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?’
4 ‘… she will have to make up her mind between them some time …’
Though Agatha was strong and happily occupied, Clara was unwell and her life emptier than before. Shortly after Agatha’s return from Miss Dryden’s in 1910, her mother fell seriously ill; no doctor could diagnose exactly what was wrong – they suggested, variously, gallstones, paratyphoid and appendicitis. Disenchanted with all of them, Clara took matters into her own hands. She believed she needed a change and, having found a doctor who advised her to try sunshine and a warm climate, settled on Egypt. This was not a bizarre choice. Near and Middle Eastern countries that today seem exotic and somewhat dangerous to Europeans were much less mysterious to the Victorians and Edwardians. They were in large part administered by the British (and, here and there, the French), there were regular sailings to and fro and Thomas Cook and Sons were used to making arrangements. Egypt was a particularly sensible place to spend the winter; it was dry and sunny and not too far away, Cairo had reputable hotels where English people stayed, several regiments were stationed nearby, there was polo to watch and a dance at one or other of the hotels nearly every night of the week. As Clara could not afford to give Agatha a London season of dances and afternoon parties like that which Madge had enjoyed in New York, Cairo was a perfect substitute. It was not expensive, there would be Englishwomen to give Clara some society and English girls for Agatha to mix with, but not so many and so smart that she would be daunted, and plenty of unattached young men with whom she could dance, flirt and go on expeditions and among whom she might even discover a husband.
They sailed on the SS Heliopolis and installed themselves for three months at the Gezirah Palace Hotel. Chaperoned by Clara, Agatha went to some fifty dances. She was profoundly irritated by the difficulty of putting up her hair, which was so long that she could sit on it; dressing it with an artificial knot of curls was almost impossible. She took, however, enormous pleasure in her first evening dresses: one of pale green chiffon with small lace frills, a plain one of white taffeta and a third of deep turquoise material, produced by Auntie-Grannie from one of her bottomless chests but so fragile that during the course of a dance it split in all directions. Its replacement, ‘bought from one of the Levantine dressmakers of Cairo’ (a fashionable one, Agatha believed, since the dress was very expensive), was pale pink shot satin with a bunch of pink rosebuds on one shoulder. This wardrobe is described in Unfinished Portrait, whose heroine Celia, during her own season in Cairo, is obliged to pad the bodice with the ‘delicate ruchings of net’ called ‘plumpers’, being, like Agatha, tall and thin.
Agatha’s photograph album shows how they passed the afternoons. There were the Cairo Races, attended by the Duke of Connaught, and Spring Manoeuvres (the pictures show the officers sitting on folding stools and the men on the ground); there was the Review, watched from a pavilion by the visitors, the ladies wearing muslin veils to protect them from the sun. Dashing officers mounted on beautiful horses brandished polo sticks and leapt over hurdles, and, with boaters and cigars at a rakish angle, perched on tables or lay languidly in wicker chairs during leisurely tea parties. There was an expedition to the Citadel and a picnic in the desert (at which the ladies in their whalebone sat heroically in canvas deckchairs). There was also, as at home, croquet and Diabolo.
Egypt was not yet the object of popular fascination that it was to become in the early nineteen-twenties, when Howard Carter’s archaeological investigations were crowned with the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Some of the findings of early explorers were, however, to be seen in the Cairo Museum and Clara tried to persuade Agatha to accompany her there. Agatha, vastly enjoying her new acquaintances and social preoccupations, resisted her mother’s entreaties. Nor did she wish to make an expedition up the Nile to visit Karnak or Luxor, although she was taken to see the Pyramids and the Sphinx, where she was photographed, sitting confidently on a donkey. It was not, then, this first stay in Egypt that stimulated Agatha’s later interest in antiquities and archaeology but it was certainly a happy visit, her first association of the East with feelings of comfort, amusement and success.
At least one of the attentive young subalterns and captains immortalised in Agatha’s photograph album asked Mrs Miller whether he might ‘speak to’ her daughter. The only men who stirred her heart, however, were a couple of bronzed colonels of thirty-five or forty, who conceded an occasional dance and teased the ‘pretty young thing’. Agatha was, moreover, still shy, with no conversation. Indeed, one of the older men said as he returned her to Clara after a dance: ‘Here’s your daughter. She has learnt to dance, in fact she dances beautifully. You had better try and teach her to talk now.’ This was Captain Crake, who had accompanied the party to the Citadel. From his photograph he looks a playful fellow, shown kneeling in his tartan trews and looking upwards at the tennis ball his fiancée is about to drop on his head. In Unfinished Portrait, Agatha made a joke of this remark, but, though justified, it was cruel.
During her stay, Agatha made friends with at least twenty or thirty young men and that, after all, was the main objective. In her autobiography she has much to say about the procedure by which girls of her age and class were launched into adult life, into a world where public affairs were with few exceptions managed by men, and older men at that. Her description is of a time of gaiety and freedom, the season in which girls who might have known few young men intimately, apart from their brothers and other male relations, might now meet large numbers of them from