Miss Webster and Chérif Read online

  Elizabeth Webster had been autocratic and sharp-tongued. Now she was an old woman. She was therefore fair game.

  You need to know why this has happened to you. Or it will happen again. But nothing ever comes round again. I shall never stand before my class or have the small moments of power and satisfaction every teacher has. I shall never see my pupils succeed nor receive those happy cards when their exams are over. I shall never teach Racine or Flaubert or Gide or Camus or Colette again. Nor will anyone else. The textbooks with the helpful introductions and glossaries are all upstairs in unmarked cardboard boxes, left over from the convent. The soft words of judgement rang in her head. I shall never again be happy, I shall never again be young.

  Elizabeth Webster conjured her own death out of shadows. He whirled before her, skeletal, black-winged. He failed to impress. His visual manifestation seemed stagy and predictable. She possessed no material goods about which she still cared, she loved no other human being; she could therefore afford to dismiss him. One irritable flick of her head and the strange rush of darkness receded. If the world really was clasped in the grip of the Evil One, as the vicar said it was, then the Almighty had failed to assert Himself. He too had been slack in matters of order, discipline, control. She realised, with gathering indifference and contempt, that she believed in nothing. She faced a world that was empty and unsafe. She was on her own.

  She became everything she most despised: querulous, forgetful, indecisive. She tottered down the lane to the shop, propped her sticks in the umbrella stand, then found that she had forgotten what she was doing there. Everyone addressed her in hushed tones. When she tried to be waspish, she uttered platitudes. Her personal carer, a middle-aged mum who talked about her children and cleaned the kitchen, bathroom and downstairs shower with indecent vigour and energy, ticked her off for leaving any hot food on her plate or rotting half-eaten meals in the fridge. Elizabeth came to dread the sound of her key in the outer lock and her cheerful greetings. She insisted that she could manage for at least part of the week on her own and reduced the visits to Tuesdays and Fridays. Then she found herself seized with a sort of joyful paranoia and took to bellowing, ‘And how are we today then, dear?’ to the empty sitting room on the days when she was spared the carer’s presence.

  Her brain was dissolving into a vegetal state. She read French aloud in the evenings to counteract the trend, but heard her own sentences trailing off. The language faded and became unintelligible. She could no longer understand anything that happened on the television. The Radio Times metamorphosed into a jumbled map of instructions written in cramped, meaningless numbers and codes. She slipped in and out of present time when images that she could not interpret lurched across the screen. She once actually confused The Midsomer Murders with the news, and sat there, transfixed, upon the green striped sofa, horrified that the BBC dared to show real bodies of rich people butchered in their desirable residences. She turned off the television and stared into space.

  She forgot to wash, then found herself tugged back into the world by disgust at her own stench. She began to avoid her visitors. Someone on the parish council sent round his gardener to re-establish order in the undergrowth. The woods invaded her garden. She saw badgers and foxes cruising across the remains of her lawn. Their eyes glowed, phosphorescent in the light from the kitchen. She had long ceased to care, but the village was upset. Everyone remembered the luxurious perfection of Miss Webster’s cottage garden. The gardener must be sent in, for the look of the thing. As he hacked and pruned, Miss Webster realised that she loathed honeysuckle, mock orange, clematis and sweet peas. She wished her plucky row of gladioli at the bottom of the sea. She planned a world of asphalt and stone, clamped over the rampant upward thrust of green. I want a world where nothing grows. Once more, she had come to a halt. Everything else that progressed, evolved and flourished was an offence to her tired eyes. On the days when she was safe from the carer she no longer bothered getting up or getting dressed. She lived in the last house at the end of the lane. Few people ever passed. She settled down to face the wall.

  Eventually she was roused by the itching on her scalp. Her unwashed long hair, descending over her shoulders like a witch’s crown, smelt dank and fishy in the August heat. She sensed her own uncomfortable descent into the lower depths. I’m falling to pieces, she grimaced at the mirror. Her sister’s mask-like face, all the lines stretched away, tucked behind the ears and underneath the chin, sneered back at her.

  ‘Look at you, you disgusting old crone.’

  Elizabeth Webster flung all her hatred at the mirror, then staggered away to the bathroom to get dressed.

  She took the bus into town, as she had not driven the car for months. It lay under green canvas in the garage, the battery irreparably flat. Elizabeth Webster never travelled by bus. Behold the lower depths of rural public transport. The huge blue vehicle grunted to a standstill, filled with exhausted, deranged and decrepit people. She had never seen any of them before. She didn’t have an appointment so she slunk into her usual hairdresser’s and sank into a seat by the door, waiting to be noticed. The girl who had always washed her hair in the old days was a sweet plump blonde called Sophie. She had been promoted to junior stylist in Elizabeth’s absence and now wore a smart white shirt, nail polish and a little badge. She didn’t recognise Elizabeth. But Elizabeth didn’t recognise her either.

  ‘Good afternoon, madam. Do you have an appointment?’

  Elizabeth rose up unsteadily, clutching her sticks. She swayed over the small table, shabby and hesitant, still clutching a gossip magazine filled with celebrity weddings and conspiracy theories. Sophie rummaged through her list. The dryers roared behind her.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Miss Webster?’ Something in the voice made the girl look up.

  Sophie forgot both her manners and how to be diplomatic in the face of catastrophe.

  ‘Oh Miss Webster! What’s happened to you? Your beautiful hair! It’s awful, it’s ruined.’

  She rushed round the desk to take Elizabeth’s hand and to touch the tangled, filthy mess that was tied back with orange plastic strips torn off the bottom of a bin bag. No part of the ensemble that had been Elizabeth Webster had been heralded by anyone as beautiful, no, not for decades. Those on the receiving end of her tongue had called her a hatchet-faced bitch; beauty didn’t come into it. Those who admired her courage and asperity never dared to open their mouths. Not even to utter compliments. It took someone as simple and ordinary as the girl from the hairdresser’s, utterly unaware of the dragon’s teeth, to speak the truth and to recognise the extent of the calamity that had befallen the old woman. Her hair had indeed been beautiful – thick, gleaming, heavy, a clear lucid grey shot through with shafts of pure white. It had never been coloured, it had never been thin.

  Sophie gathered her up and ushered her to a safe and private corner.

  ‘You’ve been very ill. I can see that you’ve been very ill. Come and sit down over here. I’ll fetch your sticks.’

  Sophie plucked at the remains of the bin bag in horror. The shop barely noticed the intrusion. Elizabeth Webster looked dingy, ragged and frail. She had therefore become invisible. But Sophie could still see her, and it was this that moved Elizabeth to tears. Her face was wiped with warm scented towels; she allowed the kind young hands to scrub her mouldering scalp and spread out the disaster on the draining board.

  ‘Thank you, Sophie,’ she murmured again and again, ‘thank you.’

  She had all her hair cut off. It was the only acceptable solution. A new face emerged beneath the scissors, with a spiky butch bob. She looked like Gertrude Stein, square, unsmiling, resolute. As she stared back at the unadorned and shrunken head, which now looked curiously fresh and naked, she managed to hint at a smile.

  ‘Thank you, Sophie, thank you very much. That will be fine.’

  She missed one appointment with Dr Broadhurst and the hospital began a campaign of harassment. His assistant pestered her with tr
oublesome phone calls at odd times, catching her off guard. They offered her a row of emergency appointments, pinned her down to dates and times and arranged for the day ambulance to pick her up. She retaliated, arrived early in a taxi, and sat down, savage in the waiting room. For the first time she sallied forth without her sticks. She felt insecure without them, but refused to yield.

  I come and go as I choose. The consultant’s assistant eyed her up, irritated. And so she alighted once more in the quiet room looking across the gardens towards the beech trees with the doctor sitting, calm and expectant, before her. She touched his damaged hands without looking down at them, as if she were verifying his identity. The uneven purple skin felt dry and scratched, like the bark of an old tree. He turned them over. The rough surface of the doctor’s palms marked the distance she had travelled.

  ‘Your haircut is very smart.’

  ‘None of my clothes fit.’

  ‘Good excuse to buy new ones. Are you eating three meals every day? I bet you’re not.’

  Silence.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’ve told you who I am. You know who I am.’

  ‘All right then. You tell me where I should go. What I must do.’

  ‘You are to go far, far away from here. You will find a country that is francophone. Then you will be at home in the language. But you must not go to France itself as that is a country you know too well. Everything must be different – the culture, the people, the food. You must go somewhere that is very strange to you, somewhere that is utterly unknown, and then you will be told what to do.’

  There was a long, long silence. And it struck her as odd that inside this silence she could hear nothing, neither the sounds of the mowers in the gardens, nor the traffic on the bypass, which usually hummed and hissed in a tense, swift rush at midday, nor the soft tap of the computers in the neighbouring office. Then she heard the doctor’s voice again, coming towards her like an approaching procession that she had last seen at a great distance.

  ‘I’m going to change your prescription. I want you to take these tiny pills four times a day. One at each meal and one before you go to bed. I’ll write to your GP and let him know.’

  Elizabeth Webster had the distinct impression that a brief rift in time had gaped open and swallowed her grasp of the remembered present. Had she hallucinated the doctor’s command to depart into the wilderness? What was still real? She left the room clutching a National Health prescription with instructions to go straight to the hospital pharmacy and then to seek out a desert on the rim of the world.

  My pills.

  Where are my pills?

  She scrabbled at the bottom of her handbag. My papers? My passport? Oh God, I’ve given them all to that Arab in pink. I must have been mad. She looked up at the black man, anguished and frantic.

  ‘My pills. I haven’t taken my pills.’

  ‘May I hold your other bag? Then you can look for them.’

  He relieved her of the tartan hold-all. She retrieved the pills. Everything she had packed was still there. Elizabeth Webster twitched and shook, paranoid and insecure, fearful of strangers. But she was no longer on home ground. Anger and despair are emotions that need a secure base and known surroundings to flourish in tranquillity. She had begun to loathe her garden, her house, her furniture and her television because they were all still there, battered but intact, while she fretted and struggled against the process of dissolution. But here she was, in the transitional flux of a foreign airport, where the air felt thrice-breathed, and all known markers vanished, swallowed down by the strangeness of the languages around her. Despair thrives on stagnation. Elizabeth Webster had packed her bags and moved on. She was no longer angry either, for the place was too strange. She had been shaken out of her hole, like the vixen that had missed the sound of the hunt breaking cover and found herself exposed in open fields. She blinked, bewildered and unsettled, at the black man whose steady, abstract gaze met her own.

  He had stretched out a small pile of documents before her as if awaiting her judgement and inspection. Here was the sullen black girl with dreadlocks coiled round her head like the Medusa. CRIME OF PASSION KILLER GOES FREE. And here was another image of a glamorous woman in a lavish blue dress, her breasts shiny with light, making love to a microphone. TRAGIC FATE OF JAZZ SINGER. She peered more closely at the huge eyes mired in dreadlocks. The coils were decorated with tiny shells and eyeless faces. Crimes of passion. Was it a crime to be passionate? Were these dead girls the images of the women the old black man was pledged to avenge? She leaned over the photographs.

  ‘Lost, lost,’ she murmured.

  ‘She is lost to me,’ agreed the black man and the disconcerted Miss Webster realised that the photographs had deceived her. The glamorous woman and the mutinous street girl were one and the same.

  And now before her fluttered the sudden apparition of the pink satin Arab, whose moustache vibrated with polite formulas.

  ‘Voilà, Madame! I have checked the flight and confirmed that your luggage will be transferred. Everything is written down here for you. We will escort you to internal departures.’

  She was marched across the atrium to yet another security gate. The guards stood at ease, watching the shifting lines of passengers, their hands on their machine guns.

  ‘There are lots of soldiers.’ Elizabeth scuttled anxiously between her two guardians, only just keeping up.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the Arab, ‘there have been other threats since the last attacks.’

  ‘Attacks?’

  The black man shrugged, irritated.

  ‘Don’t alarm Miss Webster, Hassan. The level of alert here is no worse than London.’

  But the Arab was bent on terrifying explanations.

  ‘It was all most unfortunate – two terrorist attacks, on a hotel and on a restaurant, within minutes of each other. Everyone is saying that it is Al-Qaida, but nothing has been proved. This kind of thing puts off the tourists. People feel unsafe.’

  She contemplated death by unseen and unsolicited explosion. This seemed far less terrible than being lost in the street. They reached the departure gate for internal flights. The two men began making noises of reassurance and farewell. She returned their kindness with whispers of gratitude. She could never repay their generosity. The black man raised his hand as if he was silencing a congregation; then he began a speech.

  ‘Miss Webster, here is my card. This is my mobile number, which will work in this country. But put 00 44 in front of the number and drop the first 0. It will then work like an international call. I am here in Casablanca at the Grand Hôtel Royal. If you are in any further trouble please do not hesitate to call me.’

  She peered at his name. Percival Leroy Jones in silver italics. There was a lunatic pomposity in the embossed pretentiousness, but a posh address in St John’s Wood backed up his self-importance. She clutched the card. He bowed.

  ‘And now we will escort you to your flight.’

  As she watched them walk away down the concourse she noticed that the black man rested his hand on his companion’s shoulder. The younger man looked up, trusting, comfortable. She saw their unlikely colours, pink, white, touching, merging, as they gathered one another closer to pass through the crowd. They looked – and sounded – like men from two radically severed worlds, but their obvious intimacy suggested years of shared experiences. Their connection was palpable, unequivocal. They were friends.

  2

  Taxi Driver

  Someone had blundered. She ended up in an expensive hotel far outside the great walls of the kasbahs, rising one above each other with their dark medieval streets, and far from the balconied buildings of the old colonial town. This was a smart new hotel with a view of seven palm trees and the endless desert beyond. The taxi stopped in twilight. Opposite the hotel entrance she perceived a dim expanse without colour, lights or buildings. Far away, a truck, its canvas roof torn and flapping, lurched down a long straight road, raising a giant cloud of dust which
never settled but simply lengthened, like a jet’s trail. The air tasted of cooling dust. Half a dozen children doubled up like empty gunny sacks were loitering beside the hotel’s entrance, under the red walls and towering oleanders just beyond the security gates. They sprang into action as she reeled out of the car, and tried to snatch her bags. ‘Un cadeau, un cadeau,’ they shrieked in chorus. The taxi driver shouted back in a language she had never heard before. Elizabeth Webster beat them off with one of her sticks.

  ‘They just want to help.’ The taxi driver glared at her and rang the bell.

  The receptionist and the porter looked like costumed extras on the set of Indiana Jones and the Desert of Doom. The woman was wearing chains of gold: gold falling from her ears, gold encircling her neck, gold draped in her hair, and a long black gown with a tight bodice, stitched sequins sparkling. The porter was stuffed into a tomato-red uniform with gold buttons and a fez. The glittering tassel swung madly round his head as he drove the children back under the wall. Suddenly the feeble twilight was engulfed by the black pool behind them. All the light sank into the ground. They retreated into the illuminated courts. Who had paid the taxi? Elizabeth Webster now felt very uncertain on her feet. She looked up, steadying herself on the gravel with her sticks. A large blue and yellow neon script announced the hotel bar as the Desert Rendezvous and promised a Foretaste of Paradise at Happy Hour. She heard voices and shrieking giggles. A long facade of identical pointed doorways faced a courtyard of rustling bougainvillea and tiled fountains. She could smell jasmine and sense textures, but could not distinguish any colours. Elizabeth Webster decided that she had at last arrived in hell. She was hot, she was dirty, she was tired, she was limping, she was old, she was late.