The erosion of Agatha’s idyll began in the summer of 1938. Faithful Peter died and, though Cork offered to send her a dog, Agatha felt that for the time being she ‘could not bear to have another’. The next intimation of trouble came at almost the same time, in a letter from Cork announcing that the American revenue authorities were asking such detailed questions about her financial affairs that his New York counterpart, Harold Ober, had engaged a prominent tax lawyer, Howard E. Reinheimer, ‘who deals with the affairs of many important authors’, to handle their inquiries on Agatha’s behalf. Mr Reinheimer’s work was to occupy him for the next decade. As far as Agatha was concerned, there was nothing she could do but wait – and work. After their last efforts in the Balikh Valley in the autumn of 1938, she and Max did not go abroad again, for by the spring of 1939 the European political situation was so delicate that it was unwise to travel, let alone dig in the Near East territories, each with its web of relations with different European powers. Max also refused an invitation to attend, with Agatha, the Archaeological Congress in Berlin in late August, sensibly, for by September, after months of holding back, Britain was at war with Hitler.
The Mallowans – and Mrs North, who was staying at Greenway – heard the Prime Minister’s statement on the wireless in the kitchen. Agatha calmly continued mixing a salad. Even for those who, like her, were uninterested in the intricacies of world politics, the announcement was no surprise, although, as she later wrote in her Autobiography, after Chamberlain’s reassurances, ‘we had thought … “Peace in our time” … might be the truth.’ War does not, in any case, make domestic tasks less pressing, as Agatha knew, for her perspective was essentially mundane. As she had struggled through the First World War, so she would battle in the Second. She worried about the danger for people she loved, celebrated and lamented national victories and defeats, made her own contribution in her hospital work, but her preoccupations and horizons were limited. She simply carried on.
Max and Agatha had both spent the summer in Devon, he writing up his latest work and she busy with Sad Cypress, a collection of short stories and another book. The short stories were the twelve Labours of Hercules, delivered to Cork at intervals during 1939 for publication in the Strand magazine. They were funny, clever stories (Poirot’s exploration of a nightclub called ‘Hell’, whose stairs are paved with good intentions, is especially comic) and she seems to have had little trouble with them – until, that is, they were published as a collection in 1947, when there was a blast to Cork about the cover design Collins proposed for the book: ‘I cannot describe to you the rough for the wrapper …’, she wrote. ‘It suggests Poirot going naked to the bath!!! All sorts of obscene suggestions are being made by my family. I have, I hope, been tactful but firm. Put statuary on the cover but make it clear it is statuary – not Poirot gone peculiar in Hyde Park!!!’
Over the years Collins became accustomed to such explosions. Another came at the end of the summer of 1939 when Agatha learnt that an item in the forthcoming Crime Club News was about to summarise the entire plot of Ten Little Niggers. Billy Collins reinforced his apologies with small gifts; on this occasion he sent Agatha copies of G.D.H. and Margaret Cole’s latest detective story, the new Rex Stout, and an advance copy of the Book Society Choice Love in the Sun, promising, too, some of Collins’s ‘good Autumn books’.
So sustained and mollified, Agatha and Max stayed on for the winter at Greenway. ‘Dear W.A.R.’, as Agatha called Billy Collins in her happier letters, was always attentive, offering theatre tickets, seats for Wimbledon, lunches and dinners, more books from Collins’s lists. ‘May I be greedy?’ Agatha replied. ‘It’s rather like a desert island here. We don’t drive in the blackout and so the evenings are lonely.’ Those she asked for in November 1939 were Paderewski, Gardens of England, Brief Return, The Dark Star, Pamela and Dismembered Masterpieces, all but the last two, not yet published, sent within the week.
As well as the stories in the The Labours of Hercules and Sad Cypress, in 1939 Agatha also completed One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (published in America as The Patriotic Murders). This began with Hercule Poirot’s paying a visit to a dentist, who later that day appeared to have shot himself. She had been tinkering with ‘Dentist ideas’ for some time; the thought had surfaced, for instance, when she was considering the outline of The ABC Murders and her notes briefly veered off into thinking about a crime committed by ‘legless man – sometimes tall, sometimes short. Ditto – with teeth projecting and discoloured, or white and even.’ In 1939 she asked Carlo and Mary Smith for an introduction to their dentist in Welbeck Street (where her own dentist also practised). She did not need treatment, she said, but Carlo explained to her dentist that Miss Christie wished to pay him ‘a normal fee’, ask a few questions and examine his surgery. The receptionist never forgot the sight of her employer showing Agatha the poison cabinet, as she inquired about methods and types of injection. And in the next draft Agatha was off … ‘HP in dentist’s chair – latter talks while drilling – Points (i) Never forget a face …’
As soon as war was declared, Max had applied to join the services. This proved difficult. Unsoldierly men of thirty-five were not then being recruited and the authorities also regarded Max’s father’s Austrian birth as an obstacle. Nor could he obtain a post in Whitehall, which was at first so disorganised that no use could be found for a qualified Arabist. He therefore did the best he could by joining the Brixham Home Guard, sharing two rifles among ten men. In mid-1940, he found more demanding work. The town of Ercincan in Eastern Turkey had been devastated by an earthquake and British relief was swiftly organised, both for humanitarian reasons and because Britain depended for steel-making on Turkish supplies of chrome. An Anglo-Turkish Relief Committee was formed by Professor Garstang, founder of the British School of Archaeology in Ankara and a friend as well as colleague of Max, who was invited to be the Secretary. He set about organising an appeal and the distribution of relief, duties which preoccupied him until early 1941. Rosalind, meanwhile, looked for work as a land girl on a neighbouring farm in Devon and filled in forms for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. She made herself useful as best she could and filled in more forms, this time for the ATS. At mid-summer, she told Agatha she was going to be married in a few days’ time to Hubert Prichard, a regular soldier in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, temporarily attached to Jack Watts’s regiment in Cheshire. Hubert was often at Abney and had stayed at Greenway. Agatha insisted on coming to Denbigh, where Captain Prichard was stationed, to see her daughter married, with, as Agatha put it, ‘the minimum of fuss’. ‘All very sudden,’ Agatha wrote to Billy Collins, ‘– but a very nice man. I do think they will be happy if only he comes through safely. However, as far as I can see, any one of us may go up in smoke. Bad luck on the young folk.’
Life at Greenway was no longer undisturbed. The Macleods, doctors whom Agatha had first met in Mosul, had brought their children there, away from the east coast where the first raids were expected. Agatha also found her house ‘full of soldiers practising what they would do if the Germans landed – they can hardly move they’ve got so much on!’ Eventually the Macleod children were moved to their grandmother in Wales but, shortly after, Greenway was rented by a Mr and Mrs Arbuthnot, who arrived with two nurses and ten evacuees under five. Agatha meanwhile brought her dispensing knowledge up to date. She had lost Carlo to war work (‘without Miss Fisher, I lose everything!!’) and her gardener at Wallingford had joined the RAF. Agatha decided this was the moment to move to London to be with Max, first in a flat in Half Moon Street, the only building to survive in a road that had been bombed, then a service flat in Park Place, off St James’s Street, and, at last, when the tenants of 48 Sheffield Terrace decided to leave, in their own house in Kensington. She moved most of the furniture, since there were ‘bombs all round us whistling down’. She also took a course in Air Raid Precautions. In October Sheffield Terrace became very unsafe; with the help of their old friend Stephen Glanville, Max and Agatha found a flat at 22 Lawn Road, Hampstead, in the Bauhaus block where Glanville himself lived. An Egyptologist, he had known Max since 1925. He had helped Agatha with Akhnaton and had been greatly entertained by Death on the Nile. Now, a Squadron Leader in a branch of the Air Ministry, he vigorously set about getting Max a proper wartime job.
Agatha wrote steadily on, one of her few indications of strain being a furious letter to Cork, complaining about a proposed cover design. Her protests about jackets served another purpose. Agatha’s relations with Collins, orchestrated by the tactful Cork, were generally good and she liked Billy Collins, who personally supervised her dealings there. His introduction to Agatha had been surprisingly friendly, for, shortly after joining the firm, he had been sent by the chairman, his uncle Sir Godfrey, to apologise because Collins had betrayed the identity of the murderer in a cover note. Agatha was cross with Sir Godfrey for using the young man as a shield but the tactic worked; Billy disarmed her and they became friends. It was, nonetheless, difficult for Agatha, possessive about her books, to consign them to her publishers’ care. Editing and proof-reading by successive hands, including Carlo’s and her own, still tended to leave misprints, untidy ends and inconsistencies, noticeable in any book but particularly obvious in works so tightly plotted and so meticulously scrutinised by hawk-eyed readers. Agatha tended to keep her temper as she went through her proofs; she would make certain changes for which her publishers – especially American magazine publishers – asked, once requests had been diplomatically rephrased by Cork. If all this became too much, she exploded, her wrath generally taking the form of complaints about covers. This time is was Sad Cypress. ‘Can’t you use all your influence?’ she begged Cork. ‘I do think they might consult me first.’ Cork explained that it was, alas, too late to change, ‘not a question only of the artists and the blockmaker taking time but supplies of the particular paper.… Collins thinks it would be unpatriotic to destroy 15000 copies of a jacket in these times of paper shortage.’ He promised that in future all jackets would have Agatha’s prior approval.
Otherwise she remained serene. A dramatised version of Peril at End House opened in Brighton in April, adapted by Arnold Ridley. Agatha attended some of the rehearsals and much enjoyed the experience, apart from agitation afterwards as to the whereabouts of a Spanish shawl she had lent for the production. Agatha’s clothes were at this time a mixture of the well-made and respectable – dresses and suits from Harvey Nichols and Debenham and Freebody – and the joyously theatrical. She was particularly attached to this flamboyant shawl and relieved that it had not gone permanently astray. The production of Peril at End House sparked other interest in the theatrical possibilities of Agatha’s work. There was an abortive proposal to send the play to New York and – more attractive in the long run – a request from Reginald Simpson to dramatise Ten Little Niggers. ‘If anyone is going to dramatise it, I’ll have a shot at it myself first!’ Agatha told Cork, who replied cautiously: ‘Generally speaking, I’m all against such valuable professional time as yours being spent on anything so speculative as the drama, but Ten Little Niggers is different.’
Agatha did not embark on this project straightaway. The first book she delivered in 1940 was N or M?, in which Tommy and Tuppence Beresford expose a network of spies operating on the south coast of England. ‘T & T’, as Agatha’s early notes called it – the title of the draft quickly became ‘N or M?’ or ‘2nd Innings’ – began with Agatha’s thinking about forms of code; her exercise book was full of words made up of displaced letters, dots and dashes, and numbers replacing phrases. Then she hit upon using a nursery rhyme, in this case, ‘Goosey goosey gander’, as a central device. It was published in 1941.
N or M? was written quickly and confidently. Its fate in the American market infuriated Agatha. After an unusual delay, Cork heard from Harold Ober that it had been ‘declined by likely buyers because it deals with the War. This is a little confusing in view of Collier’s insistence on a war background being put into One, Two, but I suppose editors are afraid that such a strongly anti-Nazi story as N or M? would upset a substantial section of their readers.’ In reply to a horrified letter from Agatha, Cork assured her that ‘when the heat of the election has died down, editors might be more reasonable.’ (Franklin Roosevelt had just been re-elected President, with a Democratic but strongly isolationist Congress.) It was not until September 1941 that N or M? was sold in America and another two months before Harold Ober could write with relief to Cork: ‘We are in the War now. I wish we’d gone in before but it takes this country a good while to get started.’ Agatha was upset by Collier’s attitude, not least because N or M? was a patriotic gesture of her own, reflecting, too, her recent thinking and experience. Just after the destruction of Sheffield Terrace, for instance, she suggested enthusiastically to Cork: ‘I think that I could do a better last chapter – up-to-date – taking place in a shelter when Tommy and Tuppence had just had their flat bombed.…’
The rejection of N or M? by the American magazine market was also worrying from a financial point of view. Until the position was clearer, Agatha was being very careful about money. ‘I expect I shall need that £1000,’ she wrote to Cork, in January 1940, ‘but will leave it to you to decide.’ By July she was less sanguine: ‘Am I going to get some money from America soon? A good deal of red ink in my bank a/c and they don’t seem as fond of overdrafts as they used to be.’ In August the American authorities stopped any export of her earnings until the tax matter was settled; in October the hearing was postponed. By December it appeared that anything she earned in the United States would actually be withheld to offset part of an eventual settlement. Strict exchange control regulations made this constraint even easier to enforce.
On top of this, Dodd, Mead were now seeking to draw in their horns. There is no surviving copy of Agatha’s September 1940 contract with them but her 1939 contract, for Murder is Easy, Ten Little Niggers and The Regatta Mystery, required them to pay an advance of $5,000 for each book, against a 15 per cent royalty on the first 10,000 copies, rising to 20 per cent thereafter. The 1940 contract covered three books, of which the last was Evil Under the Sun, delivered to Cork in 1940. Harold Ober had received a plaintive letter from Frank Dodd asking whether Agatha would ‘consider some relief on the advances which we have been paying’. Her books sold well and steadily but her sales were not yet as impressive as they were later to be. Cork staved off such a blow; indeed, no word of it ever reached Agatha. Cork and Ober protected her when they could from bad news and hurtful criticism, suppressing or toning down what might only upset her. Their correspondence, erratic during the War years but weekly and often twice weekly in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, shows how carefully they conspired to shield their client, with whose requests they occasionally became exasperated but for whom they always felt affection and respect.
Agatha began two other books in 1940. One was about Poirot and eventually appeared, thirty-five years later, as Curtain, the single word at the head of her first draft of the plot: ‘Poirot invents story of death believed caused by Ricin or Cobra venom – gets suspect down and takes R from him?’ The other was about Miss Marple. Its first working title was ‘Cover Her Face’, part of a quotation from The Duchess of Malfi:
Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle,
She died young.…
Agatha had first written these words in her plotting books in the mid-’thirties and the reference recurred in several of her exercise books, always with allusions to the plot of The Duchess of Malfi and sometimes to Tennyson’s Enoch Arden. The ‘Enoch Arden’ theme and, indeed, a character using that name appeared after the War in her novel Taken at the Flood; the Duchess of Malfi thought occurs elsewhere in Agatha’s notes, gradually growing into a story about a performance of that play, when a girl in the audience screams and has to be taken out. Agatha later embodied this, too, in the Marple book. She also brought into her wartime novel elements of another draft, originally with Poirot at the centre, of a story about a woman returning to a house she recognises, which turns out to be the place where her young stepmother died.
Another idea which haunted Agatha and which she took into Cover Her Face was of a dead child. She had written in her notes on voodoo, first made while she and Max were in Syria among their Yezidi labourers, about the importance of the notion of the dead child and its spirit in religions where the devil and death are central. For some reason this theme became connected in her mind with another that recurred in several plots. This was the macabre thought that a dead child might be buried in a disused fireplace, an allusion incorporated in Cover Her Face and, later, in The Pale Horse and By the Pricking of My Thumbs. ‘One in chimney’, ‘Behind the Fireplace’ – these notes reappear in Agatha’s exercise books. We do not know whether they were references to an overheard remark or to childhood memories, to an idea that occurred to her at Abney or in some other house (‘Priest’s hole good place to hide body.’ she once noted). The thought may have derived from the Venetian fireplace she and Max had admired, or from the blank wall at Cresswell Place (‘What is behind bricked-up wall.’ read another note). The image must have touched her profoundly, for it not only repeatedly occurs but in each of the three books the reference also appears in a deeply disturbing context.
Neither the wartime Poirot book nor the wartime Marple book were to be published straightaway. Agatha was anxious to build what she described to Cork as her ‘nest egg’, in case she found herself unable to work – if, for instance, anything should happen to Rosalind or Max. Moreover, the Poirot book was written when Agatha was finding her Belgian detective ‘insufferable’; in it he dies. As he was Agatha’s main source of income, ‘Poirot’s Last Case’ had inevitably to be put into cold storage. Cork approved, though he did not foresee the complications arising from Agatha’s decision to assign one copyright to Rosalind and the other to Max, ‘in consideration of the natural love and affection which I bear to my husband’. Her original intention was that Max should have the Poirot and Rosalind the Marple book, but by the end of the war she had changed her mind. The Marple story, eventually published as Sleeping Murder, was given to Max and Curtain to Rosalind.
Copies were sent to New York in accordance with a general principle of dispersal which Hughes Massie was applying to all important material, for the office at 40 Fleet Street had already been bombed. Harold Ober’s reaction was that ‘Mrs Mallowan must have been in a rather despondent state when she decided to kill off Poirot.’ Indeed, Agatha had every reason to be unhappy, as Cork told Ober in a letter written in December 1940, begging for news of the tax matter. She had lost the refuge of her own houses, for Greenway, Winterbrook and Cresswell Place were let and Sheffield Place was unsafe. Rosalind was in Northern Ireland with Hubert, Max was anxious to serve abroad and – the gravest blow – there was no Carlo. Agatha had given her a house in Ladbroke Terrace Mews and saw her from time to time but now Carlo had gone to do war work in a factory. These anxieties overshadowed Agatha’s life far more than worry about money but her financial predicament was nonetheless serious. By the end of January 1941, when the tax hearing had again been postponed and the British Revenue authorities were pressing for their own payment, Cork was writing once more to Ober: ‘The situation is pretty desperate with no money coming in.… It is hard to believe that Christie will have to find money for Income Tax on money she has not received. It does not take much imagination to see what a nightmare it has produced for our most valuable client.…’
One expedient which occurred to Agatha was to sell Greenway. She and Max were unable to use it while the War lasted and anyhow Max was now firmly settled in London. After interminable appeals to the authorities he had at last secured a proper post. ‘It is, I think, high time,’ he had written in irritation to the Ministry of Information, who had messed about with a possible appointment in Turkey, ‘that bureaucrats took a sane and just view of the services they are willing to extract from a British-born subject.’ So desperate was Max to do some useful service that to his already impressive list of references from Squadron Leaders, Colonels and Air Marshals, he added: ‘Wife, British subject. Better known as Agatha Christie, has just written an anti-Nazi book.’ And, even: ‘I have been accepted as a member of the Home Guard.’ This correspondence was copied to Stephen Glanville and in February he succeeded in pressing Max’s case. Max joined Glanville at the Air Ministry, in what became the Directorate of Allied and Foreign Liaison. With great reluctance Agatha decided to sell Greenway. ‘Two sets of people have been looking over the house,’ she wrote miserably to Cork, ‘– both unpleasant in different ways. Still, they seem to have the money.’ To which Cork gently replied: ‘I am afraid you will find anyone who wants Greenway most unpleasant. I have a feeling that what with the budget and one thing and another there are not going to be so many people who will “have the money” much longer.’ No one bought Greenway.
Agatha’s only other way out of her troubles was work but, as she told Cork, who spurred her on: ‘Do I gather from your letter that you are urging this sausage machine to turn out a couple more of the same old hand? Feel too depressed by my financial plight at the moment. What’s the good of writing for money if I don’t get anything out of it?’ She nevertheless made a start. ‘The next Christie story,’ Cork told Ober exactly a month later, ‘will be a perfectly sweet poison pen tragedy featuring Miss Marple.’ Indeed, Cork wrote, ‘as Mrs Christie is writing hard in an effort to catch up with things, it looks as if we might have an accumulation of books on our hands before long.…’
The poison pen idea was another Agatha had mulled over for years. Once hurt herself by rumour, she considered its destructive power in several stories; one was ‘The Augean Stables’ in The Labours of Hercules, where gossip is used by the wily Poirot against the scandal-mongers. The Moving Finger had a fairly easy birth, except that the Saturday Evening Post declined it on the grounds that the action began too slowly to make a successful serial. It was nevertheless first published in America. There were also difficulties about its title. Agatha first suggested ‘The Tangled Web’, which Collins thought too close to a recently published Spider’s Web. She then proposed The Moving Finger but Cork for some reason preferred ‘Misdirection’. Agatha won. Cork and Ober agreed that this was one of her best books. When she finished it, she felt something of an anti-climax and her worries resurfaced. Cork again attacked the financial issue, begging Ober to push Reinheimer: ‘She is being pressed remorselessly by the tax authorities here and the Bank to pay her English taxation, which for the year will be anything up to four times the total income she will receive.…’ He also found an ingenious way of giving Agatha some financial relief. There had been an offer from an American company, Milestone, for the film rights to N or M? and, since such rights were ‘world-wide in their scope’, Cork advised Ober that, ‘it would be possible for sums to be payable in this country, where Mrs Mallowan in the first instance, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the second, needs the money so desperately.’ Some money was also coming in from unexpected sources: Peril at End House, for instance, took £514.17.101/2 at the Lyceum, Sheffield, in the first week of May.
Further irritation came in June, when Collins proposed new contractual arrangements: an advance of £1,150, rather than £1,000, for each new book but with royalty rates of 25 per cent to start after 6,000 rather than 3,000 copies. Collins’s grounds were ‘a shocking increase in production costs’. Cork did not give way. Collins next provoked what Cork dismissed as ‘a spot of bother’ over N or M? Their editor’s chief objections were that, though ‘a pretty exciting spy story’, it lacked the ‘murder-mystery and detection element’, that it was too short and had too many loose ends. Agatha wrote a stiff letter and Billy tried to soothe her. ‘He is sorry,’ his secretary replied, ‘we had to ask you to make it a bit longer, but one of the reasons for our doing this was that, as it stood, the libraries would find people read it all too quickly, and they would not give repeat orders so readily, as their original order would then last them longer than usual.’ Agatha was unconvinced by this explanation of publishing economics and proposed a move. Cork delicately dissuaded her, confessing himself, ‘very doubtful whether under present publishing conditions Mr Gollancz would do you any better.… I admire his cleverness as much as anyone, and he has done very well with a number of books I have sold him this year,’ but Collins, Cork believed, enjoyed better relationships with booksellers. Agatha stayed and, though ‘rather anti-Collins … such a thick-headed lot’, set to work again.
‘Things all seem to come at once,’ she told Cork in a sad letter in the autumn of 1941. ‘How interminable it all is.’ As Reinheimer advised, she gave her representatives in America power of attorney to deal with her affairs and even agreed to permit her American publishers to include in the advance publicity for N or M? ‘any soft soap you like’ about her war work. She was now giving several days a week to the dispensary at University College Hospital and there had been reports of this in the American press. ‘Hospital still standing, though flattened buildings all around,’ she told Cork. ‘If they must have some kind of pictures, let them have that.’ There were limits to the sort of stories it was sensible to permit – ‘No harm in saying Max is in RAFVR but best leave it strictly at that’ – not just because of ubiquitous official warnings against disclosing any information, however trivial, that might be of use to the enemy, but also because of her revulsion at being gossiped about. ‘I will NOT be a “Mystery Woman”,’ she wrote irately to Cork, enclosing an ‘infuriating’ clipping from the Saturday Evening Post, discussing her past and her second marriage. Equally maddening was an effusive letter sent by a well-meaning American admirer, who asserted that, ‘Agatha was a peach with a swell sense of humour with a diabolically sharp wisdom. More power to you.’
By the end of 1941, however, things began to look up. Agatha had finished another book, The Body in the Library, with which Collins were delighted. It has a splendid opening, with Mrs Bantry gently emerging from sleep to find the maid indeed telling her there is a body in the library; something simultaneously so apt but incongruous that it is likely only in a dream – or a detective story. Another reassuring development was that two American film companies, RKO and Warner Brothers, were interested in the rights to Ten Little Niggers. (The first production, however, was eventually made in 1945 by Twentieth Century Fox, as And Then There Were None, directed by René Clair.) Cork and Ober also managed to arrange for the option on the film rights for N or M? to be paid by Milestone in London; Ober even held out some hope that, now the United States had entered the War, there might be changes in the tax regulations applying to payments to non-resident aliens. Collins parted with advances for The Moving Finger and The Body in the Library and, as for the British Revenue authorities, Cork stoutly advised Agatha to ‘take no notice of this preposterous nominal assessment.… Everyone is getting them.’ By mid-December Agatha was again able to report that she was ‘writing passionately and in consequence had paid no bills, answered no letters and am in fact getting into trouble all round!’ A week later she sent Cork the revised proofs of The Body in the Library and the typescript of another novel, Towards Zero. ‘That,’ she said triumphantly, ‘ought to help the New Year Depression a bit!’
Agatha asked Cork to ‘take a little time’ over thinking about serialising Towards Zero. It was in this letter that she spoke of her misery when she had forced herself to finish The Big Four and The Mystery of the Blue Train and of her wish to have at least ‘one book up her sleeve’. Towards Zero, she thought, was ‘reasonably non-dating’. It is understandable that Agatha felt insecure. Like all her fellow-countrymen she was living from day to day. Buildings and streets would be wiped out overnight, houses that still stood could be requisitioned. No one knew whether they, their families, friends and acquaintances would still be alive the next day. In squirrelling away this book, Agatha was storing up supplies, as her grandmother had done. (The Mackintoshes harboured a small cache of tinned ham and olive oil for her, in case Lawn Road was knocked flat.) Moreover, Agatha was now without Max, or ready news of him. In February he had volunteered as one of two officers to establish a branch of the Directorate in Cairo. He was promoted to Squadron Leader and set off; there, on a terrace at the Continental Hotel in Cairo, he at once spotted his brother Cecil, drinking coffee. Cecil had been interned by the Finns in 1940, evacuated to Sweden, where he worked as a lumberjack, and eventually repatriated to England, via Germany, France and Portugal. He had now been sent by the British Council to direct its Institutes in Egypt and, after this fortunate coincidence, settled down amicably with Max in a house overlooking the Nile.
Agatha, exhausted, missing Max, and, despite his farewell present of a Jaeger dressing-gown, cold, spent most of her evenings and weekends writing. She assured Cork that, even if he took his time over placing Towards Zero, ‘I am starting on another so the serial market won’t be neglected.’ This was Five Little Pigs, one of Agatha’s ‘Artist Ideas’. The setting, ‘Alderbury’, was Greenway, and the plot a ‘story of man who has affairs – really loves his wife – his mistress intent on marriage.’ It was published in America as Murder in Retrospect. Taken together, Five Little Pigs and Towards Zero show how flexible Agatha’s style of plotting and technique was at this time. Five Little Pigs is an intimate, fast-moving story, Towards Zero a picture of long-drawn-out revenge, a tale so striking that some years later it caught the attention of Claude Chabrol, who talked of making it into a film.
There was still no news from Reinheimer. The best Cork could report was that an American tax return had been filed for 1941: ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘this dreadful business is to be settled at last.’ Ober, however, no longer sent reassuring messages. Agatha’s most urgent desire was to join Max in Cairo and Cork agreed to see what might be done. If he could arrange for a magazine to commission articles, she might be allowed to go. Meanwhile, she was offered ‘the exact job I should like in England if I didn’t get out to Cairo … dispenser to a doctor in Wendover.’ Cork told her she ‘should be doing a much more important job’ than that, ‘but you’re the best judge.’ It turned out, however, that the Saturday Evening Post was interested in Cairo material and Agatha’s hopes rose.
Cork squared his brief with Agatha: ‘articles about the Middle East, topical interest for America by describing how the war has affected life’ – and arranged to have lunch with ‘the all-powerful Quentin Reynolds’, the distinguished American journalist whose press and radio reports of Britain’s wartime efforts did much to sustain support for the Allies in the United States. Even Reynolds, Cork reported, found it impossible to remove official hurdles. By July Agatha was more resigned to Max’s absence. In any case, he might soon be moved, though everything was doubtful, she told Cork. There was also a great deal to do at Greenway, now requisitioned by the Admiralty for eventual use by the officers of an American flotilla. The Arbuthnots departed, leaving Agatha and an elderly gardener to move the furniture into the drawing-room, the only quarters the Admiralty allowed her to set aside. ‘I am sick of loading trunks and getting filthy with cobwebs and am generally fed up!’ Agatha wrote to Cork in the autumn. He thoughtfully invited her to lunch at the Ecu de France.
‘In spite of my sadness about it,’ Agatha wrote to Max, ‘there might be two consolation prizes. First, I should say it is quite likely that they may bring mains electricity’ (they didn’t) ‘and, second, old man Hannaford’ (the gardener) ‘might be removed without pain’. (He stayed.) She worried about the trees and shrubs, writing to Charles Williams, the former owner, asking him to keep an eye on things. As M.P. for Torquay, she hoped, ‘he might have more influence – naval and political – than I should.’ She also reported that there had been an offer for Winterbrook; ‘we must decide some time which house we are going to stick to. I don’t believe we can keep both.’ Winterbrook was not sold but, as it was let to friends of the Goodsons in Torquay, Agatha, with all her houses, stayed at 17 Lawn Road. (She had disposed of 47 Campden Street.) Her hopes for a visit to Cairo had revived with a letter from Ober saying that Collier’s would definitely send her, but Cork now discovered the full extent of the official obstruction. There was no insuperable objection from the Ministry of Information itself, he reported, but Brendan Bracken, the Minister, had written to say that the War Office was not prepared to accredit women correspondents in the Middle East. Cork tried to put a cheerful face on the news: ‘At any rate we know what we’re up against – either the War Office must be induced to make an exception, or we must wait until the military situation is retrieved.’
Agatha consoled herself with writing long letters to Max, typed at first (though James, her new dog, disliked the noise of the machine) and later handwritten on flimsy ‘aerograms’. Many of her letters that autumn were descriptions of Greenway and the trees, with Hannaford, ‘leaf moulding and ashing before he takes on duties for the Navy’. By the end of October the house was empty.
I stayed for a little while after the men had gone and then I walked up and sat on the seat overlooking the house and the river and made believe you were sitting beside me.… It looked very white and lovely – serene and aloof as always. I felt a kind of pang over its beauty. I discovered today that there is no personal loss in leaving it – because queerly enough I can’t really recall ever being very happy in it – when I think of it I always seem to have felt so tired.… And then, after that, the War – and then the Turks, so that you couldn’t be there that Spring. All my happy memories are of the garden and you planting your magnolias and I making my new path down by the river. And yet the house is not an unhappy home – and I love it. It is untouched by what the people in it feel and think, but it wanted to be beautiful – I consider I made it beautiful, or rather, displayed its beauty. Greenway has been a mistress rather than a wife! ‘Too dear for our possessing’ but what excitement to possess it! I thought tonight sitting there – it is the loveliest place in the world – it quite takes my breath away.
For her wedding anniversary present from Max, Agatha bought ‘two of Mr Arbuthnot’s sketches – ‘one side view of the house showing the Delavayi and the other an impression from the Battery.’ ‘Tell me,’ she asked, ‘is that all right … or would you rather I got a ring?’
She need not have worried about the house. The Admiralty and the American sailors were solicitous: ‘A very nice Commander Kirkwood (real Navy) came and was really very concerned about our beautiful mahogany doors, especially the curved ones.…’ These were promptly removed and, she told Max, ‘a “leading shipwright” is coming … to consult about them and possibly cover them with beaverboard.’ Commander Kirkwood was interested in trees and shrubs, telling Agatha, ‘They suggested Dittisham for headquarters – but I said this was far and away the best.’ ‘Like the old song,’ Agatha wrote, now homeless, ‘No dwelling more, by sea or shore, But only in your heart – And a very nice place to have as a dwelling, and keep me there, darling, till the War ends.’