Unexplained Laughter Page 8

  Betty, like many women and unlike most men, was easily swayed by argument. She immediately saw the sense in these remarks and abandoned for ever (or at least for the time being) the view that the reluctance of the Church to ordain women revealed it as bigoted and unfair. ‘I wonder why everyone doesn’t see that,’ she remarked.

  ‘People can be very unreasonable,’ explained Beuno. ‘Try and think for a moment how many points of view there are in the world and how seldom people really understand each other. There are those who practise ritual cannibalism and those like yourself who won’t eat pheasants.’

  ‘I don’t understand why people want to climb mountains,’ said Lydia.

  ‘And I don’t really understand the tenets of Islam,’ said Beuno.

  ‘I simply can’t see how people can eat tripe,’ said Betty, shuddering.

  ‘No, I can’t see that either,’ agreed Lydia.

  They sat for a moment in glum accord watching the evening thicken outside.

  Lydia began to feel the need to laugh and reached for the vodka bottle.

  ‘I can’t really see what men see in women,’ she confessed after a while. ‘I sometimes think we’re quite adorable, and sometimes I wonder why men get that look in their eye. I find myself looking over my shoulder to see what it is they’re looking at that way. I think I’m very nice, but even on my best days I never look at myself like that. It makes me feel insecure – not understanding what it is they want so much. I don’t think I’ve got it to offer.’

  ‘Oh Lydia,’ said Betty, ‘of course you know.’

  She glanced at Beuno for confirmation, but he looked unmoved. Clean in the lamplight, but unmoved.

  ‘Come on,’ said Betty, ‘what do men see in women?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Beuno.

  Listen. Brrr, brrr. He isn’t answering. She hangs up and starts again. He answers. She says, ‘Oh, Wyn, Wyn, I can’t bear it. Oh, help me please. Oh Wyn, oh Wyn . . . Why did you go to London? I missed you so. Oh Wyn . . .’

  ‘Elizabeth looks pale,’ said Betty. ‘She looks tired out. I think Angharad is too much for her. She doesn’t complain, but you can see she feels the tension.’

  ‘Poor her,’ said Lydia, but as she could not imagine taking care of a disruptive child she couldn’t truly sympathise. She thought that Elizabeth was foolish to have married a silent countryman and to have con -demned herself to a life of boredom, and that she should have known better.

  ‘Elizabeth always takes Angharad to the Agricultural Fair for a treat. She really does her best for that girl,’ said Betty.

  Lydia had to admit that Betty’s eagerness to admire and approve of people, while annoying, was a good characteristic and one that she herself lacked. She didn’t find anyone very admirable, had reservations about people who devoted their lives to the care of the sick, and she didn’t go ‘Aah’ over babies and brides or the Princess of Wales. She wondered whether Angharad enjoyed her treat. Lydia didn’t like going out unless she was looking her best. She wondered how Angharad felt when she caught sight of her reflection in shop windows. A glimpse of herself with her hair all wrong or her coat bunched could ruin Lydia’s day.

  ‘I wonder what I should wear?’ she said. ‘Something smart and simple.’

  ‘I can’t see that it matters,’ said Betty, ‘not at the Agricultural Fair.’

  ‘Of course it matters,’ said Lydia.

  ‘Well, I’m just going to be comfortable,’ said Betty.

  ‘So am I,’ said Lydia. ‘If I don’t look smart I shan’t be comfortable. I shall be cross and unhappy.’

  It was still early. The morning had a soft babylike tenderness upon which the postman suddenly intruded with a postcard.

  Lydia looked at the picture before she looked at the signature. It showed some women in a northern English town at the turn of the century; they were standing under an advertisement for Mazawattee tea and seemed depressed. ‘Who on earth is this from?’ she asked.

  ‘If you read it you’ll see,’ said Betty.

  ‘I know that,’ said Lydia, ‘but speculation is so interesting.’

  She got a surprise when she turned it over. It was from Finn.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Lydia, enraged, ‘it’s from the duck. The duck is precisely the sort of person who buys second-hand postcards and carries them round and sends them to people. Left to himself, Finn would send coloured pictures of Greek beaches. He has his faults, but sepia-tinted postcards isn’t one of them.’

  ‘What does it say?’ asked Betty.

  ‘I can’t read it,’ said Lydia. ‘I can never understand a word Finn writes.’

  She had always known that Finn would reappear, because for a time they always did, never quite sure that the new woman was an improvement on the old one, keeping their options open.

  ‘There’s an exclamation mark here,’ said Lydia. ‘How disgusting. He must have made a little joke. There’s something horribly ingratiating about exclamation marks. If he thinks he’s going to get round me with his punctuation he can think again. Pah.’

  ‘Let me see if I can read it,’ said Betty. She looked at it carefully. “They’ve franked over half of it,’ she said. ‘There’s a word here that could be “lovely” and could be “lonely”.’

  ‘That’s quite crucial,’ said Lydia. ‘It could change the meaning entirely.’

  She was pleased. It is humiliating to be left and gratifying when the leaver shows signs of repentance and regret. She put the card on the dresser shelf, knowing that later she would attempt to decipher it.

  ‘I expect he’ll turn up when he gets back,’ prophesied Betty.

  ‘I expect he will,’ agreed Lydia. ‘I shall tell him to piss off.’

  ‘You are hard,’ sighed Betty. ‘So strong.’

  Lydia, however, knew that it was not strength, but vulnerability and timorousness, which led to the formation of a carapace. She did not say this to Betty, but smiled with false self-satisfaction. If Finn thought he was going to play hell with her heart he was very much mistaken, and if her carefulness made her life less rich, then that was entirely her own lookout and preferable to the interesting anguish of the uncertain love affair.

  Betty was beginning to pine and to yearn after Beuno. Not too badly as yet, but the indications were there: bright eyes and heightened vivacity when he arrived, and a mild but spun-out dreariness when he went. She contrived to sit near to him and she gave him nice things to eat. Lydia told herself it was very sad, because Betty would make a wonderful vicar’s wife. On the other hand she was totally out of Beuno’s class. His quality of ruthless innocence rendered him unsuitable for most human intercourse. While neither a saint nor a psycho path, he clearly had some of the characteristics of both – chiefly what Lydia could only think of as a sort of selfless solipsism. He was a person of disinterested good will and he wanted no return from humankind. These people are fortunately few and far between because they are extremely odd and have a way of upsetting applecarts. Lydia could quite see Beuno maddeningly getting himself martyred on some trivial point of principle, or overturning a regime with his angelic intransigeance. If he were not so attractive she thought that she herself might, by now, have shaken him soundly.

  ‘Beuno should be labelled “Not for human con -sumption”,’ she said, eating bread and jam. ‘They are a very strange family. Each one of them is in some way cut off from the rest of society: Hywel because he’s a miserable sod, Angharad because something went awfully wrong, and Beuno because he’s fallen in love with God.’

  ‘But Beuno’s normal,’ protested Betty earnestly.

  Lydia spoke carefully because she did not wish to give the impression that she was attempting to divert Betty from Beuno for nefarious reasons of her own. ‘I’m not saying he’s raving mad,’ she said, ‘but he isn’t like the rest of us.’

  Generously, if inaccurately, she ranged herself more with Betty than with Beuno. He and she were similar but he had a natural goodness which she lacked, and she did not wa
nt to claim aloud that she understood him because that, in itself, would lead to misunderstanding.

  ‘Finn is a fiend,’ she said, ‘but he’s quite easy to cope with once you’ve accepted that. Beuno would drive one crazy.’ She tried to think of the simplest way of conveying this. ‘You might cook him a wonderful pie and then you’d find he’d given it to a drunken beggar, and no matter how kind you thought him after a while you’d want to kill him. Whereas Finn would never do anything like that. He’d much more likely kick a drunken beggar, but that’s what most people are like and you can put up with it. Beuno is not, in everyday terms, a reasonable person.’

  Betty turned the radio on, perhaps not wishing to listen to any further descriptions of Beuno’s character. The radio emitted a song which Lydia associated with Finn. For a moment she was bewildered, as the real Finn and the dream Finn co-existed. The music immediately evoked the sensations, the enchantment, of being sillily in love, and simultaneously she was no longer in love. So why was she grinning like that? She was like a cured alcoholic who finds he can take a drink without again becoming addicted. It was peculiar but pleasant that she should find the song painless. A few weeks ago it would have scored claw marks on her heart.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Lydia, her hands at her breast.

  ‘Now what?’ asked Betty.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be awful if a cat scratched your heart?’

  ‘Oh Lydia,’ said Betty, ‘you do think of the weirdest things.’ She reached towards the radio.

  ‘Don’t turn it off,’ implored Lydia; ‘that is my favourite song.’ She felt positively triumphant now. It was wonderful to be able to listen to her favourite song with impunity, extraordinary that it should still have the power to move her, but not to tears.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said as she realised this could mean only one thing. ‘Finn’s on his way back.’ She realised that at some level she had always known this, since otherwise she could not have recovered so quickly. It is noticeably more difficult to get over someone who no longer loves you than over someone who still does really.

  ‘You must only have been infatuated with him if you’ve got over him so quickly,’ remarked Betty repressively.

  This is a distinction that agony aunts commonly make, and is of doubtful validity.

  ‘All falling in love is infatuation,’ said Lydia. ‘Then if he marries you they say it’s love. Then when you divorce him they say it’s a tragedy because love has failed, when really it’s all due to an eventual recovery from infatuation, which is a sort of brain disease.’

  Besides, she thought, if Finn came back and she found him not repellent he would have been rendered kinder by his infidelity. It is only the virtuous who can be truly cruel. Guilt and a sense of common humanity make people less harsh. It was the utterly excellent Yahweh who told the malefactors to go to hell. Satan welcomed them.

  Lydia shifted uneasily in her chair. It was strange how good and bad could run into each other, could appear as interchangeable: not the good of succouring the sick, nor the bad of shooting the helpless, but in the subtler regions of morality where things blended together and seemed to make the business of living easier.

  ‘Goodness is very aggressive,’ muttered Lydia into her coffee cup. It was plainly much easier to join the legions of the wicked who weren’t fussy and were rather more eager for recruits than the exclusive godfearing. Satan ran the sort of club which anyone could join. Realising this, Lydia decided that she would have to aspire to the other. This conclusion made her bad tempered, since being good necessitated much thought and hard work, whereas any fool could be bad. Thinking of badness gave her one of her ideas. ‘You know how the mental hospitals send people’s lunatics home to them now – even the ones who think they’re Napoleon or a poached egg. It’s because they can’t afford to keep them in, but they say it’s the latest therapy technique. Well, what if the prisons did the same? The government could issue each family with a cage for their own felon, and depending on how they felt about him they’d treat him accordingly. If he was normally quite a kind person who’d taken up robbing banks because he was short of cash they could put jam on his bread and vodka in his water, and if he was a horror they could empty the potato peelings over him whenever they felt like it.’

  ‘I never heard anything so ridiculous in my life,’ said Betty.

  ‘Self-sufficiency,’ said Lydia. ‘Free enterprise. Personal responsibility. Maybe you’re right.’ She spiked the idea, together with many others.

  I am hiding. I am in the graveyard where nothing lives but the slow-worm, motionless on the short grass by the path, and the little birds who search among the yews like Elizabeth in the wardrobe. She is looking for a dress for me and she is waiting to comb my hair, and she has the look on her face that she has when she guts the chickens. I will not go to the Fair. I shall hide until nightfall and eat the raspberries that grow by the stream. Hywel will go to the Fair with the cleverest dogs, but Elizabeth will not go. She will cry and say that she cannot leave the house with Angharad out on the hills alone, for anything might happen to her, anything. And Hywel will go without a word, and when he is gone and the house is silent Elizabeth will creep to the telephone and she will pick it up and it will ring in another empty house because Dr Wyn has gone to the Fair. They have the Fair in a great field where the sun beats down and the people look at me, and they see me very clearly, and they look away, and some of the children laugh and some of them cry, but they are all afraid. I would like to take each tent by the corner and pull it down, and I would untether all the neat horses and the sleek, brushed bulls and send them with a huge cry into all the hills. And the dogs would run, wailing, with their tails between their legs, and the people flee like frightened sheep, leaving Angharad, the dead, alone in a ruined field, laughing, laughing, laughing . . .

  ‘It’s as hot as hell,’ said Lydia. ‘I wish I hadn’t come. I want to go home.’

  ‘Don’t be tiresome,’ said Betty. ‘We’ve hardly seen anything yet.’

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of dogs and sheep and pigs and things,’ said Lydia, ‘and a lot of cakes and carrots and scarlet runner-beans, and millions of people, and I want to go home.’

  ‘It was you who wanted to come,’ said Betty, irritated. ‘You said you wouldn’t miss it for anything.’

  ‘I haven’t missed it. I’ve seen it, and now I’m getting hot and cross.’ Lydia glowered at the lively scene.

  ‘I want to see the traction engines in a minute,’ said Betty, looking round; but Lydia knew that she really wanted to see Beuno, since it wasn’t long since she herself had been in love and she recognised the signs.

  ‘I don’t think Elizabeth can be here,’ she said, wishing to indicate in a roundabout way that she didn’t think Beuno was here either. ‘We’d have come across her by now.’

  ‘Hywel’s here,’ said Betty. ‘He’s over there at the sheepdog trials, and I saw Wyn and April in the flower-arrangement tent.’

  ‘Well, keep out of their way,’ said Lydia. ‘I don’t think I could face Dr Wyn’s nudges and winks at the moment.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean anything by it,’ said Betty. ‘He’s probably shy. He’s frightened of you. You can be very intimidating.’

  Lydia ignored this, although she found it quite flattering. ‘Whenever I stand in the middle of a big field,’ she said, ‘I expect some harpy to come flying at me with a hockey stick. It makes me nervous. Everything that reminds me of school makes me nervous.’

  ‘You’re quite safe here,’ Betty reassured her.

  ‘I don’t like the look of that bull,’ said Lydia, ‘or that simply colossal pig. If a pig gets its teeth in you it never lets go.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ said Betty.’ If it was true there’d be people all over the world with pigs with their teeth sunk in them.’ She stood still and looked across at the beer tent, shading her eyes. ‘When you’re silly you make everyone else silly,’ she told Lydia rebukingly. ‘You make me feel all limp and incompetent.’r />
  Lydia felt a bit mean. Perhaps Betty was enjoying the occasion. Perhaps she would enjoy it more if Lydia stopped whimpering. ‘Let’s go and have a beer,’ she offered, ‘or a hot-dog or some candy-floss.’

  ‘Beer, I think,’ said Betty, making for the tent.

  ‘There you are,’ said Dr Wyn with strenuous good will.

  ‘So we are,’ said Lydia, smiling radiantly.

  ‘Enjoying yourselves?’ asked the doctor. ‘I had a splendid time in London,’ he added, with an air of triumph.

  He was like a master of ceremonies, thought Lydia. Or a cheer leader. Incapable of leaving people to get along on their own breathing their own air, thinking their own thoughts.

  ‘What are you drinking?’ he asked, going on to apologise that he would have to leave them shortly since it would be time for his surgery.

  Betty said sincerely that that was a shame, in order to prevent Lydia from saying it insincerely, as she was clearly about to do. ‘Are you having a good time?’ she asked April. ‘Did your flower arrangement win?’

  Disconcertingly, April muttered something incom -prehensible and moved a few steps away from them.

  ‘That’s not shy,’ said Lydia; ‘that’s just rude. What have they being saying about us?’

  ‘I can’t think,’ said Betty, looking suspiciously at Lydia, as though wondering what she had been up to while her own attention had been elsewhere.

  ‘I haven’t done a thing,’ protested Lydia, reading this look correctly. ‘The girl’s mad.’

  Betty stepped aside and addressed April purposefully. ‘Are your parents here, dear?’ she asked in tones that required an answer.

  April said ‘Yes’ unwillingly, but no more.

  Lydia was clad in an outfit which like many very beautiful things stopped just short of being ridiculous, hovering on the brink of parody. She had a lot of curly hair and she had tied a bow in it. Her white silk jacket and trousers were of a masculine cut and she looked androgynous and faintly degenerate – an irresistible combination to the sexually confused.