A Town like Alice

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."

Chapter 2
    I suppose there was a long pause after she said that. I remember being completely taken aback, and seeking refuge in my habit of saying nothing when you don't know what to say. She must have felt reproof in my silence, I suppose, because she leaned towards me, and she said, "I know it's a funny thing to want to do. May I tell you about it?"
    I said, "Of course. Is this something to do with your experiences in the war?"
    She nodded. "I've never told you about that. It's not that I mind talking about it, but I hardly ever think about it now. It all seems so remote, as if it was something that happened to another person, years ago-something that you'd read in a book. As if it wasn't me at all."
    "Isn't it better to leave it so?"
    She shook her head. "Not now, now that I've got this money." She paused. "You've been so very kind to me," she said. "I do want to try and make you understand."
    Her life, she said, had fallen into three parts, the first two so separate from the rest that she could hardly reconcile them with her present self. First, she had been a schoolgirl living with her mother in Southampton. They lived in a small, three-bedroomed house in a suburban street. There had been a period before that when they had all lived in Malaya, but they had left Malaya for good when she was eleven and her brother Donald was fourteen, and she had only confused memories of that earlier time. Apparently Arthur Paget had been living alone in Malaya when he met his death, his wife having brought the children home.
    They lived the life of normal suburban English children, school and holidays passing in a gentle rhythm with the one great annual excitement of three weeks holiday in August in the Isle of Wight, at Seaview or at Freshwater. One thing differentiated them slightly from other families, in that they all spoke Malay. The children had learned it from the amah, of course, and their mother encouraged them to continue talking it in England, first as a joke and as a secret family language, but later for a very definite reason. When Arthur Paget drove his car into the tree near Ipoh he was travelling on the business of his company, and his widow became entitled to a pension under the company scheme. He had been a competent and a valuable man. The directors of the Kuala Perak Plantation Company, linking compassion with their quest for first-class staff, wrote to the widow offering to keep a position for the boy Donald as soon as he became nineteen. This was a good opening and one that they all welcomed; it meant that Donald was headed for Malaya and for rubber-planting as a career. The Malay language became a matter of importance in giving him a good start, for very few boys of nineteen going to the East for their first job can speak an Oriental language. That shrewd Scotswoman, their mother, saw to it that the children did not forget Malay.
    Jean had liked Southampton well enough, and she had had a happy childhood there in a gentle orbit of home, school, the Regal cinema, and the ice-skating rink. Of all these influences the one that she remembered best was the ice rink, connected in her mind inevitably with Waldteufel's Skaters Waltz. "It was a lovely place," she said, staring reminiscently into the fire. "I suppose it wasn't much, really-it was a wooden building, I think, converted out of something that had been put up in the first war.