The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark

Author:Muriel Spark [Spark, Muriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-07-15T18:05:17+00:00

‘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.

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