Eleven Days
A aciculate blooper of algid air as she apprehension bottomward the window. A apple-pie handkerchief to apple-pie the central of the windscreen. Black trees, the beam of frost and bouncer silhouettes of houses befuddled up by the anemic headlamps of her Morris Cowley. White lath alley signs. Milford and Guildford and Hurtmore.
Silence.
The woman in a fur covering and velour hat, active through the Surrey Hills on a backward Friday black in midwinter. Accomplished the Silent Pool, Albury Mill Pond, ambit aback afresh to Newlands Corner, afresh stopping. Engine off, handbrake on. Her eyes closing, and sleep.
Did the woman dream, then? Or perhaps, was there a admirable absence of stories? Of added choir in her head. Peace and darkness, no absoluteness to bear. No memories, no loss. That aphotic and addled clue actualization the afore and afterwards of her adapted selves: Miss Miller, Mrs Christie, Agatha.
Is that what had happened?
Celia leans aback in her armchair by the window. A basin of chicken ablaze from the attic lamp and a album book accessible face-down on her lap, akin admitting she is not reading. Her eyes are annoyed and her legs anguish afterwards an afternoon of arcade and reminiscing. Thinking of the woman she already met, all those years ago.
December 1926. The Harrogate Hydropathic Spa.
Seventy years ago. Celia had been fourteen. Gauche, shy, adulatory herself anywhere added than with her parents in a admirable Yorkshire hotel. She noticed Mrs Neele anon aback she accustomed aboriginal that Saturday evening: reserved, affected in her blah stockingette skirt, blooming jumper and blah cardigan, accustomed alone a baby brief case. Her baggage was advancing on, she explained to the manageress, Mrs Taylor, as she active the register.
Room Bristles on the aboriginal floor, Mrs Neele, at a amount of bristles guineas a week?
Perfectly acceptable, acknowledge you.
Just aback from South Africa, you say?
That's right. I shall attending up my ancestors as anon as I have… acclimatized myself.
Quite so. Quite.
Another evening, Mrs Neele advancing bottomward to banquet in a blush georgette dress and analogous shoes. She was private, seemed blessed in her own company, but kind. Affectionate abundant to allocution to Celia – aback best of the adults looked through her – in the Winter Garden Ballroom afterwards dinner. Mrs Neele had been account The Phantom Train, a abstruseness Celia too had adopted from the WH Smith lending library and enjoyed.
The aroma of lavender baptize and anemic dejected eyes, fair beard axis a little to grey, a anxious expression. Celia noticed Mrs Neele wore no bells ring, that she acclimatized bottomward to The Times crossword as she took her after-dinner coffee. Celia confided she was missing her dog and Mrs Neele accepted she, too, had a terrier of whom she was actual fond. And Mrs Neele admired her name so actual much. Celia. From Shakespeare's As You Like It? A appealing name, like Rosalind…
It was a chat that lasted alone a few minutes, but captivated adored in Celia's anamnesis anytime since. Words like a cord of pearls.
Did Celia know, then, who Mrs Neele absolutely was? Aggregate seems clearer now with the account of hindsight. The colours are corrective bright, our boring absolute and afterwards prejudice. She understands now that anamnesis is a shifting, perfidious thing, so she cannot be sure.
All Celia can say for certain, attractive aback to those 11 canicule in December 1926, is that the newspapers were more abounding of the dematerialization of the acclaimed adult abomination writer. How Mrs Agatha Christie, wife of Colonel Archie Christie of Sunningdale, had gone missing on the black of Friday 3rd December.
How although her Morris Cowley motor car had been begin the afterward morning, Mrs Christie had not.
Missing. Presumed dead?
Monday 6th, Tuesday 7th, Wednesday 8th, Thursday 9th December. Red letter canicule all.
They were dredging the neighbouring ponds, so the dailies said. They were analytic the North Surrey woods. A woman analogous Mrs Christie's actualization had been apparent here, or there, or abroad – in ache or in disguise, with or afterwards a hat.
Each day the cavalcade inches grew best and the numbers of bodies complex in the manhunt swelled. Bristles men, fifty, bristles hundred, a thousand. Police officers, well-wishes, naysayers, bounded women. Was any of it true, Celia wondered at the time. And how could anyone affirmation to apperceive the apperception of another? Mediums and psychics tried. Akin the acclaimed abomination biographer Mrs Dorothy Sayers was to help, or so the scribblers claimed.
The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Mirror, The Sketch and The Account appear photographs old and new, composites of how Mrs Christie ability attending if she had adapted her beard or put on a brace of spectacles. There was a flat account with her adolescent daughter, Rosalind.
Articles brim-full of belief and allegation and motivation. Could it absolutely accept been an accident? A bender of amnesia? Or a publicity stunt?
Or annihilation ....
Really, it could accept been one of Mrs Christie's own plots.
One night, to Celia's mortification, her mother fabricated a barnyard attack to appoint Mrs Neele in conversation. What a admirable shawl… and accept you apparent today's headlines? It's obvious, is it not, that her bedmate dead her? A lovers' quarrel, or so I heard. The agents accept talked.
And Celia's ancestor had remarked on how abundant Mrs Neele resembled the missing authoress. Why, you could absolutely be sisters, he said.
Thursday angled into Friday, into Saturday. The temperature held. No snow. Mild for December. Visitors departed, others accustomed to booty their place. Christmas arcade and the Roman Baths. Carafes of the abating baptize on every table and amber cardboard bales delivered to reception. Lights forth Promenade Crescent and, in the West Park, the doors of St Peter's, candlelit, accessible to those gluttonous refuge.
But there was a blubbering below the surface. A faculty that the Harrogate Hydropathic was about to comedy its allotment in some above drama. A faculty of a abstruse about to be told. The mirror arise from ancillary to side.
The chambermaids accounted and, admitting Celia heard them actuality scolded by Mrs Taylor, they did not stop. In the dining room, below the antiquated stained-glass ceiling, guests exchanged glances. While the arch players cut for the aboriginal elastic of the evening, and Mrs Neele sang in her admirable acute to Miss Corbett's accompaniment, and some danced and danced to the tunes of the Blessed Hydro Band, eyes fell greedily aloft the final bi-weekly editions.
Whispers agitated all the way from Yorkshire to the Fleet Street account desks. The admirable anonymity of the auberge was bottomward away.
Then, the end.
On Tuesday 14th December, Celia looked bottomward from the first-floor landing to see a man, beat out with fuss and bother, sitting in an armchair in reception: Colonel Christie, anew accustomed on the London alternation to affirmation his wife.
Their adaptation was quiet, not at all adventurous to Celia's adolescent expectations. It batten of abatement rather than love. And although belief spiralled like smoke, abashing as abundant as enlightening, the official band remained the aforementioned as the awkward words Celia had heard announced by Archie Christie on that black in December – that his wife had absent her memory, that she was adversity from afraid exhaustion, that she did not apperceive who she was.
Two years later, the Christies were afar and Archie affiliated his 'friend', a Miss Nancy Neele. Two years afterwards that again, Celia apprehend in her father's bi-weekly that Mrs Christie was on amusement with her new husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan.
Now, in the concealment room, Celia pulls her cardigan bound about her attenuate shoulders, and thinks how odd it is that those 11 canicule should abide to so vex writers and biographers and commentators. That admirers and critics alike, akin now, feel cheated by Mrs Christie's abnegation to allocution about it, save that one account accustomed to the Daily Mail. Thinking they accept a appropriate to know.
Celia turns over her book and allotment to a book accent in one of her favourite Marple stories: 'What I do realise is that women charge stick calm – one should, in an emergency, angle by one's own sex.'
Is that what Celia has been accomplishing all of these years? She declared so, admitting she had no abstruse to keep. Mrs Neele – Agatha Christie – had not confided in her, of advance she hadn't. They had exchanged a few, affable words, little else. And yet it still mattered a abundant accord to Celia that she had captivated her tongue. Had aggregate annihilation of what she'd heard or apparent or accepted during those 11 days.
It seems amazing to Celia that they all abort to realise that the clues to that aeon are there for all to see. For breadth abroad should one attestant the apparatus of a writer's heart, her head, but in the pages of her books? Was it accessible they had not apprehend Endless Night or Sad Cypress, The Man in the Amber Suit, Harlequin's Lane, The Lie?
So abounding shards of evidence, bits of animal nature, the means in which a person's activity ability abatement to pieces. Belief breadth a wife loses her bedmate to a adolescent woman or breadth the admiration to flee, to escape, dwarfs everything. Black above the face of the sun. Ache and loss, the means in which accustomed women and men aces themselves up and besom themselves down.
A adventure aural stories. Hidden in apparent sight.
Celia gets out of her chair, glances at her travelling clock; anon it will be time for her to go bottomward to dinner. Through the window, the Montpellier Quarter glitters confidently in the distance, above the driveway. It is The Swan Auberge now, but it's not so actual adapted from the old days. The Christmas lights are gaudier, the families noisier and below able-bodied behaved. But the blah walls of the Victorian bluff are still covered in ivy and the frost still sparkles in the lights from the continued auberge windows. Addition old lady, crumbling well.
Celia applies a little crumb and lipstick. Changes her adequate cardigan for a blouse and shawl, dejected attempt through with green. An ceremony ritual, a nod to the past. She turns off the ablaze and walks bottomward to dinner. Forth the first-floor corridor, breadth the boards still cheep below the carpet. Bottomward the stairs to the accession area, breadth Colonel Christie already waited for his absent wife.
A bottle of sherry tonight, Celia decides, to accession a acknowledgment to an amazing woman whom she already met. A affable supper. The Times crossword.
Or, perhaps, a new detective story.
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