‘So much bathing in holiday sunshine I’ve no time for work,’ Agatha wrote to Cork in the summer of 1954. These were languorous months at Greenway, with all the garden blossoming. Agatha’s new gardener, Frank Lavin, carried off so many prizes at the Brixham Flower Show that she presented a cup for those who gardened without paid help. There were tiny new vegetables from the kitchen garden, strawberries, peaches, grapes, nectarines and figs, the fruit served on Auntie-Grannie’s green-bordered dessert plates, each with a different painted fruit in the centre. Gowler, the mediumistic butler, craftily managed so to distribute the plates that, on raising the finger bowl and lace mat, each member of the family found his favourite plate, once and only once a week. Agatha’s was the Fig, Rosalind’s the Gooseberry. There was salmon from the Dart, plaice and shellfish from Brixham. Mrs Gowler’s dairy bill was phenomenal, though Max and Anthony, whose discussions about wine seemed to Agatha interminable, were in no position to reproach her for her fondness for thick cream. Not all the meals were rich, however, for she liked simple food as much as banquets, especially if it could be eaten out of doors.
Anthony, Rosalind and Mathew spent part of every summer at Greenway. Agatha had great pleasure in watching her grandson growing up. He was at Elstree, a preparatory school in Berkshire, and during term she would drive over from Wallingford to take him out for picnics. She sent him each of her stories as soon as they were published; vetted first by the staff, they were returned to Mathew well-thumbed. Max tried to teach Mathew cuneiform script, and he and Agatha encouraged his liking for cricket. In the summer Gowler spent hours bowling to him at the nets – and doing conjuring tricks, at which he was an expert. (Gowler was not, however, omnicompetent; he invariably failed to take the prize at Brixham for ‘A Salad’, despite his artistic pipings of mayonnaise, coming second even in the year when his was the only entry.)
Greenway was the model for the setting of the book Agatha wrote that autumn in Wallingford, Dead Man’s Folly, in which an agitated Mrs Oliver summons Poirot to a local fête, for which she has arranged a ‘murder hunt’ at which someone is indeed killed. The book has much of Greenway, from the Battery to the boathouse, the long grassy slope leading to the ‘top gardens’, and a nearby youth hostel like that abutting on Agatha’s own land (from which errant hikers would sometimes wander into the garden, gazing dumbstruck through the tall windows at the family’s full-dress Sunday luncheon). Agatha was often asked to lend the garden for fêtes and was inundated with requests, always declined, to open others. She delighted in arranging treasure hunts for Mathew, for John and Peter, sons of her brother-in-law Cecil, and for the children of the diplomatic and archaeological friends who stayed at Greenway. All this was woven into a sprightly story that begins sunnily but ends grimly. Agatha’s preoccupation with wigs also has an airing, in the shape of Mrs Oliver’s postiche and other people’s changes of headgear.
Another novel was drafted at Nimrud in the first months of 1955, Hickory, Dickory Dock. It was the last whose title was derived from a nursery rhyme, although Agatha had an exercise book full of other ideas: ‘Ding Dong Bell, Pussy’s in the Well – An old maid murdered; One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Catching Fishes all Alive – Mrs C has daughter by first husband (bad lot) … Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, How does your garden grow?… Flowers on each body – viola, pansy’. Some of these plots she later used. The story is set in a hostel for students owned by a ‘Mrs Nicoletis’; Agatha’s picture was sufficiently realistic to provoke a Mr Nicoletis to write when the book was published, alleging that she had libelled his mother, who claimed to remember Agatha as a guest in her own pension. ‘I invented the name,’ Agatha expostulated to Cork. ‘I’m sure it’s all nonsense … If this is supposed to have happened in France, I’ve certainly never stayed in a hostel for students of any kind.… When I was with my mother, we always stayed at the Hotel d’Iéna and of later years it’s always been Hotels round about the rue de Rivoli, and the dear Bristol.’ (Agatha always capitalised ‘Hotels’, along with ‘Bathrooms’, ‘Bathes’, and her favourite food, ‘Caviare’, ‘Ham’, ‘Vol au Vents’, ‘Lobster’, etc.) Agatha added robustly, ‘Mr Nicoletis must just be obsessed by having a disagreeable mother. It’s terrible that if you invent characters they should come out so true to life. Positively uncanny!’
Agatha gave the royalties from Hickory, Dickory Dock to a trust for her nephews, John and Peter Mallowan, and celebrated its completion by descending on the bazaars and acquiring a silk rug and pictures by Iraqi artists. Otherwise, she admitted, ‘this is a place where my immense natural spending powers have little scope.’ Max was happy, too, for they were digging a promising spot: ‘Boxes and boxes of winged genii and devils to avert evil are coming up,’ Agatha told Cork, ‘and yesterday a large something of broken ivory and charred wood appeared!’ The weather, however, turned stormy and at the end of March she caught a chill so severe that she was taken to hospital at Mosul. She recovered by Easter, apologising for the grumpy letters she had sent and attributing the ‘backwash of bad temper’ to ‘strepto-chloro etc. mycetins killing my amiability’. Her cure had been accelerated by Cork’s sending exactly the book to appeal to her, the exposure as a forgery of the ‘prehistoric’ skull of the so-called Piltdown Man: ‘What a wonderful hoax the whole thing was!’ she wrote ecstatically.
Equally stimulating was Cork’s telegram to say that the Queen was to attend a special performance of Witness for the Prosecution at the Windsor Repertory Theatre. The play continued to flourish and, when Agatha returned to England in May 1955, Cork told her that it had also encouraged a flood of requests for dramatic rights to her other work, applications he continued to decline on her behalf. All Agatha’s theatrical ventures were prospering. It began to seem as if Peter Saunders might at last extract Towards Zero from Bertie Meyer, while the legal wrangling over the American rights to The Hollow had entered a headier realm with the death in December of their American bugbear, Lee Shubert. Though The Mousetrap had begun to flag in February, after Richard Attenborough’s engagement ended, Saunders thought it worth keeping on for the thousandth performance, since only fourteen plays in the history of the British theatre had run as long. He primed his press agent, issuing a commemorative silk programme, free of charge, to every member of the audience on that night. Business shot up. Saunders wrote in rapture to Agatha – but the letter went astray: ‘Envelope arrived with nothing in it, marked No Contents,’ she told Cork. ‘Tell him less silk programmes and more licking of envelope flaps!’
Letters poured in from admirers and entrepreneurs. Did Agatha prefer to be called Mrs or Miss Christie? (Mrs Christie.) Would she contribute to a book of favourite dishes of famous people? (No.) Might the BBC take television pictures of Greenway? (No.) Would she take part in a BBC programme called Frankly Speaking? (‘One, I think,’ Cork advised, ‘you should turn down in person.’) The BBC had for some time been hoping to make a programme about Agatha. In 1953 they had invited her to take part in a new programme called Panorama, ‘to sit in an armchair’ and be ‘gently interviewed’. Cork had told the producer: ‘I am afraid Mrs Christie feels she would definitely not like to appear on television, under any circumstances whatever. She is, as I told you, very shy, and she hates publicity of any kind, so I fear there is nothing more we can do.’ In February 1955, nonetheless, the BBC put out a radio programme Close-Up, written by Gale Pedrick, with contributions from a number of Agatha’s friends and colleagues. She was not pleased.
Her relations with the BBC were not always prickly. Though Agatha distrusted television, she liked working for the wireless and with one producer in particular, Martyn Webster. At the end of 1955 he produced a play she had written, based on one of her favourite phrases from the Bible, Butter in a Lordly Dish. This macabre drama, which lasted an hour, told the story of Sir Luke Enderby, K.C., a distinguished barrister and a womaniser. Sir Luke, it appeared, had persuaded the Court to hang an innocent man, a death horribly avenged, for he was destroyed much as Jael destroyed Sisera, when, having brought him ‘butter in a lordly dish’, she hammered a nail into his forehead. Luckily Agatha was able to provide only sound effects.
In September 1955 Agatha and Max celebrated their silver wedding. Billy Collins made his first visit to Greenway: ‘Black tie for the celebrations and the bathing is still nice and warm,’ Agatha told him. Cork could not come but sent a silver candlestick: ‘But no chopper fortunately to chop off our heads,’ said Agatha speculatively. Last-minute problems were turned to advantage: ‘Some of the guests had gastric flu and we had domestic help trouble. Result – LOTS of Caviare!!’
Agatha could also celebrate the fact that she was well ahead of her commitments. Not only was Dead Man’s Folly ready for 1956 but since the spring of 1955 she had been working, ‘at an Oriental pace’, on a new ‘Mary Westmacott’. ‘There are a good many tentative Christian names, she told Cork. ‘I can’t start writing till I can get names that I feel fit.’ This novel became The Burden. Agatha had settled from the start on its theme: ‘Two sisters – Elder loving and possessive, determined that the younger one shall be happy.’ She added a maxim which she often cited: ‘Take what you want, and pay for it, says God.’ As she worked on the novel at Winterbrook in the autumn, Agatha developed this metaphor: ‘Sometimes you haven’t the right currency. And then someone else has to pay.’
From the beginning Agatha was certain of one of the novel’s central notions, the conjunctions between separate lives, the way in which each can be affected by coincidence or deliberate meddling. Her proposed titles at this stage were ‘Double Entry’ (remembered from her book-keeping lessons), ‘Cross Reference’, ‘Angles of Attack’, or ‘Point of Interception’. This outline then became entangled with a different plot, taken, interestingly, from Unfinished Portrait. It concerned a small girl, Hazel, sent away from home to live with an aunt – rather as Clara had been sent to live with Margaret. ‘Witch Hazel’ believes (again like Clara) that she has second sight, and her unusual gifts are eventually exploited by an impresario. Though Agatha abandoned that narrative before the dénouement, it provided the basis for the story of the evangelist whose history is, somewhat oddly, entangled with that of the sisters in The Burden. ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ Agatha wrote in the middle of her notes for ‘General Projects 1955: M.W.’; it provides the key to this idiosyncratic novel.
Agatha was able to leave the typescript of The Burden with Cork when she set off for Nimrud at the beginning of 1956. She had become a C.B.E. in the New Year’s Honours List: ‘One up to the Low-Brows!!’ she wrote to Cork from Baghdad, reporting that ‘My social position has risen here a lot. I am asked about exclusively to parties with Ambassadors and Ministers and the Iraq Times has promoted me to a Dame!!’
Installed at Nimrud, she completed a detective story she had begun in the autumn. This took up a notion that had often crossed her mind and had crept into an early draft of The Burden – of two trains either passing each other in opposite directions or of one train overtaking another. Long ago she had made the note: ‘Man sees girl being strangled in train’ and now she developed it as a new problem for Miss Marple. ‘Train. Coming from London, Reading – passes local – no corridors?… Now – what really happened? Man strangles woman. Her body thrown out of carriage on to embankment or field. Or tunnel? If tunnel, how far from London? Embankment or field his own.…’ So Agatha launched into the story, introducing Mrs McGillicuddy and Lucy Eyelesbarrow, ‘leg man’ for Miss Marple who, like Agatha, found it increasingly difficult to scramble about. (Miss Eyelesbarrow, being exceptionally clever, had recognised that the best-paid posts were to be found in domestic service, thereby illustrating one of Agatha’s most heart-felt lamentations.) There are, as well, some lively small boys in the story, rather like Mathew.
The title of Agatha’s new mystery had a number of changes. First it was ‘The 4.15 from Paddington’, then ‘The 4.30’, next ‘The 4.50’ and, when Agatha sent her draft to Cork in March 1956, ‘The 4.54’. At Nimrud she consulted Peter Hulin, an epigraphist with a passion for railway trains and timetables, and on his advice fixed upon 4.54, since he assured her that no train left Paddington at that time. Otherwise, she informed Cork: ‘I thought people might write and say “but the 4.40 (or whatever it was) goes to Weston-Super-Mare.”’ Collins found this too clumsy, while Dodd, Mead suggested that American readers might not recognise the station. Exasperated, Agatha offered Cork ‘4.54 from London’ adding that, if they feared another Mr Nicoletis, ‘possibly refer to the Terminus as Padderloo – in case someone lives in a large house surrounded by railway.…’ They settled on The 4.50 from Paddington. Amid all these adjustments, Agatha overlooked the matter of Miss Marple’s age: she now appeared to be ninety. Careful excisions were made and the book was done. ‘It’s lovely to feel I haven’t got to write anything for a good long time!!!’ Agatha told Cork blissfully. ‘Just knit and read!’
Her next project was the organisation of a visit to America with Max, who had been awarded a gold medal by the University of Pennsylvania. They were to be away for two weeks in May. Cork and Ober satisfied the authorities that Agatha, who had paid thousands of dollars in American tax, would not be a charge on public funds in the United States, while Agatha investigated railway routes – ‘I hate the idea of all this flying’ – and sought out quiet hotels. ‘It will all be very expensive,’ she confessed, ‘but I’ve got to go comfortably at my time of life.’ She thought of travelling by train to Los Angeles, where Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich were filming Witness for the Prosecution, but Ober and Cork between them tried to dissuade her from ‘this crazy idea of flitting over to Hollywood’, and Agatha promised to make ‘other plans for my week of fun’. She was ready, Cork told Ober, to do whatever was necessary or desirable during her last forty-eight hours in New York, but until then she wanted it to be understood that the star of the occasion was Max and that she was going to Philadelphia as Mrs Mallowan.
Agatha and Max came back from Nimrud earlier than usual in 1956, and after ringing up Cork for what she described as ‘the latest dope’ and having her nails and hair dealt with ‘so as not to alight in New York looking like a savage’, they set off, Agatha arriving, Cork learnt from Ober’s colleague, Dorothy Olding, ‘full of bounce’. After the presentation, Agatha and Max had, according to her postcard, three days’ peace at the Grand Canyon: ‘Am enjoying myself terrifically. In fact couldn’t be enjoying myself more!! Must do this all again!’ She did after all go to Los Angeles; photographs of her and Max were sent to Dorothy Olding by the Swanson office, with a note from Agatha, saying that all was going well with Witness for the Prosecution. ‘We’re all enchanted with her,’ Dorothy reported, and Agatha was just as delighted with America as she had been on her first visit in the ’twenties.
Greenway was waiting – and work. No interviews, Agatha told Cork, no articles or book reviews: ‘It will take all my time and energy to do the yearly book!!’ There was one ordeal to be faced before she could settle undisturbed to writing, Peter Saunders’s party for The Mousetrap, which on September 13th would have run for 1998 performances, becoming, he proudly announced, the longest-running play in the history of the British theatre. Special programmes were again printed, with a photograph of Agatha (approved by her) on the cover. ‘Am full of nervous apprehension,’ she confided in Cork. ‘However it may be fun? (Very doubtful.)’ With that behind her, Agatha could enjoy Greenway and, towards the end of the autumn, work at a new plot, suggested by Stella Kirwan, who helped Agatha keep her typing and letters in order. She had drawn Agatha’s attention to the story of an Antarctic explorer, who had recently been telling the newspapers about the strangeness of returning home after months without news. Agatha brooded and in October sent Cork a note: ‘I want to know,’ she wrote, ‘from one of our barrister or solicitor advisers, what would happen in a case as follows:
Young A is charged with the murder of his stepmother, whom he hits on the head. He is tried, convicted and gets life imprisonment. His defence was an alibi: he had been with a certain person, B, a stranger, at the time of the murder. B however could never be found and the thing sounded clearly like a trumped-up story.
If B reappears and exonerates A, who has by then died in prison, Agatha asked, ‘what would be the position legally? Would a “free pardon” be granted posthumously? What steps, if any, would be taken; also would the police be likely to re-open the case? A has left a family, wife, sisters etc. A word as to this as soon as possible would help me to get to work industriously.’
The book was to be Ordeal by Innocence, an examination of another of Agatha’s preoccupations: the harm that is done by the guilty not only to the victim of a crime but also to the innocent, suspected themselves and suspecting each other until guilt is clearly assigned. Another familiar theme was the emotional and psychological price exacted by maternal love, particularly that of an adoptive mother. The book was submitted to Collins as The Innocent. Cork suggested the new title, celebrating with Agatha over lunch at the Caprice. The book, which her publishers thought the best for some years, was dedicated ‘with affection and respect’ to Billy Collins.
In the middle of her work on Ordeal by Innocence, Agatha produced a short story, ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’. ‘Do tell me what you make of it,’ Cork asked Dorothy Olding. ‘She was well on with a new mystery novel when she suddenly felt she had to write this little piece.’ It may be found in two collections, Double Sin, which appeared in America in 1961, and Miss Marple’s Final Cases, published in the United Kingdom in 1979. It had, in fact, nothing to do with Miss Marple, being more weirdly exotic, the sort of story Agatha had written earlier in her career, like those in The Hound of Death. ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ is exactly that, a life-sized doll of ‘velvet and silk and a lick of paint’, lying on the sofa, ‘the Puppet Doll, the whim of Rich Women, who lolls beside the telephone, or among the cushions of the divan’. This doll, however, has an uncanny property of moving about when alone. Otherwise it sits, ‘with an extraordinary naturalness’, looking intelligent, ‘as though she knew something we didn’t’. So unnerving is the doll’s behaviour that eventually the dressmaker throws it from the window, to be claimed by an urchin. Horrified, the dressmaker tries to persuade the child to give up the frightening thing but she carries it away: ‘If you didn’t hate her you wouldn’t have pushed her out of the window. I love her, I tell you, and that’s what she wants.’ The story is so odd and powerful that it may have grown from a fear or a dream, perhaps one of Agatha’s, still reticent, as she had been as a child, but no longer ignored – or it may just be the story of a puppet animated by anxiety to be loved.
The book done, Agatha amused herself with books and gardens, opera and theatre, delicious food and travel. She and Max went to Barbados for the sun and in London she went often to the theatre, seeing everything from The Cherry Orchard to Mourning Becomes Electra and The Elder Statesman, in a stall well to the front, as she was growing deafer. Her base for such expeditions was Chelsea, where she kept 48 Swan Court, having joyfully regained possession of Cresswell Place but almost immediately let it again.
After Christmas (Cork delicately thanked her for a plate ‘a little broken in the post’), Max and Agatha returned to Iraq. The revolution had taken place the previous July; it was to figure in her next mystery, Cat Among the Pigeons, dedicated to Stella and Larry Kirwan. A Poirot story, with much about disguise and the deceptiveness of appearances, it is set in a girls’ school, loosely based on Caledonia and, to a lesser extent, Benenden. Part of the plot was left over from some of Agatha’s early thoughts for They Came to Baghdad: ‘Idea,’ she had noted then, ‘Jewels concealed in plaster cast round arm.… Could whole thing be jewel robbery, or smuggling?’ Or, Agatha surmised, for she kept in touch (there is mention of ‘the sputnik’ in Ordeal by Innocence), ‘microfilms?’
While Agatha was away, Saunders rehearsed her latest play, No Fields of Amaranth, in which a student, in love with a middle-aged refugee professor, kills his crippled wife. Her title was taken from a line from Walter Savage Landor: ‘There are no fields of amaranth this side of the grave.’ It appeared, however, that it already belonged to another work written for amateur theatre groups, so the play opened at the Strand on May 22nd as Verdict. It got a pasting. Agatha believed the change of title had led the audience to expect a thriller or a play about detection, whereas this was a more complex drama. ‘Critics,’ she told Billy Collins and his wife Pierre, ‘are definitely anti-murder without mystery. One still hopes, as many people did seem to be enjoying it.’ Cork, who did not think it a good play, hoped Agatha’s name would carry it but after a month, and a bad press that wounded her, it was taken off. Peter Saunders immediately encouraged her to complete another, The Unexpected Guest, which she delivered in July. She had put down some notes for this and now, having finished Cat Among the Pigeons, she took her sketch and developed it (on the back of three laundry lists, one made out by Max, and a sonnet for Rosalind’s birthday). The key idea was ‘FOG’ and a voice repeating the words ‘you can do it, Jan, you can do it,’ either from ‘a record or a dictaphone or spoken by a parrot’. There was also complicated play with the theme that the clever might in fact be unbalanced and the apparently half-witted astute. Agatha allowed something of her brother to creep into her portrayal of the murdered man, who, like Monty, had taken a pot-shot at a woman coming up through the garden to the house. Peter Saunders put on The Unexpected Guest in Bristol and Agatha wrote cheerfully to Cork: ‘You kept your fingers crossed to good purpose. As you will have heard by now, the play went well and I had quite a job being “modest in the dress circle”.’ It came to London on August 12th. More happily received than Verdict, it ran, to everyone’s relief, for eighteen months. ‘All right,’ Agatha said of the notices. ‘The Mixture as before and Verdict atoned for.…’
The Mousetrap, meanwhile, celebrated its next triumph, for on April 13th, 1958, it became the ‘longest-running production of any kind in the history of the British theatre’, to the delight of Peter Saunders, who grasped the opportunity to give the play a huge public relations boost. A thousand guests were invited to a party at the Savoy Hotel, which set aside its restaurant for the occasion. There were two rooms for the press, including cinema newsreel and television cameramen. ‘See you at “Hell at the Savoy” on Sunday,’ Agatha wrote shudderingly to Cork the week before, but she loyally stood with Peter Saunders and received the guests. It is an indication of how dreadful an ordeal this was for Agatha that, arriving early as instructed, she nearly allowed herself to be turned away by an over-zealous porter. That story, too, got into the papers.
Agatha was grateful to Peter; indeed, she asked Cork to try to find her two of the original printed texts of The Mousetrap, to have specially bound for him and Anthony (who never received his). She believed, however, that the play’s popularity continued because it was clever and well-constructed, which it was. Nonetheless, it was clear even to Agatha that The Mousetrap was becoming a theatrical monument. The longer it ran, the longer the run would be sustained if, that is, Saunders continued to act as a super-ingenious barker. It was therefore evident that Agatha, increasingly averse to self-promotion, would be obliged to participate in one set of high jinks after another, as it celebrated successive anniversaries. She swallowed all this – going to Peter’s parties; donating the Mousetrap Cup for the handicap steeplechase at Exeter races, which she always attended; being photographed with each new cast – by treating it as a family joke, in which her relations also joined, bestowing on her, and eventually Mathew, who owned the rights to The Mousetrap, ornamental mice of one sort or another, china mouse cheese-covers and so forth, even a diamond ring with a tiny mouse climbing over the wearer’s finger. This attitude was shared by British critics; as tourists from every country in the world flocked to The Mousetrap, their seats booked by travel agencies months in advance, or as productions were exported to Tokyo and beyond, so Agatha’s countrymen treated the whole enterprise with tolerant hilarity mixed with pride, keeping their dignity by being gently disparaging about something so energetically marketed. But it would be unfair to imply that Agatha was not proud of The Mousetrap. Amazed and amused by its success, she thought it an excellent piece of craftsmanship and cared about the message it conveyed. To the end of her life she carried in her ever-present handbag a tiny silver mouse sent by an admirer and, without being aware of it, in moments of particular anxiety she would stroke it gently.
There was no new book for Collins in 1959 and they were obliged to assemble for 1960 the collection of long stories they had first discussed some years before. The volume was called The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding; it contained six stories, five featuring Poirot and one Miss Marple, a collection which had hitherto not appeared in Britain and of which all but one title had been published in book form only in America. It seemed at one point as if even this might not be published. A printing strike, lasting six and a half weeks, took place in the summer of 1959, and when the strike was over, there were further difficulties, since Agatha refused to allow Three Blind Mice to be included in the volume: ‘It will spoil somebody’s pleasure in the play and masses of people haven’t seen it yet!!’ She suggested, rather, that she enlarge some of the stories, so that The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding was eventually put together in the spring of 1960, after she had returned from her winter travels.
For the conclusion of the annual expedition to Nimrud did not end Max’s and Agatha’s journeys. Max, who had been made a C.B.E. in the New Year’s Honours List, now launched another project that was dear to him, the establishment of British schools and institutes of archaeology in other countries in the East. Early in 1960 he and Agatha set off to India, Pakistan and Persia, going first to Ceylon for a short holiday with Rosalind, Anthony and Mathew. ‘Delicious bathing. Nice quantity of ruins for Max and some lovely mountain scenery,’ Agatha wrote to Cork. She did not, however, manage to retain her anonymity: ‘Two rude photographers attempting to photograph me bathing were (I think) foiled by Rosalind and Mathew rushing between me on either side. I hope successfully, as it was a particularly ungainly attitude I was in at that moment. (Practically a close-up of a big behind.)’ The Colombo Times described Agatha as a ‘warmhearted woman unspoilt by fame’, but, ‘thank goodness’, she reported to Cork, ‘girlishly care-free’ from Bombay, ‘fame hasn’t caught up with me here.’ Max was amazed that Agatha survived the trip: ‘We travelled about 3000 miles right up to the Khyber Pass,’ he told the Kirwans, looking at digs and museums and taking part in festive parties, ‘even more stuffed with ideas than with food’. ‘Apparently,’ he went on, ‘Agatha is very widely read in Pakistan for at the most obscure places we had fans jumping on the train and hammering at the cabin doors to get a signature. Everyone incredibly friendly but any possible chance of privacy on our travels seems to have vanished.’ In late February they flew from Katmandu to Persia, where Agatha was besieged again; at the Park Hotel in Tehran seven photographers congregated in the passage outside her bedroom door.
She returned in time for the first night of Go Back for Murder, her dramatisation of Five Little Pigs, which opened at the Duchess Theatre in London on March 23rd. It was panned by ‘the most malicious press we have ever had, not even excepting Verdict’, Cork told Rosalind, who reported that Agatha had been very upset, ‘although I know she didn’t think some of the actors good enough’. The Mousetrap went on regardless. ‘What is Peter’s amusing idea for the 3000th?’ Agatha asked Cork warily. ‘A performance in a plushy aeroplane to Edinburgh?’
The end of the decade was marked by more than the completion of Max’s work at Nimrud. In the autumn of 1959 Harold Ober had a heart attack and died in New York. He was seventy-eight. For thirty years he had looked after Agatha’s affairs in America; he and Cork between them had been twin pillars supporting their demanding but rewarding client, and the record of their discussions, conducted by letter, cable and memorandum – only rarely in meetings or on the telephone – shows the trust and understanding that had developed between them. The correspondence between Cork and Ober and Cork and Agatha is, in fact, a remarkable archive, illuminating an aspect of an author’s life to which attention is rarely drawn – the role of the literary agent as representative, ally and intermediary. Over the years Ober, tutored by Cork, had developed an instinct for what Agatha would or would not accept. It was fortunate that Dorothy Olding had worked closely with Ober during his last years and that she and Cork were good friends, for though Ober’s death was a blow, Agatha’s affairs remained in strong and familiar hands.
Her mood was happy and serene. In 1954 she had taken out the ‘Confessions’ and made a new entry. Her favourite occupation she described as ‘sitting in the sun doing nothing’; her ‘pet aversion’, she said, was ‘crowds, noise, parties, too much conversation’. At the top of the page she put: ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner,’ and in that spirit she wrote to Archie, after years of silence, when Nancy died in the summer of 1958, saying that she understood how hard it must be after so much happiness. Archie had now retired, after a successful career as a director of various investment trusts and other companies in the City. He and Nancy had settled in the country, with their son, also called Archie but known as Beau, and they had continued to see a good deal of Sam and Madge James. Indeed, when Sam James suddenly died in his forties, they had been a great comfort to Madge, whose financial affairs Archie had diligently sorted out. Now Madge kept an eye on Archie. He continued to see Rosalind occasionally and in 1962 he heard from Mathew, who wrote from Eton asking if they might meet, for he had never known his grandfather. They arranged to see each other in London but, shortly before the day they had chosen, Archie collapsed. Madge James, who was with him, sent for an ambulance and visited him in hospital, thoughtfully smuggling in a bottle of his favourite whisky to ease his pain. He died, without seeing Mathew, in December.
Agatha was full of gratitude for her own calm, full life. In the mid-1950s, she decided to make what she called her ‘thanksgiving’ by offering a window to the church at Churston, the parish in which Greenway came. Cork approached the Diocesan authorities at Exeter and with their permission she arranged that a stained glass east window should be installed, to replace one she had always thought dull and uninspiring. There was to be no indication that Agatha was the donor but she did insist that her window would not depict the Crucifixion, as is customary in an east window, but ‘the goodness of God’. She emphasised to the designer, Mr James Paterson, the Principal of Bideford School of Art, that she wished it to be ‘a happy window … for a simple country church with a rural population’, and that she thought it should inspire the sort of innocent delight people must have derived from medieval Mystery Plays. Mr Paterson’s suggestions pleased her but she was anxious that the central figure should not have ‘too old and sad a face’. She liked his suggestion of portraying the Wise Men but had reservations about the other ideas: ‘I have never been attracted either by the doctrine or by pictures of the Annunciation, as to me the angel arriving with a lily is a kind of ecclesiastical symbol which looks silly. If you have a strong feeling for the angel,’ she wrote to Mr Paterson, ‘could he not appear to the shepherds instead?’ In the spring of 1957 a five-light and tracery east window was installed. By then Mr Paterson had discovered that Mrs Mallowan was also Agatha Christie, but only because his wife had heard it on the wireless.
In September 1960 Agatha was seventy, and still industrious. To a South American journalist who wanted to portray her as an example to encourage Brazilian women to do something more than spend the day on trivialities, she replied ruefully to Cork, ‘Brazilian women are jolly lucky.’ But with the passage of time she had become more philosophical. When Christianna Brand, a friend from the Detection Club, warned her that Ritchie-Calder intended to mark Agatha’s anniversary with a New Statesman piece on her disappearance in 1926, she took the news calmly: ‘I dare say you have heard of this already,’ she told Cork, ‘and you may worry about its coming to my ears, but after all it’s only what crops up from time to time every few years, and what does it matter after all this time? One of the advantages of being seventy is that you really don’t care any longer what anyone says about you. It’s a thing that can’t be helped – just slightly annoying – and the less notice we take of it the better, don’t you agree?’ She ignored the issue and concentrated on enjoying her birthday, with Rheingold at Covent Garden, plans to see the Passion Play at Oberammergau, a little holiday with Max in Ireland: ‘The Moules Marinière and the Dublin Bay Prawns, hot and cold, simply super!!’ On the day itself she dined in state at Greenway, in her special birthday chair, garlanded with flowers. ‘Hardly felt my age!!’ she declared. ‘Rich hot lobster for dinner.’