Unexplained Laughter (3 page)

‘And do you mean you wouldn’t be glad if Finn came back?’ asked Betty, economically retaining her expression.

‘Of course I’d be glad,’ said Lydia. ‘If he doesn’t come back I shan’t get the chance to tell him to stuff it.’

Slowly Betty stopped smiling. After a while she sighed, ‘You mean you’d still bear a grudge?’

‘Of course I’d bear a grudge,’ said Lydia, amazed that anyone could imagine she might not. ‘I wouldn’t have Finn back if he walked on his head from Mycenae to here.’

Betty ran her finger round the rim of her coffee mug. She looked inexplicably downcast. ‘I didn’t know you felt like that,’ she said.

‘Well, why should you?’ asked Lydia, puzzled. ‘I didn’t tell you.’

‘No,’ said Betty. She got up and shook the cushion on her chair. ‘I’ll go to bed now. I feel a bit tired. Leave the washing-up for me to do in the morning.’

Lydia opened the door to let out the cigarette smoke and walked as far as the stream, wondering why the blazes Betty was behaving in so singular a fashion. An awful suspicion was growing in her like some bizarre fungus from a tiny spore. What if, she was saying to herself, what if –? But no, it couldn’t be. But suppose it was. Suppose Betty had come with her not to gambol on the blades of grass, not to ask her collaboration in salad-making but to keep an eye on her.

And Lydia knew it was so. Betty was here out of the kindness of her heart to minister to a wounded human being; Betty would probably rather be in the Dordogne, but she was here making sure that Lydia didn’t lay violent hands on herself in the profundity of her misery, or let herself go to seed in the spiritless fashion of an old thistle.

Lydia emitted a sudden giggle, helpless to prevent it. She wished she could stand in the night and laugh, but already she had been heard. A shrew scuttled away in the undergrowth and Betty had opened her bedroom window wider.

‘I’m just coming,’ called Lydia, thinking how amusing it would be to make a big splash and drowning noises, but even she knew that this would not be the action of a nice woman.

‘In a week,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Beuno is coming in a week’s time. I must Jill the freezer.’

Hywel is silent
.

‘I must think of some things for him to do,’ says Elizabeth
. ‘I
must plan some parties.’

Hywel is still silent. He is thinking that Beuno had lived here all his life and no one thought of things for him to do, or gave parties for him before. I know what Hywel thinks always. I can read his silence
.

‘I’ll ask the woman from Ty Fach,’ says Elizabeth in the voice that she uses to make promises, ‘and the girl who is staying with her.’

‘Ask who you like,’ says Hywel, and then says no more
.

But this time the silence belongs to Elizabeth
.

Lydia woke late the following morning. She could hear Betty reigning below in the kitchen, shuffling plates and boiling water, and doubtless adding some original touches to the toast: slicing it laterally perhaps, or dusting it with cinnamon. She felt the desolation of a child in a strange house, saddened by the alien nature of the sandwiches, bewildered by the peculiar quality of the trifle which the family of the house take greedily for granted, almost afraid of the unfamiliar shape of the jelly, choked by the frogspawn lump of unshed tears, past which not one small sweetie can negotiate a passage. Yet she had watched unmoved as Finn put strawberry jam on his mutton because there was no red currant jelly. She supposed that marriage must be like that: an unquestioning acceptance of the weird ways of another. Lydia was resigning herself to a long stretch of celibacy. She couldn’t even eat with people she didn’t like, and as for sleeping with anyone – unless she was wildly in love or pissed out of her mind she couldn’t do it. And when she was drunk she snored. Never, in all her life, had Lydia gone to bed with anyone out of simple mechanical need and never out of the kindness of her heart.

When she came downstairs Betty was sitting at the table.

‘You must be starving,’ she said. ‘You ate nothing yesterday.’

‘I’m not,’ said Lydia. ‘I’m not hungry at all.’ Betty had a greasy crumb on her chin. Lydia didn’t know whether or not she had washed her hands. Her frock was unironed.

‘I’m going to make you a buttered egg,’ said Betty decisively, rising to her feet.

‘I’m not going to eat it,’ said Lydia. ‘I’ll have a cup of coffee.’

‘You’ll be ill if you don’t eat,’ said Betty. ‘You’ll get run down and depressed.’

‘No, I won’t,’ said Lydia. ‘I never eat if I’m not hungry, and when I’m not hungry for long enough I get gloriously high. After a bit I’ll probably start seeing visions. You should know that. Fasting makes one mystical.’

‘It makes one dead after a while,’ said Betty, taking the practical line. ‘No matter how unhappy you are you must eat.’

Dear agony aunt, said Lydia in her head, I have a person staying with me whose presence disinclines me from food. She thinks I am pining away from love. How do I put the truth to her?

Dear Lydia, said her head, you are clearly a very neurotic woman. Seek help.

She said aloud: ‘I’m really not unhappy. When I’m really unhappy I eat chocolate and raw bacon and sleep by the fridge.’ This wasn’t true, but Lydia knew that some people did.

‘Well, put a lot of milk in your coffee,’ said Betty, sitting down again.

Someone outside the kitchen door said, ‘Hello.’

‘Oh hell,’ echoed Lydia, putting her cup down.

‘Come in,’ called Betty, quite the lady of the house.

Really I can’t stand it, thought Lydia. I’ll have to get rid of her. She’s feeling what she thinks I should feel and she’s living my life. She’s making me inhuman. She’s turning me into a wild animal. Soon I shall start snarling at visitors and grubbing for nourishment in the fields, simply because I cannot bear to think of myself in the same category as Betty, and
she
has laid claim to humanity. She is going to go on behaving beautifully and so I shall be forced to behave like a pig to establish the difference between us. I wonder how far this necessity explains many criminal and anti-social acts. Was it the blameless wonderfulness of God that forced Satan to go and live in the pit, where he could leave his things lying around and put his feet on the table?

‘Get rid of whoever it is,’ said Lydia in a hiss, slithering swiftly up the stairs. She shut her bedroom door, knowing fate had decreed that the book she was reading should be resting in the sitting-room, leaving her with nothing to do but make her bed, sit on it, lie on it, unmake it, jump on it, push it round the floor – there were limits to what you could do with a bed, and it was the only piece of furniture in the room. Or she could kneel and look out of the window, or do some physical jerks. She swung her arms above her head and cracked her hand on a low beam. ‘Ow,’ she said.

‘Lydia,’ called Betty. ‘What are you doing? We’ve got a visitor. Come down.’

Lydia stared incredulously at the floorboards through which these words rose. She couldn’t call back that she was asleep or had died.

‘This is Elizabeth,’ said Betty as Lydia walked into the kitchen, wearing grey. Her clothes could not be described as unsuitable for the country, but they were not the sort of thing a country woman would wear. Elizabeth in a print frock looked very much more utilitarian than Lydia in her shirt and trousers.

‘Hi,’ said Lydia uncompromisingly.

Betty looked at her apprehensively. ‘She comes from the farm at the top of the valley,’ she explained.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Lydia, beginning to feel mad. It was surely only people of diminished responsibility who found their lives being taken over in this way. Being unmarried and childless she was unaware that many quite normal women spent a great deal of time talking to and feeding people whom they would not, themselves, have chosen to entertain. It seemed insanely silly to Lydia that she should be standing in her own kitchen flanked by two women for whom she had no time. She thought of the people she liked, whose company she enjoyed. Not one of them could be described as ordinary. Lydia played only with court cards. Her friends were mostly interestingly self-destructive: drinking, and smoking, and embarking on disastrous relationships. Their clothes were expensive and had cigarette burns in them, their licences had been taken away from them, their faces showed signs of what is known as the ruins of great beauty, they were always in various stages of depression; and, being the way they were, this had the effect of making them exceedingly witty with the scaffold humour that Lydia preferred. Few of them were caused by melancholy to sit staring slackly into the middle distance. As their sorrow increased so they grew bolder. Lydia thought of her dear ones whirling in their merry dance of death, their faces pale, their bright eyes wild, the tips of their cigarettes gleaming in the tumbling, roaring gloom . . . At this point she accused herself of exaggeration and made some boring remark about the countryside.

‘Aren’t you frightened to be here alone?’ asked the visitor.

‘No,’ said Lydia, not entirely truthfully. Sometimes she rehearsed in her mind means of escape from the murderer who lurks always just within the consciousness of the solitary. As he crept in through the scullery window she would leap from her bedroom and conceal herself in the nettles, unconscious of the pain. As he climbed through her bedroom window she would flee down the stairs, slamming the door on his sanguinary hand. But when she was very sad she understood that sorrow casts out fear, and then the murderer could call with a few of his friends and she would tell them wearily to bugger off and they would go, since, after all, there can be no satisfaction in murdering the dead. Sometimes Lydia felt that she had very little to lose, and in her poverty lay her safety. ‘No,’ she said again with more conviction.

‘I’m giving a dinner party,’ said Elizabeth to Lydia with the odd composure of those who are conversationally inept and unaware of it. ‘On Thursday.’

‘Why
should
we be frightened?’ asked Betty, nervously.

‘Oh, I should be,’ said Elizabeth. ‘At the farm I have the dogs and . . .’ she paused, ‘no one comes much to the farm unless I ask them specially.’ She got up and moved towards the door. ‘You should lock the doors and windows at night,’ she advised them.

‘I always do,’ said Lydia when she had gone. ‘Was she asking us to her dinner party? Or was she just telling us she’s having one because she.thought we might be interested?’

‘She’d already invited us before you came down,’ said Betty. ‘What do you think she meant about locking the doors?’ She looked behind her apprehensively.

‘I suppose she meant we should lock the doors,’ said Lydia, adding meanly, ‘Of course we are particularly vulnerable here. Anyone who really wanted to could get in with no trouble at all.’

‘Oh don’t,’ cried Betty. ‘You’re making me nervous. I wish we had a man with us.’

‘If we did he might be the murderer,’ said Lydia. ‘Finn had violent tendencies. I laughed at his coat once and he pushed me off a bar stool.’ She found it comforting to remember sometimes the worst aspects of Finn’s behaviour.

‘Well, no wonder he went off with that girl,’ said Betty.

‘Huh,’ said Lydia. She wished that Finn’s caique might sink in waters infested with small sharks. She hoped that one might eat the duck with the lovely hair. ‘I’m going down to the pub,’ she said; ‘I need a drink’, and added rather threateningly, ‘You coming?’

‘I never drink in the daytime,’ said Betty. ‘It makes me go to sleep in the afternoon.’

It made Lydia go to sleep in the afternoon too, which was why she did it. She was frustrated by the unsatis -factory nature of the recent conversation. She found Elizabeth hard to place, her personality oddly opaque, her responses subdued and elusive. ‘Is that girl half-witted, or is it me?’ she enquired.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Betty.

‘Being a communicator,’ explained Lydia, ‘I find it dashed annoying not to be able to communicate.’

‘You don’t communicate really,’ said Betty. ‘You just like telling people things. You don’t expect a response.’

‘Of course I do,’ said Lydia. ‘I wouldn’t fancy just standing there yelling into the void.’

‘You like people to respond by telling you how clever you are,’ said Betty. ‘That’s not actually a response. It’s flattery.’

Lydia felt quite breathless. Betty was being rude to her. How extraordinary. Every worm has a turning. ‘If they didn’t read what I write I should starve to death,’ she said.

‘You could do something else,’ said Betty. ‘But you wouldn’t feel real if you weren’t surrounded by people most of the time telling you how wonderful you are. I’m not blaming you. Some people are simply just like that.’

‘I’m not like that,’ said Lydia, but she wondered. Betty didn’t sound as though she meant to be unkind. She sounded as though she was stating a fact. How very unpleasant it can be, she reflected, to see oneself as others see one. Is it preferable to be a rat or a mouse – a long-tailed, snaggle-toothed, terror-inspiring rat or a little grey domestic pest? On the whole, she decided, being a rat was more
chic
, but nevertheless she determined to write a long earnest article soon on some subject of profound importance in which she would make a significant contribution to the sum of human awareness. Betty’s fond tolerance was not enough. Lydia wanted her respect. How greedy. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I
am
off to the pub. Here I go.’

‘They’ll think you’re an alcoholic,’ warned Betty. ‘You know how people talk in these small communities.’

‘I am an alcoholic,’ said Lydia. ‘And they mostly talk in Welsh and I don’t understand them, so I don’t care. The day they come to the door and denounce me in fluent Anglo-Saxon for a Scarlet Woman, then I’ll think about it.’

When Hywel went to the hills Elizabeth went to the telephone. She said, ‘Come to my dinner party’, and she said ‘Why not?’, and she said, ‘Beuno will be here and the Molesworths are coming, and I’ve asked the two girls who are staying at Ty Fach.’ She said, ‘April can’t come. It’s her evening class in Oswestry’, and she said, ‘About eight o’clock. Come as soon as surgery closes,’ and when she turned from the telephone she smiled
.