The Driver's Seat (10 page)

‘But I
parked it over there less than an hour ago. A cream Fiat, a bit dirty, I’ve
been travelling.’

The
doorman sends a page-boy to find the parking attendant who presently comes
along in a vexed mood since he has been called from conversation with a more
profitable client. He owns to having seen a cream-coloured Fiat being driven
away by a large fat man whom he had presumed to be the owner.

‘He
must have had extra keys,’ says Lise.

‘Didn’t
you see the lady drive in with it?’ the doorman says.

‘No, I
didn’t. The royalty and the police were taking up all my time, you know that.
Besides, the lady didn’t say anything to me, to look after her car.’

Lise
says, opening her bag, ‘Well, I meant to give you a tip later. But I’ll give
you one now.’ And she holds out to him the keys of Carlo’s car.

The
doorman says, ‘Look, lady, we can’t take responsibility for your car. If you
want to see the porter at the desk he can ring the police. Are you staying at
the hotel?’

‘No,’
says Lise. ‘Get me a taxi.’

‘Have
you got your licence?’ says the parking attendant.

‘Go
away,’ Lise says. ‘You’re not my type.’ He looks explosive. Another of tomorrow’s
witnesses.

The
porter is meanwhile busy helping some newcomers out of a taxi. Lise calls out
to the taxi-driver, who nods his agreement to take her on.

As soon
as the passengers are out, Lise leaps into the taxi.

The
parking attendant shouts, ‘Are you sure it was your own car, lady?’

She
throws Carlo’s keys out of the window on to the gravel and directs the taxi to
the Hotel Metropole with tears falling over her cheeks.

‘Anything
the matter, lady?’ says the driver.

‘It’s
getting late,’ she says, weeping. ‘It’s getting terribly late.’

‘Lady,
I can’t go faster. See the traffic.’

‘I can’t
find my boy-friend. I don’t know where he’s gone.

‘You
think you’ll find him at the Metropole?’

‘There’s
always a chance,’ she says. ‘I make a lot of mistakes.’

SIX

The chandeliers of the
Metropole, dispensing a vivid glow upon the just and unjust alike, disclose
Bill the macrobiotic seated gloomily by a table near the entrance. He jumps up
when Lise enters and falls upon her with a delight that impresses the whole
lobby, and in such haste that a plastic bag that he is clutching,
insufficiently sealed, emits a small trail of wild rice in his progress towards
her.

She
follows him back to his seat and takes a chair beside him. ‘Look at my coat,’
she says. ‘I got mixed up in a student demonstration and I’m still crying from
the effect of tear-gas. I had a date at the Hilton for dinner with a very important
Sheikh but I was too late, as I went to buy him a pair of slippers for a
present. He’d gone on safari. So he wasn’t my type, anyway. Shooting animals.’

‘I’d
just about given you up,’ says Bill. ‘You were to be here at seven. I’ve been
desperate.’ He takes her hand, smiling with glad flashes of teeth and eyes. ‘You
wouldn’t have been so unkind as to have dinner with someone else, would you? I’m
hungry.’

‘And my
car got stolen,’ she says.

‘What
car?’

‘Oh,
just a car.

‘I didn’t
know you had a car. Was it a hired car?’

‘You
know nothing whatsoever about me,’ she says.

‘Well I’ve
got a car,’ he says. ‘A friend has lent me it. I’m taking it to Naples as soon
as possible to get started on the Yin-Yang Young Culture Centre. I’m opening
with a lecture called “The World —Where is it Going?” That will be a general
introduction to the macrobiotic way of life. It’ll bring in the kids, all
right.’

‘It’s
getting late,’ she says.

‘I was
nearly giving you up,’ he says, squeezing her hand. ‘I was just about to go out
and look for another girl. I’m queer for girls. It has to be a girl.’

‘I’ll
have a drink,’ she says. ‘I need one.’

‘Oh no,
.you won’t. Oh no, you won’t. Alcohol is off the diet. You’re coming to supper
with me at a house I know.’

‘What
kind of a house?’ she says.

‘A
macrobiotic family I know,’ he says. ‘They’ll give us a good supper. Three
sons, four daughters, the mother and father, all on macrobiotics. We’ll have
rice with carrots followed by rice biscuits and goat’s cheese and a cooked
apple. No sugar allowed. The family eat at six o’clock, which is the orthodox
system, but the variation that I follow lets you eat late. That way, we’ll get
through to the young. So we’ll go there and heat up a meal. Come on!’

She
says, ‘That tear-gas is still affecting me.’ Tears brim in her eyes. She gets
up with him and lets him, trailing rice, lead her past every eye of the
Metropole lobby into the street, up the road, and into a small black utility
model which is parked there.

‘It’s
wonderful,’ says Bill as he starts up the car, ‘to think we’re together again
at last.’

‘I must
tell you,’ says Lise, sniffing, ‘that you’re not my type. I’m sure of it.’

‘Oh,
you don’t know me! You don’t know me at all.’

‘But I
know my type.’

‘You
need love,’ he says with a hand on her knee.

She
starts away from him. ‘Take care while you’re driving. Where do your friends
live?’

‘The
other side of the park. I must say, I feel hungry.’

‘Then
hurry up,’ she says.

‘Don’t
you feel hungry?’

‘No, I
feel lonely.’

‘You
won’t be lonely with me.’

They have
turned into the park.

‘Turn
right at the end of this road,’ she says. ‘There should be a road to the right,
according to the map. I want to look at something.’

‘There
are better places farther on.’

‘Turn
right, I say.

‘Don’t
be nervy,’ he says. ‘You need to relax. The reason why you’re so tense, you’ve
been eating all the wrong things and drinking too much. You shouldn’t have more
than three glasses of liquid a day.

You
should pass water not more than twice a day. Twice for a woman, three times for
a man. If you need to go more than that it means you’re taking in too much
fluid.’

‘Here’s
the road. Turn right.’

Bill
turns right, going slowly and looking about him. He says, ‘I don’t know where
this leads to. But there’s a very convenient spot farther up the main road.’

‘What
spot?’ she says. ‘What spot are you talking about?’

‘I
haven’t had my daily orgasm. It’s an essential part of this particular
variation of the diet, didn’t I tell you? Many other macrobiotic variations
have it as an essential part. This is one of the main things the young
Neapolitans must learn.’

‘If you
think you’re going to have sex with me,’ she says, ‘you’re very much mistaken.
I have no time for sex.

‘Lise!’
says Bill.

‘I mean
it,’ she says. ‘Sex is no use to me, I assure you.’ She gives out her deep
laughter.

The
road is dimly lit by lamps posted at far intervals. Bill is peering to right
and left.

‘There’s
a building over there,’ she says. ‘That must be the Pavilion. And the old villa
behind — they say in the brochure that it’s to be restored and turned into a
museum. But it’s the famous Pavilion that I want.’

At the
site of the Pavilion several cars and motor bicycles are parked. Another road
converges, and a band of teenaged boys and girls are languidly leaning against
trees, cars and anything else that can prop them up, looking at each other.

‘There’s
nothing doing here,’ says Bill.

‘Stop,
I want to get out and look around.’

‘Too
many people. What are you, thinking of?’

‘I want
to see the Pavilion, that’s all.’

‘Why?
You can come by daylight. Much better.’

Some
iron tables are scattered on the ground in front of the Pavilion, a graceful
three-storey building with a quaint gilded frieze above the first level of the
façade.

Bill
parks the car near the others, some of which are occupied by amorous couples.
Lise jumps out as soon as the car stops. She takes with her the hand-bag
leaving the zipper-bag and her book in the car. He runs after her, putting an
arm round her shoulders, and says, ‘Come on, it’s getting late. What do you
want to see?’

She
says, ‘Will your rice be safe in the car? Have you locked it?’

He
says, ‘Who’s going to steal a bag of rice?’

‘I don’t
know,’ says Lise, making her way along the path which leads to the Pavilion. ‘Maybe
those young people might feel very intensely about rice.

‘The
movement hasn’t got started yet, Lise,’ says Bill. ‘And red beans are also
allowed. And sesame-flour. But you can’t expect people to know about it till
you tell them.’

The
ground floor of the Pavilion is largely glass-fronted. She goes up to it and
peers in. There are bare café tables and chairs piled high in the classic
fashion of restaurants closed for the night. There is a long counter and a
coffee machine at the far end, with an empty glass sandwich-bar. There is
nothing else except an expanse of floor, which in the darkness can only be
half-seen, patterned in black-and-white chequered pavements. Lise cranes and
twists to see the ceiling which obscurely seems to be painted with some
classical scene; the hind-leg of a horse and one side of a cupid are all that
is visible.

Still
she peers through the glass. Bill tries to draw her away, but again she starts
to cry. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘the inconceivable sorrow of it, those chairs piled up
at night when you’re sitting in a café, the last one left.’

‘You’re
getting morbid, dear,’ says Bill. ‘Darling, it’s all a matter of chemistry. You’ve
been eating toxic foods and neglecting the fact that there are two forces in
the world, centrifugal which is Yin and centripetal which is Yang. Orgasms are
Yang.’

‘It
makes me sad,’ she says. ‘I want to go home, I think. I want to go back home
and feel all that lonely grief again. I miss it so much already.’

He
jerks her away and she calls out, ‘Stop it! Don’t do that!’ A man and two women
who are passing a few yards away turn to look, but the young group pays no
attention.

Bill
gives a deep sigh. ‘It’s getting late,’ he says, pinching her elbow.

‘Let me
go, I want to look round the back. I’ve got to see how things are round here,
it’s important.’

‘You’d
think it was a bank,’ Bill says, ‘that you were going to do a stick-up in
tomorrow. Who do you think you are? Who do you think I am?’ He follows her as
she starts off round the side of the building, examining the track. ‘What do
you think you’re doing?’

She
traverses the side of the building and turns round to the back where five large
dust-bins stand waiting for tomorrow’s garbagemen, who will also find Lise,
not far off, stabbed to death. At this moment, a disturbed cat leaves off its
foraging at one of the half-closed dust-bins and flows into an adjacent
blackness.

Lise
surveys the ground earnestly.

‘Look,’
says Bill, ‘Lise, darling, over by the hedge. We’re all right.’

He
pulls her towards a hedge separating the back yard of the Pavilion from a
foot-path which can be seen through a partly-open iron gate. A band of very
tall fair young men all speaking together in a Scandinavian-sounding language
passes by and stops to watch and comment buoyantly on the tussle that ensues
between Bill and Lise, she proclaiming that she doesn’t like sex and he
explaining that if he misses his daily orgasm he has to fit in two the next
day. ‘And it gives me indigestion,’ he says, getting her down on the gravel
behind the hedge and out of sight, ‘two in one day. And it’s got to be a girl.’

Lise
now shrieks for help in four languages, English, French, Italian and Danish.
She throws her hand-bag into the hedge; then, ‘He’s taken my purse!’ she cries
in four languages. ‘He’s gone off with my hand-bag!’ One of the onlookers tries
to creak open the stiff iron gate, but meantime another has started to climb
it, and gets over.

‘What’s
going on?’ he says to Lise in his own language. ‘We’re Swedes. What’s wrong?’

Bill
who has been kneeling to hold her down gets up and says, ‘Go away. Clear off.
What do you think’s going on?’

But
Lise has jumped to her feet and shouts in English that she never saw him before
in her life, and that he is trying to rob her, and rape her. ‘I just got out of
my car to look at the Pavilion, and he jumped on me and dragged me here,’ she
screams, over and over again in four languages. ‘Get the police!’