Friend of My Youth

breasts.
    “Here we are, then, Judy,” Antoinette said, speaking heartily as if to a slightly deaf or mutinous person. “Dudley couldn’t come. He was too busy. This is the lady he told you about on the phone.”
    Judy blushed as she shook hands. Her eyebrows were very fair, almost invisible, giving her dark-brown eyes an undefended look. She seemed dismayed by something—was it the fact of visitors, or just the flamboyance of her own spread-out hair? But she was the one who must have brushed it to this gloss and arranged it on show.
    Antoinette asked her if Miss Dobie was well.
    A clot of phlegm thickened Judy’s voice as she tried to answer. She cleared her throat and said, “Miss Dobie’s kept well all this year.”
    Now there was some awkwardness about getting their coats off—Judy not knowing quite when to reach for them, or how to direct Antoinette and Hazel where to go. But Antoinette took charge and led the way down the hall to the sitting room, which was full of patterned upholstery, brass and china ornaments, pampas grass, peacock feathers, dried flowers, clocks and pictures and cushions. In the midst of this an old woman sat in a high-backed chair, against the light of the windows, waiting for them. Though she was old, she was not at all shrivelled. She had thick arms and legs and a bushy halo of white hair. Her skin was brown, like the skin of a russet apple, and she had large purplishpouches under her eyes. But the eyes themselves were bright and shifty, as if some intelligence there looked out just when it wanted to—something as quick and reckless as a squirrel darting back and forth behind this heavy, warty, dark old face.
    “So you are the lady from Canada,” she said to Antoinette. She had a strong voice. Spots on her lips were like blue-black grapes.
    “No, that’s not me,” Antoinette said. “I’m from the Royal Hotel, and you’ve met me before. I’m the friend of Dudley Brown’s.” She took a bottle of wine—it was Madeira—out of her bag and presented it, as a credential. “This is the kind you like, isn’t it?”
    “All the way from Canada,” Miss Dobie said, taking possession of the bottle. She still wore men’s shoes—she was wearing them now, unlaced.
    Antoinette repeated what she had said before, in a louder voice, and introduced Hazel.
    “Judy! Judy, you know where the glasses are!” Miss Dobie said. Judy was just coming in with a tray. On it was a stack of cups and saucers, a teapot, a plate of sliced fruitcake, milk, and sugar. The demand for the glasses seemed to throw her off course, and she looked around distractedly. Antoinette relieved her of the tray.
    “I think she’d like a taste of the wine first, Judy,” Antoinette said. “Isn’t this nice! Did you make the cake yourself? May I take a piece back to Dudley when we go? He’s so fond of fruitcake. He’ll believe it was made for him. That can’t be true, since he only called this morning and fruitcake takes a lot longer than that, doesn’t it? But he’ll never know the difference.”
    “I know who you are now,” Miss Dobie said. “You’re the woman from the Royal Hotel. Did you and Dudley Brown ever get married?”
    “I am already married,” Antoinette said irritably. “I would get a divorce, but I don’t know where my husband is.” Her voice quickly smoothed out, so that she ended up seeming to reassure Miss Dobie. “Perhaps in time.”
    “So that’s why you went to Canada,” Miss Dobie said.
    Judy came in with some wineglasses. Anybody could see that her hands were too unsteady to pour the wine. Antoinette got the bottle out of Miss Dobie’s clasp and held a wineglass up to the light.
    “If you could just fetch me a napkin, Judy,” Antoinette said. “Or a clean tea towel. Mind it’s a clean one!”
    “My husband, Jack,” Hazel broke in resolutely, speaking to Miss Dobie—“my husband, Jack Curtis, was in the Air Force, and he used to visit you during the war.”
    Miss Dobie picked this up all right.
    “Why would your husband want to visit me?”
    “He wasn’t my husband then. He was quite young then. He was a cousin of yours. From Canada. Jack Curtis, Curtis. But you may have had a lot of different relatives visiting you, over the years.”
    “We never had visitors. We were too far off the beaten track,” Miss Dobie said firmly. “I lived at home with Mother and Father and then I lived with Mother and then I lived alone. I gave up on the sheep and went to work