Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (29 page)

Soon after completing
Taken at the Flood
Agatha turned to her alias of Mary Westmacott in order to write one of her most personal novels.
The Rose and the Yew Tree
earned the plaudit of being serialized in two monthly instalments in the US magazine
Good Housekeeping
from December 1947 to January 1948. Had Max not betrayed her soon afterwards she might well have been able, once and for all, to put the memories of her disappearance behind her for good.

Chapter Twenty-Three
Memories Shadowed

Despite the personal troubles that befell her after
The Rose and the Yew Tree
was written, it was Agatha’s favourite Mary Westmacott book. The idea behind the story had been with her since around 1929, she revealed in her memoirs. The fact that the idea came to her so soon after her divorce from Archie shows how desperately she had wanted to believe at the time that it could be possible for pure, unselfish love to redeem someone apparently beyond redemption. Max’s safe return and apparent undying loyalty meant it was written at a time when, in her owns words, she felt ‘closest to God’.

The Rose and the Yew Tree
is the idealistic story of a self-centred and amoral former war hero, John Gabriel, who redeems himself by becoming a ‘messiah’ after the heroine, Isabella Charteris – whom he has seduced and mistreated – dies after throwing herself into the path of a bullet intended for him by a political fanatic.

When John Gabriel stands as a Tory candidate in the 1945 election, he is ruthless and ambitious. He privately admits that he is really a Labour supporter but that it is a matter of expediency. He needs a job, the war is almost over and ‘the plums’ will soon be snatched up. Agatha, a lifelong Tory, has one of the Conservative characters observe that nobody can help making a mess of things after a war and it is better that it not be one’s own side.

Agatha supported the Conservatives because of their connections with the aristocracy and not because she believed they always served their country well. In
The Rose and the Yew Tree
a character denounces politics as little more than booths at a fair offering their own cure-alls for the world’s ills. Meanwhile, an aristocratic Conservative supporter expresses the idealist view of her creator that legislators should be drawn from the class that does not need to work for a living, the class that can be indifferent to gain – that is, the ruling class.

After an unconsummated liaison with a local vet’s wife John Gabriel seduces the aristocratic and sheltered Isabella Charteris from St Loo Castle. They live together unmarried, and she copes with the squalid existence to which he subjects her through her ‘art of repose’. She has the ability to recognize the important things in life and to live in the moment. She accepts people’s different natures and never tries to manipulate anyone. Despite gaining Isabella’s love, John Gabriel complains that he never really knows what she is thinking. Archie once said much the same thing about Agatha.

John Gabriel covets Isabella partly because of his sense of being inferior, admitting that he is class-conscious and hates arrogant upper-class women who make him feel like dirt. He also shares his creator’s views on the aristocracy. It is not the title that matters but the sense of feeling sure of yourself and not having to wonder what people are thinking of you; merely being concerned with what you think of them. It had been a disappointment to him not to have been born into the aristocracy, just as it had been for Agatha.

When Isabella sacrifices her life to save John Gabriel, the choice is hers. Teresa, another character in the novel, tells the grieving narrator Hugh Norreys, who has always loved Isabella from afar, that time does not mean anything, that five minutes and a thousand years are of equal importance. No one’s life is wasted, because the life of the rose and the life of the yew tree are of equal duration. Few people recognize their true selves, their own ‘design’, but Isabella was one of them. She was difficult to understand not because she was complex but because she was extraordinarily simple and able to recognize life’s essentials. A mature Agatha was in fact describing herself.

John Gabriel is devastated by Isabella’s death, and his subsequent path to redemption is made plausible because Agatha imbues him with her own religious feelings. He says that he has never been able to believe in God the father, God of creation and of love, but that sometimes he does believe in Christ who descended into hell. He promised the repentant thief paradise but went to hell with the one who cursed and reviled Him.

The Rose and the Yew Tree
gives the greatest insight of all Agatha’s novels into her renewed religious faith. The book’s main weakness lies in its use of fairy-tale motifs. These, however, make clear the enduring romanticism that lay beneath the author’s apparently pragmatic exterior.

Agatha’s idealistic belief that individuals have choice and that destiny is not entirely predetermined comes across strongly. Her more serene outlook was enhanced by her rediscovered faith and her happiness with Max, and she was dumbstruck by her publisher’s response to the book.

Billy Collins, who had succeeded his late uncle Sir Godfrey Collins as the head of her publishing house, missed the point of the book when he asked if it was wise to have a story based around the General Election, since John Gabriel was such an undesirable person as a candidate. From then on Agatha ensured that the Mary Westmacott novels were published by Heinemann, since she felt that Collins ‘hated’ Mary Westmacott and anything that distracted her from writing detective stories.

Judith and Graham Gardner recall that far greater personal upset for Agatha was to come following Max’s appointment to the first Chair of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in London University in October 1947. Max, an articulate, dedicated scholar, was in his element teaching the subject he loved. His students found him witty and stimulating, and he loved being in the spotlight. The adulation he received from his young female students, in particular, led to a number of deepening friendships.

In a letter Max wrote to Agatha’s daughter Rosalind he claimed that ‘hundreds of persons, mostly women, prostrate themselves to the ground’ as he entered the university building. Even so, he considered himself very lucky to have landed the job, and he expressed the hope that he would be able to cope adequately with all that was expected of him.

Ironically, Agatha’s generosity had led to the situation developing. Max had been offered the academic post only after two colleagues, Sidney Smith and Vere Gordon Childe, had approached her to sponsor the position at the Institute of Archaeology, and she had readily agreed for her husband’s sake.

It was Nan who broke the news to Agatha. Max’s apparent attempt to recapture his lost youth greatly upset her. Nevertheless she was better equipped to cope with Max’s occasional liaisons with his female students than with Archie’s affair with Nancy Neele because she never loved him as much as she had loved her first husband.

Max’s generous nature was partly to blame for this blow to Agatha’s happiness. Nan had approached Max for advice because a friend’s daughter, Diana Kirkbride, had left the Wrens and was uncertain how to pursue an interest in archaeology. Max had offered to help by giving Diana a place in his class, and, although he formed no intimate relationship with her, reports of his friendships with other female students got back to Diana’s mother, who in turn told Nan.

When challenged by Agatha, Max insisted he was the victim of malicious gossip. Agatha was unsure whether or not to believe him, and her unease increased when she heard that Max had driven one of his female students home. He was shrewd enough to know that if he played his cards close to his chest Agatha would not divorce him. He was very attentive to her needs when they were together, always observing her birthdays and other special occasions with gifts, cards and letters, thus impressing on her how much she meant to him. However, his wife’s feelings of being betrayed ran deep and reopened the wounds left by Archie. Max’s instincts were right. Agatha could not bear the thought of the publicity that would ensue if she divorced a second time.

Agatha remembered her mother’s advice on maintaining a marriage and whenever possible accompanied Max on trips and social occasions. His intermittent liaisons with young women were made easier for her to endure because he was always the perfect gentleman to her in private and looked out for her interests.

Nan had moved back to London after the war, and Agatha got into a routine of visiting her friend each afternoon while Max was teaching. Having refused Max the use of their car, Agatha would pick him up in it herself. Shortly before his class was due to end Agatha would often say to Nan: ‘Look at the time. I must go and fetch Max on the dot.’

Agatha’s problems with Max were a cause of anxiety for Nan and Judith. Mother and daughter had never entirely rid themselves of the suspicion that he had married Agatha for her money. Nan remembered only too well how assiduously he had attached himself to Agatha in the Middle East and followed her back to England and asked her to marry him. It angered Nan, who knew how hard Agatha had worked all her life, that her friend’s money paid for everything in the marriage and that Max basked in the reflected glory of being her husband.

As her fame increased – she made history in 1948 when Allen Lane of Penguin Books published a million of her paperbacks in one day – Agatha did everything possible to guard her private life. The public’s perception of her was of a happily married woman who had made ‘more money out of murder since Lucrezia Borgia’, and Agatha was determined to keep it that way.

She had never sought fame. Judith Gardner recalls that when Max’s mother Marguerite Mallowan remarked to Agatha one day how much she must enjoy her fame and wealth, Agatha turned to Nan saying: ‘Tell her, Nan. Tell her it’s not true. I never wanted it!’ It was one of the few occasions Judith saw Agatha really angry. Both Nan and Judith, who often discussed Agatha’s affairs, were aware that the one thing she had wanted more than anything was a happy family life with Archie and Rosalind. When Agatha was in the prime of her writing career she once told Judith: ‘I feel like a very old woman.’

By the end of the decade a lessening of political and financial tension enabled Agatha and Max to embark once more on archaeological expeditions to the Middle East. Agatha received a distressing blow, however, when it was reported in the
Sunday Times
on 13 and 20 February 1949 that the author Mary Westmacott was Agatha Christie. Deeply unhappy about Max’s indiscretions, this uncovering of her literary alter ego could not have come at a worse time.

An angry Agatha wrote to her literary agent Edmund Cork in March from the British Consul in Baghdad criticizing his ‘intelligence service’ for not being the first to inform her that her identity had been exposed. Reluctantly she gave her consent to her publishers to acknowledge Mary Westmacott’s true identity on the cover of the books. Her decision to capitalize commercially on the disclosure arose from the fact that the war had left her complicated finances in an even worse mess than ever.

Meanwhile, much to the surprise and relief of her mother, Rosalind had decided to marry a barrister called Anthony Hicks. Although they wrote to tell Agatha of their impending London register office wedding in late 1949, they intimated they did not expect her to attend because they were obliged to return to Wales immediately after the ceremony to ‘feed the dogs’. It was typical of Rosalind that she did not want to celebrate the occasion with her mother since their relationship had always been tempestuous. Agatha surprised them on the day by attending the wedding anyway. Anthony was an entertaining scholar, interested in people and travel and lacking in ruthless ambition, and his marriage to Rosalind lasted up until she died many years later.

Throughout the 1950s cracks appeared in Agatha’s own marriage. Max’s flirtations, as well as their money worries, were just some of the reasons why memories of the disappearance surfaced again. One woman threatened Agatha’s marriage more than anyone else. Barbara Parker, a smiling 42-year-old spinster, was a former archaeological student of Max’s who organized their Nimrud expeditions with such skill and good cheer that she made herself indispensable to the couple. A woman of dauntless courage, she volunteered to go out to Nimrud before the beginning of every season, to repair the roof of the expedition house and make it habitable; she also paid the workmen, assumed the role of medical officer and generally took all crises in her stride.

People who met Barbara often described her as ‘alluring’. She had begun her career as a mannequin at the couture house of Worth before studying Chinese art and archaeology. During the Second World War she had joined the London Fire Brigade and served with distinction through the Blitz. Already a colleague of Max, her path had crossed with Agatha’s in 1944 when Max had asked her to find his copy of
Herodotus
; Barbara had duly located it in the library at Winterbrook House and sent it to him abroad. In 1949 she had been appointed Secretary and Librarian of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, which was based in a house in Baghdad that had been bought with Agatha’s money. Barbara was considered a superbly tactful negotiator with the Iraqis and worked at Nimrud both as an epigraphist and the expedition’s official photographer of archaeological finds, the latter role being one she took over from Agatha.

It was Agatha’s habit to compose odes about the members of the expedition, and in the early, carefree days out in Nimrud she unsuspectingly penned one about her husband’s future mistress. Agatha began her humorous ode ‘In Blessed Nimrud did there live Saint Barbara the Martyr’ and paid tribute to a woman who, she said, would willingly share her trousers or scrambled eggs and was happy to do accounts from morn to night. Max is described as ‘the stern director’ who gave Barbara hell. Agatha’s ode was a tribute to Barbara’s capacity to shoulder responsibility with indomitable good cheer.