Unexplained Laughter (18 page)

‘He’s not a poof,’ said Lydia carefully.

‘Oh, come on,’ said Finn, ‘I’ve been talking to Betty. She says he’s never going to get married.’

‘Neither am I,’ said Lydia, ‘and
I’m
not a poof. Anyway, if you’ve been talking to Betty you know who he is.’

She was pleased with the way things were turning out. Betty would have spoken well and warmly of Beuno, and Finn was clearly jealous.

‘
Ministry
,’ continued Finn with contempt. ‘
Celibate
.’

‘He’s in love with God,’ said Lydia, rolling on to her back and staring at the sky. ‘I can’t
tell
you how boring people look once you’ve fallen in love with God.’

‘And what would
you
know about that?’ enquired Finn.

Lydia was silent.

‘Come on,’ said Finn, beginning to get nasty. ‘What do
you
know about the love of God?’

But Lydia had discovered, to her own surprise, that she found the matter too significant to quarrel about in a childish way. If she was going to quarrel about it at all she would have to do it seriously. ‘Betty wants to marry him,’ she said. ‘That’s why she was talking about marriage.’

‘You’re such a fantasist, Lydia,’ said Finn, predictably.

This Lydia
was
prepared to quarrel about. ‘Do you mean that in your opinion Betty doesn’t want to get married?’ she asked. ‘Or do you mean she doesn’t want to marry Beuno? Because I can assure you that you are entirely wrong on both counts.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Finn, and Lydia decided that even had he not gone off with the duck their relationship would have had no future.

I can only see them, but I can see them all. Only Beuno knows I am here. Beuno has always known where I am. I have seen what they call love and heard them speak of it. What Beuno feels for me is not what they feel for each other. Perhaps it is love. I cannot tell. I can see him across the wide air looking at where I am and if he was closer he would look into my eyes. No one else looks into my eyes
.

‘Hell,’ said Lydia, starting up. She had just noticed the direction that the doctor was taking, April jigging along beside him. ‘Gripes. Finn, make them come back.’

‘What’s wrong now?’ said Finn, his voice coloured by laziness and ill-temper.

‘Oh lawks,’ said Lydia agitatedly. ‘Hell and damnation.’

‘What
is
it?’ said Finn.

‘It’s too late,’ said Lydia, lying back on the grass and manifesting despair. ‘Oh well, who cares.’

She had seen, in the distance, the doctor and April making unerringly for the cave-like depression which contained the rock drawings and would indeed offer a splendid location for a spot of slap-and-tickle. The same thought might have occurred to Mrs Molesworth, because she was heading after them.

‘Dear, oh bloody dear,’ said Lydia, sitting up in renewed dismay, but they had turned and were coming downhill. ‘It could’ve been worse,’ she said.

Finn still had no idea what she was talking about and was not at all interested anyway.

‘Well,
you
certainly don’t care,’ said Lydia, irrationally annoyed. As well as being rather stupid, Finn now had grass in his hair and was looking rather stupid. One of the worst things about falling in love was falling out again, taking a long clear look at the erstwhile beloved and feeling a total lemon. It was a sensation Lydia cordially resented.

‘Had a nice walk?’ she asked coldly as the doctor came level.

‘Lovely,’ said April. ‘We saw some . . .’

The doctor knocked over a bottle of cider and Lydia leapt too late to save it, as it shattered against a flat stone. He was in a terrible temper. He was white, and several of those muscles with which the human face is so richly endowed and which are seldom called into play in a civilised context were working at the sides of his nose, pulling at his upper lip.

‘Darling, you are snarling,’ whispered Lydia to the cider bottle.

‘You go too fast,’ complained Mrs Molesworth, panting to a halt.

Lydia felt quite sorry for the doctor, who so clearly wanted to kick hell out of someone and could find no excuse. April clung to his jacket sleeve being winsome: very unwisely in Lydia’s opinion.

‘We’ll have to be starting back soon,’ she said mercifully.

He saw me. He stepped back and looked up, and his eyes saw my eyes. I thought it is good that I am dead, and good that Hywel is standing on the mountainside to the north, and good that Beuno is sitting on the mountainside to the south, and good that the girl is there, laughing, because his face was the face of the fox in the trap and if we had been alone his face would have been the face of the fox in freedom alone with the hare on the mountainside
.

‘When I was a little girl,’ said Lydia, ‘a dear little curly-headed girl, I used to keep bunnies, dear little furry bunnies, and when I shut them in for the night – that is when I remembered to shut them in for the night – I always used to wonder what they did when I wasn’t watching them. Sometimes they were eating their babies.’

‘Oh, don’t,’ said Betty in distress.

‘So that was how I knew they went on existing when I wasn’t watching them,’ said Lydia.

‘Are you wondering what will happen to the people of the valley when you go away?’ asked Beuno.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Lydia.

‘They will go on eating their babies,’ said Beuno. ‘But most of them will be here when you come back.’

‘What do they do when
you’re
not watching them?’ asked Lydia.

‘Much the same as what they do when
you’re
not watching them,’ he said. ‘But I’m one of them, so I know what they do, and even when I’m away the things that I do are the same as the things that I did and the same as the things that they’re doing.’

Betty looked bewildered, so Lydia explained. ‘Ants,’ she said, ‘always behave in much the same way, so when an ant is absent he knows very deeply what the other ants are doing, while you and me are – say – grasshoppers, so when we’re not watching ants we don’t know what they’re doing.’

Betty looked more bewildered. ‘I hope Elizabeth’s all right,’ she said, trying to bring some sense back to the evening.

Elizabeth had trodden on the broken cider bottle and a fierce shard of glass had cut the side of her foot, causing a great deal of blood to flow and making Lydia feel ill. The strange thing was that the doctor had insisted on taking her back to the farmhouse, telling Mr Molesworth to drive home his wife and disgruntled daughter. ‘How will you get back for surgery?’ April had asked, her suspicion making this innocent question sound like an accusation, and Lydia had said, ‘I’ll take him,’ and April had hated her again.

Now Lydia was waiting for him to walk down the lane from the farmhouse, and while she waited she half-expected to hear a shot, or a number of shots, depending on who had shot whom: one if it was him shooting in the cold rage of the threatened libertine, and several if it was her taking boss-eyed and vengeful shots at a faithless lover. On the other hand, reflected Lydia, considering the nature of his calling he could merely put some deleterious substance in the wound and watch the wretched woman slowly die, while she could poison the Welsh cake which she might offer him for tea.

Finn was making a pot of coffee and wondering why Beuno didn’t go home. Lydia could see him willing this as he reluctantly got four mugs from the dresser, but Beuno was as untroubled as a cat in the presence of a cat hater.

‘I could never love a doctor,’ said Lydia, thinking aloud, ‘because one’s person would hold no mystery for him.’

‘Elizabeth will soon be better,’ said Beuno, and now Finn looked bewildered.

‘Do you think so?’ asked Lydia, leaving her doubts unsaid.

‘Oh, yes, I think so,’ said Beuno.

‘She’s only got a cut foot,’ said Finn, driven by exasperation into contributing to this odd conversation with its gaping spaces of meaning.

‘Then Stan can return to the pit,’ said Lydia comfortably, ignoring Finn.

‘The holidays are over,’ said Betty suddenly. ‘Do you realise I must be back by the day after tomorrow?’

‘I’ll drive you,’ said Finn. ‘I have to get back too.’

Lydia was shocked by this, but only slightly. Betty and Finn? Finn and Betty? Well, why not? Betty was an improvement on the duck.

‘Bless you, my children,’ she said smiling knowingly and thereby strangling at birth the infant possibility of a new love affair. She saw at once what she had done and on the whole was glad. She would not really have liked to see Betty wearing her old clothes nor, by the same token, arm in arm with her old love.

She prattled as she drove the doctor back to his place of work because she was wondering what it must be like to dress the wounded foot of a discarded mistress and had forbidden herself to ask.

‘You’ll be going soon then,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Lydia, ‘but I’ll be back.’ She didn’t care if he thought of her as an outsider. Beuno didn’t.

Yet as she returned she was overcome by a feeling of such desolation that Lydia, who never wept, thought that tears might gush from her eyes with so great a force that they would wash the windscreen. She didn’t know where she belonged.

She said so to Beuno, who was waiting for her in the cow parsley by the lane. She leaned out of the car window and told him.

‘With God,’ said Beuno placidly, ‘that sense of homelessness is a reminder of where you belong.’

‘Some would say it was a yearning to get back to the womb,’ said Lydia.

‘Some would say anything,’ said Beuno.

‘How fortunate it is,’ said Lydia, ‘in view of your proposed way of life, that you believe in God. How boring for you it would be if you didn’t.’ She heard undertones of jealousy in her remark and hastened to apologise. ‘I believe in God myself,’ she explained, ‘but on the whole this belief inconveniences rather than supports me. It makes me feel inadequate and toad-like when I would prefer to feel rather wonderful and extremely happy. I wonder what happened to the laughter.’

‘I exorcised it,’ said Beuno.

Lydia was suddenly annoyed with him. ‘It was
my
laughter,’ she said. ‘You might’ve asked. Exorcising people’s laughter without asking them!’

Beuno looked at her with the expression of someone watching a normally reasonable person behaving irrationally and waiting for him to return to his senses.

Lydia read this look immediately because it was unmistakable: a look worn only by those in authority, since no one else has the right to wait in expectation of an instant change in demeanour on the part of another.

‘Oh, all right,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t my laughter at all. It was the valley’s laughter, so I suppose it was more yours than mine anyway.’

‘No,’ said Beuno, ‘it is possible that you brought it with you. I just didn’t think it advisable to let it persist. It’s the same instinct as that which causes me to turn off a dripping tap whoever it belongs to.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Lydia. ‘Like things out of place. The secret behind surrealism. It gives you a bit of a turn, but then you realise how essentially childish it is, and somehow dangerous.’

‘Children
have
a sense of order, of propriety, but haven’t yet understood quite where things should be. Like Angharad and the milk.’ He looked across the fields.

Lydia had the impression that he was about to give her as a farewell present either a benediction or a confidence, and that which was most wilful and contrary in her nature rose to refuse it. ‘Got to dash now,’ she said in a light, social tone she had not previously used with Beuno. ‘See you next hols.’

They think that death is waiting at the end of the ride, that life is like the lane and that death waits at the end. Listen. That is death on the other side of the hedgerow. And that swift shadow that is gone, before you turn, from the corner of your eye – that is death. And the whisper you can scarcely hear through the sounds of the birds calling and the wind in the leaves – that is death. Not waiting, but there beside you within reach, within earshot, so close that if you should look you would see your breath cloud on his presence. There he is, just out of sight behind the wild rose and the blackthorn, not behind you, nor before you, but beside you – and he keeps in step. Run, run, run and he will run with you. Or sit weeping on the grass by the lane and he will sit with you, not weeping. I know him well
.

Elizabeth saw death today in the eyes of the doctor, and he, looking up, saw death in her eyes. She said, ‘It’s over, isn’t it?’

And he said, ‘It’s been over for a long time, Elizabeth.’ He was gentle with her wounded foot, but I could hear him smiling
.

She said, ‘What shall I do?’

And he said, ‘You’ll live, Elizabeth.’

She said, ‘I wish I was dead.’

‘I have a perfectly horrible sense of mortality,’ said Lydia.

‘It probably comes from living next door to a graveyard,’ said Betty.

‘I don’t have it in the graveyard,’ said Lydia. ‘There is a pleasant sense of consummation in the graveyard. No one’s going anywhere. Travelling always makes me think of death. Packing up to leave makes me feel like my own relict going through things that I have no further use for. When I remove my enlivening presence from this house it will be as though the house had died. Poor little house.’ A melancholy tear clung briefly to her eyelashes.

‘I don’t believe I’ve ever known you sentimental before,’ said Betty wonderingly.

‘I’ve changed,’ said Lydia. ‘I’ve never stayed here as long before, nor met any of the people really, and now I’m all undone. I don’t know whether I’m sad because I’m sorry for them staying here, or sad because I’m not staying here, or sad because I ever came here in the first place, or whether I’m merely suffering from softening of the brain brought on by mixing with my intellectual inferiors.’

This sounded more like the old Lydia. ‘You’ve done nothing for weeks but tell me how intelligent the people here are,’ accused Betty.

‘I’m thinking of the Molesworths,’ explained Lydia. ‘They make me feel as though I’d been watching television advertisements or reading women’s magazines.’