The Driver's Seat

by Muriel Spark

  ‘Fur coats and flowered poplin shirts on their backs,’ says Mrs Fiedke as she winds along, conducted by Lise this way and that to avoid the oncoming people in the street. ‘If we don’t look lively,’ she says, ‘they will be taking over the homes and the children, and sitting about having chats while we go and fight to defend them and work to keep them. They won’t be content with equal rights only. Next thing they’ll want the upper hand, mark my words. Diamond earrings, I’ve read in the paper.’

  ‘It’s getting late,’ says Lise. Her lips are slightly parted and her nostrils and eyes, too, are a fragment more open than usual; she is a stag scenting the breeze, moving step by step, inhibiting her stride to accommodate Mrs Fiedke’s pace, she seems at the same time to search for a certain air-current, a glimpse and an intimation.

  ‘I clean mine with toothpaste when I’m travelling,’ confides Mrs Fiedke. ‘The better stuff’s in the bank back home, of course. The insurance is too high, isn’t it? But you have to bring a few bits and pieces. I clean them with my toothbrush and ordinary toothpaste, then I rub them with the hand-towel. They come up very nicely. You can’t trust the jewellers. They can always take them out and replace them with a fake.’.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ says Lise. ‘There are so many faces. Where did all the faces come from?’

  ‘I ought to take a nap,’ says Mrs Fiedke, ‘so that I won’t feel too tired when my nephew arrives. Poor thing. We have to leave for Capri tomorrow morning. All the cousins, you know. They’ve taken such a charming villa and the past will never be mentioned. My brother made that clear to them. I made it clear to my brother.’

  They have reached the circular intersection and turn into a sidestreet where a few yards ahead at the next corner there is a taxi-rank occupied by one taxi. This one taxi is taken by someone else just as they approach it.

  ‘I smell burning,’ says Mrs Fiedke as they stand at the corner waiting for another taxi to come along. Lise sniffs, her lips parted and her eyes moving widely from face to face among the passers-by. Then she sneezes. Something has happened to the people in the street, they are looking round, they are sniffing too. Somewhere nearby a great deal of shouting is going on.

  Suddenly round the corner comes a stampede. Lise and Mrs Fiedke are swept apart and jostled in all directions by a large crowd composed mainly of young men, with a few smaller, older and grimmer men, and here and there a young girl, all yelling together and making rapidly for somewhere else. ‘Tear-gas!’ someone shouts and then a lot of people are calling out, ‘Tear-gas!’ A shutter on a shop-front near Lise comes down with a hasty clatter, then the other shops start closing for the day. Lise falls and is hauled to her feet by a tough man who leaves her and runs on.

  Just before it reaches the end of the street which joins the circular intersection the crowd stops. A band of grey-clad policemen come running towards them, in formation, bearing tear-gas satchels and with their gas-masks at the ready. The traffic on the circular intersection has stopped. Lise swerves with her crowd into a garage where some mechanics in their overalls crouch behind the cars and others take refuge underneath a car which is raised on a cradle in the process of repair.

  Lise fights her way to a dark corner at the back of the garage where a small red Mini-Morris, greatly dented, is parked behind a larger car. She wrenches at the door, forcefully, as if she expects it to be locked. It opens so easily as to throw her backwards, and as soon as she regains her balance she gets inside, locks herself in and puts her head down between her knees, breathing heavily, drawing in the smell of petrol blended faintly with a whiff of tear-gas. The demonstrators form up in the garage and are presently discovered and routed out by the police. Their exit is fairly orderly bar the shouting.

  Lise emerges from the car with her zipper-bag and her hand-bag, looking to see what damage has been done to her clothes. The garage men are vociferously commenting on the affair. One is clutching his stomach proclaiming himself poisoned and vowing to sue the police for the permanent damage caused him by tear-gas. Another, with his hand to his throat, gasps that he is suffocating. The others are cursing the students whose gestures of solidarity, they declare in the colourful derisive obscenities of their mother-tongue, they can live without. They stop when Lise limps into view. There are six of them in all, including a young apprentice and a large burly man of middle age, without overalls, wearing only a white shirt and trousers and the definite air of the proprietor. Apparently seeing in Lise a tangible remnant of the troubles lately visited upon his garage, this big fellow turns on her to vent his fury with unmastered hysteria. He advises her to go home to the brothel where she came from, he reminds her that her grandfather was ten times cuckolded, that she was conceived in some ditch and born in another; after adorning the main idea with further illustrations he finally tells her she is a student.

  Lise stands somewhat entranced; by her expression she seems almost consoled by this outbreak, whether because it relieves her own tensions after the panic or whether for some other reason. However, she puts a hand up to her eyes, covering them, and in the language of the country she says, ‘Oh please, please. I’m only a tourist, a teacher from Iowa, New Jersey. I’ve hurt my foot.’ She drops her hand and looks at her coat which is stained with a long black oily mark. ‘Look at my clothes,’ Lise says. ‘My new clothes. It’s best never to be born. I wish my mother and father had practised birth-control. I wish that pill had been invented at the time. I feel sick, I feel terrible.’

  The men are impressed by this, one and all. Some are visibly cheered up. The proprietor turns one way and another with arms outstretched to call the whole assembly to witness his dilemma. ‘Sorry, lady, sorry. How was I to know? Pardon me, but I thought you were one of the students. We have a lot of trouble from the students. Many apologies, lady. Was there something we can do for you? I’ll call the First Aid. Come and sit down, lady, over here, inside my office, take a seat. You see the traffic outside, how can I call the ambulance through the traffic? Sit down, lady.’ And, having ushered her into a tiny windowed cubicle, he sits Lise in its only chair beside a small sloping ledger-desk and thunders at the men to get to work.

  Lise says, ‘Oh please don’t call anyone. I’ll be all right if I can get a taxi to take me back to my hotel.’

  ‘A taxi! Look at the traffic!’

  Outside the archway that forms the entrance to the garage, there is a dense block of standing traffic.

  The proprietor keeps going to look up and down the street and returning to Lise. He calls for benzine and a rag to clean Lise’s coat. No rag clean enough for the purpose can be found and so he uses a big white handkerchief taken from the breast pocket of his coat which hangs behind the door of the little office. Lise takes off her black-stained coat and while he applies his benzine-drenched handkerchief to the stain, making it into a messy blur, Lise takes off her shoes and rubs her feet. She puts one foot up on the slanting desk and rubs. ‘It’s only a bruise,’ she says, ‘not a sprain. I was lucky. Are you married?’

  The big man says, ‘Yes, lady, I’m married,’ and pauses in his energetic task to look at her with new, appraising and cautious eyes. ‘Three children — two boys, one girl,’ he says. He looks through the office at his men who are occupied with various jobs and who, although one or two of them cast a swift glance at Lise with her foot up on the desk, do not give any sign of noticing any telepathic distress signals their employer might be giving out.

  The big man says to Lise, ‘And yourself? Married?’

  ‘I’m a widow,’ Lise says, ‘and an intellectual. I come from a family of intellectuals. My late husband was an intellectual. We had no children. He was killed in a motor accident. He was a bad driver, anyway. He was a hypochondriac, which means that he imagined that he had every illness under the sun.’

  ‘This stain,’ said the man, ‘won’t come out until you send the coat to the dry-cleaner.’ He holds out the coat with great care, ready for her to put on; and at the same time as he holds it as
if he means her, temptress in the old-fashioned style that she is, to get out of his shop, his eyes are shifting around in an undecided way.

  Lise takes her foot off the desk, stands, slips into her shoes, shakes the skirt of her dress and asks him, ‘Do you like the colours?’

  ‘Marvellous,’ he says, his confidence plainly diminishing in confrontation with this foreign distressed gentlewoman of intellectual family and conflicting appearance.

  ‘The traffic’s moving. I must get a taxi or a bus. It’s late,’ Lise says, getting into her coat in a business-like manner.

  ‘Where are you staying, lady?’

  ‘The Hilton,’ she says.

  He looks round his garage with an air of helpless, anticipatory guilt. ‘I’d better take her in the car,’ he mutters to the mechanic nearest him. The man does not reply but makes a slight movement of the hand to signify that it isn’t for him to give permission.

  Still the owner hesitates, while Lise, as if she had not overheard his remarks, gathers up her belongings, holds out her hand and says ‘Good-bye. Thank you very much for helping me.’ And to the rest of the men she calls ‘Good-bye, good-bye, many thanks!’

  The big man takes her hand and holds on to it tightly as if his grasp itself was a mental resolution not to let go this unforeseen, exotic, intellectual, yet clearly available treasure. He holds on to her hand as if he was no fool, after all. ‘Lady, I’m taking you to your hotel in the car. I couldn’t let you go out into all this confusion. You’ll never get a bus, not for hours. A taxi, never. The students, we have the students only to thank.’ And he calls sharply to the apprentice to bring out his car. The boy goes over to a brown Volkswagen. ‘The Fiat!’ bellows his employer, whereupon the apprentice moves to a dusty cream-coloured Fiat 125, passes a duster over the outside of the windscreen, gets into it and starts to manoeuvre it forward to the main ramp.

  Lise pulls away her hand and protests. ‘Look, I’ve got a date. I’m late for it already. I’m sorry, but I can’t accept your kind offer.’ She looks out at the mass of slowly-moving traffic, the queues waiting at the bus-stops, and says, ‘I’ll have to walk. I know my way.

  ‘Lady,’ he says, ‘no argument. It’s my pleasure.’ And he draws her to the car where the apprentice is now waiting with the door open for her.

  ‘I really don’t know you,’ Lise says.

  ‘I’m Carlo,’ says the man, urging her inside and shutting the door. He gives the grinning apprentice a push that might mean anything, goes round to the other door, and drives slowly towards the street, slowly and carefully finding a gap in the line of traffic, working his way in to the gap, blocking the oncoming vehicles for a while until finally he joins the stream.

  It is also getting dark, as big Carlo’s car alternately edges and spurts along the traffic, Carlo meanwhile denouncing the students and the police for causing the chaos. When they come at last to a clear stretch Carlo says, ‘My wife I think is no good. I heard her on the telephone and she didn’t think I was in the house. I heard.’

  ‘You must understand,’ Lise says, ‘that anything at all that is overheard when the speaker doesn’t know you’re listening takes on a serious note. It always sounds far worse than their actual intentions are.

  ‘This was bad,’ mutters Carlo. ‘It’s a man. A second cousin of hers. I made a big trouble for her that night, I can tell you. But she denied it. How could she deny it? I heard it.’

  ‘If you imagine,’ Lise says, ‘that you are justifying any anticipations you may have with regards to me, you’re mistaken. You can drop me off here, if you like. Otherwise, you can come and buy me a drink at the Hilton Hotel, and then it’s good night. A soft drink. I don’t take alcohol. I’ve got a date that I’m late for already.’

  ‘We go out of town a little way,’ says Carlo. ‘I know a place. I brought the Fiat, did you see? The front seats fold back. Make you comfortable.’

  ‘Stop at once,’ Lise says. ‘Or I put my head out of the window and yell for help. I don’t want sex with you. I’m not interested in sex. I’ve got other interests and as a matter of fact I’ve got something on my mind that’s got to be done. I’m telling you to stop.’ She grabs the wheel and tries to guide it into the curb.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he says, regaining control of the car which has swerved a little with Lise’s interference. ‘All right. I’m taking you to the Hilton.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like the Hilton road to me,’ Lise says. The traffic lights ahead are red but as there is very little traffic about on this dark, wide residential boulevard, he chances it and skims across. Lise puts her head out of the window and yells for help.

  He pulls up at last in a side lane where, back from the road, there are the lights of two small villas; beyond that the road is a mass of stony crevices. He embraces her and kisses her mightily while she kicks him and tries to push him off, gurgling her protests. When he stops for breath he says, ‘Now we put back the seats and do it properly.’ But already she has jumped out of the car and has started running towards the gate of one of the houses, wiping her mouth and screaming, ‘Police! Call the police!’ Big Carlo overtakes her at the gate. ‘Quiet!’ he says. ‘Be quiet, and get into the car. Please. I’ll take you back, I promise. Sorry, lady, I haven’t done any harm at all to you, have I? Only a kiss, what’s a kiss.’

  She runs and makes a grab for the door of the driver’s seat, and as he calls after her, ‘The other door!’ she gets in, starts up, and backs speedily out of the lane. She leans over and locks the other door just in time to prevent him from opening it. ‘You’re not my type in any case,’ she screams. Then she starts off, too quickly for him to be able to open the back door he is now grabbing at. Still he is running to catch up, and she yells back at him, ‘If you report this to the police I’ll tell them the truth and make a scandal in your family.’ And then she is away, well clear of him.

  She spins along in expert style, stopping duly at the traffic lights. She starts to sing softly as she waits:

  Inky-pinky-winky-wong

  How do you like your potatoes done?

  A little gravy in the pan

  For the King of the Cannibal Islands.

  Her zipper-bag is on the floor of the car. While waiting for the lights to change she lifts it on to the seat, unzips it and looks with a kind of satisfaction at the wrapped-up objects of different shape, as it might be they represent a good day’s work. She comes to a crossroad where some traffic accumulates. Here, a policeman is on duty and as she passes at his bidding she pulls up and asks him the way to the Hilton.

  He is a young policeman. He bends to give her the required direction.

  ‘Do you carry a revolver?’ Lise says. He looks puzzled and fails to answer before Lise adds, ‘Because, if you did, you could shoot me.

  The policeman is still finding words when she drives off, and in the mirror she can see him looking at the retreating car, probably noting the number. Which in fact he is doing, so that, on the afternoon of the following day, when he has been shown her body, he says, ‘Yes, that’s her. I recognize the face. She said, “If you had a revolver you could shoot me.”’ Which is to lead to many complications in Carlo’s private life when the car is traced back to him, he being released by the police only after six hours of interrogation. A photograph of Carlo and also a picture of his young apprentice who holds a lively press conference of his own, moreover will appear in every newspaper in the country.

  But now, at the Hilton Hotel her car is held up just as it enters the gates in the driveway. There is a line of cars ahead, and beyond them a group of policemen. Two police cars are visible in the parking area on the other side of the entrance. The rest of the driveway is occupied by a line of four very large limousines each with a uniformed driver standing by.

  The police collect on either side of the hotel doorway, their faces picked out by the bright lights, while there emerge down the steps from the hotel two women who seem to be identical twins, wearing black dresses and hig
h-styled black hair, followed by an important-looking Arabian figure, sheikh-like in his head-dress and robes, with a lined face and glittering eyes, who descends the steps with a floating motion as if his feet are clearing the ground by an inch or two; he is flanked by two smaller bespectacled, brown-faced men in businesslike suits. The two black-dressed women stand back with a respectful housekeeperly bearing while the robed figure approaches the first limousine; and the two men draw back too, as he enters the recesses of the car. Two black-robed women with the lower parts of their faces veiled and their heads shrouded in drapery then make their descent, and behind them another pair appear, menservants with arms raised, bearing aloft numerous plastic-enveloped garments on coat-hangers. Still in pairs, further components of the retinue appear, each two moving in such unison that they seem to share a single soul or else two well-rehearsed parts in the chorus of an opera by Verdi. Two men wearing western clothes but for their red fezes are duly admitted to one of the waiting limousines and, as Lise gets out of her car to join the watchers, two ramshackle young Arabs with rumpled grey trousers and whitish shirts end the procession, bearing two large baskets, each one packed with oranges and a jumbo-sized vacuum-flask which stands slightly askew among the fruit, like champagne in an ice-bucket.

  A group of people who are standing near Lise on the driveway, having themselves got out of their held-up taxis and cars, are discussing the event: ‘He was here on vacation. I saw it on the television. There’s been a coup in his country and he’s going back.’ — ‘Why should he go back?’ — ‘No, he won’t go back, believe me. Never.’ — ‘What country is it? I hope it doesn’t affect us. The last time there was a coup my shares regressed so I nearly had a breakdown. Even the mutual funds …’

  The police have gone back to their cars, and escorted by them the caravan goes its stately way.

  Lise jumps back into Carlo’s car and conducts it as quickly as possible to the car park. She leaves it there, taking the keys. Then she leaps into the hotel, eyed indignantly by the doorman who presumably resents her haste, her clothes, the blurred stain on her coat, the rumpled aspect that she has acquired in the course of the evening and whose built-in computer system rates her low on the spending scale.