Agatha’s confusion arose largely from the romantic complications of her life. While staying with the Ralston-Patricks in Warwickshire, she had been taken to ‘a cold and windy meet’, where she had encountered a Colonel in the 17th Lancers, Bolton Fletcher. That evening they met again, at a fancy-dress ball at another house, The Asps, and on several other occasions. Agatha had dressed for the ball as Elaine, in white brocade with a pearl-covered cap, and three or four days after her return to Torquay she received a parcel containing a small silver-gilt box, engraved inside the lid with the words ‘The Asps, To Elaine’ and the date of the meet. Bolton Fletcher was, like Agatha’s later portrayal of him as Major Johnnie de Burgh in Unfinished Portrait, a master of the love letter, and ardent notes, flowers, books, chocolates and other tributes followed swiftly. On his third call at Ashfield, he proposed. Agatha was dazed and almost, but not quite, ready to be swept away: ‘I was charmed like the bird off a tree, and yet, when he was gone away, when I thought of him in absence, there was – nothing there.’ Clara was troubled. As she told Agatha, she had prayed for a good, kindly husband to appear for her daughter, one ‘well-endowed with this world’s goods’, for her income was now stretched very thin.
Somehow this suitor did not seem quite right. Handicapped by the lack of husband or sons who might make inquiries, Clara wrote to the Ralston-Patricks, who assured her that, apart from a profuse scattering of wild oats, Bolton Fletcher was in every way satisfactory. Clara did not mind the wild oats, nor the fact that the candidate was fifteen years older than Agatha (after all, there had been eight years between Frederick and herself), but she advised him that her daugher was too young to be pressed for an immediate decision and proposed that there be no letters or visits for six months, ‘which was probably just as well,’ Agatha remarked later, ‘because I should have fallen for those letters in the end.’ When the moratorium was over, a prepaid telegram arrived: ‘Cannot stand this indecision any longer. Will you marry me yes or no?’ ‘No,’ she wrote and straightaway felt enormous relief. ‘I turned over on my pillow and went immediately to sleep. So that was the end of that.’
Though Agatha’s life temporarily lost some of its savour, she regained her high spirits a few months later, with the arrival of Wilfred Pirie, whom she had last seen in Dinard when she was seven years old and he, older and rather superior, had been a Midshipman in the Navy. Now a Sub-lieutenant, he served in a submarine that came often to Torquay. Relieved to settle into a tranquil relationship, fortified by the friendship their fathers had enjoyed and their mothers now shared, and, no doubt, attracted as much by the lovely and intelligent Mrs Pirie as by her son, Agatha agreed that she and Wilfred should have ‘an understanding’. The friendship prospered; the romance did not. Agatha’s description of the fading of her illusion that she shared Wilfred’s tastes and enthusiasms (a phenomenon immediately recognisable to anyone who has ever sought to persuade themselves that they have met their perfect match) shows she was bored, especially when Wilfred talked about theosophy and spiritualism. It was not Wilfred’s embrace Agatha coveted but his family’s. His father was dead but in some respects Wilfred provided the masculine protection and challenge of which Agatha was deprived by her own father’s death and Monty’s elusiveness. It did not occur to her that she treated Wilfred exactly like a brother. Then there was Wilfred’s mother, whose character was as tantalising to Agatha as her schemes of interior decoration. Lilian Pirie represented the sort of woman Agatha admired; well-read, well-informed, lively and assured, she was a more emphatic version of Clara. As Agatha was to write in Unfinished Portrait, where much of Wilfred is to be found in Jim Grant (‘interested in theosophy, bimetallism, economics and Christian Science’), ‘the thing Celia enjoyed most about her engagement was her prospective mother-in-law.’ In marrying Wilfred, moreover, Agatha could believe that she would not really be leaving Clara: ‘I liked the idea of marrying a sailor very much. I should live in lodgings at Southsea, Plymouth, or somewhere like that, and when Wilfred was away on foreign stations I could come home to Ashfield and spend my time with Mother.’
The tedium of the understanding dawned on Agatha when Wilfred telephoned to ask whether she would mind if he spent his leave treasure-hunting with an expedition in South America. Naturally she agreed and on the day after he sailed she realised – for the second time – ‘that an enormous load had slipped off my mind.… I loved Wilfred like a brother and I wanted him to do what he wanted to do. I thought the treasure-hunting idea was … almost certain to be bogus. That again was because I was not in love with Wilfred. If I had been, I would have seen it with his eyes.’ Clara and Wilfred were disappointed but not devastated. A few months later Wilfred married someone else.
For this was the time when Agatha’s friends and contemporaries were determinedly marrying. Twice a bridesmaid, she speculated about her own prospects. She and Madge would look about the room for the most unappealing-looking candidates for ‘Agatha’s Husbands’, forcing her to choose between them. That was in play, but in reality, too, Agatha appraised the eligible men around her. She said something about this in her Autobiography, in a passage discussing friendship between men and women:
I don’t know exactly what brings about a friendship between man and woman – men do not by nature ever want a woman as a friend. It comes about by accident – often because the man is already sensually attracted by some other woman and quite wants to talk about her. Women do often crave after friendship with men – and are willing to come to it by taking an interest in someone else’s love affair. Then there comes about a very stable and enduring relationship – you become interested in each other as people. There is a flavour of sex, of course, the touch of salt as a condiment.
According to an elderly doctor friend of mine, a man looks at every woman he meets and wonders what she would be like to sleep with – possibly proceeding to whether she would be likely to sleep with him if he wanted it. ‘Direct and coarse – that’s a man,’ he put it. They don’t consider a woman as a possible wife.
Women, I think, quite simply try on, as it were, every man they meet as a possible husband. I don’t believe any woman has ever looked across a room and fallen in love at first sight with a man; lots of men have with a woman.
At first glance, these observations seem naïve. While acknowledging that sexual chemistry plays a part in all relationships, it is unwise to generalise, given the differences in people’s sexual proclivities, or their lack of them. It is also harder, in some societies at least, to understand Agatha’s remark that ‘Men do not by nature ever want a woman as a friend.’ From the context (she is talking about Eileen Morris), it is clear that by ‘friend’ she means a mixture of companion and confidant. In Agatha’s youth the spheres in which men and women worked and lived were distinctly separate; fewer experiences were shared from an early age. There was less for men and women to talk about together and they were in some ways more baffling to each other. At the age of twenty, moreover, Agatha’s perspective was particularly narrow. She fully expected to meet ‘her Fate’ at any moment, and, indeed, she was looking out for him. So far, her own exquisite infatuations had been short-lived and she had sensibly backed off from the ardent Bolton Fletcher and well-meaning Wilfred. There was to be one more false start.
This was Reggie Lucy, the elder brother of Blanche, Marguerite and Muriel, with whom Agatha played tennis, croquet and Diabolo, picnicked on Dartmoor and roller-skated on the pier. A casual, comfortable family, they had first taken Agatha under their wing when Clara and Madge had gone to France shortly after Frederick’s death and she had stayed behind at Ashfield. The Lucys were a happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care collection, racy and informal – the two younger girls were known as Margie and Noonie and, apart from Jack Watts, they seem to have been the only people ever to escape with calling Agatha ‘Aggie’. Reggie, a Major in the Gunners, now came home after his foreign service; he took Agatha’s erratic golf in hand and, as time passed, proposed to her in an unemphatic and companionable way. As always with the Lucys, who were constantly missing trams, trains and meals, there was no urgency: ‘Just bear me in mind, and, if nobody else turns up, there I am, you know.’ Agatha immediately agreed. Reggie, however, insisted equably that they should wait a couple of years so that Agatha could survey the field before settling down with him. He returned to his Regiment and their courtship continued by post. Reggie, who is the model for Peter Maitland in Unfinished Portrait, assured Agatha that, despite their understanding, she should consider herself absolutely free. Agatha, like Celia, in that book, did not wish to be. ‘Don’t be too humble,’ says Celia’s mother to Peter. ‘Women don’t appreciate it.’ Sadly, she was right. Agatha was carried away by someone more determined and impetuous.
Archie Christie (it is impossible to think of that engaging young man as Archibald) is also described in Unfinished Portrait, as Dermot, whom Celia meets at a regimental ball in York. He spirits her away from the partners to whom she is pledged and, within a few weeks, from her fiancé. As we know from Agatha’s Autobiography, and from her own and Archie’s papers, the reality was only a little less dramatic. The dance was given by Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh, who had invited some of the garrison at Exeter, and Agatha was taken by old family friends who lived near Chudleigh, about twelve miles from Torquay. She already had one friend among the Exeter garrison, Arthur Griffiths, and, although he could not be there himself, he took the trouble to write to ask her to look out for a friend of his. This was Archie. That dance is the first non-military entry in a record Archie made of the most important events of his life. It took place on October 12th, 1912; Agatha was just twenty-two, Archie (whose birthday was a fortnight after hers) twenty-three. His history and interests were romantic. He had been born in India, where his father was a judge in the Indian Civil Service, and he had one brother, Campbell, who like Archie was in the Army. Archie’s father had become very ill after falling from a horse – the fall had affected his brain – and had died in hospital in England. His mother then married William Hemsley, a housemaster at Clifton College in Bristol, where Archie had been Head of the School. He was resourceful and intelligent and, on taking the entrance examination for the Woolwich Military Academy, was placed fourth on the list. He was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery in July 1909, joining the 138th Battery at Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain. The Brigade had moved to Exeter early in 1912.
He was, however, fascinated not by soldiering but by flying; the aeroplane was just beginning to be regarded as more than a bizarre plaything and the farsighted saw it as a powerful weapon of war. In June 1912, Archie, who was practical and ambitious, paid the £75 fee (‘including breakages’) for a course of lessons at the Bristol School at Larkhill, on the ‘Special Reduced Terms’ offered to ‘those desirous of qualifying for The Royal Flying Corps’. He took a month’s leave and found where his heart and talent lay.
By June 27th he was flying solo, practising right- and left-hand turns, and on July 6th he flew alone for twenty-five minutes at the dizzy height of 300 feet in a five-mile-an-hour wind. The exercise was precarious; the official log made special mention of the fact that all landings were achieved ‘without even breaking so much as a piece of wire …’. By mid-July, flying a Bristol Box Kite, Archie qualified for the Royal Aero Club Aviator’s Certificate, a magnificent document, printed in English and French. The ranks of qualified aviators were noticeably small; Archie’s certificate was only No. 245. He thereupon applied to join the newly formed Royal Flying Corps and returned to his Brigade at Exeter.
It was three months later that he met Agatha at the Cliffords’ dance. From his photographs we can see that he was tall and well-built, with fair, crisply curling hair, cut short. He had strong features: an attractive mouth, a nose with a small crinkle in it, blue eyes, heavy brows and a look of slightly anxious intensity. He was very young and determined and fell in love with Agatha almost at once. They danced together a great many times. In his scrapbook Archie pasted the programme and next to it a newspaper cutting of a jolly verse, ‘The New Romance’, which began:
When first she fell in love with Frank,
’Twas not the latter’s youth and rank,
Nor yet his balance at the bank
That won the heart of Elsie;
’Twas not the whiteness of his soul
That made her lose all self-control,
But ’twas the way he kicked a goal,
When playing ‘back’ for Chelsea.…
Whether in Archie’s case it was his dancing or his heart-stopping profession as an aviator that attracted Agatha we do not know, but he felt sufficiently confident to appear at Ashfield shortly afterwards, on his motor-bike.
Agatha was playing badminton with the Mellors, who lived opposite; she used to go across to their house whenever their son was at home, to try out the latest intricate dance steps, a joke that had begun years before when they had practised waltzing, in the fashion of popular operettas, up and down the staircase. Clara, always exasperated at finding herself left to entertain Agatha’s young men unaided, summoned her home on the telephone. Rather cross, because she thought this was the ‘dreary young naval lieutenant who asked me to read his poems’, Agatha returned. There was Archie, pink and embarrassed, with a story about being in Torquay and thinking he might drop in. (Agatha spotted that he must have gone to some trouble to ask Arthur Griffiths for her address.) The afternoon passed; Agatha, Clara and Archie continued to talk, evening came, and the two women silently telegraphed to each other that he was to be invited to stay for supper.
Archie did indeed come, like Dermot, ‘in a whirlwind’ into Agatha’s life. Her Autobiography describes this important meal as taking place both ‘a week or ten days’ after the Cliffords’ dance (that is, on about October 20th) and ‘soon after Christmas, because I know there was cold turkey in the larder’. Archie then roared off into the night, returning several times during the next few weeks (or, in Agatha’s understandably shaky chronology, days). Books were exchanged, though not for reading, Archie invited Agatha to a concert at Exeter, where they decorously drank tea at the railway station (Clara judged an hotel to be too compromising), and Agatha asked Archie to the New Year Ball at Torquay. The dance was on January 2nd. Archie was moody and Agatha puzzled. Two days later, after listening to Wagner at the Pavilion, she learnt the reason. When they returned to Ashfield, Archie announced that he was soon to leave Exeter for Farnborough, since his application to the Royal Flying Corps had been accepted. He begged her to marry him. She explained about her understanding with Reggie Lucy; Archie waved it aside. He wanted to marry her immediately and Agatha knew she wanted to marry him. They were ‘poles apart in our reactions to things’, but she believed, and continued all her life to believe, that this was what fascinated both of them. It was, she said, ‘the excitement of the stranger’ and, as she remembered years later, it was at this time that she had awoken from a dream to find herself saying: ‘The stranger from the sea, the stranger from the sea.’ A poem she wrote then, ‘The Ballad of the Fleet’, indicates her state of mind. It is about the people who first inhabited the hut circles of Dartmoor, living a spare but secure life, until the coming of the Vikings in their galleys. In her verse the leader of the invaders – ‘the Stranger from the Sea’ – takes their Priestess for his own, and both die for it.
Agatha and Archie were mesmerised by one another; Clara, taken aback by Agatha’s announcement that ‘Archie Christie has asked me to marry him and I want to, I want to dreadfully,’ brought them back to earth. The understanding with Reggie was ended but Clara insisted that they wait, since Archie could not hope to support a wife on a subaltern’s pay, supplemented only by Agatha’s allowance of £100 a year from her grandfather’s trust. Archie, determined they should not wait a day longer than they could help, was momentarily bitter, but reflected that in any case the Royal Flying Corps preferred its young men to be single, in case they crashed. Agatha, too, was desperate at the thought that they might have years of delay. She was twenty-two and full of turbulent emotion. It is not surprising that for the next year and a half their relationship was stormy, first one and then the other wanting to break things off.
Archie, at least, had his training to occupy his time and attention. Shortly after the end of January 1913 he passed the RFC examination and was posted to Larkhill, in a squadron commanded by Major Brooke-Popham. His flights became ever higher (1,800 feet on April 22nd, 2,000 feet on April 24th), longer (45 minutes on April 17th), further (90 miles on April 22nd), gustier (20 miles an hour wind on April 29th), and more hazardous (April 2nd: machine wrecked; April 29th: dropped passenger engine; May 5th: bent chassis strut, goggles oily). He described his manoeuvres to Agatha: making spirals, observing artillery fire, swerving, firing double rockets from a Very pistol. She was appalled. On that first afternoon at Ashfield, when Archie had described his chosen career to Agatha and Clara, they had been enchanted. It was new and thrilling, and Agatha was fascinated by the aeroplane. She had enjoyed the hair-raising drives in fast motors; the magic of flying was still more entrancing. She had herself already flown in one of those rickety early machines, for in May 1911 Clara had taken her to see a flying exhibition where for the sum of £5 visitors could be taken up in the air for a few minutes. As Agatha acknowledged, Clara was wonderful, not just for agreeing to spend what was then, and for them, an enormous sum, but also for subduing her fears that the aeroplane, and Agatha, might hurtle to the ground. Agatha never forgot that experience. Her small straw hat firmly wedged on her head, she was taken up, the plane circled round and round and then, ‘with that wonderful switch-back down’, it ‘vol-planed’ back to earth.
None of this, however, resigned her to the perilous activities Archie was undertaking as his daily routine. She wrote begging him to give it up. Archie replied with a charming, though not wholly reassuring, letter:
I was so glad to get your note today, but I can’t give up flying yet.
For your sake, more than my own, I am taking no risks and feel perfectly confident that no harm can come to me. That poor fellow who was killed was not safe in any machine and the Cody biplane is very unstable and carries much too great a weight on the elevator. He hated flying it but did not like to refuse when he was asked to, showing a lack of moral courage.
I am terribly sorry for his family – so much so that I will give up this Corps if you really are unhappy about it but I know I am perfectly safe – I always carry St Christopher with me. It does make one morbid reading about these accidents – still more so seeing them – but confidence soon returns.
He came to see Agatha whenever he could, first from Larkhill and then from Netheravon, to which he was posted at the end of 1913. His letters to his ‘dearest Angel’ reflected the doubt and despair they were both feeling. ‘The reason why I was unwell last week,’ he wrote, ‘was that I was so worried because I thought that it would be best for you if I never saw you again and hated telling you so. Now I have not a trace of pessimism left and feel sure that all must come right.… I was only doing in a clumsy way what I thought would be best for you …’. Then, more cheerfully, ‘To return to Aviation …’.
At other times their spirits were more buoyant. After three days’ leave with Agatha in Torquay, Archie wrote that ‘One day we will have our cottage which will be heavenly happiness and will never say goodbye again. You will have to be poor but I will have you to love and look after for ever so all will be well.’ They plunged into despair and out of it again. Some of their fears were exaggerated; Agatha, for instance, wrote breaking off their engagement when she learnt that Clara might lose her sight. Archie persuaded her that this was foolish, since it might not happen for years, by which time a cure for cataract might be found. But their financial insecurity was not misplaced. Archie’s pay was minuscule and, after his stepfather’s only rich relation unexpectedly left his fortune to the Charing Cross Hospital (who sent Mr Hemsley a handsome walking stick as a token of thanks), their hope of help from that source expired. Agatha’s situation was even more precarious than before. The crash of H.B. Chaflin was now complete and Clara depended for her income on an annual allowance from the private fortune of the son of one of the partners. An indication of the economies the Millers now practised is given by a letter that Clara sent in February 1914 to the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Frederick’s father was buried in the family plot. The site was valuable and its tending expensive, and Clara enquired whether the title might be sold: ‘the lot being of no further possible use to the family, they do not wish to pay for its upkeep, and also desire the money for its sale, as they are in England, and never likely to be in America and in extremely low financial circumstances.’ The application, however, was not sent off; Clara and Agatha somehow made ends meet.
As it turned out, the engagement lasted less than two years, but the delay seemed interminable to both Agatha and Archie, not least because they did not know when its end would come. Suddenly, however, in August 1914, they were swept into a drama far bigger than their own.