Miss Webster and Chérif (16 page)

‘I don’t think so. Why?’

‘Well, it says pick your own strawberries.’

‘And leave mine alone? Chérif, you’re a treasure. No, it means what’s yours is mine. Come and pick my strawberries and when you’ve paid for your punnets they’ll be yours.’

‘Punnets?’

Chérif stared at the prickly red blob, which remained swathed in mystery.

After the debacle in the village shop they initiated a weekly joint sortie to Waitrose. Chérif loved doing the shopping. He wandered round the bright store, now already overflowing with Christmas goodies, giant boxes of crackers and crystallised fruit, and a large cardboard sledge trailing glittering, useless things. Elizabeth learned how to linger and gloat, instead of slamming fourteen bald necessities into her trolley and making for the checkout. He hovered, translating the labels. If her feet gave out she plonked herself behind the
Guardian
in the coffee bar. She never bawled at him for dawdling, for she was tasting the pleasures of the slow lane. He brought his discoveries to her, delighted.

‘Look! I know where these dates come from. I know this town. I might even know the people who cut them down from the top of the
palmiers
.’

‘Date palms. Don’t mix languages. Do you want to buy those?’

He wrinkled his nose in horror.

‘At that price? It’s a robbery.’

Elizabeth Webster laughed. She often laughed now at Chérif’s puzzles and observations. The lines on her face had begun to change; they were deeper and more beautiful.

‘My mother grew up in South America. She felt like that about avocado pears. But why quarrel with the import costs? If we don’t pay, we can’t eat them. That’s the way it goes.’

They clattered out to the car park and the chilly fog, beneath the feeble orange lights. Elizabeth sat for a long time behind the wheel, cleaning her glasses. The country lanes before her were pitch-black, as were the streets of Little Blessington, for the parish council had unanimously voted against streetlights.

‘Can you drive?’

‘Mais bien sûr.’

‘I’m going to put you on my insurance. Do you have your licence?’

But it turned out that Chérif’s licence, a battered pink piece of cardboard in French and Arabic, had been purchased. As was the custom. He had never actually passed a test. Not as such. This emerged when they filled in the AA forms.

‘Date of test? You’re only twenty-one. You must remember.’

He clearly remembered handing over the money. It had taken months to amass that much. But he had been driving large lorries since he was fifteen; he had driven his uncle’s delivery truck. He had borrowed Saïda’s Citroën to take his grandmother to hospital. He even owned a battered motorbike. And once he had tried out Abdou’s taxi, but just the once.

‘I think you’d better take a few lessons. I’ll ring BSM.’

The driving lessons went off swimmingly and Joan, the frosty local instructor, sauntered round the village declaring that she was completely in love with Miss Webster’s young man, and if she wasn’t forty-six and old enough to be his mother, well, she would be pursuing him down that muddy lane herself. This counted against Chérif with the asphalters who now described him as ‘the snake charmer’. The big shock came with the AA insurance quotation. There were too many alarming discrepancies. Number of years’ experience. Seven. Number of years with valid licence. One. Age of driver. Disturbingly young. Place of birth. Foreign. Sex. Male. Miss Webster’s insurance increased a thousand-fold to the spectacular and unbelievable total of seventeen hundred pounds. She rang the AA in a fury. A rush of placatory excuses were offered in exchange.

‘It would make a big difference if he was a near relative.’

‘What do you expect me to do? Adopt him?’

They sat in the kitchen and listened to the news. The weapons inspectors were playing at cat and mouse with the Iraqi authorities. Chérif reflected carefully on the consequences. He expected her to have an answer for everything.

‘Do you think they really do have weapons of mass destruction?’

‘Of course. Everybody does. So what does that signify? We’ve got weapons of mass destruction. Every known form of weapon. Biological, chemical and nuclear. They’re stacked up in Berkshire.’

Chérif stared at her, amazed. How on earth had she accessed all the secret files and located the laboratories? Could this be common knowledge in England? Why weren’t the authorities terrified of terrorists looking up the address in Berkshire, strolling past, and leaving with phials and fluids that could kill millions once they touched the air?

‘What will happen?’ he asked. The radio news was terrifying; the world steadied itself for war.

‘I’ll pay the seventeen hundred pounds of course,’ snapped Miss Webster. ‘I want you to be able to drive the car.’

It took him a moment to understand that she was no longer concentrating upon the political situation in Iraq. ‘But it’s a lot of money.’ No one in his village ever bothered with any kind of insurance.

‘I’ve got pots of money. I’ve saved all my life. And for bloody what?’

‘The rainy day,’ smiled Chérif, who had recently absorbed this phrase in college and came from a country where it so rarely rained your money would always be safe from wastrels. Miss Webster was adamant.

‘Well, now it’s raining.’

Nobody thought he had actually stolen the car, but they watched the curly-headed Arab heading off for college in the Clio with suspicion and mistrust. And within the secure precincts of the shop, the recycling point and the gardening club polytunnel, they prophesied an appalling and inevitable doom, certainly for the Clio – such a pity, low mileage, almost new – and possibly for Miss Webster whose imprudence knew no bounds.

Miss Webster and Chérif decided to build a bonfire for Saturday night. The derelict farmer hacked down two trees, which had been hanging over Miss Webster’s garage and polluting the gutters with a soggy black mass of dead foliage. The trunk was chopped up and carted off for firewood, but there remained a spiky pile of dead branches blocking the lane. Miss Webster therefore decreed that Guy Fawkes would be celebrated for the first and only time at her house. This necessitated a long historical explanation of gunpowder, treason and plot. Chérif listened, fascinated. Miss Webster clearly thought all forms of government should be blown sky-high. She attributed this to being independent-minded and living in the country where governments only ever interfered with you by raising petrol taxes, planning a new bypass through the local nature reserve and banning hunting with dogs.

‘There was an assassination attempt on the King’s life in the 1970s,’ said Chérif, ‘but I wasn’t born then and I don’t think there’s been one since. People in my village love our king.’ He didn’t sound convinced.

‘And you don’t?’

‘I don’t know.’ Chérif looked blank. ‘My cousin says our government is corrupt. But all governments are corrupt, aren’t they?’

‘Absolutely. It’s a necessary evil.’ Miss Webster was contemplating fireworks, had lost interest in politics and was looking up the weather forecast. ‘Fine and clear. Light frost towards dawn. New moon. Can you handle explosives?’

‘Bombs?’ Chérif flushed. He had endured enough silly jokes in college about the use to which he intended putting his knowledge of chemistry and had acquired the not entirely kind nickname of Chemical Ali. He now reacted to all suspect insinuations, however innocent. Miss Webster noticed nothing.

‘Fireworks. We have to have fireworks.’ She suddenly looked up, saw his embarrassment and made the connection: gunpowder, Arabs. ‘On second thoughts I’d better buy them. I don’t think there’s a shop in town that would sell you anything you could use as a fuse.’

And so after lunch on Saturday Chérif was discovered building a towering inferno of dead branches, rotting cardboard boxes and a broken old cupboard found abandoned in the shed. Browned grass and pale grey ash marked the regular spot for a bonfire, well clear of the fence and trees at the bottom of the garden. Miss Webster decided to go for bust and made a substantial Guy out of discarded nylons and the remains of her sister’s old clothes, which had been abandoned in her mother’s house and never claimed. It gave her no small satisfaction to send that pert bitch up in smoke. She sat the lumpy horror of indeterminate sex down at the kitchen table. The bald nylon head lolled forwards and the thing gave a sinister shudder. Miss Webster topped it off with a woollen bobble hat she no longer wore on winter sorties in the garden. As she contemplated the elongated blank head something came over her. The creature must have a face. She dug an old thick felt-tip out from the kitchen drawer, which dated from the epoch of grammatical points on flip charts, and ran it under the hot tap. Then she attacked the orange nylon lump. A moment’s brisk scratching and a face, grinning and evil, leered back at her. The felt-tip leaked black ink over her fingers, as if the malice in her intentions overflowed. She flung it into the dustbin and gazed with satisfaction at the wicked angel seated at her table. It did look uncannily like her sister, wearing the old tomato cardigan and sagging, fingerless green gloves. She wanted to gloat over her monstrous creation.

‘Chérif! Come and see what I’ve made. Chérif!’

He was absorbed in piling the remains of the rotted gate, now replaced, around the base of the bonfire as if the interior needed extra defences to build it up. He must have heard her, but for an instant he did not react. Then he turned; a baffled frown flickered across his remote, peculiar beauty. There were many ways of reading this hesitation, but Miss Webster was too astute not to be aware of its significance. She knew what it meant; in her heart she had always known.

‘Chérif!’

The reaction was too late, too strange, too staged.
He did not know his own name
. Miss Webster drew herself up and prepared for battle.

But she had no time to say anything barbed or ambiguous because the doorbell, artificially amplified so that she could hear it in the garden, howled through the house. Who comes past on a Saturday afternoon without ringing beforehand? She flung open the door. And there before her on the porch step stood a young woman wearing a brown leather flying jacket and white scarf, Biggles in a miniskirt, with thigh-high beige suede boots. She had a cheerful mouse-brown bob of hair, no handbag, and was swinging her car keys.

‘Hi! Is Chérif in?’

‘And who are you?’ snapped Miss Webster.

‘I’m Karen. I’ve come to cut Chérif’s hair.’

Elizabeth Webster was mystified rather than annoyed by this fresh apparition. Of course he was chased by pretty girls. Probably by pretty boys too. Just as well the girl has got here first. This smiling figure on her doorstep embodied yet another sign that Chérif had a life separate from her own, a life of which she knew nothing.

‘Do you have another name?’

‘Sorry?’

‘A last name?’

‘Oh! Yes. Wallis. But we always use first names at work.’

‘And you’re a student too, I suppose?’

‘Oh God no. I’m an estate agent.’

‘You’d better come in.’

Karen gave a little scream of shock and joy when she saw the Guy lolling at the table. ‘Oh, he’s brilliant! Huge. And really scary. Did Chérif make him up for you?’

‘No,’ said Miss Webster, irrationally gratified by her success at creating a Frankenstein, ‘I made him myself. Chérif’s building the bonfire.’

‘Are you having a party? Can I come?’

The demand was so innocent and excited that it never occurred to Elizabeth Webster to say no. She had guarded the gates of her home for years, with a ferocity that would have been a credit to Cerberus; now her house had become a refuge for strangers. She flung open her back door and welcomed the damp rush of cold.

‘Chérif! Your hairdresser’s arrived.’

Karen established her beauty salon in Miss Webster’s kitchen, borrowed the meat scissors, and snipped away at Chérif’s wet curls, while he sat at the other end of the table from the hideous Guy, making faces at the monster. He had a large clean towel folded over his shoulders with his curls hanging wet and limp about his ears. He looked shrunken and vulnerable. Karen clearly wasn’t very good with curls. She sipped her coffee and, reflecting on the damp heap of clean hair, appealed to Miss Webster.

‘What do you think? How short should I cut them at the top?’

‘Why not dry them out a bit, pull a chunk out straight, and cut off the same amount all round. Maybe an inch. Or two? They’ve got very long. Then let them go. They’ll bounce back like mattress springs.’

‘That’s how Ma does it at home,’ said Chérif helpfully. Miss Webster was touched by his childishness.

‘You’ve never called Saïda “Ma” before. Or at least not in my hearing,’ she observed.

‘She doesn’t like it.’ Chérif blushed a little and fell silent. Karen duffed up his curls with a vigorous rub. Miss Webster set a cup of coffee down in front of the Guy.

‘Go on. Drink up, you old cow. Any last requests? By eight o’clock tonight you’ll be toast.’

‘Oh, it’s a woman, not a man,’ exclaimed Karen.

‘It’s my sister. She’s being incinerated in absentia,’ declared Miss Webster, cool as a contract assassin. ‘And she’s going to the stake wearing all her own clothes.’