Curtain Up (8 page)

       
GOLDBERG: It seems to me, the only solution is for us to get married before next Wednesday.

       
EUGENIA: (reflectively) After all, if everyone is forced into Eugenics it will be far more chic to have an uneugenic husband . . .

       
GOLDBERG: Well, you know man hunting's quite ousting foxhunting as a sport amongst the fair sex. You can hunt a man all the year round, you see, and English women are so deuced sporting.

Agatha's own hunt for a husband, which had started in the social whirlwind of colonial Cairo and moved on to the more genteel setting of English house parties, was about to result in her marriage, at the age of twenty-five. Abandoning her fiancé, family friend Reggie Lucy, she opted instead for love from a stranger, and the promise of adventure offered by dashing young airman Archie Christie.

‘Archie and I were poles apart in our reaction to things. I think that from the start that fascinated us. It is the old excitement of “the stranger”.'
²¹
Married on Christmas Eve 1914, their early years together were disrupted by war, with Archie gaining distinction for his contribution to the ground-based operations of the Royal Flying Corps, mostly on overseas postings, while Agatha remained in Torquay as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment at the Red Cross hospital in Torquay, completing the examination of the Society of Apothecaries and becoming a dispenser.

At the end of the war Archie, by now a colonel, was stationed at the Air Ministry in London, and after the war ended he found himself a job in the City. The couple divided their time between a flat in St John's Wood and Ashfield, Agatha's mother's house in Torquay, where their daughter Rosalind was born on 5 August 1919.

The following year Agatha enjoyed a successful publishing debut with her novel
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
. Written on a break from her hospital work during the war, it was finally accepted for publication by Devon-born John Lane of the idiosyncratic and often controversial publishing house The Bodley Head, which specialised in books of poetry, and whose authors included Eden Phillpotts' friend Arnold Bennett. The Bodley Head had been responsible at the end of the previous century for the notoriously decadent literary quarterly
The Yellow Book.
The five-book deal she signed with the firm was to establish her profile as an author, but it was to be another ten years until a play of hers was produced.

In 1922, Archie was engaged to take part in a world tour to promote the forthcoming British Empire exhibition, and Agatha
took the opportunity to join her husband on this eye-opening voyage, which took in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Canada, with a stop for Agatha in New York in November on the way back, while Archie continued his work in Canada. In New York, Agatha stayed with her elderly American godmother Cassie Sullivan, and it is her name and address, along with the date 9 November 1922, that tantalisingly appears in handwriting on the front of the typed one-act playscript
The Last Séance.
In her autobiography, Agatha remembers this as one of her very first short stories, later rewritten for publication (which occurred in the American magazine
Ghost Stories
in 1926). The scenario works much better as a short play, however, and I believe that it was in this format that she first envisaged and wrote it, as an exercise in the then popular theatrical genre of Grand Guignol. In a letter to her mother from Melbourne in May 1922, Agatha writes, ‘I've been rather idle – but have written a Grand Guignol sketch and a short story.'
²²
Notes for
The Last Séance
(titled ‘The Mother') appear in Notebook 34, along with those for the novel
The Man in the Brown Suit
(1924). ‘Passed Tenerife last night' she observes at one point.
²³

At the time of Agatha's stay in Paris as a teenager, the original Parisian
Théâtre de Grand-Guignol
was under the direction of Max Maurey, and at its height as a ‘horror theatre' venue, with André de Lorde its celebrated and prolific principal writer. An ever-changing programme of evening entertainments consisting of a collection of graphically bloodthirsty and macabre one-act plays, occasionally interspersed with comedies by way of light relief, were the talk of the town. It was widely advertised that audience members frequently passed out from fear, but the public proved themselves more than happy to rise to the challenge, and flocked to the small theatre in the Quartier Pigalle. It seems unlikely that those responsible for the education of a group of teenage girls would have allowed their charges to sample the delights of the Grand Guignol, but in 1908 the French company made headlines when it toured to London, including in its repertoire a play called
L'Angoisse
(
The Medium
)
.

In the early 1920s the Little Theatre on the Strand hosted London's own Grand Guignol season, with a poster so horrifying that it was banned from the London Underground. A total of forty-three plays were produced in its rolling repertoire and the Lord Chamberlain's office added to the publicity by refusing a licence to several more. Rarely out of the newspapers, the regular casts included such stalwarts of the English stage as Sybil Thorndike and her husband Lewis Casson, and a repertoire of work that included translations of some of the original French pieces (including
The Medium
) along with pieces by several English writers of the day. Noël Coward even contributed a short play, although he opted for a comic interlude rather than a horror piece.
The Better Half
, which was another play highlighting the inadequacies of the divorce laws, culminates in this heartfelt plea from its heroine:

       
ALICE: I tried to make him strike me, so that I could divorce him for cruelty – but No. He wouldn't! He did just twist my arm a teeny bit but not enough even to bruise it . . . As somebody so very truly remarked the other day, the existing Divorce laws put a premium on perjury and adultery! Therefore I am going to find a lover and live in flaming sin – possibly at Claridges.
²⁴

As regards the horror element of the programme, the following review from
The Times
sums up the sort of evening that audiences could enjoy:

The other new feature of the evening is probably familiar to most visitors to the Paris Grand Guignol, and it has already been seen in both French and English in this country. It is
The Medium
, the gruesome little play about a sculptor who is filled with strange imaginings on moving into a new studio. His model is a medium and goes off into a trance . . . during which she reveals the grizzly secrets which the studio holds . . . Those who like two series of shudder in one evening
will probably appreciate
The Medium
, particularly as it gives Miss Sybil Thorndike another opportunity for a hair-raising performance . . . but we confess that for us
The Hand Of Death
is quite enough for one evening.
²⁵

There is no record of Agatha having attended a Grand Guignol performance at the Little Theatre, but she was living in London at the time and would have read the numerous press articles and reviews that it generated. Its preoccupations would have resonated with her own interest in the occult and her own literary experimentation with the genre, including a few published stories and a number of unpublished ones such as ‘The Green Gate', ‘The Woman and the Kenite', ‘Stronger than Death', ‘Witch Hazel' and ‘The War Bride'.
²⁶

The Last Séance
itself is a short, atmospheric and effective shocker in the true Grand Guignol tradition. Written for two male and two female actors, and set of course in Paris, it concerns a medium, Simone Letellier, who is persuaded to communicate with the spirit of a dead child. The outcome is marvellously gory, as a curtain is pulled back to reveal that ‘Simone is lying on the marble floor in a pool of blood which is dripping down the steps.'
²⁷
This would be a gripping
coup de théâtre
, but it does not make for a satisfactory short story. The dialogue, which in the story simply appears to have had speech marks put around it, works well when spoken but not when read, and the highly theatrical denouement, when briefly described on the page, goes for nothing. We don't know whether the play was submitted for performance, but in these early days Agatha found it a lot easier to get her work published than produced, so this is likely to have accounted for the change of format.
²⁸

Agatha also continued to write one-act plays on themes that seem likely to have been suggested by the writings of George Bernard Shaw, but which latterly sound as if they may also have been informed by her own experiences as a wife and mother.
Ten Years
concerns a couple who have lived together as man and wife on the basis that they will review their
relationship after a ten-year trial period. Elliot, the husband, is an author who has begun to enjoy some success, here talking to his lawyer, Rogers:

       
ROGERS: I fancy your – early views – were rather unpopular.

       
ELLIOT: Oh! They gained me a sort of notoriety. But unorthodoxy is for the young, Rogers – the young who imagine they're going to remake the world on their own improved pattern. As we go on in life we find that the old pattern is not so bad after all! . . .

       
. . . I admit that my one aim then was to free the world from many of its existing conventions which I considered hampering and degrading. You may have heard that I met my – that I met Desiree when she was studying art in Paris. She too held unorthodox views. We both agreed in condemning the convention of marriage, which seemed to us then an ignoble bondage. Instead we favoured what is known as the ten years marriage system.
²⁹

When the time comes, however, Desiree decides that, despite having been entirely faithful for ten years, she wants to leave Elliot and set up home with another male friend.

       
DESIREE: I've been a good wife and mother – but – I'm still young. Young enough to feel the divine fire, and long for it. I'm only thirty-three, remember. And something cries out in me – for more life! I want romance – passion – fire – the things we had once and can never have again. I want to feel the first exquisite thrill of mingled fear and joy. I want the beginning of love – not its end. I don't want peace and security, and calm affection. I want to
live
– to live
my
life – not yours.

This comes as a shock to Elliot, who believes that the ten-year experiment has been a success. He and Desiree argue over custody of their child and, in a sentimental ending, resolve to stay together for the child's sake.

Marmalade Moon
is another four-hander one-act play, this time a comedy reminiscent of Noël Coward. As usual with most of these early, unpublished works, the typescript is undated, the author's name is not given, and the researcher has to turn detective, scouring the script for contemporary references, or comparing stylistic traits or even paper quality, typefaces and layouts with other works the dates of which are known. In this case, it seems likely that the play predates Coward's
Private Lives
by several years, although the scenario is not dissimilar to his 1930 comedy about a divorced couple reuniting during their honeymoons with their new spouses.

There are two versions of the script in the Christie archive,
Marmalade Moon
being a slightly amended version of the earlier
New Moon
. The location is a continental hotel, the second draft rationalising the first's two settings into a more user-friendly single one. Here we meet two couples, one celebrating their honeymoon and the other the first anniversary of their divorce. In this extract, the divorced man offers some words of wisdom to the female honeymooner:

       
BRANDON: As a matter of fact, I'm here to commemorate my wife's divorce.

       
SYLVIA: Who from?

       
BRANDON: Regrettably, but inevitably, myself. She didn't start threatening soon enough. She just went (flicking his fingers) – like that. That's why I advised you to start threatening now. Then you may not have to leave later.

       
SYLVIA: Since you seem so frank about it, perhaps you wouldn't mind telling me why your wife left you?

       
BRANDON: (lightly) – You mean why I left my wife. Certainly. We couldn't agree on how to pronounce ‘Wagner'. She would call him ‘Oo – agner'. She was an American. They said it was incompatibility of temperament. Anyway, I never loved her.

       
SYLVIA: Oh dear!

       
BRANDON: Yes, it distressed me greatly, in fact, almost as much as her quite indecent mispronunciation of Wagner!
(slight pause, then seriously) But perhaps the real trouble was that neither of us would give in to the other. In married life you have to have a master – or a mistress.
³⁰

Again, there are echoes of Shaw's preface to
Getting Married
, in which he asserts, ‘the sole and sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is that they want one', and indeed to the play
Getting Married
itself, which involves a couple who are hesitant to marry and another who are divorced. In Agatha's play, as in Shaw's, the happy outcome follows a traditional dramatic convention. The newlyweds split up and then reunite, and the divorced couple are eventually reconciled. In the first version,
New Moon
, Brandon concludes, ‘This is just the beginning of a new era of our married life – a new moon.' In the wittily retitled
Marmalade Moon
he states, ‘This is just the beginning of a new era of our married life – our second honeymoon! Our Marmalade Moon. That's it – a little less sweet, perhaps, but a lot less sticky, and a thousand times more satisfying!'