The Driver's Seat

by Muriel Spark

  Lise makes straight for the ladies’ toilets and while there, besides putting her appearance to rights as best she can, she takes a comfortable chair in the soft-lit rest-room and considers, one by one, the contents of her zipper-bag which she lays on a small table beside her. She feels the outside of the box containing the food-blender and replaces it in her bag. She also leaves unopened a soft package containing the neckties, but, having rummaged in her hand-bag for something which apparently is not there, she brings forth her lipstick and with it she writes on the outside of the soft package, ‘Papa’. There is an unsealed paper bag which she peers into; it is the orange scarf.

  She puts it back into place and takes out another bag containing the black and white scarf. She folds this back and with her lipstick she traces on the outside of the bag in large capitals, ‘Olga’. Another package seems to puzzle her. She feels round it with half-closed eyes for a moment, then opens it up. It contains the pair of men’s slippers which Mrs Fiedke had mislaid in the shop having apparently in fact put them in Lise’s bag. Lise wraps them up again and replaces them. Finally she takes out her paperback book and an oblong package which she opens. This is a gift-box containing the gilded paper-opener in its sheath, also Mrs Fiedke’s property.

  Lise slowly returns the lipstick to her handbag, places the book and the box containing the paperknife on the table beside her, places the zipper-bag on the floor, then proceeds to examine the contents of her hand-bag. Money, the tourist folder with its inset map of the city, the bunch of six keys that she had brought with her that morning, the keys of Carlo’s car, the lipstick, the comb, the powder compact, the air ticket. Her lips are parted and she leans back in a relaxed attitude but that her eyes are too wide open for restfulness. She looks again at the contents of her hand-bag. A notecase with paper money, a purse with loose change. She gathers herself together in such an abrupt manner that the toilet attendant who has been sitting vacantly in a corner by the wash-basins starts to her feet. Lise packs up her belongings. She puts the paper-knife box back in the zipper-bag, carefully tucking it down the side, and zips the bag up. Her hand-bag is also packed tidily again, except for the bunch of six keys that she had brought on her travels. She holds the book in her hand, and, placing the bunch of six keys with a clatter on the plate left out for the coins, the attendant’s reward, she says to the woman, ‘I won’t be needing these now.’ Then, with her zipper-bag, her book, her handbag, her hair combed and her face cleaned up, she swings out of the door and into the hotel lounge. The clock above the reception desk says nine thirty-five. Lise makes for the bar, where she looks round. Most of the tables are occupied by chattering groups. She sits at a vacant but rather out-of-the-way table, orders a whisky, and bids the tentative waiter hurry. ‘I ‘ye got a train to catch.’ She is served with the drink together with a jug of water and a bowl of peanuts. She drenches the whisky with water, sips a small part of it and eats all the peanuts. She takes another small sip from her glass, and, leaving it nearly full, stands up and motions the waiter to bring her bill. She pays for this high-priced repast with a note taken from her bag and tells the waiter to keep the change, which amounts to a very high tip. He accepts it with incredulous grace and watches her as she leaves the bar. He, too, will give his small piece of evidence to the police on the following day, as will also the toilet attendant, trembling at the event which has touched upon her life without the asking.

  Lise stops short in the hotel lounge and smiles. Then without further hesitation she goes over to a group of armchairs, only one of which is occupied. In it sits a sickly-looking man. Bending over him deferentially to listen to something the man is saying is a uniformed chauffeur who presently turns to go, waved away by the seated man, just as Lise approaches.

  ‘There you are!’ says Lise. ‘I’ve been looking for you all day. Where did you get to?’

  The man shifts to look at her. ‘Jenner’s gone to have a bite. Then we’re off back to the villa. Damn nuisance, coming back in to town all this way. Tell Jenner he’s got half-an-hour. We must be off.’

  ‘He’ll be back in a minute,’ Lise says. ‘Don’t you remember we met on the plane?’

  ‘The Sheikh. Damn rotters in his country have taken over behind his back. Now he’s lost his throne or whatever it is he sits on. I was at school with him. Why did he ring me up? He rang me up. On the telephone. He brings me back to town all this way and when we get here he says he can’t come to the villa after all, there’s been a coup.

  ‘I’ll take you back to the villa,’ Lise says. ‘Come on, get in the car with me. I’ve got a car outside.’

  The man says, ‘Last time I saw the Sheikh it was ‘38. He came on safari with me. Rotten shot if you know anything about big game. You’ve got to wait for the drag. They call it the drag, you see. It kills its prey and drags it into the bush then you follow the drag and when you know where it’s left its prey you’re all right. The poor bloody beast comes out the next day to eat its prey, they like it high. And you only have a few seconds. You’re here and there’s another fellow there and a third over here. You can’t shoot from here, you see, because there’s another hunter there and you don’t want to shoot him. You have to shoot from over here or over there. And the Sheikh, I’ve known him for years, we were at school together, the bloody fool shot and missed it by five feet from a fifteen-foot range.’

  His eyes look straight ahead and his lips quiver.

  ‘You’re not my type after all,’ Lise says. ‘I thought you were, but I was away out.’

  ‘What? Want a drink? Where’s Jenner?’

  She gathers up the handles of her bags, picks up her book and looks at him and through him as if he were already a distant memory and leaves without a good-bye, indeed as if she had said good-bye to him long ago.

  She brushes past a few people at the vestibule who look at her with the same casual curiosity with which others throughout the day have looked at her. They are mainly tourists; one exceptional sight among so many others does not deflect their attention for very long. Outside, she goes to the car park where she has left Carlo’s car, and does not find it.

  She goes up to the doorman. ‘I’ve lost my car. A Fiat 125. Have you seen anyone drive off with a Fiat?’

  ‘Lady, there are twenty Fiats an hour come in and out of here.’

  ‘But I parked it over there less than an hour ago. A cream Fiat, a bit dirty, I’ve been travelling.’

  The doorman sends a page-boy to find the parking attendant who presently comes along in a vexed mood since he has been called from conversation with a more profitable client. He owns to having seen a cream-coloured Fiat being driven away by a large fat man whom he had presumed to be the owner.

  ‘He must have had extra keys,’ says Lise.

  ‘Didn’t you see the lady drive in with it?’ the doorman says.

  ‘No, I didn’t. The royalty and the police were taking up all my time, you know that. Besides, the lady didn’t say anything to me, to look after her car.’

  Lise says, opening her bag, ‘Well, I meant to give you a tip later. But I’ll give you one now.’ And she holds out to him the keys of Carlo’s car.

  The doorman says, ‘Look, lady, we can’t take responsibility for your car. If you want to see the porter at the desk he can ring the police. Are you staying at the hotel?’

  ‘No,’ says Lise. ‘Get me a taxi.’

  ‘Have you got your licence?’ says the parking attendant.

  ‘Go away,’ Lise says. ‘You’re not my type.’ He looks explosive. Another of tomorrow’s witnesses.

  The porter is meanwhile busy helping some newcomers out of a taxi. Lise calls out to the taxi-driver, who nods his agreement to take her on.

  As soon as the passengers are out, Lise leaps into the taxi.

  The parking attendant shouts, ‘Are you sure it was your own car, lady?’

  She throws Carlo’s keys out of the window on to the gravel and directs the taxi to the Hotel Metropole with tears falling over her
cheeks.

  ‘Anything the matter, lady?’ says the driver.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ she says, weeping. ‘It’s getting terribly late.’

  ‘Lady, I can’t go faster. See the traffic.’

  ‘I can’t find my boy-friend. I don’t know where he’s gone.

  ‘You think you’ll find him at the Metropole?’

  ‘There’s always a chance,’ she says. ‘I make a lot of mistakes.’

  SIX

  The chandeliers of the Metropole, dispensing a vivid glow upon the just and unjust alike, disclose Bill the macrobiotic seated gloomily by a table near the entrance. He jumps up when Lise enters and falls upon her with a delight that impresses the whole lobby, and in such haste that a plastic bag that he is clutching, insufficiently sealed, emits a small trail of wild rice in his progress towards her.

  She follows him back to his seat and takes a chair beside him. ‘Look at my coat,’ she says. ‘I got mixed up in a student demonstration and I’m still crying from the effect of tear-gas. I had a date at the Hilton for dinner with a very important Sheikh but I was too late, as I went to buy him a pair of slippers for a present. He’d gone on safari. So he wasn’t my type, anyway. Shooting animals.’

  ‘I’d just about given you up,’ says Bill. ‘You were to be here at seven. I’ve been desperate.’ He takes her hand, smiling with glad flashes of teeth and eyes. ‘You wouldn’t have been so unkind as to have dinner with someone else, would you? I’m hungry.’

  ‘And my car got stolen,’ she says.

  ‘What car?’

  ‘Oh, just a car.

  ‘I didn’t know you had a car. Was it a hired car?’

  ‘You know nothing whatsoever about me,’ she says.

  ‘Well I’ve got a car,’ he says. ‘A friend has lent me it. I’m taking it to Naples as soon as possible to get started on the Yin-Yang Young Culture Centre. I’m opening with a lecture called “The World —Where is it Going?” That will be a general introduction to the macrobiotic way of life. It’ll bring in the kids, all right.’

  ‘It’s getting late,’ she says.

  ‘I was nearly giving you up,’ he says, squeezing her hand. ‘I was just about to go out and look for another girl. I’m queer for girls. It has to be a girl.’

  ‘I’ll have a drink,’ she says. ‘I need one.’

  ‘Oh no, .you won’t. Oh no, you won’t. Alcohol is off the diet. You’re coming to supper with me at a house I know.’

  ‘What kind of a house?’ she says.

  ‘A macrobiotic family I know,’ he says. ‘They’ll give us a good supper. Three sons, four daughters, the mother and father, all on macrobiotics. We’ll have rice with carrots followed by rice biscuits and goat’s cheese and a cooked apple. No sugar allowed. The family eat at six o’clock, which is the orthodox system, but the variation that I follow lets you eat late. That way, we’ll get through to the young. So we’ll go there and heat up a meal. Come on!’

  She says, ‘That tear-gas is still affecting me.’ Tears brim in her eyes. She gets up with him and lets him, trailing rice, lead her past every eye of the Metropole lobby into the street, up the road, and into a small black utility model which is parked there.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ says Bill as he starts up the car, ‘to think we’re together again at last.’

  ‘I must tell you,’ says Lise, sniffing, ‘that you’re not my type. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t know me! You don’t know me at all.’

  ‘But I know my type.’

  ‘You need love,’ he says with a hand on her knee.

  She starts away from him. ‘Take care while you’re driving. Where do your friends live?’

  ‘The other side of the park. I must say, I feel hungry.’

  ‘Then hurry up,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t you feel hungry?’

  ‘No, I feel lonely.’

  ‘You won’t be lonely with me.’

  They have turned into the park.

  ‘Turn right at the end of this road,’ she says. ‘There should be a road to the right, according to the map. I want to look at something.’

  ‘There are better places farther on.’

  ‘Turn right, I say.

  ‘Don’t be nervy,’ he says. ‘You need to relax. The reason why you’re so tense, you’ve been eating all the wrong things and drinking too much. You shouldn’t have more than three glasses of liquid a day.

  You should pass water not more than twice a day. Twice for a woman, three times for a man. If you need to go more than that it means you’re taking in too much fluid.’

  ‘Here’s the road. Turn right.’

  Bill turns right, going slowly and looking about him. He says, ‘I don’t know where this leads to. But there’s a very convenient spot farther up the main road.’

  ‘What spot?’ she says. ‘What spot are you talking about?’

  ‘I haven’t had my daily orgasm. It’s an essential part of this particular variation of the diet, didn’t I tell you? Many other macrobiotic variations have it as an essential part. This is one of the main things the young Neapolitans must learn.’

  ‘If you think you’re going to have sex with me,’ she says, ‘you’re very much mistaken. I have no time for sex.

  ‘Lise!’ says Bill.

  ‘I mean it,’ she says. ‘Sex is no use to me, I assure you.’ She gives out her deep laughter.

  The road is dimly lit by lamps posted at far intervals. Bill is peering to right and left.

  ‘There’s a building over there,’ she says. ‘That must be the Pavilion. And the old villa behind — they say in the brochure that it’s to be restored and turned into a museum. But it’s the famous Pavilion that I want.’

  At the site of the Pavilion several cars and motor bicycles are parked. Another road converges, and a band of teenaged boys and girls are languidly leaning against trees, cars and anything else that can prop them up, looking at each other.

  ‘There’s nothing doing here,’ says Bill.

  ‘Stop, I want to get out and look around.’

  ‘Too many people. What are you, thinking of?’

  ‘I want to see the Pavilion, that’s all.’

  ‘Why? You can come by daylight. Much better.’

  Some iron tables are scattered on the ground in front of the Pavilion, a graceful three-storey building with a quaint gilded frieze above the first level of the façade.

  Bill parks the car near the others, some of which are occupied by amorous couples. Lise jumps out as soon as the car stops. She takes with her the hand-bag leaving the zipper-bag and her book in the car. He runs after her, putting an arm round her shoulders, and says, ‘Come on, it’s getting late. What do you want to see?’

  She says, ‘Will your rice be safe in the car? Have you locked it?’

  He says, ‘Who’s going to steal a bag of rice?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Lise, making her way along the path which leads to the Pavilion. ‘Maybe those young people might feel very intensely about rice.

  ‘The movement hasn’t got started yet, Lise,’ says Bill. ‘And red beans are also allowed. And sesame-flour. But you can’t expect people to know about it till you tell them.’

  The ground floor of the Pavilion is largely glass-fronted. She goes up to it and peers in. There are bare café tables and chairs piled high in the classic fashion of restaurants closed for the night. There is a long counter and a coffee machine at the far end, with an empty glass sandwich-bar. There is nothing else except an expanse of floor, which in the darkness can only be half-seen, patterned in black-and-white chequered pavements. Lise cranes and twists to see the ceiling which obscurely seems to be painted with some classical scene; the hind-leg of a horse and one side of a cupid are all that is visible.

  Still she peers through the glass. Bill tries to draw her away, but again she starts to cry. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘the inconceivable sorrow of it, those chairs piled up at night when you’re sitting in a café, the
last one left.’

  ‘You’re getting morbid, dear,’ says Bill. ‘Darling, it’s all a matter of chemistry. You’ve been eating toxic foods and neglecting the fact that there are two forces in the world, centrifugal which is Yin and centripetal which is Yang. Orgasms are Yang.’

  ‘It makes me sad,’ she says. ‘I want to go home, I think. I want to go back home and feel all that lonely grief again. I miss it so much already.’

  He jerks her away and she calls out, ‘Stop it! Don’t do that!’ A man and two women who are passing a few yards away turn to look, but the young group pays no attention.

  Bill gives a deep sigh. ‘It’s getting late,’ he says, pinching her elbow.

  ‘Let me go, I want to look round the back. I’ve got to see how things are round here, it’s important.’

  ‘You’d think it was a bank,’ Bill says, ‘that you were going to do a stick-up in tomorrow. Who do you think you are? Who do you think I am?’ He follows her as she starts off round the side of the building, examining the track. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  She traverses the side of the building and turns round to the back where five large dust-bins stand waiting for tomorrow’s garbagemen, who will also find Lise, not far off, stabbed to death. At this moment, a disturbed cat leaves off its foraging at one of the half-closed dust-bins and flows into an adjacent blackness.

  Lise surveys the ground earnestly.

  ‘Look,’ says Bill, ‘Lise, darling, over by the hedge. We’re all right.’

  He pulls her towards a hedge separating the back yard of the Pavilion from a foot-path which can be seen through a partly-open iron gate. A band of very tall fair young men all speaking together in a Scandinavian-sounding language passes by and stops to watch and comment buoyantly on the tussle that ensues between Bill and Lise, she proclaiming that she doesn’t like sex and he explaining that if he misses his daily orgasm he has to fit in two the next day. ‘And it gives me indigestion,’ he says, getting her down on the gravel behind the hedge and out of sight, ‘two in one day. And it’s got to be a girl.’