‘Growth, then,’ I said, tentatively. ‘Turn it into a fortune in time for my old age.’
He smiled without much mirth, and drew a sheet of paper towards him.
‘Could I have your full name?’
‘John Halley… John Sidney Halley,’ I said truthfully. He wrote it down.
‘Address?’ I gave it.
‘And your bank?’ I told him that too.
‘And I’ll need a reference, I’m afraid.’
‘Would the bank manager do?’ I asked. ‘I’ve had an account there for two years… he knows me quite well.’
‘Excellent.’ He screwed up his pen. ‘Now, do you have any idea what companies you’d like shares in, or will you leave it to me?’
‘Oh, I’ll leave it to you. If you don’t mind, that is. I don’t know anything about it, you see, not really. Only it seems silly to leave all that money around doing nothing.’
‘Quite, quite.’ He was bored with me. I thought with amusement that Charles would appreciate my continuing his strategy of the weak front. ‘Tell me, Mr Halley, what do you do for a living?’
‘Oh… um… I work in a shop,’ I said. ‘In the men’s wear. Very interesting, it is.’
‘I’m sure it is.’ There was a yawn stuck in his throat.
‘I’m hoping to be made an assistant buyer next year,’ I said eagerly.
‘Splendid. Well done.’ He’d had enough. He got cum-brously to his feet and ushered me to the door. ‘All right, Mr Halley, I’ll invest your money safely for you in good long term growth stock, and send you the papers to sign in due course. You’ll hear from me in a week or ten days. All right?’
‘Yes, Mr Bolt, thank you very much indeed,’ I said respectfully. He shut the door gently behind me.
There were now two people in the outer office. The woman with her back still turned, and a spare, middle-aged man with a primly folded mouth, and tough stringy tendons pushing his collar away from his neck. He was quite at home, and with an incurious, unhurried glance at me he went past into Bolt’s office. The clerk, I presumed.
The woman was typing addresses on envelopes. The twenty or so that she had done lay in a slithery stack on her left: on her right an open file provided a list of names. I looked over her shoulder casually, and then with quickened interest. She was working down the first page of a list of Seabury shareholders.
‘Do you want something, Mr Halley?’ she asked politely, pulling one envelope from the typewriter and inserting another with a minimum of flourish.
‘Well, er, yes,’ I said diffidently. I walked round to the side of her desk and found that one couldn’t go on round to the front of it: a large old fashioned table with bulbous legs filled all the space between the desk and the end of the room. I looked at this arrangement with some sort of understanding and with compassion.
‘I wondered,’ I said, ‘if you could be very kind and tell me something about investing money, and so on. I didn’t like to ask Mr Bolt too much, he’s a busy man. And I’d like to know a bit about it.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Halley.’ Her head was turned away from me, bent over the Seabury investors. ‘I’ve a job to do, as you see. Why don’t you read the financial columns in the papers, or get a book on the subject?’
I had a book all right. Outline of Company Law. One thing I had learned from it was that only stockbrokers — apart from the company involved — could send circulars to shareholders. It was illegal if private citizens did it. Illegal for Kraye to send letters to Seabury shareholders offering to buy them out: legal for Bolt.
‘Books aren’t as good as people at explaining things,’ I said. ‘If you are busy now, could I come back when you’ve finished work and take you out for a meal? I’d be so grateful if you would, if you possibly could.’
A sort of shudder shook her. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Halley, but I’m afraid I can’t.’
‘If you will look at me, so that I can see all of your face,’ I said, ‘I will ask you again.’
Her head went up with a jerk at that, but finally she turned round and looked at me.
I smiled. ‘That’s better. Now, how about coming out with me this evening?’
‘You guessed?’
I nodded. ‘The way you’ve got your furniture organised… Will you come?’
‘You still want to?’
‘Well, of course. What time do you finish?’
‘About six, tonight.’
‘I’ll come back. I’ll meet you at the door, down in the street.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘If you really mean it, thank you. I’m not doing anything else tonight…’
Years of hopeless loneliness showed raw in the simple words. Not doing anything else, tonight or most nights. Yet her face wasn’t horrific; not anything as bad as I had been prepared for. She had lost an eye, and wore a false one. There had been some extensive burns and undoubtedly some severe fracture of the facial bones, but plastic surgery had repaired the damage to a great extent, and it had all been a long time ago. The scars were old. It was the inner wound which hadn’t healed.
Well… I knew a bit about that myself, on a smaller scale.
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.