The Last Pupil

By the end of June, Philippa will have been teaching people to drive for forty years. Then the car goes back to the dealer in Hexham, and that is that. It needs cleaning first — the state of the passenger seat after forty years of other people’s crisp packets — and the roof sign needs taking off, which the man at the garage says will take him ten minutes and a hot air gun.

What she will miss is not the driving. She has driven the same eleven miles of Northumberland so many times that she stopped seeing it years ago. What she will miss is the talking. People tell you things in a car that they would not tell you across a table, because they are looking at the road and not at you: about their mother, about the job they did not get. By the last week of June she will have been listening to that, three hours a day, since 1986.

In the spring she had worried about the money and about what a Tuesday would be for. She need not have worried about the money. The Tuesdays she is less sure of.

The thing that surprised her was how little of it she remembers. Nine hundred pupils, give or take, and she can call up perhaps thirty. She remembered to bring the forms for the last test of her career; what she cannot stop remembering is a green Fiesta in 1991 and a boy who cried at a mini-roundabout.

The last name in the diary booked by phone in April. They said they had had lessons before, a long time ago, and left it there. They are somewhere past sixty, they drive better than they think they do, and they hold the wheel the way nobody has been taught to hold it since about 1990.

Philippa keeps her old record books in a box in the spare room, and the name is in the first of them, in her own handwriting, round and careful the way she wrote then. The first pupil she ever put in for a test, and the first one of hers to fail. It was the emergency stop that did it.

They drove out towards Corbridge, where the limit drops to forty. She told them to stop looking at the gear stick, and twenty minutes later, on the way back, they stopped to look at the river, because there was no test at the end of this one and the hour was theirs. “You needn’t slow down for this one,” she said at the roundabout, and they didn’t. Then, at the bottom of Watling Street, a dog came out from behind a parked van, and they stopped the car dead: both hands, no fuss. The dog went on across the road. Philippa said nothing at all, and neither did they, and after a moment they checked the mirror and pulled away.

Outside the Co-op they paid in cash. “Do you take new people?” they asked. She told them about the thirtieth. “Thursday, then,” they said. By Thursday she will have been waiting thirty-nine years to see them pass, and neither of them was ever going to say so.