Unexplained Laughter (17 page)

Finn was clearly perplexed. Lydia could see his dilemma. Because he liked women to be gentle and soft and obedient he thought that women would like being that way since it would make him like them. He thought that this was their purpose, their
raison d’être
. He thought all right-minded people of both sexes must hate feminists.

‘You see,’ said Lydia carefully, ‘the only use women have for men is to be impregnated by them. Once they’ve done that, men can go and boil their heads. They are surplus to requirements.’

Betty in the bathroom could hear every word and could bear it no longer. She leaned out of the open window. ‘Oh
Lydia
,’ she said, ‘you told me only yesterday that you didn’t want any children. You know you did.’

‘I’m a maverick,’ said Lydia. ‘I’m the exception that proves the pudding.’

‘Oh, you,’ said Betty crossly. ‘You think you’re the light of the world.’ She retired into the bathroom with her toothbrush.

‘Come here,’ said Finn gently, leaning towards Lydia.

He obviously had impregnation on his mind, but by now Lydia had lost her temper and she told him to get stuffed. She apologised later because the atmosphere was getting oppressive. Betty was tight-lipped and Finn was conspicuously sulking.

‘Look at him sulking,’ she said to Betty, ‘he could jump in his car and go to Bogota but no, he’s going to sit there and sulk where I can see him.’

‘You’ve hurt him,’ said Betty.

Lydia was briefly speechless, but recovered. ‘That’s exactly the same as telling the wall it’s hurt the person who just banged his head on it. Did I ask him to come back? Did I welcome him with open arms? Did I implore him to stay?’

‘He’s in love with you,’ said Betty.

‘No, he’s not,’ said Lydia. ‘He’s one of those wimps who can’t muddle along without a woman and he’s gone off the duck so he’s come back here.’

‘That’s not so,’ said Betty.’You’re being cruel.’

‘I couldn’t be cruel to him if he wasn’t here, could I?’ said Lydia reasonably, but she was beginning to regain her temper. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, since the mood of the morning appeared to depend solely on her, and she took Finn a cup of coffee.

The kitchen table was covered with slices of bread and amputated crusts, and Betty was boiling eggs and mashing sardines. A quiche and a cake sat side by side on the dresser veiled with a clean tea-towel.

Lydia thought she should offer to help, but the idea of buttering all those identical pieces of bread made her feel tired. Monotony was exhausting, no matter how light the task with which it was associated. She didn’t feel inclined to wrap anything up either. Edible things tended to crumble when packaged and someone was going to have to remember where they all were when the time came to unpack them. She thought it might as well be Betty and sat down by Finn, because then Betty, even if displeased at her laziness, could not fail to commend her courtesy.

‘Who exactly are these people you’ve got coming?’ enquired Finn.

‘Just some locals,’ said Lydia. ‘One of them is one of us but the rest are pretty good hell. The situation is rather as though instead of going to the zoo I had invited a small group of creatures to come to me. We have very little in common. I watch them and they watch me, but whereas I feel, possibly mistakenly, that I can comprehend their animal antics, they find me bewilderingly inscrutable.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Finn.

He said it warmly and gently, and at this Lydia
was
surprised since she had thought her remarks somewhat offensive and would not have made them had she still been in love with Finn and desirous of his good opinion. She looked at him warily to find that he was regarding her with unprecedented tenderness.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Like what?’ asked Finn.

‘Like that,’ said Lydia, nearly sticking her finger in his eye. ‘As though you found me exceedingly lovable.’

‘I do,’ said Finn, recoiling, and Lydia thought that here was another ludicrous irony: that the less you were in love with someone the more you could enchant and ensnare them. You could behave like a pig and they would simply think how sweet and original you were, whereas if you were wildly in love you would be on your best behaviour, nervously uncertain and consequently lacking in charm. It was all down to confidence, thought Lydia. The successful artiste is neither timorous nor tremulous but leaps around on the high-wire glittering with outrageous elan and gathering applause.

‘It makes you look like a sheep,’ she observed coldly, but even this seemed not to offend him. He merely gave her shoulder an affectionate nudge and leaned back on a cushion. Once upon a time, thought Lydia, when I was in love with him, he would’ve socked me for that. The recollection was faintly depressing, making her realise how little useful or productive communication there had been between them. She wished Beuno was there, standing by the stream and gazing through the alders at the flower-printed meadow.

‘They’ll be here soon,’ she said. ‘You’d better help Betty load the stuff in the car.’

Now she began to feel truly depressed, a not uncommon symptom when some social event blithely planned in a moment of cheerfulness becomes threaten -ingly imminent. She wished she could lay claim to a migraine but knew that Betty would not let her, that anyway even she could not be so mannerless as to absent herself from her own picnic, and that even if she did have a blinding migraine she would still have to go. ‘Oh, sod,’ she said gloomily, getting up.

The Molesworths, all three, arrived with Dr Wyn, who hooted from the lane.

‘That’s them,’ said Betty, picking up little bags of salt, pepper and sugar and peering appraisingly round the kitchen for signs of some forgotten but vital accessory to the meal.

‘Oh, come on,’ said Lydia. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

They drove in convoy along the lane to the farmhouse. The yard was empty. Lydia in the leading car was loth to hoot for fear of maddening the dogs and loth to get out for the same reason.

‘Go and bang on the door,’ she directed Finn.

‘It’s all right,’ said Betty. ‘Wyn’s going.’

The dogs snarled and cowered about his ankles. He put his hands on each side of the open door, leaned forward and called: ‘Elizabeth.’

He is calling Elizabeth. She stands in the shadow of the stair and then she goes forward. She says, ‘Hello, Wyn,’ as though they were friends, and steps past him into the yard. She stops at the two cars and then goes to the one with the woman from Ty Fach because the girl is in the other one. I have seen the cats of my country look as she looks now and afterwards make a great howling
.

‘Well, this is nice,’ said Lydia when Elizabeth had got in the back beside Betty.

‘I shouldn’t really be coming,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Farmers’ wives have no business going on picnics.’

Lydia grew more alert. This was the most interesting thing she had ever heard Elizabeth say, because it had undertones of cynicism, of self-mockery. She reminded herself that it was unlikely that all people could possibly be as stupid as she supposed them to be; that at some level even she, Lydia the clever, could find common ground and communicate intelligibly with other human beings. It was the constraints of formality, the manners and
mores
of different groups that caused alienation. Stripped of mask and domino they were not wholly unlike herself. At one time she had found appalling the comforting observation that people are similar, with much the same fears and fantasies. Not to be unique had seemed to her intolerable, but she was getting more sensible. Humbly she said what was expected of her, made the appropriate response. ‘You must have a change sometimes,’ she said. ‘All work and no play . . .’

Finn glanced at her suspiciously.

‘No, really,’ said Lydia.

She had driven as far as she could and now stopped the car.

The doctor drew up and parked beside her and every -one got out. Several people complimented her on the beauty of the surroundings, because it was her picnic and so for a while Wales was her dining room.

‘Where’s Beuno?’ asked Betty casually, and Lydia realised that she must have been silently asking that all the way from the farmhouse. She looked enquiringly at Elizabeth.

‘He said he’d meet us here,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He likes to walk.’

April suddenly began to behave very badly. She draped herself round the doctor and adopted a childish air.

He responded by calling her darling rather more often than was natural.

Her parents looked on indulgently. ‘Lovely bit of weather,’ said her father, and her mother remarked that she always thought it so silly of them not to go out in the country more when they lived so near to it.

‘We’ve got to walk a bit now,’ said Lydia.

‘But it’s so pretty here,’ said April’s Mum.

‘Shouldn’t we wait for Beuno?’ said Betty.

Lydia said that ever since running-boards had gone from cars only very vulgar people ate their victuals in the vicinity of their vehicles.

The extreme snobbery of this abstruse observation would have been rude had it been clear, for Lydia knew perfectly well that the Molesworths were the sort of people who picnicked in lay-bys, bringing little chairs and tables and using the car boot as a sort of sideboard.

‘We must all carry something,’ she said, ‘and make safari.’

Betty noticed however that Lydia contrived to carry nothing but a bottle of cider which she had clearly earmarked for herself.

Lydia led the way, conspicuous in red linen. She went in the opposite direction from the rock drawings, her planned destination when she had first conceived her scheme. How, she wondered bemusedly, could she have been so trivial recently as to wish to upset these unexceptionable people.

Finn caught up with her and she stopped, turning round to gauge her following. ‘Wait for Elizabeth,’ she commanded him. ‘Walk with her.’

Elizabeth was walking with Betty behind the doctor and April, who was clinging to his arm and, as it were, daintily tripping up. She probably imagined she was comporting herself in an attractively provocative and feminine fashion, thought Lydia, sneering and lengthen ing her stride.

‘She’s walking with Betty,’ said Finn.

‘Exactly,’ said Lydia.

‘What?’ said Finn.

‘What do you mean “What?”’ said Lydia.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Finn.

‘You’re stupid,’ said Lydia. ‘She’s in love with that creepy doctor and he’s flashing that dreary April around to upset her. Can’t you see?’

‘Nonsense,’ said Finn, who was, like most heterosexual men, disarmingly simple-minded in these matters. ‘You’re imagining things.’

Lydia was so annoyed at this that she couldn’t think where to begin but promised herself that Finn should suffer for his insolence.

They had reached a stretch of mountain where the ground was comparatively parallel with the sky. ‘This will do,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear picnicking on a slope. All the buns go rolling away.’

Beuno was sitting by a deep pool which the flatness of the ground had permitted the stream to form.

‘And here is lovely Beuno,’ said Lydia. ‘He is studying for the ministry. How clever he is to know where we should find him.’

She looked sideways at Finn to see if he was sufficiently irritated by all this. He was. He banged down the rucksack and the basket he had been carrying and looked without liking at the unencumbered Beuno.

There was fortunately no wind at all. The tablecloth needed no stones to hold it down and all the plastic bags waited for Betty to put them in the master plastic bag she had brought for the purpose. The sun shone with magisterial tranquillity and the few clouds kept their distance from it.

‘What a lovely day,’ said Mrs Molesworth when she had got her breath back. ‘April, make sure you sit on a blanket.’

For a while there was no conversation and Lydia began to regret that she had put Finn in a bad mood, since usually he was prepared to entertain when she was not.

‘I’m glad they haven’t started planting conifers up here,’ she remarked at last, resignedly and in a monotonous tone.

‘Yes,’ agreed the doctor, ‘they quite alter the ecology.’

‘They do offer job opportunities to the locals,’ said Mr Molesworth.

‘I think they’re rather pretty,’ said Mrs Molesworth. ‘All those little Christmas trees.’

‘They smell nice,’ said April unexpectedly, ‘like cough mixture.’ She giggled and snuggled closer to her lover.

‘The rain forests are being dreadfully depleted,’ said Betty.

‘Dutch elm disease is a terrible thing,’ said Mr Molesworth, coming round for a second time.

‘Something like 90,000 acres of trees per minute are being chopped down all over the world,’ contributed Lydia off the top of her head.

They looked at her doubtfully.

‘How long does it take a conifer to grow to a size where it can be used?’ she asked hastily, since her last remark had threatened to take the discussion off course. ‘Come to think of it,’ she added with more interest, ‘what do they use them for? Pit props? Paper? All that poxy pine furniture people keep buying?’

‘They have a lot of purposes,’ said Mr Molesworth, who clearly didn’t know.

But now Betty came to the rescue and began to unpack the sardine sandwiches.

They are sitting by the eye of the stream where it looks up at the sun before it weeps down the mountainside. I am above them, so high I hear the small birds sing below me. So high that I cannot hear them speak. Elizabeth will not speak. If she spoke she would say, ‘Wyn, Wyn, Wyn . . .’

‘Come for a healthy walk then, lazybones,’ said the doctor, hauling April to her feet. Whereupon she said, ‘Eeeee –’ – in a high-pitched, slaughtered-pig-like way, thought Lydia, eyeing her dispassionately. April dipped her fingers into a paper cup of cider and flicked it at him before skipping away uphill.

‘Preserve us,’ said Lydia aloud, turning on to her side.

Mrs Molesworth was paddling and her husband was poking at the stones because, he said, fossils were one of his hobbies.

‘You’ve certainly got an odd collection here,’ said Finn. ‘Who’s the poof?’