A Town Like Alice

Chapter 1-5

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 week-end?” 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 attaché 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’re 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 worth while, 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 in to 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 organisations like to keep the overheads down,” I remarked.

“I shouldn’t have thought organisations 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 worth while.”

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.”

She smiled. “Well, of course I’d love to come,” she said. “I’ve never seen an opera in my life. I don’t even know what happens.”

We sat talking about these things for an hour or more, till it was half-past nine and she got up to go; she had three-quarters of an hour to travel out to her suburban lodgings. I went with her, because she was going from St. James’s Park station, and I didn’t care about the thought of so young a woman walking across the park alone late at night. At the station, standing on the dark, wet pavement by the brightly-lit canopy, she put out her hand.

“Thank you so much, Mr. Strachan, for the dinner, and for everything you’re doing for me,” she said.

“It has been a very great pleasure to me, Miss Paget,” I replied, and I meant it.

She hesitated, and then she said, smiling, “Mr. Strachan, we’re going to have a good deal to do with each other. My name is Jean. I’ll go crackers if you keep on calling me Miss Paget.”

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” I said awkwardly.

She laughed. “You said just now you don’t feel any different as you get older. You can try and learn.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” I said. “Sure you can manage all right now?”

“Of course. Good-night, Mr. Strachan.”

“Good-night,” I said, lifting my hat and dodging the issue. “I’ll let you know about the opera.”

In the following weeks while probate was being granted I took her to a good many things. We went together to the opera several times, to the Albert Hall on Sunday afternoons, and to art galleries and exhibitions of paintings. In return, she took me to the cinema once or twice. I cannot really say that she developed any very great artistic appreciation. She liked paintings more than concerts. If it had to be music she preferred it in the form of opera and the lighter the better; she liked to have something to look at while her ears were assailed. We went twice to Kew Gardens as the spring came on. In the course of these excursions she came several times to my flat in Buckingham Gate; she got to know the kitchen, and made tea once or twice when we came in from some outing together. I had never entertained a lady in that flat before except my daughters-in-law, who sometimes come and use my spare room for a night or two in London.

Her business was concluded in March, and I was able to send her her first cheque. She did not give up her job at once, but continued to go to the office as usual. She wanted, very wisely, to build up a small reserve of capital from her monthly cheques before starting to live on them; moreover, at that time she had not made up her mind what she wanted to do.

That was the position one Sunday in April. I had arranged a little jaunt for her that day; she was to come to lunch at the flat and after that we were going down to Hampton Court, which she had never seen. I thought that the old palace and the spring flowers would please her, and I had been looking forward to this trip for several days. And then, of course, it rained.

She came to the flat just before lunch, dripping in her dark blue raincoat, carrying a very wet umbrella. I took the coat from her and hung it up in the kitchen. She went into my spare room and tidied herself; then she came to me in the lounge and we stood watching the rain beat against the Palace stables opposite, wondering what we should do instead that afternoon.

We had not got that settled when we sat down to coffee before the fire after lunch. I had mentioned one or two things but she seemed to be thinking about other matters. Over the coffee it came out, and she said,

“I’ve made up my mind what I want to do first of all, Mr. Strachan.”

“Oh?” I asked. “What’s that?”

She hesitated. “I know you’re going to think this very odd. You may think it very foolish of me, to go spending money in this way. But—well, it’s what I want to do. I think perhaps I’d better tell you about it now, before we go out.”

It was warm and comfortable before the fire. Outside the sky was dark, and the rain streamed down on the wet pavements.

“Of course, Jean,” I replied. “I don’t suppose it’s foolish at all. What is it that you want to do?”

She said, “I want to go back to Malaya, Mr. Strachan. To dig a well.”