The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

And she answered:

– Exit coming up. Then, two hundred yards later, straight on at the roundabout.

For the time being, I forgot all about my desire to phone Lindsay.

I continued to drive slowly, trying to save petrol, so it was another hour and a half before I reached Junction 1 of the M42.

– In half a mile, exit left, towards Birmingham South.

It was the first time she had spoken to me for about ten minutes. I had worked out, by now, that I could summon up her voice whenever I wanted by pressing the ‘Map’ button on my steering wheel. If you did that, she would usually tell you to carry on doing whatever you were doing at that moment. So every few minutes, I would press the button, and she would tell me to ‘Proceed on the current motorway’. I wasn’t listening to the radio. I had tried a bit of Radio 2 and a bit of Radio 4 but I didn’t want to listen to other people chattering away. I wanted to be left alone with my thoughts, and with Emma’s voice whenever I felt like hearing it.

Oh – did I not tell you that she was called Emma? I’d spent most of the last hour trying to decide what I was going to call her. Finally I chose Emma because it had always been one of my favourite names. Partly it was a memory of having to read Jane Austen’s novel for English O-Level at school: I hated the book (which was one of Caroline’s favourites, by the way) and only got a ‘D’ in the exam, but for some reason the heroine’s name had stuck in my mind as a sort of emblem of classiness and sophistication. Also, I used to have a bit of a crush on Emma Thompson, the actress – going back a bit, to the late 1980s, when she looked really boyish and did that film where she had an amazing sex scene with Jeff Goldblum. So, what with one thing and another, Emma seemed an appropriate choice.

– Exit left. Then, heading slightly right at the roundabout, take third exit.

Our relationship was going to be put to its first test, now, because I had decided not to follow her instructions for the next few minutes. She wanted me to head down the A38, all the way to the Lydiate Ash roundabout, and then take a right turn towards Rubery. But I had other plans. I wanted to drive straight over the crest of the Lickey Hills and to rejoin the A38 via the B4120 at the bottom of the hill. It was a more scenic drive, and it would take me through some of the landscape of my early childhood. But how would Emma respond? Would she understand the nostalgic impulse that lay behind it?

Feeling a little nervous at my own audacity, then, I ignored her insistent repetition of ‘Next left’ as I curved around the roundabout, and took the fourth exit rather than the third. I imagined what Caroline might have said if I’d ignored her directions in this way, on one of our family holidays. ‘No, not this one!’ There would have been a sigh of exasperation, and then her voice would tense, slipping into that awful register of angry resignation at my stubbornness and stupidity. ‘Fine. If you think you know better than I do, just carry on. I won’t bother looking at this any more.’ Then she would have thrown the road atlas into the back of the car, narrowly missing Lucy who would be sitting up on her booster seat, listening to the argument with wide-eyed bewilderment, her little brain probably asking itself whether this was how grown-ups always spoke to each other. Yes, that’s just how it would have been. I could remember countless scenarios like that.

But with Emma, it was different. She said nothing at all, at first. The only sign that she had taken any notice of my decision was a message on the screen that said ‘Calculating Route’. Then, after a few seconds, her voice returned. There was no change in her tone at all. Still calm, still measured. Totally unflustered by my little act of rebellion. ‘Proceed for about two miles on the current road,’ she said. And that was it. No disputes, no sarcasm, no questions asked. She accepted my authority, and responded accordingly. God – how easy life would have been, if only Caroline could have behaved more like that! I was already beginning to think that, in Emma, I had found something like the perfect partner. I pressed the ‘Map’ button, just so I could hear her say it again.

– Proceed for about two miles on the current road.

Beautiful. I loved the little pause she put in, after the word ‘miles’. She spoke it as if it was a line of poetry.

I was now driving up the Old Birmingham Road. On my left was the entrance to the primary school where Chris and I had met each other, becoming friends on our very first day, at the age of five. We had been inseparable after that – best friends for the next six years. And then, at the age of ten, we had been the only children from our year to sit the entrance exam for King William’s School in the centre of Birmingham. Chris passed the exam. I didn’t, and ended up going to Waseley Hills Comprehensive with all my other primary-school friends.

‘And that was probably it, wasn’t it?’ I said to Emma. ‘That was the turning point. So many things followed from that.’

– Proceed for one mile on the current road.

Of course, Chris and I continued to see each other. But the real reason for that, I suspected, was that our fathers had by now become such good friends, after meeting at various school-related social occasions. Chris’s Dad was a lecturer at Birmingham university and my father, who liked to think of himself as an intellectual as well as a poet, was not going to let that friendship die, even after Chris started going to a much posher school and his family had moved out of Rubery and into the leafier, more middle-class enclave of Edgbaston. So Chris and I kept our own friendship going, mainly out of genuine liking for each other but also out of our youthful intuition that it was what both of our families wanted and needed from us. And yet I’d always been conscious of the differences between us, from that point on. As I drove past the school drive, and on towards the summit of the hill, a memory came back to me. Chris and I were eleven years old; we had been at our new schools for a few weeks. He had come round to our house and we were talking in the back garden and he was asking me about Waseley and he said, ‘What are the masters like?’ And I didn’t know what he was talking about, at first. It took me a few seconds to work it out. ‘Is that what you call them, then, the teachers?’ I said. ‘You call them masters?’ A sudden image came to my mind and I could see a white-haired authority figure pacing up and down between the old wooden desks, wearing a gown and lecturing his attentive pupils on Latin declensions: a figure straight out of Goodbye, Mr Chips or a Billy Bunter novel. And I felt a ripple of shame – inferiority – pass through me as I realized what different worlds Chris and I now inhabited.

– At the next roundabout, take a left turn. First exit.

I did what Emma told me at this point. But then I decided upon another little detour to test her patience. Just past The Old Hare and Hounds pub, I took a spontaneous left turn into Leach Green Lane. She went quiet for a few seconds while the computer tried to get its head around what I was trying to do, then she said:

– In two hundred yards, right turn.

‘I see where you’re coming from,’ I told her, ‘but we’re going to deviate from the route for the time being. Hope that’s OK. The thing is, we’re going on a sentimental journey. And I don’t believe you have a setting for that.’