The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (7 page)

Alas, any new phenomenon is likely to become an old phenomenon soon and thus no phenomenon at all. It never occurred to Andrea that the feminist detective was a bit of a fad and that, like all fads in a consumer culture, its shelf life was limited. Oh, Andrea and her detective, London PI Philippa Fanthorpe, had tried. They had taken on new social topics—the animal rights movement, the leaky nuclear plants on the Irish Sea—but the reviews were no longer so positive. Too “rhetorical,” too “issue-oriented,” too “strident,” the critics wrote wearily. The fact that Andrea couldn’t write a sex scene to save her life led to a further decline in sales at a time when women’s erotica filled the bookstores, and Andrea retired for good to Dorset.

“Cassandra, it’s shocking how this is being reported,” she announced as we sat down in the tiny parlor. She took off her safari hat and her gray curls bristled. “Peter Putter is here giving interviews to the BBC news every few hours. And now the Americans have gotten wind of it. CNN is here and I’ve heard that Diane Sawyer is arriving tomorrow.”

“Well, Francine Crofts was born in America,” I said. “And that’s where a lot of her papers are, aren’t they?”

“Yes, everything that Putter couldn’t get his hands on is there.”

“I read somewhere that he destroyed her last journal and the manuscript of a novel she was working on.”

“Oh, yes, it’s true. He couldn’t stand the idea of anything bad about himself coming to the public’s attention.”

“Any chance he could have removed the bones himself?” I asked.

Andrea nodded. “Oh, I would say there’s a very good chance indeed. All this rowing over her headstone has not been good publicity for our Peter Putter. It puts him in a bad light, keeps bringing back the old allegations that he was responsible in great measure for Francine’s death. It’s quite possible, I think, that he began to read about the appearance of all these new blue plaques and thought to himself, ‘Right. I’ll get rid of the grave entirely, blame it on the radical feminists, and there’ll be an end to it.’ I’m sure he’s sorry he ever thought to bury the body here in the first place and to put ‘Putter’ at the end of her name. But he can’t back down now, so the only solution was to arrange for the bones to disappear.”

“I don’t suppose we could go over to the graveyard and have a look?”

Andrea peered out her small-paned front window. “We’ll go when it’s quieter. Let’s have our tea first.”

We had our tea, lavish with Devonshire cream and fresh scones, and then Andrea went off for a brief lie-down and I, left to my own resources in the parlor, went to the bookcase and found the volume of Crofts’s most celebrated poems.

They struck me with the same power as they had when I had read them twenty years before, especially the poems written at the very end—when, translucent from rage and hunger, Francine had struck out repeatedly at the ties that bound her to this earth and that man. Even as she was starving herself to death in the most barbaric and self-punishing way, she still could write like an avenging angel.

Around five, when the autumn mists had drifted down over the small village in the valley, Andrea roused herself and we walked across the road to the tiny churchyard of St. Stephen’s. The small church was from the thirteenth century and no longer in use; its front door was chained and padlocked. The churchyard was desolate as well, under the purple twilight sky, and covered with leaves damp from rain. It was enclosed on all sides by a low stone wall and shielded by enormous oaks. We went in through the creaking gate. The ground was trampled with footprints, and many of the graves were untended.

I could barely see my feet in front of me through the cold, wet mist, but Andrea led the way unerringly to a roped-off hole. There had been no effort to cover the grave back over, and dirt had been heaped hastily by its side.

It had the effect of eerie loneliness and ruthless desecration, and even Andrea, creator of the cool-headed Philippa Fanthorpe, seemed disturbed.

“You can see they didn’t have much time,” she murmured.

Suddenly we heard a noise. It was the gate creaking. Without a word Andrea pulled me away from the grave and around the side of the church. Someone was approaching the site of the theft, a woman with a scarf, heavy coat, and Wellington boots. She stood silently by the open grave a moment. And then we heard her begin to cry.

Ten minutes later we were warming ourselves in the local pub, The King’s Head. A few journos were there, soaking up the local color—the color in this case being the golden yellow of lager. Andrea bought me a half of bitter and herself a pint of ale, and we seated ourselves in a corner by the fireplace. The woman in the churchyard had left as quickly as she had come. We were debating who she could be when the door to the pub opened and a paunchy man in his fifties came in, wearing a tweed jacket and carrying a walking stick.

“That’s how he dresses in the country,” Andrea muttered. “Sodding old fart.”

It was Putter, I assumed, and I had to admit that there was a certain cragginess to his face that must have once been appealing. If I had been a lonely American working at a publishing house as a secretary in the early 1960s, perhaps I, too, would have been flattered if Chatup and Windows’s rising male author had shown an interest in
me
and asked
me
if I’d like to do a spot of typing for him. Putter’s first novel,
The Man in the Looking Glass
, had been published to enormous acclaim, and he was working on his second. An authentic working-class writer (his father was actually a bank clerk, but he kept that quiet)—who would have guessed that this voice of the masses would eventually degenerate into a very minor novelist known mostly for his acerbic reviews of other people’s work in the
Sunday Telegraph
? Poor Francine. When she was deserted by her young husband, with just one book of poetry published to very little acclaim at all, she had no idea that within two years their roles would have completely reversed. Peter Putter would in the years to come be most famous for having been Francine Crofts’s husband.

“I wish it were possible to have a certain sympathy for him,” Andrea said gruffly, downing the last of her ale. “After all, we both know what it is to experience the fickleness of public attention.”

I went up to the bar to order us another round and heard Putter explaining loudly to the journos, “It’s an outrage. Her married name was Francine Putter and that’s how I planned to have the stone engraved in the first place. I only added Crofts because I knew what she had brought off in that name, and I wished in some small way to honor it. But the radical feminists aren’t satisfied. Oh, no. It didn’t satisfy them to vandalize the headstone over and over; they had to actually violate a sanctified grave and steal Francine’s remains. No regard for me or her family, no regard for the church, no regard for her memory. God only knows what they plan to use her bones for. One shudders to think. Goddess rituals or some sort of black magic.”

“You’re suggesting a Satanic cult got hold of Francine?” a journo asked, and I could see the story in the
Daily Mail
already.

“Wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” Putter said, and he bought a round for all the newspapermen.

I returned to Andrea. “If you were a radical feminist and/or Satanic cultist, how would you have stolen the bones?”

She glowered at Putter. “It was probably dead easy. Drive over from London in a minivan, or even a car with a large boot. Maybe two of you. In the hours before dawn. One keeps watch and the other digs. The wooden casket has disintegrated in twenty years. You carefully lay the bones in a sheet—so they don’t rattle around too much—wrap the whole thing up in a plastic bag, and Bob’s your uncle!”

I shuddered. Blue plaques were one thing, but grave robbery and bone-snatching, even in the cause of justified historical revisionism, were quite another.

“Why not just another gravestone, this time with the words Francine Crofts?”

“Do you really think Putter”—Andrea shot him a vicious look—“would allow such a stone to stand? No, I’m sure whoever did it plans to rebury her.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked. “Maybe they’ll just chip off pieces of bone and sell them at American women’s studies conferences.”

“Don’t be medieval,” Andrea said absently. “No, I think it’s likely they might choose a site on the farm not far from here where Francine and Peter lived during the early days of their marriage. The poems from that period are the lyrical ones, the happy ones. A simple monument on the top of a hill: Francine Crofts, Poet.” Andrea looked up from her pint and turned to me in excitement. “That’s it. We’ll stake the farm out; we’ll be the first to discover the monument. Maybe we’ll catch them in the act of putting it up.”

“What good would that do?”

“Don’t be daft,” she admonished me. “It’s publicity, isn’t it?”

Andrea wanted to rush right over to the farm, but when we came outside the pub the fog was so thick and close that we decided to settle in for the night instead. I went to up the guest room under the eaves with a hot-water bottle and Crofts’s
Collected Poems
. I’d forgotten she had been happy until Andrea reminded me. Her memory was so profoundly imbued with her manner of dying and with her violent despair that it was hard to think of her as celebrating life and love. But here were poems about marriage, about the farm, about animals and flowers. It made one pause: if she had married a faithful and loving man, perhaps her poetry would have stayed cheerful and light. Perhaps Putter did make her what she was, a poet of genius; perhaps it was right that he still claimed her by name. But no—here were the last poems in that first collection, the ones that had been called pre-feminist, protofeminist, and even Ur-feminist. Some critics now argued that if only Francine had lived to see the women’s movement, her anger would have had a context; she wouldn’t have turned her fury at being abandoned against herself and seen herself a failure. But other critics argued that it was clear from certain poems, even early ones, that Francine understood her predicament quite well and was constantly searching for ways out. And they quoted the poem about Mary Anning, the early nineteenth-century fossil collector who was the first to discover the remains of an ichthyosaurus in Lyme Regis, not far from here, in 1811. It was called “Freeing the Bones.”

The next morning Andrea and I drove over to the farm and skirted the hedges around it looking for a spot that the unknown gravediggers might decide was suitable for a memorial of some sort.

“This is such a long shot,” I said. “But isn’t it quite possible that some Americans were involved and that they’ve taken the remains back to America? Wasn’t she from Iowa? They’ll bury them in Cedar Rapids.”

“Francine would hate that if she knew,” said Andrea. “She was such an Anglophile that she couldn’t wait to get out of Cedar Rapids. It was the pinnacle of happiness for her to study at Oxford and then to get a job here afterward. No one, not even her family, tried to make a case for sending her bones back to Iowa.”

The farm was owned by an absentee landlord; it was solitary and lovely on this mid-autumn day. We broke through a weak hedge and tramped the land, settling on one or two likely little rises where the monument might go. Francine’s spirit seemed all about us that afternoon, or perhaps it was just because I’d been reading her poetry. It would be nice if she were reburied out here in the open, rather than in that dank little closed-in churchyard. I imagined picnics and poetry readings under the oak trees. With bowls of food left on the grave to feed her starved soul.

Late in the afternoon we returned to the village and decided to have tea in Francine’s sister-in-law’s tea shop. It had occurred to me that perhaps it had been Jane Fitzwater crying at Francine’s grave last night.

The Cozy Cup Tea Shop was packed with journalists, however, and one look at Jane was enough to convince me that it had not been she in the dowdy coat and Wellingtons. Jane, a bit younger than her brother, was less craggy but still imposing, with bleached blond hair and a strong jaw that gave her the look of a female impersonator. Her dress was royal blue and so was her eye shadow—coordinated, no doubt, for the cameras.

She barely gave Andrea and me a second glance when we entered but consigned us to an out-of-the-way table and a waitress who looked to be only about twelve and who brought us very weak tea, stale scones, and whipped cream instead of clotted cream.

“
Whipped
cream?” said Andrea severely to the little waitress, who hunched her shoulders and scurried away.

Jane Fitzwater had seated herself at a table of journalists and was holding forth in quite loud tones on the absolutely undeserved amount of publicity that Francine had gotten through her death. “I say, if you’re unhappy, take a course in weaving or a holiday abroad. Don’t stew in your own self-pity. And I tried to tell Francine that. All marriages go through difficult times, but Peter would have come back to her eventually. Men will be men. Instead she had to hide away in that little flat of hers and stop eating. Oh, I tried to talk to her, I even brought her a casserole one day—I could see she’d gotten thinner—but it never occurred to me, and I’m sure it never occurred to Peter, that she was deliberately trying to starve herself to death. And then he gets all the blame. It’s made a broken man of him, you know. Never recovered from the shock of it, he hasn’t. Ruined his career, his life. She should have thought of that when she did it, but no, always thinking of herself, that’s how she was right from the beginning. My mum and dad noticed it right off. ‘Seems a little full of herself,’ my dad said the first time Peter brought her to Dorset. ‘Talks too much.’ My mum felt sorry for her, of course. Francine didn’t have a clue about life, really, her head was in the clouds. ‘It will end in tears,’ my mum said. And she was right.”

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Andrea muttered to me. “Or it will end in something redder than tears.”

We left the tea shop and strolled through the village, which was scattered with posh cars and vans emblazoned with the logos of television stations, native and foreign. Peter Putter was over in the churchyard giving an interview to what appeared to be a German film crew.