Friend of My Youth

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 anddeep-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.
    “So your only safe fish is a frozen one,” Antoinette said, ignoring her. “And another thing: they take all of the best fish for freezing. The rejects is all that is left to sell fresh.”
    “Give me your rejects, then,” Dudley said. “Let me chance it with the chemicals.”
    “More fool you. I wouldn’t put a bite of fresh fish in my mouth.”
    “You wouldn’t get a chance to. Not around here.”
    While the law was being laid down in this way about the fish, Dudley Brown once or twice caught Hazel’s eye. He kept a very straight face, which indicated, more than a smirk wouldhave done, a settled mixture of affection and contempt. Hazel kept looking at Antoinette’s suit. Antoinette’s suit made her think of Joan Crawford. Not the style of the suit but its perfect condition. She had read an interview with Joan Crawford, years ago, that described many little tricks Joan Crawford had for keeping hair, clothes, footwear, fingernails in a most perfect condition. She remembered something about the way to iron seams. Never iron seams open. Antoinette looked like a woman who would have all that down pat.
    She hadn’t, after all, expected to find Antoinette still babyish and boisterous and charming. Far from it. Hazel had imagined—and not without satisfaction—a dumpy woman wearing false teeth. (Jack used to recall Antoinette’s habit of popping caramels into her mouth between kisses, and making him wait