The Driver's Seat (2 page)

Next
morning she puts them on. When she is ready to leave she dials a number on the
telephone and looks at herself in the mirror which has not yet been concealed
behind the pinewood panels which close upon it. The voice answers and Lise
touches her pale brown hair as she speaks. ‘Margot, I’m just off now,’ Lise
says. ‘I’ll put your car-keys in an envelope and I’ll leave them downstairs
with the doorkeeper. All right?’

The
voice says, ‘Thanks. Have a good holiday. Have a good time. Send me a card.’

‘Yes,
of course, Margot.’

‘Of
course,’ Lise says when she has replaced the receiver. She takes an envelope
from a drawer, writes a name on it, puts the two car-keys in it and seals the
envelope. Then she telephones for a taxi, lifts her suitcase out to the
landing, fetches her hand-bag and the envelope, and leaves the flat.

When
she reaches the street floor, she stops at the windows of the porter’s
wood-lined cabin. Lise rings the bell and waits. No one appears, but the taxi
has pulled up outside. Lise shouts to the driver, ‘I’m just coming!’ and
indicates her suitcase which the taxi-driver fetches. While he is stacking it
in the front of the cab a woman with a brown overall comes up behind Lise. ‘You
want me, Miss?’

Lise
turns quickly to face the woman. She has the envelope in her hand and is about
to speak when the woman says, ‘Well, well, my goodness, what colours!’ She is
looking at Lise’s red and white striped coat, unbuttoned, and the vivid dress
beneath, the purple, orange and blue V-patterns of the skirt and the yellow
top. The woman laughs hugely as one who has nothing to gain by suppressing her
amusement, she laughs and opens the pinewood door into the porter’s office;
there she slides open the window panel and laughs aloud in Lise’s face. She
says, ‘Are you going to join a circus?’ Then again she throws back her head,
looking down through half-closed lids at Lise’s clothes, and gives out the
high, hacking cough-like ancestral laughter of the streets, holding her breasts
in her hands to spare them the shake-up. Lise says, with quiet dignity, ‘You
are insolent.’ But the woman laughs again, now no longer spontaneously but with
spiteful and deliberate noise, forcing the evident point that Lise habitually
is mean with her tips, or perhaps never tips the porter at all.

Lise
walks quietly out to the cab, still holding in her hand the envelope which
contains the car-keys. She looks at this envelope as she goes, but whether she
has failed to leave it at the door-keeper’s desk by intention, or whether
through the distraction of the woman’s laughter, one could not tell from her
serene face with lips slightly parted. The woman comes to the street door
emitting noise like a brown container of laughing-gas until the taxi is out of
her scope.

TWO

Lise is thin. Her height
is about five-foot-six. Her hair is pale brown, probably tinted, a very light
streaked lock sweeping from the middle of her hair-line to the top of her
crown; her hair is cut short at the sides and back, and is styled high. She
might be as young as twenty-nine or as old as thirty-six, but hardly younger,
hardly older. She has arrived at the airport; she has paid the taxi-driver
quickly and with an expression of abstract eagerness to be somewhere else. Likewise,
with the porter, while he takes her bag and follows her to the desk to have it
weighed-in. She seems not to see him.

There
are two people in front of her. Lise’s eyes are widely spaced, blue-grey and
dull. Her lips are a straight line. She is neither good-looking nor
bad-looking. Her nose is short and wider than it will look in the likeness
constructed partly by the method of identikit, partly by actual photography,
soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages.

Lise
looks at the two people in front of her, first a woman and then a man, swaying
to one side and the other as she does so, either to discern in the half-faces
visible to her someone she might possibly know, or else to relieve, by these
movements and looks, some impatience she might feel.

When it
comes to her turn she heaves her luggage on to the scale and pushes her ticket
to the clerk as quickly as possible. While he examines it she turns to look at
a couple who are now waiting behind her. She glances at both faces, then looks
back to the clerk, regardless of their returning her stares and their unanimous
perception of her bright-coloured clothes.

‘Any
hand-luggage?’ says the clerk, peering over the top of the counter.

Lise
simpers, placing the tips of her upper teeth over her lower lip, and draws in a
little breath.

‘Any
hand-luggage?’ The busy young official looks at her as much as to say, ‘What’s
the matter with
you?’
And Lise answers in a voice different from the
voice in which she yesterday spoke to the shop assistant when buying her lurid
outfit, and has used on the telephone, and in which early this morning she
spoke to the woman at the porter’s desk; she now speaks in a little-girl tone
which presumably is taken by those within hearing to be her normal voice even
if a nasty one. Lise says, ‘I only have my hand-bag with me. I believe in
travelling light because I travel a lot and I know how terrible it is for one’s
neighbours on the plane when you have great huge pieces of hand-luggage taking
up everybody’s foot-room.’

The clerk,
all in one gesture, heaves a sigh, purses his lips, closes his eyes, places his
chin in his hands and his elbow on the desk. Lise turns round to address the
couple behind her. She says, ‘When you travel as much as I do you have to
travel light, and I tell you, I nearly didn’t bring any luggage at all, because
you can get everything you want at the other end, so the only reason I brought
that suitcase there is that the customs get suspicious if you come in and out
without luggage. They think you’re smuggling dope and diamonds under your
blouse, so I packed the usual things for a holiday, but it was all quite
unnecessary, as you get to understand when you’ve travelled about as you might
say with experience in four languages over the years, and you know what you’re
doing —’

‘Look,
Miss,’ the clerk says, pulling himself straight and stamping her ticket, ‘you’re
holding up the people behind you. We’re busy.’

Lise
turns away from the bewildered-looking couple to face the clerk as he pushes
her ticket and boarding card towards her. ‘Boarding card,’ says the clerk. ‘Your
flight will be called in twenty-five minutes’ time. Next please.’

Lise
grabs the papers and moves away as if thinking only of the next formality of
travel. She puts the ticket in her bag, takes out her passport, slips the
boarding card inside it, and makes straight towards the passport boxes. And it
is almost as if, satisfied that she has successfully registered the fact of her
presence at the airport among the July thousands there, she has fulfilled a
small item of a greater purpose. She goes to the emigration official and joins
the queue and submits her passport. And now, having received her passport back
in her hand, she is pushing through the gate into the departure lounge. She
walks to the far end, then turns and walks back. She is neither good-looking
nor bad-looking. Her lips are slightly parted. She stops to look at the
departures chart, then walks on. The people around her are mostly too occupied
with their purchases and their flight-numbers to notice her, but some of those
who sit beside their hand-luggage and children on the leather seats waiting for
their flights to be called look at her as she walks past, noting without
comment the lurid colours of her coat, red and white stripes, hanging loose
over her dress, yellow-topped, with its skirt of orange, purple and blue. They
look, as she passes, as they look also at those girls whose skirts are
specially short, or those men whose tight-fitting shirts are patterned with
flowers or are transparent. Lise is conspicuous among them only in the
particular mixture of her colours, contrasting with the fact that her hem-line
has been for some years an old-fashioned length, reaching just below her knees,
as do the mild dresses of many other, but dingy, women travellers who teem in
the departure lounge. Lise puts her passport into her hand-bag, and holds her
boarding card.

She
stops at the bookstall, looks at her watch and starts looking at the paperback
stands. A white-haired, tall woman who has been looking through the hardback
books piled up on a table, turns from them and, pointing to the paperbacks,
says to Lise in English, ‘Is there anything there predominantly pink or green
or beige?’

‘Excuse
me?’ says Lise politely, in a foreignly accented English, ‘what is that you’re
looking for?’

‘Oh,’
the woman says, ‘I thought you were American.’

‘No,
but I can speak four languages enough to make myself understood.’

‘I’m
from Johannesburg,’ says the woman, ‘and I have this house in Jo’burg and
another at Sea Point on the Cape. Then my son, he’s a lawyer, he has a flat in
Jo’burg. In all our places we have spare bedrooms, that makes two green, two
pink, three beige, and I’m trying to pick up books to match. I don’t see any
with just those pastel tints.’

‘You want
English books,’ Lise says. ‘I think you find English books on the front of the
shop over there.’

‘Well,
I looked there and I don’t find my shades. Aren’t these English books here?’

Lise
says ‘No. In any case they’re all very bright-coloured.’ She smiles then, and
with her lips apart starts to look swiftly through the paperbacks. She picks
out one with bright green lettering on a white background with the author’s
name printed to look like blue lightning streaks. In the middle of the cover
are depicted a brown boy and girl wearing only garlands of sunflowers. Lise
pays for it, while the white-haired woman says, ‘Those colours are too bright
for me. I don’t see anything.’

Lise is
holding the book up against her coat, giggling merrily, and looking up to the
woman as if to see if her purchase is admired.

‘You
going on holiday?’ the woman says.

‘Yes.
My first after three years.

‘You
travel much?’

‘No.
There is so little money. But I’m going to the South now. I went before, three
years ago.

‘Well,
I hope you have a good time. A very good time. You look very gay.

The
woman has large breasts, she is clothed in a pink summer coat and dress. She
smiles and is amiable in this transient intimacy with Lise, and not even
sensing in the least that very soon, after a day and a half of hesitancy, and
after a long midnight call to her son, the lawyer in Johannesburg, who advises
her against the action, she nevertheless will come forward and repeat all she
remembers and all she does not remember, and all the details she imagines to be
true and those that are true, in her conversation with Lise when she sees in
the papers that the police are trying to trace who Lise is, and whom, if
anyone, she met on her trip and what she had said. ‘Very gay,’ says this woman
to Lise, indulgently, smiling all over Lise’s vivid clothes.

‘I look
for a gay time,’ Lise is saying.

‘You
got a young man?’

‘Yes, I
have my boy-friend!’

‘He’s
not with you, then?’

‘No. I’m
going to find him. He’s waiting for me. Maybe I should get him a gift at the
duty-free shop.’

They
are walking towards the departures chart. ‘I’m going to Stockholm. I have
three-quarters of an hour wait,’ says the woman.

Lise
looks at the chart as the amplified voice of the announcer hacks its way
through the general din. Lise says, ‘That’s my flight. Boarding at Gate 14.’ She
moves off, her eyes in the distance as if the woman from Johannesburg had never
been there. On her way to Gate 14 Lise stops to glance at a gift-stall. She
looks at the dolls in folk-costume and at the corkscrews. Then she lifts up a
paper-knife shaped like a scimitar, of brass-coloured metal with inset coloured
stones. She removes it from its curved sheath and tests the blade and the point
with deep interest. ‘How much?’ she asks the assistant who is at that moment
serving someone else. The girl says impatiently aside to Lise, ‘The price is on
the ticket.’

‘Too
much. I can get it cheaper at the other end,’ Lise says, putting it down.

‘They’re
all fixed prices at the duty-free,’ the girl calls after Lise as she walks away
towards Gate 14.

A small
crowd has gathered waiting for embarkation. More and more people straggle or
palpitate, according to temperament, towards the group. Lise surveys her
fellow-passengers, one by one, very carefully but not in a manner to provoke
their attention. She moves and mingles as if with dreamy feet and legs, but
quite plainly, from her eyes, her mind is not dreamy as she absorbs each face,
each dress, each suit of clothes, all blouses, blue-jeans, each piece of hand-luggage,
each voice which will accompany her on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.

THREE