The Driver's Seat (8 page)

They
have reached the road where the traffic thunders past in the declining
sunlight.

‘Where
do we cross?’ Lise says, looking to right and left of the overwhelming street.

‘They
are demanding equal rights with us,’ says Mrs Fiedke. ‘That’s why I never vote
with the Liberals. Perfume, jewellery, hair down to their shoulders, and I’m
not talking about the ones who were born like that. I mean, the ones that can’t
help it should be put on an island. It’s the others I’m talking about. There
was a time when they would stand up and open the door for you. They would take
their hat off. But they want their equality today. All I say is that if God had
intended them to be as good as us he wouldn’t have made them different from us
to the naked eye. They don’t want to be all dressed alike any more. Which is
only a move against us. You couldn’t run an army like that, let alone the male
sex. With all due respects to Mr Fiedke, may he rest in peace, the male sex is
getting out of hand. Of course, Mr Fiedke knew his place as a man, give him his
due.’

‘We’ll
have to walk up to the intersection,’ Lise says, guiding Mrs Fiedke in the
direction of a distant policeman surrounded by a whirlpool of traffic. ‘We’ll
never get a taxi here.’

‘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.’