The Driver's Seat (3 page)

She will be found tomorrow
morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and
her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a
park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding
at Gate 14.

Crossing
the tarmac to the plane Lise follows, with her quite long stride, closely on
the heels of the fellow-passenger whom she appears finally to have chosen to
adhere to. This is a rosy-faced, sturdy young man of about thirty; he is
dressed in a dark business suit and carries a black briefcase. She follows him
purposefully, careful to block the path of any other traveller whose aimless
hurry might intervene between Lise and this man. Meanwhile, closely behind
Lise, almost at her side, walks a man who in turn seems anxious to be close to
her. He tries unsuccessfully to catch her attention. He is bespectacled,
half-smiling, young, dark, long-nosed and stooping. He wears a check shirt and
beige corduroy trousers. A camera is slung over his shoulders and a coat over
his arm.

Up the
steps they go, the pink and shiny business man, Lise at his heels, and at hers
the hungrier-looking man. Up the steps and into the plane. The air-hostess says
good morning at the door while a steward farther up the aisle of the economy
class blocks the progress of the staggering file and helps a young woman with
two young children to bundle their coats up on the rack. The way is clear at
last. Lise’s business man finds a seat next to the right-hand window in a three-seat
row. Lise takes the middle seat next to him, on his left, while the lean hawk
swiftly throws his coat and places his camera up on the rack and sits down next
to Lise in the end seat.

Lise
begins to fumble for her seat-belt. First she reaches down the right-hand side
of her seat which adjoins that of the dark-suited man. At the same time she
takes the left-hand section. But the right-hand buckle she gets hold of is that
of her neighbour. It does not fit in the left-hand buckle as she tries to make
it do. The dark-suited neighbour, fumbling also for his seat-belt, frowns as
he seems to realize that she has the wrong part, and makes an unintelligible
sound. Lise says, ‘I think I’ve got yours.

He
fishes up the buckle that properly belongs to Lise’s seat-belt.

She
says, ‘Oh yes. I’m so sorry.’ She giggles and he formally smiles and brings his
smile to an end, now fastening his seat-belt intently and then looking out of
the window at the wing of the plane, silvery with its rectangular patches.

Lise’s
left-hand neighbour smiles. The loudspeaker tells the passengers to fasten
their seat-belts and refrain from smoking. Her admirer’s brown eyes are warm,
his smile, as wide as his forehead, seems to take up most of his lean face.
Lise says, audibly above the other voices on the plane, ‘You look like Red
Riding-Hood’s grandmother. Do you want to eat me up?’

The
engines rev up. Her ardent neighbour’s widened lips give out deep, satisfied
laughter, while he slaps her knee in applause. Suddenly her other neighbour
looks at Lise in alarm. He stares, as if recognizing her, with his brief-case
on his lap, and his hand in the position of pulling out a batch of papers.
Something about Lise, about her exchange with the man on her left, has caused a
kind of paralysis in his act of fetching out some papers from his brief-case.
He opens his mouth, gasping and startled, staring at her as if she is someone
he has known and forgotten and now sees again. She smiles at him; it is a smile
of relief and delight. His hand moves again, hurriedly putting back the papers
that he had half drawn out of his brief-case. He trembles as he unfastens his
seat-belt and makes as if to leave his seat, grabbing his brief-case.

On the
evening of the following day he will tell the police, quite truthfully, ‘The
first time I saw her was at the airport. Then on the plane. She sat beside me.

‘You
never saw her before at any time? You didn’t know her?’

‘No,
never.’

‘What
was your conversation on the plane?’

‘Nothing.
I moved my seat. I was afraid.’

‘Afraid?’

‘Yes,
frightened. I moved to another seat, away from her.’

‘What
frightened you?’

‘I don’t
know.’

‘Why
did you move your seat at that time?’

‘I don’t
know. I must have sensed something.’

‘What
did she say to you?’

‘Nothing
much. She got her seat-belt mixed with mine. Then she was carrying on a bit
with the man at the end seat.’

Now, as
the plane taxis along the runway, he gets up. Lise and the man in the aisle
seat look up at him, taken by surprise at the abruptness of his movements.
Their seat-belts fasten them to their seats and they are unable immediately to
make way for him, as he indicates that he wants to pass. Lise looks, for an
instant, slightly senile, as if she felt, in addition to bewilderment, a sense
of defeat or physical incapacity. She might be about to cry or protest against
a pitiless frustration of her will. But an air-hostess, seeing the standing
man, has left her post by the exit—door and briskly comes up the aisle to their
seat. She says. ‘The aircraft is taking off. Will you kindly remain seated and
fasten your seat-belt?’

The man
says, in a foreign accent, ‘Excuse me, please. I wish to change.’ He starts to
squeeze past Lise and her companion.

The
air-hostess, evidently thinking that the man has an urgent need to go to the
lavatory, asks the two if they would mind getting up to let him pass and return
to their seats as quickly as possible. They unfasten their belts, stand aside
in the aisle, and he hurries up the plane with the air-hostess leading the way.
But he does not get as far as the toilet cubicles. He stops at an empty middle
seat upon which the people on either side, a white-haired fat man and a young
girl, have dumped hand-luggage and magazines. He pushes himself past the woman
who is seated on the outside seat and asks her to remove the luggage. He
himself lifts it, shakily, his solid strength all gone. The air-hostess turns
to remonstrate, but the two people have obediently made the seat vacant for
him. He sits, fastens his seat-belt, ignoring the air-hostess, her reproving,
questioning protests, and heaves a deep breath as if he had escaped from death
by a small margin.

Lise
and her companion have watched the performance. Lise smiles bitterly.

The
dark man by her side says, ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘He
didn’t like us,’ Lise says.

‘What
did we do to him?’

‘Nothing.
Nothing at all. He must be crazy. He must be nutty.’

The
plane now comes to its brief halt before revving up for the takeoff run. The
engines roar and the plane is off, is rising and away. Lise says to her
neighbour, ‘I wonder who he is?’

‘Some
kind of a nut,’ says the man. ‘But it’s all the better for us, we can get
acquainted.’ His stringy hand takes hers; he holds it tightly. ‘I’m Bill,’ he
says. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Lise.’
She lets him grip her hand as if she hardly knows that he is holding it. She
stretches her neck to see above the heads of the people in front, and says, ‘He’s
sitting there reading the paper as if nothing had happened.’

The
stewardess is handing out copies of newspapers. A steward who has followed her
up the aisle stops at the seat where the dark-suited man has settled and is now
tranquilly scanning the front page of his newspaper. The steward inquires if he
is all right now, sir?

The man
looks up with an embarrassed smile and shyly apologizes.

‘Yes,
fine. I’m sorry …’

‘Was
there anything the matter, sir?’

‘No,
really. Please. I’m fine here, thanks. Sorry … it was nothing, nothing.’

The
steward goes away with his eyebrows mildly raised in resignation at the chance
eccentricity of a passenger. The plane purrs forward. The no-smoking lights go
out and the loudspeaker confirms that the passengers may now unfasten their
seat-belts and smoke.

Lise
unfastens hers and moves to the vacated window seat.

‘I
knew,’ she says. ‘In a way I knew there was something wrong with him.’

Bill
moves to sit next to her in the middle seat and says, ‘Nothing wrong with him
at all. Just a fit of puritanism. He was unconsciously jealous when he saw we’d
hit it off together, and he made out he was outraged as if we’d been doing
something indecent. Forget him; he’s probably a clerk in an insurance brokers’
from the looks of him. Nasty little bureaucrat. Limited. He wasn’t your type.’

‘How do
you know?’ Lise says immediately as if responding only to Bill’s use of the
past tense, and, as if defying it by a counter-demonstration to the effect that
the man continues to exist in the present, she half-stands to catch sight of
the stranger’s head, eight rows forward in a middle seat, at the other side of
the aisle, now bent quietly over his reading.

‘Sit
down,’ Bill says. ‘You don’t want anything to do with that type. He was
frightened of your psychedelic clothes. Terrified.’

‘Do you
think so?’

‘Yes.
But I’m not.’

The
stewardesses advance up the aisle bearing trays of food which they start to
place before the passengers. Lise and Bill pull down the table in front of
their seats to receive their portions. It is a midmorning compromise snack
composed of salami on lettuce, two green olives, a rolled-up piece of boiled
ham containing a filling of potato salad and a small pickled something, all
laid upon a slice of bread. There is also a round cake, swirled with white and
chocolate cream, and a corner of silver-wrapped processed cheese with biscuits
wrapped in cellophane. An empty plastic coffee cup stands by on each of their
trays.

Lise
takes from her tray the transparent plastic envelope which contains the
sterilized knife, fork and spoon necessary for the meal. She feels the blade of
the knife. She presses two of her fingers against the prongs of her fork. ‘Not
very sharp,’ she says.

‘Who
needs them, anyway?’ says Bill. ‘This is awful food.’

‘Oh, it
looks all right. I’m hungry. I only had a cup of coffee for my breakfast. There
wasn’t time.’

‘You
can eat mine too,’ says Bill. ‘I stick as far as possible to a very sensible
diet. This stuff is poison, full of toxics and chemicals. It’s far too Yin.’

‘I
know,’ said Lise. ‘But considering it’s a snack on a plane —’

‘You
know what Yin is?’ he says.

She
says, ‘Well, sort of …’in a vaguely embarrassed way, ‘but it’s only a
snack, isn’t it?’

‘You
understand what Yin is?’

‘Well,
something sort of like this — all bitty.’

‘No,
Lise,’ he says.

‘Well
it’s a kind of slang, isn’t it? You say a thing’s a bit too yin …’; plainly
she is groping.

‘Yin,’
says Bill, ‘is the opposite of Yang.’

She
giggles and, half-rising, starts searching with her eyes for the man who is
still on her mind.

‘This
is serious,’ Bill says, pulling her roughly back into her seat. She laughs and
begins to eat.

‘Yin
and Yang are philosophies,’ he says. ‘Yin represents space. Its colour is
purple. Its element is water. It is external. That salami is Yin and those
olives are Yin. They are full of toxics. Have you ever heard of macrobiotic
food?’

‘No,
what is it?’ she says cutting into the open salami sandwich.

‘You’ve
got a lot to learn. Rice, unpolished rice is the basis of macrobiotics. I’m
going to start a centre in Naples next week. It is a cleansing diet.
Physically, mentally and spiritually.’

‘I hate
rice,’ she says.

‘No,
you only think you do. He who hath ears let him hear.’ He smiles widely towards
her, he breathes into her face and touches her knee. She eats on with
composure. ‘I’m an Enlightenment Leader in the movement,’ he says.

The
stewardess comes with two long metal pots. ‘Tea or coffee?’ ‘Coffee,’ says
Lise, holding out her plastic cup, her arm stretched in front of Bill. When
this is done, ‘For you, sir?’ says the stewardess.

Bill
places his hand over his cup and benignly shakes his head.

‘Don’t
you want anything to eat, sir?’ says the stewardess, regarding Bill’s
untouched tray.

‘No,
thank you,’ says Bill.

Lise
says, ‘I’ll eat it. Or at least, some of it.’

The
stewardess passes on to the next row, unconcerned.

‘Coffee
is Yin,’ says Bill.

Lise
looks towards his tray. ‘Are you sure you don’t want that open sandwich? It’s
delicious. I’ll eat it if you don’t want it. After all, it’s paid for, isn’t
it?’

‘Help
yourself,’ he says. ‘You’ll soon change your eating habits, though, now that we’ve
got to know each other.’

‘Whatever
do you eat when you travel abroad?’ Lise says, exchanging his tray for hers,
retaining only her coffee.