The Dylan Thomas Murders Read Online Free PDF Page A

ones?” I retorted, and this time the rod came down across the side of my face.
    I felt angry but also disappointed. I rushed forward and hit him. He fell back into the armchair, sprawled like a boxer on his stool, waiting for the trainer’s sponge. Blood spurted from his nose and drenched the front of the white shirt that I had ironed for him before going to school.
    He stood up from the chair...and I was outside the farmhouse window again. I saw him cross the room, and heard the door open. I crouched so low that I could feel the cool of the ground on my face. He stood in the doorway looking across the yard, sniffed the air several times, and then fumbled with his trouser zip.
    â€œDo not come, gentile, into my good night,” he whispered. A stream of water splashed onto the cobbles with such force that it sprayed sideways across my hands and face. He went back inside and bolted the door.
    I ran across the farm yard and back to the car. I remember nothing of the journey home. There was a fine smell in the house as I came through the front door, and Rachel called from the kitchen: “Ready to eat?”
    â€œWhat you got?” I asked, making my way to the bathroom to wash away the stink of urine.
    â€œRed cabbage.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œSauté potatoes.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œBratwurst.”
    Â 
* * *
    The next morning I drove to Rosalind Hilton’s, and took some home-made bagels with me. I know how to get on with the natives. She found some smoked sewin and cream cheese, put them on the coffee table between us, and was ready to talk.
    â€œPeople think that Eliot and Thomas were chalk and cheese. Well, to some extent they’re right. Eliot liked order and discipline around him, Dylan lived in chaos and dirt. Eliot was cool, reserved, the great chiller, you might think, but Dylan was warm, out-going, in public at least.”
    â€œEliot the Harvard graduate...”
    â€œAnd Dylan, the failure at grammar school...”
    â€œThe banker and the scrounger, the cat lover and the cat hater...”
    â€œDylan had an absolute craving for sweets. Eliot sneered at them. Pointless self-gratification, he said. That rather sums them up, I think,” said Rosalind tartly.
    â€œDid they have anything in common?”
    â€œOh, yes, love of the sea for one thing, and molly-coddling mothers, for another.”
    â€œThey were both frail children,” I said, as if Rosalind needed an explanation. “And sickly for most of their lives.”
    â€œIsn’t it curious that they both married in secret and to women obsessed with dancing?”
    â€œI understand Dylan and Eliot were rather puritanical about sex...”
    â€œ...and neither was very good at it,” interrupted Rosalind.
    I wanted to ask how she knew but I was a little taken aback by her frankness. I decided to leave it for later. I could see that Rosalind was impatient to continue.
    â€œDrinking was important to both of them,” she said, “but other things, too. Dylan loved his bed, sucking a beer bottle, eating cake, reading trash novels. Eliot had his detective stories, and was totally obsessed with murders altogether.”
    â€œAnd politics?”
    â€œDylan was never political, except when it suited him, but he found Eliot’s right-wing views distasteful. He was very upset when he heard about Eliot’s tirade against the Jews. Eliot had given a lecture somewhere, and talked about America being invaded by foreign races. I knew nothing about Eliot’s anti-semitism until much later, and saw no signs of it myself.
    â€œI’ll say one more thing about Eliot and the Jews: he may have thought a society should be based on blood-kinship, as he put it, but he certainly didn’t put that concept into practice himself – not when his trousers were down, anyway.
    â€œWell, that brings us nicely to sex. My parents, you understand, were communists and free thinkers. They