‘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.’