Chapter Twenty-Six
The Twilight Years

 

Agatha was at the peak of her fame in the 1970s, and to those fans who eagerly awaited each new ‘Christie for Christmas’ it seemed as if she had brooked no serious rival for yours. The decade began with the publication of Passenger to Frankfurt, which became a best-seller in Britain and the United States. Initially, however, her UK publishers had hesitated over whether to publish it at all and had only done so on condition that she subtitle it ‘An Extravaganza’ and include an introduction to explain why she had written it.

In Passenger to Frankfurt Agatha had produced an international thriller involving terrorism, hijacking and an attempted resurgence of Nazi Germany by the son of Adolf Hitler. Although the plot was extremely unusual for a Christie novel, it is interesting to note that the book centres on the successful hunt to recover Project Benvo, the code-name for a drug, which, when injected into a person, effectively eradicates violent impulses by inducing a permanent state of benevolence. Readers who do not like this book often fail to realize just how concerned she had become about the violence she felt she saw, initially in Britain, and latterly as a world epidemic.

Despite Max’s continued relationship with Barbara, the author’s self-esteem rose when she heard she was to be made a Dame of the British Empire in the 1971 New Year’s Honours list. Agatha was an ardent monarchist, so she was delighted by such a title bestowed by the Queen. Not even the attention of the press could prevent her from attending her investiture at Buckingham Palace, although she declined to be interviewed by journalists.

Her new book, Nemesis, which marked a return to the domestic whodunits for which she was famous, was begun in January 1971, and next to her name and the title in her notebook she added the initials DBE. The plot deals with the depravity that can result from thwarted love and supplies one of the most emotionally compelling motives for crime in Agatha’s literary canon.

In June she was treated for a broken hip at Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital in Oxford after falling at Winterbrook and hobbling about painfully for a week. Judith and Graham had advised her to get her injury examined straight away. Agatha dismissed the idea, thinking she was just bruised, but it turned out to be more serious. Graham also had the misfortune at this time to injure his leg while he was cleaning his and Judith’s outdoor swimming-pool. Max wrote to the couple on Agatha’s behalf expressing her concern at Graham’s accident and sending them her best love; he expected it would be about another fortnight before Agatha left the hospital with her new metal hip.

Max was concerned about their finances at this time. In addition to Greenway and Winterbrook, there was the upkeep of his new Mercedes and the Swan Court flat in London where he would spend time with Barbara. It angered Judith and Graham that he did so little to ensure Agatha’s comfort: the hall light at Winterbrook came crashing down one day, the roof leaked and the house was in urgent need of general maintenance and repair. Although Agatha was a wealthy woman, much of her money had been distributed in trusts for her family in anticipation of her death. The only immediate money at hand came from Agatha Christie Ltd. The fact that Max was keeping Barbara added to his financial anxieties, recalls Graham.

One day when there was a passing reference in the conversation to Max and Barbara, Agatha alluded to the couple’s affair by saying in Graham’s hearing, ‘It doesn’t matter about Max because he’s too old now. There’s no need to worry about anything with him.’

During the previous decade Max had suffered two strokes, one in 1961 and the other at the end of 1967, and these had aged him considerably. It was impossible to discern he was fourteen years younger than Agatha, for they now looked around the same ago. His decrepit appearance owed itself to a love of rich food and alcohol that had left him pot-bellied; he also stooped and walked with a shuffle. Agatha’s attitude towards his relationship with Barbara had altered: she no longer feared he might divorce her for his mistress, and this led to her adopting a more forgiving and philosophical attitude towards Barbara’s liaison with Max. Love was at the root of a flower for Agatha. She also felt a sense of gratitude toward him for standing by her all these years.

Agatha’s relationship with her daughter remained prickly. Rosalind disapproved of her mother’s latest play, Fiddlers Five, and she was right to do so. Producer Peter Saunders was unable to find a West End theatre that would take the play and it was not well received in the provinces. Determined to salvage her creation, Agatha met the director Allan Davis who agreed to redirect the play the following year after it had been rewritten and whittled down to Fiddlers Three.

The unhappy experience led Agatha to write a long ranting letter to her daughter in which she defended all her plays in general. Although she said she knew Rosalind had her best interests at heart, Agatha was clearly in denial about how bad her play was. Plainly unable to forget Rosalind’s ‘long, intimate lunches’ with Max at the Savoy, Agatha tried to defend her dramas by taking a sour and somewhat hypocritical pot-shot at her daughter to the effect she would have missed out on forty years of happiness with Max if she had taken the advice of her sister Madge and refused to marry him. The letter ended bitterly: ‘If one doesn’t take a few risks in life one might as well be dead!’

Agatha’s self-esteem received a boost that year when Madame Tussaud’s expressed a desire to model a wax effigy of her. She gave her permission with pleasure, as she had always enjoyed visiting London’s waxworks museum as a child.

In 1972 Michael Parkinson, the television chat-show host, compiled Michael Parkinson’s Confessional Album – 1973, in which famous people were asked to record their likes and dislikes. It was unusual for Agatha to respond to a public questionnaire, but she was happy to oblige on this occasion because filling in family confessional albums had been an enjoyable pastime in her youth. She gave her ideal of beauty in nature as ‘a bank of primroses in spring’, cited Elgar, Sibelius and Wagner as her favourite composers and named T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral as the play she most admired. Her favourite quotation came from Sir Thomas Browne: ‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us’; while she gave as her motto Dr Johnson’s ‘The business of life is to go forwards.’ She stated that the qualities she most liked in men were ‘integrity and good manners’. When asked who her heroes were in real life, she wrote, ‘None. I am not a hero-worshipper.’ This complete volte-face from her intensely romantic outlook during her first marriage revealed how much she had changed over the years. She did, however, cite her favourite heroines in real life as the ‘Little Sisters of the Poor’.

When the publishers of the Guinness Book of Great Moments wrote asking for her permission to reproduce a corrected proof of a page from Nemesis, she agreed. It was a distinct feather in her cap for a woman whose grammar and literary style had often been, with some justification, derided by her critics. They usually made the mistake of judging her as a prose stylist when, really, she was a great story-teller. She was particularly good at writing about children and had the ability to be equally convincing when using the first person as either a man or a woman. In fact, Agatha frequently belittled her writing, calling herself ‘a good, honest craftsman’. What is not in doubt is that she had become a literary legend in her lifetime.

Max continued to worry about his finances. On 17 July 1972 Agatha wrote to her literary agent Edmund Cork asking him to send her a copy of the unpublished Miss Marple novel she had written during the Second World War and a copy of the deed of gift assigning ownership of the copyright to Max, as she felt it was only right that he ought to have copies of them. So long had passed that she was unable to remember if the novel’s current title was Cover Her Face or She Died Young.

Originally the manuscript was entitled Murder in Retrospect after one of the chapters in the book. Agatha’s royalty statement for 15 March 1940 shows that the secretarial agency Edmund Cork hired to type the manuscript charged £19 13s. 9. On 7 June that same year Edmund Cork had written to Agatha advising her that he would have the necessary deed of gift drawn up for the Miss Marple novel. Agatha had eventually visited her literary agent’s offices at 40 Fleet Street, London, four months later on 14 October and signed the document transferring ownership of the copyright of Murder in Retrospect to her husband in consideration of what was termed her ‘natural love and affection for him’. This was before Agatha’s American publishers had appropriated the title for Five Little Pigs in 1942 (a year ahead of the release of the UK edition that retained the nursery-rhyme title). Agatha duly renamed the novel Cover Her Face. In one of her notebooks there are references to Cover Her Face under ‘Plans for Sept. 1947’ and ‘Plans for Nov. 1948’, suggesting she was considering revising the unpublished manuscript. But these alterations did not occur until early 1950. After drafting most of the book that became Mrs McGinty’s Dead and thinking about plans for another Mary Westmacott novel, Agatha wrote to Edmund Cork from Nimrud saying that, as she was well ahead of her normal writing schedule, she had gone over the Miss Marple novel thoroughly, ‘as a lot of it seemed to have dated very much’. She had removed all the political references and remarks that emphasized the period, although she stressed that the story must remain set in the 1930s, as so much of the action depended on houses with plentiful servants, ample pre-war meals and so on. She observed that it was especially catchwords and particular phrases that seemed to make a book old-fashioned. On rereading this one she thought it was quite good, and she added, somewhat facetiously, she was not sure her writing talents hadn’t gone downhill since then. Following the publication of P.D. James’s début crime novel Cover Her Face in 1962, Agatha became aware of the need to think up yet another title for her Miss Marple book, hence her confusion in July 1972 as to whether it was still known by this title or She Died Young.

John Curran speculates in his 2009 book Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making that the reference to ‘Plans for Sept. 1947’ and ‘Plans for Nov. 1948’ indicate Agatha was still plotting Cover Her Face and did not write it until much closer to 1950. But his theory is not endorsed by the evidence of the Agatha Christie–Edmund Cork and Harold Ober correspondence files currently held at Exeter University, which also includes a copy of Agatha’s deed of gift to Max. In her autobiography Agatha had this to say about the last Poirot and Miss Marple novels:

‘It is only now that I fully realise, looking back over my wartime output, that I produced an incredible amount of stuff during those years . . . I had written an extra two books during the first years of the war. This was in anticipation of my being killed in the raids, which seemed to be in the highest degree likely as I was working in London. One was for Rosalind, which I wrote first – a book with Hercule Poirot in it – and the other was for Max – with Miss Marple in it. Those two books, when written, were put in the vaults of a bank, and were made over formally by deed of gift to Rosalind and Max.’

The publication in 2010 of a CD of Agatha dictating portions of her autobiography confirms that the essentials of this passage was faithfully transcribed. Cover Her Face was eventually published in 1976, several months after Agatha’s death, as Sleeping Murder. Nowadays most editions have dropped the subtitle Miss Marple’s Last Case presumably because its setting is so evidently rooted in the 1930s unlike Nemesis, the last Miss Marple book she wrote in 1971.

As Agatha’s health began to deteriorate, her daughter made increasingly frequent visits to her mother’s side. In Rosalind’s absence Agatha’s most devoted companion was a Manchester terrier named Bingo, who had been so terrified as a puppy that he used to bite everyone on sight. The one person he did not attack was Agatha. Mistress and dog adored each other, and Bingo slept at the end of her bed. Max’s ankles became a mass of scars, and visitors to Winterbrook soon fell victim to Bingo’s jaws, for he was adept at lying in wait. Agatha would joke with Max that the reason Bingo bit him every time he picked up the telephone when it rang was because he thought the devil was inside it. Notwithstanding, he was a good guard dog, for he gave the alarm one day when a burglar erected a ladder outside Agatha’s bedroom window and escaped with just two rather moth-eaten fur coats.

Agatha’s 1972 novel, Elephants Can Remember, concerned a love triangle that ended in triple tragedy. There is a veiled reference to Agatha’s alter ego in Harrogate when one of her characters remarks that the ill-fated Lady Ravenscroft had spoken before her death about starting a new life connected with St Teresa of Avila, the nun who became a saint through her reform of the convents. The remark is intriguing for it in no way propels the plot or leads to an explanation of Lady Ravenscroft’s death.

Agatha felt tired and worn out, and her last book, Postern of Fate, which was published in October 1973, was written in a mood of resentment and defiance. She wanted to be left in peace but felt obliged to deliver her annual manuscript to Agatha Christie Ltd on time. She complained to Mrs Thompson, her housekeeper at Greenway, that her publishers were waiting on every word she wrote. As is common with elderly people, Agatha’s thoughts turned increasingly to the past, and the home into which Tommy and Tuppence Beresford move in Postern of Fate is modelled on her beloved Ashfield.

While the exposition is a gem of inspiration, the rest of the novel was disappointing since Agatha had started off without a preconceived conjuring trick with which to dazzle her readers. Max determined to salvage the novel by editing it himself, with the help of Agatha’s then secretary, Daphne Honeybone. His editing and that of Agatha’s publishers lacked due care and attention: the ages of the Beresfords’ grandchildren are given as fifteen, eleven and seven – despite the fact that two of them are meant to be twins. Judith and Graham recall Max cajoled Agatha into completing Postern of Fate because he was worried about their finances ‘and that Parker woman’.

The writer’s most significant publication that year was Poems. The volume includes nearly all the poems that had appeared in 1924 in The Road of Dreams, as well as more recent ones. ‘A Choice’ shows the author’s futile attempt to put the regrets of the past behind her in order to live in the present. Significantly, not one of her love poems celebrates the unqualified joys of love. They express the darker side of yearning, trepidation, despair, abandonment and loss. In ‘What Is Love?’ Agatha bemoans the fact that love is not a tree, ‘rooted in time – for all eternity’.

Written in anticipation of the fact that she might die before Max, Agatha seems to suggest in ‘Remembrance’ that he will forget her, although her love for him would remain undiminished after her death.

She also recorded a number of private thoughts on scraps of paper never intending them for publication, claiming the past was with her always – she had only to ‘open the secret coffer that all of us carry within us’.

For some time Rosalind had noticed that her stepfather Max was no longer as attentive to her mother’s needs as he had once been. It had fallen on Rosalind’s husband, Anthony, who was devoted to Agatha, to help her with all her business affairs and the running of the gardens at Greenway, since, in Rosalind’s words, ‘Max could no longer be bothered.’

When it became apparent that there would be no new novel for 1974, Collins released Poirot’s Early Cases, which was a collection of short stories Agatha had published in The Sketch in the 1920s.

In October that year the writer had a heart attack and was confined to bed. She passed the time by rereading her Mary Westmacott novels. ‘Unfinished Portrait I think is one of the best after Rose and the Yew Tree,’ she told Edmund Cork. When once asked by the detective novelist and critic Julian Symons why she had used a pseudonym for her romance novels, she replied: ‘I think it is better to keep the two sorts of book separate. I like keeping them to myself, too, so that I can write exactly what I like. You can write a bit of your own life into them in a way, if nobody knows it’s you . . . I would like to have written all sorts of different books, tried all kinds of different things. But of course detective stories supported me and my daughter for many years, and they had to be written.’ It was an extraordinary epitaph for a writing career the success of which was based on detective stories. Agatha also reread her autobiography and had copies sent to Max and Rosalind, two of her sternest critics, for approval.

The medication Agatha took for her heart left her frail and thin. She regressed more and more into the past. She was more lucid some day’s than others; sometimes she would get so confused she would panic because she thought she had to pack for Baghdad, recalls Judith. Agatha was under no illusions that she was nearing the end of her life, and one day she pinned all her brooches on her dress to wear one last time. Max and Rosalind meanwhile looked after her as best they could with the help of a night nurse. Millie Bush, who was in domestic service at Winterbrook, recalls Agatha was too weak to get up some days and was washed in bed by her carers; the indignity of her condition clearly distressed her. Judith and Graham felt that Max was impatient for Agatha to die so that he could marry Barbara.

Agatha was outwardly uncomplaining when Max’s mistress came each weekend to relieve Max of his caring duties. But one day Agatha took up a pair of scissors and cut off her locks of white hair. When someone mutilates their appearance it is often a sign of deep emotional disturbance. Agatha had every reason to feel resentful at being nursed by her husband’s mistress. Her act may have been a calculated cry for help or a deliberate attempt to shock and startle Max and Barbara into a belated sense of guilt. I would suggest Agatha most likely was reminded of the fact that she was no longer a young beautiful woman and cut off her hair in preparation for meeting God. She had, after all, had a strong religious faith for many years. At any rate Max and Barbara behaved more distantly to each other in Agatha’s presence after this and treated her even more attentively.

A visit to Winterbrook by Lord Snowdon, the royal photographer, led to a series of photographs of Agatha and Max appearing in the Sunday Times, heralding the arrival in UK cinemas of Murder on the Orient Express. With her crumpled pink-and-white rose-leaf complexion, white hair and shrewd, kindly eyes Agatha looked more than ever like many of her fans’ popular conception of Miss Marple.

Agatha met Lord Louis Mountbatten in November 1974 at the glittering film prèmiere of Murder on the Orient Express. He had written to her over forty years earlier with an idea for a story that she had incorporated into her most famous novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The occasion was attended by other members of the Royal Family, and she insisted on rising from her wheelchair when she was presented to the Queen and the Princess Royal. Agatha’s pleasure at conversing with royalty left her incandescent with happiness. Not even the presence in the background of television cameras could diminish her elation. Later there was a lavish supper party at Claridge’s Hotel. The stars of the film each came to pay their respects at her table, and it was well after midnight when Lord Mountbatten wheeled her from the ballroom to her waiting car to an enormous standing ovation. It was to be her last major public appearance.

The film’s release spread her fame throughout the world, but how sensitive she remained to references to her disappearance may be measured from the fact that when the publisher Otto Penzler asked her to approve her entry for the Encyclopaedia of Mystery and Detection in mid-1975 she was upset by two allusions to her ‘attack of amnesia’. Meanwhile, since there was no new novel for that year it was decided for her by Rosalind that Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case would be released.

Age had mellowed Rosalind’s attitude towards Agatha. The two women’s relationship had entered into a state of truce and Rosalind, more openly caring than in the past, looked after Agatha to the best of her ability. One evening, towards the end of her life, when a young boy came to see her, a calm and serene Agatha presented him with a quotation that encapsulated her own philosophy of life:

I have three treasures,

Guard them and keep them safe.

The first is love,

The second is never do too much,

The third is never be the first in the world.

Through love one has no fear.

Through not doing too much one has

amplitude of reserve power.

Through not presuming to be the first in

the world one can develop one’s talent

and let it mature.

When she finally caught a cold during the last winter she murmured, ‘I’m going to meet my Maker.’ Her last Christmas was spent at Winterbrook. Owing to staff shortage Barbara Parker came to help. She was also there on the last day of Agatha’s life. She died as Max was wheeling her in her chair from lunch at Winterbrook on 12 January 1976. Death had released her from the bizarre and agonizing love triangle to which she had allowed herself to be subjected for nearly thirty years. The world lost a literary legend, and, ironically, her death became a media event. The thousands of moving tributes that appeared from around the world confirmed Agatha as the greatest of all the Golden Age detective writers – and nearly all recalled how she had become famous by disappearing.

The writer had always kept on her bedside table her mother’s copy of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, and beneath ‘Agatha Mallowan’ she had written on the flyleaf part of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution or famine, or nakedness or pen, or sword?

I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Graham recalls that it was only ‘at the end that she had grown tired of religion and had felt let down by the whole thing’. Having adhered to her wedding vows to Max, for better and for worse, Agatha was buried, in accordance with her request, with her wedding ring in Cholsey graveyard. Her fortune passed to her daughter. Rosalind and Anthony at last moved out of Ferry Cottage, after nine years’ tenure, and made Greenway house their main residence for the rest of their lives. Winterbrook and 22 Cresswell Place had been made over to Max long before she died.

After Agatha’s death, Barbara Parker took over the domestic side of Max’s life. Rodney Kannreuther, a close friend from his college days, arrived at Winterbrook one day to find Barbara massaging Max’s feet. For a while she received a dose of her own medicine when Max became interested in Baroness Jeanne Camoys. The aristocrat apparently lost interest in him as a potential husband when she learned he had not inherited Agatha’s millions. Max also developed a close friendship with a young woman, who at his invitation resided at 22 Cresswell Place for about six months. The pair drove to Devon in Max’s Bentley and stayed at Greenway as guests of Rosalind and Anthony. Barbara, attempting to make light of Max’s dalliances, said fretfully: ‘It’s so silly – so silly – I know he’ll look after me.’ After Max’s death the young woman, who wished to remain unnamed, denied having a sexual relationship with him. ‘Everyone should have a Max in their life. It was like a picnic.’ She also stated that she thought ‘the last two or three years of Agatha’s life were tough on him’.

Max’s romantic pursuits aroused a certain antipathy in Rosalind, who resented the fact he no longer coveted her company as much as he had in the past. Perhaps Rosalind also felt guilty towards her mother for having usurped his time and attention. Her dislike of Max’s mistress became evident in small ways: Barbara was a finicky eater, and this drove Rosalind mad at mealtimes; moreover, Barbara often wore a fur coat because she felt the cold, even in summer, and this really annoyed Rosalind, as she made clear with her muttered asides.

Although many have stated Rosalind and Max demonstrated enormous affection for each other, after his death when she was asked about her relationship with him, she said dismissively: ‘He didn’t beat me, or my mother, not that I remember.’ It was a typical put-down, throw-away remark. Rosalind remembered the past as she wished to remember it, and she was quick to contradict others, even when their recollections were more accurate than hers. She became a jealous custodian of Agatha’s memory.

Max, aware of the undercurrents of tension between his stepdaughter and mistress, wrote to Rosalind in some trepidation in March 1977 to tell her that he was going to marry Barbara. He was shrewd enough to know she would react less sharply to the news in this way rather than if told in person.

Max’s and Barbara’s wedding took place in September 1977, a few days after the publication of Mallowan’s Memoirs, with what many of their social circle considered ‘indecent haste’ coming so soon after the death of Agatha. Max’s autobiography dismissed her eleven-day disappearance in a single sentence as resulting from ‘a loss of memory’. He went to great pains to impress on readers how happy his marriage to Agatha had been. Mallowan’s Memoirs was officially dedicated ‘To Rosalind with love’ and made no mention of his forthcoming marriage to Barbara.

Max died from a heart attack in August 1978 and was buried with Agatha in Cholsey. Barbara continued to live in Wallingford. Her work often took her to the Oriental Institute in Oxford. As Lady Mallowan she was elected president of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. She died from complications arising from bronchitis and emphysema in November 1993. It was her private wish to be buried with Agatha and Max. Her request was denied.

A clause in Max’s will stipulated that a sum of money be set aside each year to allow members of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq to drink a toast at their annual lecture in memory of him and Agatha.

The posthumous publication of Agatha’s autobiography merely compounded the greatest mystery of her life. Agatha had once referred to Hercule Poirot, with whom she maintained a love–hate relationship, as ‘the Old Man from the Sea’, claiming he was a millstone round her neck throughout her life. The same was true of the disappearance.