Friend of My Youth (13 page)

Hazel said, “No, no, it’s all right, if Dudley is too busy.”

“It’s all set up now,” Antoinette said. “But we’ll go a bit earlier than Dudley planned. I thought later this morning, before lunch. I just have a couple of things to see about first.”

So they set out in Antoinette’s car, around half past eleven. The rain had stopped, the clouds had whitened, the oak and beech trees were dripping last night’s rainwater with the stirring of their gold and rusty leaves. The road went between low stone walls. It crossed the clear, hard-flowing little river.

“Miss Dobie has a nice house,” Antoinette said. “It’s a nice little bungalow. It’s on a corner of the old farm. When she sold off the farm, she kept one corner of it and built herself a little bungalow. Her other old house was all gone to rookery.”

Hazel had a clear picture in her mind of that other, old house. She could see the big kitchen, roughly plastered, with its uncurtained windows. The meat safe, the stove, the slick horsehair couch. A great quantity of pails and implements and guns, fishing rods, oilcans, lanterns, baskets. A battery radio. On a backless chair a big husky woman, in trousers, would be sitting, oiling a gun or cutting up seed potatoes or gutting a fish. There was not a thing she couldn’t do herself, Jack had said, providing Hazel with this picture. He put himself in it as well. He had sat on the steps outside the kitchen door, on days of hazy radiance like today’s—except that the grass and the trees had been green—and he passed the time fooling with the dogs or trying to get the muck off the shoes he had borrowed from his hostess.

“Jack borrowed Miss Dobie’s shoes once,” she said to Antoinette. “She had big feet, apparently. She always wore men’s shoes. I don’t know what had happened to his. Maybe he just
had boots. Anyway, he wore her shoes to a dance and he went down to the river, I don’t know what for”—it was to meet a girl, of course, probably to meet Antoinette—“and he got the shoes soaked, covered with muck. He was so drunk he didn’t take anything off when he went to bed, just passed out on top of the quilt. Miss Dobie did not say a word about it. Next night he came home late again and he crawled into bed in the dark, and a pailful of cold water hit him in the face! She’d rigged up this arrangement of weights and ropes, so that when the springs of the bed sagged under him, the pail would be tipped over and the water would hit him like that, to serve him right.”

“She mustn’t have minded going to a lot of trouble,” Antoinette said. Then she said they would stop for lunch. Hazel had thought that the whole point of leaving when they did had been to get the visit over with early, because Antoinette was short of time. But now, apparently, they were taking care not to arrive too soon.

They stopped at a pub that had a famous name. Hazel had read about a duel fought there; it was mentioned in an old ballad. But the pub now seemed ordinary, and was run by an Englishman who was in the middle of redecorating. He heated their sandwiches in a microwave oven.

“I wouldn’t give one of those houseroom,” Antoinette said. “They irrigate your food.”

She began to talk about Miss Dobie and the girl Miss Dobie had to look after her.

“Well, she’s hardly a girl anymore. Her name is Judy Armstrong. She was one of those what-do-you-call-thems—orphans. She went to work for Dudley’s mother. She worked there for a while, and then she got herself in trouble. The result was she had a baby. The way they often do. She couldn’t stay in town so easily after that, so it was fortunate Miss Dobie was just getting in the way of needing somebody. Judy and her child went out there, and it turned out to be the best arrangement all round.”

They delayed at the pub until Antoinette judged that Judy and Miss Dobie would be ready for them.

The valley narrowed in. Miss Dobie’s house was close to the road, with hills rising steeply behind it. In front was a shining laurel hedge and some wet bushes, all red-leaved or dripping with berries. The house was stuccoed, with stones set here and there in a whimsical suburban style.

A young woman stood in the doorway. Her hair was glorious—a ripply fan of red hair, shining over her shoulders. She was wearing a rather odd dress for the time of day—a sort of party dress of thin, silky brown material, shot through with gold metallic thread. She must have been chilly in it—she had her arms crossed, squeezing her breasts.

“Here we are, then, Judy,” Antoinette said, speaking heartily as if to a slightly deaf or mutinous person. “Dudley couldn’t come. He was too busy. This is the lady he told you about on the phone.”

Judy blushed as she shook hands. Her eyebrows were very fair, almost invisible, giving her dark-brown eyes an undefended look. She seemed dismayed by something—was it the fact of visitors, or just the flamboyance of her own spread-out hair? But she was the one who must have brushed it to this gloss and arranged it on show.

Antoinette asked her if Miss Dobie was well.

A clot of phlegm thickened Judy’s voice as she tried to answer. She cleared her throat and said, “Miss Dobie’s kept well all this year.”

Now there was some awkwardness about getting their coats off—Judy not knowing quite when to reach for them, or how to direct Antoinette and Hazel where to go. But Antoinette took charge and led the way down the hall to the sitting room, which was full of patterned upholstery, brass and china ornaments, pampas grass, peacock feathers, dried flowers, clocks and pictures and cushions. In the midst of this an old woman sat in a high-backed chair, against the light of the windows, waiting for them. Though she was old, she was not at all shrivelled. She had thick arms and legs and a bushy halo of white hair. Her skin was brown, like the skin of a russet apple, and she had large purplish
pouches under her eyes. But the eyes themselves were bright and shifty, as if some intelligence there looked out just when it wanted to—something as quick and reckless as a squirrel darting back and forth behind this heavy, warty, dark old face.

“So you are the lady from Canada,” she said to Antoinette. She had a strong voice. Spots on her lips were like blue-black grapes.

“No, that’s not me,” Antoinette said. “I’m from the Royal Hotel, and you’ve met me before. I’m the friend of Dudley Brown’s.” She took a bottle of wine—it was Madeira—out of her bag and presented it, as a credential. “This is the kind you like, isn’t it?”

“All the way from Canada,” Miss Dobie said, taking possession of the bottle. She still wore men’s shoes—she was wearing them now, unlaced.

Antoinette repeated what she had said before, in a louder voice, and introduced Hazel.

“Judy! Judy, you know where the glasses are!” Miss Dobie said. Judy was just coming in with a tray. On it was a stack of cups and saucers, a teapot, a plate of sliced fruitcake, milk, and sugar. The demand for the glasses seemed to throw her off course, and she looked around distractedly. Antoinette relieved her of the tray.

“I think she’d like a taste of the wine first, Judy,” Antoinette said. “Isn’t this nice! Did you make the cake yourself? May I take a piece back to Dudley when we go? He’s so fond of fruitcake. He’ll believe it was made for him. That can’t be true, since he only called this morning and fruitcake takes a lot longer than that, doesn’t it? But he’ll never know the difference.”

“I know who you are now,” Miss Dobie said. “You’re the woman from the Royal Hotel. Did you and Dudley Brown ever get married?”

“I am already married,” Antoinette said irritably. “I would get a divorce, but I don’t know where my husband is.” Her voice quickly smoothed out, so that she ended up seeming to reassure Miss Dobie. “Perhaps in time.”

“So that’s why you went to Canada,” Miss Dobie said.

Judy came in with some wineglasses. Anybody could see that her hands were too unsteady to pour the wine. Antoinette got the bottle out of Miss Dobie’s clasp and held a wineglass up to the light.

“If you could just fetch me a napkin, Judy,” Antoinette said. “Or a clean tea towel. Mind it’s a clean one!”

“My husband, Jack,” Hazel broke in resolutely, speaking to Miss Dobie—“my husband, Jack Curtis, was in the Air Force, and he used to visit you during the war.”

Miss Dobie picked this up all right.

“Why would your husband want to visit me?”

“He wasn’t my husband then. He was quite young then. He was a cousin of yours. From Canada. Jack Curtis, Curtis. But you may have had a lot of different relatives visiting you, over the years.”

“We never had visitors. We were too far off the beaten track,” Miss Dobie said firmly. “I lived at home with Mother and Father and then I lived with Mother and then I lived alone. I gave up on the sheep and went to work in town. I worked at the post office.”

“That’s right, she did,” Antoinette said thoughtfully, handing round the wine.

“But I never lived in town,” Miss Dobie said, with an obscure, vengeful-sounding pride. “No. I rode in every day, all that way on the motorbike.”

“Jack mentioned your motorbike,” Hazel said, to encourage her.

“I lived in the old house then. Terrible people live there now.”

She held out her glass for more wine.

“Jack used to borrow your motorbike,” Hazel said. “And he went fishing with you, and when you cleaned the fish, the dogs ate the fish heads.”

“Ugh,” Antoinette said.

“I’m thankful I can’t see it from here,” Miss Dobie said.

“The house,” Antoinette explained, in a regretful undertone. “The couple that live in it are not married. They have fixed it up but they are not married.” And, as if naturally reminded, she said to Judy, “How is Tania?”

“She’s fine,” said Judy, who was not having any wine. She lifted the plate of fruitcake and set it down. “She goes to kindergarten now.”

“She goes on the bus,” Miss Dobie said. “The bus comes and picks her up right at the door.”

“Isn’t that nice,” Antoinette said.

“And it brings her back,” Miss Dobie continued impressively. “It brings her back right to the door.”

“Jack said you had a dog that ate porridge,” Hazel said. “And that one time he borrowed your shoes. I mean Jack did. My husband.”

Miss Dobie seemed to brood over this for a little while. Then she said, “Tania has the red hair.”

“She has her mother’s hair,” Antoinette said. “And her mother’s brown eyes. She is Judy all over again.”

“She is illegitimate,” Miss Dobie said, with the air of somebody sweeping aside a good deal of nonsense. “But Judy brings her up well. Judy is a good worker. I am glad to see that they have a home. It is the innocent ones, anyway, that get caught.”

Hazel thought that this would finish Judy off completely, send her running to the kitchen. Instead, she seemed to come to a decision. She got up and handed around the cake. The flush had never left her face or her neck or the part of her chest left bare by the party dress. Her skin was burning as if she had been slapped, and her expression, as she bent to each of them with the plate, was that of a child who was furiously, bitterly, contemptuously holding back a howl. Miss Dobie spoke to Hazel. She said, “Can you say any recitations?”

Hazel had to think for a moment to remember what a recitation was. Then she said that she could not.

“I will say one, if you like,” Miss Dobie said.

She put down her empty glass and straightened her shoulders and placed her feet together.

“Excuse my not rising,” she said.

She began to speak in a voice that seemed strained and faltering at first but that soon became dogged and preoccupied. Her Scottish pronunciation thickened. She paid less attention to the content of the poem than to the marathon effort of getting it out in the right order—word after word, line after line, verse after verse. Her face darkened further with the effort. But the recitation was not wholly without expression; it was not like those numbing presentations of “memory work” that Hazel remembered having to learn at school. It was more like the best scholar’s offering at the school concert, a kind of willing public martyrdom, with every inflection, every gesture, rehearsed and ordained.

Hazel started picking up bits and pieces. A rigmarole about fairies, some boy captured by the fairies, then a girl called Fair Jennet falling in love with him. Fair Jennet was giving back talk to her father and wrapping herself in her mantle green and going to meet her lover. Then it seemed to be Halloween and the dead of night, and a great charge of fairies came on horseback. Not dainty fairies, by any means, but a fierce lot who rode through the night making a horrid uproar.

Judy sat with the cake plate in her lap and ate a large slice of fruitcake. Then she ate another—still with a fiery, unforgiving face. When she had bent to offer the cake, Hazel had smelled her body—not a bad smell, but nevertheless a smell that washing and deodorizing had made uncommon. It poured out hotly from between the girl’s flushed breasts.

Antoinette, not bothering to be very quiet, possessed herself of a tiny brass ashtray, got her cigarettes out of her bag, and began to smoke. (She said she allowed herself three cigarettes a day.)

Hazel thought that there was no use asking anymore about Jack. Somebody around here probably remembered him—somebody who had seen him go down the road on the motorbike or talked to him one night in the pub. But how was she to find that person? It was probably true that Antoinette had forgotten him. Antoinette had enough on her mind, with what was going on now. As for what was on Miss Dobie’s mind, that seemed to be picked out of the air, all willfulness and caprice. An elf-man in her yammering poem took precedence now.