Unexplained Laughter (11 page)

‘It’s as hot as hell,’ said Lydia. ‘I wish I hadn’t come. I want to go home.’

‘Don’t be tiresome,’ said Betty. ‘We’ve hardly seen anything yet.’

‘I’ve seen a lot of dogs and sheep and pigs and things,’ said Lydia, ‘and a lot of cakes and carrots and scarlet runner-beans, and millions of people, and I want to go home.’

‘It was you who wanted to come,’ said Betty, irritated. ‘You said you wouldn’t miss it for anything.’

‘I haven’t missed it. I’ve seen it, and now I’m getting hot and cross.’ Lydia glowered at the lively scene.

‘I want to see the traction engines in a minute,’ said Betty, looking round; but Lydia knew that she really wanted to see Beuno, since it wasn’t long since she herself had been in love and she recognised the signs.

‘I don’t think Elizabeth can be here,’ she said, wishing to indicate in a roundabout way that she didn’t think Beuno was here either. ‘We’d have come across her by now.’

‘Hywel’s here,’ said Betty. ‘He’s over there at the sheepdog trials, and I saw Wyn and April in the flower-arrangement tent.’

‘Well, keep out of their way,’ said Lydia. ‘I don’t think I could face Dr Wyn’s nudges and winks at the moment.’

‘He doesn’t mean anything by it,’ said Betty. ‘He’s probably shy. He’s frightened of you. You can be very intimidating.’

Lydia ignored this, although she found it quite flattering. ‘Whenever I stand in the middle of a big field,’ she said, ‘I expect some harpy to come flying at me with a hockey stick. It makes me nervous. Everything that reminds me of school makes me nervous.’

‘You’re quite safe here,’ Betty reassured her.

‘I don’t like the look of that bull,’ said Lydia, ‘or that simply colossal pig. If a pig gets its teeth in you it never lets go.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ said Betty.’ If it was true there’d be people all over the world with pigs with their teeth sunk in them.’ She stood still and looked across at the beer tent, shading her eyes. ‘When you’re silly you make everyone else silly,’ she told Lydia rebukingly. ‘You make me feel all limp and incompetent.’

Lydia felt a bit mean. Perhaps Betty
was
enjoying the occasion. Perhaps she would enjoy it more if Lydia stopped whimpering. ‘Let’s go and have a beer,’ she offered, ‘or a hot-dog or some candy-floss.’

‘Beer, I think,’ said Betty, making for the tent.

‘There you are,’ said Dr Wyn with strenuous good will.

‘So we are,’ said Lydia, smiling radiantly.

‘Enjoying yourselves?’ asked the doctor. ‘I had a splendid time in London,’ he added, with an air of triumph.

He was like a master of ceremonies, thought Lydia. Or a cheer leader. Incapable of leaving people to get along on their own breathing their own air, thinking their own thoughts.

‘What are you drinking?’ he asked, going on to apologise that he would have to leave them shortly since it would be time for his surgery.

Betty said sincerely that that was a shame, in order to prevent Lydia from saying it insincerely, as she was clearly about to do. ‘Are you having a good time?’ she asked April. ‘Did your flower arrangement win?’

Disconcertingly, April muttered something incom -prehensible and moved a few steps away from them.

‘That’s not shy,’ said Lydia; ‘that’s just rude. What
have they
being saying about us?’

‘I can’t think,’ said Betty, looking suspiciously at Lydia, as though wondering what she had been up to while her own attention had been elsewhere.

‘I haven’t done a thing,’ protested Lydia, reading this look correctly. ‘The girl’s mad.’

Betty stepped aside and addressed April purposefully. ‘Are your parents here, dear?’ she asked in tones that required an answer.

April said ‘Yes’ unwillingly, but no more.

Lydia was clad in an outfit which like many very beautiful things stopped just short of being ridiculous, hovering on the brink of parody. She had a lot of curly hair and she had tied a bow in it. Her white silk jacket and trousers were of a masculine cut and she looked androgynous and faintly degenerate – an irresistible combination to the sexually confused.

Dr Wyn was highly excited by it and left April’s side to whisper an aggressive witticism in Lydia’s ear.

‘What?’ said Lydia loudly. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’

He looked at her with detestation, and so did April.

‘What was all that about?’ asked Betty.

‘He was telling me something indelicate about a horse,’ said Lydia. ‘And all is clear to me. He has told April that I am insanely in love with him, and now they both hate me: he, because I have made it plain this is not the case, and she for much the same reason, only compounded by the fact that since he has raised the subject, and in view of his demeanour towards me . . . Oh God, I’m getting lost.’ Lydia grasped at the air. ‘I mean it’s the other way round and he is insanely in love with me, and April is mad with him because he is, and she is madder with me because I’m not, since that is so insulting to them both.’

‘You always think people are in love with you,’ said Betty. ‘It’s a sign of advancing age or lunacy.’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Lydia, ‘do I?’

‘You have a tendency that way,’ said Betty. ‘You are attractive, but people do fall in love with other people, you know.’

‘Of course I know,’ said Lydia, and at that moment Hywel came among them. He didn’t say so, but it was evident that he had been successful in the sheepdog trials, because he was unusually cheerful and forthcoming and he seemed quite jubilant to meet them there.

Lydia greeted him without smiling, which is a chilling expedient, usually employed only after a row has taken place.

He didn’t notice. He was drunk, and was finding her interesting again.

‘Where’s Elizabeth?’ asked Betty.

‘Elizabeth?’ said Hywel. ‘Elizabeth. Where’s Elizabeth?’ He beamed at her, revealing himself to be more drunk than Lydia had first supposed.

‘That was enlightening,’ said Betty crossly as he turned to speak to another farmer. ‘You mustn’t flirt with him. He’s drunk. I wonder where Elizabeth is.’

Lydia was enraged at the injustice of this and said she was definitely going home now, and what’s more her feet were hurting.

Once a person’s feet are hurting there is little more to be said, so Betty reluctantly accompanied her to the car.

‘Perhaps they’ll call in on the way home,’ she said wistfully.

Listen, listen, listen. This is what happened. This is what they do. They hurt each other. He said to her, Dr Wyn said to Elizabeth, that he would take her to the Fair. He said Hywel could take the dogs in the van but he would take her in her pretty frock in his clean car. So she put on her pretty frock and the scent that smells of yesterday and Hywel took the dogs in the van and she waited. She sat in the shade of the house wall and she waited, and she knew that I had gone to hide, but she didn’t know where. I was crouched in the hay in the stable that the horses have gone from and she didn’t know I was watching her. I was thinking ‘Poor Elizabeth’, because she was happy. She heard the car come up the lane and stepped into the sunlight and her face shone. If I could speak I would have said, ‘Elizabeth, Elizabeth, go back into the shadows, get out of the light, hide your shining face in the shadows.’

I knew what he would do. I knew he would bring the girl. The girl who is almost as silent as me and looks at me with such horror. I have watched him before, watched him watching Elizabeth as he puts his arm around a girl. He watches her face and he smiles the way he smiled when I broke my bones. No one but me knows he is smiling because his mouth does not move. But I know. I have seen him with his girls in the fields, and when he knows I am watching he kisses them. The boys from the village kiss their girls when I am there because they do not care, but he only kisses them when he is being watched. He watches and he likes to be watched. If I could I would pull the mountain down on his head and close his smiling eyes
.

Elizabeth, poor Elizabeth ran into the sunlight and he stopped the car and he got out and Elizabeth ran towards the car until she saw the girl. I closed my eyes. I do not like to see things being killed
.

She said, ‘Angharad is out on the hills alone, so I cannot come to the Fair’, and she said, ‘I am sorry you have had a wasted journey’, and she said, ‘Have a nice time at the Fair.’

He said, ‘That
is
a pity,’ with his smiling, still mouth, and he got back in the car and drove away, and Elizabeth went back in the house, and all the day she cried, and I went away to the hills
.

Elizabeth does not love me, but she does not always hate me, and when she brushes my hair perhaps she means to be kind
.

They will go to the concert, Beuno and Elizabeth and Hywel all together, and they will sing; but not Elizabeth, who only hums in the house and who will be watching all the time to see if he is there
.

‘It’s a miracle to me how Hywel got home in that condition,’ said Lydia the next day. ‘I have seldom seen a person so paralytic.’

‘I hope Elizabeth doesn’t think we got him like that,’ worried Betty. ‘I know we shouldn’t have let him go, but I didn’t feel we know him well enough to tell him he was too drunk to drive.’

‘There was a moment when I thought he wasn’t going to go ever,’ said Lydia. ‘I drank all the drink myself so that he couldn’t have it, and now I don’t feel terribly well.’

‘You could’ve just hidden it,’ said Betty.

‘I was too tired,’ explained Lydia. ‘One needs to be very alert to go creeping round with a couple of bottles up one’s sleeve, trying to hide them in the coal-scuttle or under the sink.’ She yawned. ‘I think I’ll go and sit in the garden and pull the feathers off the pheasant.’

‘What if the gamekeeper sees you?’ asked Betty querulously. ‘He might arrest you for poaching.’

‘I’ll say I bought it,’ said Lydia.

‘You can’t say you bought it,’ said Betty, speaking now with quiet satisfaction. ‘They’re out of season.’

‘Then I’ll say I bought it months ago,’ said Lydia. ‘I’ll say I like them really high.’

There was a hawk pinned to the silken air above the churchyard. Lydia watched it, thinking that they had much in common except that she had her prey in her grasp and was already preparing it for consumption. She wondered if wild creatures were capable of envy, and decided that they were not. Envy was a civilised emotion, attendant upon some degree of security and the possession of things strictly unnecessary to survival. Doubtless the hawk would take her pheasant should she permit it, but its motives would be uncomplicated. Thinking about deadly sin led her to think again of Satan. If you took an ‘a’ away from his name he would be called ‘Stan’. Lydia thought the Prince of Darkness would lose much of his power if everyone habitually called him Stan. She glanced round superstitiously, reflecting that if anyone called her Stan she would determine to get her own back on him.

‘Beuno,’ she said, as he approached up the path, ‘is it altogether wise to be cheeky to the devil?’

‘Oh, entirely,’ said Beuno without hesitation. ‘No other course is possible. If he is afforded the slightest respect it makes him worse, larger.’

‘I know you to be right,’ said Lydia in her reflective pedantic way, ‘but I have not your courage. I might cock a snook at him behind his back but I wouldn’t dash into his path making the victory sign.’

‘Nor would I,’ said Beuno. ‘I wouldn’t seek him out, but if by mischance he should loom up before me I should waggle my fingers at him.’

‘Do you think he knows we’re talking about him?’ asked Lydia, not nervously, but truly more out of curiosity.

‘I don’t think he’s omnipresent,’ said Beuno, ‘and he isn’t omniscient. He’s not the opposite of God, which would mean he’d be as powerful. He has to keep going all the time – to and fro about the world and walking up and down in it. No, I don’t think he’s listening. His presence is unmistakable . . .’

‘The whiff of sulphur?’ interrupted Lydia.

‘That sort of thing,’ said Beuno. ‘Very occasionally I have strongly sensed his presence.
His
undoubted presence. But he doesn’t need to attend to much personally. His hobgoblins can cause a lot of disruption, and simple ordinary people are remarkably good at being bad.’

‘Yes, aren’t they,’ said Lydia humbly, thinking of herself. ‘Are you sure that God is omnipresent?’

‘Yes,’ said Beuno. ‘If God is, he’s everywhere, even in the most dreadful situations, rubbing shoulders with Satan.’

‘Stan,’ said Lydia, abstractedly, pulling away at the feathers of the pheasant and strewing them about her.

‘Stan?’ queried Beuno.

‘It’s what I call the devil now,’ explained Lydia recalling herself to the conversation. ‘I keep wondering what he’d do if I wandered up to the edge of the pit and leaned over and yelled, “Oi, you down there. Stan!” ’

‘I expect he’d gnash his teeth in impotent rage,’ said Beuno.

‘I would myself,’ agreed Lydia.

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Betty trotting up rather quickly and eyeing them suspiciously. She had only just seen that Beuno had come and was sitting in the garden amongst the wild Welsh poppies and the camomile daisies and the pheasant feathers. The sight had brought her as swiftly out of the house as a child who sees the ice-cream van.

‘I was wondering how to cook this pheasant,’ said Lydia mendaciously. ‘I was going on about the relative merits of casseroling and roasting. I even wondered whether to make him into soup or pâté.’ She didn’t know if Betty knew how long Beuno had been there, so endeavoured to give the impression that she could babble away on the topic of cooking game for hours at a time. Betty would have been upset to know that they had been talking of the devil. Then Lydia, the liar, careless kindly liar, looked up and caught Beuno’s expression as he watched her; an expression of amused disapprobation. She knew instantly that he was thinking of the Father of Lies – for the Prince of Darkness has as many titles as the Prince of Wales – and she went pink.

Betty, made preternaturally alert by love, saw Beuno looking at Lydia and smiling, but misread his expression. She saw Lydia go pink, and misunderstood. She sat there quietly on the grass and grew very sad.