Unexplained Laughter (2 page)

‘Oh don’t,’ cried Betty. ‘They burned down a cottage just the other day. Not far from here.’

‘They wouldn’t get much of a blaze going in this,’ said Lydia, gesturing at the rain which was falling in an undisciplined, abandoned way as though someone had forgotten to turn it off.

‘I don’t know why, if they don’t want people to come here,’ said Betty fretfully, ‘they don’t just put up notices all along the border describing the weather conditions.’

‘But it is precisely those weather conditions,’ said Lydia carefully, ‘which make the countryside so unusually beautiful. The depth and particularity of the green are the result of the excessive rainfall.’

She had become aware of a peculiar element in her conversations with Betty. She always paused for rather too long before answering a question or responding to a remark for she feared that if she answered hastily she would say something unseemly.

‘Well, there’s no point in it being so beautiful if you can’t ever go out in it because it’s raining,’ said Betty, revealing a childish streak in her character which Lydia found rather less appealing than her habitual bossiness. Now she paused so long before answering that she forgot what she was going to say.

Hywel’s brother Beuno is coming home. He is my brother too. It is his Christian duty to love me
.

Listen
.

I am laughing in the darkness
.

The sun shone the next day, and Emyr arrived to connect the water pipes. Betty made him a cup of tea and sat among the cut lengths of gleaming copper and strong-toothed tools conducting a little chat, which afforded Lydia a moment’s amusement since Betty was adjusting her conversation to suit a person of low intelligence and the people of the valley were, on the whole, clever, devious and unusually literate. As Betty talked about the rain of the previous days the builder spoke briefly of water tables; as she deplored the unemployment in the Principality he gave a succinct resume of the economic situation; as, somewhat at a loss, she praised the sun for now shining, Emyr described in a few words how it would eventually burn itself out. The scene was rather like a bull-fight, with Betty, small-eyed, blundering hither and yon dazzled by the whisk of scarlet, the glancing slippers of the matador.

‘What do you want for lunch?’ enquired Lydia when Emyr, having demonstrated that the taps now functioned, had left.

‘I thought I’d make us my special salad,’ said Betty. ‘If you’ll wash the lettuce I’ll make my special dressing and we could pick some wild sorrel and chop it in at the last minute.’

‘Do you know, I’m not hungry,’ said Lydia, con -sideringly. There was something spinsterish in Betty’s plans for her salad, something intimate in her expectation that Lydia would collude with her, and something repellent in the prospect of two single women fussing over food in the kitchen. Lydia was damned if she’d play salads with Betty. She felt she might never eat again until Betty had gone. She had real women friends: pretty, witty women more likely to speculate on a swift method of fermenting potato peel than slaver over wild sorrel. Why were none of them here? Because she hadn’t asked them, that’s why. She had chosen for herself the human equivalent of sackcloth and ashes, and she denounced herself for a masochist. Do I, she asked herself, imagine that because I have lost a man I am in the same category as spotty Betty? Is it my Unconscious (of the existence of which I have informed doubts) that has dropped me in this plight? Because, if so, I had better watch out. ‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ she said.

‘Perhaps it’ll give you an appetite,’ said Betty.

As she walked, Lydia wondered whether perhaps Betty was lesbianly inclined and that this was why she found her presence so distasteful. After half a mile she had rejected this hypothesis and decided that it was merely because she was unattractive, the sort of person who, fifty years ago, would have worn rubber galoshes. Lydia did not castigate herself for so disliking a fellow-being, believing that it was sufficient merely to refrain from overt unkindness.

The lane had given way to a farmyard. Lydia skirted it and took to a mountain path which meandered non -chalantly between rowan and hazel trees before stopping to present the traveller with a view of the valley’s close. The hill that faced her was bearded like a prophet with a wild white waterfall. The boulders which God had flung about at the time of the creation had, to Lydia’s eyes, a patriarchal air, and the pebbles which littered the stream seemed like little children confidently at rest in this fatherly presence. Am I going mad, Lydia asked herself, in her new habit of introspection bred by grief? What is this anthropomorphism, and why do I see this landscape as male? Anyone else would be going on about softly wooded fissures and sweetly mounded hills. I must be careful. She reminded herself that it was not the countryside which had been unfaithful to her and there was no need for her to fall out of love with it.

Lydia sat down on the turf which, in its dry springiness, promptly reminded her of pubic hair. Oh hell, she said to herself and glared morosely at the scene before her, wondering why it was that while, in grief, she could still enjoy a good book or, say, a well-grilled sole, she could take no pleasure in a beautiful landscape. It’s the moon-in-June syndrome, she told herself. Lovers clasped, misty-eyed, against a backdrop of hills and trees and water. Soppy cow. She wished that Finn might contract painful boils, and rose to her feet.

A collie, black and white, and twitching strangely, approached her.

‘Hi, dog,’ said Lydia cautiously, sitting down again. Her imagination, which often inconvenienced her in this way, began to suggest that, naturally, this remote valley would be the haunt of rabid, starving packs of feral dogs.

But the dog was friendly and Lydia was relieved, since there are two sorts of sheepdog: this sort, and the other sort which bites. There is also a third sort which jumps under motor cars to embarrass their drivers in the presence of the farmer.

Here came the farmer now.

‘Hi,’ said Lydia, suppressing an urge to apostrophise him by his calling. ‘Fine day.’

As rapists never go around with dogs, Lydia’s imagination spared her one of its flights. Instead, another regrettable aspect of her personality impelled her to smile specially at this man. She had lost her love, and in her cottage was a woman preparing a possibly sapphic salad; so Lydia gave him the works.

His casual, countryman’s demeanour altered perceptibly and he stood still, looking at her.

That’s torn it, thought Lydia, swallowing the smile, extinguishing the sexuality which she knew she had caused to flicker about her like burning brandy round the Christmas pudding, and adopting instead a workmanlike, country-walking air. She searched for a phrase. Good weather for the crops. Have your sheep been suffering much from the staggers? Have you contributed a great deal this year to the butter mountain? Nothing seemed suitable, and Lydia determined to brush up her knowledge of rural matters and husbandry.

‘You at Ty Fach?’he asked.

‘Yeah,’ agreed Lydia.

‘I go by there most days,’ said the farmer, proving himself to be the sort of chap who does not mess about but gets straight to the point.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Lydia gloomily and fell to plucking at the turf between her feet.

‘Be seeing you,’ said the farmer, giving her a glance of extreme complicity and summoning his dog.

‘Not,’ said Lydia under her breath and falling back on the cliché, ‘if I see you first.’ Then she fell back on the turf and stared at the sky until she deemed it time to go home.

Listen. Elizabeth is lonely. She sighs, and sometimes she hums a little, and then she is silent because she is standing by the window looking out on the yard and turning the rings on her finger round and round. Sometimes the women say she is a saint, but that is only because she has kept me here, and they do not like her. Hywel is rich and they do not like him but he is one of them
.

Hywel is crossing the yard. In a moment he will lift the latch and kick the bottom of the door. It used to stick and Emyr has mended it, but Hywel still kicks it
.

Elizabeth says in her cheerful voice that will not be cheerful by nightfall, ‘I saw the woman from Ty Fach today. She was crossing the yard up to the mountain. She looks quite nice. I might ask her to tea.’

Hywel says, ‘Tea.’

And Elizabeth says, ‘I might ask her to dinner.’

And Hywel is silent. If he spoke he would say ‘Dinner’
.

I was up on the hill when the woman came. I saw Hywel speak to her, and after a while, after he had gone, I heard her laugh. She lay on her back and laughed at the sky
.

The wind is coming up the valley – quite slowly, like an army that will win
.

‘Hell,’ said Lydia. ‘What was that?’

‘It’s the wind,’ said Betty.

Lydia, who knew what it was, exasperatedly poked the fire. ‘I hope it doesn’t bring the new slates off the roof.’ She was not desperately concerned, since she didn’t think it would, but it was something to say. She picked up a book and stared at the firelight, hoping that Finn might get bitten by something slightly venomous.

The wind parted imperturbably around the cottage and passed on up the valley. Betty, perhaps carried away by the association of ideas, was talking about flatulence.

‘It’s caused by a sudden change to a vegetarian diet. The colon is unused to the fibre and it takes some time to adjust.’

‘Poor it,’ said Lydia. ‘I like meat.’

‘How you can,’ said Betty. ‘Just think of those lambs out there. How can you bear to eat them?’

‘I don’t like lambs,’ said Lydia. ‘I find them quite unattractive. I like lamb chops.’

‘Barbaric,’ said Betty.

‘Anyway,’ said Lydia ‘what about that steak-and-kidney pud you had on the way here?’

‘There’s no meat in pub steak-and-kidney,’ said Betty. ‘It’s all simulated out of woven soya protein.’

‘It sounds disgusting,’ said Lydia, ‘and rather dangerous.’

‘Eventually I shall become a vegan,’ said Betty. ‘No meat or fish or eggs or any milk products at all.’

‘Why?’ asked Lydia.

‘Because it’s healthier,’ said Betty, ‘and it isn’t cruel.’

‘It sounds to me intensely cruel. If you forced someone to live on nuts and lentils they’d go roaring off to the European Court of Human Rights or something.’ Lydia found it remarkable that the people who fussed most about their health with particular reference to diet and exercise seemed rather ill, just as those who enthused most warmly about sexual freedom were rather plain. ‘I hate people who go to India,’ she said.

‘I sometimes think you hate everyone,’ said Betty, who would have liked to go round India on a bicycle in an orange robe looking for an Enlightened One.

‘Not everyone,’ said Lydia after a moment’s consideration as she worked out the least impolite way of putting what she wished to say. ‘Only D.H. Lawrence and Americans and people who call Jane Austen “dear Jane”.’ She had once heard Betty calling Jane Austen ‘dear Jane’. ‘I love everyone else except Finn.’

‘I can’t think what you see in Finn anyway,’ said Betty. ‘He’s got a terrible reputation.’

‘I don’t see anything in Finn,’ said Lydia, who had found Finn’s terrible reputation one of his greatest attractions. ‘I hate him.’

‘I suppose he’d be here now if you hadn’t quarrelled,’ said Betty with the glancing brutality of those with some intuition but not much intelligence.

‘We didn’t quarrel,’ said Lydia. ‘He went off with a lexicographer with cross-eyes and knock-knees and webbed feet – a duck.’

‘She had pretty hair,’ said Betty, ‘and you did quarrel. You were
heard
. Screaming all over Fleet Street.’

Lydia was quite stunned by this. She stared at Betty, her eyes wide, her mouth open: a cartoon of astonishment. ‘Who told you that?’ she asked, her voice cracked and full of breath she’d been too shocked to exhale.

Betty shuffled a bit. ‘Everyone knows,’ she said, ‘everyone heard you.’

‘But I wasn’t screaming at Finn,’ said Lydia. ‘I was screaming at that critic who admires
The White Hotel
. I admit I don’t remember much about it, but I do know Finn wasn’t there.’ True, it was because of Finn that she had got so drunk. She had decided, quietly confident that it was safe to do so, not to accompany him on a tour of some Greek islands, and he had taken instead her of the cross-eyes etc. But the parting had been dignified. She had left Finn, wept commendably few of the scalding tears of blighted love, put a curse on him and her of the knock-knees etc., donned a dashing dress and gone out to dinner. But she
had
got very drunk. She had eaten nothing and towards the end of the evening had smitten the critic across the chest with the length of her arm. She could still feel, from fingertip to elbow, the textures of cotton shirt, silk tie and tweed jacket. Her behaviour had not been normal or good, but it was not Finn she had railed at on the public highway.

‘Do you really imagine I’d bellow at Finn in the street?’ she enquired. ‘I should be mortified if I thought I’d missed a chance to do him a mischief, but it’d be a cold day in hell before I’d make a spectacle of myself in the market place.’

‘But you
did,
’ reasoned Betty.

‘But it wasn’t
Finn,’
said Lydia, who could see that Betty, with the facts before her, still preferred her own earlier version and intended to believe it.

This is how history is made, thought Lydia despairingly. Now I’ll never dare be famous. I’ll never even dare to be successful, because when I’m dead some clod with a thesis to write will put me down as a wild-eyed harridan who jumped on her lover in the street and pulled all his hair out because he’d gone off with a person with webbed feet. There is nothing I can do. If I go on denying it they’ll all wag their fingers and say ‘Aha’ and tell me I protest too much. I shall have to remain here in obscurity, and rot.

‘Why did you get so cross with the critic?’ asked Betty with a knowing and unbelieving smile.

‘Because the man was a structuralist and an ass,’ explained Lydia, ‘and you can take that knowing and unbelieving smile off your face.’