A Town Like Alice (4 page)

As I took the certificate I asked curiously, "Did you get any of those things yourself?"

He laughed. "I was one of the lucky ones. All I got was the usual dysentery and malaria, the ordinary type malaria, not cerebral. Overwork was
my
trouble, but other people had that, too. We were in such a jam, for so long. We had hundreds of cases just lying on the floor or bamboo charpoys in palm huts-it was raining almost all the time. No beds, no linen, no equipment, and precious few drugs. You just couldn't rest. You worked till you dropped asleep, and then you got up and went on working. You never came to an end. There was never half an hour when you could slack off and sit and have a smoke, or go for a walk, except by neglecting some poor sod who needed you very badly."

He paused. I sat silent, thinking how easy by comparison my own war had been. "It went on like that for nearly two years," he said. "You got a bit depressed at times, because you couldn't even take time off to go and hear a lecture."

"Did you have lectures?" I asked.

"Oh yes, we used to have a lot of lectures by the chaps in camp. How to grow Cox's Orange Pippins, or the TT motor-cycle races, or Life in Hollywood. They made a difference to the men, the lectures did. But we doctors usually couldn't get to them. I mean, it's not much of an alibi when someone's in convulsions if you're listening to a lecture on Cox's Orange Pippins at the other end of the camp."

I said, "It must have been a terrible experience.

He paused, reflecting. "It was so beautiful," he said. "The Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. You've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains… We used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. However terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if it's beautiful."

When Jean Paget came to see me on Wednesday evening I was ready to report the progress I had made. First I went through one or two formal matters connected with the winding up of the estate, and then I showed her the schedule of the furniture that I had put in store at Ayr. She was not much interested in that. "I should think it had all better be sold, hadn't it?" she remarked. "Could we put it in an auction?"

"Perhaps it would be as well to wait a little before doing that," I suggested. "You may want to set up a house or a flat of your own."

She wrinkled up her nose. "I can't see myself wanting to furnish it with any of Uncle Douglas's stuff, if I did," she said.

However, she agreed not to do anything about that till her own plans were more definite, and we turned to other matters. "I've got your brother's death certificate" I said, and I was going on to tell her what I had done with it when she stopped me.

"What did Donald die of, Mr Strachan?" she asked.

I hesitated for a moment. I did not want to tell so young a woman the unpleasant story I had heard from Dr Ferris. "The cause of death was cholera." I said at last.

She nodded, as if she had been expecting that. "Poor old boy," she said softly. "Not a very nice way to die."

I felt that I must say something to alleviate her distress. "I had a long talk with the doctor who attended him," I told her. "He died quite peacefully, in his sleep."

She stared at me. "Well then, it wasn't cholera," she said. "That's not the way you die of cholera."

I was a little at a loss in my endeavour to spare her unnecessary pain. "He had cholera first, but he recovered. The actual cause of death was probably heart failure, induced by the cholera."

She considered this for a minute. "Did he have anything else?" she asked.

Well, then of course there was nothing for it but to tell her everything I knew. I was amazed at the matter-of-fact way in which she took the unpleasant details and at her knowledge of the treatment of such things as tropical ulcers, until I recollected that this girl had been a prisoner of the Japanese in Malaya, too. "Damn bad luck the ulcer didn't go a bit quicker," she said coolly. "If there'd been an amputation they'd have had to evacuate him from the railway, and then he wouldn't have got the cerebral malaria or the cholera."

"He must have had a wonderfully strong constitution to have survived so much," I said.

"He hadn't," she said positively. "Donald was always getting coughs and colds and things. What he had got was a wonderfully strong sense of humour. I always thought he'd come through, just because of that. Everything that happened to him was a joke."

When I was a young man, girls didn't know about cholera or great ulcers, and I didn't quite know how to deal with her. I turned the conversation back to legal matters, where I was on firmer ground, and showed her how her case for probate was progressing. And presently I took her downstairs and we got a taxi and went over to the club to dine.

I had a reason for entertaining her, that first evening. It was obvious that I was going to have a good deal to do with this young woman in the next few years, and I wanted to find out about her. I knew practically nothing of her education or her background at that time; her knowledge of tropical diseases, for example, had already confused me. I wanted to give her a good dinner with a little wine and get her talking; it was going to make my job as trustee a great deal easier if I knew what her interests were, and how her mind worked. And so I took her to the Ladies Annexe at my club, a decent place where we could dine in our own time without music and talk quietly for a little time after dinner. I find that I get tired if there is a lot of noise and bustling about, as in a restaurant.

I showed her where she could go to wash and tidy up, and while she was doing that I ordered her a sherry. I got up from the table in the drawing-room when she came to me, and gave her a cigarette, and lit it for her, "What did you do over the weekend?" I asked as we sat down. "Did you go out and celebrate?"

She shook her head. "I didn't do anything very much. I'd arranged to meet one of the girls in the office for lunch on Saturday and to go and see the new Bette Davis film at the Curzon, so we did that."

"Did you tell her about your good fortune?"

She shook her head. "I haven't told anybody." She paused, and sipped her sherry; she was managing that and her cigarette quite nicely. "It seems such an improbable story," she said, laughing. "I don't know that I really believe in it myself."

I smiled with her. "Nothing is real till it happens," I observed. "You'll believe that this is true when we send you the first cheque. It would be a great mistake to believe in it too hard before that happens."

"I don't," she laughed. "Except for one thing. I don't believe you'd be wasting so much time on my affairs unless there was something in it."

"It's true enough for that." I paused, and then I said, "Have you thought yet what you are going to do in a month or two when the income from the trust begins? Your monthly cheque, after the tax has been deducted, will be about seventy-five pounds. I take it that you will hardly wish to go on with your present employment when those cheques begin to come in?"

"No…" She sat staring for a minute at the smoke rising from her cigarette. "I don't want to stop working. I wouldn't mind a bit going on with Pack and Levy just as if nothing had happened, if it was a job worth doing," she said. "But - well, it's not. We make ladies' shoes and handbags, Mr Strachan, and small ornamental attache cases for the high-class trade-the sort that sells for thirty guineas in a Bond Street shop to stupid women with more money than sense. Fitted vanity cases in rare leathers, and all that sort of thing. It's all right if you've got to earn your living, working in that sort of place. And it's been interesting, too, learning all about that trade."

"Most jobs are interesting when you are learning them," I said.

She turned to me. "That's true. I've quite enjoyed my time there. But I couldn't go on now, with all this money. One ought to do something more worthwhile, but I don't know what." She drank a little sherry. "I've got no profession, you see - only shorthand and typing, and a bit of book-keeping. I never had any real education-technical education, I mean. Taking a degree, or anything like that."

I thought for a moment. "May I ask a very personal question, Miss Paget?"

"Of course."

"Do you think it likely that you will marry in the near future?"

She smiled. "No, Mr Strachan, I don't think it's very likely that I shall marry at all. One can't say for certain, of course, but I don't think so."

I nodded without comment. "Well then, had you thought about taking a university course?"

Her eyes opened wide. "No-I hadn't thought of that. I couldn't do it, Mr Strachan I'm not clever enough. I couldn't get into a university." She paused. "I was never higher than the middle of my class at school, and I never got into the Sixth."

"It was just a thought," I said. "I wondered if that might attract you."

She shook her head. "I couldn't go back to school again now. I'm much too old."

I smiled at her. "Not quite such an old woman as all that," I observed.

For some reason the little compliment fell flat. "When I compare myself with some of the girls in the office," she said quietly, and there was no laughter in her now, "I know I'm about seventy."

I was finding out something about her now, but to ease the situation I suggested that we should go into dinner. When the ordering was done, I said, "Tell me what happened to you in the war. You were out in Malaya, weren't you?"

She nodded. "I had a job in an office, with the Kuala Perak Plantation Company. That was the company my father worked for, you know. Donald was with them, too."

"What happened to you in the war?" I asked. "Were you a prisoner?"

"A sort of prisoner," she said.

"In a camp?"

"No," she replied. "They left us pretty free." And then she changed the conversation very positively, and said, "What happened to you, Mr Strachan? Were you in London all the time?"

I could not press her to talk about her war experiences if she didn't want to, and so I told her about mine - such as they were. And from that, presently, I found myself telling her about my two sons, Harry on the China station and Martin in Basra, and their war records, and their families and children. "I'm a grandfather three times over," I said ruefully. "There's going to be a fourth soon, I believe."

She laughed. "What does it feel like?"

"Just like it did before," I told her. "You don't feel any different as you get older. Only, you can't do so much."

Presently I got the conversation back on to her own affairs. I pointed out to her what sort of life she would be able to lead upon nine hundred a year. As an instance, I told her that she could have a country cottage in Devonshire and a little car, and a daily maid, and still have money to spare for a moderate amount of foreign travel. "I wouldn't know what to do with myself unless I worked at something," she said. "I've always worked at something, all my life."

I knew of several charitable appeals who would have found a first-class shorthand typist, unpaid, a perfect god-send, and I told her so. She was inclined to be critical about those.

"Surely, if a thing is really worth while, it'll pay," she said. She evidently had quite a strong business instinct latent in her. "It wouldn't need to have an unpaid secretary."

"Charitable organizations like to keep the overheads down," I remarked.

"I shouldn't have thought organizations that haven't got enough margin to pay a secretary can possibly do very much good," she said. "If I'm going to work at anything, I want it to be something really worthwhile."

I told her about the almoner's job at a hospital, and she was very much interested in that. "That's much more like it, Mr Strachan," she said. "I think that's the sort of job one might get stuck into and take really seriously. But I wish it hadn't got to do with sick people. Either you've got a mission for sick people or you haven't, and I think I'm one of the ones who hasn't. But it's worth thinking about."

"Well, you can take your time," I said. "You don't have to do anything in a hurry."

She laughed at me. "I believe that's your guiding rule in life never do anything in a hurry."

I smiled. "You might have a worse rule than that."

With the coffee after dinner I tried her out on the Arts. She knew nothing about music, except that she liked listening to the radio while she sewed. She knew nothing about literature, except that she liked novels with a happy ending. She liked paintings that were a reproduction of something that she knew, but she had never been to the Academy. She knew nothing whatsoever about sculpture. For a young woman with nine hundred a year, in London, she knew little of the arts and graces of social life, which seemed to me to be a pity.

"Would you like to come to the opera one night?" I asked.

She smiled. "Would I understand it?"

"Oh yes. I'll look and see what's on. I'll pick something light, and in English."

She said, "It's terribly nice of you to ask me, but I'm sure you'd be much happier playing bridge."

"Not a bit," I said. "I haven't been to the opera or anything like that for years."