The publicity that arose from the disappearance shook Agatha until her dying day and, although her continued friendship with Nan helped to sustain her in its aftermath, Agatha always regretted having staged it with her help. Moreover she never got over the loss of Archie. Walter Savage Landor’s lines perhaps most poignantly encapsulate her lifelong heartbreak: ‘While the light lasts I shall not forget, and in the darkness I shall remember.’
After Agatha’s death, her writing case was opened and found to contain her wedding ring from Archie, together with letters from him, some mementoes and a cutting of Psalm 55, verses 12, 13 and 14:
For it is not an open enemy, that hath done me this dishonour: for then I could have borne it.
Neither was it mine adversary, that did magnify himself against me: for then peradventure I would have hid myself from him.
But it was even thou, my companion: my guide, and mine own familiar friend.
Love was the most important thing in Agatha’s life: she had been raised to ‘await her fate’ and for her the true symbol of success in life was being a married woman. It is indicative that when she booked into the Harrogate Hydro she accorded herself the title of a married woman. How important this status was to her was reinforced when she created her fictional counterpart Mrs Ariadne Oliver, since there was never any mention in the books of Mr Oliver or what had become of him. Marriage, for better and for worse, was essential to Agatha’s existence, for, as she once told Max, she was like ‘a dog that needs to be taken for walks’. Moreover, as a result of the humiliating public scrutiny she endured in 1926, the extraordinary fame that later came her way never went to her head.
By not mentioning the disappearance in her autobiography Agatha’s intention was not to mislead or confuse her fans. She simply wanted to forget the episode, something she had unsuccessfully tried to do all her life. If Max had not been unfaithful to her she would have been less afraid of her future. Agatha loved Archie far more than she ever did Max, and so Max was never able to hurt her as deeply as Archie. One of the most painful lessons Agatha learned from the breakdown of her marriage to him was to love others as much for their faults as for their virtues. The reason her autobiography omitted the unpleasant episodes in her life was because she intended it as a hymn to God for all the good things that had befallen her.
Agatha spent much of her life hiding from her public. This makes it all the more important to know what happened during the disappearance, because only then can one appreciate how she exorcized her pain over the episode and her subsequent divorce in her writings. She used her poetry to reveal her anxieties about whether she was loved or would ever find love. The short stories ‘The Edge’, ‘Harlequin’s Lane’ and ‘The Man from the Sea’ reveal the chaotic aspects of her marriage to Archie. Her Mary Westmacott novels include some of her most eloquent expressions of Archie’s impact on her life. ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ and The Burden reveal her mixed feelings about Max’s mistress Barbara, while Verdict was a brave, if unsuccessful, attempt to reconcile herself to Max’s infidelity. When the love of both the men in her life failed her, Agatha was not without hope for most of the time because she found forgiveness and love in the eyes of God.
She cared passionately for the rights of the innocent. It is significant that she did not see evil as a social organism; rather, as a deviation springing from the heart of the individual. Such individuals were, in her view, like derelict ships that drift in the darkness and wreck the sound seaworthy craft. She came to identify closely with the Arab proverb which says that the fate of each man hangs around his neck, and that there is always an alternative route that could be taken, if only just.
Agatha was destined to be known as the disappearing novelist in more ways than one; much of the world she knew and wrote about has almost completely vanished; a world of chauffeured Daimlers and Bentleys, solvent aristocracy and stately homes. Many of her loyal readers hanker for this bygone age. Her detective stories are civilized and elaborately plotted versions of her ‘Gun Man’ dream; in them anyone can turn out to be the killer. The more chaotic her life became the more she made her fictitious world neat and orderly.
The reason she never admitted the full extent of her pain to her fans was because she did not want our pity. She wanted for herself what she had long wished on others: ‘The peace of God which passeth all understanding.’ Her detective stories endure because they nourish in her readers the hope that good will always triumph over evil, and the charm, good humour and humility with which she imparts her message makes her fans love her all the more.
Perhaps her greatest achievement is to represent to each successive generation a nostalgic link with a way of life that disappeared along with the British Empire.
One knows that a writer has been well loved if, when he or she dies, fans wish there was one more book left for them to read, and no one is more deserving of such an accolade than Agatha Christie.