Miss Webster and Chérif Read online

  ‘Yes. Your GP has come every week. He’s in constant touch with me. Your vicar and his wife have come twice a week ever since you’ve been here. They bring you fresh flowers from your own garden every time. They have the keys to your house. They have watered your plants and seen to the lawns. They have written to your family in Canada, who are, I believe, your closest living relations.’

  Elizabeth Webster looked at Dr Broadhurst’s ugly face and thinning, oily hair in horror.

  ‘I didn’t tell them to fuck off, did I?’

  ‘And much, much worse. Where did you learn to swear like that? You must have been in the Navy.’ The doctor boomed his incredulity and appreciation. They could hear him in the corridor. She sat before the desk, no longer innocent, but open-mouthed, appalled.

  ‘One of your ex-colleagues has been here too. Can’t remember his name. He was very impressed. He said that you were excellent at keeping order. Now we all know how you did it.’

  So that’s what had poured out of her – a torrent of enraged filth. The doctor met her eye, suddenly serious.

  ‘It’s quite normal. It often happens. I had a patient with early dementia who told us all that we were rotten, rat-arsed cunts and meant every word of it.’

  ‘I haven’t got dementia.’ Elizabeth Webster was decisive.

  ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘you haven’t.’

  ‘Then what have I got?’

  ‘You haven’t got anything that we can understand. You just came to a dead halt. And you were very ill indeed. And then you became very angry. And now we have to find out why.’

  She looked him in the eye. Her lips hardened into a thin white line. Her chin came up.

  ‘But if you do know why, you’re under no obligation to say anything whatsoever. You’re in hospital, not under arrest.’ He was being conciliatory, humouring her.

  ‘Don’t patronise me.’ She warned him off.

  ‘Wouldn’t dare,’ said Dr Broadhurst and spread out his ghastly hands before her in a gesture of surrender.

  There was a long pause. She saw someone in the gardens, shouting silent orders above the sputter of a mower. She smelt the cut grass of high summer and heard the buzzing from within the great yellow corneas of the daisies. The world glowed magnified, surreal. She sensed something huge, eyeless, breathing, close to her. The doctor sat at ease in the uncanny silence. And now the revolt that was boiling within her began to take shape. She was not under any obligation to apologise for who she was or to justify herself. She had no immediate answers or explanations, but she had that huge, long rage of the warriors who are never defeated, the wounded who die with their swords bared and bloodied, their eyes fixed on the approaching enemy. Miss Webster’s insurrection took the form of refusing to play ball with the eminent consultant. Why should she do all the talking?

  ‘Speak,’ she commanded.

  ‘Have a chocolate?’ He held out a lavish box decorated with a range of snow-capped peaks, each separate segment of dark, bitter chocolate wrapped in silver paper. She ignored him.

  ‘I speak French,’ he began to explain, apropos of nothing at all, ‘because my wife is Swiss. She speaks French and German and we have a house at Vevey, above the lake. Your GP told me that you were a French teacher and that you had a passion for the language. That is why I spoke to you in French. You wouldn’t listen to English any more. I thought that you might listen to the language you loved, if not to me.’

  She nodded. He was telling the truth. Suddenly he leaned across the desk as if he were confiding a secret.

  ‘Miss Webster – or Elizabeth – you haven’t yet said that I may call you Elizabeth – I don’t think that you are mad. I know that you have not had a stroke. You have had – or are having – a complex form of complete breakdown. Your heart is affected, but the attack was not caused by any form of heart disease. I am a cardiologist, but I am also a psychiatrist. Whatever is wrong needs to be acknowledged, and I really cannot know what is wrong until you tell me. You need to know why this has happened to you, or it will happen again. And you will die, unknowing.’

  She did not answer him. Instead she stared past the doctor’s shoulder at the huge copper beech swaying in the gardens, the branches stretching low on to the fresh damp grass.

  ‘You may call me Elizabeth,’ she said.

  He nodded, pleased.

  ‘I want to go home.’

  He rubbed his repulsive butchered palms together.

  ‘Good, good,’ he said.

  She was obstinate and courageous in front of Dr Broadhurst, but it was quite another matter entering the house she had left behind her on a windy night in March, nearly three months earlier. She came back in the ambulance. Dr Brody was waiting on the doorstep. He had read ‘deceased’ rather than ‘discharged’ on the fax that arrived in the surgery, and rang the hospital in a panic. Now he stood, wrong-footed, embarrassed, fiddling with the keys, hoping that no one had betrayed his mistake in an excess of black humour. Miss Webster was preoccupied with more basic problems than her own death, which she had always assumed would be beyond her power to organise and control. She had practised walking in the hospital, but was still dangerously unsteady on rough ground. The lane with its dips and puddles presented a frightening terrain. She concentrated on keeping herself vertical with the two canes they had given her and avoided the doctor’s eye. He had seen her at her worst in the hospital: toothless, hair unwashed and tortured into thin grey plaits, stinking, abusive, unkempt. She had suddenly become old and mad.

  Now she was wearing a shabby pair of trousers, borrowed from the hospital and her once smart cardigan, which swayed about her bony shoulders in horrid folds. Her grey skin dangled in slack sheets around her neck and jaw. The bridge was back in place, but it no longer fitted and a sinister new row of puckered lines furrowed her upper lip. Her watch, carefully returned to her in a labelled envelope, now hung loose upon her wrist. Some of the jewellery she had been wearing had disappeared. Her gold and pearl earrings, which had once belonged to her grandmother, had clip-on fixtures. The women of her family took the view that only prostitutes had their ears pierced. Jewellery often simply vanished in the hospital. No one had ever seen the little clips of pearl and gold. Or so they said. She had been a trim but solid woman, five foot five, weighing in at eleven stone. Now she staggered towards her own front door like a dilapidated spider, propped up by walking sticks.

  ‘No, I can manage.’ She pushed back the doctor and the staff from the ambulance.

  Someone had had a go at the garden. The foxgloves and hollyhocks were enormous, but the smoky blue ceanothus had been clipped and contained. The French rose, wrenched away from the windows, sported a fabulous torrent of pale pink blooms. Unscented. The old climbing roses had no scent at all. All their beauty was in opulence. Dr Brody dealt with the ambulance. She looked at his hunched back and balding head. He too was getting old. An old man helping an old patient, a retired spinster who used to fit all the polite clichés: game old bird, sharp as a button, spry and fit for someone her age, iron constitution, never misses a thing, she has a clever way of putting things, never wastes her words. Wasted. She had been laid waste. She had stopped dead in her tracks and the horror hurtling along behind her, like a convoy of articulated lorries, had simply piled into her back. She was flattened in the crash.

  ‘Miss Webster? May I help you in?’

  Dr Brody, whom she had told to stick the thermometer up his own arse and go fuck himself, was bowing and bobbing like an eighteenth-century gentleman. How on earth was the old girl going to manage? Surely she had been discharged far too soon? She could see it on his face. Someone had cleaned out and re-stocked the fridge. There was a carton of milk, a packet of processed cheese, eggs, butter, half a dozen tomatoes. The vase to the left of the television was full of fresh-cut garden flowers. She sank into an upright wooden chair that faced the windows and the open meadows beyond, so that she did not have to confront the kindness of unseen hands or the obnoxious bouquet. She could not sto
mach unsolicited generosity. She felt the bile rising again. Down hysterica passio. Let me rot. Leave me be.

  Dr Brody was fussing, making suggestions. She heard the gentle stream resolving into words such as ‘tomorrow’, ‘your personal carer’ and ‘meals on wheels’. She made one last tremendous effort to remove him from her front room without shouting.

  ‘Thank you, Dr Brody. I shall be quite all right.’

  She tried smiling reassurance. Smile at them. Then they go away and leave you alone. But the smile had become a fixed rictus before she could persuade him to leave. He backed out through the porch and into the lane, still distributing offers of assistance. She shrank into her trembling heap of oversized and disinfected clothes, then closed her eyes.

  She did not retire, she did not resign, she was pushed out, rejected as one of the unrepentant ancien régime facing a new dispensation. The three schools in her neighbourhood had been restructured; St Winifred’s, the old Catholic girls only, where she had been French mistress for over thirty years, was absorbed into a much tougher catchment area. Elizabeth Webster had been educating the nation to the best of her abilities. This meant the discipline of grammar, the rigorous pursuit of beauty in poetry, civilising the wild and discouraging drugs and eye make-up. The teachers at the convent had been like the nuns, authoritative, sincere, possessed of a vocation. But now the language of education was transformed around her; here was a new breed of teachers who had not heard the call, did not much care about their subjects, were given to fiddling with their computers rather than reading books, yet were busy moulding their careers in education. They carried clipboards and worried about the school’s position in the league tables. She was told that she could not go on teaching the old syllabus. What use was Corneille? Racine? Molière? She was urged to modernise. The language of l’informatique, economics, journalism, that’s the coming thing. Business French will be of more use to them. They have to understand the finance pages.

  Ce prince dont mon cóur se faisait autrefois

  Avec tant de plaisir redire les exploits

  À qui même en secret, je m’étais destinée ...

  Racine no longer made their hearts beat faster. She used to pack at least half a dozen Catholic girls, desperate for sex, their heads full of Phèdre, into assorted colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Now they wanted to do Media, Film and Communication Studies at universities of which Miss Webster had never heard. What is to be done? Elizabeth Webster fought a quiet but incisive campaign of rational resistance. She was, to use their jargon, ‘managed out’ over a period of two years. They reduced her timetable, then accused her of not pulling her weight. She was offered a tight-fisted early retirement package. They were liquidating the dinosaur. Time to take care of your roses, dear.

  Elizabeth Webster did not go quietly. She made a scene in the headmaster’s office. She involved the union, who thought she was mad, but did their best to improve the package. She refused to be thanked or given a retirement present. In any case she hardly knew any of her colleagues any more. Only one of the nuns still sat on the board of governors. The old guard had all been eased out and were glad to go. The young new teachers regarded her as an unnecessary antiquity, a dated porcelain piece of little value that would soon fall from the shelf of its own accord. That was the order of things. She was being brushed aside by a giant wave of ignorance and mediocrity, all action taken in the name of a great love for lists and systems. She packed up her classroom and her office in one afternoon and drove off in a rage. She took all the literature textbooks. No one tried to stop her. She sent back her keys by registered post and never set foot in the building again. Her anger remained, undiminished.

  But anger proved to be an expensive luxury. Elizabeth Webster had never married. Women of her generation made a choice: marriage and children, or an independent career. Her mother chose marriage, the large country house and the two daughters. The inexorable logic of family life took hold and the mother had then, over decades, been gently but firmly bullied into her green grave. Elizabeth’s younger sister made off to Canada as soon as she could save up enough money for the ticket and never came back. She married a rich man, but she still went out to work. The Christmas photographs of houses, dogs and children became ever larger and more affluent over the years. Finally they came by DHL Express, wonderfully wrapped in stiff gilt frames. Miss Webster’s younger sister took her husband’s name and attended the family funerals. These two things represented her concessions to convention; she tolerated nothing else. She abhorred the death-bed scenes and waited until all was quiet before booking her flight. She too now spoke beautiful French and she dressed with great taste in strong colours and matching accessories. In middle age she paid for a facelift and wore the kind of high heels that Elizabeth had banned, even in the sixth form.

  ‘I was always terrified of becoming like you. You more than Mother, although she was bad enough.’ Her sister was all candour and unpleasantness as soon as they had tucked their father neatly into the soft loam. ‘I used to wake up dreaming that I had become you. My husband tells me that I screamed and screamed.’

  And with that she sauntered back to her land of short, humid summers, emptiness and blizzards. Her responsibilities towards hearth and kin were now complete. The Christmas photographs stopped that year and Miss Elizabeth Webster never heard from her sister again.

  What am I like that you were so afraid of degenerating into a resemblance? She got up and looked into the mirror above the telephone. There she saw a stranger’s face, old, wizened, shrunken. The eyes glowered misty and huge, the nose protruded like a d×mon’s beak, the hair sank crushed and lifeless against the scalp. She had once nourished a very handsome chignon, which she could coil up into an elegant roll and secure with a tortoiseshell comb. Her appearance could not be considered elegant once she turned forty. She was too solid for elegance, but at least she had been smart and suitable, a middle-class English lady of a certain age, fitted out with all the trimmings, like a well-painted dumpy steamer, managing her affairs, brandishing car keys and briefcase, her savings accounts bulging and replete. Now she looked like a plague victim.

  Well, my sister, was this what you saw? My future and yours?

  She had been forced out of the school five years earlier, lived alone as she had always done, and saw very few other people beyond the inhabitants of Little Blessington. She went to Waitrose once a week. She offered French literature classes to the University of the Third Age, but nobody was interested. They already had a retired professor teaching existentialism. And after all, her fate was not so strange. Many women find themselves alone in their late sixties. Husbands die, children grow up and move to other parts of the country – or turn out to be monsters. There are no insurance policies against loneliness. She had never built any close friendships with anyone; she was self-sufficient and suspicious. Other people either asked you for money or made you listen to their life stories. She had no idea which was worse.

  So she joined the bridge club. This was peopled with her kind, a dozen elderly and well-heeled locals: embittered, ironic, eccentric and morose, too savagely disillusioned even to contemplate voting Tory, excellent at cards and intent on winning every game. They played for small sums. No one ever spoke at great length. Her usual partners were men of few words. Only one other woman was a member of the club, the leather-faced wife of a gentleman farmer. The bridge club got on well with Elizabeth Webster, who gave no fatal signs of being feminine and enjoyed a drink. They sent her one Get Well card during her three months in hospital and none of them came to visit her. The bridge club regarded her as one of the Fallen. Someone else took her place.

  On the whole, Miss Webster did not like men. She had not liked her father. She did not like the headmaster, who had done his best to have her sacked. She was not fond of the vicar, who was earnest and sincere, yet medieval in his theology. He feared, with some justice, that the entire world was held fast in the grip of the Evil One and endeavoured to work Satan’s prese
nce into his sermon on Christmas morning. She did not much like Dr Brody, who fussed and twittered. She did not like men who offered to help and assumed that she couldn’t start the car, carry the bags, shovel snow, chop down trees, decapitate the hedge. But there was now an exception. She admired the hideous man with the mutilated hands because he spoke her language and commanded her respect.

  Her small store of bottles was dusty and undisturbed. She poured herself a large whisky. The phone rang. She let it ring and ring and ring.

  And so it was, during that summer early on in the new century, that year from which a slice was simply lost, remaining alive became an enormous task that was almost too much for her. She knew that she was being difficult, but she found it impossible to admit that she was no longer self-sufficient, and that her odious, garrulous personal carer had become essential. The shopping grew in scale and weight until she felt like Sisyphus, facing the stone. Her sister finally managed to get through on the telephone, late one night when Elizabeth was sitting staring at the blank screen, too discouraged and demoralised even to turn on the news.

  ‘I thought something like this might happen to you. You were always so damned righteous when it happened to other people. Don’t expect any help from me.’

  ‘Have you rung up just to tell me that?’

  ‘You’ve got enough money, haven’t you? Make the best of it.’

  It was an evil reckoning.

  Why should we listen to you, you old cow? One of the children, caught smoking on the school steps had said that to her face. They were little vultures; they knew she was on the way out. They scented the kill. In her day the children had knocked on the staff-room door and begun their sentences with ‘Please, Miss, may I ...’ Now they arrived in their own cars, flirted with the younger staff and smoked openly, without let or hindrance, even when they were still wearing school uniform. She bit her lip. Meaning had evaporated from all her maxims and certainties. What mattered? Discipline, order, control. The younger children jeered at her from a safe distance. They skulked behind the privet on the way to the car park and made loud farting noises when she lowered her arse on to the driver’s seat.