Читать книгу Agatha Christie: A Biography - Janet Morgan - Страница 10

Although Agatha lacked companions of her own age, her childhood was happy and secure. The adults in her world were kind and thoughtful; her parents did not quarrel; the servants were equable and stayed for years; the household kept to a stable routine; her grandmothers, slow and massive, dispensed wise words and regular treats; birthdays and other anniversaries were properly celebrated and the progress of the seasons was marked with appropriate entertainments – sea-bathing, picnics, Christmas pantomime – and feasts – asparagus, strawberries and salmon, game, turkey and plum pudding. There was a comfortable order and predictability to life; in Agatha’s recollections of her childhood there are unexpected pleasures but no broken promises. Her world was private and safe: Ashfield and Ealing were large enough and the family sufficiently small for her to have her own quarters with her possessions around her. She was given responsibility for amusing herself and looking after her animals and birds, but the management of her surroundings was in the safe hands of sensible adults. She could see clearly where authority lay: her father was, as she put it, ‘the rock’ on which the family rested; her mother’s wishes shaped the management of the house and its members’ behaviour to one another; each grandmother was in charge of her domain at Ealing or in Bayswater; Nursie supervised Agatha and the Nursery; Jane’s sphere of influence was the kitchen; and the parlourmaid too had her own territory. These were, moreover, all adults whose authority Agatha could venerate because she respected both their characters and their professional skills. They took her questions seriously and considered her requests carefully; there were no absurd rules. Only when Agatha went to her pensions did she find regulations enforced for regulations’ sake; by then she had some self-knowledge and the support of more confident contemporaries to help her tolerate rather than be awed by people in charge. As a child she never found the grown-ups around her pettily tyrannical and the only example of injustice she later recalled was the scolding she and her friends in Pau were given when they were caught walking along a parapet at the hotel, an exploit that had not been specifically forbidden because no one had thought of it before.

Agatha was not entirely untroubled. From time to time she had a particularly disturbing dream, which she described in her Autobiography and in the novel Unfinished Portrait which she published, as ‘Mary Westmacott’, in 1934. The nightmare varied only slightly: she would dream of some sort of festivity, a family party or a picnic, at which she would suddenly be conscious of the presence of someone who was not supposed to be there. This was the ‘Gun Man’, frightening not because he carried a gun but because of his strange and terrifying way of staring at her with his pale blue eyes. Originally the Gun Man had the look of ‘a Frenchman, in grey-blue uniform, powdered hair in a queue, and a kind of three-cornered hat, … the gun … some old-fashioned kind of musket’. In later dreams Agatha, among her family and friends, would suddenly realise that, though they seemed familiar, one of them, perhaps Clara, was really the Gun Man. The manifestation described in Unfinished Portrait is even worse: ‘You looked up in Mummy’s face – of course it was Mummy – and then you saw the light steely-blue eyes – and from the sleeve of Mummy’s dress – oh, horror! – that horrible stump.’

Agatha was never able to fix on the source of this nightmare, maintaining that it resembled nothing she had overheard or read. Perhaps the picture in her mind came from something she had forgotten, an advertisement on a hoarding, or the illustrations of ‘The Man That Went Out Shooting’ and the horrid ‘Scissor-Man’ in ‘Little Suck-A-Thumb’, two stories in her copy of Dr Hoffmann’s appalling Struwwelpeter. Her terrors may have been intensified by adults’ talk, or Madge’s game of the mad ‘Elder Sister’, but her dream must have had some underlying cause. Its form – of someone familar and loving suddenly transformed into a hostile stranger – suggests that she may have doubted whether those who were supposed to love her actually did. This may seem odd. Clara and Frederick did not neglect Agatha (indeed, according to Madge and Monty, she was petted and spoilt) and she herself emphasised how close she and Clara always were. But relationships between parents and children are intricate and strange: even when profound and genuine love is demonstrated in innumerable ways, one, both or all can feel insecure and excluded. Later in her life Agatha was often to write about the destructive power of love, about possessiveness, the relations between mothers and daughters and the nature of the maternal instinct, while the theme of an adopted son or daughter or a distant relation’s joining the household occurs repeatedly in her detective stories. These are the preoccupations of someone acutely aware of the complexities of family life. Serene on the surface, Agatha’s childhood was vaguely, but not unmanageably, disturbed beneath. Her idea of misery, as she wrote in the ‘Confessions’ at the age of four, was ‘Someone I love to go away from me.’

Two shadows fell over the Miller household, of which Agatha was dimly aware: anxiety about illness and about money. By the time she was five, Frederick’s business affairs had fallen into a sorry state, and it was then that the mishandling of Nathaniel’s trust obliged the Millers to economise by letting Ashfield and spending a year abroad. On their return they found matters no better. Money that had been invested in leasehold property in New York City brought little or no income, being mostly swallowed up in repairs or taxation. One of the trustees, who wrote Frederick encouraging but baffling letters, eventually shot himself. Frederick took himself to New York to try to sort matters out but had no success; in any case, as Agatha wrote later, he was a trusting man whom it was easy to swindle. On one occasion, after the Millers’ return from France, Agatha overheard her parents discussing their financial difficulties, which she not unnaturally compared to the catastrophes befalling the families described in the books she read. (Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children and The Story of the Treasure Seekers were two, with the father wrongfully arrested in the first story and losing all his money in the second.) She straightway announced to Marie that they were ruined. When this reached Clara’s ears, she reproached Agatha and quickly dispelled her melodramatic visions, explaining that they were simply badly off and would have to economise. This was disappointing because it was unsensational; it was also not entirely reassuring.

Where money came from and why it came at all were in any case mysteries to Agatha. As her father did not go off each day to any sort of business, her notion of the connection between the expenditure of effort and the earning of money was vague. The amount of her own pocket money fluctuated from day to day; it was not computed according to any obvious principle – so much for each year of her age, or whatever – but consisted of what copper coins Frederick turned out of his pockets. ‘I would visit him in his dressing-room, say good morning, and then turn to the dressing table to see what Fate had decreed for me … Two-pence? Fivepence? Once a whole elevenpence! Some days, no coppers at all. The uncertainty made it rather exciting.’ Prosperity or penury, then, depended largely on ‘Fate’. This was the theme of some of Agatha’s own early inventions, like the story of Mrs Benson and the Kittens, precipitated into direst poverty when the Captain went down at sea but, with his reappearance, restored to vast wealth ‘just when things had become quite desperate’. As money arrived in some inexplicable fashion, so it could vanish away. Now Agatha could see that her parents were worried and that these anxieties were making her father ill.

Frederick had first felt seedy while the family was in France, where he had seen a couple of doctors, one of whom diagnosed kidney disease. His own doctor in Torquay disagreed and other diagnoses were then made by different specialists. He suffered from attacks of pain and breathlessness, exacerbated, it seemed, by worry about his financial affairs. None of the treatments prescribed – rest, a diet of hot water and hot minced beef, and so forth – produced any improvement. Clara, a keen reader of The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, found the variations in diagnosis and prescription extremely trying, but she continued to encourage Frederick by telling him how much better he looked.

Frederick, however, was very unwell. He methodically kept a list of ‘Heart Attacks’ – fifteen bouts between April 1899 and June 1901 and another thirty, mostly late at night, between June and September. He continued to seek treatment; in late October he stayed with his stepmother in Ealing and went again to see one of the most respected specialists. A letter to Clara from his Club shows how desperately they had been searching for remedies:

My darling Clara, I saw Sansom this morning & he told me very much the same thing as last time. He insisted that my trouble has more to do with the nerves of the heart than anything else and recommends very much the same thing as before – viz. plenty of fresh air, distilled water, milk after meals & later perhaps cod liver oil (emulsion) or Extract of Malt and moderate exercise. He says most positively that my heart is not dilated and is of normal size & there is nothing valvular wrong but that it is weak & irregular.… He does not think the lying up system advisable but would compromise by having me lie on a sofa a part of the day with the window open & fresh air blowing over me. I have felt wonderfully better the last two days – better in fact than I have for 3 weeks – scarcely any breathlessness & splendid nights. I don’t know whether this is owing to a prescription of Taylor’s with digitalin in it or to my doing much less walking … I have decided to return on Wednesday next 30th if all goes well. I should much prefer – between ourselves, coming down now but Mother is so kind and good that I cannot bear to disappoint her. I can’t tell you how nice she has been to me & I know she was greatly worried in the early part of the week. I didn’t tell Sansom that I had been under homeopathy.…

Ill though he was, Frederick never seemed to Agatha to become cross or irritable and, as far as he could, he lived much as before. One letter to Clara reported that he had lunched at the Naval and Military ‘with the best appetite I have had for weeks – roast beef & spinach & rice pudding’ and that his stepmother had taken him to The Silver Slipper – ‘very pretty music and fairly amusing’. That letter ended cheerfully: ‘I am now, please God, done with Doctors, & hope I may get better soon. Love to my dear ones. I hope Agatha is better today [she had a cold]. The weather is again vile today. I hope this letter will make you feel happier & I think you will see by its tone that I certainly am. God bless you, my darling.’ Less than a month later, Frederick returned to Ealing, to see friends in London who might help him to find some sort of job. He caught a chill, which turned to double pneumonia; Clara and, eventually, Madge and Agatha, were summoned. On November 26th, at the age of fifty-five, he died.

Agatha, who was eleven, fixed that moment as the end of her childhood. Her world was vulnerable; for the first time she felt responsible for someone else: Clara. Her parents’ marriage had been a good one. Hannah, the cook at Ealing, who took Agatha into the kitchen on the pretext that she needed help mixing the pastry, told her again and again, ‘They were very devoted.’ The rest of the household crept about and whispered, sighing over Clara’s prostration. She was devastated by Frederick’s death. In her Autobiography Agatha spoke of Frederick’s last letter to her mother: ‘You have made all the difference in my life. No man ever had a wife like you. Every year I have been married to you I love you more.’ With it Clara kept the notebooks she had embroidered for him, the order of service from his funeral, some beech leaves from Ealing Cemetery, the little account book in which he recorded his expenditure, with a few of his fine, pale brown hairs pressed between the pages, and the piece of Pears soap he had last used. On a card placed with this collection was written: ‘There are four things that come not back to man or woman: 1. The Spoken Word. 2. The Sped Arrow. 3. The Past Life. 4. The Neglected Opportunity.’

After three weeks in France with Madge, Clara returned to Ashfield, where Agatha was waiting alone. Monty was now abroad with his regiment. He had worked in a shipyard on the Dart in Devon and afterwards in Lincolnshire but had failed in his efforts to become an engineer. The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 settled his choice of career. He volunteered for the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Regiment and, at the end of the War in 1902, obtained a commission with the East Surreys and proceeded to India. Madge and James lived in the North, at Cheadle, near James’s parents. Clara and Agatha were left together at Ashfield; as Agatha put it, ‘We were no longer the Millers – a family. We were now two people living together, a middle-aged woman and an untried, naïve girl.’ Her description of herself is illuminating: she was, after all, only eleven. Though written years later, it is a reminder of how vulnerable and responsible she suddenly felt. There was little money. Auguste Montant, Frederick’s executor, explained to Clara that most of Nathaniel’s estate had disappeared. H.B. Chaflin & Co., of which Nathaniel had been a partner, would continue to provide an income for his widow, Margaret, and a small income for Clara, while the three children, Agatha, Madge and Monty, would each receive an income from the trust of £100 a year. Sensibly, Clara decided to sell Ashfield and find a smaller house; she preferred cathedral towns to the seaside and rather enjoyed the prospect of living somewhere like Exeter. But her children violently protested; Monty writing from India, Madge and James offering to help with running expenses, and Agatha, especially, desperately begging her mother not to abandon their home. Agatha’s attitude is particularly interesting. She wrote in her Autobiography of Clara’s unselfishness in bowing to her children’s protestations and spoke of the anxiety and expense she herself was to reap from that decision. At no point, however, was she apologetic or defensive. On the contrary, she emphasised the deep importance of Ashfield in her own life and, having talked of her mother’s feelings, her tone of voice changed and she wrote only of her own love for that house, the price she was to pay for it and her emotions at their eventual parting. It was as if, having had her father snatched away, she felt it only right for her to keep Ashfield. Her sense of responsibility for her mother seems to have been matched by a feeling that it was her particular duty to protect and maintain their home.

After Frederick’s death, Agatha became increasingly anxious lest Clara should be run over by a tram or die suddenly in the night; she would creep along the passage and listen at the door to ensure that her mother was still breathing. Although, as Agatha admitted, children of twelve or thirteen do suffer such exaggerated worries, Clara’s condition did give grounds for concern. She, too, had suffered a number of mild heart attacks and eventually Agatha took to sleeping in what had been Frederick’s dressing room, next to Clara’s bedroom, to be on hand to revive her in the night with brandy or sal volatile. This is not to say that Clara was a prostrate invalid. In many ways she was as lively as ever, suddenly carrying Agatha off to hear Sir Henry Irving (‘He may not live much longer and you must see him, a great actor. We’ve just time to catch the train …’) and, when she accompanied Agatha to Paris, going with her to the theatre and the opera.

Clara depended largely on Agatha for companionship and amusement. They could no longer afford to entertain at home and, partly for that reason, Clara did not often go out to lunch or to dine. In any case, the position of a widow, even a young one, was different from that of a woman with a husband to escort her, particularly if, as in Clara’s case, she had not been accustomed to going about alone even before her marriage. In the evenings she and Agatha would read aloud from Scott, Thackeray and, their favourite, Dickens – Clara, who wanted light nearer than the gas jets, balancing a candlestick on her chest.

Clara’s circle had been enlarged, however, by Madge’s marriage. James Watts’s mother, Annie Browne, had been a great friend of Clara’s when they were schoolgirls and it was in this way that Madge and James had met. James came from a prosperous Manchester family, whose fortunes derived from a colonial export business founded by his grandfather, Sir James Watts. In his palatial warehouses Sir James stored the bicycles, alarm clocks, flannel trousers and other goods destined for the furthest reaches of the Empire. His house, Abney Hall, was an equally famous sight. An enormous Victorian Gothic mansion, it had been altered and extended at Sir James’s direction and included a vast room that was used for religious and political gatherings, for Sir James was Lord Mayor of Manchester. The Prince Consort was entertained at Abney. while Mr and Mrs Gladstone and, on a separate occasion, Mr and Mrs Disraeli had stayed there. Madge’s father-in-law, James Watts Senior, had inherited the house in the late eighteen-seventies. An antiquarian and amateur photographer, he had continued to embellish and enrich it until it almost overwhelmed the occupants.

Much of Abney’s lavish ornamentation, including its carvings, carpets, furniture and hangings, was ‘Gothic revival’; indeed, the work was based on designs by Pugin, who had worked on the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament. There were unnumerable staircases, alcoves, galleries and arches, all fancifully decorated. Windows of coloured glass were traceried, mullioned and ornamented with gargoyles. The main drawing-room had a frieze on which a proverb was endlessly repeated, the walls were hung with green damask covered with more hangings stencilled in bright colours, and the ceiling had octagon-shaped inverted pinnacles, tipped with gold, descending from each panel – ‘like the Alhambra,’ the children said. Another drawing-room, bursting with chintz-covered sofas, had a fireplace set in a huge curlicued marble chimney-piece. The woodwork and the papier-mâché carving of doorways and shutters was picked out in ultramarine, vermilion and green; ceilings and tiles were initialled; doorhandles, lock-plates and hinges, grates, candelabra and standard lamps were all specially designed. Agatha remembered Abney as having three pianos and an organ and, years later, when it was sold, harpsichords and virginals were discovered here and there (as well as half a valuable tapestry whose remainder had hung for centuries in a church in Bruges). Every corridor was crowded with oak chests and every wall hung with paintings, some by Madge’s father-in-law. There was a room for jigsaws and in the garden a lake, a waterfall, a tunnel and a set of houses for children to play in, one a small fort with its own pointed windows and crenellations.

Madge and her husband lived at Cheadle Hall, a Georgian house nearby. Agatha and Clara spent part of every winter there, for after 1903, when Madge’s son Jack was born, they would go north to look after him while his parents went to St Moritz for skating, and at Christmas they joined the whole Watts family at Abney, feasting gloriously with James and Annie, Madge and James, Madge’s four brothers-in-law and her sister-in-law Nan. Christmas Day was especially strenuous, with a huge lunch, tea and supper, interspersed with quantities of chocolates, preserved fruits and confections from the store-room, to which, unlike its counterpart at Ealing, access was unrestrained. On Boxing Day there was an expedition to Manchester to the pantomime, while Abney itself was pervaded by charades and dressing-up, for all the Watts family, apart from James, were enthusiastic actors. Humphrey, James’s brother, who was eight or nine years older than Agatha, had his own theatre in Manchester, while Lionel, another brother, acted professionally in London. Madge, too, never lost her mania for disguise. Once, late in her married life, she came down to dinner dressed as a cricketer, in black breeches, cricket cap and shorts. James disapproved, but she induced Agatha to show solidarity by assuming the appearance and manners of a Turkish woman; entirely swaddled in black, she sat through the meal making little belching noises, as Madge instructed. (Jack Watts, Madge’s son, had the same trait. As an undergraduate at Oxford he is reputed to have dressed up in women’s clothing, on one occasion as the Virgin Mary.)

From the day of his birth Jack gave Agatha great pleasure; she was then thirteen, still baffled as to how babies originated and ignorant as to how long they took to arrive, but enthusiastically assuming the duties of an aunt. Her Autobiography has many descriptions of Jack’s sayings and doings and her album pages of photographs of her playing with him, reading to him and, wearing a large oilskin cap like a pudding-basin cover, taking him bathing in the sea. Agatha liked small boys and from the age of twelve until her marriage at the age of twenty-four she saw a good number – the children of her mother’s friends or of her own. One of these remembered, years later, playing at Ashfield when he was three and she was twenty. He had sprinkled someone’s feet with a watering-can and, when Agatha told him he was a rascal, gleefully cried out, ‘And you’re a lady rascal.’ She carried him off to the schoolroom, riding on her back, so he called her ‘Lady Elephant’, and, when she showed him the stuffed swans in two glass cases in the Billiard Room, he called her ‘Lady Swan’. Agatha remembered this occasion too; nearly twenty years afterwards she brought back a lapis lazuli elephant from the East as a present for her former playmate, and the game they played is described by Mrs Ariadne Oliver in Elephants Can Remember.

From 1902 or thereabouts, Agatha’s companions were not just little boys of her nephew’s age. This was the time when she was sent for lessons first to Miss Guyer’s and then to the succession of French pensions, in part, perhaps, because Clara did not wish that the two of them should become too exclusively dependent on each other’s company. At home in Torquay Agatha was now old enough to go about independently with other young people – the Huxleys, Hoopers, Morrises, Lucys, Bushes and Thellusons: to the Fair, where they bought nougat from a stall and rode on switchbacks and gilded roundabout horses, the girls sitting side-saddle, balancing their fruit, flower and ribbon-laden hats; to the Regattas at Dartmouth and Torquay, where they watched the yachts from the quay and the fireworks in the evening. There were teas and suppers on neighbours’ lawns and grand garden parties, with splendid ices and cakes, served by professional waiters, whom they knew because they also helped at dinner parties. Agatha’s album has many photographs of young men in high starched collars and young women in muslin leg-of-mutton blouses or narrow-waisted, fur-trimmed costumes, their skirts only a few inches from the ground, playing croquet or manipulating the sticks and strings of the new game called Diabolo.

In the morning Agatha and the Lucys would take their skates and pay their twopences to go roller-skating on the pier; there is a picture of the five of them, holding hands in a line, just managing not to roll away. Agatha, tall and slender, with quantities of thick, pale hair, is wearing a splendid hat with three or four pheasant’s tail-feathers sticking out at a dashing angle. Prim though Torquay society was at that time, with its careful segregation of the classes and the sexes, it afforded many amusements for the young – yachting and tennis, roller-skating, eating fresh mussels and oysters bought mid-morning, listening to the Royal Marines’ String Band. It was also a healthy place; the train that steamed into Torre had reached the end of the line and, though horse-drawn cabs and broughams plied between the station at the top and the quay at the bottom of the town, Agatha and her friends usually walked everywhere, up and down Torquay’s seven hills, in the clear sea air. In the summer she would cheerfully walk the two or three miles to and from her favourite swimming place; she adored sea-bathing and continued to take every opportunity to swim until she was very old. It is not surprising that she and her friends had hearty appetites, nor that, despite them, they retained their elegant shapes. Artifice helped. In a list she drew up in the nineteen-sixties comparing the advantages and disadvantages of ‘Then and Now’, Agatha put first among the drawbacks of the early nineteen-hundreds: ‘Boned collars of muslin blouses. Most painful, giving red sore places,’ and, ‘Corsets. One was encased in a kind of armour of whalebone, tightened round the waist and coming up like a painful shield over one’s bosom.’ That, and the rest of the list, gave a crisp summing-up of her circumstances; the disadvantages continued with: ‘Patent leather high-heeled shoes in which one went to garden parties. This entailed walking in them for anything up to three miles, holding up one’s long skirts at the same time. A refined form of Chinese torture. Long skirts. A continual nuisance, though useful because one could dust one’s patent leather shoes on the back of one’s stockings on arrival at a party, and your skirt concealed all. Cold hands and feet, and chilblains. Agony in winter. Children’s, and others’, tight buttoned boots. (Probably the cause of the chilblains.) Hair dos. Elaborate and painstaking, and usually entailing the use of tongs.’

The advantages, though fewer in number, were as deeply felt: ‘High standard of domestic comfort. Fire lit before you got up, cans of hot water brought at intervals all day. Luxurious train travel. Hot foot-warmers pushed in at stations at intervals, lots of porters to handle luggage, delectable lunch baskets, comfortable carriages and well cleaned. Leisure. Our greatest loss. The one really valuable thing in life – a possession that is yours to do what you like with. Without it, where are you?’