Read Online Unexplained Laughter by Alice Thomas Ellis - Free Book Online

car, marvelling at the power which people like Betty could wield merely by threatening to sulk. As she came to her car she met Hywel, homeward-bound on his tractor. He swung up a hand in a non-committal gesture and rumbled on. With some pique Lydia understood that he had decided against finding her interesting. Driving along the lane, she tried to picture Hywel parking his tractor and going into his house to be greeted by Elizabeth, and found it impossible. She could visualise only dimness and silence, and Hywel in a state of wrathful wonder at finding that alien woman, his wife, in his mother’s house. Hywel seemed to her like some hapless creature in a story, spellbound by despair, made powerless by circumstance, trapped by a ruthless magic without even the faery consolation of glamour, the illusion of delight. For Elizabeth she felt no sympathy, since presumably no one had forced her to enter Farmhouse Grim. Hywel, supposed Lydia, must have briefly courted her, have put on a suit, taken her out to a café, been moderately gay. But even so Elizabeth should have known what she was walking into, should have looked closely at the encircling fields, the rock-built house and Hywel all muddy and iced and quiet from winter toil.
    When Lydia had marvelled to Betty about the horror of Elizabeth’s existence, Betty had told her not to be so silly. I’m not being so silly, thought Lydia, resentfully. That’s a miserable farmhouse, and the people in it are perilously unhappy or I’m a monkey’s uncle.
    She was still brooding as she reached the surgery, which was situated in a superior house of dressed stone set among laurel bushes and bits of lawn. She sat in the waiting-room, which contained only one other patient – a child with ringworm, his mother in tow. She ignored the child, fearing contamination, and tried to imagine Elizabeth’s wedding. Probably, she concluded, it had just washed itself along on a tide of alcohol and that uneasy mixture of salaciousness and sanctimoniousness which characterises these melancholy occasions.
    She had just begun to worry about the honeymoon, finding an image of Hywel in Benidorm particularly elusive, when she was summoned by the doctor. How difficult it was, she now reflected, to speak of one’s physical ailments to a person with whom one has dined. How wise was her father. She lied to Dr Wyn, saying that she had wrenched her shoulder, since although there was nothing inherently shameful about noises in the head she did not wish to confide in him. How glad I am, she thought simply, that I have not suddenly contracted syphilis.
    He bade her remove her shirt, and moved her arm around, while occasionally and at random she remarked ‘Ouch’.
    ‘Not much wrong there,’ he told her. ‘Don’t use it for a few days, and see how it goes.’ He appeared to be as bored with Lydia’s shoulder as she was herself. He had some thing else on his mind. ‘I’m glad you called in this evening,’ he said. ‘Not in a hurry, are you? Got a few minutes?’
    ‘Y-e-s,’ said Lydia cautiously.
    ‘Someone I want you to meet,’ he announced, flinging open a door behind him and ushering Lydia into a sitting-room.
    ‘This is April,’ he said, indicating a nondescript, darkish girl who sat on a corner of the sofa. He didn’t tell the girl who Lydia was; so Lydia knew her reputation had gone before her.
    The girl glanced at her craftily. She wore a faintly sly and greedy look, like a child who has been promised a rather disreputable treat if it’s good.
    Lydia, who had quite often been subjected to this experience, twigged at once. Dr Wyn had told his friends that Lydia could be relied on to say something awful, or to sink, senseless, under the table. She was the floor show.
    Dr Wyn introduced her to a tall foolish-looking man who was pouring whisky at a side table, and whose name she didn’t catch.
    ‘How do you do,’ said Lydia tonelessly. She, as it were, took her personality, folded it up and