The Dylan Thomas Murders (16 page)

“Is Rachel in any danger from Waldo?”

Cressida paused, and her reply made my stomach churn. “Who in
Milk Wood
is a threat to his wife?”

“Mr Pugh, the poisoner?”

“No, not at all. He only wishes to kill his wife, he's nowhere near doing it. For Waldo, Mr Pugh would be a model of temperance. No, you have to look for a male character in
Milk Wood
whose wife died in ambiguous circumstances.”

“Why ambiguity?”

“It allows Waldo to infer whatever he believes will give him identity and purpose.”

“You obviously know who it might be?”

“Mister Waldo, Llareggub's rabbit-catcher. Mister Waldo the barber, herbalist and catdoctor.”

“What does all this add up to?”

“The most important fact about Mister Waldo is that he's a widower. So Waldo's ego-vacuum can't be satisfactorily filled through identification with Mister Waldo until Waldo himself is widowed. But Waldo can't be widowed...”

“Until he's been married. And the bride?” I asked rhetorically.

“Rachel, perhaps. Now, we're not talking real marriage here, this is not the marriage of two minds, but a marriage in the mind.”

“Why Rachel?”

“Waldo believes he's Jewish, and Rachel's probably the first Jewish woman of his age he's met. She's certainly the first who's taken an interest in him. She's a
mensch
, as it were.”

“So first he has to ‘marry' Rachel in his head, and then she has to die, so that Waldo can achieve a complete identification with Mister Waldo?”

“And that's where the ambiguity of Mrs Waldo's death comes in. How does your Waldo see this? Did Mrs Waldo die a natural death, in which case you'll have Waldo on your doorstep for the rest of your life waiting for Rachel to die. Or did Llareggub's seventeen stone barber pick up a silver razor in his pink fat hands and, creeping in the dark, cut Mrs Waldo's screaming throat? I'm sorry to be so blunt about this, Martin.”

“You're suggesting that Waldo may believe he has to kill Rachel...”

“If that's how he believes Mister Waldo became a widower. Yes.”

“So she's in real danger?”

“I doubt it. I'm outlining the worst that could happen. Mind you, if Rachel's in danger, so are you. Waldo's Jewishness could flood his ego vacuum and he could see you as a goy who's stolen his ‘wife'. He may be driven to ‘save' Rachel, to cleanse her...”

“Oh well, if that's all...” I meant it to sound flippant. Cressida's analysis was beginning to sound more and more implausible
.

“If Waldo suspects that you know about the ambiguities of his own conception, if he starts brooding that you might well be able to prove that somebody else was his father, not Dylan...”

“How could I prove that?” There was a sharper tone in my voice.

“I'm not saying you can, only hypothesising that Waldo may believe that you can. If that's what he believes, then he may well feel compelled to stop you making such revelations.”

“By killing me?”

“There's a lot at stake for him. If you prove that somebody else was his father, then his whole Dylan-based, Mister Waldo-created world collapses. His ego-vacuum will implode. For him, it may seem like a choice between your death and his.”

“I find all this very hard to believe.”

“There's another possibility,” said Cressida. “Which is, that I could be wrong.”

“Meaning?”

“That Waldo's ego-vacuum is not filling with Rachel or Jewishness or Mister Waldo or whatever, but its filling up with silence, and in the silence he's beginning to see his real self.”

“You mean that going to Meetings is actually helping him?”

“It could be as simple and as beautiful as that.”

“That's what Rachel and the Meeting believe.”

“They may be right, I could be wrong. I've never met him, I'm hypothesising on the end of a telephone line.”

“But who do I back? The Professor of Psychiatry or the professor of silence?”

“We could both be right.”

“I have to do something. I just can't wait to see what happens.”

“Try thinking critically for a change.”

It was below the belt, but I let it ride. “You have a suggestion?”

“You're too close to Rosalind, you're not asking the right questions, you're accepting everything at face value.”

“For example?” I asked defensively.

“I've been poking around, since you're plainly not up to it. There's never been such a thing as the German Helmet Call Off. The British Falconers Club told me that for nothing. And de Walden died peacefully in his bed of natural causes, not killed by his own hawk.”

“So Rosalind embellished here and there, it's only detail around the edges.”

“She's not in the Register of Electors for Ciliau until 1949. Where was she? What was she doing all that time?”

“Lots of people didn't bother to register in those days.”

“Where's the proof that Merle Kalvick became a Quaker?”

“I accept Rosalind's word for it.”

“Jews hiding in the Welsh countryside? A young girl from the East End pulls T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas? Howard de Walden seduces Florence?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“Have you checked any of it?”

“I have to trust her, I can't check every detail.”

“You're over-trusting because Rachel's working on the Dylan letters.”

“I admit we have vested interests...”

“...and I really don't believe Rosalind had it away with Eliot. He was old enough to be her father, and he just didn't do that sort of thing. Oh no, we can't let Eliot go down in history as Rosalind's lover.”

“I think you're wrong about that.”

“Rosalind's a great story teller. She's cunning and imaginative and you're completely uncritical about the story she's spinning.”

“You're confusing the facts with the truth,” I replied.

“I always thought they were one and the same.”

“You may be right about the facts but Rosalind is telling the truth, her truth, it's her world as she sees it.”

“You're one character in her story. So you don't know the plot, aren't able to see the wider picture.”

“And Waldo?”

“I've already told you. It's too early to predict if he's a danger, the signs point either way. You're just put out because you want me to make a medical decision, to say what's ‘wrong' with Waldo, to help you avoid a moral decision about going to the police.”

“Anything else?” I asked churlishly.

“There's P.K. Bergstrom's thesis.”

“Sorry?”

“He did a doctorate on the Oxfordshire poets. Went out to South Leigh to talk with people about Dylan's time there after he returned from Italy in 1947. They didn't really remember much.”

“So why's it relevant?”

“He interviewed Bill Green, who'd been the village grocer. Not a good interview, but Green kept going on about ‘Caitlin's coloured child in the caravan', a young boy apparently, but Green didn't say anything else about him.”

“This sounds very bizarre.”

“I rang Bergstrom in Sweden. He thought that maybe Caitlin had an affair with an American soldier from one of the bases round there.”

“And what happened to the boy?”

“Bergstrom never found out.”

“And what's it to do with Rosalind and Waldo?”

“Maybe nothing. But it's so strange that my intuition tells me there's a connection.”

The following Sunday, Rachel went as usual to her Quaker Meeting. I took Bedwen and a copy of Dylan's
Collected Poems
to the walled garden across the river. It had been built in the eighteenth century, and had once had twelve gardeners. In more recent times, it had fallen into disrepair, but was now being restored with a grant from the Lottery. I talked for a while with the stone mason who was repairing the wall, and then found a seat on the upper bank looking across the whole garden.

Until a few weeks ago, it had been a no-go, never-come-back area, a stinging, pricking mass of nettles, burdock, brambles and coppiced trees. Its two acres had not been cultivated since the mid-1950s. Now it was clear, flat and almost virgin again, waiting for design and landscaping, holding out the promise of being a new, democratic garden, made for children in wheelchairs. Yet as the wall around it has been repaired, the garden seems to have turned in on itself, exuding not promise but apprehension. The unwelcome smell of threat hung in the air as heavy as balsam. Diggers, dumpers and tractors would soon rip the ground apart, clawing back the earth, looting the top soil to create drains and channels, special paths, willow tunnels, slides and swings, new ponds and a small lake. Contractors will arrive, jousting with JCBs, turning up their radios, shouting into mobiles, and throwing stones at their empty cans of Lucozade. I will be driven away by noise and violence, and so will the birds, rabbits and hedgehogs, and maybe even the otters and badgers outside the walls. The sea trout will tread water for another year.

I turned to the poems, and soon became absorbed in them. The only distractions were welcome ones. A pair of mewling buzzards spiralled overhead for most of the day. At lunch time, the two parrots flew willowherb-high across the garden and perched squabbling on top of the derelict gardener's cottage. And not long after, a glossy black spot in the corner of my eye became a large dog otter that had clambered over the fallen wall in search of the mason's discarded crusts and broken chocolate digestives.

Then Rosalind appeared, carrying newspapers and a flask of coffee. She sat down beside me.

“Rachel out quakering?” she asked.

I nodded my head, and closed the book.

“Waldo's getting a lot from the Meetings, just like Dylan did.”

I wished I knew more about Merle's influence on Dylan. His biographers have said nothing about her being a Quaker. I found it difficult to envisage Dylan sitting in silence for a whole hour, or being comfortable with the Quaker dislike of alcohol. “I'm puzzled that he took to them.”

“You saw what he said in his letter about it.”

I recalled Rachel's interpretation of the Quaker references in ‘Lament', though at the time I was a little sceptical. Rosalind must have sensed my continuing doubt because she reached across and took
Collected Poems
from me. “Remember ‘Poem on his Birthday'?” She flipped through the pages. “Fifth stanza, last line,” she said handing me back the book. “Merle's love releases him from darkness. In the next stanza he discovers God, rejects darkness as a way of life, and embraces light as a place. His predators, the eagles, are then laid to rest and, in the seventh stanza, he finds an unborn God within himself...”

“That of God in everyone, as the Quakers say...”

“With,” she continued, “a priest in every soul.”

“Anyone can minister at Quaker meetings, there are no priests as such.”

“And on the very last line, he finds himself in the clouds, in a quaking peace, as he puts it, his open acknowledgement of gratitude to Merle and the Quakers. It couldn't be clearer than that.”

We sat in silence while I searched for the courage to air the other doubts that Cressida had placed in my mind. I decided that there wasn't an easy way to proceed, so I blurted out: “De Walden died in his sleep.”

I heard the crack of Rosalind's neck as she turned sharply to look at me. Her cheeks were red but not with blushing. Her eyes told me she was offended not embarrassed.

“I have to check the facts,” I tried to explain in mitigation.

“A garden would be very dull if it were just filled with Honesty.”

“I thought truth was indivisible. Is that naive of me?”

“Most things I've told you are fact – the important things are fact – but a story that's all fact and no colour would be awfully boring, don't you think?”

“And you thought you'd jazz it up for me?”

“Why not appreciate the help I'm giving you? Why assume I'm trying to deceive you? It's hurtful, very hurtful.” She turned away and gave the dog another biscuit. “Oh yes, de Walden died in his sleep but how does that look? A bit flat? A little prosaic, perhaps?”

I felt some remorse. “You might have explained,” I said.

“Don't you see? It wasn't any old death I invented for you. No, it was the aristocrat killed by his own falcon! It was a perfect metaphor. By their vanities shall they perish. Surely you see? The war had just ended, we had a new Labour government, it was the end of wealth and privilege, or so we hoped...the falcon was Trotsky, Lenin, Herbert Morrison...the saviours my father worshipped.” Rosalind slumped back on the bench. She looked exhausted. She took Bedwen up on her lap, and stroked her tummy until she stretched her legs like a cat. She turned towards me again and said: “Did you find any other shortcomings?”