Читать книгу A Town Like Alice онлайн

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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."