Miss Webster and Chérif Page 16
‘Straight at ’em, sir,’ cried Miss Webster and put her foot down. They shot off the motorway into Tottenham and became instantly ensnared in a wiggle of jams and lights. They lost sight of signs to the City or the West End and then finally of any signs at all.
‘We’d better pull off and ask an inhabitant.’ Miss Webster feared being swept round and round the North Circular with no hope of a reprieve. They turned into a side road and stopped in front of a decrepit row of terraced houses. Many were abandoned, their windows bricked up. Some looked as if they had been in a war zone for years: doorways strewn with smashed glass backed by cardboard on the front panels, abandoned rotting furniture piled in the front gardens, black plastic sacks spewing rubbish oozed on to the pavements. This decaying slum was illuminated by the same brilliant white light that accompanied their doomed trajectory down the motorway. And there, resplendent on a red plastic sofa ripped and pock-marked by cigarette burns, blocking the Clio’s slow advance down the otherwise empty street, sat three black men, magnificent as kings, their dreadlocks carefully arranged, many cans of Red Stripe lined up beside their feet.
‘Good God,’ said Miss Webster, incredulous. She stopped the car.
‘It’s the Neighbourhood Watch,’ said Chérif, and got out. One of the black men rose up as he sauntered towards them. Chérif was not a big man, but he stood straight and his black curls gleamed glossy in the sunshine. He shook hands with all three men. They stared at his beauty, perplexed and interested. He was the first event of their day. But none of them could understand his accent, nor he theirs. They surrounded the car, peering in at the smartly dressed old lady, the clean floor, rugs and cushions.
‘Yu lost?’
The face which peered through the window at Miss Webster’s London A–Z had two stained yellow teeth and then a large gap. He smelled of beer and cigarettes; he knew exactly where they were and how to get back to the best route. He revealed himself as the hermit, waiting at the crossroads, replete with warnings, the wise man that always accosts the wandering knights.
‘Yu caan’ go into central London now without a ticket,’ he declared. ‘Five pound. Then yu pay parkin’ on top. Twenty-five pound. Yu don’ pay the ticket and yu get fine. Eighty pound.’
The red plastic sofa was the tollgate warning of the Congestion Zone, which had come into being on 17 February 2003. Miss Webster had forgotten all about the Zone. She tapped her fingers on the wheel with irritation. Of course, the Inner London Congestion Zone. It had been discussed endlessly on TV and everyone said that it would never work.
‘We’ll find a car park and go in on the bus.’ Their simple adventure now presented itself as an odyssey fraught with obstacles. The Neighbourhood Watch waved enthusiastically from the sofa as they zoomed backwards down the abandoned street.
It was midday by the time they found a Masterpark in which to abandon the Clio, and Miss Webster’s temper, frazzled by hunger and outrage at the accumulating expense, could no longer be trusted. The cheerful day trip had turned into a royal progress, the road ahead lined by her diminishing stock of £20 notes. She breathed fire and slaughter at the hapless security guard entrusted with the underground car park.
‘I don’t fix the tariffs, lady. Take it up with the management.’
Chérif stood by, like an inexperienced flunkey, embarrassed and desperate, carrying her handbag and umbrella. They decided to eat. The nearest restaurant was vegetarian and appropriately called ‘Manna in the Wilderness’. They gobbled down stuffed aubergines, £11.75 each, and then mounted a calculated assault on John Lewis. Chérif’s clothes, never numerous, were becoming much-washed, faded and shabby. Miss Webster insisted on a summer wardrobe of unostentatious top quality and put it on her credit card. He protested.
‘I’m an old woman, Chérif,’ she argued. ‘I have no children. I have never spent my money on anyone else before. Fais-moi plaisir. I’m the one who has to look at you every morning, so you may as well be easy on the eye. I don’t want other people saying my lodger is dressed like an asylum seeker.’
Miss Webster’s sting lodged in her tongue. She withheld as much as she gave. The shopping folly of the afternoon was a black leather jacket with an arc of red Chinese ideograms across the back.
‘What does it say?’ Chérif expected Miss Webster to know everything.
‘Made in Hong Kong,’ she said.
The wonders of London’s national monuments were rapidly exhausted. Chérif was nonplussed by the Houses of Parliament – he could not see why they should be interesting – and remained reserved on the marvels of queens, and ornamental toy soldiers marching back and forth in front of their barracks. Apparently the kings of his country embarked on extensive palace building projects as soon as they ascended the throne. These massive constructions brought no obvious benefits to the populace, but due to an effective propaganda campaign and many state visits to dilapidated rural areas, the country people loved the present king nevertheless. Chérif stared gloomily at the distant ramparts of Buckingham Palace and showed no interest whatsoever. They settled down with a thermos of tea before the ducks and daffodils in St James’s Park until their bums were too cold to stay put.
‘Ah well,’ said Miss Webster, who wasn’t interested in royalty either, but who had heard they were tourist attractions, ‘King Faruk was the last King of Egypt and he said that by the end of the century there would be only five kings left in the world: the King of Hearts, the King of Diamonds, the King of Clubs, the King of Spades and the King of England.’
‘He was a gambler,’ cried Chérif, delighted, ‘and he was exiled to a casino!’ A biopic of the unfortunate monarch had recently been screened on Channel 4.
‘Do I gather that you are opposed to all monarchies?’ Miss Webster enquired.
‘What good do they bring to their people?’
They pondered the assembled ducks and floods of daffodils, sweeping across the greening lawns. The spring day proved deceptive, for the afternoon dusk now hovered around them, masking the distances, carving deeper shadows on the buildings, lapping their naked hands with cold. And so they slipped into the National Portrait Gallery, not only bent on education and tourism, but to warm their freezing extremities. Miss Webster pulled her hat over her ears. Chérif drew his scarf across his nose. The long escalator bore them aloft to the emptying galleries on the upper floors. But here they got no further than the grandiose jewels of the Tudors: strange, flat, white faces; evil, shifty eyes and gorgeous, cunning textures worked in satins, rubies, pearls. They faced the last great Queen of England, who stood life-size before them, her feet, lopsided and unnatural, crushing the map of her country beneath her. She looked like a gigantic voodoo doll. Robes and furred gowns hide all. Around her stood the clerics and courtiers, their unstable loyalty and probable corruption written across their cheeks and foreheads. Chérif stared into the eyes of the recorded dead, which followed him across the empty floors. Beyond the first gallery stretched room after room of fixed, ageless, unlined faces.
‘What is this place?’ he asked.
‘A memorial. Mostly to men, but there are some famous women here too, who served England, or this culture. It’s a dictionary of faces.’
‘That’s odd. We don’t make images of people except on television or in the newspapers. We don’t even take photographs. No one at home has a camera.’ Miss Webster looked at him sharply. She saw the shadow in the sand before her, the two smiling boys, the endless desert rolling towards eternity.
‘Really? No photographs? I see.’
Shakespeare perused their faces as they hesitated before him. The lights seemed to glitter on his gold earring. He cut a strange figure: knowing, rakish and fat.
‘Almost everybody here is dead,’ remarked Miss Webster. ‘It’s a mausoleum.’ They sat side by side on a bench staring at a very odd portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, who appeared to be wearing a ballet tutu. He posed like a dancing model on the catwalk, his legs tapering, elegant, misshapen.
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�Who was he?’
‘A courtier, a poet. He laid down his silk cloak in the mud and puddles so Queen Elizabeth could walk without getting her feet wet. Or so the story goes.’ Chérif smiled knowingly. So Sir Walter was a flatterer.
‘Then Elizabeth banned him from her court for getting one of her ladies pregnant. I think I read that in Aubrey’s Brief Lives. It’s at home if you’re interested. The good Sir Walter got the Queen’s lady up against one of the trees in the royal park and Aubrey says she was urging him on, or begging him to stop – history doesn’t make that clear – crying “Oh sweet Sir Walter, sweet Sir Walter ...” and as the danger and the pleasure increased the cry became “Sweeserswater, sweeserswater ...”’
Chérif fixed Miss Webster with a wicked grin. ‘I saw a film on Europe 5 before I came to England that was about Queen Elizabeth. That film reminds me of you.’
‘Does it indeed?’ Miss Webster was very flattered. Elizabeth was not beautiful and all her hair had fallen out, but she had been very powerful in her time and had never married. An ability to make extempore speeches in Latin clearly proved useful and apart from some obvious errors in foreign policy, her royal career had been largely successful.
‘Yes,’ said Chérif with real affection, ‘you remind me of Walsingham.’ He pronounced the name ‘Walseenghum’. The image of Elizabeth’s ruthless spymaster loomed before Miss Webster. She got up, less flattered, but vastly amused by this tactless, if astute assessment of her character.
‘Well, there he is.’ She indicated the thin, discerning face, surrounded by a stiff, expensive ruff. ‘He was a clever old bastard.’ She paused. ‘You were doing pretty well in those days if you died of natural causes in your bed and not on the scaffold or with a knife in your eye.’
Chérif looked at Walsingham with fresh respect.
‘Did he kill many people?’
‘Doubtless. That was his job. But he probably didn’t do it himself. He hired assassins. It wasn’t a question of personal revenge. He was the head of Elizabeth’s intelligence services, so he was protecting the state. Or at least I suppose that’s what he thought he was doing.’
They met the royal killer’s cold gaze, steady but enigmatic, fearless of judgement across four hundred years. Then Chérif said something that seemed quite extraordinary to Miss Webster, simply because he had never before used the discourse splattered across the television news, the easy words with unstable meanings.
‘In Islam it is considered wrong to kill for a personal reason. You can only take life when it is demanded by jihad.’ The fact that he had raised the subject at all was completely out of character. The seriousness of his tone was decidedly sinister.
‘And what circumstances might unleash this jihad?’ Miss Webster’s lips curled in a sneer. He commanded her full attention and her feet stopped hurting.
‘It cannot be for personal gain,’ he said firmly, ‘but to protect all the community.’
Miss Webster instantly smelt something odd, and inauthentic, about these comments. Who had he been talking to? Or, worse still, to whom had he begun to listen? Well, at least he wasn’t arguing for honour killings and liquidating women who disgraced the family name. She decided to go no further in this business, or at least to shelve the discussion for the present. Suddenly, she employed those very English weapons: devious good manners and a rapid change of subject.
‘I think there’s a café downstairs,’ she said sweetly. ‘Shall we take the lift?’
Chérif had never been inside a large concert hall or an opera house. The local Edwardian gem where they had supported Carmen Campbell to the last thunderous echo had been his first indoor theatre. This auditorium was constructed on an entirely different scale. He gazed about the wondrous gilt cavern in amazement. It was like a sports stadium or the huge amphitheatres built for fights where Rocky and Spiderman took on the monstrous champion. The steep pitch of the circle and the balcony above was unnerving, but dramatic. Once seated you forgot all about it as the people around you grappled with their bags and programmes and climbed past your knees. He spied on the bustle in the orchestra and watched the bassoons tuning up, fascinated. Miss Webster sank back, exhausted. At last, let someone else do the work. Bring on the dancing girls. How could she have imagined that she could spend the entire day on her feet, trekking round shops and galleries and then be in a fit state for a two-hour drive home?
‘Chérif,’ she hissed, preparing the future, ‘do you mind driving at night?’
‘No. I’ll drive home,’ he volunteered at once.
She nodded with relief and began to decipher the programme.
‘Bugger it. I chose Bizet’s Carmen because I thought it would be sung in French and you’d understand it easily. But it’s all in English.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
And it really didn’t.
Miss Webster could still retrieve the process of deliberation that had led her to choose Carmen. The fact that it ought, at least, to be sung in French was fundamental to her decision, but like many ordinary people who rarely go to the theatre, she discovered that she was also governed by unexamined expectations. Everybody knows the tunes. A torrid tale of adultery with a toreador. And the fast piece gets her comeuppance when he stabs her in the end. Pure melodrama with lots of colourful dancing, enjoy the show and lay your brain to rest. Also, it’s mercifully short. One interval, we’ll be out by eleven, home by one-thirty or two at the latest, buy the early edition of the papers somewhere on the motorway, sleep it all off tomorrow.
She had forgotten that Carmen is a gypsy, and that both the play and the opera conjured up untamed female sexuality, then mounted a genuine debate as to whether said sexual energy should be allowed to rove unchecked. She had forgotten that Carmen never was married to Don José, but that she seduced him away from his duty as a soldier and the good girl of the village whom he was destined to marry. And it had escaped her completely that the final murder was Don José’s last perverted, desperate gesture, to salvage his lost honour; the murder of the woman who represents uncontrolled desire and embodies his enemy within, an erotic freedom which puts all his psychic structures in question.
The ENO production turned out to be sexually explicit and even somewhat shocking. The singer playing Carmen, a voluptuous Romanian soprano with a fabulous profile and a voice that took the roof off the back of your throat, lifted her luminous, terrifying eyes to the doomed soldier. Her sexual presence, musky with excitement, exploded across the stage. Miss Webster remembered that the Opéra-Comique, where Bizet’s Carmen received its first performance, had functioned as a marriage market for nineteenth-century bourgeois French families. You hired a box, displayed your marriageable daughters in low-cut evening gowns, and interviewed prospective suitors in the intervals, all the business conducted in a respectable fashion – public, elegant, proper and discreet. This opera contained some scenes that actually took place in bedrooms. No wonder the whole thing had degenerated into a public scandal.
Miss Webster was not and never had been a feminist. She saw no reason to court any kind of solidarity with the abject victims of this world. And she had no time for other women who whinged about their lot. As she grew older her misanthropy darkened, until she no longer bothered to be polite to anyone, of whatever sex, who dared to say anything stupid. She was therefore disposed to like the character of Carmen, whose intelligence manifested itself as self-interest combined with uncompromising honesty. Carmen’s tendency to work the crowds, and the magnificent habanera, her chosen method of manipulating the mob, seemed not only understandable, but even rather brilliant. That gypsy stood up for herself, whatever the opposition; the first person she knifed was another woman. Full support on that score too, the bitch had probably asked for it; and in any case the victim then demonstrated her worthlessness by scrabbling about for the soldiers, rather than fighting back. Whatever else she had done in her life that might be counted dubious, Miss Webster had never grassed anybody up, not even her hated sister.
Miss Webster suspected that Carmen’s serial passions for soldiers and toreadors revealed a primitive desire to finger forbidden goods, to pull a prize that other women wanted. Her character proved infantile and naïve, and the woman no better than an uncontrolled child in a sweet shop. I’ll have that, and that, and that – simply because I can. Miss Webster had never known the passion that flames and dies. She could credit neither its integrity, nor its force.