Friend of My Youth

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 degreeand 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