“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 D
ylan 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.
The Dylan Thomas Murders Page 10