Unexplained Laughter Read online

  ‘I think you’ve made yourself hear it,’ said Betty. ‘The way one used to do in trains. They’d say anything that you had on your mind – licketty split, licketty split, or ticketty boo, ticketty boo . . .’

  ‘I never in my life heard a train say licketty split or tickety boo,’ protested Lydia. ‘But anyway this isn’t like that.’

  ‘Beuno,’ called Betty. ‘What do you make of it?’

  Beuno was on the far side of the stream, his head inclined towards the graveyard. He turned to face her. ‘It’s someone laughing,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, you’re as bad as each other,’ said Betty, disappointed in him. ‘You’re usually so sensible.’

  ‘Not very sensible,’ he said, walking back towards her. He pointed at his feet. ‘I walked in the stream.’

  ‘You’d better come back in the house and dry your shoes and socks,’ said Betty. ‘No sense in getting rheumatism or pneumonia.’ She pushed open the door and stood still on the threshold. ‘It’s stopped,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know how you know it’s stopped if you couldn’t hear it,’ said Lydia, ‘but you’re quite right. It has stopped.’

  ‘I could hear something,’ said Betty. ‘It just didn’t sound to me like laughter. What an odd thing.’

  ‘I mean to get to the bottom of it,’ said Lydia, only without much conviction. ‘This is one of the things I would prefer to understand.’

  ‘The only really profound question,’ said Beuno, ‘is why. How is a question asked by the foolish and answered by the trivial.’

  ‘Are you telling me off?’ enquired Lydia good -humouredly.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Beuno. ‘It’s just one of the things I like to point out sometimes. I don’t always get the chance.’

  ‘The sooner you’re ordained the better,’ said Lydia. ‘If you have this passion for pointing things out to people there could be no finer way of gratifying it than from the pulpit.’

  ‘Do come on in,’ said Betty. ‘I’m going to stoke up the fire and dry Beuno’s socks.’

  ‘Like Mary Magdalene,’ said Lydia. ‘Not that she ever dried Beuno’s socks, but you see what I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t a bit see what you mean,’ said Betty. ‘You’re being silly again.’

  ‘I don’t think you should be frightened,’ said Beuno.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Lydia quickly.

  Beuno went on. ‘Laughter and evil can’t coexist. There’s nothing funny in hell.’

  ‘It’s not just evil that frightens people,’ Lydia reminded him. ‘Jehovah was wont to scare the pants off the Israelites – or whatever it was they girded up their loins with.’

  ‘Only when they were naughty,’ said Beuno comfortingly.

  ‘The fact that in saying that you clearly mean to reassure me,’ said Lydia, ‘shows that you do not know me at all well. Anyway, fashions in mirth change. People used to go to Bedlam to laugh at the lunatics. Not funny. And I don’t think slapstick is funny. I hate seeing plates being broken. I hate mess. Humour comes out of precision, not chaps. That’s why nuclear war is so frightening – like slapstick. Destruction and confusion. And just think of the breakage. I wonder if on some distant planet there are creatures who are holding their sides at the prospect of us hurling plates at each other.’

  ‘Although,’ said Beuno thoughtfully, ‘the Second Law of Thermodynamics is extremely funny because all the things we are all so busy doing only hasten the inevitable end. Earnest misapprehension is very funny.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ve got more sophisticated,’ said Lydia. ‘People slipping on banana skins aren’t funny, but people spending a lifetime trying to figure out the meaning of the banana are. Especially when the banana goes off in their hand.’

  ‘Do try to think of something more cheerful,’ said Betty. ‘You’re making me depressed.’

  The woman from Ty Fach came here tonight with Beuno.

  She said, ‘Elizabeth, come to my picnic,’ and her voice ran with honey. And she said, ‘Hywel, will you come to my picnic?’ and her voice ran with laughter.

  ‘Picnic,’ said Hywel, and he said softly as he went away, ‘Diawl take picnics.’

  The woman said, ‘How nice it is here in the evening. How pretty this room is. Is it you, Elizabeth, who has made it so pleasant?’

  Sometimes I can hear Elizabeth smile, even before I hear the smile changing the shape of her voice. If Hywel said to her the things the woman says, for a time Elizabeth would smile.

  Then I heard Hywel come back into the room and the smiling stopped.

  ‘Do come to my picnic,’ the woman said, and her voice sounded as her silk scarf sounds when it trails behind her through the branches in the wood.

  Hywel is silent and Beuno speaks, but I do not hear what he says.

  There is a mouse above me in the roof and I am going to listen to it.

  ‘They’re all coming except Hywel,’ said Lydia as she returned later that evening. ‘I told you he wouldn’t. The farmhouse was even more grim than usual tonight. I can’t think what it must be like when Beuno isn’t there. I shouldn’t think they ever speak at all.’

  ‘Most married couples don’t talk all that much,’ said Betty.

  ‘Yes, but what they don’t say probably wouldn’t frizzle your ears if they said it,’ explained Lydia, not at her most lucid. ‘What is left unsaid in the farmhouse is positively hair-raising. I am myself now quite certain that Hywel knows about Elizabeth and the doctor. His silence has just that quality of wrath and frustration.’

  Betty sat up. ‘Ssshh,’ she said. ‘Anyone might hear you.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Lydia reasonably. ‘Owls and bats and mice and the phantom laugher, I suppose.’

  But Betty also knew that there are some things better left unsaid, no matter what the circumstances. Perhaps Hywel in his silence was proving wise. She said so.

  Lydia thought about it for a while, before she spoke. ‘What you’re saying is,’ she said, ‘that one shouldn’t even whisper it in the wind on the hill tops because once said a thing can never be unsaid; that expression gives power to thought; that even the clear though unspoken formulation of a nebulous impression may be dangerous, giving it a force and potency which silence or merely a lack of clarification would deny to it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Betty after about half a minute.

  ‘I think I agree with you,’ said Lydia after a further half a minute.

  Sometimes I hear shots in the night. Dead metal speeding into fur and feathers and flesh to make things dead. And sometimes Hywel goes out in the day with his gun and he shoots rabbits and pigeons and crows and foxes, and some he brings home to eat, and some he hangs in the hedges to remind the world that there is death. Once Elizabeth used to say, ‘Oh Hywel, Hywel, I cannot skin that rabbit. The poor little thing,’ and he would laugh, and sometimes he would skin it himself and sometimes he would throw it away, but now she says, ‘I am not going to skin that rabbit, Hywel, so don’t imagine I am,’ and sometimes he skins it himself and sometimes he throws it away. Tonight I hear shouts. The woman from Ty Fach is laughing and shouting in the night.

  Betty had heard the car stop in the lane and had begun to frighten herself even before she heard someone slip in the stream and swear, long before the knock on the door.

  ‘What the hell?’ said Lydia, leaning indignantly out of the window over the door, like Rapunzel with a hair-cut.

  ‘For God’s sake let me in,’ said Finn. ‘I fell in that bloody stream and I’m drenched.’

  Lydia gave a screech of eldritch mirth. ‘I knew you’d be back,’ she crowed. ‘Go away.’

  Betty who had nearly died of fear now felt almost dead with relief and crept to Lydia to remonstrate with her. ‘You can’t turn him away at this hour,’ she said. ‘Where would he go?’

  ‘Yes, where would I go?’ demanded the man standing in the garden. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked. ‘Make Lydia see sense, will you?’

  ‘It’s me. Betty,’ said Betty over Lydia’s
shoulder, which was shaking because she was still laughing.

  ‘Tell her to let me in,’ demanded Finn.

  ‘You must let him in,’ said Betty.

  ‘No, I mustn’t,’ said Lydia. She stopped laughing. ‘There’s a lot of ducks over there by the stream,’ she said. ‘They’d be delighted to see you, I’m sure.’ She slammed down the window and told Betty to go back to bed.

  ‘Oh Lydia,’ said Betty, not for the first time. She opened the window again. ‘Finn,’ she said, ‘try the village shop. They do bed and breakfast, and the pub may not be full. They’re probably used to people calling in the middle of the night.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re used to people calling in the middle of the night,’ said Lydia, beginning to laugh again. ‘They’ll tell him to go to hell.’

  ‘You’re mean, Lydia,’ said Betty. ‘You’re cruel.’

  ‘You’re fucking mad, Lydia. You know that?’ came a parting shout from the garden.

  Lydia flew back to the window, flung it up and said some further things into the darkness of the middle of the night.

  ‘Lydia,’ said Betty. ‘If anyone heard you . . .’

  ‘Who could hear me?’ asked Lydia crossly. ‘Anyway, I don’t care. The unmitigated gall of the man, strolling up at this time and expecting a welcome. Not to mention the fact that he has been conspicuously faithless to me. How dare he come back.’

  ‘He probably loves you really,’ said Betty.

  ‘He probably does,’ said Lydia, ‘but he’s blown it.’ All the bells of hell rang out in a wild cacophony.

  ‘Oh Lydia,’ said Betty again, ‘you shouldn’t be so unforgiving. It’s worse than Finn going away. It’s worse than infidelity.’

  ‘I daresay,’ said Lydia, ‘but hell could freeze over before I’d have him back.’

  She lay awake till dawn thinking about it. She was delighted that Finn had returned to give her the opportunity of rejecting him. She was determined that there would be no reconciliation, and even though she had found that the sound of his voice reminded her vividly and immediately that she had loved him and could do so again she lay smiling with pleasure at the sheer satisfaction of unforgivingness. It was, she decided, much sweeter than love: a sensation for the connoisseur of emotion. That it was also wicked did not greatly perturb her. It was a sin different in kind from mischief-making and could, in Lydia’s estimation, be excused on the grounds that it was the sexual misbehaviour of another to which she was responding.

  Lydia felt strongly that the author of the universe probably thought much as she did about sexual matters. She really did have a long way to go, and she had not yet learned to recognise the precise lineaments, the demeanour and the shape of the shadow of Stan.

  Elizabeth made him come to the farmhouse. He came when Hywel was here and the men and Beuno were in the yard. She was waiting in the yard and she said, ‘I want you to look at Angharad. Let us go inside where we can talk in peace.’ And when they were inside she said in a different voice, ‘What is going on between you and that girl?’

  He said, ‘What girl?’

  She said, ‘Yon know what girl. April, May, June, July . . .’

  He said, ‘For God’s sake, Elizabeth, what is wrong with you? I just gave her a lift to the Fair.’

  ‘You’ve taken her out,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I heard them in the shop talking and they said you had taken her out.’

  He said, ‘Oh, once or twice maybe. There’s nothing in it, Elizabeth.’

  She said, ‘I don’t believe you.’

  He said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

  And she said, ‘They said that her mother had told them you would marry.’

  ‘You know how they talk,’ he said. He sounded angry, but he was smiling. He is a little afraid of Elizabeth, but he loves to hurt her.

  ‘I won’t let you,’ she said. ‘I won’t let you marry. I will tell . . .’

  ‘Who would believe you?’ he said.

  ‘Angharad must know,’ said Elizabeth. ‘You know how she watches.’

  ‘And can Angharad tell?’ he said.

  Then Elizabeth cried.

  The morning was cool and so was Betty. Lydia was contrite, not because of her treatment of Finn but because her rejection of him made Betty’s kindly presence with her seem not only pointless but rather foolish. She said, ‘I do like having you here Betty. You’re much nicer than Finn. You don’t grunt.’

  ‘Of course I don’t grunt,’ said Betty. ‘Why should I grunt?’

  ‘Finn does,’ said Lydia. ‘He gets moody and grunts. I used to think he behaved like someone with constant PMT – irrational and unpredictable to an alarming degree. I’ve often noticed it in men and I’ve never known a woman to behave as weirdly as a man.’

  ‘Some do,’ protested Betty,

  ‘I know some do,’ agreed Lydia. ‘Some try and hang themselves on lamp-posts outside men’s houses, but I don’t know any of that sort. The good thing about friends is that you can choose them with consummate care and I never chose mad ones or nasty ones or boring ones, whereas you can’t choose who you’re going to fall in love with. It just hits you like some spiteful virus and down you go, knowing it’s crazy but powerless to resist. There you are with some glum, drunken, disapproving monster and you creep round asking him what’s wrong and trying to cheer him up.’

  ‘I can’t see you doing that,’ said Betty honestly.

  ‘I don’t do a lot of it now,’ confessed Lydia, ‘but I used to. I think I stopped when I once asked someone what the matter was and he said: “If you don’t know, then you can’t love me.” He’d been glaring and smashing down glasses on the table and muttering under his breath and I wondered what on earth I’d done to make him so disturbed, and then I realised I hadn’t done anything. It wasn’t me at all. It was something at work, or some other woman, or some painful inadequacy he’d discovered in himself, but he was blaming me. That’s why women are so much more essential to men than the other way round. Women are more used to accepting the conse quences of what they do and accepting their own failings, while men simply must have someone to blame.’

  ‘That’s not why you won’t have Finn back,’ said Betty astutely.

  ‘True,’ said Lydia. ‘I am sufficiently stupid to have put up with all that for a time, but I will not be cuckolded by a duck. It wouldn’t be so bad if he’d gone off with a beauty, but I’m damned if I’ll form part of a collection which includes someone bandy.’

  ‘Women can’t be cuckolded – and she wasn’t bandy,’ said Betty.

  ‘Yes, she was,’ said Lydia. ‘It was because of being web-footed. All ducks are bandy. They waddle.’

  ‘If you insist on being so exclusive,’ said Betty, ‘you’ll never get married.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of getting married,’ said Lydia. ‘Why should I get married?’

  Betty looked at her uncertainly. Just as Lydia had gradually grown fond of Betty as she recognised her good qualities, so Betty realising how reprehensible Lydia could be liked her less. In the end she would only find her fascinating and feel no pity for her at all. ‘Companionship?’ she suggested.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Lydia contemptuously, ‘and financial security and little children. No thanks.’ Mischief had gone to her head and she felt powerful and free and unconstrained. Her plot now seemed more sadly trivial than wicked. If she had known that she would be offered the opportunity of fighting Finn all round the valley, she would never have planned her picnic. She was ashamed of her scheme, now finding it unworthily small-minded.

  ‘If Finn comes back,’ she said, ‘I’ll ask him to the picnic.’

  ‘Why,’ asked Betty bluntly, ‘if you won’t let him stay here and you’re so angry with him?’

  Lydia was evasive, not having a good answer ready. ‘Mmm,’ she said shiftily, ‘I just thought it might be amusing.’

  ‘For whom?’ enquired Betty.

  ‘Oh, for me of course,’ said Lydia, forced into the open.

  ‘D
on’t I deserve any fun?’

  ‘You have lots of fun,’ said Betty repressively. ‘Too much.’

  ‘I haven’t for ages,’ pleaded Lydia. ‘I’ve had a terribly peaceful few weeks.’

  ‘You should’ve asked some of your friends to stay,’ said Betty.

  ‘I don’t want any of my friends to stay,’ said Lydia. ‘I’m bored with my friends at the moment.’

  Betty looked unhappy. ‘I don’t think you know what you want,’ she said.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve got you,’ said Lydia, rather too late.

  Betty smiled in an irritatingly understanding way. ‘Oh yes,’ she said.

  ‘And Beuno,’ added Lydia, rendered unkind by this annoying smile. She wasn’t going so far as to make protestations of delight in Betty’s company.

  ‘Anyway, I shall have to go back soon,’ said Betty. ‘You’re lucky being freelance. My boss didn’t really want me to take three weeks all at once.’

  Lydia hadn’t thought of that before. She was used to working only when she felt like it, or the deadline loomed too horridly. Besides she had a little money of her own. She wondered when Finn would turn up again. She knew he would.

  Elizabeth has left the house. I followed her down the lane on the other side of the hedge. I thought she would cry, but she is angry. I took down the curtains, the pretty curtains that she had made, because they hid my window and made the earth smaller. That wasn’t all. I took the milk, and I poured it on the floor where the slate is hollowed, because once I saw the lake in moonlight and it was white. I only saw it once, and I wanted to see it again. I thought if I waited my lake would grow, and if I waited long enough the walls would walk away and the heron would come to swoop above my lake, milk-white in the moonlight. Listen. Elizabeth is angry . . .

  ‘I don’t think I can stand it any more. She’s ripped up everything in her bedroom and she’s thrown milk all over the kitchen.’

  (Only one little, little lake.)

  ‘I’ve tried and tried to look after her well, but she’s impossible. I’m sorry to be here like this but I couldn’t get through to anyone. The telephone doesn’t work . . .’

  (I tore the wire from the wall. It rang while Elizabeth was in the field and I picked it up and someone spoke to me, but I cannot speak, so I tore it from the wall and then no one could speak to me.)