Miss Webster and Chérif

by Patricia Duncker

  She folded her arms and set her jaw like an angry mastiff. The officer nodded and stood up. As he stepped out of the porch he asked one last question.

  ‘Has Mr Al Faraj ever mentioned a woman named Carmen Campbell?’

  The final question. They always withhold the most important question until they are almost gone. You’re off your guard, relaxed. The interview is over. But this is the javelin they have come to throw. This is the thing they really want from their hapless informants. This is the moment of betrayal.

  A poster on a theatre wall rose up before Miss Webster. She expected to see the singer, gleaming in her second skin of cobalt blue, but instead a terrified child, her head a mass of decorated dreads, glared, aghast, menaced, out of an inner dark. Carmen. Is it a crime to be passionate? Is it a crime to care? Is it a crime to love someone, no matter what she has done or what the law says she deserves? The glittering eyes of the fugitive begged Miss Webster not to speak.

  ‘Carmen Campbell? Never heard of her,’ lied Miss Webster with ferocious conviction, ‘and no, he hasn’t ever mentioned the name.’

  She arranged her face into a fixed, unsmiling mask and stared him down. He climbed back into his nondescript blue Ford, which was blocking the lane, without thanking her or taking any kind of formal leave, and drove off. He had not looked at her again. As she backed into the cottage her eye rested on the CD, perched on the television set, the spare and elegant face of the outlaw jazz singer met her with a half-smile of gratitude. And there in gleaming italic script she saw the name, Carmen Campbell, Best of. The plain-clothes officer could have been looking past her straight into the singer’s eyes. Miss Webster took a hefty swig from the sherry bottle without bothering to find a glass, her knees and hands suddenly unstable and twitching. Anger had a galvanising effect on Elizabeth Webster, who always stood four square in a rage. She never trembled with fury. This was fear.

  Chérif had lost a lot of weight and Karen voiced her worries. ‘Should we take him to see Dr Brody or Dr Humphreys?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Miss Webster, ‘he’ll put it on again. Anyway, think of the Duchess of Windsor. She said you could never be too thin or too rich.’

  Karen had never heard of the Duchess of Windsor. Miss Webster grinned.

  ‘Don’t worry, my dear. She was a naughty American lady who came to no good – living proof that you can be too stupid and too fascist. I think that we have to get Chérif out of this unhealthy country for a while. His exams end on 12 May and I’ve got tickets for the 14th. Don’t tell him yet. It’s a surprise. I want you to send an e-mail to Abdou, asking him to meet the flight. I’m hoping that you’ll come next time when the house-buying boom is over.’

  ‘I’d love to see where he lives. He doesn’t talk about it much. He hasn’t invited me.’ Karen clearly brooded on Chérif’s evasiveness. ‘What’s his mum like?’

  ‘Tough, glamorous, ambitious. All good qualities in a woman, my dear. Cultivate them.’

  Karen straightened her miniskirt in the dining-room mirror, which hung above the pine cabinet with the drinks and glasses. The mirror tilted forwards, thus giving her a rather splendid cleavage.

  ‘That’s right, you’ll do nicely,’ said Miss Webster. She had not mentioned the officer’s visit to anyone else. She kept this troubling development to herself.

  On 1 May 2003 George Bush declared that major hostilities in Iraq were at an end. They sat watching the looters destroying the offices of Saddam’s administration. A cheerful man in a dirty T-shirt pushed a television away in a wheelbarrow. He made a V-sign to the cameras. Behind him huge coils of black smoke boiled out of the ravaged blank windows. Broken glass and wrecked vehicles littered the roadways. A masked gunman retreated behind a garden wall, then ducked down, his gun still visible, the single eye of the barrel pointed at the audience. The whole world held its breath as this new beast, its hour come round at last, reared its back on the streets of Baghdad. Miss Webster pursed her lips grimly and Chérif covered his face.

  ‘It’s not over, is it?’ said Karen, desperate to hear the comfort of her own voice, sounding through the calm of an English evening in late spring.

  ‘No,’ said Miss Webster, ‘it’s not over.’

  She was excited as they began their descent into Casablanca and peered out of the window at the approaching white lights. But Chérif appeared to hold his breath, ready for a plunge into the abyss. He sat braced for impact, his eyes tight shut. Faced with three thugs, all far larger than he was, and an inevitable bloody doom, Chérif fought back, clearly courageous to the point of being foolhardy. She diagnosed fear of flying, with possible added indigestion, and offered him a honey pastille. He refused.

  ‘We’ll have to change planes. It’ll mean taking off again.’ Chérif took the sweet. He didn’t open his eyes, but sucked hard. The wheels bucked down on to the runway in a series of alarming bangs and one of the overhead lockers flew open. A few passengers grunted in alarm, but Chérif never flinched, as if gathering all his strength for some terrible trial that was awaiting him in the salle d’attente. His replies shrank to alarming monosyllables; his colour drained away.

  ‘Are you sick?’ Elizabeth Webster leaned over, genuinely worried on his behalf. Her own stomach, apparently made of tin, and trained on school dinners, never rumbled or wobbled, whatever the circumstances. Fearlessness defined her character, the danger of terrorism never entered her head, and as for planes – she no longer cared if they dropped from the sky in droves, like dead pigeons.

  ‘Yes. A bit.’

  ‘What are you afraid of?’

  He turned to look at her, but said nothing. The flashing lights on the wingtips gleamed across the cabin windows. She returned his gaze, astonished by the upheaval in his eyes: fear, regret, anguish, tears. This last look bore the shadows of a leave-taking, an unmistakable farewell.

  ‘Chérif! What is the matter?’

  A babble of Arabic thanked them for choosing Royal Air Maroc and everyone leaped out of their seats and dragged coats out of lockers. A baby began to wail, slightly off-key and at intervals filled with splutters, then he pitched his yells an octave lower, deepening to a terrifying rhythmic howl. Chérif got up and grabbed her hand luggage.

  ‘Please, Madame Webster. I will carry that.’

  She was in two minds whether to stop him in his tracks and demand an answer or to let it all go; but people pushing behind him down the narrow aisles, struggling into jackets and cardigans, grappling with enormous packets, nudged the moment aside. They were swept asunder until well inside the tunnel leading to the airport.

  ‘Are you ill?’

  He had recovered his colour a little. She relaxed, reassured.

  ‘Well, I suppose you’ve only ever flown once before. Had you ever been in a plane before you flew to England?’

  Chérif didn’t appear to be interested in the question. He bought her a small plastic glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and then sat quietly beside her, silent and preoccupied. Elizabeth Webster was not a woman to plague other people when they were troubled by moods, but she did think it was peculiar that he seemed so uninterested in his own country. He had been gone for eight months. Why wasn’t he excited to be coming home? The Moroccan immigration boys stared enviously and at length at his student visa. They even held it upside down. No one raised an eyebrow at his elderly female companion with the British passport. Miss Webster surveyed the dawdling groups around her, seized with an uncanny sense of déjà vu. I have sat here, at this very table, with an unknown black man before me and a newspaper spread out upon this spangled plastic top: CRIME OF PASSION KILLER GOES FREE. She looked at Chérif. What had he done? She tried one more question.

  ‘Are you missing Karen?’

  He nodded.

  ‘But you’ll see her again.’

  He shrugged.

  Elizabeth gave up and dug out her airport thriller. The plot shifted around the question of doubles. One of the twins was a murderer. But which one? Only when they
were climbing the steps on to a smaller jet, bound for the Sahara, and Chérif gave her his hand to help her aboard, did she notice that his flesh felt grotesquely cold. The air breathed warm and dry around them, the night perfectly clear. Far above, barely visible, a faint torrent of stars fluttered. The smaller transfer plane across the Atlas Mountains bulged full of travellers, and they found themselves wedged in between some chattering Spaniards, the only other Europeans.

  ‘Chérif.’ She gave him a prod. ‘Is there something you aren’t telling me?’

  He shrank down into his Bruce Lee leather jacket, but did not speak.

  ‘Are you in trouble?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Have you done something wrong?’

  He raised his head and looked her straight in the eye, the grim film of guilt clearing away from his face. The truth tasted like fresh water on his tongue.

  ‘Yes, Madame Webster. I have done something terribly wrong.’

  ‘And are you going to tell me what it is?’

  ‘Mesdames! Messieurs! Attachez vos ceintures.’

  The flight lasted thirty-five minutes. Her ears ached. The Spaniards gabbled. Chérif said absolutely nothing, but sat there rigid, like a man condemned, sentenced and awaiting the last walk towards the post against the wall and the firing squad. Elizabeth Webster’s patience dissolved, her temper mounted alongside her increasing irritation. By the time the plane had cleared the Atlas Mountains, she was bubbling with rage. She hadn’t brought him home to make him wretched, but to give him pleasure. Her anger simmered at his remote refusal to confide in her or to ask for her help. It never occurred to her to worry about what he might have done. In her experience young people generated crises of their own that expanded into mountains of potential horror, but which resulted in no lasting consequences. She was hot, tired, hungry. Her ankles had swollen. She wanted a shower, clean pyjamas and a bed sprinkled with rose petals. She guessed which one of the twins was the murderer and lost interest in her book. She gazed at the long line of runway lights far beneath them and prayed that Abdou had checked his e-mail. If he’s not there, then that’s the last straw and I’ll end up giving this young man a clout round the chops. She glowered at the abject boy. The air hostess packed the Spaniards into their seats and removed their sticky apéritifs.

  ‘Come on, Chérif,’ she snapped – this too came out sharper than she had intended – ‘let’s face the music. Whatever it is. You can’t sit on the plane for ever.’

  They stepped into a different world, palm trees loomed out of the dark; she could smell water pouring on to the gardens in the hot night and stretched out her aching knees, delighted to feel the difference in her stride as she marched across the tarmac. Nine months ago I couldn’t have carried a shoulder bag. Watch me now.

  The first person she saw was Abdou, dressed in a spanking new kaftan; his white turban swirled behind him as he dashed towards her.

  ‘Madame!’

  He arrived like a cartwheel, all teeth and arms and smiles. She noticed that his lopsided grin had been fixed.

  ‘C’est grâce à vous, Madame.’ He bared his fangs like an angry camel. ‘Look! New teeth. First class work.’ He actually kissed her hand.

  Chérif was fishing their bags off the conveyor belt. Abdou hadn’t seen him.

  ‘Wait a moment. I’ll get Chérif.’

  ‘I’ll get the taxi.’

  They ran off in opposite directions. Chérif stood there, resolute at last, hung about with bags.

  ‘Bon, je suis prêt,’ he said, clear-eyed and calm.

  ‘Well, thank God for that.’

  She gave him a huge smile, turned around, and blundered into the open arms of a woman she hardly recognised. It was Saïda, done up like a wedding cake with her hair in a sparkling mound. Her eyelids were very black and her lips were very red. But as she reached out to embrace Elizabeth Webster, her face, at first glowing with recognition and joy, suddenly froze. She bellowed something in a language which sounded neither like Berber nor Arabic, sprang past Miss Webster, and flung herself upon Chérif in a lunge worthy of an army-trained, anti-terrorist security guard. She almost brought him down. Then she savaged his shoulders and began shaking him, screaming desperately all the time and giving him no chance to reply. He dropped all the bags. Saïda began to drag him towards the automatic doors, yelling. All the airport officials turned round to stare. An incident! Abdou reappeared in the gaping exit and let out a terrible shriek. The guards tapped their guns and began to approach the domestic brawl in case they were needed.

  Elizabeth Webster gawped at the confusion and then retrieved the abandoned bags, which lay scuffed and overturned upon the marble floor.

  ‘Will someone please tell me what is going on?’

  One of the security police marched up to Saïda and tried to stop her beating Chérif about the head with her handbag. She turned up the volume and the pitch. Her diatribe became a screech. Abdou joined in, echoing the main theme with a bass line. A crowd, which included the armed security guards, gathered around them all, peering and staring with fascinated concentration, as if they were following one of the storytellers in Djamma el Fnaa who had reached an exciting moment. Everybody ignored Elizabeth. It was as much pique at being linguistically excluded as baffled shock at this peculiar welcome which led her to mount her attack in booming colonial French.

  ‘Mais arrêtez! Stop this at once!’ She grappled with Saïda’s hairdo. ‘Abdou! Taisez-vous! Saïda, control yourself! Chérif, will you please tell me what on earth is going on.’

  But before he could reply Saïda thrust her distorted face close to Elizabeth, her mouth open and screaming, her breath hot.

  ‘This is not Chérif,’ she roared. ‘This is not my son.’

  6

  Desert

  Miss Webster awoke the next morning beneath the anticipated flood of scented petals. The bed had not been turned down, as it would have been nine months before. Nor had the curtains been drawn. The small brass lamp covered in jewels and mirrors, subtly placed before the silk drapes, had not been lit to signal her welcome. Dust coated the shade. The invisible worm had entered the rose.

  Miss Webster awoke in a rage. She had been abandoned at the airport. Chérif had vanished. Abdou had vanished. Saïda rushed forth into the night, her wails trailing in the air behind her like floating scarves. And so Elizabeth Webster was left to fend for herself. She found a wobbling trolley and rescued the suitcases. The boy had flung down his bag and never returned to reclaim his possessions or offer his assistance. The arriving airport crowds gathered to stare at her. Miss Webster did not like being the centre of invidious and disagreeable attention. Nor did she like joining the ordinary taxi queue and being leered at by a stranger, who offered to take her to a cheaper hotel that was just as good, but run by his friends. She did not like being forced to heave her own suitcases through gates and up steps. And she was alarmed and displeased by the cavernous sound of her own heels upon the marble squares as she staggered into the once scented and exotic halls of the silent hotel. The flunkeys no longer stood ready to wheedle and bow. A scruffy night porter handed her the key and left her to find her own way up in the darkness.

  The world had changed in frightening and uncomfortable ways. Why should she suffer the change when she was not culpable? None of this emotional chaos was of her making. How could she be responsible for all this mayhem and disaster? And so she awoke upon the following day with the conviction that she had been dreadfully imposed upon and fearfully misused. Moreover she was now being held to account for villainy of which she was not guilty.

  Miss Webster rang reception without preparing a speech. She was ready to overflow with lurid threats and righteous demands. She was not prepared to lie there in modified and diminishing luxury, fretting, enraged. Nine months ago Saïda’s voice would have purred dedication, comfort, reassurance. Now the phone sounded in the void; the hollow chambers of marble and alabaster with decorated iron grilles across the arched windows, the sm
all, low tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the fountains in which the mosaics glimmered and rippled, all crouched beneath her, empty and neglected. There was no one shaking cocktails in the Desert Rendezvous, no one watering the gardens, no one busy in the kitchens. No one answered her early calls for recognition and acceptance. The hotel had entered that long sleep which descends upon temples of tourism after the advent of the bombs.

  Reception simply did not respond. Miss Webster’s fury mounted and amplified like a tropical storm. She counted out her cotton shirts, plain colours, no frills. Were there enough for three weeks if the hotel laundry service had collapsed completely? Evidently not. She glared at Chérif’s offending suitcase, one of her old ones, dedicated to the cause and filled with presents for all his family and friends. The thing cowered in the lee of the door, shrinking beneath Miss Webster’s glare. He had packed his books and notes, reading for the summer, and all his new clothes. Where was he now? Or, more to the point, who had he become?

  There is a thread of privacy in the English character. The best of us develop the habit of leaving well enough alone, of not interfering with our neighbours and inserting a handsome get-out clause to all our enquiries. A comment such as ‘Off out, are you?’ does not entail a demand as to where we are going. A cheery wave will do as a response, if you have no intention of revealing your destination. Miss Webster now realised how cleverly Chérif had played the game of evasion. He had never appeared to be secretive or underhand. He had never refused to answer direct questions, but his cheerful, good-natured politeness had exploited her determination never to pry. He had indeed spoken of his mother, and of Saïda, but always in such terms that left the doors open. They could have been two separate people. And now it was clear that they were. He’s related to Saïda, thought Miss Webster, striding towards the staircase. She knew him as a child. Or she wouldn’t have dared to box his ears.