Read Online The Death of a Much Travelled Woman by Barbara Wilson - Free Book Online Page A

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 secretary 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.”
    “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