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 cafe 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.’
