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 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. He had been a competent and a valuable man. 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. 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. One thing differentiated them slightly from other families, in that they all spoke Malay. 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. Apparently Arthur Paget had been living alone in Malaya when he met his death, his wife having brought the children home. 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. They lived in a small, three-bedroomed house in a suburban street. First, she had been a schoolgirl living with her mother in Southampton. 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. “I do want to try and make you understand.” * * * * * “You’ve been so very kind to me,” she said.

“Not now, now that I’ve got this money.” She paused. 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.

It’s not that I mind talking about it, but I hardly ever think about it now.

Is this something to do with your experiences in the war?” 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. I remember being completely taken aback, and seeking refuge in my habit of saying nothing when you don’t know what to say. I suppose there was a long pause after she said that.

A town like alice first edition