Unexplained Laughter (12 page)

Oh hell, thought Lydia, moved to unwelcome compassion. Another of the things you can’t say is ‘Now look here, honeybunch, I know what you think we’ve been doing, but we
haven’t
. Honest.’ She went on tearing out feathers, glancing surreptitiously at Betty. After a while, of course, the woebegone aspect of the crossed-in-love becomes very irritating, especially if one is being unjustly blamed for it, so Lydia ripped out the last of the fluff that formed, as it were, the bird’s underclothes, rose to her feet gripping her pheasant by its knees, and then bent over and kissed Beuno. The bells of hell went ting-a-ling-a-ling.

‘The gamekeeper will see those feathers,’ said Betty later. ‘You should’ve cleared them away.’

‘He’ll only think a weasel got it,’ said Lydia. Immediately she thought guiltily that if Betty had not been such a nice girl she would now remark acidly that a weasel
had
got it. ‘You ought to make Beuno take you to the concert,’ she said, thinking instantly that she was being cruelly tactful.

‘Beuno doesn’t want
me
,’ said Betty without rancour. She was washing dishes and seemed quite calm.

Calm to the point of lifelessness, thought Lydia, veering giddily between pity and wrath. ‘He wouldn’t mind going with you to the concert,’ she said, thinking that she could have phrased that better if she’d had more notice.

‘Why don’t
you
go with him?’ asked Betty, carefully rinsing one of Lydia’s lustre jugs.

‘Because I
hate
good music,’ said Lydia. ‘You know perfectly well I do. They’ll be belting out bits of the
Messiah
and I should go mad.’

‘I might go by myself,’ said Betty. ‘I like to hear them sing.’

‘I know,’ said Lydia eagerly, relieved to find a topic fit for discussion. ‘I can’t stand the things they’re singing, but like the noise their voices make. If you see what I mean.’

Betty smiled.

It wasn’t much of a smile, but it did have a faintly superior tinge to it and Lydia began to feel better. ‘It’s in the village hall,’ she said, ‘and there’s refreshments at half time. I’ll take you there and I’m sure someone will bring you back.’ She didn’t want to say she was sure Beuno would bring her back because that would make it evident again that she knew the miserable secrets of Betty’s heart. ‘I’ll cook the pheasant while you’re out,’ she said, ‘and eat it before you get home.’

‘I’ll make the bread sauce if you like,’ said Betty selflessly; so Lydia let her, which was fairly unselfish of Lydia who made the best bread sauce in the world with a great deal of butter, nutmeg and black pepper.

Betty was so low that she somehow contrived to hurt her finger quite badly with a clove that she was sticking into an onion. It went down her nail to the quick and the onion juice made it sting.

Lydia was hopeless at first aid. She stood well back, suggesting cold water.

‘It’s all right,’ said Betty courageously. ‘I’ll put a plaster on it and forget about it.’

‘I once had a plaster on my finger,’ said Lydia, ‘and I was making duck pancakes because an editor and his wife were coming to dinner, and when I’d rolled up all the pancakes I found the plaster was missing.’

‘Oh
Lydia
,’ said Betty, diverted from her wound.

‘I wasn’t going to unroll the damn things,’ continued Lydia, ‘so I banged them in the oven, humming insouciantly the while and served them up all bubbling hot. And then I sat and watched everyone very closely, and after a while I saw Finn chewing and chewing, and then he swallowed it.’

‘
Lydia
,’ said Betty.

‘It was all right,’ Lydia reassured her. ‘A nice clean cut. No pus or anything. Bit of roughage for him.’

‘That’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard,’ said Betty, but she was smiling.

‘It was a bit disgusting,’ admitted Lydia, ‘but what could I do? Tell everyone to watch out for a foreign body? No one would’ve eaten anything and my party would’ve been a flop.’

‘You should’ve told Finn when you saw him chewing,’ said Betty.

‘How could I?’ protested Lydia. ‘“I say, darling, you’ve got the bit of plaster off my finger.” It would’ve sounded most odd.

‘Anyway, a bit of plaster looks very like a bit of duck. He never knew the difference.’

‘You’re completely unscrupulous, Lydia,’ said Betty, but she had laughed for a moment.

Lydia drove Betty to the Village Hall in the evening and drove back alone into the sudden shadow of the hill behind the cottage. Evening fell early over Lydia’s garden while the rest of the valley preened itself in the setting sun. She stood watching it while the first bat swept swiftly past her hair.

‘Go away,’ she said, disconcerted by the sudden alien speed, the urgency of its insect-intent flight.

Then the laughter began.

Lydia was not exactly terrified, but she was sitting very, very still so that if there was the slightest noise she could be quite certain that it was not she who had caused it. Lydia wished any sounds that the night had to offer to be separate and extrinsic from herself. Otherwise she would grow confused as to the limits and the confines of reality, the nature of objectivity and the state of her own mental balance. She had let the fire go out since even the soft fall of ash, the spit of a sudden irritable flame, the shifting of branches in the course of their own attrition filled her ears with restless noise and muffled what might be sounding outside: the soft tread of something moving closer, the susurration of something being unsheathed, the breath of someone hissing through his teeth.

The laughter had stopped a while ago and, ever since, Lydia’s imagination had been giving her a hard time. Why, she asked herself, had the laughter ceased? What had stopped being so funny? Had someone or something decided that now was the time to be serious? Surely in time and eternity only death and hell were really serious. She sat on the corner of the old sofa with her legs folded under her and stared at the window, willing the oil lamp not to sputter and distort the sounds that belonged to the night: the true night that lay outside in the garden and the valley and held dominion over the hills. Had she not been nervous, Lydia would have been angry, for she had realised that she was, herself, a domestic beast penned in against the night in a frightening little box of night that was all her own, vulnerable to destruction by the very bounds of its definition. The creatures of the field, unprotected as they were, had yet less to fear from the night, being part of it. Lydia, cooped up like a hen in her house, had branded herself victim, prey, alien and afraid. She told herself that the best thing she could do would be to go out of the house and climb up to where the buzzards and the ravens nested on the cliff top, but she didn’t pay herself much attention. It was dark out there.

She was still sitting motionless as a hare when they returned from the concert.

‘You’ve let the fire go out,’ accused Betty.

‘I was utterly absorbed in my book,’ explained Lydia, wondering where she had left it. ‘If you put some firelighters in it’ll start again in no time.’

‘I was going to make some supper,’ said Betty.

‘I’ll see to the fire,’ said Beuno.

‘I didn’t eat my pheasant,’ said Lydia, ‘being so absorbed in my book.’ She didn’t want to explain that she had been too nervous to go in the kitchen and cook it, too lily-livered to turn her back to the window as she lit the gas, too timorous to cause even the tiny sounds of roasting game. ‘I shall have it tomorrow.’

‘Let me help you,’ said Elizabeth to Betty, manifesting a disinclination to sit and make conversation with Lydia.

‘I heard someone laughing,’ said Lydia, speaking to Beuno but not much caring who heard her. While no one must know the extent to which she had been alarmed, she had no objection to them knowing the cause.

‘Not again?’ said Betty from the kitchen, rattling pans.

‘Yes, again,’ said Lydia. ‘Peals of it.’

‘What does she mean?’ Elizabeth asked Betty. All the villagers had an increasing tendency to address Lydia, if they had to address her at all, in the third person through the medium of Betty and it seemed that Elizabeth too had caught the habit.

‘She says she keeps hearing someone laughing,’ said Betty.

‘What sort of someone?’ asked Elizabeth.

Beuno squatting in front of the fire, endeavouring to kindle the kindling said, ‘It’s all right.’

‘What’s all right?’ asked Lydia.

‘She thinks you might think it’s Angharad. But she seldom laughs nor ever cries.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Elizabeth emerging from the kitchen, ‘but she does frighten people sometimes, without meaning to.’

‘Only stupid people,’ said Lydia, moved to annoyance by Elizabeth’s woebegone demeanour. If, as she sus -pected, Elizabeth was miserable because of that dreary village sawbones, then it was dishonest and unlikeable of her to pretend that it was because of her sister-in-law. And what’s more, thought Lydia, anyone with half an ounce of sense would, long since now, have told the doctor in no mean terms what he could go and do with himself.

‘You look awfully pale,’ she said sharply, as Elizabeth came into the lamplight, sounding even in her own ears more accusing than sympathetic. There was something about this beaten sort of humility that irritated Lydia almost beyond endurance. She had received a few blows in her time, but after the first shock she had swung back. Never had she limped around like a milk-soaked rabbit, quiet and withdrawn. She suddenly wished that she had Finn here so that she could tell
him
a few more home truths. She had been frightened, and Lydia hated to be frightened. She burst into song. ‘I wish, I wish, I wish in vain, I wish I was a maid again . . .’ she warbled.

‘Why on earth are you singing that?’ called Betty.

‘I don’t know,’ said Lydia, ‘but if you’re not awfully good I shall sing it to the end.’

‘You should have come to the concert,’ said Beuno, getting to his feet.

Lydia laughed. ‘I’m not a modest woman,’ she said, ‘but I know when I’m outclassed.’

Beuno stood and looked at the blaze he had made. ‘I like the way you laugh,’ he said without coquetry.

‘I wish you’d all shut up about laughing,’ said Betty with, Lydia noted approvingly, some spirit. ‘I’m tired of laughing.’ She said supper was ready and rattled the knives and forks.

‘I wonder what they used to eat here,’ Lydia speculated, ‘a hundred years ago.’

‘Mutton mostly,’ said Beuno. ‘Mutton and bread.’

‘And mushrooms and blackberries and bilberries,’ said Betty.

‘And cabbage,’ said Beuno. ‘Not all countrymen like being countrymen. A lot of them don’t like all that countryside or the things that grow in it. That’s why the windows of the houses are so small – so that they don’t have to see where they’ve been working all day long. So they can shut it out.’

‘I’ve noticed that,’ said Lydia. ‘All that Wordsworthian waffle, and then when you meet the people all they want to do is hop on the bus and off to the nearest bright lights.’

‘Mam used to make bilberry pie,’ said Beuno, ‘and sometimes we’d have trout, but her idea of a real treat was tinned salmon and tinned peaches.’

Elizabeth took no part in this discussion and Lydia wondered whether it was her imagination or whether Elizabeth had the air of someone who could say a great deal if she chose. She had certainly taken pains over her dinner party and Hywel had equally certainly shown no enthusiasm for it. How difficult were these culture clashes, especially over the dinner table.

‘Some country people like the country,’ protested Betty. ‘I’ve met some who do.’

‘Of course,’ Beuno agreed. ‘But on the whole the ones who like it best are the ones who’ve gone away.’

‘Elizabeth likes it,’ said Betty encouragingly. ‘Don’t you, Elizabeth?’

‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth.

‘I think that both the country people and the tourists share to some extent the illusion that the locals dematerialise when the visitors have gone, that all the countryside is a vast TV set to be switched off when no one is watching,’ said Beuno.

‘You’d rather we’d none of us come, wouldn’t you?’ said Lydia abruptly.

‘How could I,’ asked Beuno, ‘when I go and return and go again?’

‘You could stay,’ said Betty.

‘Not now the place has changed,’ said Beuno. ‘Once when all the chapels and the churches were thronged and full of singing I could have stayed because the flock was here, but now I have to go out seeking a flock. It has made me wonder quite often about the calling of shepherd of men. Hywel looks after his sheep because they are here. Would he range the world looking for sheep to care for if there were none here? I don’t think so.’

‘It’s different,’ said Betty.

‘Not all that different,’ said Beuno.

‘You think leaving the valley is corrupting, don’t you?’ said Lydia who was clinging like a terrier to a theme which had occurred to her. ‘You think the valley itself is corrupted when strangers visit it.’

‘I think you believe that more strongly than I do,’ said Beuno. ‘My most basic instincts tell me that, but my reason and my God tell me differently. A place, a physical location, is not so different from a graven image. Once you get too exclusive, too obsessed with a place, you are worshipping false gods. I think we may be called upon to wander.’

Lydia thought how the country people sometimes took on the look of the land itself, especially the old: how Angharad seemed more part of the land than of her family. If the land was a graven image then Angharad was its priestess.

‘I’m confused now,’ she said. ‘I
think
I think that tourists should be banned except for me. I think that’s what I think, but I’m not sure that if I’d been born here I’d be pleased to see me walking down the lane. I think I should regard me with the contempt with which I myself regard the more vulgar visitors.’

‘Well, there is that,’ said Beuno, ‘of course. But there is also envy and fear of where you have been and what you have done.’

‘I always say you can be frightening, Lydia,’ said Betty.

‘I don’t mind being frightening,’ said Lydia. ‘But I should hate to think that I was intrusive.’

Hywel came home alone. He had been singing, and when he came in he came in singing. He only sings when the house is empty. He looked to see that I was asleep, as he used to do before Elizabeth came, and he sang as he used to do before Elizabeth came. Elizabeth who was bright and full of laughter has brought silence with her. She has stolen me from Hywel, and the house from Hywel and all the song from Hywel. The women in the village say, ‘Poor Elizabeth, she has a lot to put up with, with that big old house and Angharad, and Hywel working so hard on the farm,’ but their eyes gleam as they speak and they do not like her. Sometimes I like her. Sometimes I think ‘Poor Elizabeth’. And if I could cry I would
.