‘Stop, stop the car. Now, I mean it.’
Barry, set and sullen faced, swerved to the side of the road with a screech of brakes that all but overrode his wife’s hysterical outburst.
‘Give me the keys. I’m driving, you can bloody well get home on your own flat feet. That is if you can ever find the way.’
Barry’s mouth flapped up and down like a gold fish as he tried to find the words to brave the familiar onslaught.
‘But we agreed, you’d drink and I’d drive. You’re in no fit state to behind that wheel, Belinda.’
‘The only driving you’re doing tonight is driving me round the bend. I said right, not left you addlepated nurd, so why the hell did you turn left?’ she fumed.
Barry really didn’t know.
The light hearted banter had seemed quite funny at the post Christmas office bash.
‘Barry’s mum used to read him The 101 Dalmations at bedtime.’
‘And I always sympathised with poor old Missis who never could tell the difference between her right paw and her left paw even when the spots were different!’ This comment had brought about little ripples of laughter.
‘D’you know what my idea of hell is?’ he continued. ‘It’s going round and round a roundabout for all eternity because I don’t know where to get off.’ Peter, his immediate boss, hooted, and began refilling Barry’s glass, but Belinda put her foot down and absolutely insisted on going to the kitchen for pure apple juice.
Barry had a fleeting vision of the grief he’d invariably suffered at Scouts because of his inability to grasp the vagaries of the OS maps used on hikes. None of the others had seemed to understand his theory about how much easier it would be if everyone was just beamed up and down between locations.
‘The Keys, Barry, now!’ Belinda was holding out her hand, the bracelet he’d given her for Christmas dangling seductively from her wrist.
‘But…’
‘No buts – I only had two glasses – you needn’t worry your thick head about that.’
Barry undid his seat belt with great deliberation, withdrew the keys, got out, slammed the door, playing for time. Belinda shuffled over into the driver seat, pulling her pashmina tight around her shoulders.
‘Keys Barry.’ She opened the window, letting in a bitter blast of all too fresh air, then leant over and snicked down the passenger door lock.
‘Come off it Belinda, even you can’t expect me to walk home in this weather. Besides, I haven’t a clue where we are.’
‘You’ve made that abundantly obvious.’
Stony silence.
‘Really Belinda, your behaviour is outrageous, totally OTT. At least let me get my coat.’
‘Oh, get back in then if you must, but this is the very last time I ever sit beside you in this car. I mean it! And that’ll really cramp your style! I can’t understand how you ever get anywhere when you’re on your own.’
Barry couldn’t either.
‘You’ve no idea what it’s like to be born without a bump of direction, he pleaded. ‘I reckon it’s a missing gene! Belinda laughed, in spite of herself.
‘What is it?’ said Barry, tearing off the birthday paper.
‘A Tom-Tom. Satellite Navigation. That should sort you out once and for all.’
‘Oh Belinda, you shouldn’t have, it’s much too expensive…’
‘Not if it saves our marriage.’
Barry wasn’t at all convinced that the marriage was saveable, or even worth saving. It wasn’t as if they had kids.
Now Barry was a whiz at computers. He sat fiddling with the Tom-Tom for the rest of the day, and set it up for the trip to their birthday treat restaurant. He insisted on driving. Never a cross word, never a miss-crossed road
‘In two hundred yards, go over the roundabout, take the second exit……In fifty yards, turn right…’ He hadn’t been in the habit of measuring spaces into 100 yard units, but after a few too early turns into cul-de-sacs - ‘turn round wherever possible’ - he soon got the hang of it.
His life was transformed. He felt liberated, a hitherto unexperienced confidence filled his every fibre, and it was all down to Jane, the Tom-Tom lady or Lady Janetta as he renamed his mentor.
‘Stop fiddling with that thing! You’ve driven to your mother’s every fortnight for the last fifteen years. Even you can’t get lost!’ Belinda taunted.
But Barry delighted in the sound of Lady Janetta’s exquisitely clear voice, her lucid instructions, he endless patience, even the little undertone of criticism when she had to repeat ‘You have reached your destination.’ Some times she said it in the middle of the night when she was on charge. He found this positively stimulating, and sometimes he even felt moved to make love to his wife, fantasising the while.
‘You know Belinda, it’s almost as good as being beamed up – no more poring over the map book, you just key in the address and blow me you’re there.’
Increasingly, he had this feeling, that there was a bit missed out of his normal life between the here and the there, where only Lady Janetta was meaningful for him.
What did she look like? Blond? Dark? He was sure she had blue eyes. He found himself looking out for her wherever he went. ‘That’s her,’ he’d say to himself, as a figure slipped in and out of the corner of his eye.’ Lady Janetta was his saviour, the one who had metamorphosed him from near inadequacy into a confident self sufficient being.
Barry set Lady Janetta increasingly difficult tasks, long, intricate routes, and he’d make a deliberate mistake to test her out, but she never failed him. She took a second or two to calculate an alternative route, put him back on course, and if all else failed commanded him to turn round whenever possible.
Meanwhile, Belinda, trust her, was getting quite uptight about the whole thing, and hummed and ha-ad and complained that he never let her drive, and moreover he was always out and they never had any quality time together. She seemed to have entirely forgotten her Christmas ultimatum.
Eventually, it came out.
‘You’ve got another woman. Go on, admit it, you’ve got another woman.’
Barry denied it of course, but not at all convincingly, because in a way it was true, he had got another woman, the ephemeral Lady Janetta who day by day was becoming more and more real to him. Why, sometimes, she even forsook her script and addressed him personally.
‘Now Barry, see what a fine man you’ve become, decisive, a first class driver, on the spot, why don’t you put in for promotion?’ Belinda had been on at him for years to better himself, complaining that he didn’t earn enough and marking up job adverts in the local paper, but after a few unadmitted applications, Barry had given up, convinced that he belonged near the bottom of the pile.
When Lady Janetta pointed out that Peter was on the move, and his job would be available for the asking, Barry bearded the boss, got a huge pay rise and a posh company car, into which he instantly installed Lady Janetta the pride of his life. He didn’t actually mention the promotion to his wife for fear of all those ‘I told you so’s’. Besides, his success was all the sweeter since it was a secret between him and his true love. He made a seemingly generous gift of his share in the old car.
‘You might as well get it registered in your name Belinda, since you’re the only user.’ Belinda was delighted, but still suspicious.
On the rare occasions when Belinda joined him in the new car, there hardly seemed room for the three of them.
‘Why don’t you get into the back dear?’ he’d suggest, but this enraged her even more, and she complained about that lady’s perfume polluting the atmosphere. Little did she know!
Barry was seriously contemplating leaving boring Belinda, even giving her the house, and asking Lady Janetta to go away with him into the blue yonder.
Christmas came round once more, as it does, trailing after it the office bash.
Barry dreamed of arriving with the delectable Lady Janetta on his arm, but of course it was Belinda that came with him, eyes on antennae to sniff out her rival. Naturally, he was driving, and she drinking, it was all agreed. The girls were in a huddle getting loud and giggly, the chaps propping up the bar, chatting pie-eyed about work. Out of the corner of his ear, Barry heard Kate from Reception gushing at Belinda.
‘You must be so proud of him now he’s Area Manager. Everyone’s impressed with the change in him. I suppose it was down to that outward bound management course he went on.’
‘What did you say?’ There was a crashing silence as Belinda stalked across to Barry, her anger poised to spring.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d been promoted,’ she shrieked.
Barry really didn’t know.
Desultory chat puttered into noisy talk.
One day, Barry carelessly left the Tom-Tom at home – Belinda had been most insistent that he remove the unit every night for fear of thieves. Panic overwhelmed him as he drove, he was totally lost, eternally stuck on that hellish roundabout, hooted at and derided. He was two hours late for his appointment, and lost a contract for the firm. He tried to be blasé about the whole thing when Belinda enquired after his day.
Next morning, he was dimly aware that something about the settings on the Tom-Tom didn’t seem quite right, but this factor flitted into insignificance in comparison with his transports of delight when he set out again the with Lady Janetta beside him.
‘Don’t ever desert me again,’ Barry pleaded.
‘I thought it was more a case of your forgetting me.’ Lady Janetta nuzzled up to him the way he liked, and kissed him tenderly on the cheek as he drove on. He drew up in a lay-by, and kissed her passionately.
‘No way!’
‘I’ll be right with you till the end of the road,’ Lady Janetta assured him after a long clinch.
‘You mean you’ll come away with me?’
‘Why not? Where would you like to go today?’
Barry didn’t care, anywhere would do as long as it was with her and without Belinda.
‘A touch of sea air?’
‘Sounds good.’
‘Then off we go. At the next roundabout, turn left, first exit, then keep left…………’
Before he realised it, they had beamed down somewhere near Eastbourne.
The road rambled up to Beachy Head, with the cloud flecked sky above and the deep blue sea below sparkling in the glittering sun, where larks warbled and seagulls shrieked and butterflies fluttered above the flowers of the spring. Tra la.
‘Turn left, after fifty yards, bear left over the grass. At the end of the grass, go straight on.’
