A Town like Alice

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.
    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 weekend?" 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 -