Free Unexplained Laughter by Alice Thomas Ellis Page A

take no notice of you because he’ll be trying to upset me.’
    ‘It sounds like another wonderful evening,’ said Lydia. ‘I wonder where Elizabeth is.’
    ‘She’s been looking after Angharad,’ said Beuno. ‘It always takes her some time to get ready. She’ll be along later.’ He spoke noncommittally, and Lydia understood that there were things of which Beuno would not yet speak to her. She didn’t mind. There was no point in being curious about hopeless situations.
    ‘We’ll be there,’ Dr Wyn was saying, as they entered the kitchen. ‘Won’t we, darling?’
    ‘Yes,’ said April, making it increasingly apparent that she was a girl of very few words.
    ‘She’s doing a flower arrangement for the competition. What is it this year, darling? Three dahlias, a book-end and a brass ornament?’
    Lydia imagined this to be a joke and was surprised when April concurred. She glanced at her for signs of irony and saw none.
    ‘Her mum always wins the malt-loaf section,’ claimed the doctor with vicarious pride.
    Lydia thought moodily that she couldn’t hope to be as boring as Dr Wyn if she tried all night. Nevertheless she made an attempt. ‘How many sections are there?’ she enquired.
    This was a mistake, because the doctor told her.
    By the time Elizabeth arrived Lydia was prepared to welcome her, since any additional flavour must add something to the evening, which was like Betty’s meatless stock into which she kept putting more and more dried herbs and burned onion in an effort to make it taste of something. It was the sort of evening on which Lydia would normally get drunk and move into a world of her own, highlighted by strange insights, hectically and artificially tuppence-coloured. Grimly, she quaffed lemon squash.
    Elizabeth told Betty that Wyn had been to school with Hywel, and Betty told Elizabeth that she had heard that the Welsh standard of education was very high.
    Sip, went Lydia at her lemon squash.
    Betty deplored the cuts in the education budget and Beuno lit a cigarette.
    ‘Smoking?’ queried the doctor. ‘Giving us all pneumoconiosis?’ He fixed Lydia with a meaning glance. ‘Guess where I’m going this weekend,’ he invited her. Sensibly he did not wait for a reply, since the possibilities were clearly endless. ‘London,’ he told her, staring at her with an air of triumph.
    Well,
I
don’t care, thought Lydia; I hope it stays fine for you. She was puzzled by the doctor’s manner. He spoke as children speak.
I’ve
got something
you
haven’t got was his meaning.
    Elizabeth got up suddenly, walked to the window and looked out. After a moment she sat down again. She didn’t speak.
    ‘Can I get you anything?’ asked Betty.
    ‘Nothing,’ said Elizabeth, ‘thank you.’ For no apparent reason she uttered a little laugh.
    ‘I live in London,’ ventured Lydia.
    ‘Yes, I know,’ said the doctor, still staring at her. So that wasn’t it.
    ‘I’m here on holiday,’ Lydia explained further.
    ‘I know,’ said the doctor.
    Lydia sipped her squash, thinking. Her original conclusion was correct. The doctor was telling her that he was off to have a good time where Lydia lived, imagining that this would induce envy in her. She stared thoughtfully into her lemon squash. The trouble with people like Dr Wyn was that there was really no answer to the jaw-dropping remarks they made. She could hardly observe aloud that the subject of his weekend was very boring.
    ‘You’ll find it pretty tedious at the moment,’ she said. ‘There’s absolutely no one there but tourists swarming all over the place.’ Another component of the doctor’s teasing was, she suspected, an acute resentment of her supposedly exalted position in the world of journalism. ‘It’s hell just at present. Like a bottle you expect to have whisky in and it turns out to be full of a specimen for the doctor.’ She beamed at him over the rim of her glass.
    ‘You know you get bored here too, Lydia,’ Betty