Unexplained Laughter Read online

  ‘He could’ve left if he’d wanted to,’ said Betty. ‘He’s been offered all sorts of consultancies at lots of London hospitals.’

  ‘Who said so?’ demanded Lydia.

  ‘He did,’ said Betty.

  ‘Oh, him,’ said Lydia.

  She knew that he had tried to give her the impression that he was going off on a promiscuous adventure and expected this to arouse in her both admiration and jealousy, but as Lydia’s misdemeanours were more of the spirit than of the flesh she found promiscuity not merely sinful but foolish and disgusting.

  ‘He is far too old to be carrying on like that,’ she said censoriously. ‘This obsession with sex is a sign of retardation. People who leap from one relationship to another like someone crossing a stream on stepping-stones never grow up. They are like people at a meal who can only take a bite from each course. Highly unnutritious.’

  Betty said nothing because, Lydia knew, Lydia’s forays into morality left her speechless.

  They stayed discreetly close to the cottage as the funeral proceeded in the adjacent churchyard. Beuno had told them that funerals were known as either private or public. The private ones, being exclusive, aroused bad feelings, but to the public ones people came from miles around and were given things to eat: distant relations, old friends, old acquaintances, old enemies, but no outsiders, no aliens. Unlike the Agricultural Fair, funerals made no provisions at all for visitors. The deceased was over ninety; so Lydia and Betty had not been called upon to express great regret or commiseration among the villagers. The year Lydia had bought her cottage a young person had died and Lydia had been lost for words, as people are in the face of tragedy. All that remains to be said is incised on stone, and the living go around silently with long faces and glances that mean ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am, but I do know how you feel.’ And sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Either way it is of little use to the bereft locked full of raw grief, which might one day mature into something more bearable, and might not. The bereft, at that time, have no way of knowing.

  As the mourners left, Lydia heard a low laugh and sat up on her rug, thinking suspiciously of her ears. But someone real had laughed. People did laugh at funerals. The joke went on after all.

  ‘I sometimes think it’s amazing that anyone ever laughs at anything,’ said Lydia when the cortège had gone away down the lane. ‘When you think of everything, it really isn’t funny.’

  ‘I had an uncle who was dying of emphysema,’ said Betty, ‘and he used to implore people not to make him laugh because it took his breath away, and I could never understand what he could find to amuse him.’

  ‘There you are then,’ said Lydia, who had now been forced on several occasions to concede that Betty was not unsympathetic and understood more than Lydia would have thought her capable of. This was humbling, and good for Lydia’s character, which stood in need of improvement. She wondered whether she heard unreal laughter as a self-inflicted punishment because she was incontinently fond of amusement and only liked people who made her laugh, no matter what their other qualities.

  The gravedigger was hurling earth into the pit. They could hear him. It seemed slightly indecent to listen. Lydia felt the need to remove herself, as people who stay in hotels get out of the way when the poor chambermaids come to make the beds. She felt she should offer to help, while knowing her help was not called for.

  They waited until the lane must surely be empty of funeral guests and then went down to the car. The little trees in the hedges on each side of the path reached out to each other across it like the opposing factions at a wedding: the families of the bride and groom which will never be united but must maintain a truce, unnaturally bound by the exigent complicity of the couple.

  ‘Christenings and weddings and funerals are to life what breakfast and lunch and dinner are to the day,’ said Lydia. ‘None of them are strictly necessary, but they do break up all that time and give people the feeling they’re doing something – achieving something. I’d just as soon make do with a packed lunch. A little viaticum.’

  She felt an old resentment at being forced into a structure. There was only one way into life, one way through, and one way out, and it made Lydia mad. She had never belonged to anything and would have been a hopeless soldier. Nevertheless she was subject, with all her kind, to the overall rules: chiefly to that most irritating of all which maintains ‘You shall not know, you shall not wholly understand why it is this way. You shall just get on with it.’

  ‘Grrrr,’ said Lydia, flinging back an importunate branch.

  There were no locals in the pub. It had been taken over by a new contingent of tourists.

  ‘I wonder where everyone is?’ said Betty.

  ‘Everyone seems to be here,’ said Lydia. ‘I mean everyone. I can hardly get to the bar.’

  ‘No, I mean the locals,’ said Betty. ‘I don’t recognise a soul.’

  ‘They’ve all gone to the funeral,’ said Lydia.

  The locals were like a shoal of fish, gone, without exception, to another part of the water – or a flock of birds, called by some mystery to a different stretch of air.

  ‘They’ll be back,’ said Lydia. She struggled to the bar and ordered a pint and a half of lager. The half was for Betty. She would want another half later, but she didn’t like being faced with a full pint all at once.

  The tourists were milling about, carrying brimming glasses, and beginning to boast, as they found seats, of sporting successes. Their women, already seated, were not speaking. It was for these women that Mrs Molesworth kept her gift shop. They would hang around all day, bored stiff, while the menfolk sported, would provide the statutory feminine presence in the evenings – be brought on, as it were, as the dancing girls – and as a reward would be permitted to waste money on the sheepskin rugs, the (fairly) local pottery and all the other objects of tourism that Mrs Molesworth purveyed.

  It became clear from their phrases that this was a boat -ing group come to sail about on the nearby natural lake.

  Lydia and Betty pushed their way out on to the road and sat on the wall that protected the customers from passing cars. Lydia explained how much she disliked tourists.

  After a while Betty protested. ‘They’re only people on their holiday,’ she said; ‘they’re just enjoying themselves.’

  ‘They couldn’t enjoy themselves,’ said Lydia. ‘Are they like this at home, or is it only when they’re on holiday?’

  ‘You shouldn’t hate people so much,’ said Betty.

  ‘I know,’ said Lydia, ‘but I can’t help it.’

  ‘Just ignore them,’ said Betty.

  ‘I would if I could,’ said Lydia, ‘but the thing is I wish they’d all crash their cars and die.’

  Poor Lydia was truly distressed. Already a bridge at the head of the village where the local youths had been wont to gather to throw coke cans in the stream had been demolished in the interests of a road-widening development designed to encourage yet more dinghy-topped cars into the vicinity.

  From where she sat she could see the Molesworth house. It stood in front of an old grey cottage which the Molesworths had bought in order to acquire the land whereon they could erect their dream home. The dream home stood and shrieked like a blatant brassy mistress proclaiming her supremacy over the poor old lovely wife, left to slow decay.

  ‘Maybe it’ll get burned down,’ said Lydia hopefully.

  ‘Don’t be wicked,’ said Betty. ‘You’re only a tourist yourself, after all. You don’t belong here any more than they do.’

  ‘My forebears came from this valley,’ said Lydia.

  ‘You never told me that before,’ said Betty suspiciously. ‘Is it true?’

  But Lydia was drinking great mouthfuls of beer and wouldn’t tell her.

  They buried the old man. They opened the earth for him and they put him inside. Not too far down, because one day, the last day, he will come back again into the air. That day the bones of the brother of my mother who went
to the bottom of the sea will rise up through the green waters, and when they meet the air they will take on his flesh again, and he will swim far up into the endless air and he will meet the old man, free of his dust walking in the air, and my mother flying, and me flying, and I will be laughing.

  Someone laughed in the graveyard because he was an old, old man who died and no one weeps much for the old. Once I saw a woman there full of grief. She was too small for all that grief. I could see it running in her until it overflowed, and as fast as it ran more grief took its place until the lane and the streams ran with grief and all the valley was the colour of grief. She was grieving for her child. Who will grieve for me? What colour will the valley be when I die? The colour of Angharad, for I am dead.

  Hywel and Beuno have gone to the funeral.

  Elizabeth said, ‘I will not go. I did not know him. I cannot leave Angharad alone.’ When they had gone she went to the phone and she said, ‘I must see you. I have to see you. I don’t care.’

  And when he came he was angry and he said, ‘What do you want, Elizabeth? Do you want me to be struck off? For God’s sake you know what they’re, like in the village. They’ll see my car coming here and they know no one’s ill and you know what they’ll think.’

  And she said, ‘I know what they’ll think and they will be quite right.’

  And he said, ‘Not any longer.’

  And her face broke and she said, ‘Oh Wyn, oh Wyn,’ and he held her in his arms, and from where I crouched in the elbow of the stairs I saw his face and it was the face of the fox that Hywel killed, and the face of the stoat that he beat with a stick in the hen-yard, and the face of the dog that savaged the ewes.

  Her face was below his face and she said, ‘I’ll say Angharad was ill again.’

  He said, ‘Where is Angharad?’ And he lifted his head and his eyes saw my eyes and he smiled.

  She said, ‘She’s out on the hills, or down in the fields.’

  And he said, ‘That’s good.’ And his face was the face of the hawk as it stoops, and the face of the shrew as the hawk stoops.

  Satan, who finds work for idle hands to do, also fills idle minds with fruitless speculation. Lydia was wondering why Elizabeth hadn’t asked April to her dinner party, and also why she had been so silent on the previous evening and had left so early.

  ‘I bet I was right first time,’ she said to Betty. ‘I bet he made a pass at her.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Betty, squinting in the sunlight.

  ‘The priapic practitioner,’ said Lydia, who had just thought of this appellation. ‘I bet he made a pass at Elizabeth. He seems to go for plain, quiet women.’

  Betty was really shocked. ‘You can’t go around saying things like that,’ she protested. ‘You’ll get into terrible trouble.’

  ‘I’m not going around saying it,’ said Lydia, ‘I just wondered, and I said it to you, so if it gets around it’ll be you who did it.’

  ‘As if I would,’ said Betty. ‘Why do you think so?’ she asked after a while, as her initial disapproval was superseded by curiosity.

  ‘I have a feeling,’ said Lydia, ‘and my feelings are not to be lightly disregarded.’

  ‘You must have some evidence,’ said Betty.

  ‘I have,’ said Lydia. ‘The evidence of my sixth sense. Hanky-panky, it says.’

  ‘No,’ said Betty. ‘I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t be so stupid.’

  ‘When you’ve lived as long as me,’ said Lydia, speaking like the crone she would one day doubtless turn into, ‘you’ll know just how stupid people can be.’

  Betty sat there thinking. ‘If it is the case,’ she said, ‘I’m very sorry for Elizabeth. Hywel is a bit grumpy, and Wyn’s so cheerful. She must be awfully unhappy now he’s taken up with April. Then on the other hand she’s got Hywel and the farm – they’re quite well off, you know. And she must have loved Hywel, or she wouldn’t have married him.’

  Lydia ignored this last asinine remark. ‘They’re all rather sad people,’ she said, ‘and they must be getting under my skin, because I quite mind about them.’

  ‘Do you?’ asked Betty.

  Lydia made an instant disclaimer. ‘No, of course I don’t,’ she said. ‘What vegetarian delight is in store for supper?’

  As Betty grated and chopped, Lydia wondered whether Sid and Lil knew that their daughter’s suitor had laid lewd hands on the daughter of their oldest friends. Yes, of course they did. But it would not be appropriate to admit it. It was the weakness of humanity that it should disguise as strength – as sense and discretion and neighbourly feeling – an inability to recognise the more deplorable aspects of behaviour. Nice people didn’t think about such things, which was why child-abuse and wife-beating went frequently unremarked.

  Beuno arrived with the lengthening shadows, bearing a dead pheasant. ‘I think it must’ve been hit by a car,’ he said. ‘Do you want it? Hywel won’t eat it.’

  Betty regarded it with a rich mixture of pity, admiration, mistrust and disgust. ‘Poor thing,’ she said. ‘It was so beautiful. How do you know a car killed it? It might have died of disease.’

  Beuno swung it up to eye-level. ‘It doesn’t show much sign of injury,’ he said, ‘but as it was on the side of the road I think it’s safe to assume it’s just one more traffic casualty.’

  Lydia took it from him. ‘It doesn’t look ill to me,’ she said, ‘apart from being dead. Its feathers look remarkably healthy.’ She jiggled it up and down. ‘Nice and heavy for the time of year.’

  ‘Don’t think I’m going to pluck it and cook it,’ said Betty. ‘If you’re going to eat it you’ll have to do it all yourself.’

  Lydia had not imagined or expected that Betty would touch the pheasant. ‘I shall hang it in the kitchen for a week,’ she said, ‘and then you can go out for the evening and I will have bread sauce and fried breadcrumbs, and game chips and red currant jelly and watercress and pheasant.’ At the final word she swung the bird towards Betty who screamed a little.

  ‘If you hang it in the kitchen,’ Betty said, ‘the gamekeeper might pass and look in and then you’ll be in trouble.’

  ‘I’ll hang it in a paper bag,’ said Lydia, ‘and if anyone asks I’ll say it’s a fetish.’

  ‘I think you should just bury it,’ said Betty, and Lydia did see what she meant, for human death was attended with such ritual and dispatch that for an instant it seemed cruelly perverse to deny something similar to this helpless creature.

  ‘If you like I’ll bury his bones,’ she said. ‘After I’ve boiled them for stock of course.’

  ‘Poor thing,’ said Betty.

  ‘People turn to vegetarianism when the spirit fails,’ said Beuno, not to anyone in particular. Nevertheless Betty looked hurt.

  ‘They are in search of purity, perfection,’ he continued, ‘– the perfection of the body – while within the spirit rots and withers from neglect, and without the threat of doom trembles on the edge of possibility. Exercised, massaged, bathed and pampered, carefully fed as a prize marrow, the body is an empty shell flaunted in the face of catastrophe.’

  ‘Practising sermons?’ enquired Lydia.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said Beuno. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Lydia. ‘A touch over-elaborate perhaps. The merest hint of hyperbole. What you mean to say is – everyone’s scared of cancer and/or the bomb, so they put their heads in the sand and take up jogging and unrefined bran . . . That would be awfully difficult to do,’ she said. ‘I think you put it rather better yourself.’

  ‘The body without spirit is nothing but a carcase,’ continued Beuno, ‘a processor for food, stamped with mortality, instinct with corruption . . .’

  ‘Yes, but it is anyway,’ objected Lydia, ‘even when the spirit’s living in it. It’s still all those things you said.’

  ‘True,’ said Beuno. ‘How about this . . .?’

  ‘You might get rather good at it,’ said Lydia when he had finished declaiming in his beautiful Welsh
voice. ‘You might revive the revivalist tradition and galvanise the tourist trade. People might come to hear you from all over the world. How awful.’

  ‘I don’t think people want to be shouted at,’ said Betty. ‘I think they want to hear something encouraging and uplifting.’

  ‘There isn’t all that much on the bright side. Not if we’re truthful,’ said Beuno. ‘Our only hope rests on the off-chance that God does exist.’

  ‘You could say that,’ suggested Lydia.

  Beuno shrugged. ‘Whatever I say,’ he said, ‘will probably be addressed to two old ladies and a stray sheep. All the churches are closing, as the cinemas did.’

  ‘You mustn’t be downcast,’ said Lydia. ‘You have a splendid opportunity to do something different and original. You can feed the hungry and comfort the oppressed and visit the sick and bury the dead. And give good counsel, and do it all with feeling, and people will be so amazed they’ll positively flock to you. Now, as most of the country’s vicars are mad, and waste all their time falling dementedly in love with middle-aged lady parishioners – whatever happened to choirboys, by the way? Oh, never mind. As I was saying, none of them do anything constructive and that’s probably why they’re all going mad. And all the bishops do is deny the existence of God and fool about trying to settle strikes and infuriate absolutely everyone.’ On conclusion Lydia found her speech distressingly girlish and assumed a severe expression. ‘Now you have the chance to revitalise the spirits of the faithful. You could have a lovely time bouncing up and down in the pulpit, screaming hell fire.’

  ‘So could you,’ Betty reminded her. ‘You could go into the Church and fight for the ordination of women.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the same,’ said Lydia. ‘A woman talking about hell fire would just sound like a fishwife. The priesthood needs men. There’s little enough they’re good for else. I think they should be left to get on with it. Women can be mothers, and men can be priests. I think that’s fair. A lot of men are distraught at not being able to give birth and there’s little to be done about that. It’s ungrateful to want to be both.’