Driving in the Dark

Driving in the Dark

Deborah Moggach

One

If only women had four wheels. They’d be easier to understand, wouldn’t they?

I’m thinking about one day in September, when I came home and found all my belongings in the front garden. It was starting to drizzle; there were my records, and my woodworking tools and all my back copies of Motor Sport, getting damp.

I thought at first that my wife was having a clean-out; To tell the truth, I was surprised. She wasn’t fond of housework. Besides, it puzzled me that none of her stuff was there, filling up the lawn.

I didn’t have a clue. I’d been away on the Isle of Man, on a Weekend Break, and my back was playing up. I went into the kitchen and there sat Eleni, smoking. The ashtray was full, which was a bad sign. She was usually well-groomed but she had a ladder in her tights, probably from carting all my stuff out.

She said: ‘My brother’s coming round.’

‘Pardon?’

‘My brother’s coming round with his van. He’ll help you with your things.’ She repeated, patiently: ‘Costas, my brother.’

I thought: why does she have to explain who her brother is? I know him. She had put on too much of that blusher stuff; it made her look like an actress.

Then she said: ‘I can’t be having you here any more.’

That was an odd way of speaking. For a moment I thought she was referring to one of her usual annoyances—my rotary lathe, something that tripped her up. But then I realized that she was referring to me. She sat there, tapping her white cowboy boot and looking at me as if she had never seen me before. It was then that I realized what she was saying.

She already looked different. Her face looked as if it had been a little bit reassembled, like somebody’s face does when you’ve just learnt their name. Her cheeks were two pink smears. She stared at me as if I shouldn’t be standing in my own kitchen. I thought of the six coats of Ronseal I’d put on the units.

‘Did you hear me, Desmond?’

She never called me that. I heard the rain pattering on the veranda and I thought of my Motor Sports and knew I shouldn’t be thinking about them. I felt a surge of anger, that she had never exerted herself like this before, on my behalf. It must have taken her ages to fill up the front garden.

She said: ‘I don’t want to be married to you any more.’

I replied: ‘But we haven’t started yet.’

I don’t know why I said that. She got up and went into the lounge. I heard the ting of the phone; she was probably ringing up her family.

I meant that we had been married for six years and there were so many things we hadn’t got round to yet. I had hardly told her anything about when I was little; there hadn’t been time. On the other hand, she had never asked. On the other hand, too, I didn’t know nearly enough about her. Sitting in the coach that morning, waiting for my passengers to embark, I had listened to Only the lonely. The name Roy Orbison had never been mentioned by either of us. That name; lots of others. Lots of things. Suddenly I felt as if all the bones had been taken out of my body. I sat down.

It’s a funny thing about time. I didn’t know how long I sat there. It was like being in another country and all the clocks were wrong. I heard her, a mile off, still talking on the phone and even the kitchen seemed to have changed shape. It wasn’t the room I had known; the walls were further away. I felt dizzy, and thought it might be a good idea if I went upstairs to sleep. I would pull the duvet over my head and when I woke up the front garden would be back to normal and she would be in the bathroom, having a bath. She liked spending ages in there; I had made it really luxurious.

I nearly moved, to go upstairs. Then I remembered her complaints about my sleeping. ‘He’s such a lump,’ she would say to her girlfriends, nudging me in the ribs. ‘Snoring in front of the telly.’ I had presumed that this was said in the normal, exasperated way that wives talked, but now I would have to remember everything all over again.

Stupid things popped into my head, like how was I going to pick up my dry cleaning when she had the tickets? I needed to know the answers but I didn’t dare ask her in case she started explaining and then it would be real. I stood up to get a can of lager, but then I sat down again. I had no breath in my chest. The phone tinged; she had finished speaking.

I didn’t want her to come in because then she would tell me when she had stopped loving me. Perhaps she would tell me that she had never loved me at all. I wanted a cigarette but my jacket was in the hall, and I would have to pass the lounge door. I stayed dead still, like an animal scenting danger. I felt I was suffocating in a sitting position.

Then I heard the front door and Costas, her brother, was in the hall. He had let himself in without ringing the bell. This was alarming; it must be a crisis. Costas stood in the hallway, looking bulky and embarrassed. Both rooms were too dangerous. He caught my eye, shrugged and spread out his hands. Women, he meant. I nodded. I had always liked Costas. In fact, I liked Eleni’s family more than she did, but now she had called them and they would have to close ranks. Her sister Maria had arrived too. Suddenly I was outnumbered by Greeks.

Costas came into the kitchen.

‘What’s got into her?’ I asked. My voice surprised me, it was squeaky.

‘Search me.’

We were silent for a moment, listening to the female voices in the lounge. Women had so much to talk about.

‘Seems a funny thing to do,’ I said.

‘You know Eleni.’

I wasn’t so sure about that. I said: ‘Sorry you had to come all the way out here, in the rush hour.’ We lived in Orpington, in the suburbs. He lived in London.

‘It’s Sunday, mate.’

I had forgotten what day of the week it was. I twitched back my cuff, furtively, to look at my watch. It was 9.20, way past the rush hour. I hoped I wasn’t going mad.

‘You know anything about this?’ I asked.

Costas shook his head. ‘Only this morning.’

Then he rummaged in his pocket, took out his cigarette packet, took two out and lit them. He passed one to me, and it was such a simple thing to do that I burst into tears.

And that was the end of my marriage. It all happened so quickly. Overnight my life changed, as if I had been arrested for a crime I hadn’t known I’d committed. It had a momentum of its own, so fast it took away my breath. Overnight something happened to my house in Croxley Road, it was like Eleni’s face changing, and when I went back I was a visitor. Eleni wore a new blue sweater and it hurt my feelings, not just that she had had the spirits to shop—and to spend my money—but that in it she looked separate. It suited her, too—it was a fluffy thing that clung to her waist—and I realized: One: that I’d be buggered if I complimented her now, and Two: that I hadn’t complimented her enough in the past.

That, she told me, with Maria in attendance, was one of my many shortcomings.

‘Remember when I had my highlights?’ she told Maria. ‘He didn’t notice it for a whole evening and then he said there was something funny about me.’

‘I’d just had three days at the Blackpool Illuminations,’ I said.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

She rolled her eyes at Maria and lit another cigarette. Chain-smoking was the only sign that she was going through a hard time. I had come back for the last of my stuff and I’d had to make my own Nescafé. She must have felt it was easier, not to be friendly.

‘He was never interested in my dancing,’ she turned to Maria. ‘Remember when I got on Yorkshire TV? Did he turn up to watch?’

‘I was on that Tulip Tour,’ I said. ‘I had thirty-three senior citizens to look after. I was in blinking Holland.’ I didn’t add that they had cut that bit anyway. When the programme had come on I’d driven her all the way to Bradford, to the only mate I knew who lived in the receiving area. It was a children’s TV story about a ballerina, and we had all sat waiting in this chap’s living room, he’d even invited the neighbours, and we’d waited for the dance routine bit to come on and it never had. The drive home had been awful.

‘Honestly, he drove me round the bend,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I felt like screaming. I used to go into the bathroom for a good bellow.’

So that was what she did in there, It always smelt of bubble bath but I was probably insensitive. There had been no point to any of it—the grouting, the varnishing, the time I had held her head all night when she had been eating mussels. I felt terrifically sleepy—more tired than I had ever been in my life. But I couldn’t just lay down on the settee; it wasn’t my home any more. She would tell me how boring I was—correction, she would tell Maria, who had already heard how I slept through TV, and snored in bed, and had once actually fallen asleep while … well, it was only the once and nobody should have heard that, not even a sister. I’d had glandular fever and I’d been plastering the lounge all day, and couldn’t even a husband be human, once in a while? I’d apologized enough at the time.

They started talking in Greek. She said something like aglocas and pracoras, but I couldn’t understand. Maria replied with a stream of k’s and l’s; they were more vivacious in their own language.

It grew darker. Maria listened, shaking her head in sympathy. This irked me. For six years Eleni had complained about her sister, saying how bossy and disapproving she was. Now, overnight, they had become chums. Maria had temporarily moved in. They were waiting for me to leave, so they could make their supper and talk about me more.

‘He was always halfway up a bloody ladder with his Black and Decker,’ Eleni said, coughing through the smoke.

I was going to reply that I was making a home for her, that I loved doing it and thought she loved it too, but I didn’t. It made me too sad.

I drove back to London. I know I was a wimp, letting myself be pushed out of the house like that. But if I got angry she might phone a lawyer, she was so hysterical, and then it would all be official and have to happen. If I laid low it might blow over. After all, she had been hysterical before, though in the early days I had called it fiery and admired her for it. Once she had bought a new dress, and when she had asked my opinion I had said it was quite nice. I hadn’t been concentrating. So first she hit me and then she took the dress into the garden and burnt it. It was made of some nylon stuff because it shrivelled and smelt strange.

I hadn’t known what to do with her. Men seemed simpler than women. Sometimes—I could admit it now—sometimes it was a relief, going to work in the morning. It was like coming into the fresh air. There they were in the depot, horsing around. ‘Wotcha,’ they’d say, and I’d say ‘wotcha’ back.

How did other blokes manage it? There were seven of us working for Reg, and most of them were married. But they all had children, one way or another; that seemed to settle things back home. Mind you, Reg had four kids, lovely children, and that didn’t stop him carrying on with Sonia in the office. He’d kept Sonia going for years and nobody had thrown his belongings into the front garden. It didn’t seem fair.

I said nothing at work. This was partly pride. Years before, Eleni had come to the depot. She had been wearing her red PVC coat and white boots and they’d all whistled at her. She was ten years younger than me and ever so pretty—slim, skinny actually, with big eyes and sheeny olive skin. She looked fragile and yet bold; she walked as if she expected to be whistled at, which was half the trick. The rest of her family was running to fat, and Maria had a moustache; Eleni was the looker. I had been amazed that she wanted to marry me.

It was partly pride, that I didn’t speak—I wasn’t usually secretive. But I kept quiet out of self-preservation, too. It was so painful, to say the words out loud, and once I talked then something would have to happen. One week passed, and another. It was a cool, damp September; she didn’t phone. I felt I was sleepwalking.

Costas had lent me the flat above his electrical repair shop, up in London. It was nice of him because he’d only just done it up. It was near to the depot in Peckham and I could walk to work. This was just as well, because Eleni had told me she needed the car, being stuck out in Orpington. I offered to be stuck out in Orpington instead, I loved our house. I told her I’d like us to be stuck out there together, like before, but she wasn’t having any of that. So I let her keep the car; if I was nice she might reconsider what she was losing. I even began telling her my trick for starting it in cold weather—it was a seven-year-old Escort and I had tuned up the engine—but then I thought what the hell and put the phone down.

The back of Costas’s shop was heaped with microwaves and toasters. They had little tags but most of them were hopeless cases; it was like a hospital down there. Someone had even brought in their kid’s remote-controlled police car. One evening I came back with some Kentucky Fried Chicken, I’d had a drink on the way, and I stood looking at it all and realizing it was just useless. I thought of all the things I had bought for our home, sometimes with Eleni beside me, and how by moving my things into the garden she had turned my possessions into junk. It all seemed such a waste. Most of my tools had rusted up but I could never imagine buying any more.

I pictured her lying in the bath, her knees two bumps in the foam, and knew I had never reached her. I knew how her skin felt slippery when she let me dry her, and how frail her shoulder blades were under my hands, and how her shins felt sandpapery when she hadn’t shaved them and how she would flinch away and remove my hand to her breast—I knew all this, and how she over-sugared her Shredded Wheat and over-milked my tea, and how she had gripped me sometimes at night with her face averted, and how she collected coupons in garages and then forgot about them—I knew all this and yet, standing in the shop that night, I knew we had never been friends.

Costas couldn’t be a friend, but he was a mate. He took me to the pub a few times but I knew he wanted to be back with his faulty radios or his wife, who was expecting a baby at Christmas. He was expanding the shop and had started a video club; most evenings I took a movie upstairs. I usually read a lot, I liked books, but nowadays it took all my willpower to get through a newspaper.

So I put on a movie instead—they all seemed to have Rod Steiger in them—and then I dozed in front of the TV screen, the way she always said I did. Nowadays she would have some justification, because I wanted to sleep all the time. I stayed up as long as I could, but some nights I gave in at half past nine.

Across the street was the shopping precinct. It was separated from me by the traffic, which hissed in the rain. At night the shop signs glowed and I pinned up a blanket. It was a big concrete precinct with walkways. I fell asleep early but I woke in the small hours. It was then that the man used to shout. He stood outside Mothercare and bellowed; his voice echoed. Sometimes a night bus passed, but nobody lived round here, it was the High Street, and nobody heard him. I tried not to listen; it only seemed a matter of time before I would be joining in.

But most of the time when I lay in bed, waiting for the clock hand to move, I thought about my son.

Two

I had a son, you see, but Eleni cut up his photograph. I’ll never forgive