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her early verse disappeared without trace, we can still read some of the poetry she wrote at the age of seventeen or eighteen, since it was printed in The Road of Dreams, the volume Geoffrey Bles published in 1924, and reprinted in Poems, published by Collins, in 1973. It is, apart from an occasional phrase, sentimental and derivative. One long sentence tells the story of Harlequin and Columbine, Pierrot and Pierrette, whose Dresden china figures decorated both Auntie-Grannie’s house and Ashfield. The theme of magical Harlequin, the lover and protector of lovers, was to resurface twenty years later in Agatha’s book, The Mysterious Mr Quin.

      Agatha also set her ‘Harlequin poems’ to music. Her composition was, in her own words, ‘not of a very high order’, but it was competent and expressive. A waltz she wrote was published, despite the fact that, in her own view, it was trite. ‘One Hour With Thee’ (‘a pretty hefty time for a waltz to last,’ she later observed), depicted on its cover a young woman looking much like Agatha herself, with golden hair, sloping shoulders, and a bunch of pansies at her bosom. To Agatha’s great pride, it was occasionally included in the repertoire of the local dance band.

      By the time she was seventeen Agatha had set aside her musical ambitions, doing so with remarkable despatch. Her studies with Charles Fürster had led her to hope that with practice and hard work she might become a professional concert pianist but, after one disastrous occasion when she was bidden to play before a visitor and, on sitting down to the piano, found herself ‘overwhelmed by inefficiency’, she asked Fürster to be honest with her. ‘He told me no lies,’ she wrote. ‘He said that quite frankly he thought I had not the temperament to play in public, and I knew he was right.’ It is interesting that, although she was miserable for a while, she immediately accepted this verdict: ‘If the thing you want beyond anything cannot be, it is much better to recognise it and go forward instead of dwelling on one’s regrets and hopes.’ Although Agatha did not know herself well, even then she recognised that public performance unnerved her. Rather than battling against her temperament, she complied with it.

      Singing was, as we have seen, the one thing she could undertake confidently in public but here too her early hopes were disappointed. In Paris she had one of the most respected singing teachers of the time, Monsieur Boué, who trained her to make the best use of her soprano voice, taking her through Cherubini, Schubert and, eventually, arias from Puccini. At home, she studied with a Hungarian composer and an English ballad teacher. Agatha sang at local concerts and to fellow guests after dinner but her ambition to become an opera singer flowered in 1909, when Madge, who had become interested in Wagner, took her to hear Die Walküre at Covent Garden. Richter conducted and Brünnhilde was sung by an American soprano, Minni Saltzman-Stephens, whose performance enraptured Agatha, already overwhelmed by the power and beauty of the music. ‘Although I did not deceive myself,’ she wrote in the unpublished draft of her autobiography, ‘I used to go over and over in my mind the faint possibility that one day I might sing Isolde. It did no harm, I told myself, at any rate to go through it in fantasy.’ An American friend of the Millers, who was connected with the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, came to hear Agatha sing, taking her through arias and exercises: ‘And then she said to me: “the songs you sang told me nothing, but the exercises do. You will make a good concert singer, and should be able to do well and make an name at that. Your voice is not strong enough for opera, and never will be.”’ Again, Agatha’s reaction was brave and drastic. ‘I came back to real life and put wishful thinking aside. I pointed out to Mother that she could now save the expense of music lessons. I could sing as much as I liked, but there was no point in studying singing.’

      Here her disappointment went deeper. The ‘cherished secret fantasy’ was one she had taken seriously, although she tried to persuade herself that it had been no more than that; ‘faint possibility’ in the first draft of her Autobiography becomes ‘illusion’ in the second and ‘dream’ in the last. ‘I did not want to be a concert singer,’ she wrote. ‘It would not have been an easy thing to do anyway. Musical careers for girls did not meet with encouragement.’ ‘Yet’, she declared, ‘if there had been any chance of my singing in opera, I would have fought for it, but that was for the privileged few, who had the right vocal cords. I am sure there can be nothing more soul-destroying in life than to persist in trying to do anything that you will do badly and in a second-rate manner.’ These urgent arguments show that she did mind; becoming an opera singer she saw as the pinnacle of attainment. Moreover, she continued to do so; towards the end of Agatha’s life she startled a young friend by saying wistfully, ‘If I’d been an opera singer, I might have been rich.’

      ‘So,’ as Agatha put it, ‘let us take it from there.’ Here was a creative and thoughtful eighteen-year-old girl, well-read, her days full of leisure, needing something to which to apply a good mind. One day as she sat in bed, recovering from influenza, bored with reading and playing Patience, she found herself reduced to idling with a silly game she had learnt in Pau and with which she always amused herself when she was ill. It consisted of dampening little pieces of bread and moulding them into tops which could be baked in the sun or a slow oven and then painted, so that they spun prettily as well as merrily. (In the second draft of her Autobiography this long explanation is dispensed with; Agatha succinctly deals herself bridge hands instead.) Clara, thinking this a pathetic expedient for dealing with boredom, suggested that the invalid try to write a story, something which Madge had done successfully before her marriage, when a series of her tales had been published in Vanity Fair. After several false starts Agatha found herself ‘thoroughly interested and going along at a great rate’, and a couple of days later the story was finished. ‘The House of Beauty’, as she called it, was some 6,000 words long – about thirty pages. She typed a fair copy in purple ink on Madge’s old Empire typewriter and signed it with the pseudonym ‘Mac Miller Esq’. It is a powerfully imaginative story, about madness and dreams, echoing the writings about the occult that Agatha and her friends were reading at the end of 1908, by Edgar Allan Poe and May Sinclair – ‘psychic stories’, Agatha called them. There was at this time a great interest in mysticism and spiritualism; one of Agatha’s friends constantly sought to persuade her to read theoretical books on the subject but she found the writing tedious and their assertions improbable. Nevertheless, she was interested in dreams and in the thin boundary between the real and the imaginary, and she was both fascinated and repelled by ‘madness’, a word which the Victorians had used to describe all sorts of instability and which was often believed to be hereditary.

      These disturbing themes are all present in ‘The House of Beauty’, together with a happier but no less interesting thread, the search for a well-known but elusive place, in this case ‘a strangely beautiful house’. Despite its infelicities of style (the word ‘exquisite’ is particularly hard-worked) and extravagance of treatment (everything is there: death, delirium, the jungle, madness, music, even a black-robed nun), ‘The House of Beauty’ is a compelling story, well-constructed and conveying with complete conviction how fragile and tenacious a dream can be. From the beginning Agatha demonstrated the two skills that characterise all her writing: she was an excellent storyteller and she could tap her readers’ deeply held fantasies. There are glimpses, too, of another characteristic that was not yet fully developed: she could be very funny. The snatches she gives of a dinner-table conversation (each person in turn opening his remarks with the proposition that it has been an unusually wet summer) have a nice comic touch, and her picture of one of the guests, a professor with an ‘unpleasantly cadaverous countenance’ and ‘a big white beard that wagged with peculiar vindictiveness when he talked’, is effective if not vastly original. ‘The House of Beauty’, drastically revised, was to be published as ‘The House of Dreams’ in Sovereign Magazine in January 1926.

      Agatha’s next effort was ‘The Call of Wings’, later published in The Hound of Death in 1933 (and again in The Golden Ball in 1971). It describes how easily those who are disposed to believe in psychic phenomena can be manipulated, especially when new mechanical inventions – in this case, the wireless – are brought into service. Agatha then tried ‘a grisly story about a séance’, which, rewritten many years later, appeared as The Sittaford Mystery. Fourth came ‘a dialogue between a deaf lady and a nervous man at a party’, which has not survived. Agatha’s papers do include a copy of her fifth try, ‘The Little Lonely God’,

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