‘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
‘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.’
