That of Satan

Rachel woke up late and grumpy. I made some tea, let out the poultry and got back into bed. When I started talking about Waldo, yet again, she sharply reminded me I had a fledgling business to attend to. I left her reading Lives of Great Quakers and headed into Lampeter. The office was much as I’d left it, though the cleaner had piled the junk mail onto my chair, and pinned the Diana Dors photograph above the desk. There were three messages on the answer machine. The moral philosophy tutor wanted to know what progress I’d made in finding Dylan’s shed. A young woman from Cardiff asked me to search for her husband whom she’d lost on the coastal footpath several years ago. An Action Group in a nearby village wondered if I would discreetly investigate a local farmer. I rang the secretary. She told me they were worried that he was running trials on genetically modified rape. They wanted to know who his financial backers were. They couldn’t pay me but promised a turkey for Christmas.

As I put the phone down, Waldo walked through the door. He looked much better, but I could see he was angry. I offered him a seat. He pushed it away, and leaned across my desk. “What the hell you up to?”

I moved my chair back to escape the foul smell on his breath. “I’m trying to find Dylan’s shed,” I replied, wondering what he’d been eating.

“Bugger the shed.”

“It belongs to you.”

“So do his letters.”

“Your mother wants them published.”

“I can do that myself.”

“The decision’s been made.”

“Over my dead body.”

“You don’t understand...”

“But I do. Your wife wants a bit of fame at my expense.”

“It’s a labour of love. She’s not being paid.”

Waldo looked at me intently. He reached in his coat pocket, took out a little pearl-handled knife and started digging the dirt from behind his nails. “Love’s labours are sometimes better lost,” he eventually said. “Too many tears, too much bloo...”

“It’s too late,” I interrupted. “They’re in the National Library. Rachel’s working from copies.”

“You had no right.”

“They belong to the nation now.”

“You’ve robbed me of my past.”

“It could give you a future.”

“It’s not what I want at my age,” he shouted angrily, banging his fist on the desk.

“I think it’s time you went.”

“I think,” he replied, as he moved towards the door, “it’s time you started taking me seriously.”

He left, slamming the door hard behind him. I sharpened a few pencils and called my brother at New Scotland Yard, and asked him if there was anything on the files for Rosalind and Waldo. He coughed and spluttered, and muttered about losing his job but eventually promised to do what he could. In fact, he rang me back almost immediately. A good deal on Waldo, he said, from an early age: truancy, stealing, fighting, driving and taking away, grievous bodily harm, and damaging property in the National Library of Wales. Rosalind’s ‘form’ was altogether more interesting. She’d been arrested with Ian Fleming in a high security zone outside a sensitive military establishment. They’d been enjoying themselves on the back seat of Fleming’s Lanchester. Fleming had punched the security guards but strings were pulled and no charges were brought, though both were closely questioned by Military Intelligence.

“When did this happen?” I asked.

“Summer, 1950.”

“Anything else?”

“There are a couple of Special Branch cross-refs. Visits abroad, I think, but I daren’t check.”

“Any advice?”

“Stay well clear.”

I rang the National Library. Oh, yes, they certainly remembered Waldo Hilton.

“A voracious reader?” I asked.

“Not quite. He came in about two years ago, asked for a day ticket, and ordered all of T.S. Eliot’s books. The Reading Room was almost empty, it was August, and the staff weren’t watching the security monitors. It was our fault, really. Anyway, he took out this package, put it on the table and started slicing it up with a scalpel. To be fair, someone on the desk did eventually see it and she was just about to go and tell him that food wasn’t allowed in the Reading Room, when the phone rang and she forgot all about it. Except it wasn’t food. It was a giant turd, which he was slicing up and putting between the pages of Eliot’s books. It’s all on the video tape, if you want to see it. We use it for induction training all the time.”

I decided it was time for a drink and drove back to the Scadan Coch. The pub was quiet, unusually for the time of year. Billy Logs was sitting on the bench next to the bar, cleaning his chainsaw whilst he waited for his food. Miss Price Rose Cottage was sitting opposite, feeding peanuts to her dog and occasionally throwing some across to Llewela, though I doubted that this was a proper snack for a miniature llama. Next to Miss Price sat Dai Dark Horse, who ran the fishing and barber shop in the village. This had always struck me as a curious combination and it wasn’t always clear what customers were waiting for. Someone asking for a Number Two could just as well be referring to a type of hook as to a cropped haircut. When Dai asks “Anything for the weekend?” the answer is as likely to be a can of worms as a pack of condoms. It’s certainly disconcerting to be sitting in the barber’s chair when a customer asks for maggots. Dai puts down the scissors and goes into the back room where the tubs of maggots are stored. I know he wears rubber gloves and washes his hands but it’s still a very uncomfortable feeling when he comes back to work on your hair.

O’Malley was sitting on a high stool behind the bar, embroidering a sampler depicting the celebration in the pub on the night we voted for a Welsh Assembly. O’Malley’s embroidery brought as many customers to the pub as his food, and most came just to marvel that a man with only two fingers on his left hand could embroider so beautifully. The pub walls were decorated with his samplers, as were the covers for the tables, each of which contained verses from his favourite poets. They were covered with heavy plate glass, and they gave the pub something of the atmosphere of a Dutch café.

O’Malley was too engrossed in his needlework to care much about his customers, so I went behind the bar, took a bottle of Brains and helped myself to some toad-in-the-hole made with sliced pigeon breasts. O’Malley grunted and pointed with his chin towards the end of the counter, indicating that the toad would not be complete without some beetroot jelly and a spoonful of pickled nasturtium seeds. He was right.

The discussion in the bar was animated. One of the area’s striking characteristics is the large number of holly trees in the woods. The principal reason for this is that Billy Logs, like his father before him, refuses to cut down holly trees because to do so would bring a lifetime of bad luck and pestilential curses. Dai was teasing him about this but was making a serious point about the unbalanced nature of the local woodland. I tucked into my toad and listened to the talk, which is perhaps why I was the first person to hear the car.

Then O’Malley looked up, clearly not pleased with the prospect of further customers at this moment. We heard four doors slamming in quick succession, and the ostentatious click of central locking, followed by the beep of the alarm being activated. Just as the door opened we heard a small child say: “But why can’t we go to Macdonalds?” Llewela instantly stood to attention. We waited nervously, because the level of English decibel at which she was likely to spit was never predictable.

The family that came into the bar were largely what I had expected. Mr and Mrs Volvo and their two children stood for a moment on the threshold. We stopped talking immediately because that is the respectful custom, is it not, when strangers enter a pub deep in the Welsh countryside. It’s the polite thing to do, but people often misunderstand. Miss Price smiled, and the conversation started again.

Mr Volvo led the family to the bar. “I gather you serve food here?”

We waited to see how O’Malley would react. His prejudices were finely honed so he had no one particular way of dealing with English-speaking customers. He picked a response according to the occasion, the customer, how he was generally feeling about the world and whether or not his love life with Ringle, the coxswain from New Quay, was still intact. He put his needlework on the bar, glanced up but said nothing. Mr Volvo looked puzzled but it could have been irritation because the two children were tugging impatiently at his green and baggy corduroy trousers.

“Do you have a menu?” asked Mrs Volvo, raising her voice as if she were on the Continent. Llewela cocked her ear but stayed quiet.

O’Malley reached across with two menus. “Croeso,” he said.

The family retreated to the Philip Larkin table near the window. They read the menu, then read it again, and finally turned it over, looking for an English translation. “I suppose its lasagne and chips again, it’s what they usually have down here.”

The conversation dropped a little and I saw O’Malley prise himself off the high stool. I knew he didn’t care about the lasagne and chips, but he’d be furious about “it’s what they have down here.” It makes you wonder why people come to Wales on holiday. Last month, a group of English tourists signed up for an evening of traditional Welsh song and entertainment at the summer eisteddfod. They walked out during the interval, complaining that it was all in Welsh, and demanding their money back. The organisers gave it to them. Some thought this was wimpish and said the tourists should have been ejected. But one of the marvellous things about the Welsh is their politeness even in the face of extreme provocation.

Mr Volvo got up and walked to the bar. “So sorry, but do you have an English menu?”

“This is a Welsh speaking establishment.”

Mr Volvo looked momentarily taken aback, but responded very heartily: “Don’t speak it, old boy.”

Llewela twitched and O’Malley leaned across the bar. “What would you do in France?”

“My wife speaks perfect French.”

“In Italy, then, or Spain or Germany...”

Mr Volvo hesitated and his wife called across: “We’d have a phrase book, wouldn’t we?”

“And where’s your Welsh phrase book, then?”

“But you all speak English, for goodness sake.”

“So they do in Holland but you’d still take your phrase book with you.”

“Mummy went to Dutch classes last year,” chipped in the oldest child.

“Our anniversary, you know, had a wonderful fortnight in Amsterdam,” squirming all the way down from the neck of his Arran sweater to the soles of his Timberland boots.

“I wonder if you’d be kind enough to translate,” asked Mrs Volvo, leaving the table and joining her husband at the bar.

“That’s another thing,” said O’Malley. “Abroad, you’d ask the waiter to translate, wouldn’t you. But why not here?”

“English is the language of commerce, old chap.”

“Darling, let me deal with this...”

Fellow!

O’Malley heard the missing word as surely as the rest of us. Llewela stood up.

“Now look here, we’ve been hours on the M4, the children are starving...”

“Lobscouse,” said O’Malley.

“I beg your pardon.”

“A Danish stew. Beef, potato and bayleaf.”

“I’m a veggie, actually.”

“Then there’s potato dumplings and beetroot in sour sauce.”

“And for the children?”

O’Malley turned, and looked across to the table where the children were sitting: “What d’you fancy?”

What a saint O’Malley could be!

“Chips,” said the younger child, smiling defiantly at her mother.

“With?” asked O’Malley.

“Lasagne,” replied her brother.

“You got it,” said O’Malley, disappearing into the kitchen, beaming with delight.

The Volvos sat back around the table. We carried on talking about holly, they began discussing the merits of various schools in Islington. The children fidgeted, bored and hungry but gave O’Malley, whom we’d never seen so tolerant of English in the bar, a big smile when he brought the knives and forks to the table. I took my cue from O’Malley, and smiled at Mrs Volvo. “My brother’s son,” I said, “did very well at Acland Burghley Comprehensive.”

She looked at me in astonishment. “Isn’t it rather cosmopolitan?” she asked.

“Look, mummy, there’s a camel in the corner,” said the boy.

“Ssh, James, I’m talking to the nice gentleman...”

“So you’re from London?” said Mr Volvo, brightening up. “On holiday?”

“But mummy, there’s a camel...”

“No, I live in the village.”

“Not a camel, darling, a baby llama.”

“We hope to buy a cottage down this way.”

“It’s so important to take the children out of London now and again, don’t you think?”

“What’s this say, mummy?” asked the girl, pointing at the Larkin poem on the embroidered cloth that covered their table.

“Why Wales?” I asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“Why choose Wales for your cottage?”

“Perhaps you’ve relations here,” suggested Billy Logs, walking towards the door, with the chainsaw dangling from his immense fist.

“What does it say, mummy?” asked the young child in frustration.

“We did try Herefordshire,” said Mr Volvo.

“But the prices were simply outrageous,” added his wife.

“I’ll read it for you,” offered her elder brother helpfully.

“Bet you can’t.”

“So it’s just the prices then?”

“Sorry?”

“Choosing Wales.”

“And the motorway to Carmarthen, it only takes four hours...”

“Go on then, read it, if you’re so clever.”

“But not the people,” I asked, “not the history, the scenery...?”

“Oh, of course, that too...”

“We rather like Dylan Thomas,” added Mr Volvo smugly.

“It rhymes with ‘duck’,” I said, “not with ‘dill’.”

“Duck in a dill and caper sauce. There’s an idea for you,” said O’Malley, appearing with the condiments.

“I’ll read it backwards for you.”

“Show off.”

“And add some extra, just for you.”

“Mummy, when’s the chips coming?”

“They fill you with the faults they had.”

“Your nephew liked Acland Burghley?”

“They may not mean to, but they do.”

“So it’s the prices then...”

“But certainly not the Prices,” interjected Miss Price, nimbly.

“Sorry?”

“They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad.”

“James!” shrieked Mrs Volvo.

Llewela came rushing across from the bar. She stopped next to the Volvo’s table. Her ears were twitching, and her mouth was stretched in a grimace of effortless superiority that only llamas and chemists know how to make.

“I’d stay quiet, if I were you,” I advised, “otherwise she’s likely to spit at you.”

O’Malley emerged from the kitchen with a tray laden with food. He sent Llewela back to her basket, unloaded the plates and asked the Volvos what they’d like to drink.

“And have you found anywhere to buy?” asked Dai Dark Horse.

“We’ve only just started looking,” replied Mrs Volvo, still watching Llewela nervously, and even more apprehensively at her son.

“There’s a place we’re going to see later,” said Mr Volvo.

“Fern Hill,” added his wife.

Now it was my turn to be shocked. It was less than two weeks since I had last seen Waldo and Rosalind but I’d heard nothing about the farm being up for sale. “It’s just down the road,” I said. “Needs a bit of work, lots of character, though.”

“Did you know that Dylan Thomas was Bob Dylan’s real father?” asked Mrs Volvo.

“I’m sure you’re right,” I replied, nodding my head sagely to humour her. It was the stalest of old chestnuts. Such stories were forever blowing in the wind down here.

Mr Volvo stood up and held out his arm. “Stillness,” he said, taking my hand and shaking it vigorously. “Ogmore Stillness. Perhaps we’ll be neighbours soon.”

The next time I saw Ogmore Stillness, he was lying face down in the Aeron, the sleeve of his Arran sweater snagged on a branch of blackthorn brought low in the river by the sloe-backed weight of its own fruitfulness.

I walked home, and found Rachel at the kitchen table becalmed on a sea of photocopied letters. She had finished the main sorting of the material that Rosalind had left. There were twelve poems by Dylan, mostly undated; over a hundred letters from May 1949 to October 1953; a handful of postcards from Prague and Sussex; and six short stories written for, or about, Waldo, which Rachel felt should be published separately. Of all the things on the table, my favourites were the flotsam and jetsam from the Scadan Coch, upon which Dylan had scribbled fragments of poems, including an early draft of ‘Poem on His Birthday’, written on the inside of a packet of Sweet Afton.

“Here’s Dylan’s first letter to Rosalind from America,” said Rachel.

I took the letter and stared in some wonderment at the crumpled handwriting:

Midston House
22 East 38th Street
New York 16
Saturday, 25th February 1950

My dear Rosalind,

A long and ghastly plane trip, & then heaved Brinnin-ho into an audience of 800 people, and afterwards a grasping, clasping, fawning reception in an apartment (flat) large enough to hold the parish of Ciliau & all its cows, whose intelligence I sorely miss. Brinnin is the archetypal Thief, whip-cracking my time and sanity through a collideascope of dotty bow-ties and snakeskin handbags. Eminent professors push knock-eyed wives at me, doctoral students hang on every gallowed word (oh, that they would till their lips were blue) and dull and desperate dentists ask me gum-numbing questions about our new national health service. They quiz me about Aneurin Bevin and Ernie Bevan, & are they brothers, they ask. I promise them that Mr Attlee will bring clement weather, & that Beveridge is not a bedtime drink. I now at last understand politics: the Germans are cuckoos, the Italians are song thrushes, the English are wrens and the Americans pigeons. I miss you so, and wish you and Waldo were here so that we could hold each other in silence and let this country’s banshee noise wash through my head till only the splash of your feet kicking through the Aeron remains.

Tell that Dylan-loined lion of ours that I have drunk milkshakes in cafés called drugstores, eaten hamburgers made from beef, sucked chips as thin and tasteless as wooden swans, & been sick into the hat of a very small lady who stood in front of me at the top of the Empire State Building (what Empire?) as it, or I, swayed in the wind. I shall eat beans with deans, scones with dons and swill Californian wine fermented from chinese dragon tongues.

They want a poet here but I cannot, for the life or death of me, give them one. The muse has donkeyed into the desert. My peregrine genes are exploding like over-ripe zucchini (marrows?). Hello Scott-Ellis, come and get me Harry Parr Davies. Shout theatre, scream movies (cinema), trumpet television (is there one in Ciliau yet – you must go and see it. I’m sure Tyglyn will have one) – these are to be the bottle-bright milkmen of my waterfalling words. Soon I shall be a great writer of opera, too. Walton is keen to work with me, Auden’s hinted at Stravinsky. They murmur here about war in Korea, but I shall have my career from it. From liberation to libretti. Milk Wood is festering nicely, too, and Gossamer Beynon sends her regards. I must now get ready for another reading. I have to change my pants (trousers), take the elevator (lift) and telephone for a cab (taxi), though it would be quicker to walk (eccentric).

The city is choked with automobiles (cars) and my chest is daily tightening in the smog. I must do something about it, but I loathe quacks, and where would the time come from? On my redgravestone, please put: “He died because he was never long enough in one place to have it seen to” (joke). I rest tomorrow, and then readings at Yale and Harvard, & a reading a day thereafter until May 18th. I shall see all America fast asleep.

Love,

Dylan.

PS I’m sending Waldo some American comics. And lots of chocolates & candy (sweets) for his birthday. I’m a fat, sweating, aching beetroot. Oh, Rosalind, what am I doing here? I want to lie quietly with you in love & peace. Rustle your petticoats on the banks of the Aeron & send me the sound in a vase (vase).

I hovered a while over the letters until I was clucked at to go away. “There was a man called Stillness in the pub,” I said, putting the kettle on, “with his barboured family. He’s thinking of buying Waldo’s place.”

“It’s up for sale?”

“Apparently.”

“Why?”

“That’s what I asked O’Malley.”

“And his two-fingered opinion?”

“That Waldo’s not been the same since the shed was stolen.”

“Or since you started interviewing his mother.”

“With your encouragement, I remember.”

“We’ve an agreed joint project here, Martin. You interview Rosalind and find Dylan’s shed, I edit the papers. It’s a very important piece of work for me.”

“Have you wondered,” I asked, “why there aren’t any letters before May 1949? That was when Dylan and Caitlin moved to Laugharne.”

 
* * *

Appropriately enough, we met by chance in Conti’s café in Lampeter. I’m an ice cream addict and Leno Conti makes one of the best in the world.

Rosalind was sitting at one of the tables near the door, eating a boiled egg with precision-cut soldiers soaked in garlic butter. I slid across the plastic bench already incised by two generations of teenage denim studs. Leno came across with a caffé macchiato and a bowl of ice cream covered in blueberries.

“Boiled egg, the Italian way?” I asked, as Rosalind crunched into the last of her pieces of bread.

“I’ve always liked the Italians.”

“Italians are Jewish,” I said, remembering an old Lenny Bruce routine.

“Only northern Italians.”

“There was never ice cream as good as this in Italy.”

“Dylan liked his covered in Sambuca.”

“I didn’t think you could get either during the war.”

“Not here you couldn’t. But this was afterwards.”

“The Tuscany trip?”

“He hated every minute. Much too hot for a fat man. And the beer was too cold.”

“When was this?”

“1947. He took the whole family, and Caitlin’s sister Brigit. He hated Florence, too many thin-lipped intellectuals, he said.”

“So why did he go?”

“MI6 sent him. They were worried about the communists on Elba. Did you know,” Rosalind said, cracking the empty eggshell between her fingers, “that even the policemen wore badges of Lenin on their uniforms?”

“To spy on the politicians? Is that why Dylan went?”

“No, much more serious than that. Elba had huge deposits of iron ore. It used to go to the works at Portoferraio for processing but after the war Italsider, the owners, closed it down. So all the ore had to be shipped to the mainland. We had intelligence reports that large quantities of it were being siphoned off by the Elba workers to the Soviet Union. Something to do with extracting uranium for the hydrogen bomb.”

“Why Dylan?”

“Elba was a closed community, especially Rio Marina, where the ore was being shipped from. We needed someone to pave the way. Dylan was perfect for the job. He could get on with virtually everybody, and he knew something about mining. Not a lot, but enough. One of his best friends at New Quay, Evan Joshua, had managed the quarry there. And Killick, of course, had worked in the mines in Africa. It was enough for us to build on. And his obsession with Auden, of course.”

“Sorry?”

“All that stuff in The Prophets about lead mining.”

“But Dylan didn’t speak Italian.”

“Caitlin spoke some, and Brigit was fluent. And remember, Dylan didn’t need words to communicate.”

Rosalind paused whilst Leno Conti put a plate of almond biscuits on the table. “The plan was for Dylan to make sufficient contacts in Florence to get an introduction to Elba. We knew that going in cold wouldn’t work. Once he was on the island, Ian Fleming and I – and Waldo of course – would join him. Fleming was still working for MI6, though he was on the staff of the Sunday Times by then.”

“So you were working for MI6 too?”

“I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that. Just the odd job here and there, filling out someone’s cover, that sort of thing.”

“As with Fleming?”

“Yes, a journalist doing a feature on post-war Italian tourism, with his wife and child in tow. And it all worked out very well. One of Dylan’s regular visitors in Florence was Luigi Berti. He lived on Elba and was Italy’s leading expert on English literature. It couldn’t have been better! As soon as Dylan said he’d like to visit the island, Berti arranged everything. Then we got the British Council to place a few stories on Dylan in the local papers. Britain’s leading socialist poet, that sort of thing, who’d opposed the Mosleyites in the Swansea Plaza.

“So when Dylan and family arrived in Rio Marina, they were met by the Mayor and the town band. Lots of speeches and spumante, flowers for the children. Berti had found them lodgings with his cousin Giovanni who ran the Albergo Elba, overlooking the fruit market. Fleming and I arrived a few days later. We stayed in the Clara, on Via Palestro, next to the port, which was perfect.

“Dylan spent the time wandering round the town, just like he did at New Quay. You couldn’t miss him in his pink shirt and green trousers. He used to sit on a rock in the harbour reading the thrillers that Margaret Taylor had sent him, and when he’d finished he just threw them into the sea. Sometimes we took a picnic and walked along the cliff from the watch tower to the little bay at Porticciolo. It was magical!

“Fleming’s job was to keep an eye on the ore being loaded on the ships and check it against the official dockets. These were smuggled in every day by Marco Gravelli, the quarry manager, who was actually working for the Italian security service. In the evenings, Fleming had to make contact with the workers, and that was where Dylan came in, of course. By now, he knew everybody in the cafés around the port.

“Everything went well until the day before we were supposed to leave. Brigit had already gone back to Florence with the children. Caitlin and Fleming were out dancing somewhere. Dylan, Waldo and I went out for dinner and ended up in the Bar Karl Marx, just off the Via Pascole. The bar’s still there. It’s a mecca for the old-guard communists. There’s even a photograph of Harry Pollitt addressing the Durham Miners Gala. His daughter married someone from Elba, you know, a pastry cook from Lacona.

“Anyway, Dylan was talking about going home, moaning about having to live in Oxford again. These men came in, miners. They grabbed Dylan and shouted ‘Churchill spy!’ Wrong Prime Minister but we got the message. They took us outside and bundled us into the back of an old American jeep. Gravelli the manager was in there, too, badly beaten up, and shackled to the seat.

“We were driven out past the Appiano tower into the hills. I really wasn’t aware of very much. I was worried stiff for Waldo. Dylan was sitting quietly, looking very gloomy. Doing a bit on the side for MI6 must have seemed very glamorous to him, and well paid, but this was a different matter. We must have travelled for about an hour up a mountain track when the jeep stopped. Gravelli was unshackled and pushed out onto the ground. I could hear them dragging him through the bushes. There was a terrible scream and then a gunshot. The men got back into the car, and we carried on up the mountain.

“Eventually, we stopped again. They pushed us out, and told us to start walking along this tiny sheep track. I thought the end had come. Waldo was crying, more from hunger than anything else. We came out into a clearing, a kind of quarry I thought, where there was another man waiting for us, not Italian going by his looks, and he seemed to take charge. They marched us over to an old stone building. Luigi Berti was inside. We sat round a table. Berti passed some bottles of beer to Dylan. ‘You English people... your wife sleeps with Giovanni, and also goes dancing with Signor Fleming. You go out to dinner with Signora Fleming and her baby. We watch you. You are old friends. The baby has your nose...”

“‘The English bond very quickly in foreign parts.’

“‘I was very muffed to be deceived,’ said Berti. ‘I asked these people to welcome you.’

“‘Miffed,’ replied Dylan.

“‘There are no pedants in the graveyard, signor.’

“‘Why have we been brought here?’

“‘They say you are a spy not a poet.’

“Dylan opened the bottle with his teeth, spat the cap onto the table and said: ‘I’m Dylan Thomas from Swansea, my father was a coal miner who wore a white muffler and was miffed that he couldn’t write poetry but I most certainly do, boyo. And what’s more,’ he said, puffing out his chest like a bull frog, ‘I’m a member of the National Liberal Club’.

“Berti shrugged his shoulders. ‘Dylan Thomas is a poet, a very good one, but are you him?’ He reached into his bag and took out a newspaper clipping. It was the South Wales Evening Post. ‘Look, you are Signor Daniel Jones, composer and Bletchley Park spy, and moonlighting – is that your expression? – with MI6. This man here in the other photograph is Dylan Thomas.’

“‘They’ve got the bloody captions wrong,’ screamed Dylan. And they had. The Post had run a story on the Kardomah Boys and had mixed up Dan and Dylan. Not the first time it had happened.

“Berti passed some sheets of paper across to Dylan. ‘Write,’ he said. ‘Show me proof.’

“Dylan looked furious. ‘I cannot and I will not write to order.’

“‘Either that or you both join Signor Gravelli’.

“‘And the baby will go to the orphanage’. This was the new man speaking for the first time. Almost faultless English but not quite.

“Dylan got up and stamped around the table. ‘I’ll need more beer and cigarettes. Food for the baby. And these boys out of here.’ I was amazed at how cool he was. I was shaking all over. I wasn’t sure that Dylan could write poetry any more. He hadn’t written anything for more than two years, not since he’d been in New Quay. And remember, Berti was no fool. He knew his English literature, he’d translated Henry James and Virginia Woolf.

“Dylan wrote until the sun came up. Berti sent for coffee and panini, took the sheets of paper from Dylan and started to read. The tension in the room was awful. Our lives depended on Dylan’s words, it was a kind of literary Russian roulette.

“Berti read the first page in complete silence, but then he started to chuckle. Dylan winked at me, and picked up Waldo to give him some breakfast. For the first time, I felt things were going our way. Then Berti called in the men from the other room. ‘Grappa, please, for a great poet.’ And he came across and shook Dylan’s hand, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘This will make Dylan Thomas a famous man’.

“When the men were seated, Berti started to read:

“‘To begin with the beginning... Per cominciare dal principio

“‘It is a summer, moonless night in the small sea town of Elohesra, starless and coal black, the cobbled streets silent, and the crouched, chestnut woods toppling invisible down to the slow black, low-backed, black as a bible sea.

“‘Notte d’estate illune e senza stelle, nera come il carbone, nella cittadina di mare de Elohesra, silenziose le vie acciottolate, e un bosco di castagni accovacciato si getta invisibile nel lento, indolente nero, dal dorso basso, mare di color Bibbia.’

“And so it went on. The miners loved every word. When Berti finished, there was a loud round of applause, and more grappa. Berti turned to Dylan: ‘This Elohesra with its milky wood and little harbour, this is a Paradise, no? A Miltonian allusion, I think.’

“‘Oh, no,’ said Dylan quickly. ‘It’s Rio Marina.’ That seemed to make everyone even more happy. Then there was a silly argument about which of the town’s quarries Signor Waldo and Signorina Garter made love in. Of course, it wasn’t the whole of Milk Wood, just the first twenty pages or so. The men were amazed that Dylan had only been in Rio a fortnight yet knew all the goings-on in the town. They couldn’t believe he knew about Signor Verni the tailor up on Via Pini and Signorina Luzi of the gelateria, who sent love letters to each other every day but could not marry because her father was a Stalinist, and he hated Signor Verni for making suits for Trotsky.

“And that was that. We were back in Rio for lunch and caught the ferry to the mainland.”

“And Caitlin and Fleming?” I asked.

“Fleming was far more resourceful, as you might expect,” replied Rosalind. “He and Caitlin swam out into the harbour, stole a fishing boat and got away to Piombino.”

“So Milk Wood started on Elba?”

“In a way, but it had been in Dylan’s head since New Quay.” Rosalind paused and called Leno Conti across to pay the bill. “You should visit Rio Marina some day. Waldo goes back every year. It’s just like it says in Milk Wood, the little town beneath the wooded slopes, the harbour, the quarries, the fishermen. And Rio’s postman did actually open the letters. He was the official censor for the Party on the island.”

“What happened to those twenty pages of script?”

“They’re in the Museo dei Minerali, on the Piazza d’Acquisto.”

“Let me pay the bill.”

“Ah, Leno, i ricciarelli erano squisiti.”

“Questa, cara signora, e una bellisima storia.”

“And Marco Gravelli?” I asked.

“We were caught between a rock and a hard place. We said nothing, though I believe Fleming reported the matter when he returned. But they were not times for justice.”

“Only of the roughest kind.”

“Count your blessings, Martin. We got Milk Wood. Read Dylan’s letters. He loved Elba. A world by itself, he said. Happiness in a world that never was. More important, Caitlin was happy. She had the sun, the dancing, the swimming, the good food and Brigit to look after the children. And Giovanni, of course. Milk Wood was born in Caitlin’s smile that summer.”

We got up to leave. “By the way,” I said, escorting her to the door. “We noticed there aren’t any letters from Dylan before May 1949.”

Rosalind looked flushed and confused. “We probably saw too much of each to bother writing,” she replied unconvincingly.

“There’s not even a post card from Italy. He was there five months. You’d have thought he’d have written.”

“They probably got lost in the post,” she said, and walked off down the High Street.

 
* * *

I remember the morning was glim – Rachel’s word for a grey day when the clouds were settled on the tree tops, and the drabness squeezed so much energy from you it was barely possible to make a cup of tea or answer the phone. White sky depression it’s called here, and it especially blights the lives of incomers who’ve usually seen Wales only in summer sunshine as they make their decision to buy a house and move here.

Half way through the desultory morning, we forced ourselves to go outside and potter in the garden. Rachel began clearing the asparagus bed and I walked down to the small meadow that lay between the vegetable garden and the river. It was regularly flooded so growing vegetables was out of the question. But we’d planted two rows of willows to make a tunnel that ran from the gate down to Rachel’s poetry hut. I had a roll of string and some scissors and my intention was to tie in some of the bigger willows before they grew away from me.

The Aeron was full and swirling brown with silt from the hills. Along the banks were large mounds of creamy foam caused by chemicals leached out of the conifer plantations by heavy rainfall the night before. They bobbed up and down on the waves of the river as if children had thrown candy floss from the bridge. A swollen river also brought its share of swimming sheep, and a good number that were already drowned. These were swept downstream to the sea on the full tide, beaching on the stony shore to be scooped up by yellow-gaitered workmen from the Council.

Some sheep never made it to the sea, but were trapped by swooping branches or caught between boulders that came out like black snares from the bed of the river. There they might stay for weeks, stenching the air as magpies and rooks feasted through the carcass, till nothing was left but a frame of bones to bleach in the sun and slip gradually down to settle on the stones of the riverbed. It was best to remove these sheep before the feasting began, to push them out into mid-stream, where they would carry on down river for the Council to deal with.

I’d been working on the willow tunnel for about hour. Rachel poured some tea from the thermos, and while it cooled, I wandered aimlessly upstream hoping to catch a glimpse of something exotic, a kingfisher or the pair of escaped parrots that had made their home in the roof of an old stable on the other bank. I stopped near our only oak tree, patted its trunk and looked upstream to the bridge. There was a sheep caught on a branch that hung low in the Aeron. I could see a large rook sitting on its neck, pecking at the back of its head.

I returned to the garden, found my long-handled spade and walked back up the bank. As I got closer, I could see that the rook’s beak was deep in the sheep’s skull, and so engrossed that I had to clap my hands to persuade it to fly away. I was distracted by the noise of a tractor stopping on the bridge, then the sound of men’s voices. When I looked back at the sheep I realised it was a man face down in the river. I half-recognised the Arran sweater and knew instinctively this was Ogmore Stillness.

I called to the farmers on the bridge, who ran down the slope into the field. We hauled the body from the river and laid the man on the bank. Leeches clung to his bloated face, and more huddled together in the folds of his neck. We stared nervously at him but Ogmore Stillness could not stare back. His eyelids had been stitched together with rose thorns. Nor could he hear the river washing by or the wind in the trees, for someone had sliced off his ears.

Rachel had run back to the house and phoned for the police. A car arrived within minutes. I took the constables across the field, showed them the corpse and left them to it. The lane was soon blocked to traffic, as more police vehicles and an ambulance arrived. Two officers were climbing into their wet suits on our lawn, holding onto the flowering cherry for support as they hopped from one leg to the other. Some of their colleagues struggled to carry a large canvas tent across the muddy field, complaining loudly about the state of their boots. Locals were arriving, lured by the sirens and numbed quiet by the awesome prospect of a big event in the village. All this we watched from our back room that looked down across the field to the river.

Some time later, I was interviewed by an Inspector from Aberystwyth. I told him that I had met Stillness in the pub some days ago, that he was with his family renting a cottage nearby, and that they had been looking at properties in the area, including Fern Hill. He asked me who else had been in the pub, and I told him. He informed me that a long-handled spade had been found on the bank near the floating body. Did I know whose it was? It was mine, I replied, and he said that it would be taken away for examination, bearing in mind the nature of the injury to the deceased’s head. I was too bewildered to take in the implication fully.

We stood at the window for the next hour or so, watching the comings and goings in the field. Gradually, the crowd of sightseers on the bridge dwindled to a little boy and his grandfather.

We took the car, drove to the coast and walked across the sands to New Quay. We had a late lunch and afterwards walked along the cliffs. Most of this we did in silence. A cold evening wind forced us inland, and we returned to the car through narrow country lanes. We were exhausted but we had walked the shock out of our systems.

 
* * *

On Sunday, Rachel went to her Quaker Meeting and I walked up to the Post Office for the papers. I was surprised at how little interest was shown in the murder. I suspected that the village would have been more affected if the body had been found on dry land. That would have meant the killer was probably a local person. But Stillness could have been killed anywhere upstream, more likely, said some, in the rough spots of Talsarn where things could get very boisterous on a Friday night.

Rachel arrived back just before lunch. Usually she returns from Meeting in a tranquil or elated state, the effect of sitting in silent worship for an hour, or of particularly uplifting ministry from one of the group. She was always buoyed by the support she found in the closeness of the circle. Occasionally she came home angry, but never did she come home looking, as she did now, as if she had been to the dentist. She was pale, and looked troubled.

I scrambled some eggs with tarragon and bacon bits chopped in, and we sat in silence around the small white table in the garden room. I made a pot of tea, and then another. I washed up, still waiting for the moment. I dried the dishes. I put them away. I cleaned the kitchen counters. I swept the floor. As I rounded the corner into the passage-way, the broom brushed up against her feet. She was leaning against the doorpost, her arms folded, looking at the floor. I sensed the time was right and said: “Well?”

“We were in Lampeter today.”

I nodded. Quakers don’t have churches, they have Meeting Houses. But Rachel’s Meeting was peripatetic and twice a month they met in the library in the Philosophy Department. On the other Sundays, it was held in the sitting room of a remote farmhouse up in the hills, where the only philosopher on offer was a barn owl who usually sat for the entire Meeting on a bird table outside the window.

“I was on the door, welcoming people in, and on the look-out for any newcomers. There were seven people already in the room, and I didn’t really expect any more. I was about to go in, when the front door opened and a gust of wind blew down the passage, blowing the papers off the table. I waited but nobody came. I walked back up towards the front door, and there was a man there, sitting on the canvas chair, shaking and trembling as if he were freezing to death. ‘Have you come to Meeting?’ I asked. He nodded, without looking up. ‘I’ll show you the way,’ I said, and cupped his elbow with my hand. He got up and walked beside me down the passage. ‘Have you been to Meeting before?’ He shook his head. I gave him that little leaflet on Quaker Worship that we give to newcomers, and he stuffed it in his pocket. We reached the door and I said: ‘Come on in.’ We stepped inside. ‘I’m Rachel, by the way.’ And then he looked up. That was the first time I’d seen his face. ‘Waldo Hilton,’ he replied, and he walked across the room to the far side of the circle and sat next to Dot.

“Now it was my turn to shake, my legs were so wobbly I could hardly get to my seat. No, I know what you’re going to ask, but I just couldn’t tell whether he was the man who killed Mably. I was terribly twitchy and agitated but then somebody stood up and did this nice little ministry about finding a well, and how he tried to get it going again, and all the foul, black stuff that poured out of the tap for a week and then suddenly the waters ran clear. That made me think of Dylan. I looked at Waldo and he was crying, and Dot was holding his hand to comfort him. Somehow, that settled me for the rest of the Meeting, though I wasn’t completely calm because I felt as if Waldo was staring at me, but when I opened my eyes and looked across at him, he was looking at the ground, and sobbing still. I can’t explain it. Anyway, we all shook hands at the end of the hour, as usual. I saw Dot talking to Waldo, and then he disappeared.”

“What did he say to her?”

“I’m here slinking from my mousehole.”

“That must have fazed her.”

“It’s from Dylan’s poem, ‘Lament’,” explained Rachel. She reached for Collected Poems, and opened it for me to read. “It’s about sex,” I eventually said, not noticing Rachel’s withering look. “It’s about Dylan’s declining sexual prowess.”

“He’s only using sex as a symbol, to lament the ascendancy of body and flesh, of earthly things, of matter over spirit. Look at the last stanza, there’s so much joy there, something’s happened, someone’s helped him to crawl out of the mousehole.”

“Merle?”

“Merle as Quaker. Dylan found something special in the Meetings, a new inner experience, his soul found a sabbath wife, as he puts it, he pushed the beast behind him and saw an angel.”

“A lament for not finding God’s love before?”

“Precisely.” Rachel gave me another disparaging look and said: “No woman would think ‘Lament’ was about sex.”

I slunk back to my mousehole, sniffed around and came up with another question of more immediate importance. “And what’s Waldo up to, coming to Meeting? Has he seen the light, like his dad?”

“Either that or he’s trying to intimidate me.”

“Perhaps it’s time I had another chat with Rosalind.”

 
* * *

I invited Rosalind to lunch at the Scadan Coch the next day. She arrived early, dressed in a white blouse and jeans, and wearing sunglasses. She looked more like fifty than eighty as she came through the door. The pub was already filling up. It was the start of the Ciliau Poetry Fest which O’Malley organised each year. Despite the quality of the poetry, I suspected that most people came for O’Malley’s cooking, because on each day of the Fest he prepared menus inspired by Eliot’s or Dylan’s poems.

We sat at the Wordsworth table and read the menu. Rosalind dithered over Surprise of Sweeney Erect and Tagine Burnt Norton, eventually choosing the latter, a pot of lamb, apricots and rice, cooked long and slow with garlic and onions until a thick, black crust formed on the bottom. I went for Salad of Long-Legged Bait – scallops and cockles in a white wine sauce, vine leaves stuffed with laverbread and shallots, with mozzarella and chopped tomatoes on the side. I skipped the Brains and joined Rosalind in a bottle of Mumbles Pomeroy which O’Malley commissioned each year for the Fest. We made small talk. I didn’t quite know the tactful way of saying: ‘Your son may have killed my dog and Ogmore Stillness, and is trying to frighten my wife.’ So I said: “I hear Waldo’s selling the farm.”

And she said: “I hear you found Ogmore Stillness’ body.”

“You sound as if you knew him.”

“Not exactly.”

“I met him here in the pub last week. He was off to view Fern Hill.”

“The police have questioned Waldo, and the people in the other properties that Stillness visited, including me.”

I think my mouth dropped open, or the fork fell out of my hand, but Rosalind certainly had a look of triumph on her face. “You know more about this than I do,” I said.

“After his visits, Stillness had a phone call to go back to London.”

“That’s where his wife assumed he was, while all the time he was floating in the Aeron,” said O’Malley as he put the food on the table. “And it wasn’t robbery. His wallet and car keys were still in his trousers.”

There was no point in asking them how they knew all this. They were on the village intranet. As a newcomer, I wasn’t.

“They were trying to buy a cottage down here,” I volunteered, as if this would astonish them, but it was the best I could do.

“No, they weren’t,” said O’Malley.

“He was thieving,” added Rosalind.

“Not money, mind, just our literary heritage.”

I gave up. “You’d better explain.”

“Dylan’s not just a poet any more, he’s an icon.”

“No, I mean explain, as in start from the beginning.”

“They sell bits of his bow-ties for hundreds of dollars.”

“A single letter to Caitlin would fetch £6,000 at auction,” added O’Malley, sitting down beside us.

“And it was probably Ogmore Stillness who stole the shed. Worth a fortune in America.”

I looked at them both in desperation. O’Malley got up, filled our glasses, and went behind the bar. “Rosalind,” I said quietly, “I think you’ll have to take this one step at a time.”

“Ogmore Stillness visited me, Fern Hill, Talsarn, New Quay.”

I saw some light. “He’s a Dylan Thomas buff?”

“No, he’s a literary scavenger.”

“He’s a collector?”

“No, he works for an auctioneer specialising in writers’ memorabilia.”

“So he wasn’t buying cottages?”

“No, that’s just one of the covers he uses.”

“What happened at Waldo’s?”

“Waldo came back from the fields and found him inside the house. Stillness seemed unperturbed, said he’d heard the farm was for sale. Waldo threatened to call the police. Stillness took out a bundle of twenty pound notes. ‘Just the first instalment, old boy’, was what he said. ‘Your mother wants you to sell me Dylan’s papers.’

“When Waldo said ‘no’, Stillness offered to introduce him to a newspaper reporter so that he could tell the world about Dylan and his love child. ‘They’ll pay you a fortune, old chap.’ Waldo saw the blackmail and threw him out into the yard. Then he noticed the photograph of Dylan was missing. He chased after Stillness and asked for it back. Stillness swung a fist, Waldo brought him to the ground and found the photograph in his coat pocket. End of visit.”

“And then Stillness came to see you?”

“Yes, but his manner was rather different. He was very polite, even charming. He claimed he represented a firm specialising in literary acquisitions. It was common knowledge, he said, that Dylan and I had been intimate friends. He wondered if there were letters and papers that survived? His interest was purely to cast new light on Dylan’s character so that the image of the ‘drunken bohemian poet’, as he put it, could be laid to rest. His firm were prepared to showcase Dylan in London and New York and pay for serious academic study of any new material.

“I told him that all of Dylan’s papers were being prepared for publication – I didn’t mention Rachel by name.”

“And who killed Stillness and why?”

“I’d rather not speculate – let’s leave that to our clever policemen.”

O’Malley appeared from the kitchen carrying a large plate. “Milk Wood Gateau,” he said, putting it on the table between us. “Laced with poteen. Enjoy.”

I cut the cake and gave us both a slice. I wanted to get back to Waldo: “He attended Rachel’s Meeting yesterday.”

“I know. He came to see me last night, so I wasn’t surprised when you suggested lunch today.”

“But why Rachel’s Meeting?”

“It’s fifty years since Dylan first went to Meeting with Merle in New York.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Waldo’s life is not his own. Not just the voices, but he can’t get away from Dylan. He can’t help it but he finds himself doing things that Dylan did. A few years ago, he went to Czech classes and filled the house with travel brochures, though in the end he didn’t actually go to Prague. It’s the anniversaries of significant moments in Dylan’s life that affect him the most, he seems to act out what Dylan did, though I’m sure he doesn’t understand that he’s doing it.”

I thought immediately of the anniversary of the shooting at Majoda. “What happened in 1995?”

“I dreaded the year from its very beginning but it turned out wonderfully. Waldo excelled himself.”

“No shoot-outs at the bungalow?”

“No, a charity event for Mencap.” Rosalind had a gift for surprise.

“Go on, tell me.”

“Waldo organised a sponsored ride from Talsarn to New Quay, passing all the places that Dylan knew. He borrowed a pony, and covered it with a white sheet, so that all you could see was the head and tail, and four little brown feet sticking out at the bottom. O’Malley embroidered the edges with a thin red line, broken up by clumps of daffodils. On the sides of the sheet, he put scenes from Dylan’s life, not just local, but skyscrapers for New York, oil wells for Iran, the leaning tower of Pisa, that sort of thing. On the pony’s rear was the bungalow at Majoda, with a man standing outside in a balaclava helmet, holding a machine gun. Not historically accurate, the balaclava, but O’Malley had seen too much footage from Belfast.”

“What happened to the sheet?”

“You sound like Ogmore Stillness.”

“It sounds like a work of art, and it’s not here in the pub.”

“It was auctioned for Mencap.”

“Who bought it?”

“A young woman from Bethlehem,” she replied, making it clear with her eyes that she wanted no more interruptions. “Waldo decorated the pony with various objects – a spanner for Dylan, a mauve Isodora Duncan scarf draped around the neck of the pony for Caitlin. And a menorah for me, tied elegantly to the pony’s tail with blue ribbon.”

“For Eliot?”

“An air raid warden’s hat. Then there were three teddy bears, one each for Dylan’s other children, Waldo’s half-siblings, of course.”

Rosalind paused whilst O’Malley cleared away the empty plates. “We set off in stately procession from Talsarn, after a blessing from the vicar, and a reading by Waldo of ‘Love in the Asylum’. I must say, Waldo looked magnificent. He’d been down to Laugharne, and borrowed an old robe from the Portreeve’s office, a deep brown velvet edged in white fur, with golden stars running down the sleeves to the cuffs. On his head, he put a tricorne, symbolising the sea that Dylan loved so much, as did Eliot, of course. We followed the Aeron...”

“We?”

“Waldo and me, people from the village like O’Malley, the children from the school who’d been given the morning off, and people joined in as we walked along. It was a glorious frosty morning. The river was sparkling and bubbly, and the sun shone warm on our backs. Now and again a patch of river mist would swallow us up, and we’d shiver with the cold until we were through into the sun again, with Waldo leading us out, waving his tricorne, and reciting chunks of Dylan’s poetry off by heart. And all around, the trees, shivering bare, looking in the mist like another thousand people cheering us on.

“The children skipped along behind the pony. The girls had kazoos and tambourines, and the boys had made drums from old tin cans. A fox followed us on the far bank, a hungry, blazing, dog fox, who came along behind, keeping a respectful distance, but stopping and watching, sniffing at the air, and ever so curious about what was happening, and he stayed with us all the way to the Beech Walk. A group of women were waiting for us, and they pinned little sprays of rosemary to the sheet, and then Waldo danced along the path with them. And every time we stopped, Waldo would take out a little silver cup from his pocket, sip some brandy, and throw the rest to the ground.

“We eventually arrived at Tyglyn Aeron for lunch where Waldo read ‘To Others than You’ and then bits from ‘The Waste Land’. Afterwards, the children went back to Talsarn and the rest of us walked along the old railway line to Aberaeron, and stayed the night in the Feathers as a birthday treat. The next day we set off along the coast path to New Quay. That was magical, too, because the dolphins were out and they stayed with us all along the coast. The gorse was yellow on the cliff tops, and the air smelt of coconut and seaweed. There were peregrines about, swooping on the sea gulls, and we even saw a pair of choughs. There was a wonderful brightness in Waldo’s eyes that I hadn’t seen for ages. The year had started well for him, he’d been completely free of his voices, and now, on his birthday, he seemed so joyful.

“We pulled up outside Majoda. Waldo read ‘The conversation of prayers’, and made a little speech. He said we should always remember great men for what they might have done, not for what they actually did but he broke down in tears, and didn’t finish. He toasted Dylan’s memory with the last drop of brandy. We raffled all the objects on the pony, including the sheet as I mentioned, but not the spanner because that was Waldo’s special thing for killing the geese at Christmas. It had actually been stolen by Dylan from the boot of Howard de Walden’s sports car. It was a collector’s piece in its own right but it was doubly valuable because Dylan had used it to take the tops off his Buckleys.”

“And yesterday, it was the same?” I asked, not disguising the note of scepticism in my voice. I knew by now how skilled Rosalind was in taking me away from the issue I wanted to explore. “An anniversary, the first Quaker Meeting with Merle?”

“I think so.”

“Dylan went to Meeting because he was in love with Merle.”

Rosalind looked shocked. “What are you suggesting?”

“I’m worried that Waldo is fixating on Rachel.”

“That’s ridiculous. His voices are quiet – Butcher Beynon has let him be.”

“And Pugh the Poisoner?”

 
* * *

As a sociologist, I could put together some of what was happening for myself. Merle was Jewish and, according to Dylan’s first letter to Rosalind, a converted Quaker. So was Rachel. Dylan had been in love with Merle, and now Waldo was building a relationship with Rachel. The next layer was that Waldo’s mother, Rosalind, also Jewish, had been Dylan’s lover. Around the twin maypoles of Waldo and Dylan, spun a blurring, conflated image of three Jewish women.

Psycho-babble, perhaps, but something was unfolding that I sensed put Rachel in danger, and I had no doubt that all this was somehow related to the murder of Ogmore Stillness. Perhaps it was something simple: did Waldo see Ogmore Stillness and Rachel as literary scavengers, each gaining in their own different way from picking over Dylan’s bones? It was possible that Waldo resented anything that might unpick his fragile, but carefully constructed, sense of self-hood. Perhaps Waldo wanted us to know Dylan only as we presently know him, because this was the Dylan upon whom Waldo’s own identity had been built.

Never mind the half-baked analysis, Rachel would say, try a bit of TLC. If Waldo continued to come to Meeting, she would see this as an opportunity to offer help and support to someone ill. This was how the others would see it, too. They understood how the Meeting could be therapeutic and empowering. Indeed, many of them, including Rachel, had themselves been helped through various personal crises by the opportunity the Meeting gave, particularly in its silence, for stocktaking and insight. They would not be deterred by Waldo’s eccentricities.

I realised I would need more convincing arguments if I were to persuade Rachel so I rang an old friend and sometime Professor of Psychiatry, Cressida Lovewhich. She was not at home.

I first met Cressida in the cells of Paddington police station in 1968, after being arrested at a Vietnam war demonstration. I had found myself, quite by chance, amongst the first ranks of demonstrators pushing up against the police outside the American Embassy. We were in the front line but our behaviour was largely determined by the thousands behind. As they surged forward, a wave of energy would crash through the crowd, sweeping those in front against the police cordon. During a lull between waves, I saw a young woman lying on the open ground behind the police. Blood flowed from a wound to her head. I asked the policemen in front of me if I could help her, and, to my surprise, they let me through. I was naive in those days, and thought they were being considerate. I knelt down beside the woman. Her head wound wasn’t as bad as it had looked, and she seemed more shaken than hurt. I was reaching into my pocket for a handkerchief, when I felt an immense blow across my upper arm. I looked up at three policemen around me with truncheons drawn. I leapt to my feet and covered my head as they rained blows on my shoulders and back. I was taken to the police bus and, when it was full, we were driven off to Paddington police station where I was put in a large cell with about twenty others. About half an hour later, the cell door opened, and a small group of women demonstrators was thrown in. The woman whom I’d gone to help sat beside me. We were there together for several hours, and got on like a house on fire. She was Cressida, an art history student, and the daughter of a baron; I was a sociologist writing a thesis on the British peerage, and the son of a bankrupt alcoholic. We talked and held hands, more in comradeship than anything else, because we also discovered that we were both members of the International Socialists. Of such things, lifelong friendships are formed.

At about seven o’clock, an extremely large and muscular policeman entered the cell and escorted me out. “I’m PC Softwell,” he said, “and you’re being done for assaulting me.” I was charged and fingerprinted and asked if I wanted to make a phone call. I rang home and asked my father to stand bail for £15. Certainly not, he replied, if you’re daft enough to hit an officer of the law then you deserve all you get. I heard my step-mother belching in the background and put down the phone. I was returned to the cell. A little later, Cressida was taken out. When she came back she said that her mother had agreed to bail us both. We were released about an hour later. “Mummy’s gone,” said Cressida, “but she’s left Bissmire.”

We went outside where the air smelt like Bonfire Night, for demonstrators from Germany had bought fireworks to throw under the hooves of the police horses. A chauffeur waited for us beside a silver Rolls Royce. We turned round, raised our clenched fists at the blue lamp, and climbed into the car. “Ronnie Scott’s,” said Cressida to Bissmire. I opened the drinks cabinet. Cressida drew the curtains across the dividing window and began to unbutton her blouse. That was the first and only time we made love in a friendship that has lasted thirty years.

The following day I bought The Guardian and, on the front page, was a photograph of me being beaten by the three policemen, with two others advancing to help. The photographer was someone I had known before when I worked in the school holidays as a copy boy on the Evening Post.

I appeared at the magistrates court on the Marylebone Road. My solicitor entered The Guardian photograph in evidence, and the photographer testified that he had taken it. He presented enlargements of the photograph which showed the identity numbers of the policemen arresting me. None of them was PC Softwell. How did PC Softwell account for that? asked my solicitor. He couldn’t. I was still found guilty and fined £25. Cressida paid, and afterwards we went to lunch at Maurer’s.

Within a year, Cressida moved from art history to art therapy to a psychology degree, and was expelled from the International Socialists for declaring that Marx might have developed a better analysis if he had been able to read Freud first. She joined the Communist Party, met Vauby Preston, a child psychiatrist, and I was their best man when they were ‘married’ in a humanist ceremony in the tenants’ hall on Woodberry Down estate. Her parents were invited, but declined to come. Cressida took a job as a social worker, then became a lecturer in applied psychology at the South Bank Poly, and eventually was appointed to a Chair of Psychiatry in London University. In the meantime, Vauby had joined the Tavistock Institute, and became the director of the child support unit. In 1988, they resigned their posts and joined an aid agency setting up psychiatric reconstruction camps to counsel those traumatised by civil war. They worked first in Angola, and then they were asked to go to Rwanda. In their third week, their jeep went over a land mine. Vauby was killed instantly. Cressida received severe chest and face injuries.

I wondered why she was not at home. I desperately needed to talk to her about Waldo. I rang her aid agency. She was, they told me, on a new tour of duty in Yugoslavia. She was expected back in a month or so.

It was to be a tense and difficult month. Waldo continued to attend Rachel’s Sunday Meeting. He became more relaxed and out-going. Rachel noticed he smiled more, and was able to keep eye-contact with people when he talked with them. He listened attentively to any ministry that was offered, and always stayed behind to help with washing the coffee cups: “My dad couldn’t take the top off an egg,” he said, the first time he offered to help. He asked about books he could read that would tell him more about the persecution of Quakers in Wales. On the third Sunday, he arrived with a bowl of plastic flowers to put on the table that stood inside the circle where people sat. Rosalind confirmed that “Waldo’s feeling hugely better. He says his head’s emptying.” Rachel interpreted this positively, that the influence of his voices was abating as a result of coming to Meeting.

Then out of the blue Cressida Lovewhich telephoned. We talked a little about Yugoslavia, and then I told her everything I knew about Waldo, and my worries. She said she would ring back after she’d had time to think about it. About a week, she said. Later, I e-mailed her the notes I had made of my conversations with Rosalind.

And what a week. On Tuesday, the police made an appointment to see me. I spent two days as nervous as a dancing duck but they only wanted to return my long-handled spade, which had been eliminated from their enquiries.

On Thursday, Waldo turned up, unasked and uninvited, to the launch of Rachel’s second collection of poems. We’d invited friends to lunch in the village hall. Rachel’s parents came down from London, bringing salt beef, gefilte fish, spiced carp and a boxful of bagels and onion platzels. Other guests brought food, too, and we provided the wine. I noticed Waldo slipping in just before Rachel started reading some of her poems. Of course, she was delighted to see him, as were the others from her Meeting, but I was angry. It felt like an intrusion. What was worse, he spent the whole time taking photographs of Rachel. Not just during the readings, but whatever she did, wherever she went, inside or out.

Cressida phoned on Friday morning. “I’ve been taking this seriously,” she began, “because someone’s been murdered. How often does that happen in your village? What was the motive? Not robbery. Was he murdered because he was an obnoxious Englishman?”

“Most unlikely,” though, as I said that, I thought of O’Malley. That’s what a murder does in a small community – it makes you think the worst of the most unlikely people.

“A random, chance killing in the countryside?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so.”

“Now look at Waldo. Here’s a man with a mental health problem. And he’s the only one in the whole story who has a connection to Stillness. Did you tell the police about that?”

“No.”

“Isn’t that odd?”

“It would be a breach of Rosalind’s trust. Everything I know about Waldo has come through her.”

“You’re afraid to tell the police in case Rosalind takes back Dylan’s papers from Rachel.”

“It’s not enough to go to the police with, not enough to break someone’s trust.”

“What if somebody else is killed?”

I recalled the seminars I taught on the ethics of sociology. Should the researcher respect the anonymity of his informants in all circumstances? Was there any difference between the sociologist and the priest in the confessional? Wasn’t the sociologist (and especially one turned private detective) entitled, like the journalist, to protect his sources?

“You could be seen as withholding evidence.”

“I’m withholding conjecture.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“An understanding of Waldo.”

Cressida sighed with exasperation. “Not a definitive analysis,” I continued, “just a few pointers.”

“Whatever’s wrong with Waldo,” she replied, “he’s going through it on his own – didn’t you say his wife made off with the fertiliser rep?”

“She did, but I don’t think Waldo was ever married to her.”

 
* * *

On Sunday, Rachel came back from Meeting and told me that Waldo hadn’t turned up. Quakers always notice when someone doesn’t come to Meeting, partly because numbers are small so it’s obvious who’s sitting in the circle and who’s not. But Quakers are also good at cherishing others. It’s even in their Rules and Regs – “Remember that each one of us is unique, precious, a child of God.”

After lunch, at which we talked mostly about Waldo, we went to our local animal sanctuary, which had phoned us to say they had a young collie for sale. We drove out through the village, and turned onto a stony track that led down into a hidden, wooded valley. As we reached the bottom, cats and kittens came rolling out of the long grass onto the track in front of us, like circus tumblers. On our left was a field of chickens and ducks, and beyond it, one with donkeys and ponies. To the right, a ploughed morass of mud, home to a group of black pygmy pigs abandoned, so local gossip told us, by a discontented wife who’d been given them by her husband as a present on their wedding anniversary.

We pulled into the yard. A tall, red-haired woman in patched jeans, and an over-sized sweater almost to her knees, came striding across, hand out-stretched. I wondered if she raided her own charity clothes bags. “Let’s go inside,” she said, opening the door into an old mill house. We went into a circular room, with white-washed walls and honey-brown beams. On the chimney breast hung a huge mosaic triptych, like the stained glass panels of a church window. “Cleo Mussi,” she said in explanation as she saw Rachel looking in admiration. “Made from broken cups and saucers.” We crossed to the kitchen at the side of the house. A black and white collie came skidding across the granite floor, its tail in extravagant semaphore, burying its teeth into Rachel’s boots. “Meet Bedwen. Welsh for birch tree.” The pup raised its white-socked paw in greeting. “The only one of five to survive. The whole litter put in a sack and thrown in the river. I’m sure you’ll be happy with her.”

“Can we look around?” Rachel was a sucker for animals. She carried a trowel in the back of the car. Every time we came across a squashed animal, she’d stop the car, scoop the remains off the road, and take it home to give it a decent burial. It often took us a long time to get anywhere.

“There’s a jumble sale at three, so I’ll leave you to yourselves.”

We wandered around the animal pens, with Bedwen pulling on the lead as if she wanted to get away as quickly as possible. Rachel became engaged in a discussion with one of the volunteers about whether it would be kinder to put dogs down rather than keep them for months on end locked up in their little cages. I edged off towards the square of trestle tables that had been set up for the jumble sale. I bought some raspberry jam and a bottle of elderflower champagne, and then found myself at a table piled high with books. I became immensely irritated because no-one had sorted them into useful categories. I looked round for Rachel but she was nowhere to be seen, probably buying a one-eyed, broken-backed cat to take home with us. So I tied Bedwen to the table leg, and set to, sorting the paperbacks from the hard backs, and then gradually working out the best categories for the paperbacks. I’d just finished sorting the fiction into various genres when Rachel appeared, thankfully without cat or any other creature. She flipped through the poetry pile and said: “There’s more than a dozen books here by Eliot, or about him.”

I went across to the jumble organiser and asked her if she remembered who’d brought the Eliot books. She said that they’d been left in a plastic bag outside the gate a week or so ago. Had there been anything else in the bag? Odds and ends, including a malacca cane, back copies of Boxing News, and a spanner. I found the cane and the spanner on the bric-a-brac stall. I unscrewed the top of the cane. There was a discoloured tooth inside. The spanner was heavy and beautiful. The steel handle was inlaid with brass art deco designs, and the head had been curved to suggest the arching neck of a dragon. I paid five pounds for the cane and a tenner for the spanner.

“The murder weapon,” said Rachel, coming up behind me, teasing me with a smile.

“The only thing we know about this spanner is that Dylan opened his beer bottles with it.”

At home, we spent several hours nest building with the puppy, then went to the pub for dinner. Ringle the coxswain was behind the bar, and warned us not to expect too much from O’Malley, only scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, which sounded good to us. We could hear O’Malley in the kitchen but he sounded less than his usual ebullient self. “Shagged out,” explained Ringle, “been down the tennis courts.” You have to be careful in west Wales if you’re told someone’s been playing tennis; it’s how local people refer to the giving and taking of bribes. Sometimes they talk about an outing to Wimbledon. In either case, they mean back-handers.

“Tennis?” I asked tentatively.

“Sponsored match for Barnardos, a new community project in New Quay.”

O’Malley was a fanatic for supporting children’s charities. Over the years he’d taken part in some amazing fund-raising events, including making a one-legged parachute jump, eating sixty boiled eggs in an hour and speaking English non-stop for three days. We knew that O’Malley’s father had walked out on him, weeks after he’d been born. “What was his mother like?” I asked Ringle. A sociologist can never stop being nosey.

“Not much cop.”

“Brought him up badly?”

“Didn’t bring him up at all. Handed him over to his grandmother when he was six.”

“To look after him?”

“His Granny did fine to begin with, then the booze got her. Had to sell the house they lived in, to pay for the drinking. They went into a one-room flat, near the steelworks. She started working the boys in the blast furnace, just to pay for the drink. She sent him round the works, looking for trade, and she’d have them in the shed behind the slag heap, while he stood outside.”

“How old was he?”

“About eleven,” said O’Malley, emerging from the kitchen, carrying a plate of artichoke and palm hearts. He put them on the counter in front of Rachel, and put his arm round Ringle’s waist.

“Someone reported her to the NSPCC. I was in care for years. Army catering corps after that, and the rest you know.”

Ringle had tears in his eyes. He turned and gave O’Malley a big hug.

“Any news on the Stillness case?” I asked, feeling a little embarrassed.

“They’ve taken Les Prop-Forward in for questioning,” he replied, looking down over Ringle’s shoulder, a bald gargoyle stranded for a moment on the collar bone of love.

Les was the odd-job man around the village, retired early from working on the farms because the farmers had become fed up with his going to the Crown in Aberaeron every lunch time and evening. It wasn’t the drink he was after, but the landlady. For ten years he had stood resolutely at the bar, never moving from opening to closing time, trying to win her affections. Hence his nickname. One night, she stumbled down the cellar steps. Les tried to resuscitate her, and that was the closest he’d ever come to the kiss he had so diligently courted, though it is doubtful that she felt the touch of his lips. Her neck had been broken and she died in hospital the following day. I couldn’t quite see him as Ogmore Stillness’ murderer. I felt a small surge of guilt, and heard Cressida Lovewhich saying: “And now you’re subjecting an innocent man to the trauma of police questioning.”

 
* * *

We came home from the pub, tired and looking forward to slumping in front of the television. We found a house full of protests from a puppy mad at having been left alone. Bedwen had chewed the bottom of the fridge door, overturned the waste paper bins in every room and had climbed onto my desk to do her business on the keyboard. We cleared up and while Rachel went to the kitchen to make coffee, I fell asleep on the settee, with a chastened Bedwen cwched in across my lap. I was woken by the phone ringing, and I skipped like a stone into consciousness, sweating wet from a bottled Brains nightmare.

I had been travelling on a plane to a mansion called Gelli where Dylan Thomas had promised to cook me a curry underneath the yew tree. I had pushed the overhead button to call a cabin steward to radio ahead to tell Dylan that I didn’t like prawns, but a huge Brahma bull came snorting down the aisle. I screamed. Someone from a seat behind touched me on the shoulder: “Leave this to me.” A nun came forward, carrying a red umbrella. She wore a tube-like coif that came so far forward that her features were invisible. She clucked soothingly at the bull, and then gradually manoeuvred it back down the aisle with the point of the umbrella, until it disappeared into the service area.

I climbed out of the settee, upending Bedwen onto the floor, and knocking over the standard lamp that seemed to occupy all the space between me and the telephone. It was Cressida. “I’ve read everything you’ve sent me and more,” she announced.

I was struggling to sound coherent, my head still full of a grinning Dylan shredding yew leaves into a spitting black pot, swearing blind they were only coriander.

“Most of us get through life because we know who we are,” she said slowly. “If that’s uncertain, then we have the King Lear problem.”

“‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’”

“Exactly. Each of us needs a clear identity, to feel good about ourselves, and understand how we fit into things, self-purpose, if you like. If this is absent or weak, then an ego-vacuum develops.”

“So we go around hoovering up affection.”

She ignored my comment. “We all have an ego-vacuum, to some degree or other. That’s why we employ ego-filling devices. We buy things like cars or clothes or paintings and we use them to say ‘Look, this is me, this is who I am’.”

“But if the vacuum’s extensive?”

“If we have no sense of who we are or what our purpose in life is, then we risk a complete psychotic breakdown. But that rarely happens...”

“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?”

I decided it would be tactful to say nothing further about Cressida’s doubts. But I told her about the malacca cane that I’d found at the jumble sale, with the tooth in the top, and the art deco spanner from de Walden’s sports car. She was pleased that these at least confirmed what she’d been telling me.

“So Waldo’s been having a clear-out.”

“Mostly Eliot stuff, apart from the spanner.”

“Waldo was so fond of it.”

“I wonder sometimes about Waldo and the connection to Stillness.”

“You have the whole story on tape.”

“I’m not inclined to break a confidence.”

“Or break ranks. We’re in this together.”

I was torn between anxiety and confusion. “Please explain.”

“Telling the police about the link between Waldo and Stillness would be as preposterous as me telling them about the link between you and Stillness.”

I choked and spluttered on my coffee.

“If one is going to be absurd about Waldo, then I could say that you had a perfectly good motive for killing Ogmore Stillness.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Not at all. I could certainly make a story about it. I might say that you were worried that Ogmore Stillness would persuade me to hand over Dylan’s papers to him. Heaven knows, I could do with the money. If I’d done that, it would have meant the end of Rachel’s nice little project.”

“But I didn’t know Stillness was in literary acquisitions until after his death.”

“Well, you’d have to prove that to the police, wouldn’t you?”

My amazement was turning to anger, and Rosalind noticed. “Don’t worry,” she said, reaching out to pat my hand. “I’m not serious, I’m just trying to give you a sense of perspective. The trouble is that we’re on the inside of the murder case. We can see only the connections amongst ourselves with Ogmore Stillness. But what do the police see? You and I and the rest of us here are simply asking who in the village could have done such a thing. But the police are asking who else in Stillness’ life might have done it, and travelled to Wales for the purpose.”

“It’s hard to tell fact from fiction, wherever you stand.”

“Martin, can’t we agree on one thing? We are working on this together, aren’t we?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t indicating agreement, only acquiescence.

 
* * *

I arrived home in a thoughtful mood. I fed Bedwen, poured some parsnip wine, and sat down to read through Under Milk Wood, yet again, to see who else was in Mister Waldo’s life. The answer was clearly Polly Garter, in whose garden only washing and babies grew, most of whom were Mister Waldo’s. This gave me no comfort whatsoever, not least because the text reminded me that Mister Waldo was searching for an Eve-like woman, soft but sharp, with whom to share his bed. That description fitted Rachel.

It was at this point that I began to wonder if I was going mad. Here I was, parsnip wine in hand, and only a few sips gone to mouth, wondering whether my wife’s well-being was at risk because of something that Dylan Thomas had put in Under Milk Wood almost fifty years ago. In the parched light of an early Sunday afternoon, that seemed ridiculous. Its only legitimacy came from an old friend who was, as it happened, a world-famous professor of psychiatry. But might it be that her own judgement had become seriously impaired after her husband had been killed by a landmine? Was it possible that the awful tragedies that she had encountered in Rwanda and Yugoslavia were distorting her own clinical assessments?

We each had different objectives. Rachel wanted to publish Dylan’s poems and to ‘save’ Waldo, to bring him within the care and nurture of the Quaker Meeting. I wanted to protect Rachel from the man she was trying to save. But what did Rosalind want? Certainly she wanted Rachel to publish Dylan’s letters and poems but I felt in no doubt that they were a lure or bait to achieve some other end. As I was thinking all this, I experienced a wave of desolation as my situation became clear – I was just a dispensable player. Disempowered, as Cressida would put it. As I came out from under the wave, I briefly caught sight of the sky – could it be that Rosalind’s end-game was to secure a Jewish wife for Waldo? In which case, I truly was dispensable. Even to think such a thing was preposterous, as if my rationality had been eroded by the wash from Llareggub’s bow.

But could it be true? Was the woman who had been forced to conceal her Jewishness when she first came to Wales now driven by a need to re-assert it through her son? Indeed, she had been forced to conceal both her Jewishness and her relationship with Dylan. Now, in the last years of her life, she had chanced upon Rachel who was uniquely positioned to clarify both of these important elements of her life.

I heard Rachel park the car outside the house and I wondered again if these thoughts were nothing more than testimony to my own derangement. Not that I was organically mad, but that I was becoming so as a result of the events in which I had been caught up, beginning with the wren in the bottle and Waldo’s eating of spiders. I was part of an unfolding story that seemed to be nibbling away at my rationality.

I opened the front door for Rachel. She looked exhausted. “No Waldo again,” she said, coming into the house and inadvertently stepping on Bedwen’s tail.

Over a very late lunch, she told me that the Meeting had asked her to contact Waldo to see if all was well. I must have pulled a face, because she asked: “What’s the problem?”

“Couldn’t somebody else do it? Maybe one of the men.”

Rachel sighed. “I’m an Overseer, and I live nearest to Waldo.”

If there’s one word that might stop me becoming a Quaker that is it. Overseer conjures up images of savage galley masters whipping chained and manacled slaves; it was also the title given to the parish officials who administered the Poor Law. But indeed, in the Quakers, an Overseer is simply one who has oversight. Their chief concern is with pastoral care. Hence the visit to Waldo: an Overseer would take note of absences, particularly of new attenders, and would be expected to enquire discreetly why someone had stopped coming to Meeting.

Rachel tried to telephone Waldo two or three times that afternoon but his phone was engaged. In between times, I tried to explain some of the matters I had discussed with Cressida, but my brain was so blocked with anxiety that the ideas came tumbling out half-baked. Psycho-babble, said Rachel, as I expected she would, and she seized on the fact that Cressida had said there was a good chance that Waldo was being helped by his involvement in Quaker meetings. End of discussion.

Rachel settled down to work on Dylan’s papers. I pottered around in the garden and then took Bedwen along the Beech Walk. We climbed up the hill and I sat on the pile of stones, looking down the valley towards the sea. The farms were shining in the strong afternoon sunlight. Our cottage stood out brightly above the river. I could just see Rachel on the terrace. Then she went inside. She came out a few minutes later and got into the car. I watched it pull away, lost it for a while as it dipped down into the valley, then followed it around the road to New Quay. It pulled up outside the entrance to Fern Hill.

No, I didn’t panic. I called Bedwen and we returned home, walking quickly to eat up the tension that was growing inside me. There was a note on the kitchen table explaining that the operator had told Rachel that Waldo’s phone had been left off the hook, and that she had decided to visit him. I was calm enough to know that I couldn’t call the police because how would it be possible to explain that my wife was caught up in a possible dénouement of Under Milk Wood? Neither could I rush round to Fern Hill on my white horse because that would make Rachel extremely angry. And if Cressida was right, going round to Fern Hill might make matters worse because it could suggest to Waldo that he was in competition with me. So I rang Cressida. She was at home but she was about to leave for London.

“You did the right thing calling me,” she said when I explained what had happened, “but I have to leave for the railway station right now.”

“But I need help. God knows what Rachel’s walking into.”

“My cab’s here.”

“This is a nightmare.”

“Do you have a mobile? Okay, give me the number. Start walking towards Fern Hill, and I’ll call you back in a minute.”

My mobile rang as I was crossing the bridge. “I’m in the cab,” she said. “Let’s start with Waldo. Why hasn’t he been coming to meeting? Been ill? Busy on the farm? Lost interest? Not at all. He’s stayed away to check out that they’ve missed him. So Rachel’s calling will reassure him that he’s valued and he’ll be back next Sunday. Where are you now?”

“Walking past the pub.”

“Tell me when you get to the farm gate.” Cressida paused as the signal weakened. “I’ve no idea what state of mind Waldo is in,” she continued, “and neither have you. Let’s be cautious and assume it’s fragile. We mustn’t do anything that makes him angry with Rachel or with you.”

“You make it sound as if we have a bomb to defuse.”

“I’m at the station, hold on while I pay the driver. Are you there yet?”

“Couple of minutes more.”

“Okay, I’m hanging up whilst I get my tickets. Call me in five minutes.”

When I reached Fern Hill, I stood in the shade of a holly tree, next to the parked car. It was almost early evening but the sun was still hot. Midges were gathering around my head. My back ached with tension. I took out my phone again and rang Cressida’s number. “I’m at the gate,” I said.

“What can you see?”

“Just a gate for God’s sake.”

“Martin, please, you have to be my eyes. Now look carefully.”

“The sign is gone.”

“Which sign?”

“Loose dogs, no callers.”

“That’s encouraging, that’s something in our favour.”

“What shall I do?”

“I’m in the train, and I may lose you now and again.”

“I can hear you fine.”

“I want you to walk up the track, there’s another gate I think you said.”

I reached the second gate in seconds. I knew what she wanted to know: “It’s been unchained but the dead birds are still here, or what’s left of them.”

“But no new ones?”

“No.”

“Can you hear anything?”

“Completely quiet.”

“No birds...”

“Nothing.”

“That is strange. Just going in....” I lost her again. “Sorry, a tunnel. I want you to come off the track and come in sideways to the farm. I don’t want him to see you.”

“You have a plan?” I asked, as I climbed over the wire fence into the field.

“I want you to get close enough to the farmhouse to tell me what they’re doing, but without being seen.”

“I’m not a Marine.”

“Regress, go back, it’s cowboy and indian time again.”

“I’m half-way across the field. There’s a small coppice ahead, and the farmhouse is the other side of it. I can smell something burning.”

“Any smoke?”

“No. There’s a dog barking somewhere.”

“What’s that awful noise?”

“Jet plane overhead. I’m on the edge of the farmyard.”

“I want you stay there, don’t go any further.”

“I’m going up to the house.”

“That’s too much of a risk. Any sign of Rachel?”

“No, the place feels empty.”

“Just stay where you are.”

“I have to see what’s going on.”

“If Rachel’s in trouble you’ll hear about it soon enough.”

“Not if Pugh the Poisoner’s in there.”

“Your trouble is...”

“That I love my wife too much just to...”

“...that you can’t stand not being in control. Sounds like a lot of unhealthy macho stuff to me. Rachel wouldn’t like it.”

“I’m going to have a look.”

“It’s against my advice, Martin...”

“I’m almost across the yard.”

“You’re risking a lot...”

“I’m underneath the window. I’m just taking a look inside. They’re sitting round the table...”

“What’s changed?”

“The table’s been tidied up.”

“Is the wren in the bottle?”

“Can’t see. It’s in the other side of the room. Waldo’s eating, Rachel’s talking.”

“What’s he eating? Don’t argue. I know what I need to know.”

“Looks like bubble and squeak with...Jesus!”

“What?”

“Kippers!”

“Anything else?”

“Some sort of salad, could be watercress, and a bottle of Guinness. Three different types of brown sauce on the table.”

“It’s Mister Waldo’s food.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s not bad.”

“Meaning?”

“He’s in his bride-making phase. Why should he harm her?”

“He’s getting up. I can’t see him any more. He’s back. Christ! He’s got the wren in the bottle. He’s giving it to Rachel.”

“She mustn’t accept it!”

“She’s angry, she’s really upset.”

“Will she take it?”

“What’s the harm?”

“She mustn’t take it!”

“She will. She’ll want to set it free.”

“He’s banking on it. She’ll be setting him free.”

“She’s standing up, I think she’s leaving.”

“That bottle is the vilest thing he could give her. He knows that. If she accepts it, she accepts him, in his wholeness. That’s how he will see it, an act of love, accepting the good and the bad.”

Before death takes you, O take back this.

“She’s taken it.”

“Get home as quickly as you can.”

I ran back across the fields, slowed down at the pub and by the time I reached the cottage I had regained much of my breath and most of my composure. I went in nervously. Rachel was sitting in the kitchen. The bottle was on the table in front of her. I stood at her side and put my arm around her shoulders. “Did he give you that?” I asked. She nodded and burst into tears. I sat down and held her hands.

“It’s evil,” she said, “but I had to take it.”

“He knows you’ll let it free.”

“But it won’t survive.”

“We have to keep it alive,” I said, trying to hide the desperation in my voice.

“It won’t have any strength.”

“We’ll build it up. I’ll look after it.”

“Chicken soup can’t cure everything.”

“It mustn’t die, for God’s sake!”

“We can put it in the spare coop in the barn.”

“You could take it back to him before...”

“No, it’s done now. There’s no before.”

I brought my glass cutter from the tool shed. We took the bottle out to the table on the terrace and laid it on its side. Rachel held the bottom and I started cutting. “Why on earth did you go to see him?”

“It was pleasant enough before he gave me this.”

The movement and noise was distressing the wren but there was nothing we could do about that. I was cutting as slowly and as gently as I could. “What did you talk about?”

“Dylan’s poetry mainly. A bit of Quaker stuff. He wanted to know about formal things, how you joined, marriages, deaths, that sort of thing.”

“Is he coming to Meeting again?” The wren was quiet now, as if all its energy was needed to absorb the fresh air that was rushing into the bottle as the cut grew larger.

“He expects to come next Sunday.”

“Would you be willing to accept him after this?” I asked, pointing at the wren.

“What we have to do and what we want don’t always coincide.”

“There’s that of God in everyone, right?”

It took almost an hour before I was able to separate the two halves of the bottle. I lifted the piece with the wren at the bottom and gently tipped it on the table. The bird came rolling out in a cloud of droppings and feathers. Rachel picked it up and stroked its back. There were tears in her eyes once more. “Must the wren die to save the hawk?” she asked.

Before death takes you, O take back this.

“Let’s climb Cader Idris tomorrow,” I suggested. “We’ve always said we should.”

“Before we get too doddery...”

“Yes, before.”