“Did you ever think how a woman could enter a men’s club and get hold of a member’s letters? No, it was Davenport. So they told Dylan that they’d send one of the love letters each week to Caitlin until he agreed to go to Iran. Of course, he caved in, and he went out to make the film. Araf passed on his list to Dylan to bring home. And that’s where it all went wrong.
“Dylan was supposed to take the list to Harold Nicolson, who would pass it to the Cabinet Secretary. But as soon as Dylan set foot in London, he went on the binge. He ended up in the Gargoyle with the usual cronies. Guy Burgess was there – he and Dylan had been great friends for a long time. He gave Araf’s envelope to Burgess: ‘Give this to Old Nick – save me going into the office tomorrow.’ Dylan was anxious to get back to Laugharne to repair things with Caitlin, and he caught the milk train that night.
“Burgess, of course, opened the envelope, and found his name on the list. Three days later, Araf was killed in a car crash in Tehran, not an accident, Philby’s doing. It gave Burgess enough time to warn the others, and in June he defected to the Soviets, and the others went soon after.”
“It was Dylan’s fault they all got away?”
“Oh yes. And they took everything with them. Nuclear secrets, lists of our agents, defence deployments, the lot.”
“You’re saying that Dylan’s mistake helped the Russians catch up in the arms race?”
“Yes, the final irony. He hated those bombs so much. He was devastated. Didn’t write a line of poetry after that.”
“And no more work for intelligence?”
“Of course not. And in the end, they had to get rid of him. He’d worked out what the Americans were up to in Iran in 1953, and didn’t like it. The CIA intercepted his letters to Bert Trick. The last straw was his suing Time magazine. They couldn’t risk anything coming out. So the Agency leaned on the hospital.”
“You mean..?”
“A winking injection too far.”
“That’s unbelievable!”
“It was the height of the Cold War. No chances were taken.”
* * *
I left Rosalind’s, drove home the back way, and called in to see O’Malley. The pub was packed and I could smell why. There were plates of roulade on the tables, most likely spinach or chard, chopped garlic sausages, and slices of fried aubergine. O’Malley came across, with a Brains in one hand, and a small plate of sausages and roulade in the other. “You know something,” I said to him as I picked up the beer, “when my mother was alive, we always had thin sausages.”
She and my father ran an oil and hardware business. We had a shop on the main street of the village, and a green Commer van that toured the farms and council estates. Selling paraffin had been in the family for three generations. The business declined under my father’s stewardship and eventually he was declared a bankrupt. This was largely because of his liking for long holidays in expensive hotels (where he called himself Wing Commander, though he had never been near a plane in his life), and by his thirst for whisky and late nights in the back room of the Wheatsheaf.
I was always eager to help on the Commer on Saturdays. Up at six, I would lay two fires and take tea to my parents in the middle bedroom, where it usually remained undrunk. Then I’d run to the yard where we kept the Commer and the stores. My job was to open up the old stable, and fill and cork two hundred bottles with parazone ready for the coming week.
I’d usually be finishing just as Sid the driver arrived, and we’d load the day’s supply of parazone into the Commer on racks behind the passenger seat. Sid would drive us down to the shop. I’d grab some breakfast, and Sid would collect the leather money bag from my mother, who had by this time opened up the shop and taken bacon and eggs to my father upstairs.
We would finish around early evening, and the routine at the end of the day was just as well established. Sid would park on the main road outside the shop, and take the day’s money into my parents. My mother and I would count it on the kitchen table, and it was my father’s job to go out to the Commer and take a note of the paraffin gauges, and check inside to see what stock had been sold. The routine was changed one Saturday evening, and it was my mother who was killed, not my father as it should have been.
We were back much later than usual. A thick winter’s fog was swirling in off the estuary and we had to inch along the lanes. We came in and found my father sitting in front of the wireless. He was filling in the scores on his football coupon, with a half a bottle of whisky on the table beside him. He refused to go out to the van until the results were over. Sid was anxious to get home, and he couldn’t take the Commer to the yard until the gauges and stock had been checked. My mother said she would do the checking and that my father would move the van later.
She found a torch, pencil and paper, and went outside. I put the kettle on, went to the bathroom to pee, and chatted to my brother who was splashing about in the bath. I walked through to the front of the house, where I had my bedroom, overlooking the main street. I could only just make out the shape of the Commer, but I could see the fuzzy light from my mother’s torch as she checked the gauges. Next thing, the headlights of a car came up behind her. I heard the screech of brakes, like fingers down a blackboard, and then a tremendous bang. The headlights went out, steam came gushing through the fog, and the torch come spinning up towards me.
I ran downstairs. My father was still in the kitchen. I screamed at him and ran out into the fog. I didn’t think at all about what I’d find, but wondered what we would do at Christmas.
She was squashed flat against the paraffin tank, her face turned sideways, looking up at the house as if she had tried in that final second to ask for my help. I watched the blood dripping from her mouth, and heard someone retching in the gutter behind me. Neighbours appeared, splashing frantically through the leaking paraffin, and took me away inside.
“Christmas,” I said to O’Malley “was a disaster. He took us to a hotel in Cornwall but we ran away with the train tickets and went home. Not bad for two kids in short trousers.”
“And fat sausages for ever more?” O’Malley really knew how to put two and two together.
When I arrived home, the house was silent and gloomy. Rachel was in the garden room. I could see she’d been crying. I sat down beside her, and she handed me the Cambrian News.
“Page eight,” she said, so quietly it was almost a whisper.
At the top of the In Memoriam column was a picture of a black and white collie. The name underneath was Mably, with the words: Caught in a spinney of murdering herbs.
“Who could do such a horrible thing?” Rachel asked.
“It’s Milk Wood, isn’t it?”
“Sort of.”
“Beynon the butcher?”
“No, Pugh the poisoner.”
* * *
The day started with slaughter.
I try to let our hens have as much daylight as possible so that they give us lots of eggs in return. I get up about 7-30, and whilst the tea is brewing, I put on my gumboots and walk down to the poultry sheds in my dressing gown and night-shirt. I scoop feed from the bins, and spend a very happy five minutes whilst the ducks, hens and geese scrabble around me fighting for food. And then back for the tea, and upstairs to bed for another hour or so, depending on the weather and the time of year.
I usually let the small birds out first so that they have time for a fair share before their big sisters come running in with their aggressive shrieks and needle-sharp beaks. I opened up the Seebrights, and they came tumbling out of their pop-hole like wild flurries of snow. I unlatched the door to let out the Welsummer bantams but, surprisingly, they didn’t emerge. I knelt down and peered into the coop. The five hens lay headless on blood-spattered straw and the young cockerel had wedged himself up near the roof. No fox could have entered the coop so I guessed a stoat had found a small hole in the wire. Not a rat, because rats just chew away at the neck and the eyes, leaving most of the head intact. Stoats and their various relative
s, on the other hand, eat the whole head and neck, leaving behind a perfectly formed headless corpse.
No amount of rational argument would persuade us to eat poultry that had been killed by a predator, so I gathered up the hens and put them in a plastic bag, ready for the rubbish collection. I prised the cockerel away from the roof of the coop, and when I put him on the floor I noticed his leg was broken. I would have to kill him.
I went back to the house, poured the tea, and went upstairs where Rachel was already sitting up in bed reading. I told her about the Welsummers and she simply said “Waldo.” I said I didn’t think so, and explained how the head had been cleanly taken off. No human could do that, I said, but I immediately remembered an incident in a pub in Oxford when I’d seen a student bite off the head of a pigeon as cleanly as any stoat would have done.
Then the phone rang. It was Rosalind Hilton. “I’m coming round to see you,” she announced, “it’s extremely important.”
I was in the shower when she arrived. I heard the bell ring, and then the sound of Rachel and Rosalind talking excitedly together. When I came out, they were in the garden room. Rosalind was sitting on the settee with a bulging plastic bag at her feet, and Rachel was laying out a small breakfast of pain chocolat, fruit, and coffee. They were discussing writing and self-discipline, and Rachel was describing the poetry workshop she went to each week.
“Dylan would have found a workshop useful,” said Rosalind. “All he had was Vernon.” She put down her cup and reached into the plastic bag. She took out a letter and put it on the table.
Rachel recognised the small, cramped handwriting immediately. “It’s Dylan,” she exclaimed.
“I was lying in bed last night, going through the Collected Letters. It made me very angry. It’s so unbalanced, just a mere handful of the letters he’d written to women.”
“But they were the important women in Dylan’s life,” I replied, realising too late that that was not the most diplomatic thing to have said. “Caitlin, Edith Sitwell...”
“I’ve decided to put the matter right,” interrupted Rosalind. “This bag holds all of Dylan’s letters to me, plus one or two to Waldo. There’s also about twenty poems which have never been published, love poems, sent to me, and a few children’s stories written for Waldo, though I must say they are a little imperfect and mostly improvised with Waldo on his knee. How you sort them out,” she said, looking at Rachel, “is entirely up to you.”
“Me?” said Rachel, rather lamely.
“I’d like you to prepare Dylan’s letters, and the poems, for publication, as one collection. You’re a good poet, you know his work, and I believe you are honest – most Quakers are. And you’re Jewish, I like that.”
“And your role? asked Rachel.
“You prepare the collection, and we’ll work on an introduction together. I can’t pay you anything, but you and Waldo can share the royalties.”
“And the letters? What’s to happen to them?”
“The National Library can have them.”
“And time scale?” asked Rachel.
“One that’s suitably speedy for an impatient octogenarian who may pop her clogs at any time.”
“But why now, after all these years?”
“You’re the right person, in the right place, at the right time. Besides...” Rosalind paused and looked across at me “...the conversations with Martin have stirred up too many memories. I need to put a few ghosts firmly in their place.”
Rosalind’s reply was plausible but I wasn’t convinced. I felt that we were being used for some purpose that was being kept from us. Perhaps this was an unworthy thought, but I felt uneasy and certainly not as pleased as Rachel clearly was.
“Here’s one I thought you would be particularly interested in,” continued Rosalind. “From Dylan’s first American trip.”
Rachel took the letter, read it with obvious enjoyment, and passed it to me.
Hotel Earle
Washington Square
New York
16th May 1950
Oh Rosalind,
I can’t begin to tell you how tired I am, & sick like an old dog with mange, sick of this country, sick of trains, sick of planes and Spillanes, sick of poems, sick of not hearing from you, sick in my shoes when I hear my voice in the audit-orium (sic), because my lines are an abacus, and Brinnin counts the money. Did you get the last cheque from Detroit, an awful city where they make motor cars? Did Waldo get the postcard from Seattle? I loved San Francisco! I ran guiltless from the readings to a pub on the water-front called Leprecohens, run by a Jew from Dublin, & read Yeats to fish-oiled sailors who told me stories about Al Catraz. The sea is awash with sardine fleets, and the hills with whizzing cable cars. There is so much to eat, & more to see, in a wonderful clear sunlight, all hills and bridges, slipping down to a bold, blue, coldblew boat-bobbing sea.
I’ve seen lobsters bigger than cats, & crabs the size of space ships. Cockles are clams & soups are chowders, and women wear pads in their shoulders. I’ve sucked Baby Ruths and squeezed Tootsie Rolls but I miss Daddie’s sexy brown bottles. But the American dream is a nightmare except that the people are not sleeping and will never have the relief of waking up. I have seen men without shoes, beggars without bowls, and Indians with not a bow and arrow between them. It’s a moonless, deathfounded night in the back streets, where the eternal poor are spat upon and robbed. Yet I have travelled gloriously: I’ve met Eisenhower, kissed Ella, played cards with the Duke & heard a scratchy recording of Victoria Spivey, which made my flesh creep and my hair uncurl. I have been to Harlem and back, & wondered why I’ve never seen Tiger Bay.
Have I mentioned Merle before? Her cousin is a paediatrician, & runs a clinic that could help Waldo. I’m having cocktails with him tomorrow. I will ask Brinnin to put some of my money into an American bank because hospitals here run out of patience if their patients run out of sense. I was stopped in the Bronx last night by a boy no older than Waldo. ‘Gimme a dollar,’ he said, ‘or I scream you to shitsville.’ I told him I was an English poet. ‘What’s so special ‘bout poetry,’ he rasped, ‘just another way of making you poor, right?’ I blessed the quality of American education, gave him my autograph and walked on. What a strange word autograph is! The rest of the world is content with a signature.
Merle took me to her Quaker Meeting last Sunday, & I’ve not been the same since. (Did you know that Caitlin’s mother was a lesbian Quaker? Or was she a Quaker lesbian?) We sat down together in a little circle of comfy armchairs, no priests or creed or mumbo-jumbo, & not a cross or crucifix in sight. The silence seemed eternal. Then an old lady started to talk about peace and the coming war. More silence which I drank and drowned in all at once. Then a very intense Negro stood up and spoke for a few minutes about the fate of the Palestinians. As he sat down, he said: ‘A mill can’t work on the water that has gone’. And that’s exactly how I’d been feeling about my writing! How did he know? We all shook hands on the hour, & went off for coffee and gooey cakes in the room next door. They called each other Friend & so they were. If I hadn’t had a hangover, I would have been inspired. I was more content than the bottom of a bottle of Buckley’s. Do they believe in God? Who knows? Some do, others don’t. But they all believe “there’s that of God in everyone”, even in me! There’s hope yet. When I return, I shall have a few more drinks in The Fox and Penn, and ask you how it’s possible for a Jew to become a Quaker. Merle did.
I’m bringing a space suit for Waldo, and a hermaphrodite monkey that climbs up a string.
Love, Dylan.
PS. Did Tommy Herbert get the Negro picture magazines?
As I finished reading, Rosalind said: “I’m sure that you’ll see this as a labour of love, but you will have to deal with Waldo. He may not approve of the collection, or of you. He’s a very private person.”
“Have you discussed it with him?”
“No, but I shall inform him this evening.” Rosalind stretched out her hand across the coffee table.
“Well, Friend, do we have a deal?”
“Let’s shake on it,” replied Rachel.
I was dispatched to Lampeter to photocopy the papers. It was lunch time when I returned, so we sat outside overlooking the river and ate granary rolls and smoked venison. “I’ve been thinking about the revelatory power of anomaly,” I said between mouthfuls.
“Meaning?”
“Rosalind knew you were a Quaker.”
“So?”
“But how did she know? I’ve never mentioned it.”
“Why don’t you go and kill that Welsummer. We’ll have it for dinner one day.”
I did as I was told. The cock was still cowering in the coop. I picked him up and carried him outside so that the other poultry didn’t see the dirty deed. I held his body under my right arm, gripped his neck with my left hand and twisted till I heard the snap of his neck. I tied some string around his legs and hung him upside down on a nail, and started plucking. It’s easy and therapeutic work when the flesh is warm. When I’d finished, I scooped up the feathers and put them in the rubbish bag with the headless hens. I went inside and laid the bird on the kitchen counter.
I pierced the skin, and cut along the back of the neck, right up to the head. Rachel looked up from Dylan’s letters and asked: “Can you do that somewhere else, please?”
“Why did she just suddenly turn up and ask you to work on the papers?”
“I was deeply honoured...”
“But you’re a complete stranger. She only met you this morning, but she entrusts her love letters to you.” I cut the neckbone with the kitchen secateurs, and pulled off the head and the loose blood vessels, just as the stoat would have done using its teeth. Out came the neckbone. I put my hand inside, loosened the innards and pulled out the gullet.
“She knows my poetry, and she’s obviously taken with you...”
“It doesn’t make sense.” I turned the bird around, cut round the vent, slipped in my hand and pulled gently on the luke-warm intestines until they slithered out across the counter.
The Dylan Thomas Murders Page 5
