Unexplained Laughter Read online

  Dr Wyn was highly excited by it and left April’s side to whisper an aggressive witticism in Lydia’s ear.

  ‘What?’ said Lydia loudly. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’

  He looked at her with detestation, and so did April.

  ‘What was all that about?’ asked Betty.

  ‘He was telling me something indelicate about a horse,’ said Lydia. ‘And all is clear to me. He has told April that I am insanely in love with him, and now they both hate me: he, because I have made it plain this is not the case, and she for much the same reason, only compounded by the fact that since he has raised the subject, and in view of his demeanour towards me . . . Oh God, I’m getting lost.’ Lydia grasped at the air. ‘I mean it’s the other way round and he is insanely in love with me, and April is mad with him because he is, and she is madder with me because I’m not, since that is so insulting to them both.’

  ‘You always think people are in love with you,’ said Betty. ‘It’s a sign of advancing age or lunacy.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Lydia, ‘do I?’

  ‘You have a tendency that way,’ said Betty. ‘You are attractive, but people do fall in love with other people, you know.’

  ‘Of course I know,’ said Lydia, and at that moment Hywel came among them. He didn’t say so, but it was evident that he had been successful in the sheepdog trials, because he was unusually cheerful and forthcoming and he seemed quite jubilant to meet them there.

  Lydia greeted him without smiling, which is a chilling expedient, usually employed only after a row has taken place.

  He didn’t notice. He was drunk, and was finding her interesting again.

  ‘Where’s Elizabeth?’ asked Betty.

  ‘Elizabeth?’ said Hywel. ‘Elizabeth. Where’s Elizabeth?’ He beamed at her, revealing himself to be more drunk than Lydia had first supposed.

  ‘That was enlightening,’ said Betty crossly as he turned to speak to another farmer. ‘You mustn’t flirt with him. He’s drunk. I wonder where Elizabeth is.’

  Lydia was enraged at the injustice of this and said she was definitely going home now, and what’s more her feet were hurting.

  Once a person’s feet are hurting there is little more to be said, so Betty reluctantly accompanied her to the car.

  ‘Perhaps they’ll call in on the way home,’ she said wistfully.

  Listen, listen, listen. This is what happened. This is what they do. They hurt each other. He said to her, Dr Wyn said to Elizabeth, that he would take her to the Fair. He said Hywel could take the dogs in the van but he would take her in her pretty frock in his clean car. So she put on her pretty frock and the scent that smells of yesterday and Hywel took the dogs in the van and she waited. She sat in the shade of the house wall and she waited, and she knew that I had gone to hide, but she didn’t know where. I was crouched in the hay in the stable that the horses have gone from and she didn’t know I was watching her. I was thinking ‘Poor Elizabeth’, because she was happy. She heard the car come up the lane and stepped into the sunlight and her face shone. If I could speak I would have said, ‘Elizabeth, Elizabeth, go back into the shadows, get out of the light, hide your shining face in the shadows.’

  I knew what he would do. I knew he would bring the girl. The girl who is almost as silent as me and looks at me with such horror. I have watched him before, watched him watching Elizabeth as he puts his arm around a girl. He watches her face and he smiles the way he smiled when I broke my bones. No one but me knows he is smiling because his mouth does not move. But I know. I have seen him with his girls in the fields, and when he knows I am watching he kisses them. The boys from the village kiss their girls when I am there because they do not care, but he only kisses them when he is being watched. He watches and he likes to be watched. If I could I would pull the mountain down on his head and close his smiling eyes.

  Elizabeth, poor Elizabeth ran into the sunlight and he stopped the car and he got out and Elizabeth ran towards the car until she saw the girl. I closed my eyes. I do not like to see things being killed.

  She said, ‘Angharad is out on the hills alone, so I cannot come to the Fair’, and she said, ‘I am sorry you have had a wasted journey’, and she said, ‘Have a nice time at the Fair.’

  He said, ‘That is a pity,’ with his smiling, still mouth, and he got back in the car and drove away, and Elizabeth went back in the house, and all the day she cried, and I went away to the hills.

  Elizabeth does not love me, but she does not always hate me, and when she brushes my hair perhaps she means to be kind.

  They will go to the concert, Beuno and Elizabeth and Hywel all together, and they will sing; but not Elizabeth, who only hums in the house and who will be watching all the time to see if he is there.

  ‘It’s a miracle to me how Hywel got home in that condition,’ said Lydia the next day. ‘I have seldom seen a person so paralytic.’

  ‘I hope Elizabeth doesn’t think we got him like that,’ worried Betty. ‘I know we shouldn’t have let him go, but I didn’t feel we know him well enough to tell him he was too drunk to drive.’

  ‘There was a moment when I thought he wasn’t going to go ever,’ said Lydia. ‘I drank all the drink myself so that he couldn’t have it, and now I don’t feel terribly well.’

  ‘You could’ve just hidden it,’ said Betty.

  ‘I was too tired,’ explained Lydia. ‘One needs to be very alert to go creeping round with a couple of bottles up one’s sleeve, trying to hide them in the coal-scuttle or under the sink.’ She yawned. ‘I think I’ll go and sit in the garden and pull the feathers off the pheasant.’

  ‘What if the gamekeeper sees you?’ asked Betty querulously. ‘He might arrest you for poaching.’

  ‘I’ll say I bought it,’ said Lydia.

  ‘You can’t say you bought it,’ said Betty, speaking now with quiet satisfaction. ‘They’re out of season.’

  ‘Then I’ll say I bought it months ago,’ said Lydia. ‘I’ll say I like them really high.’

  There was a hawk pinned to the silken air above the churchyard. Lydia watched it, thinking that they had much in common except that she had her prey in her grasp and was already preparing it for consumption. She wondered if wild creatures were capable of envy, and decided that they were not. Envy was a civilised emotion, attendant upon some degree of security and the possession of things strictly unnecessary to survival. Doubtless the hawk would take her pheasant should she permit it, but its motives would be uncomplicated. Thinking about deadly sin led her to think again of Satan. If you took an ‘a’ away from his name he would be called ‘Stan’. Lydia thought the Prince of Darkness would lose much of his power if everyone habitually called him Stan. She glanced round superstitiously, reflecting that if anyone called her Stan she would determine to get her own back on him.

  ‘Beuno,’ she said, as he approached up the path, ‘is it altogether wise to be cheeky to the devil?’

  ‘Oh, entirely,’ said Beuno without hesitation. ‘No other course is possible. If he is afforded the slightest respect it makes him worse, larger.’

  ‘I know you to be right,’ said Lydia in her reflective pedantic way, ‘but I have not your courage. I might cock a snook at him behind his back but I wouldn’t dash into his path making the victory sign.’

  ‘Nor would I,’ said Beuno. ‘I wouldn’t seek him out, but if by mischance he should loom up before me I should waggle my fingers at him.’

  ‘Do you think he knows we’re talking about him?’ asked Lydia, not nervously, but truly more out of curiosity.

  ‘I don’t think he’s omnipresent,’ said Beuno, ‘and he isn’t omniscient. He’s not the opposite of God, which would mean he’d be as powerful. He has to keep going all the time – to and fro about the world and walking up and down in it. No, I don’t think he’s listening. His presence is unmistakable . . .’

  ‘The whiff of sulphur?’ interrupted Lydia.

  ‘That sort of thing,’ said Beuno. ‘Very occasionally
I have strongly sensed his presence. His undoubted presence. But he doesn’t need to attend to much personally. His hobgoblins can cause a lot of disruption, and simple ordinary people are remarkably good at being bad.’

  ‘Yes, aren’t they,’ said Lydia humbly, thinking of herself. ‘Are you sure that God is omnipresent?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Beuno. ‘If God is, he’s everywhere, even in the most dreadful situations, rubbing shoulders with Satan.’

  ‘Stan,’ said Lydia, abstractedly, pulling away at the feathers of the pheasant and strewing them about her.

  ‘Stan?’ queried Beuno.

  ‘It’s what I call the devil now,’ explained Lydia recalling herself to the conversation. ‘I keep wondering what he’d do if I wandered up to the edge of the pit and leaned over and yelled, “Oi, you down there. Stan!” ’

  ‘I expect he’d gnash his teeth in impotent rage,’ said Beuno.

  ‘I would myself,’ agreed Lydia.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Betty trotting up rather quickly and eyeing them suspiciously. She had only just seen that Beuno had come and was sitting in the garden amongst the wild Welsh poppies and the camomile daisies and the pheasant feathers. The sight had brought her as swiftly out of the house as a child who sees the ice-cream van.

  ‘I was wondering how to cook this pheasant,’ said Lydia mendaciously. ‘I was going on about the relative merits of casseroling and roasting. I even wondered whether to make him into soup or pâté.’ She didn’t know if Betty knew how long Beuno had been there, so endeavoured to give the impression that she could babble away on the topic of cooking game for hours at a time. Betty would have been upset to know that they had been talking of the devil. Then Lydia, the liar, careless kindly liar, looked up and caught Beuno’s expression as he watched her; an expression of amused disapprobation. She knew instantly that he was thinking of the Father of Lies – for the Prince of Darkness has as many titles as the Prince of Wales – and she went pink.

  Betty, made preternaturally alert by love, saw Beuno looking at Lydia and smiling, but misread his expression. She saw Lydia go pink, and misunderstood. She sat there quietly on the grass and grew very sad.

  Oh hell, thought Lydia, moved to unwelcome compassion. Another of the things you can’t say is ‘Now look here, honeybunch, I know what you think we’ve been doing, but we haven’t. Honest.’ She went on tearing out feathers, glancing surreptitiously at Betty. After a while, of course, the woebegone aspect of the crossed-in-love becomes very irritating, especially if one is being unjustly blamed for it, so Lydia ripped out the last of the fluff that formed, as it were, the bird’s underclothes, rose to her feet gripping her pheasant by its knees, and then bent over and kissed Beuno. The bells of hell went ting-a-ling-a-ling.

  ‘The gamekeeper will see those feathers,’ said Betty later. ‘You should’ve cleared them away.’

  ‘He’ll only think a weasel got it,’ said Lydia. Immediately she thought guiltily that if Betty had not been such a nice girl she would now remark acidly that a weasel had got it. ‘You ought to make Beuno take you to the concert,’ she said, thinking instantly that she was being cruelly tactful.

  ‘Beuno doesn’t want me,’ said Betty without rancour. She was washing dishes and seemed quite calm.

  Calm to the point of lifelessness, thought Lydia, veering giddily between pity and wrath. ‘He wouldn’t mind going with you to the concert,’ she said, thinking that she could have phrased that better if she’d had more notice.

  ‘Why don’t you go with him?’ asked Betty, carefully rinsing one of Lydia’s lustre jugs.

  ‘Because I hate good music,’ said Lydia. ‘You know perfectly well I do. They’ll be belting out bits of the Messiah and I should go mad.’

  ‘I might go by myself,’ said Betty. ‘I like to hear them sing.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lydia eagerly, relieved to find a topic fit for discussion. ‘I can’t stand the things they’re singing, but like the noise their voices make. If you see what I mean.’

  Betty smiled.

  It wasn’t much of a smile, but it did have a faintly superior tinge to it and Lydia began to feel better. ‘It’s in the village hall,’ she said, ‘and there’s refreshments at half time. I’ll take you there and I’m sure someone will bring you back.’ She didn’t want to say she was sure Beuno would bring her back because that would make it evident again that she knew the miserable secrets of Betty’s heart. ‘I’ll cook the pheasant while you’re out,’ she said, ‘and eat it before you get home.’

  ‘I’ll make the bread sauce if you like,’ said Betty selflessly; so Lydia let her, which was fairly unselfish of Lydia who made the best bread sauce in the world with a great deal of butter, nutmeg and black pepper.

  Betty was so low that she somehow contrived to hurt her finger quite badly with a clove that she was sticking into an onion. It went down her nail to the quick and the onion juice made it sting.

  Lydia was hopeless at first aid. She stood well back, suggesting cold water.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Betty courageously. ‘I’ll put a plaster on it and forget about it.’

  ‘I once had a plaster on my finger,’ said Lydia, ‘and I was making duck pancakes because an editor and his wife were coming to dinner, and when I’d rolled up all the pancakes I found the plaster was missing.’

  ‘Oh Lydia,’ said Betty, diverted from her wound.

  ‘I wasn’t going to unroll the damn things,’ continued Lydia, ‘so I banged them in the oven, humming insouciantly the while and served them up all bubbling hot. And then I sat and watched everyone very closely, and after a while I saw Finn chewing and chewing, and then he swallowed it.’

  ‘Lydia,’ said Betty.

  ‘It was all right,’ Lydia reassured her. ‘A nice clean cut. No pus or anything. Bit of roughage for him.’

  ‘That’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard,’ said Betty, but she was smiling.

  ‘It was a bit disgusting,’ admitted Lydia, ‘but what could I do? Tell everyone to watch out for a foreign body? No one would’ve eaten anything and my party would’ve been a flop.’

  ‘You should’ve told Finn when you saw him chewing,’ said Betty.

  ‘How could I?’ protested Lydia. ‘“I say, darling, you’ve got the bit of plaster off my finger.” It would’ve sounded most odd.

  ‘Anyway, a bit of plaster looks very like a bit of duck. He never knew the difference.’

  ‘You’re completely unscrupulous, Lydia,’ said Betty, but she had laughed for a moment.

  Lydia drove Betty to the Village Hall in the evening and drove back alone into the sudden shadow of the hill behind the cottage. Evening fell early over Lydia’s garden while the rest of the valley preened itself in the setting sun. She stood watching it while the first bat swept swiftly past her hair.

  ‘Go away,’ she said, disconcerted by the sudden alien speed, the urgency of its insect-intent flight.

  Then the laughter began.

  Lydia was not exactly terrified, but she was sitting very, very still so that if there was the slightest noise she could be quite certain that it was not she who had caused it. Lydia wished any sounds that the night had to offer to be separate and extrinsic from herself. Otherwise she would grow confused as to the limits and the confines of reality, the nature of objectivity and the state of her own mental balance. She had let the fire go out since even the soft fall of ash, the spit of a sudden irritable flame, the shifting of branches in the course of their own attrition filled her ears with restless noise and muffled what might be sounding outside: the soft tread of something moving closer, the susurration of something being unsheathed, the breath of someone hissing through his teeth.

  The laughter had stopped a while ago and, ever since, Lydia’s imagination had been giving her a hard time. Why, she asked herself, had the laughter ceased? What had stopped being so funny? Had someone or something decided that now was the time to be serious? Surely in time and eternity only death and hell wer
e really serious. She sat on the corner of the old sofa with her legs folded under her and stared at the window, willing the oil lamp not to sputter and distort the sounds that belonged to the night: the true night that lay outside in the garden and the valley and held dominion over the hills. Had she not been nervous, Lydia would have been angry, for she had realised that she was, herself, a domestic beast penned in against the night in a frightening little box of night that was all her own, vulnerable to destruction by the very bounds of its definition. The creatures of the field, unprotected as they were, had yet less to fear from the night, being part of it. Lydia, cooped up like a hen in her house, had branded herself victim, prey, alien and afraid. She told herself that the best thing she could do would be to go out of the house and climb up to where the buzzards and the ravens nested on the cliff top, but she didn’t pay herself much attention. It was dark out there.

  She was still sitting motionless as a hare when they returned from the concert.

  ‘You’ve let the fire go out,’ accused Betty.

  ‘I was utterly absorbed in my book,’ explained Lydia, wondering where she had left it. ‘If you put some firelighters in it’ll start again in no time.’

  ‘I was going to make some supper,’ said Betty.

  ‘I’ll see to the fire,’ said Beuno.

  ‘I didn’t eat my pheasant,’ said Lydia, ‘being so absorbed in my book.’ She didn’t want to explain that she had been too nervous to go in the kitchen and cook it, too lily-livered to turn her back to the window as she lit the gas, too timorous to cause even the tiny sounds of roasting game. ‘I shall have it tomorrow.’

  ‘Let me help you,’ said Elizabeth to Betty, manifesting a disinclination to sit and make conversation with Lydia.

  ‘I heard someone laughing,’ said Lydia, speaking to Beuno but not much caring who heard her. While no one must know the extent to which she had been alarmed, she had no objection to them knowing the cause.

  ‘Not again?’ said Betty from the kitchen, rattling pans.