Agatha arrived at the height of her fame in 1970, her eightieth year. It was to be a strenuous one. She and Max had not been away to the sun at the beginning of 1969 and in the spring she struggled with a severe chill. To gather strength and escape the damp, they had a holiday in Cyprus in January 1970 and at Easter went to Austria for mountain air; Agatha had her wish, too, and saw the Oberammergau Passion Play. For the rest of the spring she tried to tidy up her new book, Passenger to Frankfurt, or, as she spelt it, ‘Frankfort’.
She had begun to think about the plot in 1963, asking Collins to find a copy of The Royal Family of Bayreuth, by Friedelinde Wagner, the composer’s grand-daughter, whom she, Max and Mathew had met at Bayreuth. Friedelind had taken them behind the scenes of the Opera House and later to King Ludwig of Bavaria’s opera house, and had told them anecdotes about her grandfather and Hitler. Agatha brooded on all this, fitting it to her ideas about world conspiracy and espionage. She also asked Collins for Contributions to European History and Cork for a list of ‘Iron Curtain Coins, all of small size and small value’, and the origins of the quotation ‘For want of a nail, the horse was lost.…’ Her draft took up another thought, long germinating, for a book beginning in ‘An Air Lounge’ – a place which is no place, designed for arrivals, departures, exchanges. ‘Passengers in Transit’ was one of Agatha’s working titles for the development of this idea, or ‘Missing Passenger Story’. This plot acquired the title Passenger to Frankfurt in 1966, in the notebook Agatha kept on her American visit: ‘Airport. Renata.… Sir Neil at War Office of M14. His obstinacy aroused. Puts advertisement in.… Hitler idea. Concealed in a lunatic asylum. One of many who think they are Napoleon – or Hitler – or Mussolini. One of them was smuggled out. H took his place … Branded him on sole of foot – a swastika. The son. Born 1945. Now 24. In Argentine? USA? Rudi, The Young Siegfried.…’
Thus Agatha started to mix her old obsessions: disguise; people who actually are who they say they are, mixed up with people who are not; the hiding of people in the obvious place for them to be (a sort of ‘purloined letter’ notion); the international conspiracy idea; the advertisement in the newspaper device. These were intermixed with popular contemporary preoccupations – the true fate of Hitler and his entourage; the refuge they might have sought; the possibility of Hitler’s return, reincarnated almost, as a son. She joined these with another theme, ‘the Mrs Boynton character’, another megalomaniac, sadistic mother: ‘old lady Gräfin – in decay but she is a woman of power – Great riches – a Bertha Krupp – Armament heiress.…’ The draft brought together a tangle of fantasies, ideologies, fixations and recollections, some evolved via meetings with dotty prophets in California, some by Agatha’s reading. ‘Do you think I could have this series?’ she asked Billy Collins, after seeing a review of the Fontana Modern Masters paperbacks. ‘It would educate me to be up-to-date, and help my writing. Alexandra must have an intelligent great-grandmother!! If they could come here – not Greenway – I could commence study!! I know I am the daughter of the horse leech, saying “Give, Give, Give!”’ There she was, plunging into Marcuse, Fanon and Chomsky. Agatha had always found intellectual speculation exciting; her discussions with Max and her family at Greenway had included Freud and Jung, Moore and Wittgenstein, as well as, years before, Dunne on time and Jeans on Relativity. It was now harder for her to concentrate; even so, some of what she now read disturbed her, the more because, from what she gathered elsewhere, it was peddled effectively and swallowed uncritically. Not that this was anything new. ‘Trends and tendencies,’ Mr Robinson says in Passenger to Frankfurt, ‘coming again and again, repeating itself like a periodic table, repeating a pattern. A desire for rebellion.’ In itself the desire was not reprehensible. What made Agatha shudder was its malevolent exploitation, the wicked taking advantage of the innocent or naïve. A long note in her draft for this book, marked ‘Incorporate’, illustrates her attitude: ‘Idealism can arise from antagonism to injustice and to crass materialism – and is fed more and more by a desire to destroy … those who get to love Violence for its own sake will never become adults. They are fixed in their own retarded development.’
This was the pin with which Agatha fastened her disjointed thoughts. ‘Suggestions’, she put in one notebook, ‘Quotation or Résumé of Stalin’s Aims (From Svetlana’s book?) … African Régime – Nkrumah or Congo? Algeria? Ireland? Belgian Congo? Italian risings and terrorist activity. American universities. Black Power etc.’ Her notes are fascinating, and moving. In large letters, with something of her middle-aged verve but more often with more of the child’s hand that had first written in the ‘Confessions’, she set down her troubled thoughts. Passenger to Frankfurt was stuffed with fantasy but it echoed the real fears expressed by Agatha’s friends and the people she met in London, Oxford and Washington, diplomats, journalists, politicians. In the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies there were constant reports of hijackings, terrorism, disaffected youth, drug-peddling, wars, coups and revolutions. Agatha described her book as an extravaganza and only the most gullible and paranoid readers saw it as more than that. It was, however, timely: a book that was confused but published at a time when everything seemed upside-down, views about human psychology and instinct as much as events in the external world. Agatha’s novel proclaimed, moreover, the triumph of the ordinary over the exotic, or, more precisely, that apparently unglamorous people could mobilise their somewhat eccentric resources against ruthless and well-equipped criminals. Lady Matilda Cleckheaton, pleasantly perfumed, pale pink, wrinkled, with a touch of arthritis; the careless, idiosyncratic Stafford Nye; stalwart, imperturbable Horsham; Colonel Pikeway, self-sufficient and weary, his office suffused (as Max’s and Stephen Glanville’s office had been) with cigarette smoke; and plain Mr Robinson, whose tastes were simple but who was one of ‘the great arrangers of money’ – these were Agatha’s archetypal heroes.
When the book was done, almost everyone – Cork and Dorothy Olding, Agatha’s family – was dismayed. Collins, in particular, feared the book would be a disaster. Only Anthony liked it, apart from its soppy ending. They were all confounded. In the autumn, sales rocketed in Britain and, when the American edition appeared in spring 1971, it was as much of a sensation there. Agatha had not only dealt with universal and timeless themes; she had hit raw nerves.
Passenger to Frankfurt also soared upwards on the publicity for Agatha’s anniversary. ‘If the book is published as an 80th birthday book,’ she had acknowledged to Cork, ‘something … will have to be done, I suppose. But I suggest – Keep it snappy! Not long tiresome “Profiles”.’ She escaped with only an effusive interview in the Daily Mail, by Godfrey Winn, who, to everyone’s delight, was bitten by Bingo, the successor to Treacle, who had died of an epileptic fit at the beginning of 1969. Bingo was irredeemably neurotic. Rosalind had found him for Agatha, who insisted on a Manchester terrier from a breeder. It turned out that he had been so terrified as a puppy that he bit almost everyone in sight. Max’s legs were a mass of scars, one visitor after another was nipped, and there were innumerable stories of Bingo’s success in pouncing on those who crept through Winterbrook by a complicated route to answer the telephone or the doorbell. Only Agatha was immune. Bingo adored her, slept on her bed; she loved him, some victims believed, because he was loyal, spiritedly protecting her privacy, and because he needed only affection.
Agatha spent her birthday in Devon, in a summer of celebration. There were parties for friends at All Souls and Boodle’s and a family feast at Greenway:
Picnic on the Moor with 5 dogs and a super dinner last night:
Avocados Vinaigrette
Hot Lobster à la Crème
Blackberry Ice Cream and real blackberries and lots of cream, and special treat – half a large cup of neat cream for ME while the rest had Champagne.
Furthermore, Agatha reassured Cork, ‘I’m still alive today!!!’ She was obliged to ask Hughes Massie to deal with greetings from abroad. The flowers, enormous telegrams and cards had, she said, made her feel ‘like a Prima Ballerina, indeed quite above myself. No proper modesty left.’ She was particularly delighted with a present of something she had – surprisingly – never owned before, a gold pen, sent by Cork: ‘Death to anyone who borrows it and doesn’t give it back.’ Last was a party at Collins, where Agatha confessed that she ‘enjoyed myself very much!!!’ She asked for copies of the photographs of herself cutting a huge chocolate cake, of herself with Max and her ‘good-looking publisher!’ and of the literary editors surrounding her in a group, with ‘a little plan of names … because it will be nice to keep it with the 80th birthday souvenirs.’ It was a publication party too; by artful counting, Passenger to Frankfurt was advertised as Agatha’s eightieth book for her eightieth year.
The New Year’s Honours List for 1971 announced that Agatha was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire. It was her last change of name. Friends and neighbours continued to call her Lady Mallowan. but her new style completely foxed American admirers (‘Dame Christie?’ was one ingenious guess), who flocked to buy Passenger to Frankfurt when it appeared in March. Agatha and Max went to Paris for a few days in January but she now found it increasingly difficult to get about. She managed, nonetheless, to deliver her new book in May, a Miss Marple story called Nemesis. It was an elaboration of a ‘National Trust idea’, listed among the ‘Projects 1966 Oct’, when Agatha had mused on what Miss Marple might discover on a tour of country houses and gardens and what her fellow-passengers might be like. (‘Lawyer? A doctor and his wife? A queer clever girl …?’) Nemesis itself was begun in January 1971. It is touching to see that Agatha has written ‘DBE’ on the line above the title of her notebook, as if she were murmuring encouragement to herself. She started her notes with a ‘Recap. Death of Mr Rafiel in Times.’ Mr Rafiel was the old man in the wheelchair whom Miss Marple had helped in A Caribbean Mystery; he was to use her as Nemesis, to see that justice was done.
The notion of retribution had always interested Agatha. Her views fluctuated but by and large she believed that, whether people were innately wicked or had chosen evil, they should not go free. The fact that certain basic rules and conventions of behaviour had been broken – taking another’s life being the most extreme case – should, she felt, be recognised; very few of Agatha’s murderers are unpunished, although a number die before they can be brought to trial. Bringing the guilty to justice also relieves the innocent, she maintained, not just those who may have been wrongly convicted but also those afflicted by not knowing where guilt lies. Justice restores order, closes an incomplete circle. She saw her detective stories as morality plays, demonstrating that there was wickedness in the world, but that it could be found out and sin expiated.
‘Justice’, however, is not punishment, vengeance or retribution. It is fairness. Agatha often leaves punishment to the gods. She wondered a good deal about all this. She would have liked to have felt that the matter was simple and, as she grew older, became more strongly convinced that crime should be strictly punished, that attempts to ‘rehabilitate’ criminals were often futile (though not all efforts were as daft as those described in They Do It with Mirrors), that punishment could deter others and that a good many dangerous madmen were allowed to wander about (not at all a surprising opinion given some of the paranoid correspondence that, despite Cork’s screening, found its way to her). Even in the mid-’fifties, however, she allowed characters in Butter in a Lordly Dish to wonder whether capital punishment allowed men to play at being gods, and possibly to make mistakes. By far the most convenient resolution was to leave retribution to providence, nature, fate, some divine power or the Eumenides, whom Agatha, after reading Aeschylus in the War, likened to the spirits summoned in voodoo ceremonies. Miss Marple was not an embodiment of these avenging Furies, but the instrument of justice, picked by Mr Rafiel to investigate a crime that had happened long ago. He had chosen an ideal person, shrewd, sensible and wise, to do what human beings can do: mete out justice to other human beings. It is interesting that Miss Marple also represented the absolute objectivity of justice to an unexpected set of readers: the Tupamaros guerillas, who had kidnapped the British Ambassador, Sir Geoffrey Jackson, in Uruguay in 1970. Not only did Sir Geoffrey find consolation in Agatha Christie’s works during his long imprisonment, fastening on Miss Marple – and, indeed, Hercule Poirot – as fixed points in an uneasy firmament, but his captors were interested in discussing Miss Marple with him, venerating her as they did their own revolutionary leader.
Nemesis, like many of Agatha’s detective stories, mixes the important and the mundane. The creeper which hides the victim’s burial place resembled the tangle of white flowers – Polygonum baldschuanicum – over the ruins of a greenhouse at Winterbrook, ‘concealing’, Agatha said meaningly to her friend Lady le Rougetel, ‘a multitude of sins’. The motive for the crime, the passion of a forceful, possessive woman for an impressionable girl, was both a powerful and an ordinary theme. (It is, incidentally, nonsense to suggest, as some critics have done, that in extreme old age Agatha suddenly broached more daring subjects, for from the beginning her books explored complex and unusual sexual and emotional relationships, of a type familiar to anyone living in a village, let alone Chelsea in the nineteen-seventies.)
Nemesis contained a number of discrepancies and oddities but, considering Agatha’s age and increasing shakiness, needed little work. There was more difficulty with the play she sent Cork in the early weeks of 1971, This Mortal Coil. Agatha had recently made vague notes for several plays, including ‘Mousetrap II’; an idea about a ‘mousetrap party in Soho’, with hired waiters, which ended with the victim being poisoned, ‘a mixture of 3 Act tragedy and “Sparkling Cyanide”.’ This Mortal Coil was based on one of these ideas, ‘death duties’, and Agatha’s first rough outline indicates the thoughts that were now running through her mind: ‘M sends money to Chancellor of Exchequer: “How do you spend conscience?”’ The play’s next title became ‘Fiddle-De-Death’, later, ‘Fiddlers Five’. Agatha had great hopes for her play. ‘We saw Move Over Mrs Markham in Oxford last week,’ she wrote to Cork. ‘Max thought it very silly. Good audience and lots of laughs. People want to be cheered up and are tired of nothing but nudity.’ She set off to Paris, leaving Cork to do what he could. Peter Saunders declined the play but James Grant Anderson, the actor-manager, took it on tour in June. It was not a success.
Agatha was by then confined to bed. She had fallen at Winterbrook and damaged her hip; at the beginning of June it was found to be broken. She was operated on at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital in Oxford, returning home shortly afterwards to convalesce. Billy sent books and Mathew and Angela music on cassettes. Rosalind, Anthony and Max did what they could to amuse her but she was bored, entertaining herself by dispatching argumentative letters to Billy about the proposed jacket for Nemesis, enclosing cuttings of book reviews complaining about other publishers’ jacket designs. By Christmas she was walking, though she found it difficult to get about in London, where she went briefly to be measured for her waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s. (Agatha gave them an old dress, being both practical and anxious not to part with clothes she liked and could still wear.) There was also Christmas shopping. ‘Most years I find it rather fun,’ she told Cork. ‘But now I get tired and want to go home.’ She discovered, however, that ordering by mail would help, supplying, for instance, a cuckoo clock, a ‘modern tool box’ for her nephew, ‘a hammering apparatus for her great-grandson’, and a ‘perennial fountain for moistening the sitting room’.
The winter was hard. By now Winterbrook was exceedingly dilapidated: ‘A lot of wind and rain and somewhere water is running or dripping,’ Agatha wrote to Angela. ‘The Hall light has crashed – so there must be SOS on Monday to a plumber and an electrician.’ The garden was overgrown, the kitchen dark and difficult for Mrs Belson to work in. Max worried about the cost of keeping up the house, meeting his bills, his own and Agatha’s old-age pension. They had acquired a Mercedes-Benz at the end of 1971 and he was anxious about the cost of its maintenance. Agatha now asked Cork to reassure him by showing him the last Miss Marple book, ‘Cover Her Face’ (published as Sleeping Murder). She remained in good spirits. Even the coal strike at the beginning of the year did not defeat her: ‘My nose gets icy cold at 4.30 a.m.,’ she told Cork. ‘I now attach an egg cosy to it at this hour.’ She arranged an expedition to Nice, so she and Max could find some sun, ordered opera tickets, took herself to Sleuth, went out to luncheon and dined with friends, amazing another octogenarian, with delicate digestion, by tucking into osso buco and ginger ice cream.
She also refused to admit defeat over ‘Fiddlers Five’. Allan Davis, a director who had seen the play in Brighton the previous autumn, made suggestions for improving it and in the spring and summer of 1972 Agatha amended the script, amalgamating two of the characters and changing the title to Fiddlers Three. She stoutly rebuffed some of Davis’s bolder ideas: ‘I do not want a play of mine to be one that deals with everyone in it doing swindles – or in thoroughly criminal surroundings.… Swedes or Norwegians or Danes seldom look anything but English – and seldom talk with Scandinavian accents. My own sister-in-law is Finnish.… I cannot see any reason for building up the Spanish Waiter’s act – he’d do just as well as an English waiter.…’ Fiddlers Three opened at Guildford at the beginning of August and Agatha was there. It toured for a few weeks but failed to find a theatre in London, which was perhaps fortunate, for it would have disappointed those who remembered Witness for the Prosecution and who still trooped to The Mousetrap. Agatha nonetheless derived great pleasure from the performance for she was still enchanted with the theatre. Indeed, the only society, apart from the Detection Club, over which she agreed to preside, out of hundreds of requests, was the Sinodun Players, an amateur dramatic society at Wallingford. She continued to scribble notes for plays to the end of her life.
That summer, too, Agatha conscientiously delivered her next book, Elephants Can Remember. ‘Mrs Oliver. Poirot,’ she wrote, clearly this time, for her psoriasis had retreated. ‘Does a problem come to P? Or to Mrs O?’ Another old friend returned in this book as well, Mr Goby, the ubiquitous but elusive purveyor of information, who had first appeared in The Mystery of the Blue Train and returned in After the Funeral and Third Girl. Mr Goby was what in the United States would be a ‘gofer’, an errand boy, but he procured facts. As other people in Agatha’s novels were arrangers of money, Mr Goby was an arranger of material, from dossiers and reference books. He provided the data from which Poirot derived his knowledge, the intellectual tools to take apart the engines of conspiracy. Into Elephants Can Remember Agatha also brought some favourite themes: the long shadow of old sins; the shame of an unresolved crime; complicated domestic crimes (‘Wife kills husband? Husband kills wife? Sick women killing children? Sisters jealous of sisters-in-law.…’) ‘All so long ago,’ Agatha wrote in her notebook. ‘Everyone will have forgotten. People don’t forget things that happened when they were children.… It’s like elephants. Elephants never forget.’ So Agatha rambled through her own childhood and her own fixations: ‘Calls on Poirot. Asks about Josephine (Crooked House).’ Ideas surfaced that had been set aside: ‘Lunch for literary women. Mrs Oliver. Mrs Gorringe. Discussion between them. A child could do a crime; Hyde Park. Nurse with Pram. Talk of gas – to make a baby sleep …; ‘Lizzie Borden family – father and mother killed – two daughters – devoted sister-in-law.…’ Old fixations resurfaced: ‘Boys pull flies’ legs off but they don’t do it when they grow up.… Mr G says Professor of Genetics or Biology and Jesuits have to take a child before 7.…’ Not unexpectedly Elephants Can Remember wandered about as well. It was nonetheless ingenious, full of forthright and often very funny passages, blunt about the physical deterioration of the old and endearing in its depiction of the relations between generations. It was the last novel Agatha wrote before her powers really declined.
She was now trying to put her literary affairs in order, looking over some of her notebooks, and trying to label pages where ideas for new detective stories had first emerged; the contents were so haphazard, that she abandoned the effort. In February 1972 she sent Cork ‘the odd poems that I have collected.… I think it best to transfer them to your care now because, at the age of 81, one might at any time leave this world rather suddenly: either as a result of motor crashes on our roads, heart attacks from doing a few of the things one has been told not to do – running upstairs – or opening the door to a long-haired young man who would bash one over the head just for the fun of it.’ Cork, she wrote, could, ‘after crying at my funeral and if my family agree, introduce them into the world.’
Three months later, she sent him Akhnaton: ‘It seems to me to be particularly applicable just at this time, that is if anyone was willing to put some money into staging it – and it would no doubt be an expensive production – but there is such a furore over the Egyptian Tutankhamun.’ She added one or two sentences to take account of recent discoveries and speculations – the fate of Nefertiti, for example – but otherwise thought it not at all dated. ‘I like the play very much,’ she observed, ‘though I am quite prepared to accept the fact that no one will put it on the stage. If that does turn out to be the case, I would like to have it published.’ Both Poems and Akhnaton were brought out by Collins in 1973, together with a detective story Agatha painfully put together. ‘I’m so tired,’ she told Mrs Thompson, who helped look after things at Greenway, ‘and they’re waiting for every word I write.’ She also felt responsible to Agatha Christie Ltd, feeling, unnecessarily, that she owed them an annual book. ‘Notes for November 1972 and Plans’, she wrote, drafting the first few chapters as she had always done. (‘Possible point: the wrong woman died.… Various ideas … Next make a list of possible characters.…’)
Tommy and Tuppence were among those with whom she toyed. The title of her next book was taken from a poem of Flecker. Agatha had noted in a plotting book some lines which sounded well, though their sense is obscure:
Pass not beneath, O Caravan, or pass not seeing.
Have you heard
The silence where the birds are dead, yet something pipeth like a bird??
She tried several titles: ‘Postern of Fate; Doom’s Caravan; Disaster’s Caravan; Fort of Fear …’; she settled on Postern of Fate.
Agatha found it harder than ever to concentrate – Max told Rosalind that writing this book nearly killed her – and she herself was uneasy. She asked Cork for a candid opinion and he tactfully suggested she have some help with editing. Max and Mrs Honeybone, who did typing for the Mallowans (and to whom Agatha had dedicated Nemesis) tidied it up, though Agatha’s family – Rosalind in particular – was unhappy. But when Postern of Fate was published, in Britain at the end of 1973 and in the United States early in 1974, the notices were unexpectedly good and so were sales. It moved rapidly up the best-seller list and by February 1974 was in third place in the list compiled by the European edition of Time magazine.
Rosalind was firm. Worried about Agatha’s health, she was also a stern guardian of her mother’s literary reputation. She asked Collins to press for no more books. Billy Collins agreed that Agatha’s health must be protected, though he left the question open by declaring that, while her mind was active, ‘maybe it is a help to her to be thinking out a plot, and surely we should not definitely turn down the idea if she thinks she would like to write another story.’ For the time being, Collins agreed that the next book would be a volume of short stories, from those hitherto published only in America or in magazines.
There was no new story. In October Agatha had a heart attack, which left her frail, although she managed to scrawl a note to Cork on a scrap of paper: ‘Heart much steadier and doctor lets me get up and come downstairs every other day for short time but otherwise still in bed. Boring!!!’ She read a great deal; all the newly reprinted Mary Westmacott books (‘Unfinished Portrait I think is one of the best after Rose and the Yew Tree’), a batch of novels, including Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow, Brian Moore’s Catholics, and some non-fiction, Mysterious Britain and The World of Victoriana. She also asked Cork to send a script of her Autobiography: ‘I have time on my hands and would enjoy reading it at leisure.’ She played with memories – ‘Dickens Menus: Salmon (Martin Chuzzlewit) Lamb. Peas. Innocent Young Potatoes. Cool Salad. Sliced Cucumber. Tender Duckling. A Tart.’ She made notes for ‘Suggested Tours by AM in Idleness: Wickham (Elephants?) Pretty Spot.… Lambourne. Views all along road and bridges … Seven Barrows.… East Hagbourne – interesting heads in Church …?’ – all the drives along the lanes and over the Downs between Oxford, the Thames and the Berkshire Downs. Some of these places came into a ‘Possibilities and Ideas’ list she also made. One was for a set of ghost stories, based on the ‘white horses’ cut into the grass of the chalky downland in different parts of England (‘perhaps in a party with White Horses at which a Ghost Horse might appear suddenly …?’). In another: ‘Jeremy – discusses with friends. Murders. What difference would it make to one’s character if one had killed someone? “Depends on what the motive had been?” “No. No motive. For no reason. Just an interesting experiment.” The object of the crime – Oneself. Would one be the same person – or would one be different? To find out one would have to commit homicide – observing all the time oneself – one’s feelings. Keeping notes – Needed A Victim.…’ And there was ‘Cookery Story. About A Meringue? Trifle. Skewer.…’
None of these was developed. In December Agatha fell into the French window at Winterbrook and badly split her head. She sat in bed, in her silk nightdress (all her nightdresses were made by the blind), her hair blood-caked, a sad figure now. The drugs she took for her heart had shrunk her into a little scrap and she ate only a very little. Frail, she remained the good sport she had been in Syria and Iraq, tottering to Wimbledon with Max, and managing to attend the Lord Mayor’s Dinner. In July Max persuaded her to come to the polling station to vote in the referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Community; her reluctance was not due to the physical effort the expedition required but to doubts as to where her duty lay. A natural conservative, believing in gradual progress on a loose rein, she was wary of political and bureaucratic schemes, as she put it in her letters to Max in the ’forties ‘to make people happy and safe by force’. Max, on the other hand, was a romantic in politics; in 1945 he had spoken to Agatha of Russia’s new golden age, ‘like that of sixth to fifth century Greece’, renowned ‘not merely for their military genius but for their economics, their organisation and … imagination. Apart from Stalin ‘perhaps’ and Michurin the agronomist, he had rhapsodised, ‘we know of no individual Russians. It is a collective genius animated by a burning belief in their political foundation, which to them amounts to a religion.’ Agatha was not wholly convinced then, nor, as Passenger to Frankfurt showed, later. Now she rallied her strength to argue with Max about the Community: it would be no more than a customs union and a regulator’s paradise, she predicted, while he visualised it as a unified historical, cultural and intellectual Eden. Gamely, Agatha agreed to try it, and voted yes.
She also kept up the running argument with Billy over covers, this time for the jacket of Collins’s recent volume of short stories, Poirot’s Early Cases: ‘He was a little man,’ she protested. ‘His smartly dressed lower half seems entirely unlike him and represents him as 6 feet high at least. I never remember him as prone to carry a little bag.’ She had been upset, too, by the choice of stories for inclusion in this collection, although these had been explicitly cleared. By now her mind was fuzzy. She still hoped to recover her old wits, to write ‘a series – ghost story or book built round the White Horse of Uffington’, which (in a swipe at the new Local Government Act) ‘was situated in Berkshire and is now being transferred with all the rest of us to Oxfordshire, which causes very bad feeling to the neighbourhood.…’ One of these days, she concluded, ‘when I am quite myself again …’
Fragile and immensely aged, Agatha became, as the very old sometimes do, more and more like the child she had been, over eighty years before. Sometimes she was serene, sitting quietly at luncheon with friends, gently leafing through one of her books. ‘Stop it, Agatha,’ Max once said, as he caught her looking speculative. At other times she was eccentric, declaring, for instance, that today she would wear all her brooches, from the grandest diamonds to small ornaments children had sent her. She was often difficult, frequently upset by the indignities and dependence of her state. Once, to the horror of her family and friends, she seized the scissors and cut off locks of the fine hair of which she had been so proud. Then she would be calm again, resting in the garden in the sun, asking repeatedly for a sun-hat and bemusedly finding she had it on. She could be as interested and quick-witted as ever; just as she had once speculated about the true facts of the Bravo murder case and, in the early nineteen-sixties, about the alleged theft of a diamond bracelet by a British footballer visiting Colombia, so she now greeted her solicitor with the words, ‘I wonder what has happened to Lord Lucan?’ From time to time she still pounced on an idea for a plot: one old friend, visiting the house at the end of Agatha’s life, explained that she gave a shine to her decanters by rinsing them in Steradent. She noticed how Agatha immediately fixed on this remark as a possible device for a story. A pompous guest was stopped in his tracks when she expostulated, ‘What is this nonsense about “training” for the theatre?’ Another lofty conversation about the meaning of life was punctuated by her asking, ‘Does there have to be a purpose?’ and an All Souls acquaintance, talking about the vulgarity of dahlias, was amused to hear her murmur: ‘But pompom dahlias do go so well with Dresden.’
Physical and mental decline is sad. Agatha’s family tried to protect her. She still saw old friends and, very occasionally, a pilgrim. One admirer who called at Winterbrook was Lord Snowdon, commissioned by the Sunday Times to take photographs to mark the release of Lord Brabourne’s film of Murder on the Orient Express. They were interesting and sympathetic pictures but her family insisted that it had been made clear that none was to be published without Agatha’s explicit approval. She was upset when, with no clearance, the pictures appeared, and even more hurt when her desultory conversation with her guest appeared as an interview in an Australian magazine. It was another reminder of the gulf between those who see people as exhibits, to be used, and those who prefer to let individuals themselves decide whether they wish to live, and die, by self-advertisement.
One of Agatha’s few expeditions was to the première of Murder on the Orient Express. Despite her determination that this story, one of her most precious, should not be made into a film, she had succumbed to the blandishments of Lord Mountbatten, so persuasive that she briefly forgot her disenchantment with filmmaking and agreed to entrust her story to his son-in-law, John Brabourne. Agatha was impressed by the lavish production and thought Albert Finney a convincing Poirot, apart from his feeble moustache; otherwise she was unconverted. The last outing was to the annual Mousetrap Party.
Agatha now needed a great deal of looking after. Her bed at Wallingford was moved downstairs and Max, writing his own Memoirs, left the sanctuary of his library for an uncomfortable chair beside her. Neighbours and friends would sit with her and a night nurse was engaged, but Agatha was unhappy at being so intimately cared for by a relative stranger and once more the work of attending her fell to Max and the family. Barbara Parker, who had so efficiently looked after things at Nimrud, came at weekends, to give Max some rest. Friends came to sit with Agatha; delirious, she talked of preparations and journeys, going to find Max, travelling to Cambridge, bringing ladders to fetch down trunks, packing for ‘the children’.
Now she turned to her memorial. Months before, she had addressed an envelope to ‘Max or Rosalind’, adding later ‘or Mathew’. Inside was the instruction, ‘Put on my Slate: Sleep after Toyle, Port after Stormie Seas. Ease after Warre, Death after Life, Doth greatly please.’ She asked for ‘Bach Air in D from 3rd Suite played at my funeral, please. Also Nimrud [sic] from the Elgar Variations. Mathew to arrange.’ In another envelope, she again gave the quotation from Spenser, adding a phrase from the Psalms: ‘In Thy Presence is the fulness of Joye,’ with the words, ‘I would like these two things put on my Tombstone. Agatha Mallowan.’
Agatha did outlive ‘the insufferable Poirot’, for in 1975 Rosalind decided that Curtain should now be published. In it, Poirot returns to Styles, telling Hastings, ‘I am very tired – and the exertions I have been through have strained me a good deal. It will not, I think, be long …’ There was also a new edition of Come, Tell Me How You Live, published the autumn of 1975.
That winter Agatha caught a cold. ‘I’m joining my Maker,’ she murmured and on January 12th, just after luncheon, she died at Winterbrook. Max telephoned the doctor who had looked after her for twenty years, listened to her talk of her dreams, been worried by Treacle and bitten by Bingo. He left his house immediately but before he reached Winterbrook Max telephoned again: ‘She’s gone,’ and then, the doctor’s wife thought, strangely, ‘Don’t say a word.’ Max’s warning was wise, for within hours the invasion began. The local, national and foreign press appeared in Wallingford, the telephone rang incessantly. Max was inundated with telegrams and letters from the family and personal friends, which he answered within the day, official tributes, and requests that were sometimes in poor taste (an American company wanted to market a commemorative Hercule Poirot ‘moustache mug’) or well-meaning but idiotic (like ‘a letter from some quasi-lunatic who would like to handle all Agatha’s records’, Max told Cork).
Agatha was buried wearing her wedding ring, as she had asked, at Cholsey, the little church near Winterbrook. The service was private, a small reunion on a chill January day for Agatha’s family and a handful of close friends. In May there was a memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields, with the music she had requested, the Twenty-Third Psalm and a reading from Thomas à Kempis, the book she kept by her bedside. Billy Collins, unwell himself, delivered an address.
Some of Agatha’s affairs were settled quickly. There was little money to leave – only small bequests here and there – and the treasures she had chosen for her friends were soon packed and despatched (though an enormous mother-of-pearl ‘Damascus’ chest and a Wedgwood bust of Mercury were more difficult to transport to Edmund Cork). A fund to which her admirers contributed was divided between the Little Sisters of the Poor and the Agatha Christie Trust for Children, two causes close to her heart. Other memorials took longer. There were difficulties, for example, over her tombstone, the lettering carved by a friend from archaeological days and embellished with cherubs by another. The stone slab was so heavy that a crane was needed to hoist it over the churchyard wall. It can be seen, tall and shining, from the London-to-Oxford railway, where the lines skirt Cholsey.
Agatha’s most complex legacy was her work. Sleeping Murder, the last Miss Marple story, was published in 1976. Billy was not, perhaps, surprised to receive a letter from Rosalind regretting that she had not been shown the proposed design for the jacket. For to Rosalind now fell the task of battling to protect the integrity of Agatha’s creations: to ensure that Agatha Christie Ltd kept a wholesome distance from proposals for games, strip cartoons, toys, cookery books; and to consider what her mother’s wishes would have been with regard to the exploitation of the enormous number of copyrights in every market in the world, in an age when literary material was seized on for films, television, mail order and book club sales, cable rights and video-cassettes.
It is difficult to make more than a rough assessment of the total volume of Agatha’s sales, since any calculation is complicated by the fact that her books are known to be published in at least fifty languages, in countries which have different procedures for making returns, when they make them at all. Statistics are unreliable and often out of date. An indication of her success is given by the fact that by 1980 UNESCO believed that some four hundred million copies of her books had been sold, world-wide, since she first published The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Nor can we give a precise figure for the earnings from her work, though the records of Agatha Christie Ltd, for many years now the owners of the vast majority of her copyrights, show in the 1980s an annual turnover of over a million pounds. The complexities of the Christie estate make it impossible to establish the total income from her work or to estimate trends. The figures that are available do show, however, that the popularity of her work continues to grow.
Rosalind also found herself fielding successive applications to write an official biography of her mother. A number of self-appointed biographers published volumes of their own, from the gushing to the malicious, from pot-boiling romances to serious literary criticism. As Agatha had cheerfully forecast, the more lightweight efforts were overshadowed by her own Autobiography. This was published in 1977, after a great deal of cutting and correction by Philip Ziegler of Collins, Rosalind and Anthony. Max (who, bereft, had married Barbara Parker in September 1977) conscientiously examined the proofs but his own health was failing now. After an operation on his arthritic hip in July, he had a mild heart attack and died in August 1978.
Agatha’s books last because they are good, if sometimes hopelessly improbable, stories. The reader, once hooked, wants to know what happens next. They deal with myths, fantasies, obsessions shared by people of every sort: quests and contests, death, sex, money, murder, conspiracy, transformation, power, the triumph of the simple over the complex, the importance of the mundane as well as the cosmic. They construct a pattern, assigning facts and emotions to their appointed place as problems are resolved and guilt and innocence established.
This last quality helps us understand why Agatha’s Autobiography is so interesting. It is an enchanting book, fluent, pungent, clear-eyed about the times and circumstances in which she lived, funny about herself and other people. With Come, Tell Me How You Live, it gives many clues to her life and her nature. It interests Agatha’s insatiable admirers and people who do not like detective stories or care a fig for her mysteries. Some feel her Autobiography leaves nothing more to say; others, disappointed because she dwells on her childhood – and ignores her flight to Harrogate altogether – believe much remains hidden.
There is, indeed, always more to say, if only because no one can give a balanced assessment of themselves. Memory fails, especially of events in adult life; recollections are invariably coloured. A person who writes an autobiography approaches it, consciously or not, in one of several ways: it may be their presentation of themselves to the world or their exploration of how they became what they are, an unravelling process for the writer as much as the reader. Some autobiographies do both. Agatha’s is one. To what extent she gives a ‘true’ picture of herself and a fair account of her development is something each reader must judge alone; this biography, authorised by her daughter and based on Agatha’s private papers, may help that assessment.
Knowing now as much as we do of Agatha, her work and its origins, we can, I think, understand the purpose of her own Autobiography. It was not intended as a screen, nor to distract attention from aspects of her life she did not want to be discussed. Agatha described her experiences as best she could, in the ‘Mary Westmacott’ novels and in the narrative and characterisation of her detective stories. If some of her writing about herself is fantasy or wishful thinking, that is true of all of us when we talk about ourselves. Agatha was good at seeing patterns, astute, sensible, down-to-earth, affectionate and dry. In her Autobiography she almost succeeded in fitting everything together, as she had matched pieces of the Nimrud ivories and Max’s pots. Some pieces she could not fit; others, being too close, she could not see. Perhaps we can perceive her more clearly, in this biography, as if by shaking a kaleidoscope, looking along its length. There, reflected and refracted in its mirrors, is another arrangement of the fragments.