In the Driver's Seat Read online

  Acclaim for Helen Simpson's

  IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT

  “Marvelous, diverting language, and sharply drawn characters … deft and entrancing tales.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Simpson serves up big themes—birth, death and life-altering illness—in small piquant bites.”

  —Deseret Morning News

  “If the humor of George Carlin or Woody Allen keeps a smile on your face, then Helen Simpson's In the Driver's Seat is a must read… . After making us guffaw, and making us smirk, Simpson shows us what's going to help us get through not being in the driver's seat: acceptance.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “A book of abundant delights, alive and electric with the quirkiness of life itself.”

  —The Times (London)

  “Funny, wry, and always closely attuned to the lives of women and especially mothers, Simpson is the UK's answer to Lorrie Moore.”

  —The Star-Ledger (Newark)

  “Insouciant.”

  —Vogue

  “Gifted… . [Filled with] ebullient prose and humor.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Hyperarticulate… . [In the Driver's Seat] chronicles what runs through a woman's mind in the course of a walk or … a carpool drive.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Funny, sharply observed… . These pieces speak to us about urgent issues, and they do so with a sense of honesty that makes them gratifying to read… . Her characters are ordinary, flawed people, but they are deeply human and carefully drawn.”

  —The Palm Beach Post

  “A small masterpiece.”

  —The Independent (London)

  “[Simpson is] a writer whose ‘specialty' is no less than the heart in turmoil… . Even as we confront inexorable deterioration, Simpson seems to say, life offers private moments of compensatory lightness and triumph.”

  —The Tennessean

  “Simpson is faultless, each word lined up and ready to jump through hoops at her command.”

  —The Daily Telegraph (London)

  “With sometimes dark satirical wit, sometimes joyful silliness, but mainly with rich yet terse sentences, Simpson's stories take readers on a literary roller-coaster ride—ending just when the reality of the fun you're having is catching up to you.”

  —Asian American Press

  “A virtuoso performance… . Simpson's use of language is remarkable: she handles prose with the risky precision of a trapeze artist.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph (London)

  “The brilliance of the conceits and the complex economy that shapes the best of these tales match and surpass any of Helen Simpson's earlier writing.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  Helen Simpson

  IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT

  Helen Simpson is the author of three collections of short stories, Getting a Life (winner of the Hawthorn-den Award), Four Bare Legs in a Bed (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award), and Dear George, as well as one novella, Flesh and Grass. She is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

  Also by Helen Simpson

  Getting a Life

  Four Bare Legs in a Bed

  Flesh and Grass

  Dear George

  Contents

  Up at a Villa

  The Door

  The Year's Midnight

  Every Third Thought

  Early One Morning

  The Tree

  In the Driver's Seat

  If I'm Spared

  The Phlebotomist's Love Life

  The Green Room

  Constitutional

  Up at a Villa

  They were woken by the deep-chested bawling of an angry baby. Wrenched from wine-dark slumber, the four of them sat up, flustered, hair stuck with pine needles, gulping awake with little light breaths of concentration. They weren't supposed to be here, they remembered that.

  They could see the baby by the side of the pool, not twenty yards away, a furious geranium in its parasol-shaded buggy, and the large pale woman sagging above it in her bikini. Half an hour ago they had been masters of that pool, racing topless and tipsy round its borders, lithe Nick chasing sinewy Tina and wrestling her, an equal match, grunting, snaky, toppling, crashing down into the turquoise depths together. Neither of them would let go underwater. They came up fighting in a chlorinated spume of diamonds. Joe, envious, had tried a timid imitation grapple but Charlotte was having none of it.

  “Get off!” she snorted, kind, mocking, and slipped neatly into the pool via a dive that barely broke the water's skin. Joe, seeing he was last as usual, gave a foolish bellow and launched his heavy self into the air, his aimless belly slapping down disastrously like an explosion.

  After that, the sun had dried them off in about a minute, they had devoured their picnic of pissaladière and peaches, downed the bottles of pink wine, and gone to doze in the shade behind the ornamental changing screen.

  Now they were stuck. Their clothes and money were heaped under a bush of lavender at the other end of the pool.

  “Look,” whispered Tina as a man came walking toward the baby and its mother. “Look, they're English. He's wearing socks.”

  “What's the matter with her now,” said the man, glaring at the baby.

  “How should I know,” said the woman. “I mean, she's been fed. She's got a new nappy.”

  “Oh, plug her on again,” said the man crossly, and wandered off toward a cushioned chaise longue. “That noise goes straight through my skull.”

  The woman muttered something they couldn't hear, and shrugged herself out of her bikini top. They gasped and gaped in fascination as she uncovered huge brown nipples on breasts like wheels of Camembert.

  “Oh gross!” whispered Tina, drawing her lips back from her teeth in a horrified smirk.

  “Be quiet,” hissed Nick as they all of them heaved with giggles and snorts and their light eyes popped, overemphatic in faces baked to the color of flowerpots.

  They had crept into the grounds of this holiday villa, one of a dozen or more on this hillside, at slippery Nicks suggestion, since everything was fermé le lundi down in the town and they had no money left for entrance to hotel pools or even to beaches. Anyway, they had fallen out of love over the last week with the warm soup of the Mediterranean, its filmy surface bobbing with polystyrene shards and other unsavory orts.

  “Harvey,” called the woman, sagging on the stone bench with the baby at her breast. “Harvey, I wish you'd …”

  “Now what is it,” said Harvey testily, making a great noise with his two-day-old copy of The Times.

  “Some company,” she said with wounded pathos. “That's all.”

  “Company,” he sighed. “I thought the idea was to get away from it all.”

  “I thought we'd have a chance to talk on holiday,” said the woman.

  “All right, all right,” said Harvey, scrumpling up The Times and exchanging his chaise longue for a place on the stone bench beside her. “All right. So what do you want to talk about?”

  “Us,” said the woman.

  “Right,” said Harvey. “Can I have a swim first?” And he was off, diving clumsily into the pool, losing his poise at the last moment so that he met the water like a flung cat.

  “She's hideous,” whispered Tina. “Look at that gross stomach, it's all in folds.” She glanced down superstitiously at her own body, the high breasts like halved apples, the handspan waist.

  “He's quite fat, too,” said Charlotte. “Love handles, anyway.”

  “I'm never going to have children,” breathed Tin
a. “Not in a million years.”

  “Shush,” said Joe, straining forward for the next installment. The husband was back from his swim, shaking himself like a labrador in front of the nursing mother.

  “‘Us,'” he said humorously, wiggling a finger inside each ear, then drubbing his hair with the flats of his hands. “Fire away then.”

  She started immediately, as if she knew she had only two or three minutes of his attention, and soon the air was thick with phrases like Once she's on solids, and You'd rather be reading the paper, and Is it because you wanted a boy? He looked dull but resigned, silent except for once protesting, What's so special about bathtime? She talked on, but like a loser, for she was failing to find the appropriate register, flailing around, pulling clichés from the branches. At some subliminal level each of the eavesdropping quartet recognized their own mother's voice in hers, and glazed over.

  “You've never moaned on like this before,” marveled Harvey at last. “You were always so independent. Organized.”

  “You think I'm a mess,” she said. “A failure as a mother.”

  “Well, you're obviously not coping,” he said. “At home all day and you can't even keep the waste bins down.”

  Nick and Tina were laughing with silent violence behind the screen, staggering against each other, tears running down their faces. Joe was mesmerized by the spectacle of lactation. As for Charlotte, she was remembering another unwitting act of voyeurism, a framed picture from a childhood camping holiday.

  It had been early morning, she'd gone off on her own to the village for their breakfast baguettes, and the village had been on a hill like in a fairy tale, full of steep little flights of steps, which she was climbing for fun. The light was sweet and glittering and as she looked down over the rooftops she saw very clearly one particular open window, so near that she could have lobbed in a ten franc piece, and through the window she could see a woman dropping kisses onto a man's face and neck and chest. He was lying naked in bed and she was kissing him lovingly and gracefully, her breasts dipping down over him like silvery peonies. Charlotte had never mentioned this to anyone, keeping the picture to herself, a secret snapshot protected from outside sniggerings.

  “The loss of romance,” bleated the woman, starting afresh.

  “We haven't changed,” said Harvey stoutly.

  “Yes we have! Of course we have!”

  “Rubbish.”

  “But we're supposed to change, it's all different now, the baby's got to come first.”

  “I don't see why,” said Harvey. “Mustn't let them rule your life.”

  The baby had finished at last, and was asleep; the woman gingerly detached her from her body and placed her in the buggy.

  “Cheer up,” said Harvey, preparing for another dip. “Once you've lost a bit of weight, it'll all be back to normal. Romance et cetera. Get yourself in shape.”

  “You don't fancy me anymore,” she wailed in a last-ditch attempt to hold him.

  “No, no, of course I do,” he said, eyeing the water. “It's just a bit … different from before. Now that you've gone all, you know, sort of floppy.”

  That did it. At the same moment as the woman unloosed a howl of grief, Nick and Tina released a semi-hysterical screech of laughter. Then—“Run!” said Joe—and they all shot off round the opposite side of the pool, snatching up their clothes and shoes and purses at the other end. Harvey was meanwhile shouting, “Hoi! Hoi! What the hell d'you think you're playing at!” while his wife stopped crying and his daughter started.

  The four of them ran like wild deer, leaping low bushes of lavender and thyme, whooping with panicky delight, lean and light and half naked—or, more accurately, nine tenths naked—through the pine trees and après-midi dappling. They ran on winged feet, and their laughter looped the air behind them like chains of bubbles in translucent water.

  High up on the swimming pool terrace the little family, frozen together for a photographic instant, watched their flight open-mouthed, like the ghosts of summers past; or, indeed, of summers yet to come.

  The Door

  Organizing a new back door after the break-in was more complicated than you might imagine. Even sourcing a ready-made door to fit the existing frame took some doing. After following a couple of false trails I drove to a little DIY shop five miles away in a drafty row of shops just off the A3 after the Tolworth Tower turning.

  Bleak from the outside, this charmless parade supplied all sorts of seductive and useful items when you looked more closely. Under the dustbin lid of a sky were: a travel agent offering cut-price controlled escapes; a newsagent with a bank of magazine smiles on entry and a surprisingly choice collection of sweets (real Turkish Delight, macadamia praline, Alpine milk chocolate); an art shop with a dusty sleeping cat at the foot of a good wooden easel; a café with Formica tables, a constant frying pan, and a big steel teapot. If you looked closely and in the right way, all the pleasures and comforts were accessible here in this dogleg just off the Tolworth turning, as well as all the nuts and bolts. It was the first time for months that I'd been able to entertain such a thought. In the iron light of February I entered the hardware shop and inside was a little community of goodwill and respect.

  The woman on the other side of the counter listened to me attentively, looked at me with kind eyes from behind her glasses, and explained the sizes, finishes, charges, and extras for the various models of ready-made doors they could supply. While she did this she also dealt with a couple of phone calls, politely and efficiently, and paused for a few seconds to admire the baby asleep in the arms of the café owner from next door who had come round with some query about his ceiling, promising herself aloud a cuddle once my order had been taken. Since the seventeenth of August I had grown unimaginative about others, selfishly incurious and sometimes downright hostile. Now, here, some sort of thaw was taking place. A tall man in overalls was talking to the shop's manager, telling him about the progress of a job out in West Molesey and it seemed it was going well.

  There was an atmosphere of good temper that was rare and warming, none of the usual sighs or in-staff carping or reined-in impatience when you wanted to know how much it would be with extra safety bolts or with three coats of paint rather than two. I was charmed. I wanted to stay in this dim toasty light amid the general friendliness and walls festooned with hosepipes, tubes of grouting and sealant, boxes of thumbtacks, lightbulbs, my mind soothed by the industrious but not frantic atmosphere.

  Everything here had to do with maintenance and soundness. Grief kept indoors grows noxious, I thought, like a room that can't be aired; mold grows, plants die. I wanted to open the windows but it wasn't allowed.

  The order was complicated—did I want full or partial beading; what about a weatherboard; the door furniture, would I prefer a silver or gold finish, or perhaps this brushed aluminium—and it took quite a while. Even so, I was sorry when it was finished and Sally—that was the young woman's name—had handed me my carbon copy and swiped a hundred pounds from my Barclaycard as the deposit. Because even a very ordinary ready-made back door was going to cost £400in total to supply, fit, hang, and paint.

  “They're not cheap, are they, doors,” I said, as I signed the slip.

  “They're not,” Sally sighed in agreement, not taking my comment in any way personally. “But they're well-made, these doors. Nice and strong.”

  “Good,” I said, tucking the Visa slip into my wallet. For a moment I toyed with the idea of telling her how they'd kicked the last one in, but I couldn't face the effort. Even so I felt she was like a sister to me.

  “So Matthew will be along on the twenty-second to hang the door and paint it,” she said.

  “You've got my number in case he needs to change the date.”

  “Yes, that's right, but expect him on the twenty-second at about nine thirty,” she said. “Matthew is very dependable.”

  At nine thirty-five on the twenty-second I had a phone call, and I relaxed at the sound of Sally's calm voice, ev
en though I was expecting her to cancel the door-fitting appointment with all the irritation that would involve. I had with difficulty arranged a day at home to deal with a couple of files from the office, without having to take it off my annual holiday allowance. But she was not ringing to cancel, no, she was ringing only to let me know that the traffic was terrible that morning and Matthew had rung her to say he was stuck out in a jam near Esher but should be with me before ten.

  He arrived at two minutes to, the tall man in overalls I had seen earlier in the shop; he had a frank open face and unforced smile. As he walked into the kitchen at the back my shoulders dropped and I gave a sigh as thorough as a baby's yawn. It was going to be all right.

  “Would you like tea or coffee?” I asked, raising the kettle to show this was no idle offer.

  “Not just now, thank you,” he said. “Later would be good, but I'd better get cracking on straight away.”

  Again he smiled that nice natural smile. He was not going to be chatty, how wonderful, I would be able to trust him and leave him to it and get on with my work. He did not need respectful hovering attendance as the man who had recently mended the boiler had; nor me running around for step ladders and spare bits and pieces that he might have forgotten, like the electrician before Christmas just after I'd moved in. That had been three months after the funeral I wasn't at. First I'd chucked things out in a sort of frenzy, sackfuls to Oxfam, but then I'd realized that wouldn't be enough, I'd have to move. Which I'd done, somehow.

  I hovered around a bit while he brought in his toolboxes. Then, staggering only slightly and with a shallow stertorousness of breathing and blossom of sweat on his forehead, he carried in the door itself, a raw glazed slab of timber that looked too narrow for the destined frame.

  “I didn't quite realize …,” I said. “I thought it was going to be ready painted, ready to hang today.”