Friend of My Youth

quite an elderly person,” Antoinette said—disapprovingly, Hazel thought. “She lives away up in the valley.”
    “My husband’s name was Jack.” Hazel waited, but she didn’t get any response. The coffee was bad, which was a surprise, since the rest of the meal had been so good.
    “Jack Curtis,” she said. “His mother was a Dobie. He used to come here on his leaves and stay with this cousin and he would come into town in the evenings. He used to come here, to the Royal Hotel.”
    “It was a busy place during the war,” Antoinette said. “Or so they tell me.”
    “He would talk about the Royal Hotel and he mentioned you, too,” Hazel said. “I was surprised when I heard your name. I didn’t think you’d still be here.”
    “I haven’t been here the whole time,” Antoinette said—as if to suppose that she had been would be to insult her. “I livedin England while I was married. That’s why I don’t talk the way they do around here.”
    “My husband is dead,” Hazel said. “He mentioned you. He said your father owned the hotel. He said you were a blonde.”
    “I still am,” Antoinette said. “My hair is just the same color it always was; I never have had to do anything to it. I can’t remember the war years very well. I was such a wee little girl at the time. I don’t think I was born when the war started. When did the war start? I was born in 1940.”
    Two lies in one speech, hardly any doubt about it. Blatant, smooth-faced, deliberate, self-serving lies. But how could Hazel tell if Antoinette was lying about not knowing Jack? Antoinette would have no choice but to say that, given the lie she must have told all the time about her age.
    For the next three days it rained, off and on. When it wasn’t raining, Hazel walked around the town, looking at the exploded cabbages in kitchen gardens, the unlined flowered window curtains, and even at such things as a bowl of waxed fruit on the table in a cramped, polished dining room. She must have thought that she was invisible, the way she slowed down and peered. She got used to the houses’ being all strung together. At the turn of the street she might get a sudden, misty view of the enthralling hills. She walked along the river and got into a wood that was all beech trees, with bark like elephant skin and bumps like swollen eyes. They gave a kind of gray light to the air.
    When the rains came, she stayed in the library, reading history. She read about the old monasteries that were here in Selkirk County once, and the Kings with their Royal Forest, and all the fighting with the English. Flodden Field. She knew some things already from the reading she had done in the Encyclopaedia Britannica before she ever left home. She knew who William Wallace was, and that Macbeth killed Duncan in battle instead of murdering him in bed.
    Dudley and Hazel had a whisky in the lounge now, everynight before dinner. An electric radiator had appeared, and was set up in front of the fireplace. After dinner Antoinette sat with them. They all had their coffee together. Later in the evening Dudley and Hazel would have another whisky. Antoinette watched television.
    “What a long history,” said Hazel politely. She told Dudley something of what she’d read and looked at. “When I first saw the name Philiphaugh on that building across the street I didn’t know what it meant.”
    “At Philiphaugh the fray began,” Dudley said, obviously quoting. “Do you know now?”
    “The Covenanters,” Hazel said.
    “Do you know what happened after the battle of Philiphaugh? The Covenanters hanged all their prisoners. Right out there in the town square, under the dining-room windows. Then they butchered all the women and children on the field. A lot of families travelled with Montrose’s army, because so many of them were Irish mercenaries. Catholics, of course. No—they didn’t butcher all of them. Some they marched up toward Edinburgh. But on the way they decided to march them off a bridge.”
    He told her this in a most genial voice, with a smile. Hazel had met this smile before and she had never been sure what it meant. Was a man who smiled in this way daring you not to believe, not to acknowledge, not to agree, that this was how things must be, forever?
    Jack was a hard person to argue with. He put up with all kinds of nonsense—from customers, from the children, probably from Hazel as well. But he would get angry every year on Remembrance Day, because the local