by Dick Francis
‘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.
NINE
‘Now look,’ said Lord Hagbourne, amidst the bustle of Kempton races, ‘I’ve had a word with Captain Oxon and he’s satisfied with the way things are going. I really can’t interfere any more. Surely you understand that?’
‘No, sir, I don’t. I don’t think Captain Oxon’s feelings are more inportant than Seabury Racecourse. The course should be put right quickly, even if it means overruling him.’
‘Captain Oxon,’ he said with a touch of sarcasm, ‘knows more about his job than you do. I give more weight to his assurance than to your quick look at the track.’
‘Then couldn’t you go and see for yourself? While there is still time.’
He didn’t like being pushed. His expression said so, plainly. There was no more I could say, either, without risking him ringing up Radnor to cancel the whole investigation.
‘I may… er… I may find time on Monday,’ he said at last, grudgingly. ‘I’ll see. Have you found anything concrete to support your idea that Seabury’s troubles were caused maliciously?’
‘Not yet, sir.’
‘A bit far-fetched, if you ask me,’ he said crossly. ‘I said so to begin with, if you remember. If you don’t turn something up pretty soon… it’s all expense, you know.’
He was intercepted by a passing Steward who took him off to another problem, leaving me grimly to reflect that so far there was a horrid lack of evidence of any sort. What there was, was negative.
George had still found no chink in Kraye’s respectability, ex-sergeant Carter had given Bolt clearance, and Chico had come back from Seabury with no results all along the line.
We’d met in the office that morning, before I went to Kempton.
‘Nothing,’ said Chico. ‘I wagged me tongue off, knocking at every front door along that road. Not a soggy flicker. The bit which crosses the racecourse wasn’t closed by diversion notices, that’s for sure. There isn’t much traffic along there, of course. I counted it. Only forty to the hour, average. Still, that’s too much for at least some of the neighbours not to notice if there’d been anything out of the ordinary.’
‘Did anyone see the tanker, before it overturned?’
‘They’re always seeing tankers, nowadays. Several complaints about it, I got. No one noticed that one, especially.’
‘It can’t be coincidence… just at that spot at that time, where it would do most harm. And the driver packing up and moving a day or two afterwards, with no forwarding address.’
‘Well…’ Chico scratched his ear reflectively. ‘I got no dice with the hiring of lifting gear either. There isn’t much to be had, and what there was was accounted for. None of the little bungalows saw anything in that line, except the breakdown cranes coming to lift the tanker up again.’
‘How about the drains?’
‘No drains,’ he said. ‘A blank back to Doomsday.’
‘Good.’
‘Come again?’
‘If you’d found them on a map, the hurdle race accident would have been a genuine accident. This way, they reek of tiger traps.’
‘A spot of spade work after dark? Dodgy stuff.’
I frowned. ‘Yes. And it had to be done long enough before the race meeting for the ground to settle, so that the line of the trench didn’t show…’
‘And strong enough for a tractor to roll over it.’
‘Tractor?’
‘There was one on the course yesterday, pulling a trailer of dug up turf.’
‘Oh yes, of course. Yes, strong enough to hold a tractor… but wheels wouldn’t pierce the ground like a horse’s legs. The weight is more spread.’
‘
True enough.’
‘How fast was the turf-digging going?’ I asked.
‘Fast? You’re joking.’
It was depressing. So was Lord Hagbourne’s shilly-shallying. So, acutely, was the whole day, because I kept my promise to Zanna Martin. Pity, curiosity, surprise, embarrassment and revulsion, I encountered the lot. I tried hard to look on some of the things that were said as tactlessness or bad manners, but it didn’t really work. Telling myself it was idiotic to be so sensitive didn’t help either. If Miss Martin hadn’t kept her side of the bargain, I thought miserably, I would throttle her.
Half way through the afternoon I had a drink in the big upstairs bar with Mark Witney.
‘So that’s what you’ve been hiding all this time in pockets and gloves,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Bit of a mess,’ he commented.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Does it hurt still?’
‘No, only if I knock it. And it aches sometimes.’
‘Mm,’ he said sympathetically. ‘My ankle still aches too. Joints are always like that; they mend, but they never forgive you.’ He grinned. ‘The other half? There’s time; I haven’t a runner until the fifth.’
We had another drink, talking about horses, and I reflected that it would be easy if they were all like him.
‘Mark,’ I said as we walked back to the weighing room, ‘do you remember whether Dunstable ran into any sort of trouble before it packed up?’
‘That’s going back a bit.’ He pondered. ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t doing so well during the last year or two, was it? The attendances had fallen off, and they weren’t spending any money on paint.’
‘But no specific disasters?’
‘The Clerk of the Course took an overdose, if you call that a disaster. Yes, I remember now, the collapse of the place’s prosperity was put down to the Clerk’s mental illness. Brinton, I think his name was. He’d been quietly going loco and making hopeless decisions all over the place.’
‘I’d forgotten,’ I said glumly. Mark went into the weighing room and I leant against the rails outside. A suicidal Clerk of the Course could hardly have been the work of Kraye, I thought. It might have given him the idea of accelerating the demise of Seabury, though. He’d had plenty of time over Dunstable, but owing to a recent political threat of nationalisation of building land, he might well be in a hurry to clinch Seabury. I sighed, disregarded as best I could a stare of fascinated horror from the teenage daughter of a man I used to ride for, and drifted over to look at the horses in the parade ring.