the windows.
She lifted herself off my penis when it had gone, letting the semen fall on to my crotch. She sat herself behind the steering wheel, holding the wet glans in her hand. She looked around the compartment of the car, as if speculating on any other uses to which she could put our sexual act. Lit by the afternoon sun, the fading scar on her face marked off these concealed motives like the secret frontier of an annexed territory. Thinking that I might reassure her in some way, I took her left breast from the brassiere and began to stroke it. Stirred happily by its familiar geometry, I gazed at the jewelled grotto of the instrument panel, at the jutting shroud of the steering assembly and the chromium heads of the control switches.
A police car appeared on the service road behind us, its white hull rolling heavily through the dips and ruts. Helen sat up and put away her breast with a deft band. She dressed quickly, and began to remake her face in the mirror of her compact. As abruptly as we had begun, she was now distanced from her own eager sexuality.
However, Helen Remington clearly felt no concern herself at these out-of-character actions, these sexual acts in the cramped compartment of my motor-car parked in various deserted service roads, culs-de-sac and midnight parkways. When I collected her during the following weeks from the house she had rented in Northolt, or waited for her in the reception lounge outside the airport immigration offices, it seemed incredible to me that I had any kind of sexual involvement with this sensitive woman doctor in her white coat, listening indulgently to the self-defeating arguments of some tubercular Pakistani.
Strangely, our sexual acts took place only within my automobile. In the large bedroom of her rented house I was unable even to mount an erection, and Helen herself would become argumentative and remote, talking endlessly about the more boring aspects of her work. Once together in my car, with the crowded traffic lanes through which we had moved forming an unseen and unseeing audience, we were able to arouse each other. Each time she revealed a growing tenderness towards myself and my body, even trying to allay my concern for her. In each sexual act together we recapitulated her husband’s death, re-seeding the image of his body in her vagina in terms of the hundred perspectives of our mouths and thighs, nipples and tongues within the metal and vinyl compartment of the car.
I waited for Catherine to discover my frequent meetings with this lonely woman doctor, but to my surprise she showed only a cursory interest in Helen Remington. Catherine had rededicated herself to her marriage. Before my accident our sexual relationship was almost totally abstracted, maintained by a series of imaginary games and perversities. When she stepped out of bed in the mornings she seemed like some efficient mechanic servicing herself: a perfunctory shower; the night’s urine discharged into the lavatory pan; her cap extracted, re-greased and once again inserted (how and where did she make love during her lunch-hour, and with which of the pilots and airline executives?); the news programme played while she percolated the coffee…
All this had now passed, replaced by a small but growing repertory of tendernesses and affections. As she lay beside me, willingly late for her office, I could bring myself to orgasm simply by thinking of the car in which Dr Helen Remington and I performed our sexual acts.
Chapter 9
This pleasant domestic idyll, with its delightful promiscuities, was brought to an end by the reappearance of Robert Vaughan, nightmare angel of the expressways.
Catherine was away for three days, attending an airline conference in Paris, and out of curiosity I took Helen to the stock-car races in the stadium at Northolt. Several of the stunt drivers working on the Elizabeth Taylor feature at Shepperton Studios put on displays of ‘hell-driving’. Unwanted tickets circulated around the studios and our own offices. Disapproving of my affair with the widow of the man I had killed, Renata gave me a pair of tickets, presumably as an ironic gesture.
Helen and I sat together in the half-empty stand, waiting as a succession of stripped-down saloon cars circled the cinder track. A bored crowd watched from the perimeter of the converted football ground. The announcer’s voice boomed away over our heads. At the conclusion of each heat the drivers’ wives cheered half- heartedly.
Helen sat close to me, arm around my waist, face touching my shoulder. Her face was deadened by the continuous roar of defective silencer units.
‘It’s strange—I thought all this would be far more popular.’
‘The real thing is available free of charge.’ I pointed to the yellow programme sheet. ‘This should be more interesting—'The Recreation of a Spectacular Road Accident'.’
The track was cleared and lines of white bollards were arranged to form the outline of a road intersection. Below us, in the pits, the huge, oil-smeared body of a man in a silver-studded jacket was being strapped into the driver’s seat of a doorless car. His shoulder-length dyed-blond hair was tied behind his head with a scarlet rag. His hard face had the pallid and hungry look of an out-of-work circus hand. I recognized him as one of the stuntmen at the studios, a former racing driver named Seagrave.
Five cars were to take part in the re-enactment of the accident—a multiple pile-up in which seven people had died on the North Circular Road during the previous summer. As they were driven to their positions in the field the announcer began to work up the audience’s interest. The amplified fragments of his commentary reverberated around the empty stands as if trying to escape.
I pointed to a tall cameraman in a combat jacket who was hovering around Seagrave’s car, shouting instructions to him over the engine roar through the missing windshield.
‘Vaughan again. He talked to you at the hospital.’
‘Is he a photographer?’
‘Of a special kind.’
‘I thought he was doing some sort of accident research. He wanted every conceivable detail about the crash.’
Vaughan’s present role in the stadium seemed that of a film director. As if Seagrave were his star, an unknown who would make Vaughan’s reputation, he leaned intently against the windshield pillar, outlining with aggressive gestures some new choreography of violence and collision. Seagrave lolled back, smoking away at a loosely wrapped hash cigarette which Vaughan held for him as he adjusted his straps and the rake of the steering column. His dyed blond hair provided the chief focus of interest in the stadium. From the announcer we learned that Seagrave would drive the target car, which would be cannonaded by a skidding truck into the path of four oncoming vehicles.
At one point Vaughan left him and ran up the stand to the commentator’s box behind us. A brief silence followed, after which we were told in tones of some triumph that Seagrave had asked for his closest friend to drive the skidding truck. This last dramatic addition failed to rouse the crowd, but Vaughan seemed satisfied. His hard mouth, with its scarred lips, was parted in a droll smile as he came down the gangway. Seeing Helen Remington and me together, he waved to us as if we were long-standing aficionadoes of these morbid spectacles in the arena.
Twenty minutes later, I sat in my car behind Vaughan’s Lincoln as a concussed Seagrave was helped across the parking-lot. The accident re-enactment had been a fiasco—struck by the skidding truck, Seagrave’s car had been locked on to the raw fenders like a myopic bullfighter running straight on to the bull’s horns. The truck carried him fifty yards before ramming him into one of the oncoming saloon cars. The hard, unshielded collision had brought the entire crowd, Helen and myself to our feet.
Vaughan alone was unmoved. As the stunned drivers clambered from their cars and eased Seagrave from behind his driving wheel Vaughan walked swiftly across the arena, beckoning in a peremptory way to Helen Remington. I followed her across the cinders, but Vaughan ignored me, steering Helen through the crowd of mechanics and hangers-on.
Although Seagrave was able to walk, wiping his greasy hands on his silver overall trousers and groping blankly at the air a few feet in front of him, Vaughan persuaded Helen to accompany them to Northolt General Hospital. Once we had set off I found myself hard pressed to keep up with Vaughan’s car, the dusty Lincoln with a
