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 that were damp with 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 the dirt was heaped hastily by the side.
It had the effect of eerie loneliness and ruthless desecration, and even Andrea, creator of the cold-blooded 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 a pint of Old Peculiar for herself, 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 young American working at a publishing house as a secretary in the early sixties, 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 Old Peculiar. “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.”
“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 hilclass="underline" Francine Crofts, Poet.” Andrea looked up from her Old Peculiar 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 up to 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 prefeminist, protofeminist and even Ur-feminist. Some critics now argued that if only Francine had lived to see the worn-en’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.