by Alice Munro
“Antoinette,” he said. “That’s the lady.”
“And is she the manager of the hotel?”
“She is the owner of the hotel.”
The problem was just the opposite of what she had expected. It was not that people had moved away and the buildings were gone and had left no trace. Just the opposite. The very first person that she had spoken to that afternoon had been Antoinette.
She should have known, though—she should have known that such a tidy woman, Antoinette, wouldn’t employ this fellow as a barman. Look at his baggy brown pants and the burn hole in the front of his V-neck sweater. Underneath the sweater was a dingy shirt and tie. But he didn’t look ill cared for or downhearted. Instead, he looked like a man who thought so well of himself that he could afford to be a bit slovenly. He had a stocky, strong body, a square, flushed face, fluffy white hair springing up in a vigorous frill around his forehead. He was pleased that she had mistaken him for the barman, as if that might be a kind of trick he’d played on her. In the classroom she would have picked him for a possible troublemaker, not the rowdy, or the silly, or the positively sneering and disgusted kind, but the kind who sits at the back of the class, smart and indolent, making remarks you can’t quite be sure of. Mild, shrewd, determined subversion—one of the hardest things to root out of a classroom. What you have to do—Hazel had said this to younger teachers, or those who tended to get discouraged more easily than she did—what you have to do is find some way of firing up their intelligence. Make it a tool, not a toy. The intelligence of such a person is underemployed.
What did she care about this man anyway? All the world is not a classroom. I’ve got your number, she said to herself; but I don’t have to do anything about it.
She was thinking about him to keep her mind off Antoinette.
He told her that his name was Dudley Brown and that he was a solicitor. He said that he lived here (she took that to mean he had a room in the hotel) and that his office was just down the street. A permanent guest—a widower, then, or a bachelor. She thought a bachelor. That twinkly, edgy air of satisfaction didn’t usually survive married life.
Too young, in spite of the white hair, a few years too young, to have been in the war.
“So have you come over here looking for your roots?” he said. He gave the word its most exaggerated American pronunciation.
“I’m Canadian,” Hazel said quite pleasantly. “We don’t say ‘roots’ that way.”
“Ah, I beg your pardon,” he said. “I’m afraid we do that. We do tend to lump you all together, you and the Americans.”
Then she started to tell him her business—why not? She told him that her husband had been here during the war and that they had always planned to make this trip together, but they hadn’t, and her husband had died, and now she had come by herself. This was only half true. She had often suggested such a trip to Jack, but he had always said no. She thought this was because of her—he didn’t want to do it with her. She took things more personally than she ought to have done, for a long time. He probably meant just what he said. He said, “No, it wouldn’t be the same.”
He was wrong if he meant that people wouldn’t be in place, right where they used to be. Even now, when Dudley Brown asked the name of the cousin in the country and Hazel said Margaret Dobie, Miss Dobie, but in all probability she’s dead, the man just laughed. He laughed and shook his head and said, Oh, no, by no means, indeed not.
“Maggie Dobie is far from dead. She’s a very old lady, certainly, but I don’t believe she’s got any thought of dying. She lives out on the same land she’s always lived on, though it’s a different house. She’s pretty sound.”
“She didn’t answer my letter.”
“Ah. She wouldn’t.”
“Then I guess she wouldn’t want a visitor, either?”
She almost wanted him to say no. Miss Dobie is very much the recluse, I’m afraid. No, no visitors. Why, when she’d come so far?
“Well, if you drove up on your own, I don’t know, that would be one thing,” Dudley Brown said. “I don’t know how she would take it. But if I was to ring up and explain about you, and then we took a run out, then I think you’d be made most welcome. Would you care to? It’s a lovely drive out, too. Pick a day when it isn’t raining.”
“That would be very kind.”
“Ah, it isn’t far.”
In the dining room, Dudley Brown ate at one little table, and Hazel at another. This was a pretty room, with blue walls and deep-set windows looking out over the town square. Hazel sensed none of the gloom and neglect that prevailed in the lounge. Antoinette served them. She offered the vegetables in silver serving dishes with rather difficult implements. She was very correct, even disdainful. When not serving, she stood by the sideboard, alert, upright, hair stiff in its net of spray, suit spotless, feet slim and unswollen in the high-heeled shoes.
Dudley said that he would not eat the fish. Hazel, too, had refused it.
“You see, even the Americans,” Dudley said. “Even the Americans won’t eat that frozen stuff. And you’d think they’d be used to it; they have everything frozen.”
“I’m Canadian,” Hazel said. She thought he’d apologize, remembering he’d been told this once already. But neither he nor Antoinette paid any attention to her. They had embarked on an argument whose tone of practiced acrimony made them sound almost married.
“Well, I wouldn’t eat anything else,” Antoinette said. “I wouldn’t eat any fish that hadn’t been frozen. And I wouldn’t serve it. Maybe it was all right in the old days, when we didn’t have all the chemicals we have now in the water, and all the pollution. The fish now are so full of pollution that we need the freezing to kill it. That’s right, isn’t it?” she said, turning to include Hazel. “They know all about that in America.”
“I just preferred the roast,” Hazel said.
“So your only safe fish is a frozen one,” Antoinette said, ignoring her. “And another thing: they take all of the best fish for freezing. The rejects is all that is left to sell fresh.”
“Give me your rejects, then,” Dudley said. “Let me chance it with the chemicals.”
“More fool you. I wouldn’t put a bite of fresh fish in my mouth.”
“You wouldn’t get a chance to. Not around here.”
While the law was being laid down in this way about the fish, Dudley Brown once or twice caught Hazel’s eye. He kept a very straight face, which indicated, more than a smirk would have done, a settled mixture of affection and contempt. Hazel kept looking at Antoinette’s suit. Antoinette’s suit made her think of Joan Crawford. Not the style of the suit but its perfect condition. She had read an interview with Joan Crawford, years ago, that described many little tricks Joan Crawford had for keeping hair, clothes, footwear, fingernails in a most perfect condition. She remembered something about the way to iron seams. Never iron seams open. Antoinette looked like a woman who would have all that down pat.
She hadn’t, after all, expected to find Antoinette still babyish and boisterous and charming. Far from it. Hazel had imagined—and not without satisfaction—a dumpy woman wearing false teeth. (Jack used to recall Antoinette’s habit of popping caramels into her mouth between kisses, and making him wait until she’d sucked the sweetness out of the last shred.) A good-natured soul, chatty, humdrum, a waddly little grandmother—that was what she had thought would be left of Antoinette. And here was this pared-down, vigilant, stupid-shrewd woman, sprayed and painted and preserved to within an inch of her life. Tall, too. It wasn’t likely she’d been any kind of cozy bundle, even at sixteen.
But how much would you find in Hazel of the girl Jack had taken home from the dance? How much of Hazel Joudry, a pale, squeaky-voiced girl who held her fair hair back with two bows of pink celluloid, in Hazel Curtis? Hazel was thin, too—wiry, not brittle like Antoinette. She had muscles that came from gardening and hiking and cross-country skiing. These activities had also dried and wrinkled and roughened her skin
, and at some point she’d stopped bothering about it. She threw out all the colored pastes and pencils and magic unguents she had bought in moments of bravado or despair. She let her hair grow out whatever color it liked and pinned it up at the back of her head. She broke open the shell of her increasingly doubtful and expensive prettiness; she got out. Years before Jack died, even, she did that. It had something to do with how she took hold of her life. She has said and thought that there came a time when she had to take hold of her life, and she has urged the same course on others. She urges action, exercise, direction. She doesn’t mind letting people know that when she was in her thirties she had what used to be called a nervous breakdown. For nearly two months she was unable to leave the house. She stayed in bed much of the time. She crayoned the pictures in children’s coloring books. That was all she could do to control her fear and unfocussed grief. Then she took hold. She sent for college catalogues. What got her going again? She doesn’t know. She has to say she doesn’t know. Maybe she just got bored, she has to say. Maybe she just got bored, having her breakdown.
She knew that when she had got out of bed (this is what she doesn’t say), she was leaving some part of herself behind. She suspected that this was a part that had to do with Jack. But she didn’t think then that any abandonment had to be permanent. Anyway, it couldn’t be helped.
When he had finished his roast and vegetables, Dudley got up abruptly. He nodded to Hazel and said to Antoinette, “I’m off now, my lamb.” Did he really say that—“lamb”? Whatever it was, it had the satirical inflection that an endearment would need between him and Antoinette. Perhaps he said “lass.” People did say “lass” here. The driver on the bus from Edinburgh had said it to Hazel, that afternoon.
Antoinette served Hazel a piece of apricot flan and started immediately to fill her in on Dudley. People were supposed to be so reserved in Britain—that was what Hazel had been led to believe, by her reading, if not by Jack—but it didn’t always seem to be the case.
“Off to see his mother before she’s tucked up for the night,” Antoinette said. “Always off home early on a Sunday night.”
“He doesn’t live here?” Hazel said. “I mean, in the hotel?”
“He didn’t say that, did he?” said Antoinette. “I’m sure he didn’t say that. He has his own home. He has a lovely home. He shares it with his mother. She’s in bed all the time now—she’s one of those ones who have to have everything done for them. He’s got a day nurse for her and a night nurse, too. But he always looks in and has a chat Sunday nights, even if she doesn’t know him from Adam. He must have meant that he gets his meals here. He couldn’t expect the nurse to get his meals. She wouldn’t do it, anyway. They won’t do anything extra at all for you now. They want to know just what they’re supposed to do, and they won’t do a tick more. It’s just the same with what I get here. If I say to them, ‘Sweep the floor,’ and I don’t say, ‘Put up the broom when you’re finished,’ they’ll just leave the broom lying.”
Now is the time, Hazel thought. She wouldn’t be able to say it if she put if off longer.
“My husband used to come here,” she said. “He used to come here during the war.”
“Well, that’s a long time ago, isn’t it? Would you like your coffee now?”
“Please,” Hazel said. “He came here first on account of having a relative here. A Miss Dobie. Mr. Brown seemed to know who she would be.”
“She’s 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 lived in 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, every night 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 paper would run some lugubrious story about the war.
“NOBODY WINS IN A WAR” was the headline of one such story. Jack threw the paper on the floor.
“Holy Christ! Do they think it’d be all the same if Hitler had won?”
He was angry, too, when he s
aw the Peace Marchers on television, though he usually didn’t say anything, just hissed at the screen in a controlled, fed-up way. As far as Hazel could see, what he thought was that a lot of people—women, of course, but, as time went on, more and more men, too—were determined to spoil the image of the best part of his life. They were spoiling it with pious regrets and reproofs and a certain amount of out-and-out lying. None of them would admit that any of the war was fun. Even at the Legion you were supposed to put on a long face about it; you weren’t supposed to say anymore that you wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
When they were first married, Jack and Hazel used to go to dances, or to the Legion, or just to other couples’ houses, and sooner or later the men would begin telling their stories about the war. Jack did not tell the most stories, or the longest, and his were never thick with heroics and death staring you in the face. Usually he talked about things that were funny. But he was on top then, because he had been a bomber pilot, which was one of the most admired things for a man to have been. He had flown two full tours of operations (“ops”—even the women referred to “ops”). That is, he had flown on fifty bombing raids.
Hazel used to sit with the other young wives and listen, meek and proud and—in her case, at least—distracted by desire. These husbands came to them taut with proved courage. Hazel pitied women who had given themselves to lesser men.
Ten or fifteen years later the same women sat with strained faces or caught one another’s eyes or even absented themselves (Hazel did, sometimes) when the stories were being told. The band of men who told these stories had shrunk, and it shrank further. But Jack was still at the center of it. He grew more descriptive, thoughtful, some might say long-winded. He recalled now the noise of the planes at the American airfield close by, the mighty sound of them warming up in the early dawn and then taking off, three by three, flying out over the North Sea in their great formations. The Flying Fortresses. The Americans bombed by day, and their planes never flew alone. Why not?