‘I’d be careful about that, miss,’ said the driver. ‘Don’t go warming those hands up too fast or the fingers will drop off.’ A comforting chap. Inaccurate too, I trusted. Joanna looked more worried than ever.
We walked from the telephone box to the taxi. It was an ordinary black London taxi. I wondered what charm Joanna had used to get it so far out into the country in the middle of the night; and also, more practically, whether the meter was still ticking away. It was.
‘Get in, out of the wind,’ she said, opening the taxi door.
I did as I was told. She had brought a suitcase, from which she now produced a thin, pale blue cardigan of her own, and a padded man-sized olive-coloured anorak which zipped up the front. She looked at me judiciously, and out came the scissors. Some quick snips and the ruins of my shirt lay on the seat beside me. She cut two long strips of it and wound them carefully round my wrists. The taxi driver watched.
‘This is a police job,’ he suggested.
I shook my head. ‘Private fight,’ I said.
He held up the harness hook, which he had brought across from the telephone box.
‘What sort of thing is this?’ he asked.
‘Throw it in the ditch,’ I said, averting my eyes.
‘You’ll be needing it for the police,’ he insisted.
‘I told you,’ I said wearily, ‘no police.’
His disillusioned face showed that he knew all about people who got themselves beaten up but wouldn’t report it. He shrugged and went off into the darkness, and came back without the hook.
‘It’s in the ditch just behind the telephone box, if you change your mind,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
Joanna finished the bandages and helped my arms into both the garments she had brought, and fastened the fronts. The next thing the suitcase produced was a pair of fur lined mittens which went on without too much trouble, and after that a thermos flask full of hot soup, and some cups.
I looked into Joanna’s black eyes as she held the cup to my mouth. I loved her. Who wouldn’t love a girl who thought of hot soup at a time like that?
The driver accepted some soup too, and stamped his feet on the ground and remarked that it was getting chilly. Joanna gave him a pained look, and I laughed.
He glanced at me appraisingly and said, ‘Maybe you can do without a doctor, at that.’ He thanked Joanna for the soup, gave her back the cup, settled himself in the driving seat and, switching off the light inside the taxi, started to drive us back to London.
‘Who did it?’ said Joanna.
‘Tell you later.’
‘All right.’ She didn’t press. She bent down to the case and brought out some fleecy slippers, thick socks and a pair of her own stretchy trews. ‘Take your trousers off.’
I said ironically ‘I can’t undo the zip.’
‘I forgot...’
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I’ll settle for the socks; can’t manage the trousers.’ Even I could hear the exhaustion in my voice, and Joanna without arguing got down on her knees in the swaying cab and changed my wet socks and shoes for dry ones.
‘Your feet are freezing,’ she said.
‘I can’t feel them,’ I said. The moon shone clearly through the window and I looked at the slippers. They were too large for me, much too large for Joanna.
‘Have I stepped into Brian’s shoes?’ I asked.
After a pause she said neutrally, ‘They are Brian’s, yes.
‘And the jacket?’
‘I bought it for him for Christmas.’
So that was that. It wasn’t the best moment to find out.
‘I didn’t give it to him,’ she said after a moment, as if she had made up her mind about something.
‘Why not?’
‘It didn’t seem to suit a respectable life in the outer suburbs. I gave him a gold tie-pin instead.’
‘Very suitable,’ I said dryly.
‘A farewell present,’ she said quietly.
I said sincerely, ‘I’m sorry.’ I knew it hadn’t been easy for her.
She drew in a breath sharply. ‘Are you made of iron, Rob?’
‘Iron filings,’ I said.
The taxi sped on.
‘We had a job finding you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry we were so long. It was such a big area, you see.’
‘You came, though.’
‘Yes.’
I found sitting in the swaying taxi very uncomfortable. My arms and shoulders ached unceasingly and if I leaned back too heavily the raw bits didn’t like it. After a while I gave it up, and finished the journey sitting on the floor with my head and my hands in Joanna’s lap.
I was of course quite used to being knocked about. I followed, after all, an occupation in which physical damage was a fairly frequent though unimportant factor; and, especially during my first season, when I was a less efficient jockey and most of the horses I rode were the worst to be had, there was rarely a time when some area of my body was not black and blue. I had broken several of the smaller bones, been kicked in tender places, and dislocated one or two joints. On my general sense of well-being, and on my optimism that I wouldn’t crash un-mendably, none of these things had made the slightest dent. It seemed that in common with most other jockeys I had been born with the sort of resilient constitution which could take a bang and be ready for business, if not the following day, at least a good deal quicker than the medical profession considered normal.
Practice had given me a certain routine for dealing with discomfort, which was mainly to ignore it and concentrate on something else: but this system was not operating very well that evening. It didn’t work, for instance, when I sat for a while in a light armchair in Joanna’s warm room with my elbows on my knees, watching my fingers gradually change colour from yellowy white to smudgy charcoal, to patchy purple, and finally to red.
It began as a tingle, faint and welcome, soon after we had got back and Joanna had turned both her powerful heaters on. She had insisted at once on removing my clammy trousers and also my pants, and on my donning her black trews, which were warm but not long enough by several inches. It was odd, in a way, letting her undress me, which she did matter-of-factly and without remark; but in another way it seemed completely natural, a throwback to our childhood, when we had been bathed together on our visits to each other’s houses.
She dug out some rather powdery-looking aspirins in a bottle. There were only three of them left, which I swallowed. Then she made some black coffee and held it for me to drink. It was stiff with brandy.
‘Warming,’ she said laconically. ‘Anyway, you’ve stopped shivering at last.’
It was then that my fingers tingled and I told her.
‘Will it be bad?’ she said prosaically, putting down the empty coffee mug.
‘Possibly.’
‘You won’t want me to sit and watch you then,’ she said.
I shook my head. She took the empty mug into the kitchen and was several minutes coming back with a full one for herself.
The tingle increased first to a burning sensation and then to a feeling of being squeezed in a vice, tighter and tighter, getting more and more agonising until it felt that at any minute my fingers would disintegrate under the pressure. But there they were, harmlessly hanging in the warm air, with nothing to show for it except that they were turning slowly puce.
Joanna came back from the kitchen and wiped the sweat off my forehead.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
She nodded, and gave me a faint edition of the intimate smile that had had my heart doing flip-flaps from boyhood, and drank her coffee.
When the pulse got going, it felt as though my hands had been taken out of the vice, laid on a bench, and were being rhythmically hammered. It was terrible. And it went on too long. My head drooped.