“Every car you’ve ever driven has been filthy”

MY SISTER — resolutely urban and under-whelmed by country life — has arrived from London.

Swinging her suitcase into the boot of my car in the airport, she says suddenly “you’ve got to be joking,” and swings it back out. “I’m not putting my suitcase in there.” I glance inside the boot, where our 15-year-old dog (alive) lies under a thin mantle of hay. She opens the side door, spreads out her newspaper and places the suitcase on top of it. “What is it with you and cars?” she asks, huffing into the front seat while I close the boot.

I start the engine. “What in god’s name is that smell?” she says. My sister opens her window in theatrical disgust and sticks her head out. I explain that I tracked down the source of the smell yesterday — a mackerel-paté sandwich my husband had forgotten he’d put in the glove compartment — but she interrupts; she doesn’t need details, thanks, all she needs to know is have I got rid of it? I reassure her I have.

“This,” she says as we drive off, “is like sitting in a sewer.”

She says that I’m a “car slattern”.

“Slattern,” I say, “great word… never heard anyone use it besides Mum.”

“Have you ever thought about the assumptions people might make about you, based on the state of your car?”

“Only fleetingly.”

“Every car you’ve ever driven has been filthy,” she shouts from outside the window, where her head is hanging and her cheeks are vibrating in the wind, “people probably assume you’re an all-round slattern.” This thought is unnerving.

“My house is scrupulously clean,” I respond.

“I know that,” she says, bringing her head back in, “but people who don’t know you don’t. God, that smell is sick.”

“People shouldn’t judge.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, you make judgements all the time about weird things. You judge people who wear nun shoes.”

A car is a particularly stupid object on which to base a judgement about someone, I retort. “I mean what can a car really tell you?”

“About as much as nun shoes I should think,” she says.

The conversation deviates weirdly off the point for a while before my sister says, “I think it’s quite reasonable for people to assume that someone whose car stinks of dead beasts might live in a house that stinks of them too.”

She sticks her head back out. I wish I could do the same. I resolve to clean my car.

At the supermarket, she gets out and draws dramatic deep breaths. As she strides into the shop, an elderly man approaches my open window. He leans on his walking stick while we exchange pleasantries for a few moments, after which he says, apropos of nothing, “I wonder would you mind telling me what you know about Nissan Micras?”

I look left, right and over my shoulder. There are men everywhere. I can’t imagine what on earth has marked me out as someone who might know useful facts about cars, but I’m anxious to please this stranger, particularly when he says he’s hoping to buy a Nissan for his grand-daughter.

I’m pretty sure Nissans are Japanese. Perhaps I might be able to tease something helpful out of this one fact. I do my best.

My sister, who’s returned with two bottles of red, catches the tail end of the conversation. She sits with her eyebrows drawn up in disbelief, until my one fact gives up its ghost and the elderly man thanks me before walking away.

“He seemed a bit confused,” I say.

“Got to be,” she says, “why else would he ask you about cars?”

She sticks her head back out, maintaining that position until we arrive home.

As I shut the driver’s door, I hear my sister emit a strange, hit-the-jackpot kind of laugh from behind the car.

“Come here a sec,” she says. I stand beside her.

“Nothing wrong with that man,” she says, “you’re the one who’s confused” and jabs her finger at the car boot. “You drive a bloody Nissan Micra,” she says, jabbing away.

“Oh,” I say, “I thought it was a Ford Fiesta, you see before we had this car, you remember we had one the same colour…”

“God I need that wine,” she says and marches indoors.