Miss Webster and Chérif Page 10

  ‘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, pen
cils, 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.

  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 ha
d 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.