A Town like Alice

atlas out while she had been telling me her story to see where the places were, and I looked at it again now. "You could get off the aeroplane at Kuantan," I said. "It's shorter from there."
    "I know," she said. "I know it's a bit shorter. But I couldn't bear to go back there again." There was distress in her voice.
    To ease the situation I said idly, "It would take me years to learn how to remember these Malay names."
    "It's all right when you know what they mean," she said. "They're just like English names. Bahru means New, and Kota means a fort. It's only Newcastle, in Malay."
    She went on with her work at Perivale, and I went on with mine in Chancery Lane, but I was unable to get her story out of my mind.
    There is a man called Wright, a member of my club, who was in the Malayan Police and was a prisoner of the Japanese during their occupation of Malaya, I think in Changi gaol. I sat next to him at dinner one night, and I could not resist sounding him about it. "One of my clients told me an extraordinary story about Malaya the other day," I said. "She was one of a party of women that the Japanese refused to put into a camp."
    He laid his knife down. "Not the party who were taken at Panong and marched across Malaya?"
    "That was it," I said. "You know about them, do you?"
    "Oh yes," he said. "It was a most extraordinary thing, as you say. The Japanese commanders marched them from place to place, till finally they were allowed to settle in a village on the east coast somewhere, and they lived there for the rest of the war. There was a very fine girl who was their leader; she spoke Malay fluently. She wasn't anybody notable; she'd been a shorthand typist in an office in Kuala Lumpur. A very fine type."
    I nodded. "She's my client."
    "Is she! I always wondered what had happened to her. What's she doing now?"
    I said dryly, "She's a shorthand typist again, working in a handbag factory at Perivale."
    "Really!" He ate a mouthful or two, and then he said, "I always thought that girl ought to have got a decoration of some sort. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can give to people like that. But if she hadn't been with them, all those women and children would have died. There was no one else in the party of that calibre at all."
    "I understand that half of them did die," I said.
    He nodded. "I believe that's true. She got them settled down and working in the rice fields in the end, and after that they were all right."
    I saw Jean Paget from time to time in the six weeks before she left this country. She booked her passage to sail from London docks on June 2nd, and she gave notice to her firm to leave at the end of May. She told me that they were rather upset about it, and they offered her a ten shilling rise at once; in view of that she had told Mr Pack about her legacy, and he had accepted the inevitable.
    I made arrangements for her income for the months of July and August and September to be available to her in Singapore, and I opened an account for her with the Chartered Bank for that purpose. As the time for her departure drew closer I became worried for her, not because I was afraid that she would overspend her income, but because I was afraid she would get into some difficulty due to her expenses being higher than she thought they would be. Nine hundred a year does not go very far in these days for a person travelling about the east.
    I mentioned that to her about a week before she left. "Don't forget that you're a fairly wealthy woman now," I said. "You're quite right to live within your income and, indeed, I have to see you do. But don't forget that I have fairly wide discretionary powers under your uncle's will. If you get into any difficulty, or if you really need money, let me have a cable at once. As, for example, if you should get ill."
    She smiled. "That's very sweet of you," she said. "But honestly, I think I'll be all right. I'm counting upon taking a job if I find I'm running short. After all, I haven't got to get back here to England by a given date, or anything like that."
    I said, "Don't stay too long away."
    She smiled. "I shan't Mr Strachan," she said. "There's nothing to keep me in Malaya once I've done this thing."
    She was giving up her room in Haling, of course, and she asked if she might leave a trunk and a suitcase in the box-room of my flat till she came back to England. She brought them round the day before she sailed, and with them a pair of skating boots with skates attached, which wouldn't