Friend of My Youth

in town. I worked at the post office.”
    “That’s right, she did,” Antoinette said thoughtfully, handing round the wine.
    “But I never lived in town,” Miss Dobie said, with an obscure, vengeful-sounding pride. “No. I rode in every day, all that way on the motorbike.”
    “Jack mentioned your motorbike,” Hazel said, to encourage her.
    “I lived in the old house then. Terrible people live there now.”
    She held out her glass for more wine.
    “Jack used to borrow your motorbike,” Hazel said. “And he went fishing with you, and when you cleaned the fish, the dogs ate the fish heads.”
    “Ugh,” Antoinette said.
    “I’m thankful I can’t see it from here,” Miss Dobie said.
    “The house,” Antoinette explained, in a regretful undertone. “The couple that live in it are not married. They have fixed it up but they are not married.” And, as if naturally reminded, she said to Judy, “How is Tania?”
    “She’s fine,” said Judy, who was not having any wine. She lifted the plate of fruitcake and set it down. “She goes to kindergarten now.”
    “She goes on the bus,” Miss Dobie said. “The bus comes and picks her up right at the door.”
    “Isn’t that nice,” Antoinette said.
    “And it brings her back,” Miss Dobie continued impressively. “It brings her back right to the door.”
    “Jack said you had a dog that ate porridge,” Hazel said. “And that one time he borrowed your shoes. I mean Jack did. My husband.”
    Miss Dobie seemed to brood over this for a little while. Then she said, “Tania has the red hair.”
    “She has her mother’s hair,” Antoinette said. “And her mother’s brown eyes. She is Judy all over again.”
    “She is illegitimate,” Miss Dobie said, with the air of somebody sweeping aside a good deal of nonsense. “But Judy brings her up well. Judy is a good worker. I am glad to see that they have a home. It is the innocent ones, anyway, that get caught.”
    Hazel thought that this would finish Judy off completely, send her running to the kitchen. Instead, she seemed to come to a decision. She got up and handed around the cake. The flush had never left her face or her neck or the part of her chest left bare by the party dress. Her skin was burning as if she had been slapped, and her expression, as she bent to each of them with the plate, was that of a child who was furiously, bitterly, contemptuously holding back a howl. Miss Dobie spoke to Hazel. She said, “Can you say any recitations?”
    Hazel had to think for a moment to remember what a recitation was. Then she said that she could not.
    “I will say one, if you like,” Miss Dobie said.
    She put down her empty glass and straightened her shoulders and placed her feet together.
    “Excuse my not rising,” she said.
    She began to speak in a voice that seemed strained and faltering at first but that soon became dogged and preoccupied. Her Scottish pronunciation thickened. She paid less attention to the content of the poem than to the marathon effort of getting it out in the right order—word after word, line after line, verse after verse. Her face darkened further with the effort. But the recitation was not wholly without expression; it was not like those numbing presentations of “memory work” that Hazel remembered having to learn at school. It was more like the best scholar’s offering at the school concert, a kind of willing public martyrdom, with every inflection, every gesture, rehearsed and ordained.
    Hazel started picking up bits and pieces. A rigmarole about fairies, some boy captured by the fairies, then a girl called Fair Jennet falling in love with him. Fair Jennet was giving back talk to her father and wrapping herself in her mantle green and going to meet her lover. Then it seemed to be Halloween and the dead of night, and a great charge of fairies came on horseback. Not dainty fairies, by any means, but a fierce lot who rode through the night making a horrid uproar.
    “Fair Jennet stood, with mind unmoved
,
    The dreary heath upon;
    And louder, louder wax’d the sound
,
    As they came riding on!”
    Judy sat with the cake plate in her lap and ate a large slice of fruitcake. Then she ate another—still with a fiery, unforgiving face. When she had bent to offer the cake, Hazel had smelled her body—not a bad smell, but nevertheless a smell that washing and deodorizing had made uncommon. It poured out hotly from between the girl’s flushed breasts.
    Antoinette, not bothering