A Town Like Alice (19 page)

Flying to England, I thought, must have made a considerable hole in his thousand pounds. "You came to London, then, and went straight down to Southampton?"

"That's right," he said.

"And from there you went up to North Wales and from there you came here?"

"That's right."

I looked him in the eyes, and smiled. "You must want to see Miss Paget very much."

He met my gaze. "I do."

I leaned back in my chair. "I've got a disappointment for you, I'm afraid, Mr Harman. Miss Paget is abroad."

He stared down at his hat for a moment. Then he raised his head. "Is she far away?" he asked. "I mean, is it France or anything like that, where I could get to see her?"

I shook my head. "She's travelling in the East."

He said quietly, "I see."

I couldn't help liking and respecting this man. It was perfectly obvious that he had come twelve thousand miles or so to find Jean Paget, and now he wasn't going to find her. It was bad luck, to say the least of it, and he was taking it well. I felt that I wanted a little time to consider this affair.

"The most that I can do for you," I said, "is to forward a letter. I can do that, if you care to write one, and I'll send it to her by air mail. But I'm afraid that you may have to wait a month or so before you get an answer."

He brightened. "I'd like to do that. I never thought that after coming all this way I'd find that she'd gone walkabout."

He thought for a minute. "What address should I put upon the letter."

"I can't give you my client's address, Mr Harman," I said. "What I suggest that you do is to write her a letter and bring it in to me here tomorrow morning. I will send it on with a short covering note explaining how it came into my hands. Then if she wants to see you she will get in touch with you herself."

"You don't think she'll want to see me?" he said heavily.

I smiled. "I didn't say anything of the sort, Mr Harman. I'm quite sure that when she hears you've been in England looking for her she will write to you. What I'm saying is that I have her interests to consider, and I'm not going to give her address to anyone who comes into this office and cares to ask for it." I paused. "There's one thing that you'd better know," I said. "Miss Paget is a fairly wealthy woman. Women who have command of a good deal of money are apt to be troubled by touts. I'm not saying that you're a tout or that you're after her money. I
am
saying that you must write to her first of all, and then let her decide if she wants to meet you. If you're a friend of hers you'll see that that's reasonable."

He stared at me. "I never knew that she had money. She told me she was just a typist in an office."

"That's quite true," I said. "She inherited some money recently."

He was silent. "Suppose you come back tomorrow morning, Mr Harman," I said. I glanced at my engagement diary. "Say, twelve o'clock tomorrow morning. Write her a letter saying whatever it is you want to say, and bring it here then. I will forward it to her tomorrow evening."

"All right," he said. He got up and I got up with him.

"Where are you staying, Mr Harman?" I asked.

"At the Kingsway Palace Hotel."

"All right, Mr Harman," I said. "I shall expect you tomorrow morning, at twelve o'clock."

I spent most of that evening wondering if I had done the right thing in refusing Mr Harman the address. I thought ruefully that Jean would have been very angry if she had known I had done such a thing, especially when she was looking for him all over Australia. At the same time, what I had done would not delay a letter from him reaching her, and there was no sense in putting all her cards upon the table for him to see just at present. One thing that puzzled me a little was, why had he suddenly awoken to the fact that he wanted to meet Jean Paget again, after six years? A question or two upon that point seemed to be in order, and I prepared a small interrogation for him when he came to see me with his letter.

Twelve o'clock next morning came, and he didn't turn up for his appointment. I waited in for him till one o'clock, and then I went to lunch.

By three o'clock I was a little bit concerned. The initiative had passed into his hands. If he should vanish into thin air now and never come back to see me again, Jean Paget would be very cross with me, and rightly so. Between clients I put in a telephone call to the Kingsway Palace Hotel and asked to speak to Mr Joseph Harman. The answer was that Mr Harman had gone out after breakfast, and had left no message at the desk. I left one for him, asking him to ring me as soon as he came in.

He did not ring that day.

At half past ten that night I rang the hotel again, but I was told that Mr Harman was not in.

At eight o'clock next morning I rang again. They told me that Mr Harman had not checked out and his luggage was still in his room, but that he had not slept in the room that night.

As soon as I got into the office I sent for Derek Harris. "Harris," I said. "I want you to try and find that man Harman. He's an Australian." I told him briefly what had happened. "I should try the hotel again, and if you draw a blank, ring round the various police courts. I think I may have given him some rather unwelcome news, and it's quite possible he's been out on a blind."

He came back in a quarter of an hour. "You must have second sight, sir," he said. "He's coming up at Bow Street this morning, drunk and disorderly. They had him in the cooler for the night."

"He's a friend of Miss Paget's," I said. "Get along down to Bow Street, Harris, and make yourself known to him. Which court is he coming up in?"

"Mr Horler's."

I glanced at my watch. "Get along down there right away. Stay with Harman and pay the fine if he hasn't got any money. Then give me a ring, and if it's all in order take him in a taxi to my flat. I'll meet you there."

There was nothing on my desk that day that could not be postponed or handled by Lester. I got back to my flat in time to catch my charwoman at work and tell her to make up the spare room bed. I told her I should want food in the flat for three or four meals, and I gave her money and sent her out to buy whatever food she could get off the ration.

Harris arrived with Harman half an hour later, and the Australian looked a little bit the worse for wear. He was cheerful and sober after his night in the cells, but he had lost one shoe and he had lost his collar stud and his hat. I met him in the hall. "Morning, Mr Harman," I said. "I thought perhaps you'd rather come round here and clean up. You'd better not go back to the hotel looking like that."

He looked me in the eyes. "I've been on the grog," he said.

"So I see. The water's hot for a bath if you want one, and there's a razor in the bathroom." I took him and showed him the geography of the house. "You can use this room." I looked him up and down, smiling. "I'll get you a clean shirt and collar. You can try a pair of my shoes; if they're too small I'll send out for a pair."

He wagged his head. "I dunno why you want to do this for me. I'll be all right."

"You'll be righter when you've had a bath and a shave," I said. "Miss Paget would never forgive me if I let a friend of hers go wandering about the streets like that."

He looked at me curiously, but I left him and went back to the sitting-room. Harris was waiting for me there. "Thanks, Derek," I said. "There was a fine, I suppose?"

"Forty shillings," he said. "I paid it."

I gave him the money. "He was cleaned out?"

"He's got four and fourpence halfpenny," he replied. "He thinks he had about seventy pounds, but he's not sure."

"It doesn't seem to worry him," I said.

He laughed. "I don't think it does. He seems quite cheerful over it."

I sent Harris back to the office and settled down to write a few letters while Harman was in the bath. He came into the sitting-room presently looking a bit sheepish, and again I noticed the curious, stiff gait with which he walked. "I dunno what to say," he said in his slow way. "Those jokers I was with got all the money I had on me so Mr Harris had to pay the fine. But I got some more. I got a thing called a letter of credit that the bank in Brisbane gave me. I can get some money on that and pay him back."

"That's all right," I said. "Have you had any breakfast?"

"No."

"Want any?"

"Well, I dunno. Maybe I'll get something round at the hotel."

"You don't have to do that," I said. "My woman's here still; she'll get you some breakfast." I went out and organized this, and then I came back and found him standing by the window. "You didn't come back with that letter," I observed.

"I changed my mind," he said. "I'm going to give it away."

"Give it away?"

"That's right," he said. "I won't be writing any letter."

"That's seems rather a pity," I said quietly.

"Maybe. I had a good long think about it, and I won't be writing any letter. I decided that. That's why I didn't come back at the time you said."

"As you like," I said. "Perhaps you'd like to tell me a bit more about it when you've had some breakfast."

I left him to his breakfast and went on with my letters. My woman took it to the dining-room and he went in there to eat it; a quarter of an hour later he came back to me in the sitting-room.

"I'd better be getting along now," he said awkwardly. "Will it be all right if I come round later in the day and leave these shoes with the woman?"

I got up and offered him a cigarette. "Will you tell me a bit more about yourself before you go?" I asked. "You see, I shall be writing to Miss Paget in a day or two, and she's sure to want to know all about you."

He stared at me, cigarette in hand. "You're going to write and tell her I've been here?"

"Of course."

He stood silent for a moment, and then said in his slow Queensland way, "It would be better to forget about it, Mr Strachan. Just don't say nothing at all."

I struck a match and lit his cigarette for him. "Is this because I told you about her inheritance?"

"You mean, the money?"

"Yes."

He grinned. "I wouldn't mind about her having money, same as any man. No, it's Willstown."

That was rather less intelligible than Greek to me, of course. I said, "Look, Joe, it won't hurt you to sit down for a few minutes and tell me one or two things." I called him Joe because I thought that it might make him loosen up.

"I dunno as there's much to tell," he said sheepishly.

"Sit down, anyway." I thought for a moment, and then I said. "I'm right in thinking that you met Miss Paget first in the war?"

"That's right," he said.

"That was in Malaya, when you were both prisoners?"

"That's right.".

"Some time in 1942?"

"That's right."

"And you've never met her since, nor written to her?"

"That's right."

"Well, what I don't understand is this," I said. "Why do you want to meet her now so very badly? After all, it's six years since you met her. Why the sudden urge to get in touch with her now?" It was still vaguely in my mind that he had somehow heard about her money.

He looked up at me, grinning. "I thought she was a married woman."

I stared at him. "I see… When did you find out that she wasn't married?"

"I only found out that this May. I met the pilot that had flown her out from a place in Malaya called Kota Bahru. At Julia Creek, that was."

He had driven his fourteen hundred cattle down from Midhurst station to Julia Creek with Jim Lennon and two Abo stockriders to help. From Midhurst to Julia Creek is about three hundred miles by way of the Norman River, the Saxby River and the Flinders River. They left Midhurst at the end of March and got the herd to railhead at Julia Creek on the third of May, moving them at the rate of about ten miles a day. The beasts were corralled in the stockyards of the railway, and they set to work to load them into trains; this took about three days.

During this time Jim and Joe lived in the Post Office Hotel at Julia Creek. It was very hot and they were working fourteen hours a day to load the cattle into trucks; whenever they were not working they were standing in the bar of the hotel drinking hugely at the cold Australian light beer that does no harm to people sweating freely at hard manual work. One evening while they were standing so two dapper men in uniform came into the bar and shouted a couple of rounds; these were the pilots of a Trans-Australia Airline Dakota which had stopped there for the night with an oil leak in the starboard engine.

Harman found himself next to the chief pilot. Joe was wearing an old green linen sun hat that had once belonged to the American Army, a cotton singlet, a pair of dirty khaki shorts, and boots' without socks; his appearance contrasted strangely with the neatness of the airman, but the pilot was accustomed to the outback. They fell into conversation about the war and soon discovered they had both served in Malaya. Joe showed the scars upon his hands and the pilots examined them with interest; he told them how he had been nailed up to be beaten, and they shouted another grog for him.