Unexplained Laughter Read online

  ‘How’s Angharad?’ asked Betty, who had, last night, discussed at length with Elizabeth the problems and frustrations of bringing up a defective child and felt thus freed to go on talking about it.

  ‘I’ve hardly seen her,’ said Beuno. ‘She keeps out of my way. She keeps out of everyone’s way if she possibly can.’

  ‘Elizabeth’s been trying to change that,’ Betty told him, although he must surely have known already.

  ‘Elizabeth worries too much,’ said Beuno. ‘There isn’t anything to be done about it now. It’s best to let her go her own way. Elizabeth has a townswoman’s fears. Angharad is safer on the hills than she is indoors. Most days her path and Hywel’s cross. He usually knows pretty well where she is.’

  Lydia had just realised why Elizabeth was childless. She was afraid. She was afraid she would have a defective child because she had seen in Angharad what could happen in her husband’s family. She really could not, under the circumstances, be expected to love Angharad, thought Lydia, remembering the hostility and anger which Elizabeth had so briefly exhibited last night. How could you love a child who, because of its strangeness and deformity, precluded you from having a child of your own because it might bear the same strangeness and deformity? It seemed remarkable that Elizabeth should be as good as she was to her sister-in-law. Lydia thought herself very slow not to have realised all this before, but then she reflected that the rapidity with which they had learned the circumstances of this secluded family was in itself strange. Elizabeth was lonely and Beuno guileless. Were these two qualities sufficient in themselves to cause their owners to lay all secrets bare? I suppose they must be, thought Lydia, shrugging, and wondering also whether the modern tendency, which was American in origin, to tell everybody everything before they’d even got the first olive off the cocktail stick had percolated as far as here. In the old days you kept your lunatics and your shapeless in the west wing, if you ran to one. Otherwise the attic or the coal cellar had to suffice, but concealment had been the fashion. Now, many people as they retrieved their fingers from the handshake were likely to tell you that their husband had just fathered an illegitimate child and ask your advice on how to proceed, or offer to give you the telephone number of their analyst/acupuncturist/homeopath/hypnotist who had been so helpful over their drink problem. No one hesitated to tell you that their spouse was schizophrenic, they themselves alcoholic, homosexual or beastlily promiscuous (no, they were all rather proud of that one) or, of course, that they hated their mother. It had not always been so, Lydia knew. And it was the teeniest bit boring, having largely absorbed the shock element that had once added a prurient interest to social intercourse.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ said Beuno, ‘because Hywel wants me to help dip the sheep and I hate the things.’

  ‘You’re a shepherd of men,’ said Betty, and Lydia hoped she wasn’t going to be roguish.

  ‘Do you take the view that God exists?’ asked Lydia. ‘Or do you see him as an inconvenient remnant of outmoded superstition – a bit like a gallstone – of which we must all be purged before religion can take on its true form, that is, without him?’

  Beuno turned to look at her. ‘They’ve all been thinking,’ he said. ‘I wish they wouldn ‘t.’

  ‘I thought it was good to think,’ said Betty.

  ‘There you are,’ said Lydia. ‘There’s a limit to what you can think about God.’

  Beuno agreed. ‘It’s when they think he’s a gallstone they find it difficult.’

  ‘Don’t you mind being in a Church that doesn’t believe in God?’ asked Betty.

  ‘It’s only a few of them who don’t believe,’ explained Beuno. ‘The academics. They get embarrassed at High Table if they think their peers imagine they do. They have to explain that although they’re priests they’re really not credulous nitwits, and then they feel they have to go further and they end up writing books about it and yapping away on the television.’ He added tranquilly: ‘No one takes much notice of them.’

  Lydia was pleased with him. It was seldom she met someone with whom she was in religious accord. Finn hadn’t believed in anything; not even that the Ancient of Days had dwindled to a gallstone. Some of their worst rows had resulted from this incompatibility. ‘I like God,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t show much sign of it,’ accused Betty. ‘You never go to church and you’re not very charitable.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lydia, ‘but God makes me laugh.’ ‘Perhaps you make him laugh,’ suggested Betty.

  ‘Perhaps it’s him you keep hearing.’

  ‘That is not impossible,’ said Lydia. ‘But it’s more likely to be the little fat chap who laughs when people make love.’

  ‘Cupid?’ asked Betty cautiously.

  ‘No, no,’ said Lydia. ‘This one’s much older, and oriental in appearance. He sits on a very smokey-looking cloud and he laughs and laughs at the sight of copulation. All his stomachs and his chins wobble. He has to hang on to them with his hands.’

  After a moment Betty said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘This god,’ said Lydia. ‘The one who invented sex. He did it for a laugh.’

  Betty glanced appealingly at Beuno. ‘I thought you were a Christian,’ she said to Lydia. ‘One God.’

  ‘I am a Christian,’ said Lydia. ‘This little god is the product of my imagination.’

  ‘Then how do you know the other one isn’t as well?’ demanded Betty, seeing that a point might be scored here.

  ‘I know my imagination,’ said Lydia. ‘I can’t imagine the other one.’

  ‘Then how do you know he’s there?’ asked Betty.

  ‘I know he’s there because I can’t imagine him,’ explained Lydia patiently. ‘If I could I should be extremely doubtful. He’d resemble Santa Claus or someone. Anyone I can imagine is quite unlikely to exist.’

  ‘We could talk about God at the same time as walking,’ said Beuno. ‘I’ll show you the place where the convent used to be in the Middle Ages.’

  ‘I want to walk up the other valley too,’ said Betty. ‘Someone told me the hedge is centuries old. According to Hooker’s hypothesis.’

  They went across the fields and came to a place where a few stones lay, giving no indication at all that they had once combined to form a dwelling for holy women.

  ‘The Welsh name for the bridge over there,’ said Beuno, gesturing, ‘means “the place where the milk was spilt” because one year the nuns’ cow went dry and they had to go down to the village to beg for some, and they got this far and then one of them dropped it.’

  ‘And they all said, Hereinafter and for evermore let this place be known as the place where the milk was spilt,’ said Betty dreamily.

  ‘Well, I suppose when they’d finished saying bugger and blast and damn and kicking butter-fingers in the head they might get round to saying that,’ said Lydia.

  ‘Angharad used to spend a lot of time here,’ said Beuno. ‘There, where the leaves come down to the water. She’d hide in there for hours.’

  ‘Who looked after her when she was little?’ asked Betty, who had learned that Angharad’s mother had died giving birth to her.

  ‘Hywel mostly,’ said Beuno. “The women from the village used to come and help, but it was mostly him.’

  Both Betty and Lydia found this odd and wanted to know how they’d managed.

  Beuno considered, politely. ‘I suppose we must have had more help than I remember,’ he said after a while. ‘I don’t remember that she was ever much trouble. I was much younger than Hywel, so I suppose he bore the brunt of it, but I don’t remember him complaining. We look after our own. We’re used to it. We’ve been used to it for centuries. There was never anyone else to turn to here, over the hills and far away, and there’s an ancient tradition of mistrusting strangers. Even Elizabeth has got it now.’ He smiled at them reassuringly. ‘If you stay long enough you will look with suspicion on unfamiliar faces.’

  Lydia, picturing Hywel’
s dark eyes, thought that he’d probably have put up with a great deal rather than have strangers in his house.

  ‘Hywel didn’t like having people around,’ said Beuno. ‘For years before he married Elizabeth I don’t think anyone came to the house except for the old men on Sunday after chapel. I didn’t think he’d ever marry.’

  It was an unlikely match. Lydia tried to imagine a more suitable bride for the dour Hywel and could see only a dim, faintly female version of himself. ‘I suppose he got an ache in the loins,’ she said.

  ‘Lydia,’ said Betty.

  ‘Will you marry?’ Lydia asked Beuno.

  ‘Lydia,’ said Betty.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Beuno. ‘I want to comb God’s hair. If I married I’d only end up cleaning his shoes. You can’t love God and anyone else.’

  ‘I do so agree with you,’ said Lydia, relieved. There was something most unpleasing and incongruous about the idea of Bueno shackled to a wife.

  ‘The Church has always had trouble with marriage,’ said Beuno, ‘trying to combine two mutually exclusive imperatives. The vicar’s wife is usually a pain. Like the doctor’s wife.’

  ‘Or the king’s wife,’ said Lydia, ‘or the politician’s wife. Appendages – being hauled round like a penitent’s placard.’

  ‘Whose wife do you like?’ asked Betty.

  ‘Nobody’s,’ said Lydia. ‘Wives are a bad thing. So are husbands.’

  ‘You’d have married Finn like a shot if he’d asked you,’ said Betty, losing her temper and speaking wildly.

  Lydia was sitting on a stile with the sun behind her and Beuno beside her. Betty faced them with the sun in her eyes. She could hardly see them. Lydia wasn’t smiling in her usual maddening way, but Betty thought she was; and she thought perhaps Beuno was smiling too. ‘Don’t deny it,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Lydia, pacifically, after a while. She didn’t want to make Betty cry here in a field in the summer. Her motive was only partly compassionate. It would be very disgusting if Betty were to burst into tears in the sunshine. Lydia sat still and sighed, waiting. She knew the recent conversation had been fantastical, with faint cruel undertones, and that it had excluded Betty, who was a good little thing. She now felt herself to be like the squirrel, staring with bright inimical eyes at a sad domestic beast. But if Betty began to weep Lydia would be, in humanity, bound to put her arm about her in consolation; so she said earnestly that she was suddenly terribly hungry and could it possibly be time for lunch.

  ‘Betty is a wonderful cook,’ she said, as they walked slowly back across the fields. ‘And she knows all about wild mushrooms and things.’ The conversation had become intensely boring.

  I saw them in the field with the fallen stones. Beuno was talking. He always talks like that. I went home through the field with the cows. The cows of my country are small and black, and the cats, and the eyes of my countrymen.

  Betty cooked lunch happily. Lydia even brought her some dandelion leaves. Beuno didn’t suggest that Elizabeth would be expecting him back, but ate his omelette as casually and thoughtlessly as the squirrel who had moved off to eat nuts in a different hazel tree.

  ‘Betty is turning into a vegetarian,’ explained Lydia; ‘so we lean rather heavily on the egg.’ She regarded Beuno, thinking how fortunate she was to discover one of her own kind in this improbable environment.

  Betty thought he looked more like a gipsy than a minister – a good gypsy. It was ridiculous to suppose that he would never marry. Even Catholic priests were getting married now. Betty detested waste.

  ‘Why do you suppose I keep hearing laughter?’ Lydia was asking idly. She had drunk several glasses of wine and didn’t really care at the moment.

  ‘I think there’s something wrong with your hearing,’ said Betty, in a hurry because speculation on this could easily lead to the sort of conversation that she didn’t like. ‘I think you should go and see the doctor.’

  ‘OK,’ said Lydia, bibulously obedient.

  ‘You ought to go tonight,’ said Betty, ‘before it gets any worse. I’m going down to the shop later, so I’ll make an appointment for you.’

  I was in the graveyard at noonday. The shadows were sparse and the light was cruel, as though the noonday devil had taken more than his share out of malice and greed. There is a time in the day when the days are long, when the edge of light meets the edge of darkness and for a moment there is nothing.

  I stood on my grave and my flesh knew all there is to know of clay, and my bones of stone. All the grasses stood still in the wicked sunlight until the evil had to loosen its hold, and the shadows came back, and a little breeze, and the earth began to turn again.

  It is light which is to be feared. The darkness is nothing, and beyond it is another light, and I won’t be dead. I won’t be dead . . .

  When the fumes of the wine had dissipated themselves Lydia said she wouldn’t go and see the doctor. She said she hated doctors. She said they were quite untrust worthy and cut off people’s arms and legs unnecessarily in order to keep their hand in, demonstrate their skills and prove that they were earning their money. The fumes of the wine had not been entirely dissipated and she felt too lazy to go all the way to the village and tell Dr Wyn about her ears. Her ears, she claimed, were perfectly sound. If she heard laughter that wasn’t there it was not her ears but her brain which was at fault, and she wished to preserve her experience intact in order to present it freshly to the specialist whom she intended to consult when her holiday was over.

  ‘If I start gassing about it to the local vet,’ she said, ‘it’ll get all stale and distorted, and I shall be so bored with it I shan’t be able to talk about it at all.’

  Lydia’s stubbornness would make Betty look a fool in the eyes of the doctor, so she got cross. ‘You must go,’ she said, ‘I had an awful time persuading him to see you. He’s fitting you in at the end of all his appointments.’

  This wasn’t true. The lady who fixed the appointments had said 6 o’clock without any messing about.

  At 5.45 Lydia walked down the path to the car, marvelling at the power which people like Betty could wield merely by threatening to sulk. As she came to her car she met Hywel, homeward-bound on his tractor. He swung up a hand in a non-committal gesture and rumbled on. With some pique Lydia understood that he had decided against finding her interesting. Driving along the lane, she tried to picture Hywel parking his tractor and going into his house to be greeted by Elizabeth, and found it impossible. She could visualise only dimness and silence, and Hywel in a state of wrathful wonder at finding that alien woman, his wife, in his mother’s house. Hywel seemed to her like some hapless creature in a story, spellbound by despair, made powerless by circumstance, trapped by a ruthless magic without even the faery consolation of glamour, the illusion of delight. For Elizabeth she felt no sympathy, since presumably no one had forced her to enter Farmhouse Grim. Hywel, supposed Lydia, must have briefly courted her, have put on a suit, taken her out to a café, been moderately gay. But even so Elizabeth should have known what she was walking into, should have looked closely at the encircling fields, the rock-built house and Hywel all muddy and iced and quiet from winter toil.

  When Lydia had marvelled to Betty about the horror of Elizabeth’s existence, Betty had told her not to be so silly. I’m not being so silly, thought Lydia, resentfully. That’s a miserable farmhouse, and the people in it are perilously unhappy or I’m a monkey’s uncle.

  She was still brooding as she reached the surgery, which was situated in a superior house of dressed stone set among laurel bushes and bits of lawn. She sat in the waiting-room, which contained only one other patient – a child with ringworm, his mother in tow. She ignored the child, fearing contamination, and tried to imagine Elizabeth’s wedding. Probably, she concluded, it had just washed itself along on a tide of alcohol and that uneasy mixture of salaciousness and sanctimoniousness which characterises these melancholy occasions.

  She had just begun to worry abou
t the honeymoon, finding an image of Hywel in Benidorm particularly elusive, when she was summoned by the doctor. How difficult it was, she now reflected, to speak of one’s physical ailments to a person with whom one has dined. How wise was her father. She lied to Dr Wyn, saying that she had wrenched her shoulder, since although there was nothing inherently shameful about noises in the head she did not wish to confide in him. How glad I am, she thought simply, that I have not suddenly contracted syphilis.

  He bade her remove her shirt, and moved her arm around, while occasionally and at random she remarked ‘Ouch’.

  ‘Not much wrong there,’ he told her. ‘Don’t use it for a few days, and see how it goes.’ He appeared to be as bored with Lydia’s shoulder as she was herself. He had some thing else on his mind. ‘I’m glad you called in this evening,’ he said. ‘Not in a hurry, are you? Got a few minutes?’

  ‘Y-e-s,’ said Lydia cautiously.

  ‘Someone I want you to meet,’ he announced, flinging open a door behind him and ushering Lydia into a sitting-room.

  ‘This is April,’ he said, indicating a nondescript, darkish girl who sat on a corner of the sofa. He didn’t tell the girl who Lydia was; so Lydia knew her reputation had gone before her.

  The girl glanced at her craftily. She wore a faintly sly and greedy look, like a child who has been promised a rather disreputable treat if it’s good.

  Lydia, who had quite often been subjected to this experience, twigged at once. Dr Wyn had told his friends that Lydia could be relied on to say something awful, or to sink, senseless, under the table. She was the floor show.

  Dr Wyn introduced her to a tall foolish-looking man who was pouring whisky at a side table, and whose name she didn’t catch.

  ‘How do you do,’ said Lydia tonelessly. She, as it were, took her personality, folded it up and sat on it.

  ‘I think it’s ever so pretty here, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Such a change from the city. I often say to my friend – I wish I could retire and live here all the time.’

  ‘Have another drink,’ offered Dr Wyn, looking rather puzzled.