A Town like Alice

go into the trunk. She told me then that she was only taking one suitcase as her luggage.
    "But what about your tropical kit?" I asked. "Have you had that sent on?"
    She smiled. "I've got it with me in the suitcase," she said. "Fifty Paludrine tablets and a hundred Sulphatriads, some repellent, and my old sarong. I'm not going out to be a lady in Malaya."
    She had nobody but me to go down to the docks with her to see her off; she was very much alone in the world, and friends she had who might have liked to come were all working in jobs, and couldn't get the time off. I drove her down in a taxi. She took her journey very much as a matter of course; she seemed to have made no more preparation for a voyage half way round the world than a girl of my generation would have made for a weekend at Chislehurst. The ship was a new one and everything was bright and clean. When the steward opened the door of her cabin she stood back amazed, because he had arranged the flowers all round the little room, and there were plenty of them. "Oh Noel, look!" she said. "Just look at all the flowers!" She turned to the steward. "Wherever did they come from? Not from the Company?"
    "They come in three big boxes yesterday evening," he replied. "Make a nice show, don't they, Miss?"
    She swung round on me. "I believe you sent them." And then she said, "Oh, how perfectly sweet of you!"
    "English flowers," I said. "Just to remind you to come back to England soon." I must have had a premonition, even then, that she was never going to come back.
    Before I could realize what she was doing, she had slipped an arm round my shoulders and kissed me on the lips. "That's for the flowers, Noel," she said softly. "For the flowers, and for everything you've done for me."
    And I was so dumbfounded and confused that all I could find to say to her was, "I'll have another of those when you come back."
    I didn't wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly. I went back in the taxi to my flat alone, and I remember that I stood for a long time at the window of my room watching the ornamented wall of the stables opposite and thinking of her fine new steamer going down the river past Gravesend and Tilbury, past Shoebury and the North Foreland, taking her away. And then I woke myself up and went and shifted her trunk and her suitcase to a corner of the box-room by themselves, and I stood for some time with her boots and skates in my hand, personal things of hers, wondering where they had better go. Finally I took them to my bedroom and put them in the bottom of my wardrobe, because I should never have forgiven myself if they had been stolen. She was just such a girl as one would have liked to have for a daughter, but we never had a daughter at all.
    She travelled across half the world in her tramp steamer and she wrote to me from most of the ports she called at, from Marseilles and Naples, from Alexandria and Aden, from Colombo, from Rangoon, and from Penang. Wright was always very interested in her because he had known about her in Malaya, and I got into the habit of carrying her latest letter about with me and telling him about her voyage and how she was getting on. He knew the British Adviser to the Raja at Kota Bahru quite well, a Mr Wilson-Hays, and I got him to write out to Wilson-Hays by air mail telling him about Jean Paget and asking him to do what he could for her. He told me that that was rather necessary, because there was nowhere a lady could stay in Kota Bahru except with one of the British people who were living there. We got a very friendly letter back from Wilson-Hays saying that he was expecting her, and I was able to get a letter out to her by air mail to meet her at the Chartered Bank telling her what we had done.
    She only stayed one night in Singapore, and took the morning plane to Kota Bahru; the Dakota wandered about all over Malaya calling at various places, and put her down upon the air-strip at Kota Bahru early in the afternoon. She got out of the Dakota wearing the same light grey coat and skirt in which she had left London, and Wilson-Hays was there himself to meet the aeroplane, with his wife.
    I met Wilson-Hays at the United University Club a year later, when he was on leave. He was a tall, dark, quiet man with rather a long face. He said that she had been a little embarrassed to find that he had come to the airstrip to meet her personally; she did not seem to realize that she was quite a