The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Read online

  I always considered myself a seaman of the first order, and it never occurred to me that my experience of the sea had been confined to tranquil oceans farther south, azure and emerald playgrounds for dolphins and humpback whales. This was a sea of ice floes as enormous as New York skyscrapers and vast swells the size of Himalayan mountains. Our ship had buckled and almost broken more than once; everything on the decks not tied down had been swept away and shards of glass and ceramic littered the galley where the cupboards had been forced open. But now it was over, now the small band of us stood on the deck, on the mercifully horizontal deck, as Greenland, great Greenland, land of Eskimos and Vikings, land of ice mountains and majestic peoples, came into view. Thank God we were approaching land. At last.

  “I always rather liked that passage myself,” said a voice from the hall, a low pleasant voice, not at all quavery.

  I was so stunned that I dropped the book and flashed my light every way but the right one.

  “I wrote it, you know,” the voice continued. “I wrote all those books. We thought it was a lark at first, Tommy and I. We would go to the British Library and look up information, or we’d talk to people who really had been to those places. Then we’d go back to our small flat in Bayswater and I’d use all my powers of imagination. It was a lark, but it also paid the bills. Times were hard then.”

  “So you’ve never been to any of these places?” I sat down in a lump on the sofa, hardly able to take it in.

  Constance Root advanced into the sitting room and sat down opposite me. The moonlight gave the room an unearthly cast, but I could see her clearly. Her thin face was tired, yet I noticed she was wearing trousers and a heavy sweater and looked stronger than I remembered.

  “We were poor as church mice. How could we travel?”

  “Why did you use just Tommy’s name?”

  “My family was more respectable than Tommy’s, you see. My father was a vicar in Somerset, and I had five brothers and sisters. They never would have let me go off to Australia on my own, much less Greenland. Tommy had just her brother, who retired from his job in Exeter to Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor. He was much older than Tommy and thought she was rather wild and boyish. It seemed perfectly plausible to him that his sister would spend all her time exploring foreign places.”

  I was still trying to take it in. “And your publishers? Didn’t they ever check?”

  “You must remember, my dear, that in those days there was no television and rather less general knowledge of what places looked like. Tommy found she loved acting the part of intrepid explorer, and our publishers loved it, too. Periodically she’d dress up in khaki and tall leather boots with a riding jacket and a tweed cap and swagger into the staid old office of Chatham and Son with a new manuscript. She refused to have her photograph in the books and, on my suggestion, said she always travelled incognito, in disguise. That was to prevent people in the countries we wrote about from realizing that she had never been there.”

  “But after the books were successful, didn’t you have any desire to actually travel to foreign places?”

  “Tommy did,” said Constance. “But my thought was that neither of us would be able to take the kind of chances I took in the travel books, and that if by any chance we were exposed, it would mean the end of a rather lucrative career.”

  “I thought for a while that you and Tommy Price were the same person,” I said slowly. “And that Tommy had created you as a kind of alter ego, someone to stay at home while she explored the world.”

  “You could just as easily say that I created Tommy Price as my alter ego,” Constance said. “Someone to explore the world for me while I stayed home.”

  My eyes went to the shelves of books in their faded bindings. How many happy days I’d passed reading about Tommy Price’s adventures. And now it turned out they were bogus.

  “It must have been hard for you when the books began to be reprinted,” I said. “And suddenly the world discovered Tommy Price again.”

  “Things had not gone so well with us in the last twenty years,” Constance said, with lips pinched. “Sometimes it seemed as if Tommy had come to believe my stories about her. There were periods when she spent most of her time walking over the moors; and other times when she gave out that she was on a trip but stayed home and inside, expecting me to wait on her hand and foot. When the books began to be reprinted, at first I was happy, for it would be more income. But then I realized what it was going to be like living with her.”

  “Now you have the income, but no Tommy Price to worry you,” I said. “I know she left everything to you in her will.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “I’m curious about one thing,” I said. “Why Tommy invited me here to visit.”

  “I didn’t know she had until you turned up. It was rather unexpected, to say the least.” Constance’s wrinkled old face looked quite ghostly now, and evil, as if she were a Dartmoor pixie come back in human shape. No time to turn my jacket inside out now, either. “Perhaps Tommy had begun to be afraid of me and wanted a witness,” Constance said, so cold-bloodedly that I couldn’t help shivering. I remembered the toughness of her books. She hadn’t hesitated to shoot imaginary tigers or draw her gun against rampaging kangaroos. Why would she stop at murder?

  “And that ticket to Burma?”

  “I bought it for myself, as a kind of reward, I suppose. I had always wanted to see the pagodas of Burma. But when I arrived at Heathrow on December second, I realized that such a trip was impossible for me. The years when I could have enjoyed it were long over. I passed two not very agreeable weeks at a bed and breakfast in Bournemouth and returned home earlier this evening. I’ll spend the rest of my life here”—Constance’s mouth twisted, ironically or cruelly, I couldn’t tell—“answering fan mail for Tommy.”

  “And when did you push Tommy into the bog and hold her down? Was she drugged? Was the car that passed me that afternoon on the road your car, and were you driving her unconscious body to the moor and the bog? How did you manage it?”

  “My dear Cassandra,” Constance said distantly. “Tommy Price’s death was accidental, as the coroner ruled. Everyone knows that Tommy loved the moors, and that the ground can be treacherously unstable. Why don’t we just say that Tommy Price had the death she deserved: quick and dramatic.”

  “I think I had better tell someone,” I said.

  “No, you won’t, my dear. You won’t be believed, you know. Leave it as it is, and you’ll be far more comfortable. You’re only a tourist to the land of murder and I, after all this time, am now a traveller there.”

  Murder at the International Feminist Book Fair

  “DEE!” I CALLED TO the woman in the pegboard exhibit stand, the small freckled woman with a round green cap who was staring a little woefully around her at unopened cardboard boxes.

  “Cassandra Reilly, my girl!” She fell into my arms. “It’s been years.”

  “Was it Manila or Auckland?”

  “Manila,” she said. “I missed Auckland. And now here we are at Vladivostok. Who could have imagined it?”

  “Thank goodness for glasnost.” I began to help her unpack the boxes. “Still just doing Canadian authors?”

  “It’s all you can get money for,” she said. “Though of course as a loyal Canadian I’m convinced our writers are the best.” She taped up a photograph of Serena Wood, Coastal Editions’ star author. Back in the 1970s she had written a book on log cabin building for women, and it was still selling. “I thought they might be interested in this in Siberia,” Dee said hopefully. “That’s around here someplace isn’t it?”

  “Farther south, I think,” I said, shivering slightly.

  “How about you?” Dee asked. “Still doing Spanish translation? Still living in London? I don’t know how you stand the place.”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” I said. “I’m hardly ever there, anyway. I just came back from six months in Latin America.” I swung my briefcase for her to see. It was packed with manu
scripts and books that I hoped to foist on reluctant publishers. “I’m on a translation panel tomorrow. One of my authors, Luisa Montiflores, is here. She’s a depressed Uruguayan, very famous in some circles. Actually, I have to meet her now. Can we get together for lunch tomorrow?”

  “Great.”

  The fair began with a flourish of speeches in Russian, English, with simultaneous translation into French, Spanish, Catalan, and Croatian. I looked around for a couple of hours and chatted with friends and acquaintances. Then I made my way over to Dee’s stand, which now had, like all the others, a number and a sign printed by the Russian organizers. CAOSTAL EDITIONS. Well, it was close.

  When I arrived, a tall woman in a black skirt, black leather jacket, black scarf, black boots, and black hat was haranguing Dee in an upperclass British accent.

  “But my books do extremely well in England,” she was saying. “My last novel was about a woman who left her husband for another woman, and it received very good reviews in the Observer and the Times.” She pulled a clipping from her Filofax and read: ‘Mrs. Horsey-Smythe treats this subject subtly and maturely, with none of the po-faced humorlessness characteristic of the so-called lesbian novel.’ So, you see, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t do well in America. My agent doesn’t understand why…”

  “I’m sure your book is just wonderful,” said Dee insincerely, “but, as I’ve been trying to tell you, I’m not an American publisher. Oh, Cassandra, hello!” She looked relieved to see me. “This is Felicity Horsey-Smythe. Cassandra Reilly. Cassandra lives in London too. Peckham or someplace, isn’t it?”

  Felicity gave me a smile the shape of a fingernail clipping and, pretending to see a dear friend across the hall, escaped.

  “Don’t say Peckham in public,” I warned her. “Anyway, it was East Dulwich. But now I’ve moved. My bassoonist friend Nicola has offered me an attic room in the house she shares in Hampstead.”

  But Dee wasn’t really listening. “Do you think I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life explaining to people that Canada is not a state of America? It even happened when the fair was held in Montreal. Felicity is fucking English—didn’t she learn any geography?”

  “Probably not in ballet school or wherever she went,” I comforted Dee. “Can you leave your stand or should I get some food and bring it back?”

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “The public doesn’t come ’til two. I’m going to need all my strength to deal with the Rooskies.”

  “Has it been hard getting here?” I said. “These things are so easy for me. I just fly in and out.”

  “It gets harder every year to leave Vancouver,” Dee said. “I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a jet-setting feminist.”

  “What? And miss out on all the gossip?” We went past the British women’s presses, and I waved to a friend of mine at Sheba. “That’s what these things are really about. Remember a few years ago?”

  Dee’s blue eyes began to sparkle. “The showdown between the Northern and Southern hemispherists?”

  “Or Oslo?”

  “It stayed light too late was the problem. It went to people’s heads.”

  We laughed. “What about this year?” I asked. “Heard anything scandalous yet?”

  Dee thought. “Well. You-know-who is here from Germany again…and…Oh, I know. Lulu Britten’s got a stand.”

  “Lulu Britten?”

  “The editor of Trash Out.”

  “Oh, really,” I said. “That should provoke a few fireworks.”

  As an American expatriate, I was usually a little behind the times, but even I’d heard of the New York-based Trash Out: A Journal for Contentious Feminists. It was a forty-page monthly, stapled, on newsprint, with a glossy cover usually featuring someone in the women’s community. Gloria, Rita Mae, Lily, Martina had been among the faces to appear on the cover. Inside was a lengthy (negative) assessment of their writing, performance, and lifestyle, spiced with innuendo and rude remarks from unnamed sources. CIA connections, drinking and drug bouts, hysterical displays of temper, peculiar sexual tastes, and, most of all, the hypocrisy of their moral public pronouncements contrasted with their sordid personal lives. It was hot and it was nasty. But that wasn’t all.

  In addition to the “profiles” of infamous feminists, Trash Out also offered blow-by-blow accounts of women’s conferences rather in the manner of off our backs. The difference was that Trash Out rarely reported what went on during the panels and plenaries, instead giving the full treatment to cruel remarks and furious behind-the-scenes dissension. The journal also had a lengthy review section where critics slandered and dismissed feminist authors, musicians, and artists.

  Feminism is in many ways a literary movement, so it wasn’t surprising that Trash Out concentrated on well-known authors, nor that it had been able to exploit a market hungry for the low-down on mentors who had gotten too famous. The journal gave a voice to critics who were tired of being forced to at least appear to be giving a balanced assessment of writers’ work and allowed the personal life of the writer to come in for as much dirt as possible. Yet the profiles, conference reports, and reviews were only part of Trash Out’s appeal. Many of its readers couldn’t have cared less why such and such famous authors fell out, or why a certain author was no longer publishing with a certain press. What the average reader looked forward to every month was the letters section where any feminist could write and complain about her sisters.

  Once we had “criticism/self-criticism,” the Maoist-inspired exchange that used to come at the end of bruising political meetings. The “Trash Box” section of Trash Out was a little like that—but without the self-criticism. Women wrote in to detail the wrongs that had been done to them by ex-lovers, political enemies, feminist publishers, recording companies, theaters and galleries, and by their mothers and former best friends. In her editorials, Lulu justified this massive mud-slinging (and counter mud-slinging, because almost everybody wanted to reply) as “cathartic.”

  “For too long,” she wrote, “we have been silenced by the false claims of sisterhood. We cannot live in the rarefied air of feminist solidarity. Our divisions are too deep to be mended, too harsh to be smoothed over. Only by speaking of our differences can we move forward…”

  I said to Dee, “Do you think Lulu is here gathering dirt on the book fair for the journal?”

  “No doubt. We’d better lie low,” she laughed.

  “Oh, we’re too insignificant for her. She’s never trashed anyone outside America, has she?”

  “Margaret Atwood. Though possibly she thought she was American,” said Dee. “Maybe I should sic her on Felicity Horsey-Smythe. After all, there is a certain prestige attached to being on the cover of Trash Out. It means you’re important enough to criticize.”

  “It’s funny, now that I think about it,” I said. “Not only has the journal never had a non-American woman on the cover, it’s never had a woman of color. Either Lulu has decided that women of color are out of bounds, or she’s racist enough not to think they’re important enough to trash.”

  “Maybe she’s planning to remedy that. Look over there.” Dee pointed across the central courtyard to where a couple of black women stood talking. Close enough to overhear, but not to be obvious, was a chunky white woman with glasses and a funny kind of topknot. She was swathed in as many scarves as a fortune teller, and her long, multicolored skirt reached her ankles. She was sucking on the tip of a pen and regarding the two women avidly.

  “The woman on the right is Simone Jefferson,” said Dee, “and Madame Zelda over there is Lulu.”

  “So you think Simone’s her next victim?” It would make sense. With a brilliant first novel and a book of essays just out this year, Simone was already being compared to Alice Walker. She looked very young next to the older woman, a writer I recognized from Nigeria. “Do you think we should warn her?”

  “Just a word maybe,” said Dee. “Not that Lulu lets much of anything get in her way. She went to law scho
ol and knows the libel laws backward and forward.”

  The cafeteria was serving some kind of goulash. In front of us, a woman named Darcy Joanne from a feminist press in Santa Cruz, California was making a big deal about vegetarian food to the woman behind the counter.

  “Macro-bi-otic,” she repeated. “You know—tofu? Tempe? Nori? What about just some brown rice and broccoli?”

  The thickset Russian woman stared at her and continued to hold out the goulash.

  With a sigh Darcy took it. “Nobody thinks about the culinary aspects of where we hold these things,” she complained to us. “God, remember Oslo? Twenty bucks for a seafood salad that turned out to be covered with artificial crab meat.” Without a change in her voice, she went on, “These Russians. Have you met that poet Olga Stanislavkigyovitch or something? She’s been pestering me all morning to publish a book of her poems.”

  “No,” said Dee feelingly. “But I had some French deconstructionist yammering away at me for an hour about translating her book.”

  “Honestly,” said Darcy, moving away to join a group from the States. “Everybody knows translations don’t sell.”

  Later that day, after I’d spent an exhausting hour on the translation panel and an even more punishing hour in the company of Luisa Montiflores going over the reasons why her latest book had sold so badly in England, I stopped by Dee’s stand to see how she was getting on. A very attractive young Russian woman was making her case to Dee.