‘It looks, does it not, as though we return to our muttons?’
(Translation of a French phrase which means, ‘go back to the start’, part 2, chapter 2)

‘I’m not one to gossip!’
(In the pantomime world of Agatha Christie, this always the preliminary to someone launching into a massive gossip, in this case gabby Nurse O’Brien)

‘Just like the pictures, isn’t it?’
(Nurse O’Brien sums up the pop culture cheesiness of the plot)

‘Old sins have long shadows, as they say!’
(Pithy proverb from Nurse Nolan)

Mrs. Bishop’s bust heaved with a flash of jet.

Part 1. The murder of Mary Gerrard

The narrative is cast in three parts. Part one gives us the events leading up to The Murder.

Old Mrs Laura Welman is bed-ridden after a stroke. She is attended round the clock by two nurses, older, plump Nurse Jessie Hopkins and Nurse O’Brien, and periodically visited by the handsome, humorous local doctor, Dr Peter Lord.

Laura’s husband died years ago and she is the owner and sole inhabitant of the Hunterbury estate (well, along with the raft of servants). At the end of the drive is the village of Maidensford. When she dies it is expected that she will divide the estate between her niece, Elinor, and her late husband’s nephew, Roderick ‘Roddy’ Welman.

We are shown numerous scenes between Roddy and Elinor where it becomes clear that 1) they have been in love since they were boy and girl playing on the lovely Hunterbury estate; 2) neither of them have plans to get a job or career because their plans for their future entirely depend on inheriting Aunt Laura’s money; 3) Elinor is cold and calculating, deliberately restraining her love for Roddy, and wondering how long before Aunt Laura finally dies.

The fly in the ointment who queers the whole situation is Mary Gerrard. She is the same age as Elinor and Roddy but born into a different class. She’s the daughter of the grumpy old lodge keeper to the estate, angry old Ephraim Gerrard. But here’s the thing: when Mary was a girl, Laura Welman, with no child of her own, took a shine to her and paid for her to go to private school, have French and piano lessons and be sent abroad to finishing school. She is just back from two years in Germany. Thus she has been educated ‘above her station’.

Not only this, but here, right at the start of the narrative, Elinor receives a letter which is really a scrawled, illiterate note, warning her that someone is sucking up to the old lady in the hope of winning her fortune. This can only refer to Mary, but the question is: who wrote and sent Elinor this note? And why?

The scenes between Elinor and Roddy quite cleverly build up the picture of two immature and naive young people who think they’re in love because they’ve been such jolly good friends for so long, and who’ve put their lives on hold while they wait for the old lady to pass away, but whose love is not real. It is a kind of formality or type of politeness to each other. They way they continually ask each other whether they love each other indicates its superficiality and fragility.

All this is exposed by the simple event of Roddy walking by himself through the grounds wondering about the future and pondering his love for Elinor when out of the woods, illuminated by sunlight, walks Mary Gerrard like a vision of beauty. I’ll quote the entire little scene because it shows how clearly Christie writes, with a beautiful limpidity and simplicity. As Christie’s biographer Laura Thompson says (and maybe it’s an obvious enough remark) Christie’s popularity is less down to her plots or characters, than to her immense readability.

He went out of the walled garden by the gate at the far end. From there he wandered into the little wood where the daffodils were in spring. They were over now, of course. But the green light was very lovely where the sunlight came filtering through the trees.

Just for a moment an odd restlessness came to him – a rippling of his previous placidity. He felt: ‘There’s something – something I haven’t got – something I want – I want – I want….’

The golden green light, the softness in the air – with them came a quickened pulse, a stirring of the blood, a sudden impatience.

A girl came through the trees towards him – a girl with pale, gleaming hair and a rose-flushed skin. He thought, ‘How beautiful – how unutterably beautiful.’

Something gripped him; he stood quite still, as though frozen into immobility. The world, he felt, was spinning, was topsy-turvy, was suddenly and impossibly and gloriously crazy!

The girl stopped suddenly, then she came on. She came up to him where he stood, dumb and absurdly fishlike, his mouth open. She said with a little hesitation:

‘Don’t you remember me, Mr. Roderick? It’s a long time of course. I’m Mary Gerrard, from the lodge.’

Short sentences. Short paragraphs. Simple characters. Child-like psychology. Easily understood. Perfect undemanding holiday reading for generations of satisfied readers.

So Roddy not so much falls in love with as is transfixed by this vision of young beauty. And Elinor sees it. In every subsequent scene where Mary appears, Roddy stops in the middle of what he’s saying to follow her with his eyes, with the result that Elinor becomes a seething cauldron of hate and jealousy.

Roddy and Elinor are both based in London where they have their separate flats. They visit Aunt Laura one or two times more before they get a message that she’s had another stroke and is a bad way. They rush down to Hunterbury to comfort the poor woman who now can’t speak. But the nurses and the doctor, when he attends, can see that Laura is upset about something and between them work out that she is very concerned about her will. She appears to want to make provision for her beloved Mary in it. Elinor (witnessed by the two nurses) promises she’ll do this, and also call the family solicitor Mr Seddon to come and see her tomorrow.

But tomorrow never comes. Aunt Laura dies in the night intestate i.e. she never made a will. In these circumstances the entire estate, and her considerable fortune, go to her next of kin who is Laura, with nothing to Roddy and nothing to Mary. Says the family lawyer:

‘The death duties, I am afraid, will be somewhat heavy, but even after their payment, the fortune will still be a considerable one, and it is very well invested in sound gilt-edged securities.’

In the event Elinor does the decent thing: she gifts Mary £2,000 which everyone thinks is very generous. But when she tries to offer Roddy some of the money he says he doesn’t want her charity and they end up having a row. In other words, the money which was meant to bring them together and ensure they lived happily ever after, ends up diving them more bitterly. They have broken off their engagement. Elinor suggests that Roddy goes away, abroad, takes a long break, to decide whether it’s she (Elinor) or Mary that he loves, so off he goes.

More than once Elinor is shown thinking ‘If only Mary wasn’t here… But for Mary… If only Mary were gone…’ maybe things between her and Roddy would return to ‘normal’.

Worse is to come because, now that they are not going to get married, Elinor is left as the sole inhabitant of the big old house at Hunterbury and decides she can’t bear to live there amid the ruins of her dreams. So she decides to sell it. All its rooms and gardens which she fondly planned to share in her happy marriage to Roddy, all these taste of ashes because of that damn Mary Gerrard! And so the narrative amply conveys all the reasons Elinor has for hating Mary, and how Elinor’s character becomes increasingly cold, calculating and bitter.

(I should have mentioned that shortly before Aunt Laura’s second stroke, Nurse Hopkins had mentioned to Nurse O’Brien that she can’t find one of the tubes of morphine in her nurse’s bag (it’s for a different patient of theirs: Eliza Rykin with cancer). She either mislaid it or, while her bag was left open in the hall, someone must have stolen it… a thought which neither of them fully acknowledge and quickly stifle, because it would imply that someone is up to no good.)

To cut a long story short, Mary dies and is thought to have been murdered. The actual death takes place at an innocent sandwich lunch. Laura has put Hunterbury up for sale. She therefore has to clear out all the furniture and writes asking Mary to come and do the same for the lodge where she grew up. Mary asks Nurse Hopkins to help her. On this particular day we are shown Elinor going shopping in the village high street and, at the butcher’s, buying types of paste to make sandwiches with. She frivolously mentions the fact that some fish pastes have been reported as causing food poisoning which the butcher assures her are not true of his.

Anyway, come lunchtime, Elinor invites Mary and Nurse Nolan from the lodge (where they’re cleaning out) up to the big house. Here she offers them the fish paste sandwiches we saw her making from the fish paste we saw her buying. Nurse Hopkins makes a pot of tea. Mary has a cup but Elinor doesn’t. Then Elinor invites Nurse Hopkins upstairs to take a look at the clothes she plans to throw out: maybe some of them can be redistributed to the poor and elderly in the village.

They do this for some time and when they come downstairs find Mary slumped in her chair, unconscious and blue. Nurse Hopkins immediately diagnoses poisoning, speaks very harshly to Elinor (obviously suspecting her of foul play) and barks at her to phone Dr Lord.

Here, on this dramatic scene, ends Part 1 of the novel.

Red herrings

According to Wikipedia:

A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion. A red herring may be used intentionally, as in mystery fiction or as part of rhetorical strategies (e.g., in politics), or may be used in argumentation inadvertently.

The term was popularized in 1807 by English polemicist William Cobbett, who told a story of having used a strong-smelling smoked fish to divert and distract hounds from chasing a rabbit.

Euthenasia? Anyway, there are several red herrings I haven’t got round to mentioning yet. One is that we are shown old Aunt Laura confiding in Dr Lord, a sympathetic man, that she doesn’t want to end up helpless and gaga, being washed and cared for like a vegetable.

‘She’d talked to me about it. Asked me more than once if I couldn’t ‘finish her off.’ She hated illness, the helplessness of it…’

She would much rather the doctor put her out of her misery, something he cheerfully refuses to do, saying he didn’t intend to be hanged for murder. But did he? Put her quietly to sleep, as per her wishes?

Talking of Lord, it becomes clear in part 2 that he (rather inexplicably) carries a torch for Elinor. Could the doctor conceivably, somehow have poisoned Mary to make Elinor’s life better? Wildly improbable, but I’ve read worse things in Christie.

Ted Bigland’s anger This is Mary’s boyfriend, from her own (working) class. He is ‘a fine sturdy specimen’ who grew up with Mary and they obviously had some kind of understanding. We are shown a couple of scenes in which Ted asks to go out with her but Mary refuses and we are shown Ted’s frustration and then anger that Mary now thinks she’s ‘too good’ for him etc. Could this anger be motive enough for ted to murder her?

Mary’s mysterious parentage Late in part 1, looking through paperwork in the Lodge, Nurse Hopkins comes across a marriage certificate for old Gerrard and his wife but the date of the marriage is a year after Mary (now 21) was born. Further enquiry reveals that Mary wasn’t old Gerrard’s daughter at all. He confirms this in person. Mary’s father was an unnamed ‘gentleman’ who impregnated a lady’s maid to old Mrs Welman. She subsequently married Gerrard after Mary was born. No wonder he resented Mary, and she said she often felt he didn’t behave like a father to her. The obvious question is who was the father and could it have any possible bearing on Mary’s murder?

Lewis Rycroft On one of her last nights, Mrs Welman called out ‘Lewis, Lewis, photograph’. She directed Nurse O’Brien to get an old photograph out of her (locked) tallboy, an old photo in a silver frame depicting a handsome young man. She held and admired it for a while and then ordered it be locked away again. Well, some time later, after Mrs Welman’s death, Nurse O’Brien moves to a new job with a new client, Lady Rattery, staying at a place called Laborough Court where, by the kind of fantastic coincidence beloved of Christie and romance authors in general, she sees on the grand piano the exact same photo, of a dashing young man. When she asks the butler, he tells her it’s a photo of Lady Rattery’s brother – Sir Lewis Rycroft. He lived locally and was killed in the War. She further finds out that Lewis was married but that his wife (Lady Rycroft) went into a lunatic asylum soon after the marriage, but remained living. In other words, according to the laws of the day, he was unable to divorce and remarry. Nurse O’Brien then speculates that this Sir Lewis and Mrs Welman must have had a love affair but couldn’t marry because of the mad wife problem. As she comments:

They must have been very fond of each other, he and Mrs W., and unable to marry because of the wife being in an asylum. Just like the pictures, isn’t it?

So I’m guessing this solves the mystery of Mary’s parentage. What if not only Mary’s father was Lewis Rycroft but somehow, he got Mrs Welman pregnant, and Mary was Mrs Welman’s natural daughter!!!

So that’s the state of play and information, as part 1 ends on the dramatic scene of Mary dying of poisoning in the sitting room at Hunterbury, as Elinor Welman looks on cold-eyed and Nurse Hopkins turns to accuse her, ‘her eyes hard with suspicion’.

Part 2. Enter Hercule Poirot

Part 2 opens with young Dr Lord visiting Poirot and begging him to help find the evidence to get Elinor off the charge of murder. She has been arrested and charged and the trial will take place soon. Poirot asks Dr Lord to give him a complete summary of all the characters and the events leading up to Mary Gerrard’s death – which is a very handy recap for the reader, too.

Poirot agrees to help and sets off on the usual round of interviews. A chapter apiece is devoted to his extended interviews of: Nurse Nolan; Mrs Bishop; Ted Bigland; Roderick Welman; Mr Seddon the family lawyer; Chief Inspector Marsden; Nurse O’Brien; then Elinor herself, in prison. Then he meets with Dr Lord and tramps about the scene of the crime, throughout the empty house, but also along the land running beside the house from which, they realise, anyone could have had a clear view through the kitchen window of Elinor making the sandwiches on the fatal morning.

Poirot returns alone to interview Nurse O’Brien and she confirms what I suspected about Mary being Mrs Welman’s illegitimate daughter. It’s spelled out in black and white in an old letter she found at the Lodge, written by Mary’s ostensible mother, the lady’s maid Eliza Riley, who took the baby as her own and married Ephraim Gerrard.

Part 3. In court

Christie was constantly experimenting with the format of her novels. More often than not someone is murdered and the narrative describes the process of finding the killer. This one plays a variation on the theme which is that it is the first novel in the Poirot series to feature significant part of the narrative in a courtroom.

The novel actually opens with a preliminary scene in court, with Elinor standing in the dock, being accused of the murder of Mary Gerrard and asked to enter a plea, before the scene shimmers and fades before our eyes and transports us back to the origins of the story (part 1) and Poirot’s investigations (part 2), which I have summarised above.

I say ‘experimentation’ but, of course, by 1940 this kind of brief opening in the present which quickly gives way to flashbacks explaining how we got to this point, had become commonplace in popular fiction and especially in the movies. And having a good deal of a murder mystery set in court as different witnesses present the evidence which slowly pieces together the truth, this device has obviously been used in tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of movies and TV crime series since.

But it was new in Christie’s oeuvre to include such a courtroom scene and to use it to reveal the truth. We’d gotten used to Poirot calling all the suspects together and doing one of his Big Explanations.

Cast

• Aunt Laura Welman – owner of the Hunterbury estate, old lady, bed-ridden after a stroke
• Henry Welman – her husband, died decades earlier after just five years of marriage
• Sir Lewis Rycroft – who Laura was in love with decades earlier, during the Great War, in which he was killed
• Miss Elinor Carlisle – young niece of Laura Welman, in love with Roddy – ‘I’ve always fancied that you had, perhaps, rather an intense nature—that kind of temperament runs in our family. It isn’t a very happy one for its possessor’ – says to herself, ‘ It’s that beastly brooding, possessive mind of yours’
• Roddy Welman – Mrs Welman’s (dead) husband’s nephew, posh, nervous, attended Eton
• Mary Gerrard – daughter of the lodge keeper of the Welman estate who Aunt Laura took a shine to and had educated, piano, French etc, beyond her station ‘At twenty-one, Mary Gerrard was a lovely creature with a kind of wild-rose unreality about her: a long delicate neck, pale golden hair lying close to her exquisitely shaped head in soft natural waves, and eyes of a deep vivid blue’ – Nurse Hopkins thinks ‘Mary was one of the most beautiful girls you’ve ever seen. Might have gone on the films any time’
• Ephraim Gerrard – Mary’s father who has angrily rejected her since her posh education gave her hoity-toity ways: ‘an elderly man with a bent back was painfully hobbling down the two steps’; in the opinion of Horlicks the gardener, ‘always grumbling, and crusty as they make them’
• Eliza Gerrard née Riley – lady’s maid to Mrs Welman, who had a baby and married Ephraim Gerrard
• Ted Bigland – Mary’s boyfriend, from her original (working) class, works at Henderson’s garage – ‘a fine sturdy specimen’, a ‘good-looking, fair young giant’
• Mrs Bishop – housekeeper at Hunterbury for 18 years, ‘a stately figure of ample proportions, handsomely dressed in black’
• Nurse Jessie Hopkins – the District Nurse who came every morning to assist with the bed making and toilet of the heavy old lady, was a homely-looking middle-aged woman with a capable air and a brisk manner’ – ‘the biggest gossip in the village’ – according to Dr Lord, ‘the town crier’
• Nurse O’Brien – ‘a tall red-haired woman of thirty with flashing white teeth, a freckled face and an engaging smile. Her cheerfulness and vitality made her a favourite with her patients’
• Dr Peter Lord – ‘a young man of thirty-two. He had sandy hair, a pleasantly ugly freckled face and a remarkably square jaw. His eyes were a keen, piercing light blue’
• Horlick the gardener – ‘a tall, good-looking young fellow wheeling a barrow’
• Dr Ransom – Dr Lord’s predecessor, now retired
• Mrs Slattery – Dr Ransom’s housekeeper
• Mr. Seddon of Bloomsbury Square – Aunt Laura’s lawyer
• Mr Abbot – the butcher
• Chief Inspector Marsden – police officer in charge of the criminal investigation, an experienced, kindly looking man’

In court

• Sir Samuel Attenbury – counsel for the prosecution – there’s a flicker of Christie’s casual antisemitism when she has Elinor describe him as ‘the horrible man with the Jewish nose’
• Sir Edwin Bulmer, K.C. – leading barrister assigned to defend Elinor; he is described as ‘the forlorn hope man’ because he takes on hopeless cases – a specialist in ‘sob stuff – stressing the prisoner’s youth’ etc
• Dr Alan Garcia – distinguished forensic analyst
• Inspector Brill – police officer in charge
• Alfred James Wargrave – rose grower from Emsworth, Berkshire
• James Littledale – qualified chemist employed by the wholesale chemists, Jenkins & Hale
• Amelia Sedley of Boonamba, Auckland, New Zealand
• Edward of Auckland, New Zealand, now living in Deptford

Nurses

I’ve been reading Laura Thompson’s account of Christie’s time as a nurse working for a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) at Torquay Hospital during the First World War. It’s a happy coincidence that this novel is the one which contains more nurses, and comment about the profession of nursing, than any others to this point.

Dr Lord numerous times emphasises the professionalism of the two nurses, but also how they’d be scared to death of lapsing in their duties. When interviewing Nurse Nolan, Poirot is a little patronising and she quickly corrects him in the tone of brisk practicality which is what the reader also picks up from Thompson’s account of Agatha’s own time as a nurse.

Poirot sighed. He said: ‘As you say, men fight shy of illness. It is the women who are the ministering angels. What should we do without them? Especially women of your profession – a truly noble calling.’
Nurse Hopkins, slightly red in the face, said: ‘It’s very kind of you to say that. I’ve never thought of it that way myself. Too much hard work in nursing to think about the noble side of it.’
(Part 2, chapter 3)

Bookishness

Hercule Poirot said: ‘One does not practise detection with a textbook! One uses one’s natural intelligence.’
Peter Lord said: ‘You might find a clue of some sort there.’
Poirot sighed: ‘You read too much detective fiction.’

‘Her mother had been a lady’s maid to old Mrs Welman. She married Gerrard after Mary was born.’
‘As you say, quite a romance – a mystery romance.’

Wordsworth

Suddenly, out of the blue, Poirot quotes a fragment of Wordsworth and tells us he is a fan.

‘Therefore, the next step logically would seem to be: Mary Gerrard was not killed! But that, alas, is not so. She was killed!’
He added, slightly melodramatically:

“But she is in her grave, and oh,
The difference to me!”

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Roddy.
Hercule Poirot explained:
‘Wordsworth. I read him much.’

Period vocabulary

Says Nurse Nolan:

‘She wasn’t one of these girls who are all S.A. and IT. She was a quiet girl!’

Where S.A. obviously stands for ‘sex appeal’, a phrase Nolan can’t even bring herself to utter, and IT refers to It Girl:

The expression ‘It Girl’ originated in British upper-class society around the turn of the 20th century. It gained further attention in 1927 with the popularity of the Paramount Studios film It, starring Clara Bow.

Summary

The two Agatha Christie novels I’ve enjoyed most have been The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery because they are the funniest, most high spirited books, the silly far-fetched plots being part of the comedy.

But of Christie’s mid-period novels this may be the one I’ve enjoyed reading most. The final explanation is as preposterously contrived as all her other plots but there’s something perilously close to depth and real psychology in the characterisation of Elinor Welman. And the penultimate scene where Dr Lord drives her to a sanatorium where she can finally rest and be at peace, had, for a moment, a flicker of the depth and real emotion you look for in proper literature.

But then the final scene of the novel has Poirot conveniently tidying up any loose ends for the benefit of the holiday reader and it turns back into pantomime again.

Credit

‘Sad Cypress’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in March 1940.

Related links

• Sad Cypress online (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1940s reviews