雙語·像愛麗絲的小鎮(zhèn) Chapter 1

Chapter 1

James Macfadden died in March 1905 when he was forty-seven years old; he was riding in the Driffield Point-to-Point.

He left the bulk of his money to his son Douglas. The Macfaddens and the Dalhousies at that time lived in Perth, and Douglas was a school friend of Jock Dalhousie, who was a young man then, and had gone to London to become junior partner in a firm of solicitors in Chancery Lane, Owen, Dalhousie, and Peters. I am now the senior partner, and Owen and Dalhousie and Peters have been dead for many years, but I never changed the name of the firm.

It was natural that Douglas Macfadden should put his affairs into the hands of Jock Dalhousie, and Mr Dalhousie handled them personally till he died in 1928. In splitting up the work I took Mr Macfadden on to my list of clients, and forgot about him in the pressure of other matters.

It was not until 1935 that any business for him came up. I had a letter from him then, from an address in Ayr. He said that his brother-in-law, Arthur Paget, had been killed in a motor car accident in Malaya and so he wanted to redraft his will to make a trust in favour of his sister Jean and her two children. I am sorry to say that I was so ignorant of this client that I did not even know he was unmarried and had no issue of his own. He finished up by saying that he was too unwell to travel down to London, and he suggested that perhaps a junior member of the firm might be sent up to see him and arrange the matter.

This fitted in with my arrangements fairly well, because when I got this letter I was just leaving for a fortnight's fishing holiday on Loch Shiel. I wrote and told him that I would visit him on my way south, and I put the file concerning his affairs in the bottom of my suitcase to study one evening during my vacation.

When I got to Ayr I took a room at the Station Hotel, because in our correspondence there had been no suggestion that he could put me up. I changed out of my plus-fours into a dark business suit, and went to call upon my client.

He did not live at all in the manner I had expected. I did not know much about his estate except that it was probably well over twenty thousand pounds, and I had expected to find my client living in a house with a servant or two. Instead, I discovered that he had a bedroom and a sitting-room on the same floor of a small private hotel just off the sea front. He was evidently leading the life of an invalid though he was hardly more than fifty years old at that time, ten years younger than I was myself. He was as frail as an old lady of eighty, and he had a peculiar grey look about him which didn't look at all good to me. All the windows of his sitting-room were shut and after the clean air of the lochs and moors I found his room stuffy and close; he had a number of budgerigars in cages in the window, and the smell of these birds made the room very unpleasant. It was clear from the furnishings that he had lived in that hotel and in that room for a good many years.

He told me something about his life as we discussed the will; he was quite affable, and pleased that I had been able to come to visit him myself. He seemed to be an educated man, though he spoke with a marked Scots accent.“I live very quietly, Mr Strachan,”he said.“My health will not permit me to go far abroad. Whiles I get out upon the front on a fine day and sit for a time, and then again Maggie—that's the daughter of Mrs Doyle who keeps the house—Maggie wheels me out in the chair. They are very good to me here.”

Turning to the matter of the will, he told me that he had no close relatives at all except his sister, Jean Paget.“Forbye my father might have left what you might call an indiscretion or two in Australia,”he said.“I would not say that there might not be some of those about, though I have never met one, or corresponded. Jean told me once that my mother had been sore distressed. Women talk about these things, of course, and my father was a lusty type of man.”

His sister Jean had been an officer in the WAACs in the 1914-1918 War, and she had married a Captain Paget in the spring of 1917.“It was not a very usual sort of marriage,”he said thoughtfully.“You must remember that my sister Jean had never been out of Scotland till she joined the army, and the greater part of her life had been spent in Perth. Arthur Paget was an Englishman from Southampton, in Hampshire. I have nothing against Arthur, but we had all naturally thought that Jean would have married a Scot. Still, I would not say but it has been a happy marriage, or as happy as most.”

After the war was over Arthur Paget had got a job upon a rubber estate in Malaya somewhere near Taiping, and Jean, of course, went out there with him. From that time Douglas Macfadden had seen little of his sister; she had been home on leave in 1926 and again in 1932. She had two children, Donald born in 1918 and Jean born in 1921; these children had been left in England in 1932 to live with the Paget parents and to go to school in Southampton, while their mother returned to Malaya. My client had seen them only once, in 1932 when their mother brought them up to Scotland.

The present position was that Arthur Paget had been killed in a motor accident somewhere near Ipoh; he had been driving home at night from Kuala Lumpur and had driven off the road at a high speed and hit a tree. Probably he fell asleep. His widow, Jean Paget, was in England; she had come home a year or so before his death and she had taken a small house in Bassett just outside Southampton to make a home for the children and to be near their schools. It was a sensible arrangement, of course, but it seemed to me to be a pity that the brother and the sister could not have arranged to live nearer to each other. I fancy that my client regretted the distance that separated them, because he referred to it more than once.

He wanted to revise his will. His existing will was a very simple one, in which he left his entire estate to his sister Jean.“I would not alter that,”he said.“But you must understand that Arthur Paget was alive when I made that will, and that in the nature of things I expected him to be alive when Jean inherited from me, and I expected that he would be there to guide her in matters of business. I shall not make old bones.”

He seemed to have a fixed idea that all women were unworldly creatures and incapable of looking after money; they were irresponsible, and at the mercy of any adventurer. Accordingly, although he wanted his sister to have the full use of his money after his death, he wanted to create a trust to ensure that her son Donald, at that time a schoolboy, should inherit the whole estate intact after his mother's death. There was, of course, no special difficulty in that. I presented to him the various pros and cons of a trust such as he envisaged, and I reminded him that a small legacy to Mrs Doyle, in whose house he had lived for so many years, might not be out of place provided that he was still living with them at the time of his death. He agreed to that. He told me then that he had no close relations living, and he asked me if I would undertake to be the sole trustee of his estate and the executor of his will. That is the sort of business a family solicitor frequently takes on his shoulders, of course. I told him that in view of my age he should appoint a co-trustee, and he agreed to the insertion of our junior partner, Mr Lester Robinson, to be co-trustee with me. He also agreed to a charging clause for our professional services in connection with the trust.

There only remained to tidy up the loose ends of what was, after all, a fairly simple will. I asked him what should happen if both he and his sister were to die before the boy Donald was twenty-one, and I suggested that the trust should terminate and the boy should inherit the estate absolutely, when he reached his majority. He agreed to this, and I made another note upon my pad.

“Supposing then,”I said,“that Donald should die before his mother, or if Donald and his mother should die in some way before you. The estate would then pass to the girl, Jean. Again, I take it that the trust would terminate when she reached her majority?”

“Ye mean,”he asked,“when she became twenty-one?”

I nodded.“Yes. That is what we decided in the case of her brother.”

He shook his head.“I think that would be most imprudent, Mr Strachan, if I may say so. No lassie would be fit to administer her own estate when she was twenty-one. A lassie of that age is at the mercy of her sex, Mr Strachan, at the mercy of her sex. I would want the trust to continue for much longer than that. Till she was forty, at the very least.”

From various past experiences I could not help agreeing with him that twenty-one was a bit young for a girl to have absolute control over a large sum of money, but forty seemed to me to be excessively old. I stated my own view that twenty-five would be a reasonable age, and very reluctantly he receded to thirty-five. I could not move him from that position, and as he was obviously tiring and growing irritable I accepted that as the maximum duration of our trust. It meant that in those very unlikely circumstances the trust would continue for twenty-one years from that date, since the girl Jean had been born in 1921 and it was then 1935. That finished our business and I left him and went back to London to draft out the will, which I sent to him for signature. I never saw my client again.

It was my fault that I lost touch with him. It had been my habit for a great many years to take my holiday in the spring, when I would go with my wife to Scotland for a fortnight's fishing, usually to Loch Shiel. I thought that this was going on for ever, as one does, and that next year I would call again upon this client on my way down from the north to see if there was any other business I could do for him. But things turn out differently, sometimes. In the winter of 1935 Lucy died. I don't want to dwell on that, but we had been married for twenty-seven years and—well, it was very painful. Both our sons were abroad, Harry in his submarine on the China station and Martin in his oil company at Basra. I hadn't the heart to go back to Loch Shiel, and I have never been to Scotland since. I had a sale and got rid of most of our furniture, and I sold our house on Wimbledon Common; one has to make an effort at a time like that, and a clean break. It's no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.

I took a flat in Buckingham Gate opposite the Palace stables and just across the park from my club in Pall Mall. I furnished it with a few things out of the Wimbledon house and got a woman to come in and cook my breakfast and clean for me in the mornings, and here I set out to re-create my life. I knew the pattern well enough from the experience of others in the club. Breakfast in my flat. Walk through the Park and up the Strand to my office in Chancery Lane. Work all day, with a light lunch at my desk. To the club at six o'clock to read the periodicals, and gossip, and dine, and after dinner a rubber of bridge. That is the routine that I fell into in the spring of 1936, and I am in it still.

All this, as I say, took my mind from Douglas Macfadden; with more than half my mind upon my own affairs I could only manage to attend to those clients who had urgent business with my office. And presently another interest grew upon me. It was quite obvious that war was coming, and some of us in the club who were too old for active military service began to get very interested in Air Raid Precautions. Cutting the long story short, Civil Defence as it came to be called absorbed the whole of my leisure for the next eight years. I became a Warden, and I was on duty in my district of Westminster all through the London blitz and the long, slow years of war that followed it. Practically all my staff went on service, and I had to run the office almost single-handed. In those years I never took a holiday, and I doubt if I slept more than five hours in any night. When finally peace came in 1945 my hair was white and my head shaky, and though I improved a little in the years that followed I had definitely joined the ranks of the old men.

One afternoon in January 1948 I got a telegram from Ayr. It read,

Regret Mr Douglas Macfadden passed away last night please instruct re funeral.

Doyle, Balmoral Hotel, Ayr.

I had to search my memory, I am afraid, to recollect through the war years who Mr Douglas Macfadden was, and then I had to turn to the file and the will to refresh my memory with the details of what had happened thirteen years before. It seemed rather odd to me that there was nobody at Ayr who could manage the funeral business. I put in a trunk call to Ayr right away and very soon I was speaking to Mrs Doyle. It was a bad line, but I understood that she knew of no relations; apparently Mr Macfadden had had no visitors for a very long time. Clearly, I should have to go to Ayr myself, or else send somebody. I had no urgent engagements for the next two days and the matter seemed to be a little difficult. I had a talk with Lester Robinson, my partner, who had come back from the war as a brigadier, and cleared my desk, and took the sleeper up to Glasgow after dinner that night. In the morning I went down in a slow train to Ayr.

When I got to the Balmoral Hotel I found the landlord and his wife in mourning and obviously distressed; they had been fond of their queer lodger and it was probably due in a great part to their ministrations that he had lived so long. There was no mystery about the cause of death. I had a talk with the doctor and heard all about his trouble; the doctor had been with him at the end, for he lived only two doors away, and the death certificate was already signed. I took a brief look at the body for identification and went through the various formalities of death. It was all perfectly straightforward, except that there were no relations.

“I doubt he had any,”said Mr Doyle.“His sister used to write to him at one time, and she came to see him in 1938, I think it was. She lived in Southampton. But he's had no letters except just a bill or two for the last two years.”

His wife said,“Surely, the sister died, didn't she? Don't you remember him telling us, sometime towards the end of the war?”

“Well, I don't know,”he said.“So much was happening about that time. Maybe she did die.”

Relations or not, arrangements had to be made for the funeral, and I made them that afternoon. When that was done I settled down to look through the papers in his desk. One or two of the figures in an account book and on the back of the counterfoils of his cheque book made me open my eyes; clearly I should have to have a talk with the bank manager first thing next morning. I found a letter from his sister dated in 1941 about the lease of her house. It threw no light, of course, upon her death, if she was dead, but it did reveal significant news about the children. Both of them were in Malaya at that time. The boy Donald, who must have been twenty-three years old at that time, was working on a rubber plantation near Kuala Selangor. His sister Jean had gone out to him in the winter of 1939, and was working in an office in Kuala Lumpur.

At about five o'clock I put in a trunk call to my office in London, standing in the cramped box of the hotel, and spoke to my partner.“Look, Lester,”I said.“I told you that there was some difficulty about the relations. I am completely at a loss up here, I'm sorry to say. Provisionally, I have arranged the funeral for the day after tomorrow, at two o'clock, at St Enoch's cemetery. The only relations that I know of live, or used to live, in Southampton. The sister, Mrs Arthur Paget, was living in 1941 at No 17 St Ronans Road, Bassett—that's just by Southampton somewhere. There were some other Paget relations in the district, the parents of Arthur Paget. Mrs Arthur Paget—her Christian name was Jean—yes, she was the deceased's sister. She had two children, Donald and Jean Paget, but they were both in Malaya in 1941. God knows what became of them. I wouldn't waste much time just now looking for them, but would you get Harris to do what he can to find some of these Southampton Pagets and tell them about the funeral? He'd better take the telephone book and talk to all the Pagets in Southampton one by one. I don't suppose there are so very many.”

Lester came on the telephone to me next morning just after I got back from the bank.“I've nothing very definite, I'm afraid, Noel,”he said.“I did discover one thing. Mrs Paget died in 1942, so she's out of it. She died of pneumonia through going out to the air raid shelter—Harris got that from the hospital. About the other Pagets, there are seven in the telephone directory and we've rung them all up, and they're none of them anything to do with your family. But one of them, Mrs Eustace Paget, thinks the family you're looking for are the Edward Pagets, and that they moved to North Wales after the first Southampton blitz.”

“Any idea whereabouts in North Wales?”I asked.

“Not a clue,”he said.“I think the only thing that you can do now is to proceed with the funeral.”

“I think it is,”I replied.“But tell Harris to go on all the same, because apart from the funeral we've got to find the heirs. I've just been to the bank, and there is quite a sizeable estate. We're the trustees, you know.”

I spent the rest of that day packing up all personal belongings, and letters, and papers, to take down to my office. Furniture at that time was in short supply, and I arranged to store the furniture of the two rooms, since that might be wanted by the heirs. I gave the clothes to Mr Doyle to give away to needy people in Ayr. Only two of the budgerigars were left; I gave those to the Doyles, who seemed to be attached to them. Next morning I had another interview with the bank manager and telephoned to book my sleeper on the night mail down to London. And in the afternoon we buried Douglas Macfadden.

It was very cold and bleak. and grey in the cemetery, that January afternoon. The only mourners were the Doyles, father, mother, and daughter, and myself, and I remember thinking that it was queer how little any of us knew about the man that we were burying. I had a great respect for the Doyle family by that time. They had been overwhelmed when I told them of the small legacy that Mr Macfadden had left them and at first they were genuinely unwilling to take it; they said that they had been well paid for his two rooms and board for many years, and anything else that they had done for him had been because they liked him. It was something, on that bitter January afternoon beside the grave, to feel that he had friends at the last ceremonies.

So that was the end of it, and I drove back with the Doyles and had tea with them in their sitting-room beside the kitchen. And after tea I left for Glasgow and the night train down to London, taking with me two suitcases of papers and small personal effects to be examined at my leisure if the tracing of the heir proved to be troublesome, and later to be handed over as a part of the inheritance.

In fact, he found the heir without much difficulty. Young Harris got a line on it within a week, and presently we got a letter from a Miss Agatha Paget, who was the headmistress of a girls' school in Colwyn Bay. She was a sister of Arthur Paget, who had been killed in the motor accident in Malaya. She confirmed that his wife, Jean, had died in Southampton in the year 1942, and she added the fresh information that the son, Donald, was also dead. He had been a prisoner of war in Malaya, and had died in captivity. Her niece, Jean, however, was alive and in the London district. The headmistress did not know her home address because she lived in rooms and had changed them once or twice, so she usually wrote to her addressing her letters to her firm. She was employed in the office of a concern called Pack and Levy Ltd, whose address was The Hyde, Perivale, London, NW.

I got this letter in the morning mail; I ran through the others and cleared them out of the way, and then picked up this one and read it again. Then I got my secretary to bring me the Macfadden box and I read the will through again, and went through some other papers and my notes on the estate. Finally I reached out for the telephone directory and looked up Pack and Levy Ltd, to find out what they did.

Presently I got up from my desk and stood for a time looking out of the window at the bleak, grey, January London street. I like to think a bit before taking any precipitate action. Then I turned and went through into Robinson's office; he was dictating, and I stood warming myself at his fire till he had finished and the girl had left the room.

“I've got that Macfadden heir,”I said.“I'll tell Harris.”

“All right,”he replied.“You've found the son?”

“No,”I said.“I've found the daughter. The son's dead.”

He laughed.“Bad luck. That means we're trustees for the estate until she's thirty-five, doesn't it?”

I nodded.

“How old is she now?”

I calculated for a minute.“Twenty-six or twenty-seven.”

“Old enough to make a packet of trouble for us.”

“I know.”

“Where is she? What's she doing?”

“She's employed as a clerk or typist with a firm of handbag manufacturers in Perivale,”I said.“I'm just about to concoct a letter to her.”

He smiled.“Fairy Godfather.”

“Exactly,”I replied.

I went back into my room and sat for some time thinking out that letter; it seemed to me to be important to set a formal tone when writing to this young woman for the first time. Finally I wrote,

Dear Madam,

It is with regret that we have to inform you of the death of Mr Douglas Macfadden at Ayr on January 21st. As Executors to his will we have experienced some difficulty in tracing the beneficiaries, but if you are the daughter of Jean (née Macfadden) and Arthur Paget formerly resident in Southampton and in Malaya, it would appear that you may be entitled to a share in the estate.

May we ask you to telephone for an appointment to call upon us at your convenience to discuss the matter further? It will be necessary for you to produce evidence of identity at an early stage, such as your birth certificate, National Registration Identity Card, and any other documents that may occur to you.

I am,

Yours truly,

for Owen, Dalhousie and Peters,

N. H. Strachan

She rang me up the next day. She had quite a pleasant voice, the voice of a well-trained secretary. She said,“Mr Strachan, this is Miss Jean Paget speaking. I've got your letter of the 29th. I wonder—do you work on Saturday mornings? I'm in a job, so Saturday would be the best day for me.”

I replied,“Oh, yes, we work on Saturday mornings. What time would be convenient for you?”

“Should we say ten-thirty?”

I made a note upon my pad.“That's all right. Have you got your birth certificate?”

“Yes, I've got that. Another thing I've got is my mother's marriage certificate, if that helps.”

I said,“Oh yes, bring that along. All right, Miss Paget, I shall look forward to meeting you on Saturday. Ask for me by name, Mr Noel Strachan. I am the senior partner.”

She was shown into my office punctually at ten-thirty on Saturday. She was a girl or woman of a medium height, dark-haired. She was good-looking in a quiet way; she had a tranquility about her that I find it difficult to describe except by saying that it was the grace that you see frequently in women of a Scottish descent. She was dressed in a dark blue coat and skirt. I got up and shook hands with her, and gave her the chair in front of my desk, and went round and sat down myself. I had the papers ready.

“Well, Miss Paget,”I said.“I heard about you from your aunt—I think she is your aunt? Miss Agatha Paget, at Colwyn Bay.”

She inclined her head.“Aunt Aggie wrote and told me that she had had a letter from you. Yes, she's my aunt.”

“And I take it that you are the daughter of Arthur and Jean Paget, who lived in Southampton and Malaya?”

She nodded.“That's right. I've got the birth certificate and mother's birth certificate, as well as her marriage certificate.”She took them from her bag and put them on my desk, with her identity card.

I opened these documents and read them through carefully. There was no doubt about it; she was the person I was looking for. I leaned back in my chair presently and took off my spectacles.“Tell me, Miss Paget,”I said.“Did you ever meet your uncle, who died recently? Mr Douglas Macfadden?”

She hesitated.“I've been thinking about that a lot,”she said candidly.“I couldn't honestly swear that I have ever met him, but I think it must have been him that my mother took me to see once in Scotland, when I was about ten years old. We all went together, Mother and I and Donald. I remember an old man in a very stuffy room with a lot of birds in cages. I think that was Uncle Douglas, but I'm not quite sure.”

That fitted in with what he had told me, the visit of his sister with her children in 1932. This girl would have been eleven years old then.“Tell me about your brother Donald, Miss Paget,”I asked.“Is he still alive?”

She shook her head.“He died in 1943, while he was a prisoner. He was taken by the Japs in Singapore when we surrendered, and then he was sent to the railway.”

I was puzzled.“The railway?”

She looked at me coolly, and I thought I saw tolerance for the ignorance of those who stayed in England in her glance.“The railway that the Japs built with Asiatic and prisoner-of-war labour between Siam and Burma. One man died for every sleeper that was laid, and it was about two hundred miles long. Donald was one of them.”

There was a little pause.“I am so sorry,”I said at last.“One thing I have to ask you, I am afraid. Was there a death certificate?”

She stared at me.“I shouldn't think so.”

“Oh...”I leaned back in my chair and took up the will.“This is the will of Mr Douglas Macfadden,”I said.“I have a copy for you, Miss Paget, but I think I'd better tell you what it contains in ordinary, non-legal language. Your uncle made two small bequests. The whole of the residue of the estate was left in trust for your brother Donald. The terms of the trust were to the effect that your mother was to enjoy the income from the trust until her death. If she died before your brother attained his majority, the trust was to continue until he was twenty-one, when he would inherit absolutely and the trust would be discharged. If your brother died before inheriting, then you were to inherit the residuary estate after your mother's time, but in that event the trust was to continue till the year 1956, when you would be thirty-five years old. You will appreciate that it is necessary for us to obtain legal evidence of your brother's death.”

She hesitated, and then she said,“Mr Strachan, I'm afraid I'm terribly stupid. I understand you want some proof that Donald is dead. But after that is done, do you mean that I inherit everything that Uncle Douglas left?”

“Broadly speaking—yes,”I replied.“You would only receive the income from the estate until the year 1956. After that, the capital would be yours to do what you like with.”

“How much did he leave?”

I picked up a slip of paper from the documents before me and ran my eye down the figures for a final check.“After paying death duties and legacies,”I said carefully,“the residuary estate would be worth about fifty-three thousand pounds at present-day prices. I must make it clear that that is at present-day prices, Miss Paget. You must not assume that you would inherit that sum in 1956. A falling stock market affects even trustee securities.”

She stared at me.“Fifty-three thousand pounds?”

I nodded.“That seems to be about the figure.”

“How much a year would that amount of capital yield, Mr Strachan?”

I glanced at the figures on the slip before me.“Invested in trustee stocks, as at present—about ￡1550 a year, gross income. Then income tax has to be deducted. You would have about nine hundred a year to spend, Miss Paget.”

“Oh...”There was a long silence; she sat staring at the desk in front of her. Then she looked up at me, and smiled.“It takes a bit of getting used to,”she remarked.“I mean, I've always worked for my living, Mr Strachan. I've never thought that I'd do anything else unless I married, and that's only a different sort of work. But this means that I need never work again—unless I want to.”

She had hit the nail on the head with her last sentence.“That's exactly it,”I replied.“Unless you want to.”

“I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have to go to the office,”she said.“I haven't got any other life...”

“Then I should go on going to the office,”I observed.

She laughed.“I suppose that's the only thing to do.”

I leaned back in my chair.“I'm an old man now, Miss Paget. I've made plenty of mistakes in my time and I've learned one thing from them, that it's never very wise to do anything in a great hurry. I take it that this legacy will mean a considerable change in your circumstances. If I may offer my advice, I should continue in your present employment for the time, at any rate, and I should refrain from talking about your legacy in the office just yet. For one thing, it will be some months before you get possession even of the income from the estate. First we have to obtain legal proof of the death of your brother, and then we have to obtain the confirmation of the executors in Scotland and realize a portion of the securities to meet estate and succession duties. Tell me, what are you doing with this firm Pack and Levy?”

“I'm a shorthand typist,”she said.“I'm working now as secretary to Mr Pack.”

“Where do you live, Miss Paget?”

She said,“I've got a bed-sitting-room at No 43 Campion Road, just off Ealing Common. It's quite convenient, but of course I have a lot of my meals out. There's a Lyons just round the corner.”

I thought for a minute.“Have you got many friends in Ealing? How long have you been there?”

“I don't know very many people,”she replied.“One or two families, people who work in the firm, you know. I've been there over two years now, ever since I was repatriated. I was out in Malaya, you know, Mr Strachan, and I was a sort of prisoner of war for three and a half years. Then when I got home I got this job with Pack and Levy.”

I made a note of her address upon my pad.“Well, Miss Paget,”I said,“I should go on just as usual for the time being. I will consult the War Office on Monday morning and obtain this evidence about your brother as quickly as I can. Tell me his name, and number, and unit.”She did so, and I wrote them down.“As soon as I get that, I shall submit the will for probate. When that is proved, then the trust commences and continues till the year 1956, when you will inherit absolutely.”

She looked up at me.“Tell me about this trust,”she asked.“I'm afraid I'm not very good at legal matters.”

I nodded.“Of course not. Well, you'll find it all in legal language in the copy of the will which I shall give you, but what it means is this, Miss Paget. Your uncle, when he made this will, had a very poor opinion of the ability of women to manage their own money. I'm sorry to have to say such a thing, but it is better for you to know the whole of the facts.”

She laughed.“Please don't apologize for him, Mr Strachan. Go on.”

“At first, he was quite unwilling that you should inherit the capital of the estate till you were forty years old,”I said.“I contested that view, but I was unable to get him to agree to any less period than the present arrangement in the will. Now, the object of a trust is this. The testator appoints trustees—in this case, myself and my partner—who undertake to do their best to preserve the capital intact and hand it over to the legatee—to you—when the trust expires.”

“I see. Uncle Douglas was afraid that I might spend the fifty-three thousand all at once.”

I nodded.“That was in his mind. He did not know you, of course, Miss Paget, so there was nothing personal about it. He felt that in general women were less fit than men to handle large sums of money at an early age.”

She said quietly,“He may have been right.”She thought for a minute, and then she said,“So you're going to look after the money for me till I'm thirty-five and give me the interest to spend in the meantime? Nine hundred a year?”

“If you wish us to conduct your income-tax affairs for you, that would be about the figure,”I said.“We can arrange the payments in any way that you prefer, as a quarterly or a monthly cheque, for example. You would get a formal statement of account half-yearly.”

She asked curiously,“How do you get paid for doing all this for me, Mr Strachan?”

I smiled.“That is a very prudent question, Miss Paget. You will find a clause in the will, No 8, I think, which entitles us to charge for our professional services against the income from the trust. Of course, if you get into any legal trouble we should be glad to act for you and help you in any way we could. In that case we should charge you on the normal scale of fees.”

She said unexpectedly,“I couldn't ask for anybody better.”And then she glanced at me, and said mischievously,“I made some enquiries about this firm yesterday.”

“Oh... I hope they were satisfactory?”

“Very.”She did not tell me then what she told me later, that her informant had described us as,“as solid as the Bank of England, and as sticky as treacle.”“I know I'm going to be in very good hands, Mr Strachan.”

I inclined my head.“I hope so. I am afraid that at times you may find this trust irksome, Miss Paget; I can assure you that I shall do my utmost to prevent it from becoming so. You will see in the will that the testator gave certain powers to the trustees to realize capital for the benefit of the legatee in cases where they were satisfied that it would be genuinely for her advantage.”

“You mean, if I really needed a lot of money—for an operation or something—you could let me have it, if you approved?”

She was quick, that girl.“I think that is a very good example. In case of illness, if the income were insufficient, I should certainly realize some of your capital for your benefit.”

She smiled at me, and said,“It's rather like being a ward in Chancery, or something.”

I was a little touched by the comparison. I said,“I should feel very much honoured if you care to look at it that way, Miss Paget. Inevitably this legacy is going to make an upset in your condition of life, and if I can do anything to help you in the transition I should be only too pleased.”I handed her her copy of the will.“Well, there is the will, and I suggest you take it away and read it quietly by yourself. I'll keep the certificates for the time being. After you've thought things over for a day or two I am sure that there will be a great many questions to which you will want answers. Would you like to come and see me again?”

She said,“I would. I know there'll be all sorts of things I want to ask about, but I can't think of them now. It's all so sudden.”

I turned to my engagement diary.“Well, suppose we meet again about the middle of next week.”I stared at the pages.“Of course, you're working. What time do you get off from your office, Miss Paget?”

She said,“Five o'clock.”

“Would six o'clock on Wednesday evening suit you, then? I shall hope to have got somewhere with the matter of your brother by that time.”

She said,“Well, that's all right for me, Mr Strachan, but isn't it a bit late for you? Don't you want to get home?”

I said absently,“I only go to the club. No, Wednesday at six would suit me very well.”I made a note upon my pad, and then I hesitated.“Perhaps if you are doing nothing after that you might like to come on to the club and have dinner in the Ladies Annexe,”I said.“I'm afraid it's not a very gay place, but the food is good.”

She smiled, and said warmly,“I'd love to do that, Mr Strachan. It's very kind of you to ask me.”

I got to my feet.“Very well, then, Miss Paget—six o'clock on Wednesday. And in the meantime, don't do anything in a great hurry. It never pays to be impetuous...”

She went away, and I cleared my desk and took a taxi to the club for lunch. After lunch I had a cup of coffee and slept for ten minutes in a chair before the fire, and when I woke up I thought I ought to get some exercise. So I put on my hat and coat and went out and walked rather aimlessly up St James's Street and along Piccadilly to the Park. As I walked, I wondered how that fresh young woman was spending her weekend. Was she telling her friends all about her good luck, or was she sitting somewhere warm and quiet, nursing and cherishing her own anticipations, or was she on a spending spree already? Or was she out with a young man? She would have plenty of men now to choose from, I thought cynically, and then it struck me that she probably had those already because she was a very marriageable girl. Indeed, considering her appearance and her evident good nature, I was rather surprised that she was not married already.

I had a little talk that evening in the club with a man who is in the Home Office about the procedure for establishing the death of a prisoner of war, and on Monday I had a number of telephone conversations with the War Office and the Home Office about the case. I found, as I had suspected, that there was an extraordinary procedure for proving death which could be invoked, but where a doctor was available who had attended the deceased in the prison camp the normal certification of death was the procedure to adopt. In this instance there was a general practitioner called Ferris in practice at Beckenham who had been a doctor in Camp 206 in the Takunan district on the Burma-Siam railway, and the official at the War Office advised me that this doctor would be in a position to give the normal death certificate.

I rang him up next morning, and he was out upon his rounds. I tried to make his wife understand what I wanted but I think it was too complicated for her; she suggested that I should call and see him after the evening surgery, at half past six. I hesitated over that because Beckenham is a good long way out, but I was anxious to get these formalities over quickly for the sake of the girl. So I went out to see this doctor that evening.

He was a cheerful, fresh-faced man not more than thirty-five years old; he had a keen sense of humour, if rather a macabre one at times. He looked as healthy and fit as if he had spent the whole of his life in England in a country practice. I got to him just as he was finishing off the last of his patients, and he had leisure to talk for a little.

“Lieutenant Paget,”he said thoughtfully.“Oh yes, I know. Donald Paget—was his name Donald?”I said it was.“Oh, of course, I remember him quite well. Yes, I can write a death certificate. I'd like to do that for him, though I don't suppose it'll do him much good.”

“It will help his sister,”I remarked.“There is a question of an inheritance, and the shorter we can make the necessary formalities the better for her.”

He reached for his pad of forms.“I wonder if she's got as much guts as her brother.”

“Was he a good chap?”

He nodded.“Yes,”he said.“He was a delicate-looking man, dark and rather pale, you know, but he was a very good type. I think he was a planter in civil life—anyway, he was in the Malay volunteers. He spoke Malay very well, and he got along in Siamese all right. With those languages, of course, he was a very useful man to have in the camp. We used to do a lot of black market with the villagers, the Siamese outside, you know. But quite apart from that, he was the sort of officer the men like. It was a great loss when he went.”

“What did he die of?”I asked.

He paused with his pen poised over the paper.“Well, you could take your pick of half a dozen things. I hadn't time to do a post mortem, of course. Between you and me, I don't really know. I think he just died. But he'd recovered from enough to kill a dozen ordinary men, so I don't know that it really matters what one puts down on the certificate. No legal point depends upon the cause of death, does it?”

“Oh, no,”I said.“All I want is the death certified.”

He still paused, in recollection.“He had a huge tropical ulcer on his left leg that we were treating, and that was certainly poisoning the whole system. I think if he'd gone on we'd have had to have taken that leg off. He got that because he was one of those chaps who won't report sick while they can walk. Well, while he was in hospital with the ulcer, he got cerebral malaria. We had nothing to treat that damn thing with till we got around to making our own quinine solutions for intravenous injection; we took a frightful risk with that, but there was nothing else to do. We got a lot through it with that, and Paget was one of them. He got over it quite well. That was just before we got the cholera. Cholera went right through the camp-hospital and everything. We couldn't isolate the cases, or anything like that. I never want to see a show like that again. We'd got nothing, nothing, not even saline. No drugs to speak of, and no equipment. We were making bed-pans out of old kerosene tins. Paget got that, and would you believe it, he got over cholera. We got some prophylactic injections from the Nips and we gave him those; that may have helped. At least, I think we gave him that—I'm not sure. He was very weak when that left him, of course, and the ulcer wasn't any too good. And about a week after that, he just died in the night. Heart, I fancy. I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll put down for Cause of Death—Cholera. There you are, sir. I'm sorry you had to come all this way for it.”

As I took the certificate I asked curiously,“Did you get any of those things yourself?”

He laughed.“I was one of the lucky ones. All I got was the usual dysentery and malaria, the ordinary type malaria, not cerebral. Overwork was my trouble, but other people had that, too. We were in such a jam, for so long. We had hundreds of cases just lying on the floor or bamboo charpoys in palm huts—it was raining almost all the time. No beds, no linen, no equipment, and precious few drugs. You just couldn't rest. You worked till you dropped asleep, and then you got up and went on working. You never came to an end. There was never half an hour when you could slack off and sit and have a smoke, or go for a walk, except by neglecting some poor sod who needed you very badly.”

He paused. I sat silent, thinking how easy by comparison my own war had been.“It went on like that for nearly two years,”he said.“You got a bit depressed at times, because you couldn't even take time off to go and hear a lecture.”

“Did you have lectures?”I asked.

“Oh yes, we used to have a lot of lectures by the chaps in camp. How to grow Cox's Orange Pippins, or the TT motorcycle races, or Life in Hollywood. They made a difference to the men, the lectures did. But we doctors usually couldn't get to them. I mean, it's not much of an alibi when someone's in convulsions if you're listening to a lecture on Cox's Orange Pippins at the other end of the camp.”

I said,“It must have been a terrible experience.”

He paused, reflecting.“It was so beautiful,”he said,“The Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. You've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains.... We used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. However terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if it's beautiful.”

When Jean Paget came to see me on Wednesday evening I was ready to report the progress I had made. First I went through one or two formal matters connected with the winding up of the estate, and then I showed her the schedule of the furniture that I had put in store at Ayr. She was not much interested in that.“I should think it had all better be sold, hadn't it?”she remarked.“Could we put it in an auction?”

“Perhaps it would be as well to wait a little before doing that,”I suggested.“You may want to set up a house or a flat of your own.”

She wrinkled up her nose.“I can't see myself wanting to furnish it with any of Uncle Douglas's stuff, if I did,”she said.

However, she agreed not to do anything about that till her own plans were more definite, and we turned to other matters.“I've got your brother's death certificate,”I said, and I was going on to tell her what I had done with it when she stopped me.

“What did Donald die of, Mr Strachan?”she asked.

I hesitated for a moment. I did not want to tell so young a woman the unpleasant story I had 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 improbably 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 are 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 into 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 organizations like to keep the overheads down,”I remarked.

“I shouldn't have thought organizations 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. Goodnight, Mr Strachan.”

“Goodnight,”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 Garden 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.”