The Christie Affair(82)

Funktionslust. It’s a German word for the joy of doing what one does best. Seducing Archie, stealing him away from his wife, had a very specific purpose. But as it turned out, I was good at it. Better than good. It might have been a tennis match. No other woman at the club, no other woman anywhere, could touch me.

‘Oh, Nan,’ Archie said. Smooth hands down my smoother side. He had good lips, Archie did, tasting like Scotch in the evening. By now I’d learned how to arch and whisper, how to climb and conquer. The night before Archie’s wife disappeared I could sense the night before, enough to understand the imperative of reclaiming him. Now that he’d decided to move forward there could be no more lapses or wavering. My claim on him as a shark, swim or die.

I clamped my hand over Archie’s mouth, hard enough for it to hurt him. ‘Hush,’ I commanded.

‘Nan,’ he answered, a tight gurgle. And then, when all had come to rest, ‘I love you.’

The covers had been thrown to the floor and my head rested on his slick chest, his breath still coming out hard and forced.

‘Dear Nan,’ Archie said. ‘How I love you.’



In nine days’ time it would finally occur to Archie to wonder in earnest. Where had I gone?

He would have an afternoon to escape the confines of Styles and the chaos of the fruitless search. He would travel to London.

Turning his collar up against the cold, he would march down city streets to my flat. Walk up the steps and rap on my door. Hold his ear against it when there was no answer. The silence inside sounding like it had taken time to build. An uninhabited place.

Nothing in the world removes the ills a wife causes like the balm of a mistress. Even as Archie listened for me, he thought if I were to swing the door open and welcome him inside with a seductive smile, I’d be nothing but a poor substitute, the satisfaction I offered him temporary, fleeting. Only enough to carry him through this terrible grief until his wife was found.

My door sat sealed, the room on the other side of it soundless. My neighbour, old Mrs Kettering, opened the door. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen Archie and she frowned at him as she always did. He responded with a placating smile. People like her, who’d witnessed us together, might be trouble down the road.

Still the question bubbled up inside of him, impossible not to ask. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Kettering. I wonder, have you seen Miss O’Dea?’

‘Not for days,’ she said. ‘More than a week, I’d say. Not a glimpse of her nor a peep from her. Here’s hoping she’s run off with some bloke her own age.’ She bestowed one last, hawk-like glare before slamming the door behind her and stamping down the stairs. There are too many women in the world helping men with their dirty work. But so many more taking each other’s side in unexpected moments.

Equally unexpected, Archie would find the moment of reprieve he’d wanted. For the first time in days, his mind went blank with sheer perplexity. The question eclipsed emotion, for just one moment. Where had Nan gone?

He hurried down the stairs to the street. Walked quickly, his breath coming out in gusts. Willing his hands not to rise and cover his face. Any tears in his eyes could be explained away by the cold. Miles away in Harrogate, I wasn’t thinking of Archie. Hardly a bit. Hardly at all.

While he was thinking: How peculiar, and what has precipitated this? The Age of Disappearing Women.



The age of disappearing women did not begin with Agatha Christie. It had begun long before Agatha hopped into a car and motored away from Newlands Corner with Finbarr. And it would continue for quite a bit longer. We disappeared from schools. From our hometowns. From our families and our jobs. One day we would be going about our business, sitting in class, or laughing with friends, or walking hand in hand with a beau. Then, poof.

What ever happened to that girl? Don’t you remember her? Where did she go?

In America we went to Florence Crittenton homes. In England to Clark’s House, or any of the various homes run mostly by the Anglican Church. In Australian hospitals, babies were taken from mothers who were drugged, incapacitated, unwilling. And, of course, some of us didn’t go anywhere at all. We bled to death on butchers’ tables. We jumped off bridges.

The age of disappearing women. It had been going on forever. Thousands of us vanished, with not a single police officer searching. Not a word from the newspapers. Only our long absences and quiet returns. If we ever returned at all.



Before Agatha disappeared, before I knew Finbarr had returned to Britain, the plan I’d authored was well underway. In the Owens’ house, in the borrowed bed, my arms wrapped tight around Archie. The overriding element was mercenary, true. But there were other elements.

‘I love you, Nan,’ Archie said, as if he couldn’t say it enough, as if the words needed to be repeated ad infinitum until the world conspired to let this moment last, the delicious, breathless secret of it.

I loved him too. If that’s what you’d like to call love.





The Disappearance



Day Eight

Saturday, 11 December 1926



IN THE MIDST of all the maelstrom, Agatha’s work was another place for her to go. A world to visit apart from her own. She could lose herself there no matter what occurred. In the Timeless Manor the typewriter keys clicked and clacked. Let them search. Let Archie worry. When her fingers flew over the typewriter keys it was the whole world that vanished. Not her.