“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. O
verseer 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.
The Dylan Thomas Murders Page 12
