I am not Cassandra Reilly. I wouldn’t exactly like to be Cassandra Reilly. But I enjoy being her companion, her amanuensis, her friend.
Other people in my life take an interest in Cassandra too and often suggest scenery for her to wander through and problems for her to solve. Few of their ideas have been ones I could use directly; still, a clipping that came from England in the mail, an anecdote told over dinner in Brussels, an environmental brochure from Germany—all became grist for the mill. The foreign flavor of these stories is no accident. I have spent years of my life outside the United States and have long-standing friendships and connections in many countries. In piecing together a portrait of Cassandra Reilly, expatriate dyke detective and open-eyed observer of what goes on around her, I’ve tried to give the sense of a life lived outside North America yet deeply American all the same—one of the essential themes of our New World literature, and one that crosses gender and genre.
The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman
IT IS A COMMONPLACE that in this world there are tourists and then there are travellers. Among the latter are the great travel writers, Jan Morris and M.F.K. Fisher, for example, who delight in words as much as famous sights and cities, and are inclined less to the rigors of the adventurous life than the luxuries or piquant poverties of foreignness. There are also the great travellers—Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell, Mary Kingsley, and Isabella Bird (a frail Victorian lady whose husband said of her, “She has the appetite of a tiger and the digestion of an ostrich.”)—women who will, whatever age, seek out the bizarre and dangerous and coincidentally sometimes produce works of fine travel literature. And then there are the travellers, not very great, who write books, not very literary ones.
Edith “Tommy” Price was that last sort of traveller, that last sort of writer. And I’d adored her.
I’d grown up reading her books. My Aunt Eavan, who was something of a traveller herself, having ventured to Alaska before the cruise ships and Hawaii before the hordes, was a great fan of Tommy Price’s and had collected all her books and sent copies on to me from the time I was eleven or twelve. Jungle Journey, To the Top of the Very Top, and Lost in the Interior were my favorites. For years they’d been out of print, but the British publisher Harridan had recently relaunched two volumes in a handsome new paperback edition, and interviews with Tommy Price had begun to appear in everything from the Guardian’s Women’s Page to Spare Rib.
She sounded such a dashing, risk-taking, literate woman that I determined to meet her. As an itinerant translator, I have travelled widely myself, but not always adventurously—at least not intentionally. My idea of foreign intrigue is an attractive woman at the next cafe table. I do admire my more intrepid sister voyagers, however, and have a nodding acquaintance with many. Therefore I wrote to Tommy Price at her home in Dartmoor and proposed a visit. I said I was in the process of translating her book, Bound for Greenland, into Spanish for an Argentinean publisher. This was not an entire falsehood. My dear friend Victoria, who runs a publishing house in Buenos Aires, should be publishing Tommy Price, and I’d have to make a note to persuade her one of these days.
A brief reply came immediately: “Tuesday, December 1, I shall be at home from three o’clock. Please join me for tea. Yours sincerely, Tommy Price.”
I took the train to Exeter the morning of Tuesday, December 1, and then hired a car for the hour’s journey to the small village of Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor. December was a bleak and glorious time of year to visit Dartmoor, and it was an appropriately bleak and glorious day, with wind sweeping over the yellow gorse and purple heather and sun breaking out dramatically behind the great rock piles, the granite formations called tors. It had been many years since I’d been in this part of the country; the last time had been with Sheila Cragworth, who was at the time nursing a desperate passion for a married woman and hoped to lose herself in the close study of geology and Neolithic archeological remains. I’m afraid I also learned perhaps more than I wanted to know about the way hot lava had once bubbled up to the surface where it cooled to become granite, and about the hut circles, barrows, monoliths, dolmens, menhirs, and kistvaens of the ancient people who once inhabited this severe landscape. It had been forested then; now it was bare and dramatic, with bogs and rivulets, granite rubble, and herds of Dartmoor ponies roaming freely through the military firing ranges.
Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor is an old market village hidden in a wooded valley by a river. It has a stone church, numerous tea shops, and at least one four-star pub for the walkers who throng to Dartmoor in the summer months. The address Tommy Price had given me was down a narrow lane with thick stone walls on either side. As I drove cautiously along, a wild rain burst out, and an oncoming car, in a great hurry, almost sideswiped my rented Ford Escort.
That was irritating, but not quite so irritating as arriving at Tommy’s cottage to find no one at home. I stood on the step knocking loudly, wondering if she were deaf, or if she were the sort of woman who would deliberately invite a stranger to Dartmoor and leave her standing wretchedly in the rain outside. I remembered she had written in Lost in the Interior:
At times, I know not why, a perversely asocial sensibility comes upon me, and I find myself doing and thinking things completely at odds with received notions of good behavior. It is precisely this misanthropic and contrary streak in my character which has enabled me to turn my back on civilization for months at a time and to embrace hardship and solitude with equanimity. Alas for my friends and family, however: the suddenness of my mood changes, the violence of my antisocial emotions!
Alas for Cassandra Reilly, standing on the step and becoming more and more soaked, the unwitting victim of a burst of antisocial contrariness!
Well, I could be contrary too. I returned to the car, found a bed and breakfast not far away, and changed my wet clothing. My landlady made me a cup of tea and commiserated about the failed visit to Tommy Price.
“She’s not what you would call a friendly sort,” Mrs. Droppington said. “Keeps to herself, she does.”
“Has she lived here long?”
“Long enough. The cottage belonged to her brother, who retired here in the thirties. But he’s been dead years and years now. Miss Price keeps the place up, I’ll say that for her, but that’s mainly the work of her friend, Miss Root.”
“Miss Root?”
“Oh yes, childhood friend, I understand. Constance Root. She has always taken care of Miss Price’s things while Miss Price was gallivanting around the world.”
None of the books had ever mentioned a Constance Root.
“And is Miss Root a friendly sort?”
“The two of them keep to themselves mostly, but when Miss Price is away, I’d say Miss Root is friendlier.”
I set out again for the Price-Root household about five, in the dark of an early evening thick with rain. Familiar country smells of animals and manure mingled with the acid scent of peat and bog from the hills above us. Sheila Cragworth had not believed any of the folktales and horror stories that abound in Dartmoor, about the Wisht Hounds and the ghosts and pixies, but I, granddaughter of Irish immigrants, couldn’t help a shudder creeping back and forth across my shoulders, as I squished along the short road from Mrs. Droppington’s. Dartmoor had been a place of great religious significance once, but all that was left were superstitions. I remembered reading that the only way to deal with pixies was to take off one’s coat, turn it inside out, and put it on again.
It was too cold for that and so I only hurried on. This time I found a light on in the cottage window, a light that hadn’t been there earlier.
I knocked. I knocked hard. And harder.
At length a gray head appeared in the window at the top of the door, and a low voice asked cautiously, “Who is it?”
“Cassandra Reilly. I had an appointment with Tommy Price for tea a few hours ago. But no one was here when I arrived, so I’ve come back.”
The door slowly opened and a woman in her early eighties stood there
in a plain dress with a heavy shawl over her shoulders and slippers on her feet. The stay-at-home, I thought: Miss Root who keeps the home fires burning while Miss Price is out writing books about her adventures.
“Please come in out of the rain,” she said finally, when she could see I wasn’t moving. “Miss Price isn’t at home, I’m very sorry.”
I stepped into the vestibule and couldn’t help craning my neck for a view of a cozy-looking sitting room stuffed with books.
“She left very suddenly,” the woman said.
I remembered the car that had almost sideswiped me in the narrow lane: Tommy Price on a sudden mission to Borneo perhaps.
“I can offer you some tea,” Miss Root said. “I’m afraid I live very simply when Tommy is not here.”
She invited me into the sitting room.
“Oh look,” I said, going immediately to the bookshelves. “The original editions of Out Beyond Outback and Kangaroo Cowboys. I loved those books when I was a girl. I longed to go live in Australia.”
A faint glimmer of pleasure drifted across Constance Root’s wrinkled features, replaced almost immediately by one of disapproval. “Well, they’re terribly outdated now. The modern day reality is surely quite different. I watch television and read the papers, and what Tommy described is not to be found in Australia today. I can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in republishing such fairy tales.”
“Oh, but that’s part of the charm,” I said. “We like to imagine a world where everything seemed simpler, where a traveller could come upon an enchanted place and describe it like a fairy tale. Nowadays it’s all Hiltons and package tours.”
Miss Root shook her head and went to put the kettle on for tea. I took the opportunity to scan the bookshelves for other favorite books. Tommy Price had a wonderful library of women’s travel stories. Here were some of the classics: Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates by Lady Anne Blunt; My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel; Dust in the Lion’s Paw, the autobiography of Freya Stark; A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird.
Here too were hard-to-find, wonderful titles like On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers by Kate Marsden (1883); To Lake Tanganika in a Bath-Chair by Annie Hore (1896); and Nine Thousand Miles in Eight Weeks: Being an Account of an Epic Journey by Motor-Car Through Eleven Countries and Two Continents by Mildred Bruce (1927). Yes, and here were the complete works of Tommy Price, detailing her travels to Greenland, the Amazon, Tibet, Ethiopia, Australia—all written in the tough, no-nonsense prose that had so delighted me in my youth.
I opened Kangaroo Cowboys and read at random:
It wasn’t long before Jake guessed I was not the fearless British ex-soldier I had made myself out to be. “Why,” he said to me one day as we were riding alongside each other through the bush, “you’re a lady, ain’t you?”
Miss Root came back in with a tea tray and I told her enthusiastically, “One of the things I really loved about Tommy Price was her disguises. Half the time she was masquerading as a man, but she also loved to get herself up in any kind of native costume. Do you remember how she disguised herself as a harem girl to get into the Sheik’s inner sanctum?”
“Oh yes,” said Constance dryly. “Tommy was quite the quick-change artist.”
“I hadn’t realized she was still travelling,” I said. “Where’s she off to this time?”
“The city of Pagan in Burma,” Constance said. “She said she had an old friend there she wanted to see. At her age she’s trying to pack in as much as possible.”
The disapproving look came over Miss Root’s wrinkled face again. I wondered how it must feel to be always left behind.
“You’ve known Miss Price a long time, I gather?” I said.
She shook her head and asked, “More tea?”
I returned to Mrs. Droppington’s farm house and spent the evening curled up with Kangaroo Cowboys, which Constance Root had insisted I take.
“It can’t make up for having come all the way from London, but please take it anyway. I know Tommy wouldn’t mind.”
The next morning I decided that I’d take a walk on the moors before returning to Exeter and London. I was disappointed not to have met Tommy Price, but felt inspired all the same. Would I still be on the go at eighty, visiting pagodas in the jungle? Or would I have retired to some quiet village like Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor? I had never been a true adventurer except in spirit; I liked a bittersweet espresso and a good newspaper far better than a jungle teeming with scorpions and snakes.
Mrs. Droppington fixed me a hearty country breakfast and warned me about straying too far from the paths.
“The mists and rain can come sudden up here. There’s plenty of folks lost on Dartmoor every year.”
I promised to be careful and took the Wellingtons and oilskin slicker she pressed on me, as well as a sandwich and thermos of tea for later. It was a clear morning, sunny and brisk, just right for walking, and I set off in good spirits, dutifully sticking right to the paths. The hills above Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor had a number of famous tors, those masses of bulging granite that look in some cases like great fists pushing their way up from the earth and in other cases like Easter Island gods, with enormous noses and full lips. To gaze out across the landscape was to feel in a very wild place, at the top of the world; yet the ground itself was hard going, being covered with what is called clitter, the rubble from outcrops of granite, and being squelchily wet. Dartmoor is poorly drained; the land is a like a sponge, with bogs among the tussocks of purple moor grass and tufts of whortleberries and wild thyme.
I walked for several hours, seeing few signs of life except for the occasional pony and, high above, the lark or stone curlew with its eerie cry. I had hoped to see some of the hut circles that Sheila Cragworth had been so keen on all those years ago, but all I saw were a few moorstones, the old stones along the ancient path that had been erected by villages like Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor centuries ago to help travellers find their way across the stretches of high ground. I remembered how irritating Sheila had found my superstitious bent. Poor old Sheila; she was now some sort of Tory functionary in Brighton, which showed what a broken heart could do to you.
I had lunch next to a particularly impressive tor that looked like a Northwest totem pole with a raven’s beak and a bear’s torso and finished Kangaroo Cowboys:
Someone once said to me: Why travel? After all, there’s nothing new to discover, no place where no one has been before. To that I would say that more than half of travel, perhaps ninety percent of travel, is imagination. Some people can stay home and live lives of great adventure; others may roam the entire globe and yet remain as provincial as a country lad. What you get out of travel is what you put into it; and if you put your whole imagination, you get a great deal.
I had difficulty reading the last words and raised my head to realize that, quite suddenly, the weather had changed.
An opaque white cloud was pouring over me like a sift of flour; but this cloud was wet and thick. It blanketed out the sun, the path, and even the tor at my back. Within a few minutes I couldn’t see my boots in front of me. The fog quickly crept under my collar and through my clothes, until I felt chilled all over. I stood up, but had no idea which direction to move, or whether to chance moving anywhere. Shapes and sounds were completely distorted; I thought I heard a curlew, and the cry made my skin crawl. The pixies were going to get me, if the Wisht Hounds didn’t first. It was almost preferable to break my neck stumbling through the clitter, or to fall into a bog and drown. I hugged my arms to my chest and thought, ‘be calm, the fog will lift in a minute.’ But it didn’t. It got worse. A howling wind tore at my hat, and pellets of hail whipped my face.
What would the intrepid Tommy Price do in a situation like this? Once, I remembered, she had run out of petrol in Greenland and had to walk for hours through a blazing white landscape without markers. She had kept her spirits up by singing Noel Coward tunes. I tried one in a quavering voice. In reality
I wasn’t much good with nature adventures. I was used to taking care of myself in awkward, unfamiliar, and even dangerous situations involving people, but weather was another matter. Weather was serious.
Still, thinking of Tommy Price helped a little. I flattened my body against the side of the tor and began to inch around its circumference. The cold granite scraped my face, but at last I found what I had vaguely recalled: a slit in the rock wide enough for a body to squeeze into. I don’t know how long I sheltered there, but I had plenty of time to regret large portions of my life, particularly the portion that had begun the day before with my arrival in Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor. I assumed that if I stayed there long enough, a search party would be sent out for me. Possibly Mrs. Droppington, seeing the fog sweep over the moors, had already alerted the search-and-rescue mission.
I may have dozed a little; at least I thought I was dreaming when I sensed a lull in the wind and a slight thinning of the fog. It wasn’t complete, but still, looking out from my crack in the tor I realized I could see boulders, and the path, and some furze bushes. That was enough for me; if I didn’t get moving I would freeze to death—my fingers inside my gloves were already like ice. I charged down the path, hoping that by always going down I would find my way back to the valley. I couldn’t see any markers, couldn’t remember how many paths there had been. The landscape seemed completely changed; no longer did the moor seem a bracing plateau with bones of granite jutting up through the thin soil. It was a swampy morass of pea-green bogs and pools that I could only avoid sometimes by jumping from tussock to tussock.
Trouble in Transylvania Page 24