A Town Like Alice

Chapter 1-4

I said absently, “I only go to the club. No, Wednesday at six would suit me very well.” I made a note upon my pad, and then I hesitated. “Perhaps if you are doing nothing after that you might like to come on to the club and have dinner in the Ladies Annexe,” I said. “I’m afraid it’s not a very gay place, but the food is good.”

She smiled, and said warmly, “I’d love to do that, Mr. Strachan. It’s very kind of you to ask me.”

I got to my feet. “Very well, then, Miss Paget—six o’clock on Wednesday. And in the meantime, don’t do anything in a great hurry. It never pays to be impetuous...”

She went away, and I cleared my desk and took a taxi to the club for lunch. After lunch I had a cup of coffee and slept for ten minutes in a chair before the fire, and when I woke up I thought I ought to get some exercise. So I put on my hat and coat and went out and walked rather aimlessly up St. James’s Street and along Piccadilly to the Park. As I walked, I wondered how that fresh young woman was spending her week-end. Was she telling her friends all about her good luck, or was she sitting somewhere warm and quiet, nursing and cherishing her own anticipations, or was she on a spending spree already? Or was she out with a young man? She would have plenty of men now to choose from, I thought cynically, and then it struck me that she probably had those already because she was a very marriageable girl. Indeed, considering her appearance and her evident good nature, I was rather surprised that she was not married already.

I had a little talk that evening in the club with a man who is in the Home Office about the procedure for establishing the death of a prisoner of war, and on Monday I had a number of telephone conversations with the War Office and the Home Office about the case. I found, as I had suspected, that there was an extraordinary procedure for proving death which could be invoked, but where a doctor was available who had attended the deceased in the prison camp the normal certification of death was the procedure to adopt. In this instance there was a general practitioner called Ferris in practice at Beckenham who had been a doctor in Camp 206 in the Takunan district on the Burma-Siam railway, and the official at the War Office advised me that this doctor would be in a position to give the normal death certificate.

I rang him up next morning, and he was out upon his rounds. I tried to make his wife understand what I wanted but I think it was too complicated for her; she suggested that I should call and see him after the evening surgery, at half-past six. I hesitated over that because Beckenham is a good long way out, but I was anxious to get these formalities over quickly for the sake of the girl. So I went out to see this doctor that evening.

He was a cheerful, fresh-faced man not more than thirty-five years old; he had a keen sense of humour, if rather a macabre one at times. He looked as healthy and fit as if he had spent the whole of his life in England in a country practice. I got to him just as he was finishing off the last of his patients, and he had leisure to talk for a little.

“Lieutenant Paget,” he said thoughtfully. “Oh yes, I know. Donald Paget—was his name Donald?” I said it was. “Oh, of course, I remember him quite well. Yes, I can write a death certificate. I’d like to do that for him, though I don’t suppose it’ll do him much good.”

“It will help his sister,” I remarked. “There is a question of an inheritance, and the shorter we can make the necessary formalities the better for her.”

He reached for his pad of forms. “I wonder if she’s got as much guts as her brother.”

“Was he a good chap?”

He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “He was a delicate-looking man, dark and rather pale, you know, but he was a very good type. I think he was a planter in civil life—anyway, he was in the Malay volunteers. He spoke Malay very well, and he got along in Siamese all right. With those languages, of course, he was a very useful man to have in the camp. We used to do a lot of black market with the villagers, the Siamese outside, you know. But quite apart from that, he was the sort of officer the men like. It was a great loss when he went.”

“What did he die of?” I asked.

He paused with his pen poised over the paper. “Well, you could take your pick of half a dozen things. I hadn’t time to do a post mortem, of course. Between you and me, I don’t really know. I think he just died. But he’d recovered from enough to kill a dozen ordinary men, so I don’t know that it really matters what one puts down on the certificate. No legal point depends upon the cause of death, does it?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “All I want is the death certified.”

He still paused, in recollection. “He had a huge tropical ulcer on his left leg that we were treating, and that was certainly poisoning the whole system. I think if he’d gone on we’d have had to take that leg off. He got that because he was one of those chaps who won’t report sick while they can walk. Well, while he was in hospital with the ulcer, he got cerebral malaria. We had nothing to treat that damn thing with till we got around to making our own quinine solutions for intravenous injection; we took a frightful risk with that, but there was nothing else to do. We got a lot through it with that, and Paget was one of them. He got over it quite well. That was just before we got the cholera. Cholera went right through the camp—hospital and everything. We couldn’t isolate the cases, or anything like that. I never want to see a show like that again. We’d got nothing, nothing, not even saline. No drugs to speak of, and no equipment. We were making bed-pans out of old kerosene tins. Paget got that, and would you believe it, he got over cholera. We got some prophylactic injections from the Nips and we gave him those; that may have helped. At least, I think we gave him that—I’m not sure. He was very weak when that left him, of course, and the ulcer wasn’t any too good. And about a week after that, he just died in the night. Heart, I fancy. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll put down for Cause of Death—Cholera. There you are, sir. I’m sorry you had to come all this way for it.”

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 T.T. 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.