Friend of My Youth (11 page)

Ruins of “Kirk of the Forest.” Old graveyard, William Wallace declared Guardian of Scotland here, 1298
.

Courthouse where Sir Walter Scott dispensed judgment, 1799–1832
.
Philiphaugh? 1945
.

Gray town. Some old gray stone like Edinburgh. Also grayish-brown stucco, not so old. Library once the jail (gaol)
.

Country around very hilly, almost low mountains. Colors tan, lilac, gray. Some dark patches, look like pine. Reforestation? Woods at edge of town, oak, beech, birch, holly. Leaves turned, golden-brown. Sun out, but raw wind and damp feels like coming out of the ground. Nice clean little river
.

One gravestone sunk deep, crooked, name, date, etc., all gone, just skull and crossbones. Girls with pink hair going by, smoking
.

Hazel struck out the word “judgment” and wrote in “justice.” Then she struck out “lilac,” which seemed too flimsy a word to describe the gloomy, beautiful hills. She didn’t know what to write in its place.

She had pressed the button beside the fireplace, hoping to order a drink, but nobody had come.

Hazel was cold in this room. When she checked into the Royal Hotel, earlier in the afternoon, a woman with a puff of gilt hair and a smooth, tapered face had given her the once-over, told her what time they served dinner, and pointed out the upstairs lounge as the place where she was to sit—ruling out, in this way, the warm and noisy pub downstairs. Hazel wondered if women guests were considered too respectable to sit in the pub. Or was she not respectable enough? She was wearing corduroy pants and tennis shoes and a windbreaker. The gilt-haired woman wore a trim pale-blue suit with glittery buttons, white lacy nylons, and high-heeled shoes that would have killed Hazel in half an hour. When she came in after a couple of hours’ walk, she thought about putting on her one dress but decided not to be intimidated. She did change into a pair of black velvet pants and a silk shirt, to show she was making some effort, and she brushed and repinned her hair, which was gray as much as fair now, and fine enough to have got into an electric tangle in the wind.

Hazel was a widow. She was in her fifties, and she taught biology in the high school in Walley, Ontario. This year she was on a leave of absence. She was a person you would not be surprised to find sitting by herself in a corner of the world where she didn’t belong, writing things in a notebook to prevent the rise of panic. She had found that she was usually optimistic in the morning but that panic was a problem at dusk. This sort of panic had nothing to do with money or tickets or arrangements or whatever dangers she might encounter in a strange place. It had to do with a falling-off of purpose, and the question why am I here? One could as reasonably ask that question at home, and some people do, but generally enough is going on there to block it out.

Now she noticed the date that she’d written beside “Philiphaugh”: 1945. Instead of 1645. She thought that she must have been influenced by the style of this room. Glass-brick windows, dark-red carpet with a swirly pattern, cretonne curtains with red flowers and green leaves on a beige background. Blocky,
dusty, dark upholstered furniture. Floor lamps. All of this could have been here when Hazel’s husband, Jack, used to come to this hotel, during the war. Something must have been in the fireplace then—a gas fire, or else a real grate, for coal. Nothing was there now. And the piano had probably been kept open, in tune, for dancing. Or else they’d had a gramophone, with 78s. The room would have been full of servicemen and girls. She could see the girls’ dark lipstick and rolled-up hair and good crêpe dresses with their sweetheart necklines or detachable white-lace collars. The men’s uniforms would be stiff and scratchy against the girls’ arms and cheeks, and they would have a sour, smoky, exciting smell. Hazel was fifteen when the war ended, so she did not get to many parties of that sort. And even when she did get to one, she was too young to be taken seriously, and had to dance with other girls or maybe a friend’s older brother. The smell and feel of a uniform must have been just something she imagined.

Walley is a lake port. Hazel grew up there and so did Jack, but she never knew him, or saw him to remember, until he turned up at a high-school dance escorting the English teacher, who was one of the chaperones. By that time Hazel was seventeen. When Jack danced with her, she was so nervous and excited that she shook. He asked her what the matter was, and she had to say that she thought she was getting the flu. Jack negotiated with the English teacher and took Hazel home.

They were married when Hazel was eighteen. In the first four years of marriage they had three children. No more after that. (Jack told people that Hazel had found out what was causing it.) Jack had gone to work for an appliance-sales-and-repair business as soon as he got out of the Air Force. The business belonged to a friend of his who had not gone overseas. Until the day of his death Jack worked in that place, more or less at the same job. Of course, he had to learn about new things, like microwave ovens.

After she had been married for about fifteen years, Hazel started to take extension courses. Then she commuted to a college fifty miles away, as a full-time student. She got her degree
and became a teacher, which was what she had meant to do before she got married.

Jack must have been in this room. He could easily have looked at these curtains, sat in this chair.

A man came in, at last, to ask what she would like to drink.

Scotch, she said. That made him smile.

“Whisky’ll do it.”

Of course. You don’t ask for Scotch whisky in Scotland.

Jack was stationed near Wolverhampton, but he used to come up here on his leaves. He came to look up, and then to stay with, the only relative in Britain that he knew of—a cousin of his mother’s, a woman named Margaret Dobie. She was not married, she lived alone; she was middle-aged then, so she would be quite old now, if indeed she was still alive. Jack didn’t keep up with her after he went back to Canada—he was not a letter writer. He talked about her, though, and Hazel found her name and address when she was going through his things. She wrote Margaret Dobie a letter, just to say that Jack had died and that he had often mentioned his visits to Scotland. The letter was never answered.

Jack and this cousin seemed to have hit it off. He stayed with her in a large, cold, neglected house on a hilly farm, where she lived with her dogs and sheep. He borrowed her motorbike and rode around the countryside. He rode into town, to this very hotel, to drink and make friends or get into scraps with other servicemen or go after girls. Here he met the hotelkeeper’s daughter Antoinette.

Antoinette was sixteen, too young to be allowed to go to parties or to be permitted in the bar. She had to sneak out to meet Jack behind the hotel or on the path along the river. A most delectable, heedless, soft, and giddy sort of girl.
Little Antoinette
. Jack talked about her in front of Hazel and to Hazel as easily as if he had known her not just in another country but in another world. Your Blond Bundle, Hazel used to call her. She imagined Antoinette wearing some sort of woolly pastel sleeper outfit, and she thought that she would have had silky, babyish hair, a soft, bruised mouth.

Hazel herself was a blonde when Jack first met her, though not a giddy one. She was shy and prudish and intelligent. Jack triumphed easily over the shyness and the prudery, and he was not as irritated as most men were, then, by the intelligence. He took it as a kind of joke.

Now the man was back, with a tray. On the tray were two whiskies and a jug of water.

He served Hazel her drink and took the other drink himself. He settled into the chair opposite her.

So he wasn’t the barman. He was a stranger who had bought her a drink. She began to protest.

“I rang the bell,” she said. “I thought you had come because I rang the bell.”

“That bell is useless,” he said with satisfaction. “No. Antoinette told me she had put you in here, so I thought I’d come and inquire if you were thirsty.”

Antoinette.

“Antoinette,” Hazel said. “Is that the lady I was speaking to this afternoon?” She felt a drop inside: her heart or her stomach or her courage—whatever it is that drops.

“Antoinette,” he said. “That’s the lady.”

“And is she the manager of the hotel?”

“She is the owner of the hotel.”

The problem was just the opposite of what she had expected. It was not that people had moved away and the buildings were gone and had left no trace. Just the opposite. The very first person that she had spoken to that afternoon had been Antoinette.

She should have known, though—she should have known that such a tidy woman, Antoinette, wouldn’t employ this fellow as a barman. Look at his baggy brown pants and the burn hole in the front of his V-neck sweater. Underneath the sweater was a dingy shirt and tie. But he didn’t look ill cared for or downhearted. Instead, he looked like a man who thought so well of himself that he could afford to be a bit slovenly. He had a stocky,
strong body, a square, flushed face, fluffy white hair springing up in a vigorous frill around his forehead. He was pleased that she had mistaken him for the barman, as if that might be a kind of trick he’d played on her. In the classroom she would have picked him for a possible troublemaker, not the rowdy, or the silly, or the positively sneering and disgusted kind, but the kind who sits at the back of the class, smart and indolent, making remarks you can’t quite be sure of. Mild, shrewd, determined subversion—one of the hardest things to root out of a classroom. What you have to do—Hazel had said this to younger teachers, or those who tended to get discouraged more easily than she did—what you have to do is find some way of firing up their intelligence. Make it a tool, not a toy. The intelligence of such a person is underemployed.

What did she care about this man anyway? All the world is not a classroom. I’ve got your number, she said to herself; but I don’t have to do anything about it.

She was thinking about him to keep her mind off Antoinette.

He told her that his name was Dudley Brown and that he was a solicitor. He said that he lived here (she took that to mean he had a room in the hotel) and that his office was just down the street. A permanent guest—a widower, then, or a bachelor. She thought a bachelor. That twinkly, edgy air of satisfaction didn’t usually survive married life.

Too young, in spite of the white hair, a few years too young, to have been in the war.

“So have you come over here looking for your roots?” he said. He gave the word its most exaggerated American pronunciation.

“I’m Canadian,” Hazel said quite pleasantly. “We don’t say ‘roots’ that way.”

“Ah, I beg your pardon,” he said. “I’m afraid we do that. We do tend to lump you all together, you and the Americans.”

Then she started to tell him her business—why not? She
told him that her husband had been here during the war and that they had always planned to make this trip together, but they hadn’t, and her husband had died, and now she had come by herself. This was only half true. She had often suggested such a trip to Jack, but he had always said no. She thought this was because of her—he didn’t want to do it with her. She took things more personally than she ought to have done, for a long time. He probably meant just what he said. He said, “No, it wouldn’t be the same.”

He was wrong if he meant that people wouldn’t be in place, right where they used to be. Even now, when Dudley Brown asked the name of the cousin in the country and Hazel said Margaret Dobie, Miss Dobie, but in all probability she’s dead, the man just laughed. He laughed and shook his head and said, Oh, no, by no means, indeed not.

“Maggie Dobie is far from dead. She’s a very old lady, certainly, but I don’t believe she’s got any thought of dying. She lives out on the same land she’s always lived on, though it’s a different house. She’s pretty sound.”

“She didn’t answer my letter.”

“Ah. She wouldn’t.”

“Then I guess she wouldn’t want a visitor, either?”

She almost wanted him to say no.
Miss Dobie is very much the recluse, I’m afraid
.
No, no visitors
. Why, when she’d come so far?

“Well, if you drove up on your own, I don’t know, that would be one thing,” Dudley Brown said. “I don’t know how she would take it. But if I was to ring up and explain about you, and then we took a run out, then I think you’d be made most welcome. Would you care to? It’s a lovely drive out, too. Pick a day when it isn’t raining.”

“That would be very kind.”

“Ah, it isn’t far.”

In the dining room, Dudley Brown ate at one little table, and Hazel at another. This was a pretty room, with blue walls and
deep-set windows looking out over the town square. Hazel sensed none of the gloom and neglect that prevailed in the lounge. Antoinette served them. She offered the vegetables in silver serving dishes with rather difficult implements. She was very correct, even disdainful. When not serving, she stood by the sideboard, alert, upright, hair stiff in its net of spray, suit spotless, feet slim and unswollen in the high-heeled shoes.

Dudley said that he would not eat the fish. Hazel, too, had refused it.

“You see, even the Americans,” Dudley said. “Even the Americans won’t eat that frozen stuff. And you’d think they’d be used to it; they have everything frozen.”

“I’m Canadian,” Hazel said. She thought he’d apologize, remembering he’d been told this once already. But neither he nor Antoinette paid any attention to her. They had embarked on an argument whose tone of practiced acrimony made them sound almost married.

“Well, I wouldn’t eat anything else,” Antoinette said. “I wouldn’t eat any fish that hadn’t been frozen. And I wouldn’t serve it. Maybe it was all right in the old days, when we didn’t have all the chemicals we have now in the water, and all the pollution. The fish now are so full of pollution that we need the freezing to kill it. That’s right, isn’t it?” she said, turning to include Hazel. “They know all about that in America.”

“I just preferred the roast,” Hazel said.