live with them, 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!52
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 the truth.’ As a result of this experience, she now advises, ‘Love isn’t everything. Marry a man you can respect and admire. Love will come.’
In order to preserve Nan’s marriage, and indeed in order to prevent three generations of her family becoming homeless, Hannah enlists the assistance of Nell, who is asked to lie for her sister and claim that Nan in fact stayed overnight with her after dining with Sir Peter. This is ‘the Lie’ of the title. It is believed that this plan will work, because of John’s apparent affinity with Nell. Hannah persuades Nell with the forceful argument, ‘I believe with all my heart and soul, that in every life there comes a moment, one supreme and all powerful moment, when we hold our fate in our hands, to decide our entire life for good or evil! Nell! Don’t let this moment pass by!’
The whole drama is played out in the course of one evening – ‘one never knows what a day might bring forth’ is a repeated line in the play – and the tension that Agatha builds as the various revelations unfold in a suburban front room over a matter of hours is skilfully sustained. The final scene is brilliantly dramatic as, with the disgraced Nan upstairs in her room, Nell faces her brother-in-law to tell him ‘the Lie’. His astonishing response, having seen through and dismissed Nell’s fiction for the attempt to protect her sister that it is, is to declare his secret love for Nell – which is clearly reciprocated as they embrace and ‘he kisses her long and passionately’.
Rather than John divorcing Nan for her infidelity, Nell and John vow to elope and allow Nan to divorce him, so that the shame of her own indiscretion is thereby not revealed. ‘Let the disgrace be ours,’ says Nell, ‘We’re doing a far worse thing than she has done.’ At this moment Nan walks in and, oblivious to developments between her husband and her sister (of which she continues to remain blissfully ignorant), falls to her knees, confesses her infidelity and begs John to forgive her. In a final twist, Nell fights her sister’s corner and begs John to return to the realities of married life rather than pursuing the fantasy of what might have been, echoing her mother’s words: ‘A moment comes to everyone – a moment when they hold their life in their hands … Sometimes – it’s not only one life there might be three – three lives and we hold them all! It’s our moment!’
John is persuaded to forgive his wife and is reconciled with her, forgoing the possibility of a relationship with the younger Nell, and unwittingly echoing his mother-in-law, ‘We’ll both start again, Nan – together … Someday – who knows? – happiness may come …’ In the final moments of the play Nell is left alone on the stage, repeating John’s words:
Someday – who knows? – happiness may come … Someday … (she stands over the lamp, preparing to blow it out. In a final tone of doubt and wonder.) Someday? (she blows out the lamp. The stage is in darkness. Curtain.)
This play is about many things: infidelity and divorce, sisterly and motherly love, and the familiar Christie theme of choosing between the excitement of dangerous, passionate love and the perceived tedium of steady commitment. One thing it may at first not appear to be about is incest.
However, as with all things Christie it is important to set the subject matter in context. In 1907, the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act had ended decades of controversy by allowing widowers to marry the sister of their deceased spouse. This form of marital union had been made illegal in 1835, and remained a topic of lively debate, both inside and outside Parliament, throughout the Victorian period. The controversy centred around the effects of sexual desire on the purity of the English family, not to mention the ability of government to legislate on issues of morality, control individual behaviour and regulate the family. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the relationship between sisters was used to make the domestic sphere part of the public, political world. The sisterly bond was used by politicians as the catalyst for discussions about marriage, the sanctity of family life and even threats to the authority of the Church of England. The issue even merits a mention in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe (1882); when Strephon is sent by the Queen of the Fairies to stir up Parliament, one of his tasks is to ‘prick that annual blister, Marriage with deceased wife’s sister’. In the end, the change in law was to an extent an acknowledgement of the status quo. It was common in the nineteenth century for single women to move in with a sister’s family and assist with the raising of the children; and it was a small logical step, at least in nineteenth-century terms, for that role to be formalised in the event of the married sister’s death.53
The Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act, however, permitted only what was referred to in its somewhat convoluted title. It was not until the 1960 Marriage (Enabling) Act that a man could marry his former wife’s sister whether that wife was ‘living or not’. So, when Christie started writing her autobiography in 1950, she might well still have regarded the relationship between John and Nell as ‘incestuous’ (although there are wider theological issues here that we need not concern ourselves with). Readers who have been paying close attention to the intricate legislative subplot of this chapter will note that, prior to 1923, the ‘incestuous’ nature of John’s relationship with Nell may well have assisted Nan in obtaining a divorce from him. Meanwhile, John and Nell discuss fleeing the country, perhaps not only in order to escape the scandal but possibly also so that they can marry, once his divorce comes through, without the requirement for Nan to be ‘deceased’.
Christie underlines this theme in the play when John declares to Nell, ‘I love you – and you love me – Oh! Why did I marry Nan? Nan – when you were there, growing up day by day, from childhood to womanhood … You! My Nell!’ He goes on to refer to her as his ‘little sister’, asserting ‘I look upon you as my sister’ and ‘Haven’t I always been a brother to you?’ Further emphasis is given to the relationship between John and his sister-in-law by a change in title in the second draft from The Lie to The Sister-In-Law.54 I prefer the original. All of this,
