The Driver's Seat Read Online Free Page A

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