Unexplained Laughter by Alice Thomas Ellis

Beuno. Not too badly as yet, but the indications were there: bright eyes and heightened vivacity when he arrived, and a mild but spun-out dreariness when he went. She contrived to sit near to him and she gave him nice things to eat. Lydia told herself it was very sad, because Betty would make a wonderful vicar’s wife. On the other hand she was totally out of Beuno’s class. His quality of ruthless innocence rendered him unsuitable for most human intercourse. While neither a saint nor a psycho path, he clearly had some of the characteristics of both – chiefly what Lydia could only think of as a sort of selfless solipsism. He was a person of disinterested good will and he wanted no return from humankind. These people are fortunately few and far between because they are extremely odd and have a way of upsetting applecarts. Lydia could quite see Beuno maddeningly getting himself martyred on some trivial point of principle, or overturning a regime with his angelic intransigeance. If he were not so attractive she thought that she herself might, by now, have shaken him soundly.
    ‘Beuno should be labelled “Not for human con -sumption”,’ she said, eating bread and jam. ‘They are a very strange family. Each one of them is in some way cut off from the rest of society: Hywel because he’s a miserable sod, Angharad because something went awfully wrong, and Beuno because he’s fallen in love with God.’
    ‘But Beuno’s
normal
,’ protested Betty earnestly.
    Lydia spoke carefully because she did not wish to give the impression that she was attempting to divert Betty from Beuno for nefarious reasons of her own. ‘I’m not saying he’s raving mad,’ she said, ‘but he isn’t like the rest of us.’
    Generously, if inaccurately, she ranged herself more with Betty than with Beuno. He and she were similar but he had a natural goodness which she lacked, and she did not want to claim aloud that she understood him because that, in itself, would lead to misunderstanding.
    ‘Finn is a fiend,’ she said, ‘but he’s quite easy to cope with once you’ve accepted that. Beuno would drive one crazy.’ She tried to think of the simplest way of conveying this. ‘You might cook him a wonderful pie and then you’d find he’d given it to a drunken beggar, and no matter how kind you thought him after a while you’d want to kill him. Whereas Finn would never do anything like that. He’d much more likely kick a drunken beggar, but that’s what most people are like and you can put up with it. Beuno is not, in everyday terms, a reasonable person.’
    Betty turned the radio on, perhaps not wishing to listen to any further descriptions of Beuno’s character. The radio emitted a song which Lydia associated with Finn. For a moment she was bewildered, as the real Finn and the dream Finn co-existed. The music immediately evoked the sensations, the enchantment, of being sillily in love, and simultaneously she was no longer in love. So why was she grinning like that? She was like a cured alcoholic who finds he can take a drink without again becoming addicted. It was peculiar but pleasant that she should find the song painless. A few weeks ago it would have scored claw marks on her heart.
    ‘Ooh,’ said Lydia, her hands at her breast.
    ‘Now what?’ asked Betty.
    ‘Wouldn’t it be awful if a cat scratched your heart?’
    ‘Oh
Lydia
,’ said Betty, ‘you do think of the weirdest things.’ She reached towards the radio.
    ‘Don’t turn it off,’ implored Lydia; ‘that is my favourite song.’ She felt positively triumphant now. It was wonderful to be able to listen to her favourite song with impunity, extraordinary that it should still have the power to move her, but not to tears.
    ‘You’re right,’ she said as she realised this could mean only one thing. ‘Finn’s on his way back.’ She realised that at some level she had always known this, since otherwise she could not have recovered so quickly. It is noticeably