Miss Webster and Chérif (13 page)

‘Do you often light fires?’ She acknowledged to herself that this must be a redundant question, for behold the practised hand, cupping the flame.

‘Every night. To cook. We cook outside.’

Elizabeth nodded. What was the effect of repetition? What did it mean to see this huge descending tower folded in upon itself and rushing downwards in an explosion of dust, again and again? When something is repeated its meaning changes.
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
She looked round at Chérif. He was sitting in front of the stove, collapsed like a deckchair, with his arms around his knees.

‘And where were you when it happened?’

‘In the Hôtel des Voyageurs. Watching CNN.’

Elizabeth Webster had never been to America and had no intention of doing so. In her considered opinion the United States was the source of disgusting food and consequent obesity, appalling films which took place at grotesque speeds, but hooked you all the same, unintelligible accents and bad taste in clothes. America was a nation of petty bosses with no trade unions to kick their shins and politicians who didn’t even bother to cover up their own corruption. There was therefore nothing more behind her next question other than simple curiosity.

‘Did your people think the Americans deserved what they got?’ Elizabeth Webster thought the Americans had had it coming for some time.

‘Of course. Some people did. The people of my village were horrified. It is forbidden to take innocent life. That is what we are taught. But we have supporters of the Palestinians. Mostly young people in the cities. They get very worked up.’

Elizabeth did not follow Middle East politics in any great detail. It had become an insoluble barrage of accusations and reprisals, quarrels between old men, who sent the young to their deaths leaving behind unburied bodies, shattered buildings and blood on pavements. She disliked disorder, riots and injustice. Her temper was easily disturbed by self-serving righteousness and gratuitous declarations that changed nothing; she therefore often watched the news in a rage. Before them on
Newsnight
the second tower crumpled with the precision of a computer-generated special effect in a disaster movie.

‘What on earth did that have to do with the Palestinians?’

‘They are a dispossessed people. They are our people. The Americans support Israel. But it’s not only that. It’s hard for me to explain.’

‘You don’t think all that wanton destruction is justified, do you?’

‘No. Mais bien sûr que non. Mais moi, je comprends la rage derrière de telles horreurs.’

‘Don’t mix your languages,’ commanded Miss Webster.

There was a long pause. They listened to the instant punditry and an alarming clip of the mad mullah installed by popular acclaim at the Finsbury Park mosque, declaring jihad in a leafy North London street. A Black West Indian Muslim, who was in charge of the Brixton mosque, suggested point-blank that the sooner the hero of Finsbury Park was arrested and deported the better. The mullah had only one hand; the other hand had been replaced by a hook, which he was waving in the air to excellent effect.

‘Look, Madame Webster! It’s the captain from
Peter Pan
. And here comes the crocodile. Tic, tic, tic!’

The home secretary appeared, looking fierce, and declared that the mullah’s days of freedom to preach terrorism were numbered. A police car revved across the scene.

‘Good Heavens. Did you read J.M. Barrie when you were a child? Whatever next!’

‘It’s a film,’ grinned Chérif, ‘Disney!’

Chérif had some difficulty accounting for Miss Webster’s solitude. She never mentioned a family; no photographs of grown-up children decorated the shelves and no visible evidence of a husband, alive or dead, disturbed her arrangements. Then he found a set of working power tools stored in the cupboard with the vacuum cleaner and was reassured. She must be a widow who could not bear to look at photographs of her late beloved spouse. She had cleared out all his clothes and shoes, even his spectacles, and handed them over to refugees of the Turkish earthquake. Then Chérif made the mistake of referring to her departed husband.

‘My late husband? What are you talking about? I never married.’

A shiver of alarm crossed Chérif’s face. He had clearly been misinformed, for by now he was persuaded that someone had mentioned the deceased husband. Elizabeth read the flicker incorrectly; she anticipated a mixture of scorn and pity for the spinster, the woman not chosen.

‘I didn’t want to marry. I would never have married. I wanted my independence.’

This was quite beyond Chérif’s comprehension. In his world women had to marry. It was a disaster if they did not. And they all wanted children. Children were their raison d’être.

‘I didn’t want children,’ thundered Elizabeth Webster, her irritation uncanny and appropriate, ‘so why should I marry?’

Chérif began to panic; his skin prickled. She could read his mind. Elizabeth was becoming dogmatic and irrefutable. She attacked the boy’s bewildered alarm, all guns blazing.

‘Do you understand why I didn’t want children and why I never married? Well, young man, do you?’

‘Pas vraiment.’

Chérif slunk back into French, where he felt more secure and knew that he could avoid being rude. Elizabeth checked herself. He was her guest, after all.

‘Listen. Have you seen any of those Agatha Christie movies? Not Poirot. The ones with the little old lady in the English village?’

Chérif remembered
Murder at the Vicarage
, which, when he first saw it, aged twelve, in black and white, might as well have been describing life on Mars.

‘Do you remember Miss Marple? The old lady in the hat on the bicycle with the wicker basket? Well, I’m like Miss Marple.’

‘Ah,’ cried Chérif, radiant with illumination, ‘you worked as a detective!’ So, all was revealed – English and Belgian detectives never married. It was a condition of service.

‘Oh my God.’ Elizabeth gave up on the explanations. ‘Put the kettle on, will you?’

But neither of them was disappointed or annoyed by this conversation. Chérif felt that he had learned something significant about Miss Webster’s past and Elizabeth felt that she had told this young man a thing or two about English women. At least he had assumed that Miss Marple exercised a worthy profession. Even if he now imagined that it had been her own. A detective. A pleasant amateur sleuth gentility descended over Elizabeth Webster as she hunted down the coconut biscuits she had noticed that he liked more than the ginger ones. Yes, maybe she was something of a detective.

‘I taught French for thirty-eight years,’ she announced, sitting down before her new teapot. ‘Go on. Pour the tea as you do in your country.’

Chérif sniffed the mint.

‘You have a flower bed full of mint in your garden. Do you always have tea like this?’

‘No. I use it for mint sauce. With leg of lamb.’

Chérif tried to imagine the consistency of Miss Webster’s mint sauce and failed.

Sometimes misunderstanding is no bad thing. Were we to grasp every unintended insult, every irritated gesture, every accidental slight, and to take it badly, we would spend our days and nights at one another’s throats. Miss Webster and Chérif did not comprehend each other’s meanings. Their methods of communication were always approximate, for they had no first language in common. They were from different generations, cultures, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman. She was one of the warrior sex; the women with whirling blades attached to their chariots, the one-breasted Amazons galloping fearless towards the enemy host, with their bows drawn. He had never conceived of the existence of this particular species of woman, let alone encountered one, but she did remind him of various women he had seen in Hollywood films, who were usually far younger, more beautiful, and always came to bad ends. For her, he represented a generation that she was inclined to dismiss as arrogant little bastards sporting feathery beards, thoroughly brainwashed by some mad imam, and so up themselves that they could hardly see their own feet. None of this was auspicious. But he had wandered into her world and looked to her to explain his surroundings.

The need for explanations called forth the best in both of them. Elizabeth Webster had always defended her pupils, whoever they were and whatever their views. Someone in her class was one of her own; even when they did not like her or she them, she stepped calmly before them as guardian and shield, inspired by fabulous and patronising delusions of what it meant to be a great leader. Chérif fell, by accident, into the category of vulnerable beginner, someone who was learning slowly, but showed promise. She decided to invest time and energy in his sentimental education. He was clever, and therefore worth the trouble; she intended to introduce her desert dweller to the modern world.

In the mornings during those first weeks he was already up when she came down at seven-thirty, to greet the gleaming chill of dew on the lawns and the faint trace of white frost in the shadow of her potting shed. He had prepared her tea tray, with the mug she always used for her first cup, early in the day, and the kettle had boiled. But he was never in the kitchen. He was always sitting motionless on the back doorstep, wrapped up in a football jersey, staring at the birds. A squadron of tits jostled for landing positions on the feeder. There was a block of stale cake sitting upright in the toy house, but a strictly limited range of access. Frequent fights broke out. A starling arrived on the fence, then another. The bigger bird fluffed himself up a little. He clearly planned to intimidate the fray before launching an attack. Chérif stared at the sudden dips and jabs as the birds assaulted the cake. He smiled up at Elizabeth when she peered out of the kitchen window, but continued watching the birds. The disorganised aggression unrolled in twitters and shrieks. The cake crumbled and the raids intensified. A chunk plunged over the edge, only to be hotly disputed in the wet grass. When he came in, Elizabeth checked out the thickness of his jersey by running her fingers over the sleeve.

‘At least you have some warm clothes.’

‘It snows in the Anti-Atlas. I have a huge woollen djellaba that doubles up as a blanket,’ he grinned, ‘and it freezes in the desert. The rocks sometimes explode at night when the temperature falls. We sleep around the coals. I’m used to winter cold.’ He nodded to the birds. ‘I love them. They never give up.’

She drove in to pick him up from college at five o’clock on Thursdays. He waited outside the lodge, tired and quiet. But he looked exactly like all the other students wandering past, heading for the union, the sports centre or the halls of residence. She found this reassuring, but did not examine why she did. He walked round to the driver’s side, unthinking. He was used to left-hand drive. She leaned across and opened the door.

‘Other side, Chérif. Would you like to see your camouflaged soldier? The real one on the cloisters’ roof?’

She drove back to the centre of town against the traffic and parked just outside the cathedral close. Chérif was fascinated, not by the Gothic spires above, but by the cobblestones beneath them.

‘These are sea stones,’ he said, ‘we must be nearer the sea than I thought.’

‘Maybe an hour’s drive? We can go to the sea later on in the term if you like. Before it gets too cold.’

She was already planning outings, trips. But she pulled herself up short. I can’t monopolise him. And he mustn’t disappoint his mother. He has to work hard and do well. He needs to meet other young people, have friends his own age. He can’t stay with me, embalmed in chintz. She shook herself back into her usual chill sensibility and marched before him into the damp stone mass of medieval glory.

‘All right?’

He had hesitated at the first step.

‘You don’t take off your shoes. I know that you don’t take off your shoes here.’

‘There aren’t any carpets. It’s all stone. Have you been in a church before?’

‘Yes. There’s a chapel in the desert. It’s part of a monastery. Just seven holy men live there now. But it’s very simple. White lime walls. No tiles or paintings.’

They were inside the cathedral. The forbidding hollow void loomed huge and dark above them. High in the organ loft someone was flicking through the pages of music, illuminated by one virulent spotlight. The cathedral’s echo carried the rustle and slap of each turned page. She saw and heard the building breathe in and exhale as if it were an alien thing. The great, undecorated columns of the nave sank into the aisles, pushing the long rows of empty chairs together. There were lights in the choir stalls, but the ambulatory behind the high altar shaded away into grey dark, deepening in the chapels. Chérif peered at the dead knights and bishops on their marble tombs. He looked down at the memento mori of the rotting skeleton, sculpted in the base, and the ruthless stone faces of the clerics in their rigid shrouds. Maybe they don’t have graves in mosques. No, I’m sure they don’t. He must be wondering why we sit here in twilight and cold, surrounded by the dead. They wandered deeper into the increasing dark. The cathedral shop closed as they passed by and the long shafts of light, displaying postcards, pencils, paperweights, fluffy toys, life-size brass rubbings and pressed flowers under glass, suddenly clicked off, generating a stranger and more terrible darkness in the great cold space above them. She could just see the windows, but the stained glass remained lifeless and obscure. The dark sucked the shop back into the shadows creeping up the Gothic side-chapels. Elizabeth felt for the wooden latch, which led into the cloisters, and nosed out the steps with the toes of her boots. The padded door thudded shut.