Miss Webster and Chérif (14 page)

A rush of chilly damp air flung itself into their faces, but the light re-kindled into early evening, with a sky the colour of grey silk.

‘I hope we’ll be able to see him.’

They set off round the stone square, elegant and austere, encircled with blossoming marble columns and patterned porphyry, staring upwards. The roof bosses, recently restored in authentic medieval colours, smirked back down at them in vulgar blues, green, reds.

‘Look at this,’ cried Chérif, delighted, ‘Noah’s ark!’

And there was the emblem of the world’s survival, all the named animals marching up the ramp into the ark of the covenant, two by two by two by two, ducks and swans and cockatoos, the elephants and the kangaroos, everything that you find in zoos  ...

‘Two by two by two by two by two,’ sang Elizabeth. She remembered the chant from her Sunday school child-hood. She glared at the tiny giraffes pinned to the roof above her and suddenly voiced one of her deepest festering resentments.

‘The world is organised for twos. Or more than two. Two plus two. I’ve always been one of one. And made to pay for it.’

This complaint was intended to be understood literally. Elizabeth Webster paid single-room supplements on package holidays or was charged extra for single occupation of double rooms, missed out on special family deals, could not afford villas and gîtes with views and swimming pools, because they were all tarted up for couples, groups or families. It was more expensive to be one of one. She paid through the nose and grudged every Euro.

But Chérif heard a lament, a candid declaration of loneliness. He found himself more alone now in this strange place than he had ever been. He had always been one of two, Moha and Chérif, the two boys raised in the sand beneath the date palms. At dinner he had been one of twelve, the men of his family, the uncles, cousins, grandsons, sitting on his heels before a tagine of lemon chicken, rice and roasted vegetables. At school he had been one of thirty-eight in a ramshackle classroom, trying to learn all he could to qualify for the senior class where he could be one of twenty-three and get more of the professor’s attention. In all his short life he had never, ever experienced that state which could be described as alone. Elizabeth stumbled as she snarled upwards at Noah’s ark. The flagstones were uneven; pools of damp formed in the hollows. Chérif took her arm, chivalric and serious.

‘Now you are one of two,’ he said. And he escorted her all the way round the cloister. This was Chérif’s first conscious act of friendship towards her, and Elizabeth did not understand his deeper meaning. What she did know was that she was not as stable on her pins as she had once been and that this young man had clearly been properly brought up; he offered an old lady his arm in a gesture of supportive respect. He was well on the way to being a gentleman.

They had missed the green man. He clutched at the roof like a succubus on the far side of the cloister. Elizabeth consulted the plan on the wall and they set off again in twilight, certain that they would no longer be able to pick him out in the shadowy vaults. But suddenly there he was above them, his fixed mad eyes staring down through the golden mask of leaves, which spread like tentacles across his face. They stood beneath him, heads thrown back, meeting his returning gaze.

‘Who is he?’ asked Chérif.

‘Lots of theories. Nobody really knows,’ said Elizabeth.

Chérif was way ahead of his year in mathematics and way behind in chemistry. His tutor arranged extra lab sessions with one of the research students to cover the lost ground, but this involved getting up in the dark and being there, ready to perform and take notes by eight o’clock in the morning. Elizabeth set the central heating for five-thirty so that he would come downstairs to a warm house. She offered to reduce the excessive floral arrangements in his room, but he refused to have anything changed. She cleared a bookshelf for him. His small stock of textbooks began to reproduce itself along the shelves. Together they transformed her mother’s tripod of vanity mirrors and glass surfaces into a working desk. She never used the downstairs shower and he cleaned it himself. He never entered her bathroom. Not a word was ever said. They silently divided the house between them. She made a rule to herself that she would never go into his room if he wasn’t there. But sometimes she crept in to close the window or turn up the radiator. During these fleeting raids into alien masculine terrain she absorbed odd details, which became strange treasures, endearing mysteries about the boy who had come out of the night to live with her.

He had a tiny cache of books in Arabic. Their subjects remained indecipherable. She lacked the code. She wondered if any one of these was the Qur’an, and if so, was he a fervent believer? He had not mentioned his religion once, not even in passing. She rang the university chaplaincy in a spirit of supportive enquiry. Was there a mosque in town? No, but the small Muslim community met for prayers every Friday at the old Quaker meeting house. She took down all the details to give to him, intending to do it at once, but then could never find a convenient opportunity.

She never made his bed, but laid out the clean pile of sheets and towels upon the now hugely unsuitable embroidered flounce that had once been her mother’s living-room curtains. At the end of the third week she noticed a small ring-bound notebook stuck under the pillow. A pencil, marking the page, rolled out. She picked it up from the carpet and then bent down to put it back. Tucked inside the page next to a closely written block of Arabic, was a photograph.

She did hesitate. She remembered hesitating before taking up the photograph and studying the image for many minutes. But had she been interrogated on her motives, her replies would have been jumbled and confused. Who does he care about? Whose image does he keep close in the night? To whom has he given his heart? She had expected the image of Saïda or of a young woman. But it looked like a blurred family shot; a favourite memory of a happy day when someone loved came home. Two smiling young men with their arms around each other were standing beneath a date palm in an otherwise empty desert. The sun was just behind the person with the camera, so that her outline was inscribed upon the sand before her. This was a woman’s dress; that was her
foulard
, the long scarf covering her hair which all the desert women wore, a little untucked, blowing sideways. Her hair escaped in a dark stringy cloud, as if it had been worked into tight plaits or rats’ tails. She was young. Here was the sharper waist and the wide, long skirts of a young woman. Elizabeth drew the photograph closer to her glasses and examined the boys. One was a smiling, sunny Chérif, happier than the one who had left for college that morning in the lifting dark. The other was shorter, slightly heavier in build, with a much darker skin. Chérif, dressed in Western clothes, could almost pass for white; only an intense and perceptive inspection revealed his origins. This other boy was a black man, a desert dweller, someone from the south wearing shepherd’s robes. He had a different beauty, the beauty that always accompanies someone who is fearless and walks lightly across the earth. Both of them flung vivid joyous smiles back to the camera and the strange young woman whose bare elbow and fine strong arm cut a stinging silhouette across the sand.

There were three young people in the photograph. Elizabeth studied the shadow figure traced upon the earth. Who was she? The blown outline, troubled by the wind, did not suggest Saïda, who never wore the
foulard
. Was this the girl left waiting in the desert for Chérif’s return? He had never once asked to use the telephone. He had an e-mail account in college, but he never mentioned news from home. No letters came for him, and no one ever rang her number. He did not have a mobile phone, or at least she had never seen one. She pondered the background of the photograph. There was the endlessness she remembered reduced to four by four. An odd right-angled shadow loomed behind the woman’s left shoulder and disappeared across the edge of the picture. That might be a car, or a building. She could gather no further information. And so she hastily replaced the photograph and scuttled out of the room, feeling guilty and ashamed. If she had caught him in her bedroom she would have turned him out of the house. She had no business being there. She had no right to look.

The TV men came down the lane at eight-thirty on Saturday morning and blocked the track with their van. Chérif was still asleep. They walked round to the back of the house and proposed to climb out of his window on to the flat roof and then up the back brick wall to the aerial.

‘Are you sure you didn’t want Sky? It says so here on the order form and we’ve got the box and the dish.’

‘No. I just wanted the DVD to work and not to interfere with my reception. But my lodger has fixed the DVD, that works perfectly now, but we still have some interference on Channel 4 and sometimes the picture shudders on BBC 2. He says it must be the aerial.’

‘OK. We’ll check the system. But we still need to get out of that window.’

‘Chérif!’

He stumbled forth in hasty jeans, jersey and bare feet. The TV men gaped at him, astonished. Sleep made his face more open and more vulnerable. His curls had got longer. He looked like one of Byron’s boys, a Greek beauty, simple and as fragile as a girl, yet remote and withdrawn, like a difficult and much-importuned god, who always withheld his blessings. The TV men apologised for the disturbance with more fervour than was necessary, not to Elizabeth, but to Chérif. He clearly had no idea who they were, but accepted their oblique homage as a matter of course. They handed him the list of Sky deals on offer. He turned it over on the kitchen table while Elizabeth filled up the kettle.

‘Sky TV!’ His excitement warmed the room. The summary of news packages lay beneath his fingertips.

‘Which package have you ordered? Oh, Madame Webster, if you got this one we could see the news on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia and Sky and CNN!’

And in that instant, her hand on the taps, the filling kettle slippery in her grasp, facing her October garden washed in pale sunshine and drifting leaves, Elizabeth Webster decided on the £47.00 package, which gave her world news from every known station and thirty-eight channels of digital nonsense, reality TV and interactive shopping. She marched out the back door and yelled at the ascending engineers who had not yet reached the aerial.

‘Get the dish! We’re going for Sky!’

Several distant neighbours who were sweeping leaves, or preparing for the shops, heard the shout. Miss Elizabeth Webster, whose acid opinions and savage tongue had plagued village committees for years, and whose near-demise had unleashed creeping evil thoughts, some as nakedly unkind as, ‘the old cow deserves all she gets’, was heard shouting down the back gardens – saying yes to afternoon game shows and UK Gold, yes to
Paradise Island
,
Antique Auction Bargain Slot
and
Most Haunted
. That voice that had always been raised in contempt and dissent was at last proclaiming herself one of us. That spell in hospital changed her for the better. She’s much more human now.

This was certainly one section of opinion expressed at the bus stop and in the shop. But another school of thought, those involved in the church and the campaign to have the telephone mast sited elsewhere, had absorbed the fact of Chérif’s presence and did not like what they saw. That young Arab boy from the college who is living with Miss Webster – have you seen him? Oh yes, he takes the early bus every morning. The Sky dish looked ordinary. But there was the uneasy combination of young Arab man – an unknown foreigner who spoke several languages – and a recently installed, highly sophisticated communications network, which troubled the torpid consciousness of an English village. Little Blessington was too far away from the city to be a safe harbour for strange faces. The self-contained huddle of old houses, with only one new row behind the pub, remained a village that was untroubled by students, overflowing dustbins, abandoned cars, burglary or petty crime. The pond gleamed with water lilies, not floating plastic bags, everyone recycled their bottles and knew the names of each other’s children and pets. Whatever announced itself as new and different was noticed and picked over. The new Sky dish was carefully observed and discussed in detail. Someone had heard that Miss Webster’s lodger arrived on her doorstep in the middle of the night and that she took him in, never having seen him before and having no real idea who he was. What can she have been thinking of? She never used to be so imprudent. It will all end in tears, you mark my words.

No good can come of this.

4

Unsuitable Music

The vicar came to see them on a Thursday night just before Guy Fawkes. By this time Chérif had been resident in Miss Webster’s house for well over a month. The vicar was not exactly spying, but on something of a fishing trip. Everybody wanted to know what was really going on in the cottage at the bottom of the lane. Miss Webster’s attendance at communion seemed no more irregular than usual, but her stony-faced concentration had mutated into something reflective and peaceable – entirely uncharacteristic of the old girl. She gazed thoughtfully at her surroundings more often than she used to do. She forgot her collection envelopes, then slapped a ten-pound note and some loose coppers on to the dish when it approached her pew. No one ever put cash in the collection bowl, and so the congregation present pretended not to notice. The spare change rattled with a vulgar clink.
Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works
. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ muttered Miss Webster, audibly objecting to the collection of church funds being represented as a charitable act that demonstrated Christian virtue and benefited others. Her neighbours heard her, but they were used to muffled, enraged muttering and occasional sudden departures. She sat there oblivious, scratching her spiky white hair, as if she had developed lice. Dear me, she looks like an escaped lunatic. After this minor incident the vicar’s wife gave him a prod.