Unexplained Laughter Read online

  As rapists never go around with dogs, Lydia’s imagination spared her one of its flights. Instead, another regrettable aspect of her personality impelled her to smile specially at this man. She had lost her love, and in her cottage was a woman preparing a possibly sapphic salad; so Lydia gave him the works.

  His casual, countryman’s demeanour altered perceptibly and he stood still, looking at her.

  That’s torn it, thought Lydia, swallowing the smile, extinguishing the sexuality which she knew she had caused to flicker about her like burning brandy round the Christmas pudding, and adopting instead a workmanlike, country-walking air. She searched for a phrase. Good weather for the crops. Have your sheep been suffering much from the staggers? Have you contributed a great deal this year to the butter mountain? Nothing seemed suitable, and Lydia determined to brush up her knowledge of rural matters and husbandry.

  ‘You at Ty Fach?’he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Lydia.

  ‘I go by there most days,’ said the farmer, proving himself to be the sort of chap who does not mess about but gets straight to the point.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Lydia gloomily and fell to plucking at the turf between her feet.

  ‘Be seeing you,’ said the farmer, giving her a glance of extreme complicity and summoning his dog.

  ‘Not,’ said Lydia under her breath and falling back on the cliché, ‘if I see you first.’ Then she fell back on the turf and stared at the sky until she deemed it time to go home.

  Listen. Elizabeth is lonely. She sighs, and sometimes she hums a little, and then she is silent because she is standing by the window looking out on the yard and turning the rings on her finger round and round. Sometimes the women say she is a saint, but that is only because she has kept me here, and they do not like her. Hywel is rich and they do not like him but he is one of them.

  Hywel is crossing the yard. In a moment he will lift the latch and kick the bottom of the door. It used to stick and Emyr has mended it, but Hywel still kicks it.

  Elizabeth says in her cheerful voice that will not be cheerful by nightfall, ‘I saw the woman from Ty Fach today. She was crossing the yard up to the mountain. She looks quite nice. I might ask her to tea.’

  Hywel says, ‘Tea.’

  And Elizabeth says, ‘I might ask her to dinner.’

  And Hywel is silent. If he spoke he would say ‘Dinner’.

  I was up on the hill when the woman came. I saw Hywel speak to her, and after a while, after he had gone, I heard her laugh. She lay on her back and laughed at the sky.

  The wind is coming up the valley – quite slowly, like an army that will win.

  ‘Hell,’ said Lydia. ‘What was that?’

  ‘It’s the wind,’ said Betty.

  Lydia, who knew what it was, exasperatedly poked the fire. ‘I hope it doesn’t bring the new slates off the roof.’ She was not desperately concerned, since she didn’t think it would, but it was something to say. She picked up a book and stared at the firelight, hoping that Finn might get bitten by something slightly venomous.

  The wind parted imperturbably around the cottage and passed on up the valley. Betty, perhaps carried away by the association of ideas, was talking about flatulence.

  ‘It’s caused by a sudden change to a vegetarian diet. The colon is unused to the fibre and it takes some time to adjust.’

  ‘Poor it,’ said Lydia. ‘I like meat.’

  ‘How you can,’ said Betty. ‘Just think of those lambs out there. How can you bear to eat them?’

  ‘I don’t like lambs,’ said Lydia. ‘I find them quite unattractive. I like lamb chops.’

  ‘Barbaric,’ said Betty.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Lydia ‘what about that steak-and-kidney pud you had on the way here?’

  ‘There’s no meat in pub steak-and-kidney,’ said Betty. ‘It’s all simulated out of woven soya protein.’

  ‘It sounds disgusting,’ said Lydia, ‘and rather dangerous.’

  ‘Eventually I shall become a vegan,’ said Betty. ‘No meat or fish or eggs or any milk products at all.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Lydia.

  ‘Because it’s healthier,’ said Betty, ‘and it isn’t cruel.’

  ‘It sounds to me intensely cruel. If you forced someone to live on nuts and lentils they’d go roaring off to the European Court of Human Rights or something.’ Lydia found it remarkable that the people who fussed most about their health with particular reference to diet and exercise seemed rather ill, just as those who enthused most warmly about sexual freedom were rather plain. ‘I hate people who go to India,’ she said.

  ‘I sometimes think you hate everyone,’ said Betty, who would have liked to go round India on a bicycle in an orange robe looking for an Enlightened One.

  ‘Not everyone,’ said Lydia after a moment’s consideration as she worked out the least impolite way of putting what she wished to say. ‘Only D.H. Lawrence and Americans and people who call Jane Austen “dear Jane”.’ She had once heard Betty calling Jane Austen ‘dear Jane’. ‘I love everyone else except Finn.’

  ‘I can’t think what you see in Finn anyway,’ said Betty. ‘He’s got a terrible reputation.’

  ‘I don’t see anything in Finn,’ said Lydia, who had found Finn’s terrible reputation one of his greatest attractions. ‘I hate him.’

  ‘I suppose he’d be here now if you hadn’t quarrelled,’ said Betty with the glancing brutality of those with some intuition but not much intelligence.

  ‘We didn’t quarrel,’ said Lydia. ‘He went off with a lexicographer with cross-eyes and knock-knees and webbed feet – a duck.’

  ‘She had pretty hair,’ said Betty, ‘and you did quarrel. You were heard. Screaming all over Fleet Street.’

  Lydia was quite stunned by this. She stared at Betty, her eyes wide, her mouth open: a cartoon of astonishment. ‘Who told you that?’ she asked, her voice cracked and full of breath she’d been too shocked to exhale.

  Betty shuffled a bit. ‘Everyone knows,’ she said, ‘everyone heard you.’

  ‘But I wasn’t screaming at Finn,’ said Lydia. ‘I was screaming at that critic who admires The White Hotel. I admit I don’t remember much about it, but I do know Finn wasn’t there.’ True, it was because of Finn that she had got so drunk. She had decided, quietly confident that it was safe to do so, not to accompany him on a tour of some Greek islands, and he had taken instead her of the cross-eyes etc. But the parting had been dignified. She had left Finn, wept commendably few of the scalding tears of blighted love, put a curse on him and her of the knock-knees etc., donned a dashing dress and gone out to dinner. But she had got very drunk. She had eaten nothing and towards the end of the evening had smitten the critic across the chest with the length of her arm. She could still feel, from fingertip to elbow, the textures of cotton shirt, silk tie and tweed jacket. Her behaviour had not been normal or good, but it was not Finn she had railed at on the public highway.

  ‘Do you really imagine I’d bellow at Finn in the street?’ she enquired. ‘I should be mortified if I thought I’d missed a chance to do him a mischief, but it’d be a cold day in hell before I’d make a spectacle of myself in the market place.’

  ‘But you did,’ reasoned Betty.

  ‘But it wasn’t Finn,’ said Lydia, who could see that Betty, with the facts before her, still preferred her own earlier version and intended to believe it.

  This is how history is made, thought Lydia despairingly. Now I’ll never dare be famous. I’ll never even dare to be successful, because when I’m dead some clod with a thesis to write will put me down as a wild-eyed harridan who jumped on her lover in the street and pulled all his hair out because he’d gone off with a person with webbed feet. There is nothing I can do. If I go on denying it they’ll all wag their fingers and say ‘Aha’ and tell me I protest too much. I shall have to remain here in obscurity, and rot.

  ‘Why did you get so cross with the critic?’ asked Betty with a knowing and unbelieving smile.

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sp; ‘Because the man was a structuralist and an ass,’ explained Lydia, ‘and you can take that knowing and unbelieving smile off your face.’

  ‘And do you mean you wouldn’t be glad if Finn came back?’ asked Betty, economically retaining her expression.

  ‘Of course I’d be glad,’ said Lydia. ‘If he doesn’t come back I shan’t get the chance to tell him to stuff it.’

  Slowly Betty stopped smiling. After a while she sighed, ‘You mean you’d still bear a grudge?’

  ‘Of course I’d bear a grudge,’ said Lydia, amazed that anyone could imagine she might not. ‘I wouldn’t have Finn back if he walked on his head from Mycenae to here.’

  Betty ran her finger round the rim of her coffee mug. She looked inexplicably downcast. ‘I didn’t know you felt like that,’ she said.

  ‘Well, why should you?’ asked Lydia, puzzled. ‘I didn’t tell you.’

  ‘No,’ said Betty. She got up and shook the cushion on her chair. ‘I’ll go to bed now. I feel a bit tired. Leave the washing-up for me to do in the morning.’

  Lydia opened the door to let out the cigarette smoke and walked as far as the stream, wondering why the blazes Betty was behaving in so singular a fashion. An awful suspicion was growing in her like some bizarre fungus from a tiny spore. What if, she was saying to herself, what if –? But no, it couldn’t be. But suppose it was. Suppose Betty had come with her not to gambol on the blades of grass, not to ask her collaboration in salad-making but to keep an eye on her.

  And Lydia knew it was so. Betty was here out of the kindness of her heart to minister to a wounded human being; Betty would probably rather be in the Dordogne, but she was here making sure that Lydia didn’t lay violent hands on herself in the profundity of her misery, or let herself go to seed in the spiritless fashion of an old thistle.

  Lydia emitted a sudden giggle, helpless to prevent it. She wished she could stand in the night and laugh, but already she had been heard. A shrew scuttled away in the undergrowth and Betty had opened her bedroom window wider.

  ‘I’m just coming,’ called Lydia, thinking how amusing it would be to make a big splash and drowning noises, but even she knew that this would not be the action of a nice woman.

  ‘In a week,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Beuno is coming in a week’s time. I must Jill the freezer.’

  Hywel is silent.

  ‘I must think of some things for him to do,’ says Elizabeth. ‘I must plan some parties.’

  Hywel is still silent. He is thinking that Beuno had lived here all his life and no one thought of things for him to do, or gave parties for him before. I know what Hywel thinks always. I can read his silence.

  ‘I’ll ask the woman from Ty Fach,’ says Elizabeth in the voice that she uses to make promises, ‘and the girl who is staying with her.’

  ‘Ask who you like,’ says Hywel, and then says no more.

  But this time the silence belongs to Elizabeth.

  Lydia woke late the following morning. She could hear Betty reigning below in the kitchen, shuffling plates and boiling water, and doubtless adding some original touches to the toast: slicing it laterally perhaps, or dusting it with cinnamon. She felt the desolation of a child in a strange house, saddened by the alien nature of the sandwiches, bewildered by the peculiar quality of the trifle which the family of the house take greedily for granted, almost afraid of the unfamiliar shape of the jelly, choked by the frogspawn lump of unshed tears, past which not one small sweetie can negotiate a passage. Yet she had watched unmoved as Finn put strawberry jam on his mutton because there was no red currant jelly. She supposed that marriage must be like that: an unquestioning acceptance of the weird ways of another. Lydia was resigning herself to a long stretch of celibacy. She couldn’t even eat with people she didn’t like, and as for sleeping with anyone – unless she was wildly in love or pissed out of her mind she couldn’t do it. And when she was drunk she snored. Never, in all her life, had Lydia gone to bed with anyone out of simple mechanical need and never out of the kindness of her heart.

  When she came downstairs Betty was sitting at the table.

  ‘You must be starving,’ she said. ‘You ate nothing yesterday.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Lydia. ‘I’m not hungry at all.’ Betty had a greasy crumb on her chin. Lydia didn’t know whether or not she had washed her hands. Her frock was unironed.

  ‘I’m going to make you a buttered egg,’ said Betty decisively, rising to her feet.

  ‘I’m not going to eat it,’ said Lydia. ‘I’ll have a cup of coffee.’

  ‘You’ll be ill if you don’t eat,’ said Betty. ‘You’ll get run down and depressed.’

  ‘No, I won’t,’ said Lydia. ‘I never eat if I’m not hungry, and when I’m not hungry for long enough I get gloriously high. After a bit I’ll probably start seeing visions. You should know that. Fasting makes one mystical.’

  ‘It makes one dead after a while,’ said Betty, taking the practical line. ‘No matter how unhappy you are you must eat.’

  Dear agony aunt, said Lydia in her head, I have a person staying with me whose presence disinclines me from food. She thinks I am pining away from love. How do I put the truth to her?

  Dear Lydia, said her head, you are clearly a very neurotic woman. Seek help.

  She said aloud: ‘I’m really not unhappy. When I’m really unhappy I eat chocolate and raw bacon and sleep by the fridge.’ This wasn’t true, but Lydia knew that some people did.

  ‘Well, put a lot of milk in your coffee,’ said Betty, sitting down again.

  Someone outside the kitchen door said, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Oh hell,’ echoed Lydia, putting her cup down.

  ‘Come in,’ called Betty, quite the lady of the house.

  Really I can’t stand it, thought Lydia. I’ll have to get rid of her. She’s feeling what she thinks I should feel and she’s living my life. She’s making me inhuman. She’s turning me into a wild animal. Soon I shall start snarling at visitors and grubbing for nourishment in the fields, simply because I cannot bear to think of myself in the same category as Betty, and she has laid claim to humanity. She is going to go on behaving beautifully and so I shall be forced to behave like a pig to establish the difference between us. I wonder how far this necessity explains many criminal and anti-social acts. Was it the blameless wonderfulness of God that forced Satan to go and live in the pit, where he could leave his things lying around and put his feet on the table?

  ‘Get rid of whoever it is,’ said Lydia in a hiss, slithering swiftly up the stairs. She shut her bedroom door, knowing fate had decreed that the book she was reading should be resting in the sitting-room, leaving her with nothing to do but make her bed, sit on it, lie on it, unmake it, jump on it, push it round the floor – there were limits to what you could do with a bed, and it was the only piece of furniture in the room. Or she could kneel and look out of the window, or do some physical jerks. She swung her arms above her head and cracked her hand on a low beam. ‘Ow,’ she said.

  ‘Lydia,’ called Betty. ‘What are you doing? We’ve got a visitor. Come down.’

  Lydia stared incredulously at the floorboards through which these words rose. She couldn’t call back that she was asleep or had died.

  ‘This is Elizabeth,’ said Betty as Lydia walked into the kitchen, wearing grey. Her clothes could not be described as unsuitable for the country, but they were not the sort of thing a country woman would wear. Elizabeth in a print frock looked very much more utilitarian than Lydia in her shirt and trousers.

  ‘Hi,’ said Lydia uncompromisingly.

  Betty looked at her apprehensively. ‘She comes from the farm at the top of the valley,’ she explained.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Lydia, beginning to feel mad. It was surely only people of diminished responsibility who found their lives being taken over in this way. Being unmarried and childless she was unaware that many quite normal women spent a great deal of time talking to and feeding people whom they would not, themselves, have chosen to entert
ain. It seemed insanely silly to Lydia that she should be standing in her own kitchen flanked by two women for whom she had no time. She thought of the people she liked, whose company she enjoyed. Not one of them could be described as ordinary. Lydia played only with court cards. Her friends were mostly interestingly self-destructive: drinking, and smoking, and embarking on disastrous relationships. Their clothes were expensive and had cigarette burns in them, their licences had been taken away from them, their faces showed signs of what is known as the ruins of great beauty, they were always in various stages of depression; and, being the way they were, this had the effect of making them exceedingly witty with the scaffold humour that Lydia preferred. Few of them were caused by melancholy to sit staring slackly into the middle distance. As their sorrow increased so they grew bolder. Lydia thought of her dear ones whirling in their merry dance of death, their faces pale, their bright eyes wild, the tips of their cigarettes gleaming in the tumbling, roaring gloom . . . At this point she accused herself of exaggeration and made some boring remark about the countryside.

  ‘Aren’t you frightened to be here alone?’ asked the visitor.

  ‘No,’ said Lydia, not entirely truthfully. Sometimes she rehearsed in her mind means of escape from the murderer who lurks always just within the consciousness of the solitary. As he crept in through the scullery window she would leap from her bedroom and conceal herself in the nettles, unconscious of the pain. As he climbed through her bedroom window she would flee down the stairs, slamming the door on his sanguinary hand. But when she was very sad she understood that sorrow casts out fear, and then the murderer could call with a few of his friends and she would tell them wearily to bugger off and they would go, since, after all, there can be no satisfaction in murdering the dead. Sometimes Lydia felt that she had very little to lose, and in her poverty lay her safety. ‘No,’ she said again with more conviction.

  ‘I’m giving a dinner party,’ said Elizabeth to Lydia with the odd composure of those who are conversationally inept and unaware of it. ‘On Thursday.’

  ‘Why should we be frightened?’ asked Betty, nervously.