Friend of My Youth

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 justhad 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