Curtain Up by Julius Green Page B

continuous film of enjoyment.’ 49
    When, in 1922, Christie was writing notes for the novel The Man in the Brown Suit in Notebook 34, while on the Grand Tour, they appear under the heading ‘Adventurous Anne Episode 1’. 50 Reeve’s heroine and ‘episodic’ format were therefore very much on her mind – although she later claimed that ‘Anne the Adventuress’, the title under which the novel was serialised in the Evening News the following year, was ‘as silly a title as I had ever heard’. 51 All of this, though, seems to indicate that the script for The Clutching Hand pre-dates 1922, and Agatha’s own first visit to America.
    And now on to more serious matters, in the shape of an unpublished and unperformed three-act ‘domestic drama’ called simply The Lie . In her autobiography Agatha mysteriously states, ‘I wrote a gloomy play, mainly about incest. It was refused firmly by every manager I sent it to. “An unpleasant subject”. The curious thing is that, nowadays, it is the kind of play which might quite likely appeal to a manager.’ 52 I believe The Lie to be that play and, although the chronology in her autobiography is notoriously inaccurate, Agatha clearly places it in the mid-1920s after her and Archie’s return from the Grand Tour. The action of the play, of which there are two drafts, takes place in a suburban house, located in Wimbledon (amended to Putney) in version one or Hampstead in version two. The house belongs to John, who is married to Nan. Nan’s mother and grandmother live withthem, and her younger sister Nell, who is fighting off the attentions of an ineffectual young suitor, shares a flat with a female friend elsewhere.
    Nan is disillusioned with the boredom of her marriage to John, whom she married when she was seventeen, and the fact that he lavishes more of his attention on her golf- and tennis-playing younger sister than on her. In an attempt to get some excitement back into her life, she spends a night with an older admirer, Sir Peter (whom we never meet), claiming that she is staying with family friends. But when she returns home the next day she discovers that a friend of John’s has told him that he has seen her dining with Sir Peter, and it is not long before he establishes that she has not in fact been staying with the family friends. As Nan explains to her mother, Hannah:
    I suppose he’s a good husband. He’s kind and polite, and feeds and clothes me well, and doesn’t beat me. Oh! A model husband! But I’m outside his life – right outside it. He goes to his business in the morning, and when he comes back in the afternoon, if it’s summertime, he plays golf or tennis with Nell. In the evening there’s music – with Nell. He’d sooner talk to her than to me. He never cares to be with me – he never wants me – I don’t interest him. Although I’m his wife I never dare laugh and joke with him as Nell does. And so it’s gone on from day to day – until I felt I couldn’t bear it any longer! (a pause) And then, Sir Peter came. He wanted to talk to me, he liked to be with me – I was the person to him! What happened? John told me to drop him! Altogether! Told me quite coldly and calmly, not because he cared – not because he was jealous – but because I was his wife, and he disliked having his property talked about! 53
    As Hannah explains to her own mother, ‘A love not expressed is no love at all to Nan. And a man like John, upright, honourable, and straight as a die, lacks one thing – imagination.’ We are told that Hannah herself followed her dream: ‘I loved him!He was fascinating. His bad qualities were all beneath the surface. I promised to marry him. My people did their best to stop it, they knew him better than I did, but I was young and headstrong, I wouldn’t listen! I went my own way, and shut my eyes to