The Death of a Much Travelled Woman

by Barbara Wilson

  Still, I suppose some good did come out of it all. Felicity Horsey-Smythe had a wonderful subject for her next novel, and Darcy Joanne said she’d publish it in the States. They signed a contract at the Vladivostok Airport and agreed to move quickly on the project. They did want, after all, to get the book out in time for the next international feminist book fair.

  “Tierra del Fuego!” said Dee when I told her. “I can hardly wait.”

  Theft of the Poet

  IT STARTED GRADUALLY. HERE and there on London streets new blue plaques that might have been placed there by the authorities, if the authorities had been reasonably literate and unreasonably feminist, began to appear. At 22 Hyde Park Gate, the enamel plaque stating that Leslie Stephen, the noted biographer, had lived here was joined by a new metal plate, much the same size and much the same color, which informed the passerby that this was where writer Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell had spent their childhoods. Over in Primrose Hill, the plaque noting that Yeats had once been resident in this house was joined by a shiny new medallion gravely informing us that Sylvia Plath had written the poems in Ariel here before committing suicide in 1963.

  Above the blue plaque at 106 Hallam Street, the birthplace of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, another one appeared to emphasize that poet Christina Rossetti had lived here as well. The plate at 20 Maresfield Gardens, which recorded that Sigmund Freud had passed the last year of his life here, was joined by a new one telling us that Anna Freud had passed forty-two years at this address. A medallion to Jane Carlyle, letter writer, joined that of her famous husband Thomas at 24 Cheyne Row, and a plaque telling us about Fanny Burney, author of Evelina and other novels, appeared above that describing Sir Isaac Newton’s dates and accomplishments on the outside of a library in St. Martin’s Street.

  The appearance of these blue plaques was at first noted sympathetically, if condescendingly, by the liberal newspapers, and a certain brave editor at The Guardian was bold enough to suggest that it was high time more women writers who had clearly achieved “a certain stature” be recognized. The editor thus managed to give tacit approval to the choice of authors awarded blue plaques and to suggest that the perpetrators had gone quite far enough. “We wouldn’t want blue plaques on every house in London, after all.”

  But the plaquing continued, heedless of The Guardian’s pointed admonition, to the growing excitement of many and the consternation of quite a few. Who was responsible and how long would it go on? Would the authorities leave the plaques up or bother to remove them? Apparently they had been manufactured out of a lighter metal than the original plaques, but instead of being bolted to some of the buildings, they had been affixed with Super Glue. Some residents of the buildings were delighted; other inhabitants, in a conservative rage, defaced the medallions immediately.

  The next blue plaques to go up were placed on houses previously unrecognized as having been the homes of women worth remembering and honoring. A plaque appeared outside the house in Maida Vale where authors Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain had shared a flat for several years. A similar plaque commemorating the relationship of poets H.D. and Bryher appeared in Knightsbridge. Mary Seacole, a Victorian black woman who had travelled widely as a businesswoman, gold prospector, and nurse in the Crimean War and who had written an autobiography about her life, was honored on the wall of 26 Upper George Street off Portman Square, as was Constance Markievicz, many times imprisoned Irish Republican, who was the first woman elected as a member of the British Parliament (though she refused to take her seat in protest over the Irish situation), and who was born in Westminster on Buckingham Street. Of course, my friends in the progressive backwater of East Dulwich were delighted when Louise Michel, the French Revolutionary Socialist and Communard, was honored with a plaque, and those of us who are interested in printing and publishing were quite thrilled when a plaque appeared at 9 Great Coram Street, home in the 1860s to Victoria Printers, which Emily Faithfull set up in order to train women as printers and where she published Britain’s first feminist periodical.

  The list could go on and on, and it did. You would have thought the authorities would be pleased. Tourists flocked to obscure neighborhoods; guidebooks to the new sites proliferated; tours were organized; handwritten notes appeared on walls suggesting plaques; letters to the editor demanded to know why certain women hadn’t been honored. Other letters criticized the manner in which only bourgeois individuals were elevated and suggested monuments to large historical events, such as Epping Forest, where Boadicea, the leader of the Celts, fought her last battle with the Romans in A.D. 62, or the Parliament Street Post Office, where Emily Wilding Davison set fire to a letter box in 1911, the first suffragist attempt at arson to draw attention to the struggle for women’s rights. One enterprising and radical artist even sent the newspapers a sketch for a “Monument of Glass” to be placed on a busy shopping street in Knightsbridge, to commemorate the day of March 4, 1912, when a hundred suffragists walked down the street, smashing every plate glass window they passed.

  The Tory and gutter papers were naturally appalled by such ideas and called for Thatcher (whom no one had thought to plaquate) to put a stop to the desecration of London buildings and streets. Vigilant foot patrols were called for and severe penalties for vandalization were demanded.

  This then was the atmosphere in which the news suddenly surfaced that the grave of a famous woman poet had been opened and her bones had gone missing.

  As it happened, the small village in Dorset where the poet had been buried was also the home of a friend of mine, Andrea Addlepoot, once a writer of very successful feminist mysteries, back when feminist mysteries had been popular, and now an obsessive gardener and letter writer. It was she who first described the theft to me in detail, the theft that the London papers had hysterically headlined: POET’S GRAVE VANDALIZED.

  My dear Cassandra,

  By now you have no doubt heard that Francine Crofts “Putter” is no longer resting eternally in the small churchyard opposite my humble country cottage. My first thought, heretically, was that I would not miss the hordes of visitors, primarily women, primarily Young American Women, who had made the pilgrimage to her grave since her death. I would not miss how they trampled over my tender flowers, nor pelted me with questions. As if I had known the woman. As if anyone in the village had known the woman.

  And yet it is still quite shocking, and everyone here is in an uproar over it.

  You of course realize that the theft is not an isolated action, but only the latest in a series of “terrorist acts” (I quote Peter Putter, the late poet’s husband) perpetrated on the grave, and most likely not totally unrelated to the unchecked rememorializing of London and surrounding areas. (Discreet plaquing is one thing, but I really could not condone the defacing of Jane Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral. Surely, “In Memory of Jane Austen, youngest daughter of the late Reverend George Austen, formerly Rector of Steventon,” says everything necessary. There was no reason on earth to stencil onto the stone the words “Author of Pride and Prejudice and other novels.”)

  These “terrorist acts” consisted of the last name, “Putter,” in raised lead lettering, being three times chipped off from the headstone. The headstone was repaired twice, but the third time Mr. Putter removed the headstone indefinitely from the grave site. That was over a year ago and it has not been re-erected, which, despite what you might think, has not made my life any easier. I cannot count the number of times that sincere young women have approached me as I stood pruning my roses and beseeched me, most often in flat American accents, to show them the unmarked grave of Francine Crofts.

  Never Francine Putter or Francine Crofts Putter.

  For Francine Crofts was her name, you know, even if at one time she had been rather pathetically eager to be married to the upcoming young writer Peter Putter and had put aside her own poetry to type his manuscripts. Francine Crofts is the name the world knows her by. And, of course, that’s what Putter cannot stand.

/>   I know him, you must realize. Although his boyhood was long, long over by the time I moved here (after the enormous financial success, you recall, of Murder at Greenham Common), his parents Margery and Andrew and sister Jane Fitzwater—the widow who runs the local tearoom, and who has a penchant for telling anyone who will listen what a shrew Francine was and what a saint dear Peter—still live in the large house down the road that Peter bought for them. This little village represents roots for Peter, and sometimes you’ll see him with one or another young girlfriend down at the pub getting pissed. When he’s really in his cups, he’ll sometimes go all weepy, telling everyone what a raw deal he’s getting from the world about Francine. It wasn’t his fault she died. He really did love her. She wasn’t planning to get a divorce. They were soul mates.

  It’s enough to make you vomit. Everybody knows what a cad he was, how it was his desertion of her that inspired Francine’s greatest poetry and the realization that he wasn’t coming back that led to her death. It’s hard to see now what she saw in Putter, but, after all, he was younger then, and so was she. So were we all.

  But Cassandra, I’m rambling. You know all this, I’m sure, and I’m equally sure you take as large an interest in the disappearance of Francine’s bones as I do. Why not think about paying me a visit for a few days? Bring your translating work, I’ll cook you marvelous meals, and together we’ll see—for old times’ sake—whether we can get to the bottom of this.

  When I arrived at Andrea’s cottage by car the next day, she was out in her front garden chatting with journalists. As usual she was wearing jeans and tall boots and a hat that suggested hunting big game rather than deadheading spent roses. At the moment she was busy giving quotes to the journos in her usual deep, measured tones:

  “Peter Putter is an insecure, insignificant man and writer who has never produced anything of literary value himself, and could not stand the idea that his wife was a genius. He drove her to…Oh, hello, Cassandra.” She broke off and took my bag, waving good-bye to the newspaper hacks. “And don’t forget it’s AddlePOOT—not PATE, author of numerous thrillers…Come in, come in.” She opened the low front door and stooped to show me in. “Oh, the media rats. We love to hate them.”

  I suspected that Andrea loved them more than she hated them. It was only since her career had slipped that she’d begun to speak of them in disparaging terms. During the years when the feminist thriller had been in fashion, Andrea’s name had shone brighter than anyone’s. “If Jane Austen were alive today and writing detective stories, she would be named Andrea Addlepoot,” one reviewer had gushed. All of her early books—Murder at Greenham Common, Murder at the Small Feminist Press, Murder at the Anti-Apartheid Demonstration—had topped the City Limits Alternative Best Seller list, and she was regularly interviewed on television and in print about the exciting new phenomenon of the feminist detective.

  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 s
ecretary 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.”