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 reerected, 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 fiat 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 safari hat. In spite of her disdain for Americans, she was secretly flattered when anyone mentioned that she, rangy and weathered, looked a bit like the Marlboro man. 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 that 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,” gushed one reviewer. 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 lists, 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 be 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, and Andrea Addlepoot’s fortunes declined. In the bookstores feminist mysteries were replaced with the latest best-selling genre: women’s erotica.
And Andrea, who had never written a sex scene in her life, 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 in on it. Cable News Network is here and I’ve heard 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, it 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 now as they had when I read them twenty years ago, 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.