Mike, Marriage, and Motherhood

Everyone has a bad year, what Queen Elizabeth called an “annus horribilis”.  My horriblest year was 1990 when I lost my husband Mike Gill in June and my mother Esme Scobie in November.

The year began well. Chris was happy and busy in Japan. Catherine, a junior in Lexington High with excellent grades and a place on the Varsity soccer team, looked a shoo-in for four tuition-free years at Tufts University like her brother and had a good shot at an Ivy League school.  Mike ‘s research was in high gear, and on July 1 he was due for a promotion that would mean a thirty percent increase in his salary. As for me, I was frantically finishing my book on Agatha Christie. I say frantic because I was sitting opposite our clunky, capricious DEC computer and rewriting a book on Agatha Christie. In 1989, totally clueless about how the publishing business worked, I had sent in a proposal for a book of critical essays on Christie to the Free Press, a division of Macmillan. Even though I was not represented by an agent, the editor Joyce Seltzer had miraculously fished my proposal out of the “round file”, offered me a book contract and a (very modest!) advance. I then set to and wrote the book I had proposed well within deadline—only to have my editor reject it. No one cares about literary criticism, opined Joyce Seltzer, but biography is hot right now, so what you must do, dear Gillian, is rewrite the whole thing as a biography.

This mandate at the eleventh hour threw me into a tizzy. 

I was trained in literary criticism, I knew nothing of biography or indeed history writing of any kind, and it was accepted wisdom that writing anything about Agatha Christie was impossible because her papers were not in the public domain. After her famous disappearance of 1926, Christie had worked obsessively to keep her private life private and had largely succeeded. After her death, all Christie’s papers and memorabilia remained is she had left them at Greenway, her beloved Devon estate, and her daughter and heir Rosalind Hicks sat on them like the dragon Smaug on the treasure of Mordor. As of 1990, Hicks had authorized one single person, the journeyman journalist Janet Morgan, to read her mother’s papers and do a biography and the solid, safe book Morgan published in 1984 duly said little that Christie herself had not said before. In the decades since 1984, let me add, the Christie estate has granted access to the Christie papers to only one other biographer, the gifted Australian poet and critic Laura Thompson.

But Joyce Seltzer knew her editing business and, in the essays I had submitted she could see that I was actually telling a story that a lot of people would want to read. Agatha Christie’s popularity was continuing to soar via movies and television, and she would get renewed press attention in 1990 as it was the centenary of her birth. And so Seltzer flexed her editorial muscles and told me to rewrite the fruits of my research—I had conscientiously read every word Christie ever wrote, which is a lot—as the story of an author’s life, and in the end I was able to capitalize on the fact that the Christie papers were inaccessible. By drilling deep down into Christie’s extensive, if guarded, memoirs, plus the extremely revealing books she published under the carefully guarded pseudonym Mary Westmacott, I was able to tell a new and persuasive story about a very famous yet largely unknown woman. As I write in 2024, I am proud to say that my short, scholarly, sympathetic, witty little book about Agatha Christie that got warm accolades in the American press but then fell into oblivion and never got a reissue due to a copyright dispute, is today considered a landmark in the new and expanding field of Christie studies and has become something of a collector’s item.

But to return to the first months of 1990, after coming up with a great title for my book--“Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries” -- I sent the document file in, and Seltzer loved it. Publication was set for the end of 1990, but I now hit my next big obstacle, the Macmillan legal department. Its mandate was to avoid any problem with the legendarily litigious Christie estate and the Free Press lawyers sifted through my book counting words and cutting quotes to ensure that I did not go beyond “fair usage”.

This second editing process astonished and at first enraged me. Notably in regard to the 1926 disappearance, I was telling a new story, and I was eager for my reader to know that I could support everything I had written from published sources, most importantly Christie’s own work. What I had to learn—and it was an important lesson for my future as a biographer—was that I could actually invent anything I wanted about a dead person because libel laws do not apply to the dead and every biography, when you get right down to it, is a story one person tells about another person’s life. All documentation is fragmentary, all memories are faulty, all autobiographies are, on some level, fictions, and the key turning points in a person’s life are all too often “off the record”. As for “knowing” who another person “really” is, that is as impossible in biography as it is in life.  A good biographer is diligent and trustworthy, she does research and cites her sources, but she also admits to herself and her reader that imagination, instinct, and personal experience all have a part to play in the work she publishes. 

At Easter, with my Christie rewrite complete, Mike and I returned to my native Cardiff to celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and my parents’ golden wedding anniversary. It had been my mother’s great wish that Mike and I should be married on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her own wedding, and, in this, as in all the arrangements for our wedding, we had complied and in the end felt good about complying. For the double anniversary celebration, anxious still to keep the peace at home by making my temperamental mother happy, I bought myself a dress and jacket in a sort of grayish-pinkish check that was not at all to my taste but that I thought Mummy would think appropriate. I also, for some weird reason, got my hair permed. One of the lesser ironies of that year would be that, in the modest fanfare of publicity that surrounded the publication of my Christie book, too grief-stricken to even contemplate the idea of shopping for clothes, I was captured for posterity in various recorded interviews in a suit I disliked and with my hair in a frizz.

The double anniversary dinner in Cardiff was a happy event, and Mike took a lot of nice photos of those gathered

Me, Dad, Mum, and Harry at the Anniversary Dinner

The fact that Mike, as the photographer, did not appear in any of the anniversary photos struck me later as almost prophetic. Other photos from around this time, notably those taken on his most recent trip to Japan, show Mike thin and worn-looking, but neither I nor anyone else was picking up on this at the time.

The family reunion In Cardiff was a happy and successful time but beneath the surface comity of the anniversary celebration, there was a growing coolness between Mike and me that we had yet to admit or address. Though I had never confided this to anyone, not even my beloved sister Rose, I was no longer happy in my marriage. I loved Mike, I valued and admired him, he was my best friend and wisest counselor, but I was finding it more and more difficult to live with him. Mike had always been a type A personality, but, as his health declined, his pace revved up, and our life changed to  a dodgem car ride in which we kept crashing into one another. 

Following Mike’s second major heart attack in the winter of 1986/7, his doctors at MGH had told us that if any further surgical intervention was attempted, he was likely to die on the table. After that consultation, again without confiding in anyone, I told myself in these exact words that I could be left a widow at any moment/ It therefore behooved me  to pull myself together, pick up my professional career where it had left off,  and begin to chart a new, independent path. The Christie book was the result of that inner resolution, yet, as I regained some of my old professional confidence, I found that I was no longer content to allow Mike to make the decisions for me and dictate the terms of our family life.  To use a sailing metaphor, I was no longer willing to forever be first mate to Mike’s skipper and obey the orders he bellowed from the helm. Mike had always had a fiery temper, but he was now facing death and he tended to take out his fury and frustration on his family. Chris had moved out of his father’s orbit and Catherine would soon do so too, but I was living under the often-explicit threat of” Don’t make me angry—it could kill me”, and it had worn me down. 

Thus, by the spring of 1990, I was reaching the conclusion that the best course for both Mike and for me could well be an amicable divorce. To repeat, I confided this to no one, but I remember I had clearly formulated it in my own mind. and now seemed a good time to broach it with my husband. Though precarious, Mike’s health was, from what he told me and as far as I could observe, stable. In 1989 we had hiked five strenuous days in Colorado, ending with the descent to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. This was a trip Mike and had dreamed off and planned and he did not tell me that he needed several nitroglycerine pills to combat angina as he made the long, steep ascent. Similarly, on vacation in Cape Cod, I had sat on the shore and watched Mike sail out far to sea on his brand-new windsurfer, anxiety gripping my heart—and he had come back hale and happy and exultant. It was only after his death when I came to give the surfer to a friend that I found the nitroglycerine pills taped to the mast.

Once home from Cardiff, we three Gills in Lexington took up our lives and, as part of my new independence, I said that I wanted to go to Japan to visit Chris. He and I had always been close, and I was eager to see what his new life was like firsthand.

After graduating from Tufts University, our son had opted to pursue his passion for all things Japanese and spend a year in Tokyo. The plan at first was for him to continue at a language school, but he had soon dropped out of that, realizing, correctly, that the way to learn a language was by hanging out with native speakers. He now had the latest in a string of Japanese girlfriends, friends to go to bars and sing Karaoke with, and was playing first clarinet with a good amateur orchestra. Chris was paying his bills by giving English language lessons, both in schools and privately, and was also working part time in the lab of one of Mike’s closest collaborators. Despite living on a shoestring in the (then) most expensive city in the world, Chris was having a BALL and 

Mike, who was collaborating with several Japanese scientists and had seen Chris on his most recent visit to Tokyo, raised no objections to my going. I had no grant money to pay for my trip, so I arranged to stay with Chris and Mike bought me a ticket to Tokyo via Seoul, Korea. This added about four hours to an already long flight, but in our marriage we had always tried to cut costs, so it didn’t occur to me to protest. Mike also did not offer to drive me to Logan airport and so my departure was a very casual, even cold, affair. I drove to a garage, left the car in a garage in Harvard Square for Mike to pick up, and then schlepped to the airport on the T. My last call to Mike was to tell him where the car was, and it went onto his answering machine. 

So, we two never said to one another “I love you—I will miss you—take care,” --the kind of banalities loving couples habitually say when leaving on separate vacations. This says something about the state of our relationship, and it is a sorrow to me. I did love Mike. I would miss him. More than anything, knowing that he never did, I wanted   him to take care while I was away from him.  I could and should have managed things better. 

I was exhausted when I got off the plane at Narita airport and, instead of finding my son I was greeted by Chris’s Turkish friend from Tufts, Turhan Kanli. Chris, Turhan explained, was rehearsing for the concert his orchestra would give that night and had deputed him to meet me, carry my suitcase, and guide me back to the apartment. Turhan had been in Tokyo only a few days, but he is an exceptionally bright guy and had mastered not only the subway system—the fastest way to get around Tokyo, he correctly assured me—but also the maze of little streets in the suburban district where Chris lived and where we would both be billeted for the next week. 

I use the word “billeted”, with its connotations of barracks life, deliberately. Chris’s “apartment” consisted of an eight tatami mat space (the Japanese measure their apartments in tatami mats). It had a big closed cupboard along one side where all the bedding and Chris’s clothes were stashed, a beaten-earth floor covered with the mats, a sink with cold running water, a small hot plate, an electric tea kettle, a standing electric fan, and a toilet in the shape of a hole in the ground with flush. Also a telephone.

The Tokyo weather was grey, hot, and steamy. I am a very sweaty person and by the time I arrived chez Chris I was dripping, and the ever-obliging Turhan said the thing to do was for us to walk over to the public baths. This proved to be an experience in itself., and, by the time we got back and changed into our concert outfits, I was dripping again as we headed off to the subway and the concert but the next few hours were exhilarating. It was a joy for me to hear Chris play first clarinet in a Brahms concerto, and after the concert we three went out to celebrate with his friends. We ate a lot of food and drank a lot of sake, and we rolled home sometime in the small hours. By this time, I had been on the go for about thirty -six hours. and so, once the futons had emerged from the moldy depths of the cupboard and I had had a quick pee down the hole, I lay down on my mat under the fan next to Chris and Turhan and fell dead asleep. 

A few hours later, I became dimly aware that a telephone rang. Chris answered and then put the receiver in my hand. It was Catherine, sobbing, calling to tell us that Mike was dead. He had gone out that morning to play tennis with our friend Kathy Mockett, had suffered a heart attack on the court, and had died before the ambulance could reach him. Catherine had been serving customers in a little French bakery owned by a friend when Kathy came to tell her what had happened. Showing her mettle, Catherine then elected to make the call to us in Japan, The news was something we had long expected and tried to prepare for, but in vain. We were all three in shock and all Chris and I were able to say to Catherine was, “Hold on, we will be home as soon as we possibly can”. 

Chris’s Tokyo network now sprang into action. His girlfriend came over with croissants and coffee, Turhan made himself unobtrusively useful, and someone got on the phone to the airlines. I put my credit card on the line, no expense spared now, and as I recall we were on a flight home by the evening. There was one connection we had to make and some issue with our tickets, so somewhere, perhaps in California, I remember being in a line to talk to an airline official. We were short of time and Chris asked the couple before us if we could go to the head of the line. “My mother has just lost her husband”, he said, but the husband curtly refused. “God, I hate Americans,” Chris said, which made me even more distraught. Would my son choose to live in Japan?

Sleep has always been a safe haven for me, and a source of strength, and after I arrived home, I was totally exhausted and fell into a deep sleep. After that, more in shock than in mourning, I moved about in a kind of daze and my memory of the next week or ten days is fragmentary. News of Mike’s death had quickly been transmitted to our family in the United Kingdom, and within a day or so our house was full of relatives. My mother-in-law Dorothy Gill arrived, accompanied by Mike’s younger brother Adrian. My parents, Bill and Esme Scobie, flew in along with my sister Rose. Somehow we found beds for them all. Mike’s other brother Andrew came in from Ontario with his wife Maureen and stayed for a few days in a nearby hotel. 

I discovered that, after someone dies, there is a lot to be done and that it helps to be busy. Someone had to make the official identification of the body, and since Chris was coping with stuff like arrangements with the funeral parlor and the obituary in the local newspapers, his friend Ephraim Lassell volunteered to go with me to the morgue. I have no memory of Mike in death. I think I averted my eyes, and just said ‘yes, that is my husband.” It was a good move. My children and I decided to have no ceremony at the crematorium, to hold a formal memorial service as soon as could be arranged, and in the meantime to invite friends to remember Mike in an informal reception in our garden. Our family was not religious and, although I was confirmed in the Anglican faith I had no love of the Anglican funeral service. I have, however, a regard for ritual so I asked my Jewish friends to say Kadish for Mike at the reception. This will seem strange, but back in 1971, when Mike and I had buried our baby daughter Sarah, some of the Jewish students in our Radcliffe dorm had spontaneously gathered over her grave to say Kadish and I had found some peace in that.

Over the following days, I have no memory of cooking anything or making a bed. I think Rose and Adrian between them must have taken on the job of running the household and keeping people fed. It was an immense comfort to me to have my parents and Rose and Adrian with us, and for my children it was an opportunity to get to know these family members better. We worked together as a team, and all would have been love and care and harmony had it not been for Mike’s mother. Dorothy Gill arrived in our house in the role of chief mourner, expecting that her needs and wishes must take precedence over anyone else’s.

This attitude shocked my own family who barely knew Mike’s mother, but, even as if it chafed on me, it did not take me by surprise. From the beginning, I had known that Mike was Dorothy’s favorite son, the sun in her sky. Mike had kept the state of his health from her as much as possible and his death was not just a hideous shock but a devastating blow. In the midst of our grief, my children and I recognized his mother’s sorrow and were ready to support her as we were supporting each other and being supported in our turn by family and friends. The problem was that the empathy seemed to go only in one direction. From the very first day that she and I were introduced, Dorothy Gill had seen me as her rival for Mike’s affections and now she seemed to resent the fact that, as his widow, I was at the center of the attention and care surrounding his sudden death.  

A little background is necessary here. Over the twenty-five years Mike and I were married, Dorothy (as I always called her, never Mum) had a slightly corrosive influence on my relationship with my husband. She was the parent we felt most responsible for, the parent we saw most often, and the parent we found it most difficult to like.  As the joint anniversary celebration of 1990 had shown, my marriage to Mike had begun under the auspices of my parents’ very happy marriage but it had also been marked by the ending of the marriage of Mike’s parents. His father Raymond Gill chose our wedding day in April 1965 to announce that he had moved out of the home and was filing for divorce from Dorothy in order to marry his young colleague Margot Philips. The ensuing divorce was acrimonious and within a year or so Dorothy found herself a divorcee, living alone in small, terraced house in Streatham, just down the hill from the beautiful home she still regarded as hers.  

Over the next years, as a divorced woman living alone, Dorothy asked for and needed more support from Mike and me than either my parents or Ray and Margot. We visited her almost every year, she visited us every two years, getting to know our friends. When Mike had his first heart attack and then needed a triple by- pass operation, Dorothy was able and eager to fly over to take on the household and the two kids as I was working fulltime, and our au pair had deserted us. She was the grandmother my children knew best, and, always favoring boys, she was an especially loving and attentive grandmother to Chris who gave her the name she loved--“Grandee”’