Unexplained Laughter (8 page)

Beuno was standing in the stream with his back to them, not doing anything.

‘What’s Beuno doing?’ asked Betty, mop in hand, sweating slightly from the exertion of housework, Martha to the life.

‘He isn’t doing anything,’ said Lydia. ‘He’s just standing in the stream.’

‘I wonder if he’d run me to the shop,’ said Betty. She had asked Elizabeth and Dr Wyn to come in for a drink that evening. She had wanted to ask the Molesworths too, but Lydia wouldn’t let her. ‘There are some people,’ Lydia had said, ‘who, as it were, belong in my house, and there are some that I can tolerate. And then there are those than whom I would rather have mice, and into this latter category fall the Molesworths.’ She had not spoken so elaborately for some time, and Betty knew the warning signs; so, whereas with anyone else she would have appealed to their better nature, in this case she held her tongue.

‘I’m going to make some cheese straws,’ she said, ‘and maybe fry some onion rings. I’d get some sausages, but I don’t know what’s in them.’

‘Pure pig,’ said Lydia. ‘That’s pig lips, pig toenails, pig . . .’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Betty.

Beuno said, ‘There’s a funeral in the church tomorrow.’

‘Someone must have died,’ said Lydia. She had wakened in the night with the fear of death upon her and was presently inclined to a harsh and flippant approach to the subject.

‘That is usually the case when a funeral is planned,’ said Beuno.

‘Yes,’ said Lydia, ‘a funeral would feel pointless without a body. I like funerals. They’re so much more satis factorily final and distinguished than weddings; and christenings always fill me with great unease and pessi mism and I don’t like sugared almonds.’

‘I think weddings are the worst,’ said Beuno. ‘There’s always someone with their fingers crossed. I think it’s usually the mother of the groom. What will I do when I have to officiate at one? I shall have to have a long talk with the Lord beforehand.’

‘And the bride and groom,’ said Lydia. ‘You’ll have to invite them into the vicarage and try and dissuade them, and then when they’re stubborn you’ll have to elaborate on the Christian concept of matrimony.’

‘The Lord will provide,’ said Beuno. ‘Did I tell you how people die in this valley?’ he asked.

‘Do they have a special mode?’ asked Lydia.

‘They put clean nightdresses on, and they straighten their bed, and then they lie down with their hands crossed on their chest. I see it like this. The Angel of Death looks in and he says: “You’ve got five minutes to get your clean nightdress on, and arrange your effects, and put the cat out, and tear up that compromising letter, and then I’ll be back for you.” And instead of arguing about it – they do.’

‘I wonder if I would?’ mused Lydia. ‘Or would I start screaming that I’d left a soufflé in the oven, or forgotten to get the coat back from the cleaners, or I was too young to die . . .’

‘Die?’ asked Dr Wyn with professional interest, manoeuvring himself and April over the stepping-stones.

‘Hi,’ said Lydia. ‘Go on up to the cottage while I get my shoes on.’ She whispered to Beuno that they must both be very boring now, very staid, because she utterly refused to amuse Dr Wyn. She thought that it was odd that she should be so certain of Beuno’s allegiance with her against one of his countrymen, but she had no doubts of him. ‘I didn’t know April was coming,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we asked her.’

‘He’ll drag her round everywhere for a time,’ said Beuno, ‘and then he’ll get sick of her, or find some other girl who takes his fancy. He’s been doing it for years. You may not have noticed, but there’s an awful lot of bachelors in the valley. Their mothers tell them no one is good enough for them. It happens in rural communities.’

Lydia watched Betty ushering the guests into the cottage. ‘If you see me drinking too much,’ she said to Beuno, ‘you must tie up my throat like a cormorant, or I shall start speaking wildly.’

‘Wyn disapproves of me,’ said Beuno. ‘He thinks the ministry is an affectation and a waste of time, and on the other hand he thinks priests should be very good, and he doesn’t think I am because he’s known me for so long, so he’s annoyed with me. He’ll probably take no notice of you because he’ll be trying to upset me.’

‘It sounds like another wonderful evening,’ said Lydia. ‘I wonder where Elizabeth is.’

‘She’s been looking after Angharad,’ said Beuno. ‘It always takes her some time to get ready. She’ll be along later.’ He spoke noncommittally, and Lydia understood that there were things of which Beuno would not yet speak to her. She didn’t mind. There was no point in being curious about hopeless situations.

‘We’ll be there,’ Dr Wyn was saying, as they entered the kitchen. ‘Won’t we, darling?’

‘Yes,’ said April, making it increasingly apparent that she was a girl of very few words.

‘She’s doing a flower arrangement for the competition. What is it this year, darling? Three dahlias, a book-end and a brass ornament?’

Lydia imagined this to be a joke and was surprised when April concurred. She glanced at her for signs of irony and saw none.

‘Her mum always wins the malt-loaf section,’ claimed the doctor with vicarious pride.

Lydia thought moodily that she couldn’t hope to be as boring as Dr Wyn if she tried all night. Nevertheless she made an attempt. ‘How many sections are there?’ she enquired.

This was a mistake, because the doctor told her.

By the time Elizabeth arrived Lydia was prepared to welcome her, since any additional flavour must add something to the evening, which was like Betty’s meatless stock into which she kept putting more and more dried herbs and burned onion in an effort to make it taste of something. It was the sort of evening on which Lydia would normally get drunk and move into a world of her own, highlighted by strange insights, hectically and artificially tuppence-coloured. Grimly, she quaffed lemon squash.

Elizabeth told Betty that Wyn had been to school with Hywel, and Betty told Elizabeth that she had heard that the Welsh standard of education was very high.

Sip, went Lydia at her lemon squash.

Betty deplored the cuts in the education budget and Beuno lit a cigarette.

‘Smoking?’ queried the doctor. ‘Giving us all pneumoconiosis?’ He fixed Lydia with a meaning glance. ‘Guess where I’m going this weekend,’ he invited her. Sensibly he did not wait for a reply, since the possibilities were clearly endless. ‘London,’ he told her, staring at her with an air of triumph.

Well,
I
don’t care, thought Lydia; I hope it stays fine for you. She was puzzled by the doctor’s manner. He spoke as children speak.
I’ve
got something
you
haven’t got was his meaning.

Elizabeth got up suddenly, walked to the window and looked out. After a moment she sat down again. She didn’t speak.

‘Can I get you anything?’ asked Betty.

‘Nothing,’ said Elizabeth, ‘thank you.’ For no apparent reason she uttered a little laugh.

‘I live in London,’ ventured Lydia.

‘Yes, I know,’ said the doctor, still staring at her. So that wasn’t it.

‘I’m here on holiday,’ Lydia explained further.

‘I know,’ said the doctor.

Lydia sipped her squash, thinking. Her original conclusion was correct. The doctor was telling her that he was off to have a good time where Lydia lived, imagining that this would induce envy in her. She stared thoughtfully into her lemon squash. The trouble with people like Dr Wyn was that there was really no answer to the jaw-dropping remarks they made. She could hardly observe aloud that the subject of his weekend was very boring.

‘You’ll find it pretty tedious at the moment,’ she said. ‘There’s absolutely no one there but tourists swarming all over the place.’ Another component of the doctor’s teasing was, she suspected, an acute resentment of her supposedly exalted position in the world of journalism. ‘It’s hell just at present. Like a bottle you expect to have whisky in and it turns out to be full of a specimen for the doctor.’ She beamed at him over the rim of her glass.

‘You know you get bored here too, Lydia,’ Betty reminded her.

‘Yes, I know,’ conceded Lydia, ‘but then I dash off somewhere else to see something different.’ She wondered whether the doctor imagined that because she was here without a man she hadn’t got one. She shrank from his crudity and his playground teasing. There was something clumsily sadistic in teasing: signs of an almost homicidal inadequacy and despair. Lydia wondered whether he was impotent. His insistence on sexual matters could not be merely attributable to his calling, since not all doctors carried on like that. Perhaps it was caused by the com -plicated influences of the valley where the men seemed so often to remain unmarried, sometimes perhaps because, as Beuno held, their mothers said there was no one good enough for them, sometimes because there simply wasn’t anyone. And there was the residue of a chapel-rooted misogyny quite usual in remote rural communities. It was dispiriting and chilling, and the teasing was its outward and visible form. These men jeered and poked sticks through the bars at creatures they secretly, at once, feared and desired.

Elizabeth stood up again. ‘I must go back to Angharad,’ she said.

‘Don’t go,’ said the doctor, lying back in his chair and smiling at her lazily.

Lydia was furious. How dare he dissuade
her
guests from leaving. He was as bad as Betty. Am I so negligible, she asked herself indignantly, that everyone feels this compul -sion to speak for me?

‘Of course she must go,’ she said, ‘if she’s worried about Angharad.’

‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, ‘I must go,’ and she went.

The doctor’s smile broadened.

Lydia felt oppressed and vaguely threatened.

‘There’s no one of any consequence in London at the moment,’ she told him, ‘but you won’t be able to move for the millions of nobodies going to look at the Tower.’

‘Oh, I’ll find something to do,’ he said with an air of practised lewdness.

April, who until now had been just sitting there, at this point, to give her her due, showed symptoms of unease. ‘Oh, Wyn,’ she said.

Lydia felt briefly sorry for her and attempted to engage her in conversation, but it was no good. She turned to Beuno and spoke of lighter matters until darkness descended.

‘I thought that was a very pleasant evening,’ said Betty. ‘Beuno helped me with the washing-up after you went to bed.’

‘I don’t like Dr Wyn,’ said Lydia. ‘I increasingly don’t like him.’

‘He’s a good doctor,’ said Betty. ‘They all say he’s very good. Elizabeth says he’s wonderful with Angharad. He’ll go and see her any time of the day or night. Elizabeth only has to phone him.’

‘He still gives me the creeps,’ said Lydia.

‘He’s only teasing,’ said Betty. ‘I don’t know where we should be without people like him.’

But Lydia, remembering the look on his face, thanked Heaven that she was not a child under his interested regard. ‘I think he’s a disappointed man,’ she said. ‘He’s getting on and he hasn’t got far. Stuck in his village forever.’

‘He could’ve left if he’d wanted to,’ said Betty. ‘He’s been offered all sorts of consultancies at lots of London hospitals.’

‘Who said so?’ demanded Lydia.

‘He did,’ said Betty.

‘Oh, him,’ said Lydia.

She knew that he had tried to give her the impression that he was going off on a promiscuous adventure and expected this to arouse in her both admiration and jealousy, but as Lydia’s misdemeanours were more of the spirit than of the flesh she found promiscuity not merely sinful but foolish and disgusting.

‘He is far too
old
to be carrying on like that,’ she said censoriously. ‘This obsession with sex is a sign of retardation. People who leap from one relationship to another like someone crossing a stream on stepping-stones never grow up. They are like people at a meal who can only take a bite from each course. Highly unnutritious.’

Betty said nothing because, Lydia knew, Lydia’s forays into morality left her speechless.

They stayed discreetly close to the cottage as the funeral proceeded in the adjacent churchyard. Beuno had told them that funerals were known as either private or public. The private ones, being exclusive, aroused bad feelings, but to the public ones people came from miles around and were given things to eat: distant relations, old friends, old acquaintances, old enemies, but no outsiders, no aliens. Unlike the Agricultural Fair, funerals made no provisions at all for visitors. The deceased was over ninety; so Lydia and Betty had not been called upon to express great regret or commiseration among the villagers. The year Lydia had bought her cottage a young person had died and Lydia had been lost for words, as people are in the face of tragedy. All that remains to be said is incised on stone, and the living go around silently with long faces and glances that mean ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am, but I do know how you feel.’ And sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Either way it is of little use to the bereft locked full of raw grief, which might one day mature into something more bearable, and might not. The bereft, at that time, have no way of knowing.

As the mourners left, Lydia heard a low laugh and sat up on her rug, thinking suspiciously of her ears. But someone real had laughed. People did laugh at funerals. The joke went on after all.

‘I sometimes think it’s amazing that anyone ever laughs at anything,’ said Lydia when the cortège had gone away down the lane. ‘When you think of everything, it really isn’t funny.’

‘I had an uncle who was dying of emphysema,’ said Betty, ‘and he used to implore people not to make him laugh because it took his breath away, and I could never understand what he could find to amuse him.’

‘There you are then,’ said Lydia, who had now been forced on several occasions to concede that Betty was not unsympathetic and understood more than Lydia would have thought her capable of. This was humbling, and good for Lydia’s character, which stood in need of improvement. She wondered whether she heard unreal laughter as a self-inflicted punishment because she was incontinently fond of amusement and only liked people who made her laugh, no matter what their other qualities.