jimmy, their son Jack (who had served in France and the Middle East with the Cheshire Regiment) – had survived the war unscathed. So, too, had Nan’s other brothers Humphrey, Lyonel and Miles, as well as Humphrey’s four daughters, Eleanor (a great friend of Agatha’s), Felicity, Penelope and Sizza. Having served as the leader of Britain’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during the war, Humphrey’s second eldest daughter went on to become the first Director of the Women’s Royal Air Force in 1949, and, after her marriage to Harald Peake in 1952, she became known as Air Commodore Dame Felicity Peake. Sadly, Humphrey did not live to see her achievements because he died unexpectedly in May 1946.

Agatha and Max focused their energies first on moving back into Greenway, which was officially derequisitioned on Christmas Day 1945. The following year in July they returned to Winterbrook House and spent much time restoring it. Max also dedicated his energies to writing up his account of his pre-war digs, since the unstable political situation in the Middle East meant that archaeological exploration of the region was out of the question.

For some time Agatha and Nan had been worried about the future of Abney Hall. Unless their nephew Jack married and produced an heir the property might pass out of the family. Agatha’s concerns were sublimated into
The Hollow,
which was published in November 1946: the Angkatell family fear their beloved ancestral home Ainswick will eventually have to be sold off to strangers if the shy and retiring Edward Angkatell does not marry and raise a family there.

The return to peace-time was not easy for the British who were shattered by the deprivations, death and destruction brought on by war.
Taken at the Flood
, delivered to Agatha’s literary agent towards the end of 1946, although not published in the UK until November 1948, was the first of her novels to acknowledge the hardships caused by war and its aftermath: rationing, taxation, general shortages, loss of servants and a feeling of uncertainty and change in the air. Lynn Marchmont, one of the characters in the novel, thinks to herself:
‘It’s the aftermath the war has left. Ill will. Ill feeling. It’s everywhere. On railways and buses and in shops and among workers and clerks and even agricultural labourers. And I suppose worse in mines and factories. Ill will.’

Agatha, remembering her late brother Monty, well understood how some men found it impossible to settle back down to normal civilian life.
‘I know his type,’
Superintendent Spence says of one of the murder suspects.
‘It’s a type that’s done well during the war. Any amount of physical courage. Audacity and a reckless disregard of personal safety. That sort will face any odds. It’s the kind that’s likely to win the VC – though, mind you, it’s often a posthumous one. Yes, in wartime, a man like that is a hero. But in peace – well, in peace such men usually end up in prison. They like excitement and they can’t run straight, and they don’t give a damn for society – and finally they have no regard for human life.’