Unexplained Laughter (7 page)

Betty cooked lunch happily. Lydia even brought her some dandelion leaves. Beuno didn’t suggest that Elizabeth would be expecting him back, but ate his omelette as casually and thoughtlessly as the squirrel who had moved off to eat nuts in a different hazel tree.

‘Betty is turning into a vegetarian,’ explained Lydia; ‘so we lean rather heavily on the egg.’ She regarded Beuno, thinking how fortunate she was to discover one of her own kind in this improbable environment.

Betty thought he looked more like a gipsy than a minister – a good gypsy. It was ridiculous to suppose that he would never marry. Even Catholic priests were getting married now. Betty detested waste.

‘Why do you suppose I keep hearing laughter?’ Lydia was asking idly. She had drunk several glasses of wine and didn’t really care at the moment.

‘I think there’s something wrong with your hearing,’ said Betty, in a hurry because speculation on this could easily lead to the sort of conversation that she didn’t like. ‘I think you should go and see the doctor.’

‘OK,’ said Lydia, bibulously obedient.

‘You ought to go tonight,’ said Betty, ‘before it gets any worse. I’m going down to the shop later, so I’ll make an appointment for you.’

I was in the graveyard at noonday. The shadows were sparse and the light was cruel, as though the noonday devil had taken more than his share out of malice and greed. There is a time in the day when the days are long, when the edge of light meets the edge of darkness and for a moment there is nothing
.

I stood on my grave and my flesh knew all there is to know of clay, and my bones of stone. All the grasses stood still in the wicked sunlight until the evil had to loosen its hold, and the shadows came back, and a little breeze, and the earth began to turn again
.

It is light which is to be feared. The darkness is nothing, and beyond it is another light, and I won’t be dead. I
won’t
be dead . .
.

When the fumes of the wine had dissipated themselves Lydia said she wouldn’t go and see the doctor. She said she hated doctors. She said they were quite untrust worthy and cut off people’s arms and legs unnecessarily in order to keep their hand in, demonstrate their skills and prove that they were earning their money. The fumes of the wine had not been entirely dissipated and she felt too lazy to go all the way to the village and tell Dr Wyn about her ears. Her ears, she claimed, were perfectly sound. If she heard laughter that wasn’t there it was not her ears but her brain which was at fault, and she wished to preserve her experience intact in order to present it freshly to the specialist whom she intended to consult when her holiday was over.

‘If I start gassing about it to the local vet,’ she said, ‘it’ll get all stale and distorted, and I shall be so bored with it I shan’t be able to talk about it at all.’

Lydia’s stubbornness would make Betty look a fool in the eyes of the doctor, so she got cross. ‘You
must
go,’ she said, ‘I had an awful time persuading him to see you. He’s fitting you in at the end of all his appointments.’

This wasn’t true. The lady who fixed the appointments had said 6 o’clock without any messing about.

At 5.45 Lydia walked down the path to the car, marvelling at the power which people like Betty could wield merely by threatening to sulk. As she came to her car she met Hywel, homeward-bound on his tractor. He swung up a hand in a non-committal gesture and rumbled on. With some pique Lydia understood that he had decided against finding her interesting. Driving along the lane, she tried to picture Hywel parking his tractor and going into his house to be greeted by Elizabeth, and found it impossible. She could visualise only dimness and silence, and Hywel in a state of wrathful wonder at finding that alien woman, his wife, in his mother’s house. Hywel seemed to her like some hapless creature in a story, spellbound by despair, made powerless by circumstance, trapped by a ruthless magic without even the faery consolation of glamour, the illusion of delight. For Elizabeth she felt no sympathy, since presumably no one had forced her to enter Farmhouse Grim. Hywel, supposed Lydia, must have briefly courted her, have put on a suit, taken her out to a café, been moderately gay. But even so Elizabeth should have known what she was walking into, should have looked closely at the encircling fields, the rock-built house and Hywel all muddy and iced and quiet from winter toil.

When Lydia had marvelled to Betty about the horror of Elizabeth’s existence, Betty had told her not to be so silly. I’m not being so silly, thought Lydia, resentfully. That’s a miserable farmhouse, and the people in it are perilously unhappy or I’m a monkey’s uncle.

She was still brooding as she reached the surgery, which was situated in a superior house of dressed stone set among laurel bushes and bits of lawn. She sat in the waiting-room, which contained only one other patient – a child with ringworm, his mother in tow. She ignored the child, fearing contamination, and tried to imagine Elizabeth’s wedding. Probably, she concluded, it had just washed itself along on a tide of alcohol and that uneasy mixture of salaciousness and sanctimoniousness which characterises these melancholy occasions.

She had just begun to worry about the honeymoon, finding an image of Hywel in Benidorm particularly elusive, when she was summoned by the doctor. How difficult it was, she now reflected, to speak of one’s physical ailments to a person with whom one has dined. How wise was her father. She lied to Dr Wyn, saying that she had wrenched her shoulder, since although there was nothing inherently shameful about noises in the head she did not wish to confide in him. How glad I am, she thought simply, that I have not suddenly contracted syphilis.

He bade her remove her shirt, and moved her arm around, while occasionally and at random she remarked ‘Ouch’.

‘Not much wrong there,’ he told her. ‘Don’t use it for a few days, and see how it goes.’ He appeared to be as bored with Lydia’s shoulder as she was herself. He had some thing else on his mind. ‘I’m glad you called in this evening,’ he said. ‘Not in a hurry, are you? Got a few minutes?’

‘Y-e-s,’ said Lydia cautiously.

‘Someone I want you to meet,’ he announced, flinging open a door behind him and ushering Lydia into a sitting-room.

‘This is April,’ he said, indicating a nondescript, darkish girl who sat on a corner of the sofa. He didn’t tell the girl who Lydia was; so Lydia knew her reputation had gone before her.

The girl glanced at her craftily. She wore a faintly sly and greedy look, like a child who has been promised a rather disreputable treat if it’s good.

Lydia, who had quite often been subjected to this experience, twigged at once. Dr Wyn had told his friends that Lydia could be relied on to say something awful, or to sink, senseless, under the table. She was the floor show.

Dr Wyn introduced her to a tall foolish-looking man who was pouring whisky at a side table, and whose name she didn’t catch.

‘How do you do,’ said Lydia tonelessly. She, as it were, took her personality, folded it up and sat on it.

‘I think it’s ever so pretty here, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Such a change from the city. I often say to my friend – I wish I could retire and live here all the time.’

‘Have another drink,’ offered Dr Wyn, looking rather puzzled.

‘Oooh, no I mustn’t,’ said Lydia, who longed for one. ‘I’ve got such a silly head. Spirits make it go round and round. Tee, hee, hee.’

I have broken Elizabeth’s doll. I threw it on the cobble-stones and Elizabeth cried. I cannot speak. If I could speak, they would say I am mad. Because I cannot speak, they say I am mad. Elizabeth said to Hywel it was her doll when she was a little girl and she had loved it, and Hywel said, ‘More fool you.’ And she dried her eyes
.

Beuno buried the doll under a rowan tree. She cried to Bueno that it had been her doll when she was a little girl and she had loved it, and he took the spade, and dug a hole, and buried it
.

I thought I would dig it up again, and put it in her bed, all covered with mould, so that she would know it was dead, but after a while she stopped crying, so I left it there. I hid among the rocks and Hywel came looking for me. He couldn’t find me. I waited until the shadows filled the valley before I went home
.

Beuno said ‘Oh Angharad’ when I went upstairs, but no one else said anything
.

‘He wheeled me in as the star turn,’ said Lydia indignantly when she got back. ‘He didn’t give a toss for my – ears. He just wanted to use me as a sort of social-aid-cum-aphrodisiac. I do detest social climbers. They leave muddy boot-marks on your shoulders, and you get glimpses of quite their least attractive aspects. So I sat there thinking about life, and when I listened again he was talking about orgasms.’ She paused, squinting reflectively. ‘
Could
he’ve been? Yes, he was, because, after that, he started going on about nights of love. I do seem to have the most extraordinary effect on people. Or do you suppose he does it all the time?’

‘I don’t think he does it at all,’ said Betty. ‘I think it’s your imagination again.’

‘I don’t imagine that sort of thing,’ protested Lydia. ‘What I just told you is straight reportage. I think I’ve even left out the worst bits. Blocked them. I’m beginning to think this valley is a sort of extended nut-house.’

‘It’s you who keep hearing things,’ Betty reminded her.

‘It’s probably one of them,’ said Lydia, ‘– one of the lunatics giggling away in the night.’

Both women wished that this had not been said.

Betty went over and locked the door, and Lydia looked out of the window at the shadows that were gathering under the trees. ‘They don’t like us, you know,’ she told Betty.

‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Betty. ‘What about Elizabeth’s dinner party? If they didn’t like us they wouldn’t’ve asked us, would they?’

‘It wasn’t them,’ said Lydia. ‘Elizabeth asked us, and she isn’t one of them. If it wasn’t for her we’d never have set foot in Farmhouse Grim. They don’t like outsiders.’

‘What about Beuno?’ asked Betty. ‘He likes us.’

‘It’s his Christian duty to do so,’ said Lydia. ‘Beuno likes everyone a little and no one in particular. He’s a true religious.’

‘I have come to the conclusion,’ said Betty, who had also been thinking, ‘that the reason Beuno doesn’t marry is the same as the reason Elizabeth won’t have children. They’re afraid of heredity. It’s Angharad. I saw her today. Poor little girl.’ She looked faintly stunned, as people do who have observed the misshapen: there is no Schadenfreude to ease the witnessing of deformity.

Lydia shivered and knelt to light the fire. The flames were pure, but then she remembered the ash in the morning. She thought of water, which was pure, and then remembered the crud on the bed of the stream. She thought that everything was composed of heat and corruption and water – that we live off death and water – and she resented her own blinding mortality. ‘I know God originally intended me for an angel,’ she said crossly, brushing wood shavings from her knees. ‘I wonder what dreadful thing I did to end up as a human being?’

‘I’m never sure you are a human being,’ said Betty repressively. ‘You’re very peculiar.’

‘That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,’ said Lydia. ‘I saw the Molesworths outside their house. I’d rather be a rat than a Molesworth. I’d rather live in Farmhouse Grim than Château Molesworth. I’d rather be a rat and his wife than be April or a doctor.’

‘April?’ said Betty. ‘The Molesworths’ daughter is called April. It must’ve been her.’

‘Oh help,’ said Lydia. ‘What a good thing I went all quiet. I could’ve said something frightful.’

‘As if you cared,’ said Betty.

‘Oh, come on,’ said Lydia. ‘I do know where to draw the line.’

The day of the Agricultural Fair approached and passions rose in the village. In the shop Lydia heard rumours of men who sat up all night amongst their carrots, a shotgun across their knees for fear of jealous rivals who would come under cover of darkness to pour paraquat on the feathery fronds; of women who stood all night in their kitchens baking, baking in the quest for the one, the perfect, cake or loaf. In the hills men and women were combing and washing and polishing chosen animals to a
Vogue
-like perfection of appearance, winners determined to hold their titles, aspirants determined to displace them.

‘Oo-er,’ said Lydia. ‘They alarm me. I begin to get some idea of what the Roman games must’ve been like.’

‘All villages are the same,’ said Betty. She had acquired a copy of the rules of the various competitions and was reading it. ‘There’s a section here for the most prettily arranged salad. Shall I try?’

‘You wouldn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance,’ said Lydia. ‘It’s all rigged beforehand.’ She had now grown quite used to Betty who had, on the whole, been very patient with her; and, once accepted, it was restful having someone around to do the cooking and the washing-up. She had so far relented towards Betty that she did not wish to see her disappointed. ‘We’ll just go along as onlookers,’ she said, ‘and cheer whenever it seems appropriate. Then they won’t be cross with us for interfering in their primitive rituals.’

‘Do you want to go to it?’ asked Betty, looking up in surprise. ‘I’d have thought you’d be bored.’

‘Nothing would persuade me to miss it,’ said Lydia. ‘I always go to tribal events, wherever I am.’

For some reason this made her think of Finn, and she stood still for a moment, again waiting cautiously for any twinges of anguish, any signs of unhealed wounds. There were none. She didn’t even wish he’d break a leg. She didn’t care if he broke a leg or not. She looked across the stream, through the leaves at the distant field; at the nettles and the meadow-sweet and the wild roses; down at the camomile daisies crushed under her feet.

‘Very, very pretty,’ she approved, aloud. She was cured. Oh, the relief.

‘You’re looking much better recently,’ said Betty, observing this show of gladness. ‘Have you quite stopped hearing things?’

‘Not so much as a titter,’ Lydia answered her, breathing deeply. Now she could get on with life, concern herself with the large airy matters like God and death and the problem of suffering; forget, for a while, the goblin things – sex and money and regular meals.