The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Read online

  “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.

  “It’s enough to make one lose one’s appetite entirely,” Andrea said and slammed the door to her little cottage.

  That night I was awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of a car driving down the road to the village. Normally it would not have been anything to wake up to, but I had a sudden odd feeling that it was the car I’d borrowed to come here. I staggered over to the little garret window, but saw nothing. I crept down the steep stairs and peeked into Andrea’s room.

  She was not there.

  I went out the back door and saw that the small Ford was gone.

  Since Andrea didn’t have a car, I supposed she’d taken mine. Perhaps she’d decided to visit the farm by herself to stake out the gravediggers; perhaps she’d heard someone else’s car driving down the road and decided to follow it. Whatever my suppositions, my actions we
re limited. The farm was a good four miles away, it was raining, and—I finally looked at the clock—four in the morning. I got dressed just to keep warm and paced around a bit, then remembered that Andrea had a bicycle out in the shed behind the cottage. With the feeling that there was nothing else to do, I steeled myself for cold and rain and set off into the dark night.

  With water streaming down my face, I pedaled furiously, wondering why roads that always seemed to be perfectly flat when you drove over them by car suddenly developed hills and valleys when you were travelling by bicycle. Still the cold rain gave me an incentive for speed, and I arrived at the farm in record time. There were no cars at the side road leading to the farmhouse, so I got off the bike and began to reconnoiter on foot around the hedges. There must be another road leading to the farm, but I would waste more time looking for it than going on foot.

  By this time my clothes were soaked and my boots caked with mud. I tried to retrace the steps Andrea and I had taken the day before, but in the darkness it was hard to see the difference between land and sky, much less between a rise and fall in the earth. Then, through the hedges, I saw a small light. I broke through and started staggering over the land toward it. It was joined by another small light.

  The lights seemed to be dancing together, or were they struggling? One of the lights vanished. I began to hear voices. Had Andrea discovered the perpetrators; was she fighting with them?

  But then I heard a voice I thought I recognized. “Put those bones down! I’ll have you in court for this. Grave robbing is a criminal offense as well as a sin!”

  “What you did to Francine is a sin and a crime,” another even more familiar voice shot back. “Give me back my shovel. She deserves to have a better resting place than the one you gave her.”

  “I was her husband, I have a right to decide where she’s buried.”

  “You gave up your rights long ago.”

  Then there was only the sound of grunts as they grappled again.

  “Peter,” I said. “Andrea. Stop this. Stop this right now!”

  I picked up one of the flashlights and shone it at each of their faces in turn. “What’s going on here?”

  “I suspected her right from the beginning,” said Peter, looking like a large wet muskrat in his brown oilskin jacket. “I’ve been keeping an eye on her. Lives right across from the churchyard; easy enough to break into the grave. Tonight I heard the car starting up and decided to follow her. Called the journalists first, they’ll be here in a minute. You’ll go to jail for this, Addlepoot!”

  “Oh, Cassandra,” groaned Andrea. “I’m sorry. I had it planned so differently.”

  But she didn’t have time to exonerate herself. The journalists were suddenly on us like a pack of hounds; there were bright lights everywhere, illuminating a stone marker that said FRANCINE CROFTS, POET and a muddy sheet piled, haphazardly, with thin white bones.

  Some weeks after this, when I was back in London, Andrea came up to see me. If it hadn’t been for the surprising intercession of Mrs. Putter, Peter’s mother (for she had been the woman we’d seen crying at the grave), Andrea would have been on trial now. As it was, Francine’s bones were back in the churchyard of St. Stephen’s, and Andrea had closed up her cottage and was thinking of moving back to London.

  “I didn’t have completely ignoble motives,” she said. “I always did believe that Francine deserved better than a Putterized headstone or no headstone in a grim little grave under the eye of people who had hated her. But I have to admit that I saw an opportunity. When the blue plaques started to appear, I thought, why not? Someone’s bound to do it, why not me? I wouldn’t say I was the one who’d done it, of course. I’d steal the bones, rebury them, erect a marker and then—with you as a witness—I’d discover the new site and let the media know. It would have been the best kind of publicity, for me and for Francine. I would have solved a mystery, my name would be back in the news, my publisher might decide to reissue my books…but instead…”

  “Instead the newspapers called you a grave robber and filled the pages of the tabloids with photos that made you look like a refugee from Nightmare on Elm Street. And they spelled your name wrong.”

  Andrea shuddered. “I’m going to have to put all this behind me. Start over. Science fiction perhaps. Or why not feminist horror? Skeletons that walk in the night, the ghosts of Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Brontë that haunt us still today…”

  “I did read in the newspaper today,” I interrupted, “that the owner of the farm has decided to put up a marker to Francine himself, and to open the farm up to readings and poetry workshops. Apparently he’s something of an artist himself, in addition to being a stockbroker. He said he never knew that Francine had lived there. So something good came of it.”

  Andrea cheered up. “And Putter didn’t look so terribly fabulous in those photographs either.”

  We started to laugh, embarrassed at first, and then with gasping and teary amusement, recalling our wet night in the mud.

  Then we went out for a walk to look at some of the blue plaques that had gone up recently. For, you see, the remembering and honoring hadn’t stopped.

  There were now more blue plaques to women than ever.

  Belladonna

  I.

  It is over a year since I spent the day with you on your lovely island. I remember it all very vividly…

  —Georgia O’Keefe,

  letter to her hosts on Maui

  FOR A LONG TIME I turned up my nose at Hawaii. The very name reeked of junior-high talent shows where pimpled hula dancers tried to keep their cellophane skirts up and their flowery wreaths from falling into their eyes. Luaus with barbecued pigs, tiny paper umbrellas decorating tall, lethally sweet cocktails, muscular tanned youths with surfboards, Waikiki, Gidget, Magnum P.I.—those are the images that came to mind when people said, “You’ve never been to Hawaii? You’ve never been to Hawaii, and you’ve been to Patagonia and the Ivory Coast?”

  But that’s the point. We who call ourselves travellers are snobs of the worst kind. We would much prefer to be wildly uncomfortable on the cushionless seats of a bus in Bangladesh or a train traversing the Gobi Desert, moving slowly through some strange desolate landscape and either feeling boiling hot or freezing cold, with nothing to eat, no toilet paper, and nothing to read, surrounded by hostile people who don’t speak our language and perhaps want to convert us to their religion or to steal all our money, than to do anything so gauche as to enjoy ourselves in any sort of tropical paradise, particularly if it means that another Westerner, a mere tourist, might be anywhere in sight.

  Luisa Montiflores, the gloomy and recondite Uruguayan novelist, was not of the same opinion. She had just spent three “cold like hell” winter months as a writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto and wanted to recuperate on the Hawaiian islands. And she wanted me, as her translator, “my friend,” to join her.

  Luisa had once been my protégé, but over the years, the situation had reversed itself. I had been a lone voice championing her difficult, deconstructionist novels, sending sample translations of her work to publishers and writing articles that proclaimed her originality. Now I had lost interest in her work, just as academics and the literary elite were discovering her peculiar blend of poetry and self-pity. Although I suspected that hardly a thousand people in the English-speaking world could have read her work, Luisa attracted honors, grants, stipends, symposia, and residencies all over the world.

  “All, all I owe to you,” she often said. “I am loyal, you see,” and to prove it she frequently stipulated that a translator’s salary be part of her agreements. From Stockholm to Adelaide we had travelled the globe together, and if it had truly been my goal in life to be Luisa’s literary factotum, I’d have been ecstatic.

  We had just been to the University of Hawaii in Honolulu where Luisa gave a seminar talk on the new Latin American fiction, which was, strangely enough, only about her fiction. Now we were in Maui, where Luisa planned to sta
y a month to put the final touches on her latest novel, and talk to me about translating it. We were staying with Claudie, a friend of Luisa’s who was an art dealer in Lahaina.

  “When Gloria de los Angeles goes to give a talk, they do not ask her about my work. Why do they ask me about her?” Luisa glared at me. “I still do not understand, Cassandra, how you can also translate her. That idiot and her magic realism. I spit on her magic realism.”

  “You’re writing for different audiences,” I soothed her. “Believe me, your work and hers cannot even be discussed in the same breath. Do you think the most brilliant minds of Spanish language departments are impressed by her writing? I can tell you, Luisa: they laugh at her. Simply laugh at her and shrug their shoulders. But when they say Luisa Montiflores, they bow their heads in respect.”

  We were sitting on a terrace overlooking Claudie’s magnificent garden of ginger, hibiscus, and trailing orchids in the warm, sweet-scented evening. I had managed to keep up my anti-tropical-paradise attitude through this morning’s arrival at the Honolulu airport, with its refrigerated leis and prêt-à-porter pineapples. But by the time the day was over, I was half-converted, and by the time our plane had taken us through an indigo and passion fruit sunset to Maui an hour ago, I was babbling like an idiot. “Just look at that surf! And look, palm trees swaying in the wind!”

  Luisa looked slightly mollified; she stroked the white streak in her sleeked-back dark hair. As usual she managed, in her Oxford shirt and loose slacks, to appear both careless about her clothes and impossibly elegant. I attributed it to the good posture she’d acquired at her Swiss boarding school.

  “Everyone is reading Gloria de los Angeles,” she said, but with a slight smile now. “Every airport I am in, I see her books. Pah! She is a fool. She is over-accessible, a tramp.”