The Country Life (32 page)

‘I can't drive,' I said.

There was a long silence. Beside me, Martin sat looking straight ahead.

‘Right,' he said, finally.

‘If your parents find out,' I continued, ‘they'll send me home.'

‘Probably.' He nodded. ‘They did say driving was essential, Stel-la.'

‘I know.'

It seemed futile to explain the process by which, conveniently or otherwise, I had neglected to take notice of this requirement at the time, or to draw this neglect to anyone's attention afterwards. What concerned me in that moment was what Martin intended to do about it. Having confessed to him, I had put myself entirely in his hands. Although I had been aware that our intimacy had gathered strength since the moment of our first meeting, it had never occurred to me to test it. Now I had a sense of my bond with Martin vying with that of his parents; and as he sat beside me in the car, pulled in either direction by these conflicting loyalties, his ruling took on for me an importance beyond the merely expedient. My heart lay hollow, waiting to be filled by his regard; and the thought
of his refusing me, and turning me over to be dealt with by the familial authorities while he withdrew into their ranks, was unbearable.

‘It can't be that hard,' he observed presently. ‘I know how it works. I'll just tell you what to do.'

‘All right,' I said recklessly. ‘If you're sure you won't be frightened.'

‘It would be an honour,' said Martin, ‘to die with you, Stel-la. Turn the key.'

I found the key, which was already in the ignition, and turned it. There was a stutter of life from beneath the bonnet, and then the car slowly began to tremble around us.

‘Is it on?' I said. I had expected a roar of some kind.

‘Of course it's on. Now, there are three pedals at your feet. On the right, the accelerator. Press it.'

I pressed it with my foot, my hands gripping the wheel. The noise of the engine did grow louder, but the car did not move. Thinking this to be because I had not pressed hard enough, I put down my foot until it would not go any further.

‘Stop!' shouted Martin, above the scream of the engine.

‘Why didn't we move?' I said as it died away.

‘Because we're not in gear. I only asked you to press it so that you'd know which one it was. The middle one is the brake. Press that.'

I did so.

‘The pedal on your left is the clutch. You press the clutch when you want to change gear.'

‘OK.'

‘When you press the clutch, you take your foot off the accelerator. Then, when you've changed gear, you put your foot back on the accelerator again.'

‘How do you change gear?'

‘You just – look, I'll tell you what. I'll change gear for you. I'll just shout
clutch
, and you put your foot on the clutch, OK? You concentrate on steering.'

‘OK.'

‘OK. Clutch.'

I looked through the windscreen at the remote spectacle of the drive. The car was pointing directly down it, for which I was grateful.

‘Clutch, Stel-la.'

‘Oh. Sorry.'

I pressed the clutch and Martin manoeuvred the gearstick beside me with his left hand.

‘Good. Now, keep your foot on the clutch for the time being. Release the brake.'

‘I'm not touching the brake,' I said, bemused.

‘No, the
hand
brake. It's beside you. You press the front bit and it goes down.'

‘Like that?'

‘Fine. Now, hands on the wheel, Stel-la. Put your foot on the accelerator, and
very slowly
take your foot off the clutch.'

I pressed the accelerator and the noise of the engine mounted.

‘Not that much!' shouted Martin. ‘Just a little bit. That's right. OK, very slowly off the clutch.'

It is difficult for me to convey my surprise, despite the advance warning I had received, at the way in which with the command of my feet the whole world became a blur of noise and motion. Had I been able to drive entirely with my hands, I would probably have applied more natural instincts to the business of pulling away from the house. As it was, the simplicity of Martin's instruction had been profoundly deceptive; for I had no premonition of the chaos my gentle paddling would unleash. I took my foot off the clutch and the car bolted forward at such speed that I pressed indiscriminately at the pedals in panic, while the jolting scenery bore down on us and Martin shouted vainly beside me above the roar of the engine. I had no time in this onslaught of events even to think about controlling them. All I could do was to try and recall, with a
contrasting lassitude at once terrifying and inalterable, how to stop the car. Very slowly, my mind dimly remembered that ceasing to press the accelerator would have some effect on the speed at which we were travelling. Even slower, my foot responded; against its will, I should add, because instinct told it to press harder the faster we went. The car veered off the gravel drive and chugged across the grass. It heaved once, twice, and died.

‘Not bad,' said Martin in a high voice. ‘Let's try again.'

‘I don't know if I can.' Now that we had come to a blessed halt, I found that I was shaking with terror and relief. ‘I'm terrible at it. I should just accept that I'll never be able to drive.'

‘Don't be silly. No one can just
drive.
You have to learn.'

Looking around, I was surprised to see that we had only come a few yards. The house stood patient and contemptuous behind us.

‘I can't.'

‘You have to, Stel-la. Besides, if you don't get a move on, my mother will be out to investigate.'

This proved the greatest spur to action yet. I turned the key again.

‘Now go a bit faster this time,' advised Martin. ‘Then you won't stall.'

‘I was going fast!' I cried.

‘You were going about five miles an hour. Clutch.'

My second attempt proved rather more successful than my first. Less afraid now of the accelerator, I was able to focus on the steering wheel as the guiding principle of the exercise. I directed us back onto the gravel, and with a thrill of confidence realized that I was able to propel the car in a straight line down the drive.

‘Clutch!' shouted Martin.

Stabbing about with my foot, I found the pedal. As I pressed it, the engine reared with a horrible shriek.

‘Take your foot off the accelerator, stupid! OK, now let go of the clutch and put the accelerator back on.'

The car lurched forward as the engine began to sing in a new key.

‘We changed gear!' cried Martin.

Alarmingly quickly, the gates at the bottom of the drive loomed into view.

‘What do I do now?'

‘Foot on the clutch. Other foot on the brake.'

I put my foot on the brake, and the car stopped so suddenly that both Martin and I were thrown forward.

‘Do it gently! OK, we're turning right here. Clutch.'

One way or another, before long we were out on the tarmacked road. My feelings were a curious mixture of the drunken excitement of achievement combined with the more sober consciousness of how fragile my control of the situation really was. Like someone walking a wire, I sensed that the moment in which I became aware of my feat would be the moment I ceased to accomplish it. I wasn't quite sure, in other words,
how
I was driving the car. All I knew was that everything depended on my continuing to do so.

‘Clutch,' said Martin.

I was fortunate, at least, in that the remoteness of the narrow roads meant that there was little chance of meeting anybody else travelling along them. This did not particularly strike me at first – I was interested only in my own progress, and had not considered the fact that the realm I had entered was communal and open to invasion by others – but when after some time the fringes of Buckley came into view, replete with obstacles, I felt the force of my presumption in taking the wheel.

‘We've got to stop.'

‘Now just stay calm,' said Martin anxiously. ‘It's not far to go now.'

‘I can't,' I said. At the sight of houses and other cars, I had
surrendered my authority over the car. I took my feet off the pedals.

‘Stella!' shouted Martin. ‘We're in the middle of the road! You can't just stop!'

The car slowed down and then shuddered violently to a halt. I could hear the whirr of a fan in the silence.

‘OK,' said Martin, more gently. ‘Turn the key.'

‘No.'

‘You have to. We can't stay here. Turn the key.'

My sudden consciousness of my own incompetence, and my retrospective astonishment at the fact that I had driven the car almost to Buckley, was effecting a sort of paralysis in my limbs. I had lost, I knew, the nerve on whose buoyancy I had delivered us to this inconvenient place. I had also experienced an abrupt attack of amnesia, and could not remember anything at all that Martin had told me about how the car worked.

‘Look, there's someone coming behind us. Turn the key.'

Wildly I turned the key, against every internal protest. We were facing directly into the sun, and it beat down on my face through the windscreen. In the thick glare, the road beyond was a group of indistinct shapes.

‘I can't see anything.'

‘Fuck. Hang on.' He reached across me and flipped down the sun shield. ‘Is that better?'

‘A bit.'

‘Right. Clutch.'

‘Which one's the clutch?'

‘On the left!'

The car surged forward and I clung to the wheel, steering this way and that while Martin shouted indistinct warnings beside me. Several times as we entered the town I closed my eyes and gasped, for the body of the car seemed so broad to me that an intake of breath was required to get it through apertures of impossible narrowness.

‘Slow down a bit,' said Martin shrilly. ‘That's right. We're going to turn left in a minute.'

The astonished faces of passers-by flashed past me in a blur of houses and shopfronts and parked cars. I had no sense whatever of my own control over what was happening.

‘
Left!
' yelled Martin, gesturing wildly with his arms.

My body responded only to the direction of the command rather than the proper procedure for executing it. I slewed the wheel automatically to the left, without slowing down, and there was a tremendous shrieking all around us as we shot into what was evidently a car park and came to a timely, if unintentional, halt.

‘Jesus Christ,' said Martin.

‘Sorry.'

I felt drained of all life and could only sit limply behind the steering wheel. Martin, when I looked at him, wore a blanched expression of exhaustion.

‘You'd better get me out,' he said. ‘I'm late.'

When I opened the car door and stepped out, my knees gave way beneath me and I staggered, almost falling over. Clinging to the car, I inched my way round to the boot and opened it.

‘Stella,' called Martin from the front. ‘How are you going to get home?'

I had not given any consideration to this question, but it was immediately obvious to me that I could not drive the car alone.

‘You'll have to stay,' continued Martin, who had evidently reached the same conclusion.

‘Stay here? What will I do?'

‘I dunno. Help out or something. Meet my interesting friends.'

‘What about Pamela?' I heaved the chair unsteadily out of the boot. ‘She'll be expecting me back.'

‘There's a remarkable invention,' said Martin, ‘called the telephone.'

I got Martin into his chair and then, my hands shaking, locked the car. On the far side of the car park was a low modem building made of red brick. Releasing the brake with my trembling foot, I began slowly to wheel him towards it.

We entered a reception area, with plastic chairs in a row against one wall and a long desk along the other. Both walls were almost entirely covered with drawings held there by drawing pins. Some were very childish; others quite accomplished. My attention was caught by a portrait of a woman drawn in bold pencil. She was sitting rather self-consciously, with her hand beneath her chin, and a slightly tense, impatient smile on her lips. I immediately recognized her as Pamela.

‘Did you do that?' I said to Martin.

‘Yes. She hates it. She thinks it makes her look old.'

I could not comprehend how Pamela could fail to be pleased by Martin's evident talent for drawing; but looking at it again, I saw how her vanity might have overpowered her delight. Martin had certainly caught her likeness in a manner which foreshadowed what was to come, rather than reflected past glories; but there was something ineffably more real to the picture also, which could only be the work of intimacy and which revealed things about Pamela that I suspected but could never properly have expressed. He had captured her self-regard – a form of insolence which surprised me – and a certain affectation of manner too. Most tellingly, he had included in
his picture the fact that its subject did not like being examined; that she regarded his scrutiny as presumptuous and threatening, and the act of drawing itself as rather suspect. It was difficult not to wonder, with his animadversion so publicly displayed before me, what else Martin thought about Pamela.

‘Afternoon, Martin!' said a cheerful voice.

‘Hello, Mary,' Martin replied. ‘This is my friend Stella.'

A woman had emerged from a door at the far end of the room, and now took up a position behind the desk. She was quite elderly, with grey hair set in waves. I was momentarily confused, thinking that I recognized her.

‘Stella, is it?' she said, to me. ‘Nice to have you here, love.'

I realized that she resembled the woman who ran the village shop in Hilltop.

‘Thank you,' I said.

‘You'd better hurry in,' she said. ‘I think they've started without you.'