Odds against

EIGHT

She came out of the door at ten past six wearing a neat well cut dark overcoat and with a plain silk scarf covering her hair, tied under her chin. It hid only a small part of the disaster to her face, and seeing her like that, defenceless, away from the shelter she had made in her office, I had an uncomfortably vivid vision of the purgatory she suffered day in and day out on the journeys to work.

She hadn’t expected me to be there. She didn’t look round for me when she came out, but turned directly up the road towards the tube station. I walked after her and touched her arm. Even in low heels she was taller than I.

‘Mr Halley!’ she said. ‘I didn’t think…’

‘How about a drink first?’ I said. ‘The pubs are open.’

‘Oh no…’

‘Oh yes. Why not?’ I took her arm and steered her firmly across the road into the nearest bar. Dark oak, gentle lighting, brass pump handles, and the lingering smell of lunchtime cigars: a warm beckoning stop for city gents on their way home. There were already half a dozen of them, prosperous and dark-suited, adding fizz to their spirits.

‘Not here,’ she protested.

‘Here.’ I held a chair for her to sit on at a small table in a corner, and asked her what she would like to drink.

‘Sherry, then… dry…’

I took the two glasses over one at a time, sherry for her, brandy for me. She was sitting on the edge of the chair, uncomfortably, and it was not the one I had put her in. She had moved round so that she had her back to everyone except me.

‘Good luck, Miss…?’ I said, lifting my glass.

‘Martin. Zanna Martin.’

‘Good luck, Miss Martin.’ I smiled.

Tentatively she smiled back. It made her face much worse: half the muscles on the disfigured right side didn’t work and could do nothing about lifting the corner of her mouth or crinkling the skin round the socket of her eye. Had life been even ordinarily kind she would have been a pleasant looking, assured woman in her late thirties with a loving husband and a growing family: years of heartbreak had left her a shy, lonely spinster who dressed and moved as though she would like to be invisible. Yet, looking at the sad travesty of her face, one could neither blame the young men who hadn’t married her nor condemn her own efforts at effacement.

‘Have you worked for Mr Bolt long?’ I asked peaceably, settling back lazily into my chair and watching her gradually relax into her own.

‘Only a few months…’ She talked for some time about her job in answer to my interested questions, but unless she was supremely artful, she was not aware of anything shady going on in Charing, Street and King. I mentioned the envelopes she had been addressing, and asked what was going into them.

‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘The leaflets haven’t come from the printers.’

‘But I expect you typed the leaflet anyway,’ I said idly.

‘No, actually I think Mr Bolt did that one himself. He’s quite helpful in that way, you know. If I’m busy he’ll often do letters himself.’

Will he, I thought. Will he, indeed. Miss Martin, as far as I was concerned, was in the clear. I bought her another drink and extracted her opinion about Bolt as a stockbroker. Sound, she said, but not busy. She had worked for other stockbrokers, it appeared, and knew enough to judge.

‘There aren’t many stockbrokers working on their own any more,’ she explained, ‘and… well… I don’t like working in a big office, you see… and it’s getting more difficult to find a job which suits me. So many stockbrokers have joined up into partnerships of three or more; it reduces overheads terrifically, of course, and it means that they can spend more time in the House…’

‘Where are Mr Charing, Mr Street, and Mr King?’ I asked.

Charing and Street were dead, she understood, and King had retired some years ago. The firm now consisted simply and solely of Ellis Bolt. She didn’t really like Mr Bolt’s offices being contained inside of those of another firm. It wasn’t private enough, but it was the usual arrangement nowadays. It reduced overheads so much…

When the city gents had mostly departed to the bosoms of their families, Zanna Martin and I left the pub and walked through the empty city streets towards the Tower. We found a quiet little restaurant where she agreed to have dinner. As before, she made a straight line for a corner table and sat with her back to the room.

‘I’m paying my share,’ she announced firmly when she had seen the prices on the menu. ‘I had no idea this place was so expensive, or I wouldn’t have let you choose it… Mr Bolt mentioned that you worked in a shop.’

‘There’s Aunty’s legacy,’ I pointed out. ‘The dinner’s on Aunty.’

She laughed. It was a happy sound if you didn’t look at her, but I found I was already able to talk to her without continually, consciously thinking about her face. One got used to it after a very short while. Some time, I thought, I would tell her so.

I was still on a restricted diet, which made social eating difficult enough without one-handedness thrown in, but did very well on clear soup and Dover sole, expertly removed from the bone by a waiter. Miss Martin, shedding inhibitions visibly, ordered lobster cocktail, fillet steak, and peaches in kirsch. We drank wine, coffee and brandy, and took our time.

‘Oh!’ she said ecstatically at one point. ‘It is so long since I had anything like this. My father used to take me out now and then, but since he died… well, I can’t go to places like this myself… I sometimes eat in a café round the corner from my rooms, they know me there… it’s very good food really, chops, eggs and chips… you know… things like that.’ I could picture her there, sitting alone, with her ravaged head turned to the wall. Lonely unhappy Zanna Martin. I wished I could do something — anything — to help her.

Eventually, when she was stirring her coffee, she said simply, ‘It was a rocket, this.’ She touched her face. ‘A firework. The bottle it was standing in tipped over just as it went off, and it came straight at me. It hit me on the cheek bone and exploded… It wasn’t anybody’s fault… I was sixteen.’

‘They made a good job of it,’ I said.

She shook her head, smiling the crooked tragic smile. ‘A good job from what it was, I suppose, but… they said if the rocket had struck an inch higher it would have gone through my eye into my brain and killed me. I often wish it had.’

She meant it. Her voice was calm. She was stating a fact.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It’s strange, but I’ve almost forgotten about it this evening, and that doesn’t often happen when I’m with anyone.’

‘I’m honoured.’

She drank her coffee, put down her cup, and looked at me thoughtfully.

She said, ‘Why do you keep your hand in your pocket all the time?’

I owed it to her, after all. I put my hand palm upward on the table, wishing I didn’t have to.

She said ‘Oh!’ in surprise, and then, looking back at my face, ‘So you do know. That’s why I feel so… so easy with you. You do understand.’

I shook my head. ‘Only a little. I have a pocket; you haven’t. I can hide.’ I rolled my hand over (the back of it was less off-putting), and finally retreated it on to my lap.

‘But you can’t do the simplest things,’ she exclaimed. Her voice was full of pity. ‘You can’t tie your shoe-laces, for instance. You can’t even eat steak in a restaurant without asking someone else to cut it up for you…’

‘Shut up,’ I said abruptly. ‘Shut up, Miss Martin. Don’t you dare to do to me what you can’t bear yourself.’

‘Pity…’ she said, biting her lip and staring at me unhappily. ‘Yes, it’s so easy to give…’

‘And embarrassing to receive.’ I grinned at her. ‘And my shoes don’t have shoe-laces. They’re out of date, for a start.’

‘You can know as well as I do what it feels like, and yet do it to someone else…’ She was very upset.

‘Stop being miserable. It was kindness. Sympathy.’

‘Do you think,’ she said hesitantly, ‘that pity and sympathy are the same thing?’

‘Very often, yes. But sympathy is discreet and pity is tactless. Oh… I’m so sorry.’ I laughed. ‘Well… it was sympathetic of you to feel sorry I can’t cut up my own food, and tactless to say so. The perfect example.’

‘It wouldn’t be so hard to forgive people for just being tactless,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘No,’ I agreed, surprised. ‘I suppose it wouldn’t.’

‘It might not hurt so much… just tactlessness?’

‘It mightn’t…’

‘And curiosity… that might be easier, too, if I just thought of it as bad manners, don’t you think? I mean tactlessness and bad manners wouldn’t be so hard to stand. In fact I could be sorry for them, for not knowing better how to behave. Oh why, why didn’t I think of that years ago, when it seems so simple now. So sensible.’

‘Miss Martin,’ I said with gratitude. ‘Have some more brandy… you’re a liberator.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Pity is bad manners and can be taken in one’s stride, as you said.’

‘You said it,’ she protested.

‘Indeed I didn’t, not like that.’

‘All right,’ she said with gaiety. ‘We’ll drink to a new era. A bold front to the world. I will put my desk back to where it was before I joined the office, facing the door. I’ll let every caller see me. I’ll…’ Her brave voice nearly cracked. ‘I’ll just think poorly of their manners if they pity me too openly. That’s settled.’

We had some more brandy. I wondered inwardly whether she would have the same resolve in the morning, and doubted it. There had been so many years of hiding. She too, it seemed, was thinking along the same lines.

‘I don’t know that I can do it alone. But if you will promise me something, then I can.’

‘Very well,’ I said incautiously. ‘What?’

‘Don’t put your hand in your pocket tomorrow. Let everyone see it.’

I couldn’t. Tomorrow I would be going to the races. I looked at her, appalled, and really understood only then what she had to bear, and what it would cost her to move her desk. She saw the refusal in my face, and some sort of light died in her own. The gaiety collapsed, the defeated, defenceless look came back, the liberation was over.

‘Miss Martin…’ I swallowed.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said tiredly. ‘It doesn’t matter. And anyway, it’s Saturday tomorrow. I only go in for a short while to see to the mail and anything urgent from today’s transactions. There wouldn’t be any point in changing the desk.’

‘And on Monday?’

‘Perhaps.’ It meant no.

‘If you’ll change it tomorrow and do it all next week, ‘I’ll do what you ask,’ I said, quaking at the thought of it.

‘You can’t,’ she said sadly. ‘I can see that you can’t.’

‘If you can, I must.’

‘But I shouldn’t have asked you… you work in a shop.’

‘Oh.’ That I had forgotten. ‘It won’t matter.’

An echo of her former excitement crept back.

‘Do you really mean it?’

I nodded. I had wanted to do something — anything — to help her. Anything. My God.

‘Promise?’ she said doubtfully.

‘Yes. And you?’

‘All right,’ she said, with returning resolution. ‘But I can only do it if I know you are in the same boat… I couldn’t let you down then, you see.’

I paid the bill, and although she said there was no need, I took her home. We went on the underground to Finchley. She made straight for the least conspicuous seat and sat presenting the good side of her face to the carriage. Then, laughing at herself, she apologised for doing it.

‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘the new era doesn’t start until tomorrow,’ and hid my hand like a proper coward.

Her room was close to the station (a deliberately short walk, I guessed) in a large prosperous looking suburban house. At the gate she stopped.

‘Will… er… I mean, would you like to come in? It’s not very late… but perhaps you are tired.’

She wasn’t eager, but when I accepted she seemed pleased.

‘This way, then.’

We went through a bare tidy garden to a black painted front door adorned with horrible stained glass panels. Miss Martin fumbled endlessly in her bag for her key and I reflected idly that I could have picked that particular lock as quickly as she opened it legally. Inside there was a warm hall smelling healthily of air freshener, and at the end of a passage off it, a door with a card saying ‘Martin’.

Zanna Martin’s room was a surprise. Comfortable, large, close carpeted, newly decorated, and alive with colour. She switched on a standard lamp and a rosy table lamp, and drew burnt orange curtains over the black expanse of french windows. With satisfaction she showed me the recently built tiny bathroom leading out of her room, and the suitcase sized kitchen beside it, both of which additions she had paid for herself. The people who owned the house were very understanding, she said. Very kind. She had lived there for eleven years. It was home.

Zanna Martin had no mirrors in her home. Not one.

She bustled in her little kitchen, making more coffee: for something to do, I thought. I sat relaxed on her long comfortable modern sofa and watched how, from long habit, she leant forward most of the time so that the heavy shoulder length dark hair swung down to hide her face. She brought the tray and set it down, and sat on the sofa carefully on my right. One couldn’t blame her.

‘Do you ever cry?’ she said suddenly.

‘No.’

‘Not… from frustration?’

‘No.’ I smiled. ‘Swear.’

She sighed. ‘I used to cry often. I don’t any more, though. Getting older, of course. I’m nearly forty. I’ve got resigned now to not getting married… I knew I was resigned to it when I had the bathroom and kitchen built. Up to then, you see, I’d always pretended to myself that one day… one day, perhaps… but I don’t expect it any more, not any more.’

‘Men are fools,’ I said inadequately.

‘I hope you don’t mind me talking like this? It’s so seldom that I have anyone in here, and practically never anyone I can really talk to…’

I stayed for an hour, listening to her memories, her experiences, her whole shadowed life. What, I chided myself, had ever happened to me that was one tenth as bad. I had had far more ups than downs.

At length she said, ‘How did it happen with you? Your hand…’

‘Oh, an accident. A sharp bit of metal.’ A razor sharp racing horse-shoe attached to the foot of a horse galloping at thirty miles an hour, to be exact. A hard kicking slash as I rolled on the ground from an easy fall. One of those things.

Horses race in thin light shoes called plates, not the heavy ones they normally wear: blacksmiths change them before and after, every time a horse runs. Some trainers save a few shillings by using the same racing plates over and over again, so that the leading edge gradually wears down to the thickness of a knife. But jagged knives, not smooth. They can cut you open like a hatchet.

I’d really known at once when I saw my stripped wrist with the blood spurting out in a jet and the broken bones showing white, that I was finished as a jockey. But I wouldn’t give up hope, and insisted on the surgeons sewing it all up, even though they wanted to take my hand off there and then. It would never be any good, they said; and they were right. Too many of the tendons and nerves were severed. I persuaded them to try twice later on to rejoin and graft some of them and both times it had been a useless agony. They had refused to consider it again.

Zanna Martin hesitated on the brink of asking for details, and fortunately didn’t. Instead she said, ‘Are you married? Do you know, I’ve talked so much about myself, that I don’t know a thing about you.’

‘My wife’s in Athens, visiting her sister.’

‘How lovely,’ she sighed. ‘I wish…’

‘You’ll go one day,’ I said firmly. ‘Save up, and go in a year or two. On a bus tour or something. With people anyway. Not alone.’

I looked at my watch, and stood up. ‘I’ve enjoyed this evening a great deal. Thank you so much for coming out with me.’

She stood and formally shook hands, not suggesting another meeting. So much humility, I thought: so little expectation. Poor, poor Miss Martin.

‘Tomorrow morning…’ she said tentatively, at the door.

‘Tomorrow,’ I nodded. ‘Move that desk. And I… I promise I won’t forget.’

I went home cursing that fate had sent me someone like Zanna Martin. I had expected Charing, Street and King’s secretary to be young, perhaps pretty, a girl I could take to a café and the pictures and flirt with, with no great involvement on either side. Instead it looked as if I should have to pay more than I’d meant to for my inside information on Ellis Bolt.