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Duchess of Death- The Unauthorized Biography of Agatha Christie PDF

320 Pages·2011·2.5 MB·English
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Duchess of Death THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF Agatha Christie Richard Hack PPHHOOEENNIIXX BBOOOOKKSS Copyright © 2009 Richard Hack and Phoenix Books, Inc. All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except brief quotations in critical reviews and articles. The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author of this book and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher or its affiliates. ISBN-10: 1-59777-620-3 ISBN-13: 978-1-59777-620-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data Available Book Design by Sonia Fiore Printed in the United States of America Phoenix Books, Inc. 9465 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 840 Beverly Hills, CA 90212 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Jared N. Stein, who knows the reason why. Table of CoNTeNTS PRologue Mystery at Newlands Corner .........................................vii oNe Mrs. Miller Has a baby ......................................................1 Two Coming of age ...................................................................27 THRee Mrs. archibald Christie ...................................................49 fouR The Mystery writer .........................................................71 five My Name is Neele ............................................................93 Six finding agatha ...............................................................115 SeveN Mrs. Max Mallowan .......................................................135 eigHT The Tax Man Cometh ....................................................155 NiNe The Sausage factory .....................................................173 TeN one for the books ...........................................................191 eleveN The Movie Years ............................................................207 ePilogue The great entertainer ...................................................231 aPPeNDix ..........................................................................................239 eNDNoTeS ......................................................................................................247 bibliogRaPHY ...................................................................................257 aDDiTioNal PeRioDiCalS .................................................................261 iNDex ......................................................................................................265 aCkNowleDgMeNTS ..................................................................................283 vii PRologue MYSTERY AT NEWLANDS CORNER “...you’re so beautiful—so beautiful. Promise me you’ll always be beautiful.” “You’d love me just the same if i weren’t.” “No. Not quite. it wouldn’t be quite the same. Promise me. Say you’ll always be beautiful…” agatha Christie unfinished Portrait DECEMBER3, 1926.AGATHA CHRISTIE DREW ASIDE THE thick velvet drapery and peered expectantly through the bedroom window. The fog, so typical of Sunningdale in December, had moved across the road and now threatened to block her view of the front drive completely. She hated fog; hated the way it leaned into familiar shapes, turning them sinister and threatening. As her body shivered, she protectively pulled closed the curtain, blocking the cold draft that found its way through the window at night, turning the room damp. It was a little after nine p.m., and she knew her husband wasn’t ever coming home. After twelve years of marriage, mystery writer Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller Christie was thirty-six years old, famous and alone. Not alone in the sense that there was no one else in the large, brooding brick house named Styles. Her seven-year- old daughter, Rosalind, was sleeping in the next room, and Lilly, a chambermaid, was downstairs doing whatever it was she did at night before getting ready to sleep herself. In less than an hour, Rosalind’s nanny and Agatha’s secretary, the viii Richard Hack always punctual Charlotte Fisher, would be returning home on the last train from London, just forty minutes away. She would normally welcome Charlotte’s arrival, for she regarded her as her closest friend. Only the previous evening, she and Charlotte (whom she nicknamed Carlo) had danced the Charleston, or tried to, as they were taking classes together in Ascot, one town over. Dear Carlo. Loyalty paid for by the hour. She would need to leave Carlo a note to explain what she was about to do. But how,she thought, does one explain that your life is over? How do you explain the overwhelming isolation of feeling alone? Moving to her writing desk, she found a correspondence card and her fountain pen, and then struggled to get beyond “Dear Carlo.” A writer without words. Even at a time like this, the irony amused her. Despite having authored eight books, Agatha still found writing difficult. Imagining the stories was easy; that was fun. Writing them down, explaining them, that was the difficult part. Her first book had taken years to be published, and even after it appeared in bookstores across the country when Agatha was thirty, she never thought of writing as a career. Her husband wouldn’t have accepted that. To him, her mystery stories were little more than amusing diversions, like needlepoint or gardening. He thought of them as “silly”— almost as ridiculous as he now thought her to be. It wasn’t always that way, of course. When Agatha Miller eloped with Archibald Christie in December 1914, hers was the “happily ever after” love of fairy tales and dreams come true. He was tall, movie-star handsome and an aviator in Britain’s Royal Flying Corps. In the two years he had courted her, she could think of none other. Back then, she had a flawless complexion, long wavy red hair, a tall, fashionably full figure and a plan to be his wife forever. Even then, he was hardly ever comfortable with her touch or talk of the future, but she steadfastly refused to admit that her husband believed the commitment of marriage was less about eternity and more about the companionship of an eternally attractive wife. “Promise me you’ll always be beautiful,” she later wrote in a novel, mimicking Archie’s words. Duchess of Death ix Determined to be ever available to her husband, she never allowed him to see her writing, not that he had shown any interest. He was so structured, so utterly obsessed with his fledgling investment career, that any hope she had once held of rating a passing smile or compliment had been dimmed in the shadow of his neglect. As one year followed another, Archie showed less and less interest in her, often spending nights at his club in London and weekends on the golf course. She wanted his touch, needed his attention. Yet the more she tried to draw him close, the harder he pulled away. All the while, she quietly produced one book and then the next and the next, with her meager royalties bolstering the family’s finances, which, at the time, were barely adequate. Now it has come to this,she thought, looking back at the too quiet room. She felt movement at her feet and reached down to stroke her beloved wirehaired terrier, Peter, as he repositioned himself to lick the back of her hand. She barely felt his moist, warm tongue, her mind muted as if shrouded in layers of cotton wool, unable to command itself to think. Still, she needed to finish, quickly now, and leave before logic and reason shattered her plan. After removing her wedding ring, Agatha placed it inside a small mahogany box on the desk, where she was certain it would be discovered. She stood and crept toward the door, lowering her head, as if embarrassed, and never slowing until she reached her daughter’s room. Inside, she watched silently as Rosalind exhaled rhythmic breath in the cadence of peaceful sleep. She then kissed her child on the forehead, as she did every night, just as her own mother had done with her. It was only as she left the room that she allowed herself to remember the smell of her mother’s violet cologne as her face drew near. Agatha wiped away the tears summoned by the memory. Eight months earlier, everything had been so different. Then, Agatha’s mother, Clara, was still alive, living in Ashfield, the family’s estate in Torquay. Her mother would have known what to do. Clara had a way of always knowing what was right. Yet the suddenness of her mother’s death in April 1926, at the age of seventy-two, fueled a depression that left Agatha bereft of joy and spirit. A gray wash of numbness was her only x Richard Hack comfort. “Sometimes one feels so eager to get out of this body,” her mother had told her, during one of her frequent illnesses near the end. “One longs to be released from this prison.”i Suddenly Agatha understood. Archie was no help in times of sadness. He was awkward around grief, and had, in fact, “a violent dislike of illness, death and trouble of any kind.”iiIn place of compassion, Archie made jokes. At the time of Clara’s death, he suggested traveling—a vacation in Spain. It would be “fun,” he said. It would “distract.” Distract? Agatha didn’t want distraction. “I wanted to be with my sorrow and get used to it,”iiishe said. Leaving her husband in London, she drove herself to Torquay, three hours away, dreading the chore of closing a house that had been her childhood haven of fantasy and safety. Once there, Agatha was engulfed by her suffering, stalled like a storm front, shuffling silently through her task on slippered feet. She had only meant to be gone for weeks, not months, and certainly not half a year. But there it was. Archie declared he found it inconvenient to travel to Ashfield on weekend visits, suggesting instead that the pair take an extended trip to Italy in August to visit an obscure health resort in Alassio, on the Gulf of Genoa. Agatha readily agreed, hoping that the vacation would rekindle love, clutching onto the plan with such anticipation that when her husband eventually arrived at Ashfield on August fourth, she was packed for two weeks of mineral baths and therapeutic scrubs. Her eagerness manifested itself in nervous whispered chatter, like the swarming of a thousand bees, when simple silence might have served her well. Archie thought Agatha looked edgy and in extremely poor health. While her letters had made mention of her inability to sleep as well as her lack of appetite and mental despair, he was horrified at what he saw when she rushed to meet his car. His shock translated itself into superficial conversation, polite but without emotion. It was that coldness that terrified her. “I think the nearest I can get to describing what I felt at that moment is to recall an old nightmare of mine,” Agatha wrote in her autobiography. “The horror of sitting at a tea table, looking across at my best- loved friend, and suddenly realizing that the person sitting there was a stranger.”iv Duchess of Death xi What she did not admit then, or later, was the complete absence of love in her husband’s face. If her eyes were glazed with disappointment, his shifted with the uneasiness of betrayal. Well-mannered words passed between husband and wife found stilted conversation fall away to silence, until Archie burst into a spontaneous revelation. Barely able to meet Agatha’s gaze, her husband confessed that he had fallen in love with another woman, and wanted an immediate divorce. Divorce. Upon hearing the word, red and white blotches like oilcloth gingham spread across Agatha’s face, as anger replaced disbelief. This was not happening, could not be happening. “Her name is Nancy Neele,” he said. “You remember her,” he said. “She’s been in our house,” he said. It was all so rushed and unexpected, the words hardening into a wall of denial structured by her refusal to forsake a happy ending. Agatha was sick, her stomach an acid swirl of recrimination and self-doubt. She begged for time; she would be different; she could change. Panicking, she asked for three months; he gave her four. Sixteen weeks of polite pirouettes, circling rather than crossing paths, saying words but skipping thoughts. He skillfully avoided the real issues by arranging schedules of separate play, biding time, nothing more. The morning of Friday, December third, began the same as any other in Sunningdale. Cook had served eggs, beans, sausage, and tomatoes, a proper English breakfast. It was Agatha who spoke first, announcing her intention to spend the weekend resting at a bed and breakfast in Yorkshire three hours away, and invited Archie to join her. He was unavailable, he said, having already made plans to meet his friends, the Jameses, for a weekend at their lodge in Hurtmore near Godalming. Her disappointment roiled in her mind, poisoning her mood. She was the one who shouted first, for volume was all she had left now. Meaningless words and one idle threat. If he would not be spending the weekend with her, she threatened, she would not be at home when he returned. Archie’s reaction was cold and prepared. Worse still, he was in control. The louder his wife shouted, the less need there was for him to respond at all. He only had to tell her the truth. Slowly, without emotion, he did. He had waited long

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