Unexplained Laughter Read online

  ‘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 Never had she limped around like a milk-soaked rabbit, quiet and withdrawn.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.

  ‘Good heavens,’ said Lydia. ‘Rock drawings. How very peculiar.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Betty, her tone sceptical.

  ‘Here,’ said Lydia.

  ‘Good heavens,’ said Betty.

  They stared at the flat blade of rock jutting out of the turf-clad flank of the hill.

  ‘Perhaps they’re druidical,’ said Betty hopefully.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Lydia. ‘The men are wearing jackets and trousers and the women have got short skirts. I think the druids were clad mainly in woad.’

  ‘But who would come out here to scribble on rock?’ asked Betty unanswerably.

  Lydia didn’t answer. She was peering closely at the drawings. ‘One of them’s got a stethoscope,’ she said. ‘Several of them have got a stethoscope. I think it’s all the same man, only the females are all different. What an odd thing. Oops.’

  ‘What?’
said Betty.

  ‘Don’t look,’ said Lydia. ‘It’s rude.’

  ‘Dear, oh, dear,’ said Betty, who naturally had looked. ‘It is a bit.’

  ‘They’re rather good drawings,’ said Lydia. ‘Simple but effective.’

  ‘I don’t like that one,’ said Betty distastefully.

  ‘It isn’t actually prurient,’ said Lydia, gazing at it. ‘More sort of clinical. Dispassionate observation.’

  ‘Some things are better not observed,’ said Betty.

  ‘There’s a theory that anyone who has witnessed the act depicted here is incurable,’ said Lydia.

  ‘Incurable from what?’ enquired Betty.

  ‘From the neurosis induced by witnessing the act depicted here,’ explained Lydia. ‘Though put like that it all sounds a bit circular. And anyway, when you think of what goes on on telly now, if it was true we’d all be raving.’

  ‘I very seldom watch telly,’ said Betty.

  ‘Nor do I, pet,’ said Lydia indulgently. ‘Only some times when I’m tired it sort of forces itself on my attention.’ She sat down and leaned back against the rock looking out over the sweep of moorland. ‘If we had a dog we could let it off the leash now and it would go and roll in the heather.’

  ‘No, we couldn’t,’ said Betty. ‘It might chase sheep.’

  ‘I would have trained it not to do so,’ said Lydia. ‘I should be very firm with it.’

  Betty began to open her mouth to argue that it wasn’t well trained at all until she remembered that it didn’t exist, and she had vowed not to get drawn into Lydia’s idiotic fantasies.

  Lydia grinned to herself. She had grown fond of Betty and found her thought-processes amusing.

  ‘You’ve sat on a bilberry,’ said Betty with satisfaction. ‘Your trousers are stained.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Lydia. ‘It’s too pretty a day to mind about such things.’

  ‘You could dye them the same colour,’ said Betty. ‘You can make dyes from heather.’

  Lydia said life was too short to mess about making dyes from heather. It was easier to buy a new pair of pants.

  ‘I’d quite like to try making my own dye,’ said Betty. ‘It would be very rewarding.’

  ‘Speaking of self-sufficiency,’ said Lydia, ‘I still haven’t eaten that perishing pheasant. I shall have it as soon as we go back.’

  ‘It’s horribly high,’ warned Betty. ‘I smelled it when I opened the cupboard this morning.’

  ‘Then I’ll go at once and cook it,’ said Lydia who was adamantly determined not to be thwarted of her bird. She broke into a run as they returned to the cottage.

  It was high. There was no denying it. Lydia even went so far as to bathe it in vinegar at Betty’s behest.

  ‘Faugh,’ said Betty, waving her fingers in front of her nose like an eighteenth-century character in a costume drama. ‘It stinks.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Lydia, resolutely sticking a lump of butter in it.

  It smelled all right when she got it out of the oven. She left it to settle on top of the stove while she warmed up some bread sauce and crisps. Betty discouraged a fly from sitting on it and watched it as she prepared a salad for herself.

  Lydia wasn’t actually desperately hungry but she managed to eat most of the pheasant, making vulgar noises of gastonomic appreciation.

  ‘You are disgusting,’ reproved Betty, toying daintily with a dandelion leaf.

  No one called that evening, and they went to bed early.

  Lydia woke suddenly in the tangible blackness that was moonless country night. There were unusual sounds in the house. She reached down to the floor where her candle stood, and when she’d groped for the matches, which proved, as always, astonishingly difficult to locate, she lit it.

  Betty was being sick. Or, if it wasn’t Betty, someone certainly was. Lydia felt her way to the door of the tiny bathroom. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked in the lowered tone that one uses in the darkness. Stupid question.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sick,’ came a wail after a moment from the other side of the door.

  ‘Oh, poor you,’ said Lydia inadequately, suddenly ripped with a desire, which she recognised as utterly reprehensible, to sit on the floor and giggle insanely. It was so deeply, wholly unfair. And so characteristic of life.

  ‘It can’t’ve been anything I ate,’ said poor Betty later, as she sat shivering by the kitchen table while Lydia kindly boiled some water for her. ‘It must be a virus I picked up somewhere.’

  ‘You were lucky to make it to the lav,’ observed Lydia, meaning that she was very grateful that Betty had made it to the lav, since one of the rules is that the afflicted person does not mop up her own vomit and Lydia was absolutely no good at doing this. Sick made her sick. Even now she stood further from Betty than was entirely necessary. Still, seeing the poor girl shivering so, Lydia did go and fetch her dressing-gown.

  ‘Oh, you are kind, Lydia,’ said Betty, making Lydia feel like a skunk. ‘I’m a bit better now. I think I’ll go back to bed.’

  ‘Take a bucket with you,’ advised Lydia, not solicitously, just to be on the safe side.

  Betty thanked her for the bucket and smiled at her, and Lydia, who, if Betty went on like this, might turn out to be quite human, decided that she would take her her breakfast in bed in the morning: thin crispy toast with a scraping of butter and golden clear jasmine tea, and an egg-cupful of harebells to remind her of the sky.

  ‘You’re an angel,’ said Betty next morning, as Lydia, with meticulous deliberation, carried out her vow.

  It was all unfair, reflected Lydia. Betty doing this sort of thing was simply taken for granted, whereas when a nasty, selfish, attractive person like Lydia did it people grew breathless with thanks. ‘You stay in bed,’ she said. ‘I’ll go down to the village and see if they’ve got any newspapers and magazines.’

  At this Betty’s eyes widened with wondering gratitude and Lydia felt unworthy. She also felt the beginnings of wrath. Days ago she had decided to be good – she was being quite good – but she was only pretending to be good so far and all this appreciation was as yet undeserved. She wondered how long she would have to keep it up before she could stop convicting herself of hypocrisy.

  ‘Shall I get the doctor to come and see you?’ she asked, and was surprised when Betty said she thought it might be a good idea.

  ‘I feel so giddy now,’ Betty explained apologetically. ‘My head keeps going round.’

  Dr Wyn came at lunchtime while Lydia was eating pheasant leg and wondering whether the goodness inherent in a broth made from pheasant carcase was sufficient to justify sneaking it, disguised as soupe bonne femme, on to the supper tray of an ailing vegetarian, and what her real motives were.

  ‘She was very sick,’ Lydia told him coldly. ‘She’s upstairs in bed feeling giddy.’

  He banged his head on the beam at the top of the stairs.

  Lydia heard the concussion. ‘Physician heal thyself,’ she remarked sotto voce.

  When he came down he was wearing a professional air and said the symptoms were those of food poisoning.

  For some reason, although she had not been doing the cooking, this made Lydia feel like Lucretia Borgia. ‘How could it be?’ she asked. ‘She only eats salads and things. And mushrooms. Maybe she got a funny mushroom.’

  ‘Just give her liquids for a time,’ he said and dropped his professional air.

  Lydia eyed him discouragingly. He had sighed, rubbed his hands together and sat down on a kitchen chair. Now he reached out and picked up a pheasant wing which he proceeded to eat.

  Lydia watched incredulously. ‘I’m surprised you’re not frightened to eat that,’ she said, ‘in this pestilent household.’

  ‘Oh, I trust you,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t poison me.’

  Oh, I might, thought Lydia, but she said: ‘I didn’t poison Betty either,’ in a childishly defensive way which put her in a worse mood.

  ‘Elizabeth and Beuno were here last night as well,�
�� she said. ‘Perhaps you’d better go and have a look at them. They could be writhing round in agony.’

  ‘They’d’ve let me know,’ he said, picking up another splinter of pheasant.

  Exasperatedly, Lydia filled the kettle. This man was the opposite of Beuno, who followed her thoughts with ease, needed no explanations and leapt to no wrong conclusions. To converse with the doctor she would have to speak with unnatural care and lucidity, and she really couldn’t be bothered.

  He tipped his chair back and fixed his gaze full upon her, very much at home. ‘I’d love a cup of tea, thanks,’ he said. ‘Or possibly something a bit stronger.’

  ‘I haven’t got anything stronger,’ said Lydia. ‘I’ve got to go down to the off-licence later.’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘You’re intoxicating enough.’

  Lydia ignored this. ‘I’d better go and see how Betty is,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘Talk to me.’

  He too sounded childish, Lydia realised, reflecting that childishness in an adult was painfully unattractive. ‘I have a great deal to do,’ she said in a dismissively grown-up voice.

  For a moment it seemed that he would protest, but then he got up.

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Lydia going rapidly upstairs.

  She looked out of the little window above the door and saw him stop on the path. Elizabeth appeared out of the overhanging leaves and confronted him. That was the way it was, thought Lydia – she confronted him. I was right, she said to herself. Clever old me.

  ‘Lydia,’ called Betty, ‘is that you?’

  ‘It is I,’ said Lydia, opening the bedroom door. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘A bit weak,’ said Betty, ‘but better. I just had a funny thought. You know those rock drawings. Well, when Wyn had his stethoscope in his ears I wondered if they were meant to be him. Perhaps I’m delirious. It could’ve been any doctor, and it might not’ve been a stethoscope. It might have been a necklace.’

  ‘People don’t stick necklaces in their ears,’ said Lydia thoughtfully. ‘I think you’re right. How perceptive we’re all getting.’

  ‘No, I must be wrong,’ said Betty. ‘It’s the sort of silly idea one gets when one’s ill.’