Confessions of a Driving Instructor

by Timothy Lea

  I land up with Mrs. Carstairs because there is no alternative available. Garth has the ’flu, Petal is in the South of France with one of his actor friends—bloody nice being a pouf, isn’t it?—and the other two are booked up to the eyeballs, so Dawn has to grin and bear it.

  Mrs. Carstairs makes Mrs. B. sound like a nun that has taken a vow of silence. From the first moment she rears up like a female polar bear in the E.C.D.S. reception, covered from head to toe in furs, she never stops rabbiting.

  “You must think it absolutely amazing that anyone of my age doesn’t know how to drive,” she yodels as we sweep through the door with me trying to keep up with her. In fact, I would never have given it a thought, but I don’t have time to tell her because she is already trying to climb into the driver’s seat.

  “If you haven’t driven before, I think we’d better start somewhere a little less crowded,” I suggest, steering her across to the other door.

  “You’re probably right. It would be a bad advertisement if I killed somebody outside the School, wouldn’t it?”

  I smile my ‘customer is always right’ smile and whip her up to the golf course. By the time we get there we have covered Vietnam, pollution of the environment and vivisection—or rather she has. Some of her sentences end in questions but I never have time to answer them because she has done that herself or started on something else. I don’t mind too much because I am busy lapping up her luscious contours. She has ‘lovely bones’, as my Mum is always saying about the nobs she so much admires, and big blue eyes you could comb your hair in. She must be over forty but is better preserved than Dad’s war record and her figure would win whistles on a girl of nineteen. What I like most about her is her smell. My hooter is very sensitive to the perfume a bird uses and it is a change to have something that tickles your scrotum rather than bashes you over the goolies with a rubber mallet.

  She is also no fool and from the very first lesson performs a bloody sight better than most of the rubbish I get lumbered with. She is confident—possibly too confident, and takes in what you have to say very quickly. I can see what Garth means about bright pupils being death to a driving school. I learn that her old man is a director of ‘Python’s Pesticides’ and that she decided to take lessons because she was bored. Normally, my ears would have pricked up at the mention of the word ‘boredom’ because a bored woman is nine-tenths of the way towards taking her knickers off for you, even if she doesn’t know it at the time; but in this case there is something so assured and upper-class about Mrs. C. that I dare not entertain any hopes. Maybe I take after Mum, but an upper-class accent and a bit of swank always make me reach for my forelock.

  “I tell you this at the risk of boring you out of your mind,” says Mrs. C., “but if I have to entertain one more Scandinavian expert on how to wage germ warfare on slugs I will go stark raving mad. I think it affects them, you know. I mean, working with pesticides. Something gets into them and makes them mentally and physically impotent.”

  “Don’t you mean sterile?” I say, because all the long words I know come from the sex books I used to get out of Battersea Public Library.

  “Mr. Lea,” she says, shaking her head in a mock-serious manner, “I fear that in my case it may be both. Very unkind of me to say so of the man who provides my wherewithal, but I think that somewhere along the line he’s been got at. I could probably make a fortune telling the story to the Sunday newspapers.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “There is such a thing as family loyalty, Mr. Lea. And anyway, what’s a few thousand compared with George’s nice steady income? No, I’m very fond of sex, but there are other things—even if I can’t think of them at the moment. Oh, shit!” The last exclamation is caused by her nearly driving into an oak tree some fool has left littering the side of the road, and it is a few minutes before I hear of her other interests besides taking driving lessons.

  “Don’t get the idea that I just sit at home twiddling my thumbs all day. I sit on a lot of committees, which is damn hard work—mainly because the rest of the old harridans on them are so obstreperous—and I paint. Very well, though I say so myself, although it could be better if George would let me indulge myself on a European tour. But he’s too mean—and too jealous; he imagines I would be pulling every Italian waiter in sight into my bed. Can you imagine?”

  From the waiter’s point of view I can. Only too well. If it was me she wouldn’t have to break into a muck sweat to do it.

  “I think it all goes back to the perils of Python’s Pesticides,” she continues. “When he was in the first flush of youth, so to speak, he was a most unjealous man—is there such a word? It doesn’t matter anyway. Now that sex has its problems for him, he’s suspicious of his own shadow—that’s rather good. Can you imagine being cuckolded by your shadow?”

  I can’t, because I don’t know what ‘cuckolded’ means, but it sounds pretty painful and I nod my agreement.

  “What kind of things do you paint?” I ask as we speed back to the E.C.D.S. with me safely behind the wheel.

  “Oh, everything. Landscapes, still lifes—or should it be still lives?—nudes. It’s difficult to get models around here, you know. I think most of the locals think it’s ‘a bit orf’ or that I’m going to practise withcraft on them. George sits for me sometimes but he is clearly embarrassed, poor dear, and not very inspiring. Especially when he is poring over his balance sheets and sucking his teeth all the time. I know—” I can feel her eyes flitting over me and I tilt back my hear to tighten up the jaw muscles “—could you, I mean would you sit for me?”

  “What? Me?” It is difficult to get exactly the right note of slightly confused amazement into my voice but I think I do it quite well. “I don’t know. I’ve never done anything like that before.”

  “No experience necessary. Just keep reasonably still. I’d pay you, of course.”

  “Well, I don’t know.” I pretend to be giving the matter serious thought.

  “I’m sorry. I can see that you don’t really like the idea. I should never have asked. Look, can you drop me here? I want to pop into the butcher’s.”

  “Oh no, I’d like to do it,” I blurt out. “When would you want me to start? I’m free most evenings, or there’s mornings or some afternoons.”

  I feel I have overdone it a bit as soon as I close my mouth and Mrs. C. looks appropriately confused.

  “Are you sure? You seemed so hesitant a moment ago.”

  “Yes, well, I was trying to think what spare time I had in the next few weeks.”

  “I don’t intend to cast you in bronze. I won’t be making much of a hole in your time off. Just an hour here and there. How can I get in touch with you?”

  “I’m not on the telephone at my digs. You’d better mention it to me when you’re having your lessons.”

  “O.K. I can leave a message at the School, can’t I?”

  I don’t disagree with her but I can’t see Dawn responding very well to that. She looks me over pretty closely when I report back at the School as if checking that my flies are still done up and that I am not covered in lipstick, but it is Cronk who shows most emotion. He flashes out of his office as I go in and demands almost hysterically where Mrs. Carstairs is.

  “Real feather in our cap, that one,” he tells me when he finds I haven’t driven her off the end of the pier. “If we can do a good job with her, we’ll be on the map and no mistake. Once she starts chatting to the top brass at Python’s they’ll all be down here. Directors’ wives, managers’ wives, right down to the shop stewards eventually. It’s up to you, lad. Pull out the stops on this one.”

  I give him my plucky ‘do my best sir’ smile, borrowed from all those British war films you see on the telly and wink at Dawn, who scowls and looks the other way. Poor kid, I can understand how threatened she feels and she doesn’t know the half of it: me naked on some rug with Mrs. C. trying to stop the paintbrush dropping from her twitching fingers—my mind races away into overdrive as usual. />
  In fact, Mrs. C. hardly mentions her painting the next time I take her out and I am on the point of deciding she has thought better of it when a sour-faced Dawn hands me a piece of paper with a telephone number scrawled on it and tells me that “your fancy bit rang and asked you call her this afternoon.” This leads to a lot of leg-pulling from the rest of the lads, which I am secretly very pleased about although I play it all dead casual.

  I have nothing on after eleven o’clock so I spin out my pint of lunch and hop round to the nearest telephone box dead on the stroke of two-thirty, which I consider to be sufficiently far into the afternoon not to appear too eager. Of course, it has been stripped by vandals, and so has the next one. The Post Office is shut because it is early closing day and I am half way to Shermer before I find a box that is operational. I know it is operational because there is a bloke inside dialling numbers he has listed on a piece of paper as long as your arm. I don’t know what he is doing—probably making obscene telephone calls—but it takes him nearly half an hour to do it. By this time I am getting fidgety, to put it mildly, and when he comes out without even saying sorry it is more than I can stand.

  “Do you mind if I use your phone?” I ask him.

  “Yer what?” is all he can manage.

  “I thought you were running a business from in there. How much does it cost to rent it?”

  “Get stuffed.”

  Now he is talking my language and we have a merry little battle of words before he drives off and I ring up Mrs. C., to find that the number is engaged. This is the last straw and I have asked the operator to check it before I eventually hear a harrassed upper-class voice bark “Cromingham 234.” This would be fun if it was a female voice but, to my surprise, it is nothing of the kind. I ask to speak to Mrs. Carstairs and there is a curt “Hang on a minute” before I hear the bod who answered the telephone shouting out to someone.

  “It’s some peasant for you, darling. Hurry up and get rid of him, will you, otherwise I’m going to be late for the plane.”

  There is a further interchange and then Mrs. C. comes on, all instant charm. “Hello. Julia Carstairs speaking. Who is that?”

  “It’s the peasant from the driving school,” I say haughtily. “You asked me to ring you.”

  “Oh, yes. Mr. Lea. Thank you so much. I’m awfully sorry about my husband. He’s got to rush off to Stockholm and he’s a trifle out of sorts. Aren’t you, darling?”

  There is another little interchange in which I can hear a voice being raised in the background, and then she returns to me. “He agrees with me. Now, let’s see. Where were we? I expect you know why I rang you. The muse is on me fit to bust at the moment and as soon as I’ve run my grumpy husband to the firm’s airstrip I’d like to get down to work. Are you available at the moment?”

  I am still smarting at being called a peasant, but of course I say yes and it is agreed that I will report to the Carstairs residence—”You can’t miss it; it’s the only house in the lane”—at six o’clock, with the promise of a drink and some supper should our session go on long enough.

  Ever hopeful, I retire to my lodgings and have a bath, carefully anointing my body in strategic places with some Odour (sic. Ed.) Cologne I keep for the purpose. Thus fortified and having swilled half a cup of Mrs. B.’s Dettol round my chops, I lie down until it is time to go into action.

  At six o’clock on the dot my finger is pressed firmly against the nipple-like bell-push of Cavenham Lodge: all white stucco and green shutters with a circular lawn in front cut closer than a guardsman’s chin.

  I am trembling with excitement and cold beneath my flared denim jeans and too-tight T-shirt worn under my genuine shaggy sheepskin overcoat and I hope she has got central heating. It occurs to me, as it always does when it is too late to do anything about it, that nothing has been said about posing in the nude. I might be landing myself with a two-hour stint of gazing at a bowl of fruit.

  The door springs open and Mrs. C. is revealed, wearing what appears to be judo kit: baggy trousers and a kind of wrap-over waistcoat secured by a sash which matches the one holding back her hair. The action woman bit surprises me as I had been expecting a spot of the long cigarette holders and “Do come in, dahling.”

  “Good,” she says. “I’m glad you’re punctual. I’m itching to get at you.” She smiles brightly and leads me through a couple of rooms furnished so that you expect to see John Betjeman standing on the mantelpiece.

  “I’m afraid it’s a bit of a shambles where we’re going. Make sure you don’t step on a tube of paint.”

  She opens a door in the wall next to what looks like the fiction section of Battersea Public Library and waves a hand at a welter of canvases, trestles and easels which appear in a room slightly smaller than the centre court at Wimbledon. She is not kidding about it being in a mess and it takes me a bit of time to pick out the canvas she intends to work on. This faces a low divan with a few rugs lying on it and is in front of a long mirror which covers one wall of the room.

  “The artificial light is a damn nuisance,” she says, fiddling with a few switches. “But if I can sketch in a framework, perhaps you can come back when you have a free afternoon—or morning ideally.”

  “I’ll try,” I say. “What do you want me to do?”

  This is the sixty-four thousand dollar question and I don’t mind telling you that the sight of the divan has started a few naughty thoughts on a slow bicycle race round my mind.

  “Well,” says Mrs. Carstairs slowly, “perhaps I should have told you this before, and I sort of tried to in a way; the particular subject I have in mind requires you to pose in the nude! I didn’t want to mention it right away in case you thought I was some kind of crank.”

  When she leans forward to adjust a spotlight I notice that she is not wearing a bra, and I wonder what the rest of her breasts look like. Pretty good, I would reckon.

  “That’s all right,” I hear myself saying. “What exactly do you want me to do?” I start to give her the famous Lea slow burn but she is still farting about with the lighting, so I decide to hold it for a couple of minutes.

  “I’m going through a classical period at the moment,” she rambles on enthusiastically, “and I have a certain fondness for the Rape of Lucretia.”

  Well, we all have our funny little ways, and who am I to point the finger at anybody?

  “Oh, yes,” I say, with the easy nonchalance that has made me the toast of the Streatham Ice Rink. “Very nice.”

  “Probably something very Freudian about it,” she gushes, “but one can’t help one’s id, can one?”

  She is leaving me behind fast, but I smile graciously and start taking my shoes and socks off. She fills me in on the background: how this Roman gent called Tarquin fancied a married bint called Lucretia, who was one of the old-fashioned kind and told him to get stuffed, thus making him decidedly narky to the point where he rammed his nasty up her before she could put down her spaghetti bolognese, thus causing a good deal of ill-feeling all round.

  It occurs to me that I am a certainty for the part of Tarquin but that unless the whole thing took place in his imagination, we are going to need a bird. No doubt Mrs. C. has thought of this and I look round hopefully for signs of my fellow model.

  “Get on the couch,” says Mrs. C. “I want to make sure I’ve got the lighting right. You needn’t take off your pants yet. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”

  I stretch out on the couch and she gives me a few instructions whilst sketching away with a piece of charcoal. Apparently satisfied, she pins up a new sheet and smiles at me encouragingly.

  “Right, off we go,” she says, and to my amazement she starts to peel off the top part of her robe. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to put up with a rather uncomely Lucretia for a few moments.” Off come the baggy trousers and she is naked except for a tiny pair of panties. And they are on the floor in the time it takes me to write this.

  “I daren’t ask any female I know to model in case they
think I’m a lesbian,” she goes on, “so I have to do it all myself. That’s why the mirror is such a blessing. Now, let’s see. What shall we try first?”

  She is standing beside the divan and her muff is practically tickling my nose. By the cringe, but she is a lovely bird. Ripe and curvy like a basket of pears just before they start attracting the flies.

  “Let me lie down while you get on top of me,” she says.

  It can’t be bad, can it? I swing my legs over the side of the divan and she snuggles down and tilts back her head.

  “Hold my wrists. That’s right. Now bend them back so I look as if I’m being staked out over an anthill. Excellent.”

  I imagine she does all this because she likes to live the part in order to get a bit of inspiration and I am about to give her some help when she turns her head to one side and twists away from me.

  “Now stick your legs out as far as they will go and lie on top of me. Not bad. Not bad at all.”

  She is looking away from me again and I suddenly realise she is studying the shape our bodies make in the mirror. Two more contortions and she leaps off the divan with everything shaking and starts hammering away with the charcoal.

  “If you can remember that position it will be a big help,” she yammers. “I’m afraid I’m a bit of a painting-by-numbers expert, no imagination at all. I have to see what I’m doing. Oh dear. I can’t remember how that bit went. We’ll have to do it again.”

  And she is over on the divan again with me on top and the faint smell of her perfume playing merry hell with my nostrils and her soft flesh kneading against mine and—