Unexplained Laughter Read online

  ‘Oh, I should be,’ said Elizabeth. ‘At the farm I have the dogs and . . .’ she paused, ‘no one comes much to the farm unless I ask them specially.’ She got up and moved towards the door. ‘You should lock the doors and windows at night,’ she advised them.

  ‘I always do,’ said Lydia when she had gone. ‘Was she asking us to her dinner party? Or was she just telling us she’s having one because she.thought we might be interested?’

  ‘She’d already invited us before you came down,’ said Betty. ‘What do you think she meant about locking the doors?’ She looked behind her apprehensively.

  ‘I suppose she meant we should lock the doors,’ said Lydia, adding meanly, ‘Of course we are particularly vulnerable here. Anyone who really wanted to could get in with no trouble at all.’

  ‘Oh don’t,’ cried Betty. ‘You’re making me nervous. I wish we had a man with us.’

  ‘If we did he might be the murderer,’ said Lydia. ‘Finn had violent tendencies. I laughed at his coat once and he pushed me off a bar stool.’ She found it comforting to remember sometimes the worst aspects of Finn’s behaviour.

  ‘Well, no wonder he went off with that girl,’ said Betty.

  ‘Huh,’ said Lydia. She wished that Finn’s caique might sink in waters infested with small sharks. She hoped that one might eat the duck with the lovely hair. ‘I’m going down to the pub,’ she said; ‘I need a drink’, and added rather threateningly, ‘You coming?’

  ‘I never drink in the daytime,’ said Betty. ‘It makes me go to sleep in the afternoon.’

  It made Lydia go to sleep in the afternoon too, which was why she did it. She was frustrated by the unsatis -factory nature of the recent conversation. She found Elizabeth hard to place, her personality oddly opaque, her responses subdued and elusive. ‘Is that girl half-witted, or is it me?’ she enquired.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Betty.

  ‘Being a communicator,’ explained Lydia, ‘I find it dashed annoying not to be able to communicate.’

  ‘You don’t communicate really,’ said Betty. ‘You just like telling people things. You don’t expect a response.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Lydia. ‘I wouldn’t fancy just standing there yelling into the void.’

  ‘You like people to respond by telling you how clever you are,’ said Betty. ‘That’s not actually a response. It’s flattery.’

  Lydia felt quite breathless. Betty was being rude to her. How extraordinary. Every worm has a turning. ‘If they didn’t read what I write I should starve to death,’ she said.

  ‘You could do something else,’ said Betty. ‘But you wouldn’t feel real if you weren’t surrounded by people most of the time telling you how wonderful you are. I’m not blaming you. Some people are simply just like that.’

  ‘I’m not like that,’ said Lydia, but she wondered. Betty didn’t sound as though she meant to be unkind. She sounded as though she was stating a fact. How very unpleasant it can be, she reflected, to see oneself as others see one. Is it preferable to be a rat or a mouse – a long-tailed, snaggle-toothed, terror-inspiring rat or a little grey domestic pest? On the whole, she decided, being a rat was more chic, but nevertheless she determined to write a long earnest article soon on some subject of profound importance in which she would make a significant contribution to the sum of human awareness. Betty’s fond tolerance was not enough. Lydia wanted her respect. How greedy. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I am off to the pub. Here I go.’

  ‘They’ll think you’re an alcoholic,’ warned Betty. ‘You know how people talk in these small communities.’

  ‘I am an alcoholic,’ said Lydia. ‘And they mostly talk in Welsh and I don’t understand them, so I don’t care. The day they come to the door and denounce me in fluent Anglo-Saxon for a Scarlet Woman, then I’ll think about it.’

  When Hywel went to the hills Elizabeth went to the telephone. She said, ‘Come to my dinner party’, and she said ‘Why not?’, and she said, ‘Beuno will be here and the Molesworths are coming, and I’ve asked the two girls who are staying at Ty Fach.’ She said, ‘April can’t come. It’s her evening class in Oswestry’, and she said, ‘About eight o’clock. Come as soon as surgery closes,’ and when she turned from the telephone she smiled.

  That night a storm circled the valley. The watchful, who included Lydia, watched the sky behind the hills lurid with lightning and heard the distant cursing of thunder. What a scene, thought Lydia, who was a connoisseur of rows. The lightning flashed with bitter, brief, revealing wit, and the inarticulate thunder grumbled, protested and eventually roared. The lightning replied and then at last retired leaving the dull thunder the last fading word. And the night wept – heavy, despairing, relentless tears.

  ‘Wow,’ said Lydia, heaving herself to the other side of the bed and plumping up her pillow. She remembered uneasily one or two scenes with Finn, and wondered whether, in battles with a loved one, it might not be advisable to suppress the cutting edge of one’s cleverness. The lightning, it seemed to Lydia, had undoubtedly come off best in that encounter. If she were the thunder, she thought, she would never speak to it again.

  Next morning, the countryside was heavy and sullen like a house where a dreadful quarrel has taken place and still nothing is resolved. A dark palpable mist hung over the moorland and behind it the sun flamed in temper.

  It was a lousy day. Everybody said so. Lydia and Betty said so, and when Lydia went into the village shop it was full of people who were saying so as well. It was the sort of day when men run their fingers round their collars and women pull their skirts away from their thighs, and people debate whether a hot cup of tea really cools you down or whether a glass of cold water is more helpful. ‘It’s so humid,’ they moaned, and they wondered why it was that the storm had left them in this stifling, steamy condition when storms were supposed to clear the air. Even the older villagers claimed they’d never known anything like it. Some who had driven over the Berwyns insisted that they had had to put their headlights on, and this in the middle of a July day.

  After a while Lydia grew bored with hearing people insulting the weather. Contrarily, she determined to find something to say in its favour. It was, after all, an unusual day, with its ominous dark mist. It made the previous days seem like shallow, callow girls, all light and bright and ordinary. ‘It’s not such a bad day – sort of interesting,’ she said. It was now that she gained her reputation for eccentricity. Being an outsider she would have got it anyway, but this precipitated matters.

  ‘Oh, you like it, do you?’ asked an elderly farmer, buying a quarter of boiled ham for his tea. ‘Well, well, then.’

  That seemed to sum it up, and Lydia left for home, driving slowly because of the sheep, the young pheasants, the occasional rabbit and the small groups of tourists on their way to view some antiquity or item of rustic charm who variously loped, flapped, skittered and scuttled before her. She stopped at the graveyard to visit the dead; but as, even alive, they would all have been strangers to her she felt intrusive. It was not correct, she thought, to walk among these sleepers, regarding their bed-heads wrought from stone and criticising their counterpanes of gravel. The grass-grown graves looked the most comfortable. There was something uneasy, something that still protested, in the others – the ones with the polished granite headstones and low-walled rectangles of tooth-white, glittering chippings – as though the occupants lay open-eyed, indignant at their powerlessness to alter their unjust circumstances. These, felt Lydia, would rise on the last day, climbing briskly out of their coffins, brushing away the mould of corruption and muttering, ‘About time too.’ They would instantly begin questioning the way the world had been running since their enforced absence, and they would not approve; whereas those who lay softly beneath the blowing grasses, the quiet slate, had long since turned over in rest and when they woke would wake like children and smile at the sky. Lydia’s imagination was at it again. She thought she ought to be able to master it sufficiently to make it write a po
em for her, but it didn’t work like that.

  There was someone else in the graveyard, someone who slipped soundlessly behind the church as she watched.

  That’s a ghost, said Lydia’s imagination.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Lydia. ‘It’s the village idiot.’

  She left the car outside the churchyard in a space where the cockpit used to be and walked home.

  Betty was sitting in the porch of the cottage peeling potatoes. The porch was made of slate like the peaceful gravestones. It was economical, thought Lydia, and reassuring to make your dwelling place of the same indigenous material as your grave. Living and dying here you would feel much the same.

  ‘I saw the most extraordinary creature in the churchyard,’ she said.

  ‘What sort of creature?’ asked Betty suspiciously, possibly thinking of those large mysterious cats which are regularly sighted all over the British Isles but never caught.

  ‘I think it was a girl,’ said Lydia. ‘She didn’t look quite human.’

  ‘Oooh, you are horrible, Lydia,’ said Betty indignantly.

  ‘I don’t think all that much of humans,’ said Lydia; ‘so when I say one doesn’t quite look like one I don’t mean it offensively.’

  Betty found this rather hard to understand, and Lydia sounded dangerous, so she peeled another potato.

  Appeased by the silence, Lydia went on: ‘She looked at home in the graveyard. More at home than the ladies in hats who come on Sundays with chrysanthemums . . .’ She was thinking that the girl might have lacked an umbilicus; might have come straight from the hand of God, who having finished making the mountains had picked a bit of clay from under his thumbnail and fashioned just one more sort of person, perhaps as an experiment. Naturally she didn’t say this. Some thoughts are entirely unsuitable for conversation. ‘Most people are like plates,’ she said instead; ‘so if one gets broken you can go back to the shop and get another one of similar pattern.’ But that made her think of Finn, who really wasn’t much like other people at all. ‘I shall never own anything of value,’ she said. ‘Things of value are death to peace of mind.’

  ‘Do cheer up,’ said Betty.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ said Lydia. ‘This is not a day for cheering up on. This is a day for thinking of the Four Last Things and meditating on sin.’ She had forgotten her brief attempt to enjoy it, and looked round at it with disgust. It made her think of sour washing.

  I saw the woman from Ty Fach today. She was in the graveyard. Some of the people read the gravestones as they read the addresses on envelopes. The woman looked at the graves as though she would like to open them. She looked at the grave of Hywel’s mother. One day I shall lie beside that grave and the stone will say ‘Angharad’ and I shall have been dead for a long time. She was my mother too.

  Betty wrought all those peeled potatoes into rosti, and grilled some sausages, remarking that they contained very little meat. She was frustrated by the narrow range of vegetables available in the country and said that tomorrow she would go foraging in the fields for different types of mushrooms and wild herbs. She was missing the aubergines and things that brightened the street-markets of London and was discommoded by the absence of garlic. The nearest town was sufficiently far north to be a pie place, and nearly all the shops – the butchers, the bakers, the grocers, the solitary delicatessen – vied with each other in the quantity and variety of their pies. And certainly they took a casual attitude to vegetables, clearly regarding them as very second-rate fodder and not really to be taken seriously. Betty was horrified to note that the butchers’ shops kept cooked pies adjacent to raw meat. ‘The risk of salmonella,’ she said, ‘the possibility of food-poisoning. Oh! Are none of them aware of the dangers? I wonder what the health inspectors are thinking about.’

  Lydia felt some sympathy with Betty for once. Now that she knew Betty was here because she pitied her and not because she liked her, she felt less threatened and decided that she would just let her take over the cooking and do as she wished in the kitchen.

  ‘I’ve got to work on some stuff for an article,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it up to my bedroom and you can listen to the radio in the sitting-room.’

  ‘I thought I’d sit in the garden,’ said Betty. ‘The mist’s nearly cleared and I like to see the stars.’

  ‘What a good idea,’ said Lydia.

  She lay on her bed and after a while heard Betty come in again, slapping at her cheeks and arms. Lydia grinned. She could have told her guest that the midges were like little piranhas of the air; but she hadn’t, and now Betty had found out for herself.

  Behaving badly made Lydia feel better. She hoped she wasn’t turning into one of those maniacs who murder people in order to establish their superiority over their fellows who say Please and Thank you and conform to the basic customs of society. She thought it unlikely. Murder seemed to her too intimate, too similar to giving birth. She thought she would never care enough about anyone to give birth to them or to kill them. With the possible exception of Finn. Lydia lay for some time wondering how best to upset him. The duck with the hair was not unlike Betty, which was probably why Betty found her so attractive. It was something to do with their hemlines, mused Lydia: something to do with the length and disposition of the bottoms of their skirts. They both sometimes wore white stockings, which compounded the uniquely maddening quality of their hems, adding to the aspect, both prim and clinical, which so infuriated Lydia. They were no better in trousers, because then they both got the waistline wrong. Spinsters should never even attempt to marry, thought Lydia drowsily, and fell asleep.

  She woke a short while later under the impression that she’d dropped off at a cocktail party. She had heard people laughing. The room was nearly dark and the silence unbroken.

  She got off the bed and listened. Perhaps Betty had asked some people in and they were enduring one of those breaks in conversation, but the silence went on. By now two people would have started talking at the same moment. She went downstairs.

  Betty was quite alone reading a book called Yarns of an Old Shellback that Lydia had brought from her father’s house.

  ‘Who was laughing?’ enquired Lydia abruptly.

  Betty stared at her. ‘No one,’ she said.

  ‘Someone was,’ said Lydia. ‘It woke me up.’

  ‘It must have been the wind in the trees,’ suggested Betty.

  ‘Winds roar and howl and occasionally whisper,’ said Lydia, ‘but they don’t, to the best of my recollection, laugh.’

  ‘Then it must have been the stream running over the rocks,’ said Betty.

  ‘And while I know streams are said to chuckle,’ remarked Lydia acidly, ‘they don’t go like this – Har Har Har.’ She gave a mirthless impression of a full-bodied laugh.

  ‘Then it must have been a ghost,’ said Betty, and clearly wished she hadn’t. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts,’ she affirmed.

  ‘I think there probably are,’ said Lydia argu menta tively. ‘Only I can’t see what they’ve got to laugh about. On the other hand, now I come to think of it I can’t see why they should go round clanking chains. What a waste of time. If I was dead I think I might laugh. After all, death frightens the hell out of everyone; so once you’d gone and got it over with you might feel quite light-hearted.’

  ‘You mean nothing worse could happen?’ asked Betty doubtfully,

  ‘Yeah,’ said Lydia.

  ‘But what about reincarnation?’ asked Betty.

  ‘I don’t know about reincarnation,’ said Lydia, ‘except it sounds to me a bit of a dirty trick. You think you’ve got it ail over with – and bang, you’re re-cycled as a beetle or something. Anyway, just at present I’m thinking about disembodied laughter.’

  ‘Was it – frightening?’ asked Betty.

  Lydia thought, ‘It wasn’t at the time,’ she said, ‘because I didn’t know it was inexplicable. I’m not frightened now. It wasn’t a lunatic giggle. But I wouldn’t go outside at the moment.’

&nb
sp; ‘Oh, we are silly,’ said Betty, straightening up in her chair.

  ‘It must’ve been someone walking home from the pub.’

  ‘Can’t have been,’ said Lydia. ‘If they were on the road we couldn’t hear them from the house, and I truly doubt that anyone would go home via the graveyard and the woods. And if they did they wouldn’t be laughing; they’d be too busy tracking their way through the undergrowth. Besides, the only people who live beyond here are that Elizabeth and the farmer, and neither of them strikes me as the riotous type.’

  “Then it must have been holiday-makers out for a walk,’ said Betty.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Lydia, but she somehow knew it wasn’t.

  There was a storm and it stayed. It lay in the valley all day like a dead body and I didn’t go out. I lay in my room like a dead body and I listened to Elizabeth thinking about her dinner party.

  She opened her cookery book, and after a while she boiled a chicken, and she sang.

  Beuno is coming home today, and tomorrow is Elizabeth’s dinner party, and Dr Wyn will come.

  Elizabeth is going to be very kind to me.

  Lydia and Betty were the first to arrive and were met by two of the farm dogs – one charming, one not, like pairs of detective inspectors. Lydia had an impression when Elizabeth opened the door that no one had spoken in that house for some time. She then thought that people seldom visited here, and yet Elizabeth was not an incompetent hostess. She took them through the square hall into a sitting-room and offered them sherry. She was not shy, but neither was she easy. After a while Lydia understood. She had herself spent several weeks alone in her cottage when she had just bought it and when she returned to mix with people she had found that her vocabulary had deserted her, that without stimulation she had completely lost the art of conversation, had been able only to mutter inanities in monosyllabic form. It had soon passed, but it had alarmed her at the time. It was not pleasant to feel like a mindless bore.

  ‘Have you always lived here?’ asked Betty.

  ‘No,’ said Elizabeth. ‘My parents bought a bungalow and retired down here and I met Hywel and married him.’