Unexplained Laughter (6 page)

“There’s someone laughing out there,’ said Lydia.

They stared at each other in silence, their roles reversed: Lydia fearful and Betty courageous.

‘Let me listen,’ said Betty decisively. ‘I’m going to open the door and listen.’

She didn’t open the door too widely and she didn’t go outside, but she listened assiduously. ‘I think I can hear something,’ she said after a while. ‘It’s coming from the left.’

‘It’s coming from the right,’ said Lydia, ‘and I can hear it as clear as a bell.’

I listened to them. I stood by the open window and the dogs licked my hands as I listened
.

They said, ‘Elizabeth, you are wonderful to look after her the way you do’, and ‘Elizabeth, you are wonderful to cook as you do’, and ‘Elizabeth, what would Hywel have done without you?’ and ‘Elizabeth, what a difference you have made to the house’, and ‘Elizabeth, Elizabeth’
.

Once I heard Hywel laugh. And Beuno talked and talked, and one by one they all laughed. But when all the people had gone no one laughed, and after a while no one spoke any more
.

She had put the doll she gave me on my bed. It has yellow hair, and its eyes open and shut, and it is dead
.

‘I ate too much last night,’ said Betty at what would have been breakfast if they’d made any. ‘I shall just have a cup of camomile tea.’

Lydia made coffee and pushed the door wide open. The sun shone warm and the air was now very pure: a calm reflective day, not given to laughter.

‘You didn’t eat much,’ said Betty.

‘No,’ agreed Lydia. Her imagination had suggested to her that dinner in a Welsh farmhouse might comprise mutton redolent of wild herbs, or native lobster winged from the coast by landrover. It had conjured up visions of arcane Celtic stews bubbling mysteriously in metal vessels, and bitter rowan-beer strengthened by the bodies of songbirds. But Elizabeth read women’s magazines and had offered them quiche and Coronation Chicken and melon balls in wine glasses. The men had drunk canned beer and the women sweet wine. Lydia had once read a women’s-magazine-type romance in book-form and her mind had felt then as her stomach felt now – ever so slightly destroyed. Women’s magazines had a lot to answer for, thought Lydia, with their embroidered jumpers, their mackerel and mandarin oranges, their stories of the nurse who gets the surgeon, the typist who gets the boss, contrasting so starkly with the bewildered anguish manifested by their love-ruined readers on the letters page.

There was a grey squirrel nipping up and down a hazel tree near the stream. It was neat and elegant, like all wild animals, with an air of aristocratic insouciance and good breeding. The silly sheep, the witless pheasants, the dumb cows bred by man for his own purposes had lost all joy and definition, needing to be doused, medicated, imprisoned and fed until, poor bourgeois, they were ready to be killed. Beuno came walking into Lydia’s meditation. He was like the squirrel with his bright clear skin, his healthy curls and gleaming eyes: not at all a sullen, greedy, domestic beast, destined for an ignominious end.

He came at eleven o’clock, which seemed to Lydia a reasonable hour, an indication of natural good manners. Betty looked pleased to see him. Lydia found it impos sible to imagine a mate for Beuno. Like the squirrel, he should marry only someone of precisely the same blood lines as himself. Anything else would be grotesquely unsuitable.

‘How’s Angharad?’ asked Betty, who had, last night, discussed at length with Elizabeth the problems and frustrations of bringing up a defective child and felt thus freed to go on talking about it.

‘I’ve hardly seen her,’ said Beuno. ‘She keeps out of my way. She keeps out of everyone’s way if she possibly can.’

‘Elizabeth’s been trying to change that,’ Betty told him, although he must surely have known already.

‘Elizabeth worries too much,’ said Beuno. ‘There isn’t anything to be done about it now. It’s best to let her go her own way. Elizabeth has a townswoman’s fears. Angharad is safer on the hills than she is indoors. Most days her path and Hywel’s cross. He usually knows pretty well where she is.’

Lydia had just realised why Elizabeth was childless. She was afraid. She was afraid she would have a defective child because she had seen in Angharad what could happen in her husband’s family. She really could not, under the circumstances, be expected to love Angharad, thought Lydia, remembering the hostility and anger which Elizabeth had so briefly exhibited last night. How could you love a child who, because of its strangeness and deformity, precluded you from having a child of your own because it might bear the same strangeness and deformity? It seemed remarkable that Elizabeth should be as good as she was to her sister-in-law. Lydia thought herself very slow not to have realised all this before, but then she reflected that the rapidity with which they had learned the circumstances of this secluded family was in itself strange. Elizabeth was lonely and Beuno guileless. Were these two qualities sufficient in themselves to cause their owners to lay all secrets bare? I suppose they must be, thought Lydia, shrugging, and wondering also whether the modern tendency, which was American in origin, to tell everybody everything before they’d even got the first olive off the cocktail stick had percolated as far as here. In the old days you kept your lunatics and your shapeless in the west wing, if you ran to one. Otherwise the attic or the coal cellar had to suffice, but concealment had been the fashion. Now, many people as they retrieved their fingers from the handshake were likely to tell you that their husband had just fathered an illegitimate child and ask your advice on how to proceed, or offer to give you the telephone number of their analyst/acupuncturist/homeopath/hypnotist who had been so helpful over their drink problem. No one hesitated to tell you that their spouse was schizophrenic, they themselves alcoholic, homosexual or beastlily promiscuous (no, they were all rather proud of that one) or, of course, that they hated their mother. It had not always been so, Lydia knew. And it was the teeniest bit boring, having largely absorbed the shock element that had once added a prurient interest to social intercourse.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ said Beuno, ‘because Hywel wants me to help dip the sheep and I hate the things.’

‘You’re a shepherd of men,’ said Betty, and Lydia hoped she wasn’t going to be roguish.

‘Do you take the view that God exists?’ asked Lydia. ‘Or do you see him as an inconvenient remnant of outmoded superstition – a bit like a gallstone – of which we must all be purged before religion can take on its true form, that is, without him?’

Beuno turned to look at her. ‘They’ve all been thinking,’ he said. ‘I wish they wouldn ‘t.’

‘I thought it was good to think,’ said Betty.

‘There you are,’ said Lydia. ‘There’s a limit to what you can think about God.’

Beuno agreed. ‘It’s when they think he’s a gallstone they find it difficult.’

‘Don’t you mind being in a Church that doesn’t believe in God?’ asked Betty.

‘It’s only a few of them who don’t believe,’ explained Beuno. ‘The academics. They get embarrassed at High Table if they think their peers imagine they do. They have to explain that although they’re priests they’re really not credulous nitwits, and then they feel they have to go further and they end up writing books about it and yapping away on the television.’ He added tranquilly: ‘No one takes much notice of them.’

Lydia was pleased with him. It was seldom she met someone with whom she was in religious accord. Finn hadn’t believed in anything; not even that the Ancient of Days had dwindled to a gallstone. Some of their worst rows had resulted from this incompatibility. ‘I like God,’ she said.

‘You don’t show much sign of it,’ accused Betty. ‘You never go to church and you’re not very charitable.’

‘I know,’ said Lydia, ‘but God makes me laugh.’ ‘Perhaps you make
him
laugh,’ suggested Betty.

‘Perhaps it’s him you keep hearing.’

‘That is not impossible,’ said Lydia. ‘But it’s more likely to be the little fat chap who laughs when people make love.’

‘Cupid?’ asked Betty cautiously.

‘No, no,’ said Lydia. ‘This one’s much older, and oriental in appearance. He sits on a very smokey-looking cloud and he laughs and laughs at the sight of copulation. All his stomachs and his chins wobble. He has to hang on to them with his hands.’

After a moment Betty said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘This god,’ said Lydia. ‘The one who invented sex. He did it for a laugh.’

Betty glanced appealingly at Beuno. ‘I thought you were a Christian,’ she said to Lydia. ‘One God.’

‘I am a Christian,’ said Lydia. ‘This little god is the product of my imagination.’

‘Then how do you know the other one isn’t as well?’ demanded Betty, seeing that a point might be scored here.

‘I know my imagination,’ said Lydia. ‘I can’t imagine the other one.’

‘Then how do you know he’s there?’ asked Betty.

‘I know he’s there because I can’t imagine him,’ explained Lydia patiently. ‘If I could I should be extremely doubtful. He’d resemble Santa Claus or someone. Anyone I can imagine is quite unlikely to exist.’

‘We could talk about God at the same time as walking,’ said Beuno. ‘I’ll show you the place where the convent used to be in the Middle Ages.’

‘I want to walk up the other valley too,’ said Betty. ‘Someone told me the hedge is centuries old. According to Hooker’s hypothesis.’

They went across the fields and came to a place where a few stones lay, giving no indication at all that they had once combined to form a dwelling for holy women.

‘The Welsh name for the bridge over there,’ said Beuno, gesturing, ‘means “the place where the milk was spilt” because one year the nuns’ cow went dry and they had to go down to the village to beg for some, and they got this far and then one of them dropped it.’

‘And they all said, Hereinafter and for evermore let this place be known as the place where the milk was spilt,’ said Betty dreamily.

‘Well, I suppose when they’d finished saying bugger and blast and damn and kicking butter-fingers in the head they might get round to saying that,’ said Lydia.

‘Angharad used to spend a lot of time here,’ said Beuno. ‘There, where the leaves come down to the water. She’d hide in there for hours.’

‘Who looked after her when she was little?’ asked Betty, who had learned that Angharad’s mother had died giving birth to her.

‘Hywel mostly,’ said Beuno. “The women from the village used to come and help, but it was mostly him.’

Both Betty and Lydia found this odd and wanted to know how they’d managed.

Beuno considered, politely. ‘I suppose we must have had more help than I remember,’ he said after a while. ‘I don’t remember that she was ever much trouble. I was much younger than Hywel, so I suppose he bore the brunt of it, but I don’t remember him complaining. We look after our own. We’re used to it. We’ve been used to it for centuries. There was never anyone else to turn to here, over the hills and far away, and there’s an ancient tradition of mistrusting strangers. Even Elizabeth has got it now.’ He smiled at them reassuringly. ‘If you stay long enough you will look with suspicion on unfamiliar faces.’

Lydia, picturing Hywel’s dark eyes, thought that he’d probably have put up with a great deal rather than have strangers in his house.

‘Hywel didn’t like having people around,’ said Beuno. ‘For years before he married Elizabeth I don’t think anyone came to the house except for the old men on Sunday after chapel. I didn’t think he’d ever marry.’

It was an unlikely match. Lydia tried to imagine a more suitable bride for the dour Hywel and could see only a dim, faintly female version of himself. ‘I suppose he got an ache in the loins,’ she said.

‘
Lydia
,’ said Betty.

‘Will you marry?’ Lydia asked Beuno.

‘
Lydia
,’ said Betty.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Beuno. ‘I want to comb God’s hair. If I married I’d only end up cleaning his shoes. You can’t love God and anyone else.’

‘I do so agree with you,’ said Lydia, relieved. There was something most unpleasing and incongruous about the idea of Bueno shackled to a wife.

‘The Church has always had trouble with marriage,’ said Beuno, ‘trying to combine two mutually exclusive imperatives. The vicar’s wife is usually a pain. Like the doctor’s wife.’

‘Or the king’s wife,’ said Lydia, ‘or the politician’s wife. Appendages – being hauled round like a penitent’s placard.’

‘Whose wife
do
you like?’ asked Betty.

‘Nobody’s,’ said Lydia. ‘Wives are a bad thing. So are husbands.’

‘You’d have married Finn like a shot if he’d asked you,’ said Betty, losing her temper and speaking wildly.

Lydia was sitting on a stile with the sun behind her and Beuno beside her. Betty faced them with the sun in her eyes. She could hardly see them. Lydia wasn’t smiling in her usual maddening way, but Betty thought she was; and she thought perhaps Beuno was smiling too. ‘Don’t deny it,’ she said.

‘I’m not,’ said Lydia, pacifically, after a while. She didn’t want to make Betty cry here in a field in the summer. Her motive was only partly compassionate. It would be very disgusting if Betty were to burst into tears in the sunshine. Lydia sat still and sighed, waiting. She knew the recent conversation had been fantastical, with faint cruel undertones, and that it had excluded Betty, who was a good little thing. She now felt herself to be like the squirrel, staring with bright inimical eyes at a sad domestic beast. But if Betty began to weep Lydia would be, in humanity, bound to put her arm about her in consolation; so she said earnestly that she was suddenly terribly hungry and could it possibly be time for lunch.

‘Betty is a wonderful cook,’ she said, as they walked slowly back across the fields. ‘And she knows all about wild mushrooms and things.’ The conversation had become intensely boring.

I saw them in the field with the fallen stones. Beuno was talking. He always talks like that. I went home through the field with the cows. The cows of my country are small and black, and the cats, and the eyes of my countrymen
.