Unexplained Laughter (13 page)

‘Good heavens,’ said Lydia. ‘Rock drawings. How very peculiar.’

‘Where?’ asked Betty, her tone sceptical.

‘Here,’ said Lydia.

‘Good heavens,’ said Betty.

They stared at the flat blade of rock jutting out of the turf-clad flank of the hill.

‘Perhaps they’re druidical,’ said Betty hopefully.

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Lydia. ‘The men are wearing jackets and trousers and the women have got short skirts. I think the druids were clad mainly in woad.’

‘But who would come out here to scribble on rock?’ asked Betty unanswerably.

Lydia didn’t answer. She was peering closely at the drawings. ‘One of them’s got a stethoscope,’ she said. ‘Several of them have got a stethoscope. I think it’s all the same man, only the females are all different.
What
an odd thing. Oops.’

‘What?’said Betty.

‘Don’t look,’ said Lydia. ‘It’s rude.’

‘Dear, oh, dear,’ said Betty, who naturally had looked. ‘It
is
a bit.’

‘They’re rather good drawings,’ said Lydia. ‘Simple but effective.’

‘I don’t like that one,’ said Betty distastefully.

‘It isn’t actually prurient,’ said Lydia, gazing at it. ‘More sort of clinical. Dispassionate observation.’

‘Some things are better not observed,’ said Betty.

‘There’s a theory that anyone who has witnessed the act depicted here is incurable,’ said Lydia.

‘Incurable from what?’ enquired Betty.

‘From the neurosis induced by witnessing the act depicted here,’ explained Lydia. ‘Though put like that it all sounds a bit circular. And anyway, when you think of what goes on on telly now, if it was true we’d all be raving.’

‘I very seldom watch telly,’ said Betty.

‘Nor do I, pet,’ said Lydia indulgently. ‘Only some times when I’m tired it sort of forces itself on my attention.’ She sat down and leaned back against the rock looking out over the sweep of moorland. ‘If we had a dog we could let it off the leash now and it would go and roll in the heather.’

‘No, we couldn’t,’ said Betty. ‘It might chase sheep.’

‘I would have trained it not to do so,’ said Lydia. ‘I should be very firm with it.’

Betty began to open her mouth to argue that it wasn’t well trained at all until she remembered that it didn’t exist, and she had vowed not to get drawn into Lydia’s idiotic fantasies.

Lydia grinned to herself. She had grown fond of Betty and found her thought-processes amusing.

‘You’ve sat on a bilberry,’ said Betty with satisfaction. ‘Your trousers are stained.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Lydia. ‘It’s too pretty a day to mind about such things.’

‘You could dye them the same colour,’ said Betty. ‘You can make dyes from heather.’

Lydia said life was too short to mess about making dyes from heather. It was easier to buy a new pair of pants.

‘I’d quite like to try making my own dye,’ said Betty. ‘It would be very rewarding.’

‘Speaking of self-sufficiency,’ said Lydia, ‘I still haven’t eaten that perishing pheasant. I shall have it as soon as we go back.’

‘It’s horribly high,’ warned Betty. ‘I smelled it when I opened the cupboard this morning.’

‘Then I’ll go at once and cook it,’ said Lydia who was adamantly determined not to be thwarted of her bird. She broke into a run as they returned to the cottage.

It was high. There was no denying it. Lydia even went so far as to bathe it in vinegar at Betty’s behest.

‘Faugh,’ said Betty, waving her fingers in front of her nose like an eighteenth-century character in a costume drama. ‘It stinks.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Lydia, resolutely sticking a lump of butter in it.

It smelled all right when she got it out of the oven. She left it to settle on top of the stove while she warmed up some bread sauce and crisps. Betty discouraged a fly from sitting on it and watched it as she prepared a salad for herself.

Lydia wasn’t actually desperately hungry but she managed to eat most of the pheasant, making vulgar noises of gastonomic appreciation.

‘You are
disgusting
,’ reproved Betty, toying daintily with a dandelion leaf.

No one called that evening, and they went to bed early.

Lydia woke suddenly in the tangible blackness that was moonless country night. There were unusual sounds in the house. She reached down to the floor where her candle stood, and when she’d groped for the matches, which proved, as always, astonishingly difficult to locate, she lit it.

Betty was being sick. Or, if it wasn’t Betty,
someone
certainly was. Lydia felt her way to the door of the tiny bathroom. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked in the lowered tone that one uses in the darkness. Stupid question.

‘Oh, I’m so sick,’ came a wail after a moment from the other side of the door.

‘Oh, poor you,’ said Lydia inadequately, suddenly ripped with a desire, which she recognised as utterly reprehensible, to sit on the floor and giggle insanely. It was so deeply, wholly unfair. And so characteristic of life.

‘It can’t’ve been anything I ate,’ said poor Betty later, as she sat shivering by the kitchen table while Lydia kindly boiled some water for her. ‘It must be a virus I picked up somewhere.’

‘You were lucky to make it to the lav,’ observed Lydia, meaning that she was very grateful that Betty had made it to the lav, since one of the rules is that the afflicted person does not mop up her own vomit and Lydia was absolutely no good at doing this. Sick made her sick. Even now she stood further from Betty than was entirely necessary. Still, seeing the poor girl shivering so, Lydia did go and fetch her dressing-gown.

‘Oh, you are kind, Lydia,’ said Betty, making Lydia feel like a skunk. ‘I’m a bit better now. I think I’ll go back to bed.’

‘Take a bucket with you,’ advised Lydia, not solicitously, just to be on the safe side.

Betty thanked her for the bucket and smiled at her, and Lydia, who, if Betty went on like this, might turn out to be quite human, decided that she would take her her breakfast in bed in the morning: thin crispy toast with a scraping of butter and golden clear jasmine tea, and an egg-cupful of harebells to remind her of the sky.

‘You’re an angel,’ said Betty next morning, as Lydia, with meticulous deliberation, carried out her vow.

It was
all
unfair, reflected Lydia. Betty doing this sort of thing was simply taken for granted, whereas when a nasty, selfish, attractive person like Lydia did it people grew breathless with thanks. ‘You stay in bed,’ she said. ‘I’ll go down to the village and see if they’ve got any newspapers and magazines.’

At this Betty’s eyes widened with wondering gratitude and Lydia felt unworthy. She also felt the beginnings of wrath. Days ago she had decided to be good – she
was
being quite good – but she was only pretending to be good so far and all this appreciation was as yet undeserved. She wondered how long she would have to keep it up before she could stop convicting herself of hypocrisy.

‘Shall I get the doctor to come and see you?’ she asked, and was surprised when Betty said she thought it might be a good idea.

‘I feel so giddy now,’ Betty explained apologetically. ‘My head keeps going round.’

Dr Wyn came at lunchtime while Lydia was eating pheasant leg and wondering whether the goodness inherent in a broth made from pheasant carcase was sufficient to justify sneaking it, disguised as
soupe bonne femme
, on to the supper tray of an ailing vegetarian, and what her real motives were.

‘She was very sick,’ Lydia told him coldly. ‘She’s upstairs in bed feeling giddy.’

He banged his head on the beam at the top of the stairs.

Lydia heard the concussion. ‘Physician heal thyself,’ she remarked
sotto voce
.

When he came down he was wearing a professional air and said the symptoms were those of food poisoning.

For some reason, although she had not been doing the cooking, this made Lydia feel like Lucretia Borgia. ‘How could it be?’ she asked. ‘She only eats salads and things. And mushrooms. Maybe she got a funny mushroom.’

‘Just give her liquids for a time,’ he said and dropped his professional air.

Lydia eyed him discouragingly. He had sighed, rubbed his hands together and sat down on a kitchen chair. Now he reached out and picked up a pheasant wing which he proceeded to eat.

Lydia watched incredulously. ‘I’m surprised you’re not frightened to eat that,’ she said, ‘in this pestilent household.’

‘Oh, I trust you,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t poison me.’

Oh, I might, thought Lydia, but she said: ‘I didn’t poison Betty either,’ in a childishly defensive way which put her in a worse mood.

‘Elizabeth and Beuno were here last night as well,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’d better go and have a look at them. They could be writhing round in agony.’

‘They’d’ve let me know,’ he said, picking up another splinter of pheasant.

Exasperatedly, Lydia filled the kettle. This man was the opposite of Beuno, who followed her thoughts with ease, needed no explanations and leapt to no wrong conclusions. To converse with the doctor she would have to speak with unnatural care and lucidity, and she really couldn’t be bothered.

He tipped his chair back and fixed his gaze full upon her, very much at home. ‘I’d love a cup of tea, thanks,’ he said. ‘Or possibly something a bit stronger.’

‘I haven’t got anything stronger,’ said Lydia. ‘I’ve got to go down to the off-licence later.’

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘You’re intoxicating enough.’

Lydia ignored this. ‘I’d better go and see how Betty is,’ she said.

‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘Talk to me.’

He too sounded childish, Lydia realised, reflecting that childishness in an adult was painfully unattractive. ‘I have a great deal to do,’ she said in a dismissively grown-up voice.

For a moment it seemed that he would protest, but then he got up.

‘Goodbye,’ said Lydia going rapidly upstairs.

She looked out of the little window above the door and saw him stop on the path. Elizabeth appeared out of the overhanging leaves and confronted him. That was the way it was, thought Lydia – she
confronted
him. I was right, she said to herself. Clever old me.

‘Lydia,’ called Betty, ‘is that you?’

‘It is I,’ said Lydia, opening the bedroom door. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘A bit weak,’ said Betty, ‘but better. I just had a funny thought. You know those rock drawings. Well, when Wyn had his stethoscope in his ears I wondered if they were meant to be him. Perhaps I’m delirious. It could’ve been any doctor, and it might not’ve been a stethoscope. It might have been a necklace.’

‘People don’t stick necklaces in their ears,’ said Lydia thoughtfully. ‘I think you’re right. How perceptive we’re all getting.’

‘No, I must be wrong,’ said Betty. ‘It’s the sort of silly idea one gets when one’s ill.’

‘It’s the sort of silly idea I get all the time,’ observed Lydia, ‘only this time it was you who got it.’

‘But who would’ve made the drawings?’ asked Betty.

‘Some discarded mistress?’ surmised Lydia. ‘Some cuckolded person?’

Betty persisted, ‘No, but why would they go all that way to draw on a rock?’

Lydia considered, ‘You mean, why not squirt rude messages on the petrol station?’

‘Not quite that,’ said Betty. ‘It just seems odd to do it where no one is likely to see it. It doesn’t seem like revenge.’

No, thought Lydia, it didn’t. The drawings had had that oddly unimpassioned quality. None of the fetid rage of the sexually wronged.

‘What a mysterious valley this is,’ she said. ‘Unexplained laughter and filthy drawings in secret places. Perhaps Stan is walking abroad.’

‘Who?’ asked Betty.

‘Oh, no one,’ said Lydia. ‘Perhaps the ancient fairies are looking after things round here.’

The woman from Ty Fach has found the pictures that I made on the rock, and the little woman with her has looked at them. I lay in the bracken on the side of the hill and watched them. I did not think that anyone would ever see the pictures except the sheep and the swooping ravens. I thought that I would scratch out the pictures, but now that the woman has seen them they are not mine any more. They have moved from the rock into her eyes and into her head and so they are hers. There is little that is mine. No, no, no. The hills are mine, and the living streams and the wind that breathes in the valley and the tiny white flowers that only I know because only I lie so close to the earth that I can see them move. I lie so close to the earth that I am part of it and so it is mine. And once I remember – I very faintly remember – that I flew as the buzzards and the ravens fly and all the great sky was mine. I have been dead for a long time and by day I circle the huge air above the hills and by night I sleep in the quiet rock, as quiet as the rock, and the little worms mean consolation as they eat me
.

Lydia was tired of being good. She felt it didn’t altogether suit her. It made her feel a little dowdy, as though she had taken up residence in the suburbs of morality. Had she had it in her to be extraordinarily good she would have felt cosmopolitan, since, she considered, there was a definite elegance, a
chic
, in sanctity. Being a mere apprentice was boring and carried no
cachet,
and Lydia was dauntedly aware that she had a long way to go before she achieved the skills and ease of perfection. It was much, much easier to be mischievous, to be slightly bad; and while, of course, being very good was an infinity, an eternity, away from being very bad, being a bit bad was very similar to being a bit good and unfortunately offered more opportunities for fun.

‘Let’s have a picnic,’ she said, telling herself that next week she would make a real effort to work again at the practice of virtue.

Betty was enthusiastic. ‘A real one,’ she cried. ‘An Edwardian one with tablecloths and lobster patties and champagne.’

‘I was thinking more in terms of sardine sandwiches and a flask of tea,’ said Lydia. ‘The village shop is short on lobster and I don’t see why I should pour Dom Perignon down people’s gullets.’ Nevertheless she spoke mildly. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘the Molesworths would turn up their noses at anything too fancy. They like sort of hotel tea.’