Free Unexplained Laughter by Alice Thomas Ellis Page B

reminded her.
    ‘Yes, I know,’ conceded Lydia, ‘but then I dash off somewhere else to see something different.’ She wondered whether the doctor imagined that because she was here without a man she hadn’t got one. She shrank from his crudity and his playground teasing. There was something clumsily sadistic in teasing: signs of an almost homicidal inadequacy and despair. Lydia wondered whether he was impotent. His insistence on sexual matters could not be merely attributable to his calling, since not all doctors carried on like that. Perhaps it was caused by the com -plicated influences of the valley where the men seemed so often to remain unmarried, sometimes perhaps because, as Beuno held, their mothers said there was no one good enough for them, sometimes because there simply wasn’t anyone. And there was the residue of a chapel-rooted misogyny quite usual in remote rural communities. It was dispiriting and chilling, and the teasing was its outward and visible form. These men jeered and poked sticks through the bars at creatures they secretly, at once, feared and desired.
    Elizabeth stood up again. ‘I must go back to Angharad,’ she said.
    ‘Don’t go,’ said the doctor, lying back in his chair and smiling at her lazily.
    Lydia was furious. How dare he dissuade
her
guests from leaving. He was as bad as Betty. Am I so negligible, she asked herself indignantly, that everyone feels this compul -sion to speak for me?
    ‘Of course she must go,’ she said, ‘if she’s worried about Angharad.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, ‘I must go,’ and she went.
    The doctor’s smile broadened.
    Lydia felt oppressed and vaguely threatened.
    ‘There’s no one of any consequence in London at the moment,’ she told him, ‘but you won’t be able to move for the millions of nobodies going to look at the Tower.’
    ‘Oh, I’ll find something to do,’ he said with an air of practised lewdness.
    April, who until now had been just sitting there, at this point, to give her her due, showed symptoms of unease. ‘Oh, Wyn,’ she said.
    Lydia felt briefly sorry for her and attempted to engage her in conversation, but it was no good. She turned to Beuno and spoke of lighter matters until darkness descended.
    ‘I thought that was a very pleasant evening,’ said Betty. ‘Beuno helped me with the washing-up after you went to bed.’
    ‘I don’t like Dr Wyn,’ said Lydia. ‘I increasingly don’t like him.’
    ‘He’s a good doctor,’ said Betty. ‘They all say he’s very good. Elizabeth says he’s wonderful with Angharad. He’ll go and see her any time of the day or night. Elizabeth only has to phone him.’
    ‘He still gives me the creeps,’ said Lydia.
    ‘He’s only teasing,’ said Betty. ‘I don’t know where we should be without people like him.’
    But Lydia, remembering the look on his face, thanked Heaven that she was not a child under his interested regard. ‘I think he’s a disappointed man,’ she said. ‘He’s getting on and he hasn’t got far. Stuck in his village forever.’
    ‘He could’ve left if he’d wanted to,’ said Betty. ‘He’s been offered all sorts of consultancies at lots of London hospitals.’
    ‘Who said so?’ demanded Lydia.
    ‘He did,’ said Betty.
    ‘Oh, him,’ said Lydia.
    She knew that he had tried to give her the impression that he was going off on a promiscuous adventure and expected this to arouse in her both admiration and jealousy, but as Lydia’s misdemeanours were more of the spirit than of the flesh she found promiscuity not merely sinful but foolish and disgusting.
    ‘He is far too
old
to be carrying on like that,’ she said censoriously. ‘This obsession with sex is a sign of retardation. People who leap from one relationship to another like someone crossing a stream on stepping-stones never grow up. They are like people at a meal who can only take a bite from each course. Highly unnutritious.’
    Betty said nothing because, Lydia knew, Lydia’s