The Driver' s Seat

‘This will keep it safe,’ says Lise, stuffing her passport down the back of the seat, stuffing it down till it is out of sight.

The old lady turns her spry nose towards this operation. She looks puzzled for an instant, but soon complies with the action, moving forward to allow Lise more scope in shoving the little booklet out of sight.

‘That’s that,’ says Lise, leaning back, breathing deeply, and looking out of the window. ‘What a lovely day!’

The old lady leans back too, as if leaning on the trusting confidence that Lise has inspired. She says, ‘I left my passport in the hotel, with the Desk.’

‘It’s according to your taste,’ Lise says opening the window to the slight breeze. Her lips part blissfully as she breathes in the air of the wide street on the city’s outskirts.

Soon they run into traffic. The driver inquires the precise point at which they wish to be dropped.

‘The Post Office,’ Lise says. Her companion nods.

Lise turns to her. ‘I’m going shopping. It’s the first thing I do on my holidays. I go and buy the little presents for the family first, then that’s off my mind.’

‘Oh, but in these days,’ says the old lady. She folds her gloves, pats them on her lap, smiles at them.

‘There’s a big department store near the Post Office,’ Lise says. ‘You can get everything you want there.’

‘My nephew is arriving this evening.’

‘The traffic!’ says Lise.

They pass the Metropole Hotel. Lise says, ‘There’s a man in that hotel I’m trying to avoid.’

‘Everything is different,’ says the old lady.

‘A girl isn’t made of cement,’ Lise says, ‘but everything is different now, it’s all changed, believe me.’

At the Post Office they pay the fare, each meticulously contributing the unfamiliar coins to the impatient, mottled and hillocky palm of the driver’s hand, adding coins little by little, until the total is reached and the amount of the tip equally agreed between them and deposited; then they stand on the pavement in the centre of the foreign city, in need of coffee and a sandwich, accustoming themselves to the lay-out, the traffic crossings, the busy residents, the ambling tourists and the worried tourists, and such of the unencumbered youth who swing and thread through the crowds like antelopes whose heads, invisibly antlered, are airborne high to sniff the prevailing winds, and who so appear to own the terrain beneath their feet that they never look at it. Lise looks down at her clothes as if wondering if she is ostentatious enough.

Then, taking the old lady by the arm, she says, ‘Come and have a coffee. We’ll cross by the lights.’

All perky for the adventure, the old lady lets Lise guide her to the street-crossing where they wait for the lights to change and where, while waiting, the old lady gives a little gasp and a jerk of shock; she says, ‘You left your passport in the taxi!’

‘Well, I left it there for safety. Don’t worry,’ Lise says. ‘It’s taken care of.’

‘Oh, I see.’ The old lady relaxes, and she crosses the road with Lise and the waiting herd. ‘I am Mrs Fiedke,’ she says. ‘Mr Fiedke passed away fourteen years ago.

In the bar they sit at a small round table, place their bags, Lise’s book and their elbows on it and order each a coffee and a ham-and-tomato sandwich. Lise props up her paperback book against her bag, as it were so that its bright cover is addressed to whom it may concern. ‘Our home is in Nova Scotia,’ says Mrs Fiedke, ‘where is yours?’

‘Nowhere special,’ says Lise waving aside the triviality. ‘It’s written on the passport. My name’s Lise.’ She takes her arms out of the sleeves of her striped cotton coat and lets it fall behind her over the back of the chair. ‘Mr Fiedke left everything to me and nothing to his sister,’ says the old lady, ‘but my nephew gets everything when I’m gone. I would have liked to be a fly on the wall when she heard.’

The waiter comes with their coffee and sandwiches, moving the book while he sets them down. Lise props it up again when he has gone. She looks around at the other tables and at the people standing up at the bar, sipping coffee or fruit-juice. She says, ‘I have to meet a friend, but he doesn’t seem to be here.’

‘My dear, I don’t want to detain you or take you out of your way.

‘Not at all. Don’t think of it.’

‘It was very kind of you to come along with me,’ says Mrs Fiedke, ‘as it’s so confusing in a strange place. Very kind indeed.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be kind?’ Lise says, smiling at her with a sudden gentleness.

‘Well, I’ll be all right just here after we’ve finished our snack. I’ll just take a look round and do a bit of shopping. I won’t keep you, my dear.’

‘You can come shopping with me,’ Lise says, very genially. ‘Mrs Fiedke, it’s a pleasure.’

‘How very kind you are!’

‘One should always be kind,’ Lise says, ‘in case it might be the last chance. One might be killed crossing the street, or even on the pavement, any time, you never know. So we should always be kind.’ She cuts her sandwich daintily and puts a piece in her mouth.

Mrs Fiedke says, ‘That’s a very, very beautiful thought. But you mustn’t think of accidents. I can assure you, I’m terrified of traffic.’

‘So am I. Terrified.’

‘Do you drive an automobile?’ says the old lady.

‘I do, but I’m afraid of traffic. You never know what crackpot’s going to be at the wheel of another car.’

‘These days,’ says Mrs Fiedke.

‘There’s a department store not far from here,’ Lise says. ‘Want to come?’

They eat their sandwich and drink their coffee. Lise then orders a rainbow ice while Mrs Fiedke considers one way or another whether she really wants anything more, and eventually declines.

‘Strange voices,’ says the old lady looking round. ‘Look at the noise.’

‘Well, if you know the language.’

‘Can you speak the language?’

‘A bit. I can speak four.’

Mrs Fiedke marvels benevolently while Lise bashfully plays with crumbs on the tablecloth. The waiter brings the rainbow ice and while Lise lifts the spoon to start Mrs Fiedke says, ‘It matches with your outfit.’

Lise laughs at this, longer than Mrs Fiedke had evidently expected. ‘Beautiful colours,’ Mrs Fiedke offers, as one might offer a cough-sweet. Lise sits before the brightly streaked ice-cream with her spoon in her hand and laughs on. Mrs Fiedke looks frightened, and more frightened as the voices of the bar stop to watch the laughing one; Mrs Fiedke shrinks into her old age, her face dry and wrinkled, her eyes gone into a far retreat, not knowing what to do. Lise stops suddenly and says, ‘That was funny.’

The man behind the bar, having started coming over to their table to investigate a potential disorder, stops and turns back, muttering something. A few young men round the bar start up a mimic laugh-laugh-laugh but are stopped by the barman.

‘When I went to buy this dress,’ Lise says to Mrs Fiedke, ‘do you know what they offered me first? A stainless dress. Can you believe it? A dress that won’t hold the stain if you drop coffee or ice-cream on it. Some new synthetic fabric. As if I would want a dress that doesn’t show the stains!’

Mrs Fiedke, whose eager spirit is slowly returning from wherever it had been to take cover from Lise’s laughter, looks at Lise’s dress and says, ‘Doesn’t hold the stains? Very useful for travelling.’

‘Not this dress,’ Lise says, working her way through the rainbow ice; ‘it was another dress. I didn’t buy it, though. Very poor taste, I thought.’ She has finished her ice. Again the two women fumble in their purses and at the same time Lise gives an expert’s glance at the two small tickets, marked with the price, that have been left on the table. Lise edges one of them aside. ‘That one’s for the ice,’ she says, ‘and we share the other.’

‘The torment of it,’ Lise says. ‘Not knowing exactly where and when he’s going to turn up.

She moves ahead of Mrs Fiedke up the escalator to the third floor of a department store. It is ten minutes past four by the big clock, and they have had to wait more than half an hour for it to open, both of them having forgotten about the southern shopping hours, and in this interval have walked round the block looking so earnestly for Lise’s friend that Mrs Fiedke has at some point lost the signs of her initial bewilderment when this friend has been mentioned, and now shows only the traces of enthusiastic cooperation in the search. As they were waiting for the store to open, having passed the large iron-grated shutters again and again in their ambles round the block, Mrs Fiedke started to scan the passers-by.

‘Would that be him, do you think? He looks very gaily dressed like yourself.’

‘No, that’s not him.’

‘It’s quite a problem, with all this choice. What about this one? No this one, I mean, crossing in front of that car? Would he be too fat?’

‘No, it isn’t him.’

‘It’s very difficult, my dear, if you don’t know the cast of person. ‘‘He could be driving a car,’ Lise had said when they at last found themselves outside the shop at the moment the gates were being opened.

They go up, now, to the third floor where the toilets are, skimming up with the escalator from which they can look down to see the expanse of each floor as the stairs depart from it. ‘Not a great many gentlemen,’ Mrs Fiedke remarks. ‘I doubt if you’ll find your friend here.’

‘I doubt it too,’ says Lise. ‘Although there are quite a few men employed here, aren’t there?’

‘Oh, would he be a shop assistant?’ Mrs Fiedke says.

‘It depends,’ says Lise.

‘These days,’ says Mrs Fiedke.

Lise stands in the ladies’ room combing her hair while she waits for Mrs Fiedke. She stands at the basin where she has washed her hands, and, watching herself with tight lips in the glass, back-combs the white streak, and with great absorption places it across the darker locks on the crown of her head. At the basins on either side of her two other absorbed young women are touching up their hair and faces. Lise wets the tip of a finger and smooths her eyebrows. The women on either side collect their belongings and leave. Another woman, matronly with her shopping, bustles in and swings into one of the lavatory cubicles. Mrs Fiedke’s cubicle still remains shut. Lise has finished tidying herself up; she waits. Eventually she knocks on Mrs Fiedke’s door. ‘Are you all right?’

She says again, ‘Are you all right?’ And again she knocks. ‘Mrs Fiedke, are you all right?’

The latest comer now bursts out of her cubicle and makes for the wash-basin. Lise says to her, while rattling the handle of Mrs Fiedke’s door, ‘There’s an old lady locked in here and I can’t hear a sound. Something must have happened.’ And she calls again, ‘Are you all right, Mrs Fiedke?’

‘Who is she?’ says the other woman.

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you’re with her, aren’t you?’ The matron takes a good look at Lise.

‘I’ll go and get someone,’ Lise says, and she shakes the handle one more time. ‘Mrs Fiedke! Mrs Fiedke!’ She presses her ear to the door. ‘No sound,’ she says, ‘none at all.’ Then she grabs her bag and her book from the wash-stand and dashes out of the ladies’ room leaving the other woman listening and rattling at the door of Mrs Fiedke’s cubicle.

Outside, the first department is laid out with sports equipment. Lise walks straight through, stopping only to touch one of a pair of skis, feeling and stroking the wood. A salesman approaches, but Lise has walked on, picking her way among the more populated area of School Clothing. Here she hovers over a pair of small, red fur-lined gloves laid out on the counter. The girl behind the counter stands ready to serve. Lise looks up at her. ‘For my niece,’ she says. ‘But I can’t remember the size. I think I won’t risk it, thank you.’ She moves across the department floor to Toys, where she spends some time examining a nylon dog which, at the flick of a switch attached to its lead, barks, trots, wags its tail and sits. Through Linen, to the down escalator goes Lise, scanning each approaching floor in her descent, but not hovering on any landing until she reaches the ground floor. Here she buys a silk scarf patterned in black and white. At a gadgets counter a salesman is demonstrating a cheap electric food-blender. Lise buys one of these, staring at the salesman when he attempts to include personal charm in his side of the bargain. He is a thin, pale man of early middle age, eager-eyed. ‘Are you on holiday?’ he says. ‘American? Swedish?’ Lise says, ‘I’m in a hurry.’ Resigned to his mistake, the salesman wraps her parcel, takes her money, rings up the till and gives her the change. Lise then takes the wide staircase leading to the basement. Here she buys a plastic zipper-bag in which she places her packages. She stops at the Records and Record-Players department and loiters with the small group that has gathered to hear a new pop-group disc. She holds her paperback well in evidence, her hand-bag and the new zipper-bag slung over her left arm just above the wrist, and her hands holding up the book in front of her chest like an identification notice carried by a displaced person.

Come on over to my place

For a sandwich, both of you,

Any time …

The disc comes to an end. A girl with long brown pigtails is hopping about in front of Lise, continuing the rhythm with her elbows, her blue-jeans, and apparently her mind, as a newly beheaded chicken continues for a brief time, now squawklessly, its panic career. Mrs Fiedke comes up behind Lise and touches her arm. Lise says, turning to smile at her, ‘Look at this idiot girl. She can’t stop dancing.’

‘I think I fell asleep for a moment,’ Mrs Fiedke says. ‘It wasn’t a bad turn. I just dropped off. Such kind people. They wanted to put me in a taxi. But why should I go back to the hotel? My poor nephew won’t be there till 9 o’clock tonight or maybe later; he must have missed the earlier plane. The porter was so kind, ringing up to find out the time of the next plane. All that.’

‘Look at her,’ Lise says in a murmur. ‘Just look at her. No, wait! —She’ll start again when the man puts on the next record.’

The record starts, and the girl swings. Lise says, ‘Do you believe in macrobiotics?’

‘I’m a Jehovah’s Witness,’ says Mrs Fiedke. ‘But that was after Mr Fiedke passed on. I have no problems any more. Mr Fiedke cut out his sister you know, because she had no religion. She questioned. There are some things which you can’t. But I know this, if Mr Fiedke was alive today he would be a Witness too. In fact he was one in many ways without knowing it.’

‘Macrobiotics is a way of life,’ Lise says. ‘That man at the Metropole, I met him on the plane. He’s an Enlightenment Leader of the macrobiotics. He’s on Regime Seven.’

‘How delightful!’ says Mrs Fiedke.

‘But he isn’t my type,’ Lise says.

The girl with the pigtails is dancing on by herself in front of them, and as she suddenly steps back Mrs Fiedke has to retreat out of her way. ‘Is she what they call a hippy?’ she says.

‘There were two others on the plane. I thought they were my type, but they weren’t. I was disappointed.’

‘But you are to meet your gentleman soon, won’t you? Didn’t you say?’

‘Oh, he’s my type,’ Lise says.

‘I must get a pair of slippers for my nephew. Size nine. He missed the plane.’

‘This one’s a hippy,’ says Lise, indicating with her head a slouching bearded youth dressed in tight blue-jeans, no longer blue, his shoulders draped with an assortment of cardigans and fringed leather garments, heavy for the time of year.

Mrs Fiedke looks with interest and whispers to Lise, ‘They are hermaphrodites. It isn’t their fault.’ The young man turns as he is touched on the shoulder by a large blue-suited agent of the store. The bearded youth starts to argue and gesticulate, but this brings another, slighter, man to his other shoulder. They lead him protesting away towards the emergency exit stairway. A slight disturbance then occurs amongst the record-hearing crowd, some of whom take the young man’s part, some of whom do not. ‘He wasn’t doing any harm!’ ‘He smelt awful!’ ‘Who do you think you are?’

Lise walks off towards Televisions, followed anxiously by Mrs Fiedke. Behind them the pigtailed girl is addressing her adjacent crowd: ‘They think they’re in America where if they don’t like a man’s face they take him out and shoot him.’ A man’s voice barks back: ‘You couldn’t see his face for the hair. Go back where you came from, little whore! In this country, we …’

The quarrel melts behind them as they come to the television sets where the few people who have been taking an interest in the salesman appear now to be torn between his calm rivulet of words and the incipient political uprising over at Records and Record-Players. Two television screens, one vast and one small, display the same programme, a wild-life documentary film which is now coming to an end; a charging herd of buffalo, large on one screen and small on the other, cross the two patches of vision while music of an unmistakably finale nature sends them on their way with equal volume from both machines. The salesman turns down the noise from the larger set, and continues to address his customers, who have now dwindled to two, meanwhile keeping an interested eye on Lise and Mrs Fiedke who hover behind.

‘Would that be your gentleman?’ Mrs Fiedke says, while the screens give a list of names responsible for the film, then another and another list of names. Lise says, ‘I was just wondering myself. He looks a respectable type.’

‘It’s up to you,’ says Mrs Fiedke. ‘You’re young and you have your life in front of you.’

A well-groomed female announcer comes on both televisions, small and large, to give out the early evening headlines, first stating that the time is 17.00 hours, then that a military coup has newly taken place in a middle-eastern country details of which are yet unknown. The salesman, abandoning his potential clients to their private deliberations, inclines his head towards Mrs Fiedke and inquires if he can help her.

‘No thank you,’ Lise replies in the tongue of the country. Whereupon the salesman comes close up and pursues Mrs Fiedke in English. ‘We have big reductions, Madam, this week.’ He looks winningly at Lise, eventually approaching to squeeze her arm. Lise turns to Mrs Fiedke. ‘No good,’ she says. ‘Come on, it’s getting late,’ and she guides the old lady away to Gifts and Curios at the far end of the floor. ‘Not my man at all. He tried to get familiar with me,’ Lise says. ‘The one I’m looking for will recognize me right away for the woman I am, have no fear of that.’

‘Can you credit it?’ says Mrs Fiedke looking back indignantly in the direction of Televisions. ‘Perhaps we should report him. Where is the Office?’

‘What’s the use?’ Lise says. ‘We have no proof.’

‘Perhaps we should go elsewhere for my nephew’s slippers.’

‘Do you really want to buy slippers for your nephew?’ Lise says.