Friend of My Youth

carefully.”
    They changed places—Hazel was rather surprised that Antoinette had agreed—and Hazel drove slowly, while Antoinette sat with her eyes closed most of the time and her hands against her mouth. Her skin showed gray through the pink makeup. But near the edge of town she opened her eyes and dropped her hands and said something like “This is Cathaw.”
    They were going past a low field by the river. “Where in that poem,” Antoinette said—speaking hastily, as one might if one was afraid of being overtaken by further vomiting—“the girl goes out and loses her maidenhead, and so on.”
    The field was brown and soggy and surrounded by what looked like council housing.
    Hazel was surprised to recall a whole verse now. She could hear Miss Dobie’s voice chanting it hard at them.
    “Now, gowd rings ye may buy, maidens
,
    Green mantles ye may spin;
    But, gin ye lose your maidenheid
,
    Ye’ll ne’er get that agen!”
    A ton of words Miss Dobie had, to bury anything.
    “Antoinette isn’t well,” Hazel said to Dudley Brown when she came into the lounge that evening. “She has a sick headache. We drove out today to see Miss Dobie.”
    “She left me a note to that effect,” Dudley said, setting out the whisky and water.
    Antoinette was in bed. Hazel had helped her get there, because she was too dizzy to manage by herself. Antoinette got into bed in her slip and asked for a facecloth, so that she could remove what was left of her makeup and not spoil the pillowcase. Then she asked for a towel, in case she should be sick again. She told Hazel how to hang up her suit—still the same one, and still miraculously unspotted—on its padded hanger. Her bedroom was mean and narrow. It looked out on the stucco wall of the bank next door. She slept on a metal-frame cot. On the dresser was displayed all the paraphernalia that she used to color her hair. Would she be upset when she realized that Hazel must have seen it? Probably not. She might have forgotten that lie already. Or she might be prepared to go on lying—like a queen, who makes whatever she says the truth.
    “She had the woman from the kitchen go up to see about dinner,” Hazel said. “It’ll be on the sideboard, and we’re to help ourselves.”
    “Help ourselves to this first,” Dudley said. He had brought the whisky bottle.
    “Miss Dobie was not able to remember my husband.”
    “Was she not?”
    “A girl was there. A young woman, rather. Who looks after Miss Dobie.”
    “Judy Armstrong,” Dudley said.
    She waited to see if he could keep himself from asking more, if he could force himself to change the subject. He couldn’t. “Has she still got her wonderful red hair?”
    “Yes,” Hazel said. “Did you think she would have shaved it off?”
    “Girls do terrible things to their hair. I see sights every day. But Judy is not that sort.”
    “She served a very nice dark fruitcake,” Hazel said. “Antoinette mentioned bringing a piece home to you. But I think she forgot. I think she was already feeling ill when we left.”
    “Perhaps the cake was poisoned,” Dudley said. “The way it often is, in the stories.”
    “Judy ate two slices herself, and I ate some and Miss Dobie ate some, so I don’t think so.”
    “Perhaps only Antoinette’s.”
    “Antoinette didn’t have any. Just some wine, and a cigarette.”
    After a silent moment Dudley said, “How did Miss Dobie entertain you?”
    “She recited a long poem.”
    “Aye, she’ll do that. Ballads, they’re rightly called, not poems. Do you recall which one it was?”
    The lines that came into Hazel’s mind were those concerning the maidenhead. But she rejected them as being too crudely malicious and tried to find others.
    “First dip me in a stand of milk?” she said tentatively. “Then in a stand of water?”
    “But hold me fast, don’t let me pass,” Dudley cried, very pleased. “I’ll be your bairn’s father!”
    Quite as tactless as the first lines she had thought of, but he did not seem to mind. Indeed, he threw himself back in his chair, looking released, and lifted his head and started reciting—thesame poem that Miss Dobie had recited, but spoken with calm relish now, and with style, in a warm, sad, splendid male voice. His accent broadened, but, having absorbed a good deal of the poem once already, almost against her will, Hazel was able to make out every word. The boy captured by fairies, living a life of adventures and advantages—not able to