The Dylan Thomas Murders Page 2

  “Tell me.”

  “Geoffrey Faber took it to Tyglyn Aeron.”

  “Faber? T.S. Eliot’s publisher?”

  “The very same.” He finished pouring my beer, and placed it on the counter with all the satisfaction of a fisherman playing out his line. “Go and see old Eli. I’ll give him a ring to say you’re coming.”

  * * *

  I drove to Lampeter to pick up a curry. Lampeter I liked. It was cosmopolitan, just like the part of London we had left. The pasty, chapel-serious faces of the locals were leavened by the black, brown and Chinese faces of students from the college. Hasidim rubbed shoulders with farm labourers in the Spar, hippies strummed in Harford Square, and Muslim women floated down the High Street in deep purdah.

  A thickening mist slowed my drive home with the take-away. I remember the table was already laid, and Rachel was in the kitchen making raita, and warming some home-made nan. After that, my memory of what happened is extremely disconnected. We sat down at the table. We lit the candles and said a silent prayer. Rachel was picking up a spoon to serve the rice, and I remember that I was trying to tear the nan bread in two. I heard the creak of the yard gate, and wondered why the geese were so quiet. I heard footsteps outside, someone moving quietly around the yard. Mably was in the back room but, instead of barking furiously as he usually did at the slightest noise, he came whimpering through the house, and flung himself trembling under the table. There was a sound of scuffling feet outside the front door – we have no lobby and the door opens directly into the room where we were eating. I remember looking over my left shoulder, and seeing a white envelope come through the letterbox, and glide down to the doormat. I went across to pick it up. No address on it, just the lines

  Find meat on bones that soon have none,

  And drink in the two milked crags,

  The merriest marrow and the dregs

  Before the lady’s breasts are hags

  And the limbs are torn.

  Rachel said something about the food getting cold, so I put the envelope on the table beside me and ate some mutton muglai. Then I saw the envelope move. I stopped eating, picked it up and slit open the back with my knife.

  I heard Rachel screaming and the sound of her fork hitting the plate. I jumped to my feet and stood riveted as a black spider came through the slit in the envelope and worked its way towards my hand. The touch of its feet on my finger made me shudder and the envelope fell to the table. Dozens of spiders came spilling out. They scuttled across the table, some abseiling down to the floor, but most running wildly between the plates. Some of the larger ones had already clambered into the silver cartons and were now desperately trying to extricate themselves from the burning curries. I recall seeing three or four small green spiders burrowing into the pilau rice, and Rachel running to the other side of the room.

  Foolishly, I picked up a nan and began swotting the spiders but the bread was not well suited to the task. I rushed into the kitchen to fetch a can of fly spray from under the sink. I sprayed it vigorously across the top of the table, Rachel angrily shouting “Poison us, go on, poison us, I would.” Then I heard something squealing with pain, the noise a small creature makes when the talons of a hawk strike through its flesh. I dropped the can and ran outside. The orange hazard lights on the car were flashing across the darkening yard. I walked nervously across. I could see the outline of a bird trapped in a layer of mist above the car. A live house martin had been impaled on the aerial.

  * * *

  I arrived late at the office the next morning. After a wasted hour shuffling papers across my desk, and wondering about the spiders and the man at Fern Hill, I rang the National Library. Tyglyn Aeron, they said, had been built in the early nineteenth century. Geoffrey Faber had bought it in 1930 and T.S. Eliot was a regular summer guest.

  I grabbed a seafood ciabatta from the deli, and drove munching to meet Eli Morgan. O’Malley had said he was a gardener, and that was where I found him, leaning on a spade in the front garden of his small white cottage. He was tall and well-built, and looked surprisingly fit for his age. His eyes were hidden by a peaked cap, so that his face was dominated by the strong chin that jutted out like Mr Punch’s, though much broader. We shook hands, and sat on a wooden bench beneath an old apple tree. I clipped a tiny microphone onto his lapel. Old habits die slow. I had carried a tape recorder almost every day of my working life as a sociologist. I could give all my attention to the speaker, not worrying about taking notes or trying to remember what was being said. It would be just as useful in my new role as rural sleuth.

  I asked Eli what he remembered about Geoffrey Faber, and let him talk away.

  “I worked down there in Tyglyn as second under-gardener, vegetables mostly, which we were sending by train up to London to Faber’s house. The Head Gardener was Oaten, who came down here from South Wales with his wife and daughters, and you daren’t glance at those girls for Oaten would give you a good beating. He was a brute.

  “I seldom was talking to Faber, he was one above us. He was in church sometimes, or the shop. His tongue was sharp if you was upsetting him.”

  “What did he want with Dai Fern Hill’s shed?”

  “Somewhere quiet to write, you see.”

  “For himself, you mean?”

  “Eliot.”

  “Used to write in the shed?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Did you ever see Eliot about?”

  “He would stay mainly in the house. Sometimes we would see him writing in the shed. He and Faber used to go shooting, I know that. Big bugs they were, they weren’t for mixing.”

  “So Eliot didn’t know any locals?”

  “Not many.”

  “None you can remember?”

  “Well, that’s not for me to say. But there are stories.”

  We talked a little more about his prize vegetables, and then I left. As I walked down the lane, I had the uneasy feeling that someone was watching me. When I reached the car, I felt that something wasn’t quite right, though I couldn’t see what. I put the key in the door but it was already unlocked. I looked through the window but could see nothing missing or amiss so I opened the door and climbed in. I turned the ignition and started the engine. I pulled over the seat belt and snapped it in across my chest and looked, as I always did, in the rear view mirror.

  But the rear view was missing. Someone had covered the mirror with a piece of paper. There was a verse on it, written in faint red ink:

  Chew spider

  suck wren

  bitch’s blood

  fountain

  penned.

  Find meat on bones? Not his.

  War on the spider and the wren!

  I pulled the paper off, and opened the glove compartment to keep the verse for Rachel. Inside, still oozing blood, was a ring of puppy tails, threaded together with orange baler twine.

  I drove fast to the Scadan Coch and asked O’Malley for a glass of RUC, and he quickly poured a double Bushmills into a pint of Guinness. “I’ve got some tapas for you,” I said, putting the tails onto the bar. “Fry for two minutes with sage, onion and tomato and serve in a roll, your original, authentic Ceredigion hot dog, your very own chien chaud, serve with relish if not enthusiasm.” I quick-marched half the RUC into my stomach. “Look, what the hell’s going on?”

  “You been asking about the shed?”

  “You encouraged me.”

  “You’ve upset him somehow.” O’Malley lifted the ring of tails from the counter. “I’ll fry these over for the ferret.”

  I finished my drink, and went home, taking the shortcut through the field behind the pub. As I crossed the old bridge, I could see Rachel rounding up the chickens. She was having difficulty in enticing the flighty Seebrights into the coop, and the big Sumatran cockerel was refusing pointblank to go in with the hens. I watched for a minute, enjoying the chaos, and then walked up the dark lane to the cottage.

  I let myself in. I was half-way across the room when I sa
w the upturned bucket on the table. I padded round warily whilst I took off my coat, checked the answering machine and put the kettle on. “It’s a letter,” said Rachel, coming in with one Seebright still clinging to the top of her shoulder. “I thought it was the safest place to put it.”

  I rescued the bantam and took it down the garden path to the coop. When I returned, Rachel was standing by the table, fly swat in hand, convinced that the letter contained more wild life. I lifted the bucket, and we stared at the pale lavender envelope. It remained perfectly still but even so Rachel lunged forward and began furiously beating the envelope with her swat.

  I picked it up and clipped off a little corner with the kitchen scissors. Nothing came out except the smell of eau-de-cologne. We both relaxed, though Rachel kept the swat in her hand. I slowly slit open the envelope. There was a letter inside, no spiders or puppy tails. I gingerly unfolded the single sheet of paper and read the note out loud: “Come and have coffee this evening. I should like to talk about Mr. Eliot, amongst others. Yours, Rosalind A. Hilton.”

  * * *

  Rosalind Hilton’s welcome was warm and effusive. She insisted on giving me a tour of her cottage, at the same time reeling off the names of the talented people who had lived on the banks of the Aeron. Not just Eliot and Dylan Thomas, she said with pride, but opera singer Sir Geraint Evans at the mouth of the river. “Not to mention,” she concluded with a wink, “the new Aeron poets like Rachel Mossman.”

  “My wife,” I said in what I hoped was a modest tone.

  “I know,” she replied. “I like Rachel’s poetry a good deal. She’s Jewish, isn’t she?”

  “Straight out of Hackney.”

  “And you?”

  “No. Her toy goy.”

  After pouring coffee, Rosalind sat on one side of the fire, and told me to sit opposite. I asked her if I could record our conversation, and after some hesitation, she agreed. Looking across the hearth at her, I guessed she was in her eighties, like old Eli Morgan. Her face was bright and sharp, her hair tied back in a bun. Three gold rings on her right hand gleamed brightly in the light of the fire. She rolled them between the finger and thumb of her other hand, as if she were trying to hypnotise me. Though she looked small and rather frail, when she spoke her voice was so deep and powerful that her presence filled the room.

  “I’ll come straight to the point, and then, no doubt, you’ll want me to start at the beginning.” I said that was fine, and then she said in a matter-of-fact voice: “Eliot and I...” She paused and I saw a faint blush on her cheeks, though it might well have been the flames from the fire “...were lovers.”

  And then she began at the beginning.

  “I was born and brought up in the east end of London, in Copley Street, Stepney. My mother’s maiden name was Shodken and my father, who was a tailor, was a Hintler. That was a double cross to bear, so to speak, to be Jewish in the 1930s and called Hintler.

  “You smile, but it was no joke to be the daughter of Mr and Mrs Hitler, for that was what people called us.

  “My parents could see which way things were going in Germany, so in 1935 they made two decisions which they thought would save our lives, or at least make life more tolerable. They changed the family name to Hilton, and we moved out of London to Ciliau Aeron, where I’ve lived ever since.”

  “Why Ciliau?”

  “Geraint our milkman was always going on about how pretty it was.”

  “He ran the dairy in Copley Street?”

  “Two cows in a tin shed behind the shop, and a churn pulled round the streets on a three-wheeled trolley.”

  “Did your parents really think that Jews from London could hide in the countryside?”

  “Perhaps it was naive but many families did the same. Lubetkin, for instance, who designed the penguin house at London Zoo. He took his family to Gloucestershire, didn’t he?”

  “But why Wales?”

  “It was as far away west as you could get from Europe and the Nazis. And my father had always believed that the Celts were fond of Jews. Perhaps they are, Dylan Thomas certainly was, but I’ll come to him in a minute.”

  “How did you get by?”

  “In the time-honoured way. My father did alterations for the bachelor and widowed farmers, my mother took in washing. And we helped out with the haymaking and other farm work. My father was also a scholar – he’d thought seriously of being a Rabbi when he was young but the Communist Party got to him first. The Welsh like scholarship so they took to him quickly.

  “No, we told no-one we were Jewish because we were convinced the Germans would eventually invade. We were simply regarded as Londoners who had fled the city for a quiet country life. We were treated politely and kindly, if a little suspiciously. Within a month of being here, my parents were going to church. It caused them some pain but not much. They were both atheists and hadn’t been religious Jews since their early teens. Going to church was part of the new identity, like going to the agricultural shows and the eisteddfodau. The worst thing was getting rid of our duvets – deks, we called them – and learning to sleep with blankets. Only Jews had duvets at that time, and my parents didn’t want to keep anything that would give us away.”

  “Didn’t you miss London?”

  “Strangely enough, no. I already knew that I had a little talent for painting and that blossomed here in the countryside. I loved the sea, which I had only ever seen once or twice before. I could wear lipstick without being hissed at by the neighbours, some of whom were very frum. Here we had our own little cottage, but in Copley Street we all lived upstairs in three rooms, with Mrs Presse and her children downstairs. The lavatory was at the bottom of the garden, and we had to go through Mrs Presse’s kitchen to reach it. I didn’t miss that, I can tell you, and besides, I felt at home here.”

  “Really?”

  “Wales is Old Testament country – the men were Isaac and Jacob and Esau, and the villages Carmel, Hebron and Bethlehem, even a Sodom or two. You see, Wales is Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia rolled up into one. It was heimisher.

  “Social life? I had little of that in London. I was more interested in books and painting, and, besides, not many wanted to date the daughter of Mr Hitler. Down here it was better. I went on rambles with the theology students from Lampeter, and that helped both my painting and my Welsh. And on Friday evenings there was always a dance in Aberaeron. I used to catch the train in with the two Oaten girls and we had a wonderful time.

  “Within a year of arriving, I was helping out at Tyglyn when the Fabers were down. I was just a general handy girl. Sometimes I looked after the children when the nanny was ill. If there were guests for dinner, I helped in the kitchen or prepared the tables for auction bridge. And that is how I first met Eliot. I was sitting on a bench in the garden sketching. Eliot came out of his shed and walked down the path towards me. He stood behind me for a while, watching as I sketched. Then he sat down. I noticed how fastidiously he arranged his plus fours, which he always wore at Tyglyn. He sat with me for about twenty minutes. We talked mainly of painting and he wanted to know what I thought of the Surrealists. I knew nothing of them, I’m afraid, and he gave me a little lecture on Salvador Dali. That was to be the first of many conversations. And the next year, I met Dylan Thomas. Such things could not have happened to me in Stepney.

  “I’ll tell you a bit about Dylan and then go back to Eliot. It was in July 1936, in the evening. I was alone in Tyglyn baby-sitting – I think the nanny had been got rid of by then. The Fabers were at a poetry reading at another mansion just up the road. Eliot was upstairs in his room writing. There was a hammering on the door. I opened it and this young man with tousled hair stood there, looking slightly unkempt in corduroy trousers and a black polo-neck sweater. I noticed a two-seater sports car in the drive with an older man with flaming red hair behind the driving wheel. The young man came into the hall, looked about and said: “Where’s Vernon hiding?” I replied that he had come to the wrong house, and that if he wished to hear M
r Watkins read then I could re-direct him.

  “He gave me a huge smile and said he’d much prefer to read some poetry to me. He stretched out his hand and said ‘I’m Dylan Thomas.’ Well, of course I’d heard of him. Eliot had mentioned him. And my father was always talking about him, too.

  “I invited him into the Drawing Room, and he fell back into the red leather sofa and almost disappeared between the cushions, he was quite slim, really, at least he was then. I asked him if he’d like a drink and he said yes, but nothing alcoholic. I had the impression that he was recovering from an illness and he’d been told to stay off alcohol for a while.”

  “I suppose he wanted sweets,” I said.

  “No, he asked for a glass of milk and cake, so I went to the kitchen and brought some for him. There was a certain chemistry between us straight away. After all, I was twenty-one at the time and he was only a year older. I told him that Eliot was writing upstairs and asked if he would like to meet him. ‘What, and play altar boy to his Pope?’

  “He stayed for more than an hour. He asked to see the Library, and he sniffed along the shelves like a truffle hound. He found some Hardy, which he read to me, and then Rilke, das Stündenbuch, I think, which I read to him, translating as I went along. Then a quick tour of the house, avoiding upstairs. We talked a lot about London, and he asked me about Copley Street and all the goings-on. He said he was fascinated by neighbours because his father hated them so much. He soon picked up it was a mainly Jewish street, so I told him, rather cleverly I thought, that we used to give our Jewish neighbours a box of Matzos at Passover, and they would give us a pudding at Christmas.

  “Copley Street felt like thin ice so I changed the subject and told him about the Faber’s home-made electricity. There was a waterwheel in the farmyard linked to a generator, which fed into a very large bank of lead accumulators in a room next to the kitchen. He wanted to see it for himself, and that’s how we spent the time. And, of course, to the kitchen for more milk and some widgeon pie that had been left out for Eliot’s supper. Dylan ate it all. On the way out, he took Eliot’s scarf, only for a borrow, he said, but he never returned it. He asked me to help him put on his jumper, which I did, though I thought it rather odd. And off he went to find Vernon.”