Miss Webster and Chérif

by Patricia Duncker

  The curving marble stairs emerged gloomy and obscure from the bowels of the foyer, despite the wash of gold light flooding the courtyard. The globes that were always aglow on the balustrades were now eclipsed by the half dark. Clearly the hotel was economising on electricity. The same hollow void she had encountered on arrival repeated her steps as she descended into emptiness. No lights shimmered in reception. The tall blue vase, which in more prosperous times always overflowed with lilies and gladioli, now stood stricken and empty; the computers’ screens cowered, blank and dark. Miss Webster realised at that moment that she was the only person staying in the hotel. The world had been closed down around her.

  ‘It’s the war, isn’t it? And the bombs.’ She addressed the mass of keys with their heavy tags attached, hanging in the empty pigeonholes, with fearless contempt. Miss Webster’s fatalism would never allow her to cancel her voyages, even if her journey took her into the heart of a civil war. She asserted her right to travel, one of those terrifying tourists who carry on with their sightseeing even as the streets explode into dust just behind them.

  ‘Bonjour, Madame.’

  Before her stood a young girl, dark-skinned, anxious, wearing a faded blue dress and sandals. Her hair was covered with a long black veil, tiny silver medallions stitched into the fringe. These tinkled softly when she moved. She smiled at Miss Webster, clearly wishing to please and to help, but uncertain of her welcome. The child could not have been more than twelve or thirteen, her breasts looked quite flat. The old lady replied in slow careful French.

  ‘Good morning, my dear. Do you know where Saïda is?’

  ‘Oui, Madame. Elle est partie.’

  ‘Partie? Gone where?’

  ‘To the desert, Madame. To see her sister.’

  That’s it. Miss Webster’s deductions snapped into place. She’s his aunt. Saïda is Chérif’s mother’s sister. So they are related.

  ‘Was she very angry when she left?’

  ‘Oui, Madame. Quelqu’un a volé tout son argent.’

  ‘Aha!’ cried Miss Webster with great satisfaction. So, Saïda has been robbed. And I know whom she has accused of theft. There was a pause. The girl stared at her, less nervous now, but wary.

  ‘Est-ce que vous voulez prendre le petit déjeuner, Madame?’

  ‘Yes, my dear. I would like that very much indeed.’

  But Miss Webster was not prepared for the confrontation with the shrouded tables in the abandoned dining room. The scene of emptiness and desolation appeared yet more horrible because of the gleaming brightness of the morning on the terrace outside. The garden tables and chairs were stacked and covered with blue plastic sheets. It had actually rained a little in the night and the ragged lawns shone and bristled. The jasmine was still flowering, still fragrant, and a torrent of undisciplined plumbago, blue and white, surged down before the French windows. Miss Webster flung open the doors, chasing out the foetid, stale smells of old food and damp floors. She stepped forth into the bright day and placed one of the indoor tables in the long wedge of sun. She used a stray napkin to polish the grimy surface and installed herself before the windows. The gardens had been watered, but not clipped. She noted the ragged little lines of box and the red sand blown into a smeared tide line across the flagstones. The hibiscus loomed purple, scarlet and white, the torrid wash of colour masking the signs of deterioration and neglect. Miss Webster knew, without going to look, that the swimming pool was empty. She missed the low drone of the chlorinating unit. Beyond the florid row of fig trees with their huge leaves like deep green outstretched hands, the sky rose, gigantic, filled with the promise of morning. The green world of the garden, flowering out of control, reproached her depressed indecision. What is to be done? To whom should I complain? Miss Webster turned her back on the miraculous garden, blossoming in the desert, and stared into her empty coffee cup.

  The little girl was standing beside her.

  ‘Papa has gone to get the bread, Madame.’ She offered fresh orange juice as a pallid excuse for failing in hospitality.

  ‘Who is your papa?’ demanded Miss Webster, but the child did not understand the question and stood before her, disconcerted and afraid.

  ‘What does your papa do in the hotel? Apart from fetching the bread?’

  ‘Oh,’ her face cleared. ‘Il est jardinier.’

  He’s the gardener. Miss Webster sank down before her orange juice, fearing a long wait for coffee, croissant, bread and sweet cakes. Here a huge buffet once towered up, on several levels and across many tables, a theatre of breakfast tended by white-uniformed actors with golden polished buttons. A woman devoted to fresh pancakes cooked them for her waiting plate. There lay sliced fruit resting in beds of ice, white roses everywhere, palms and banana leaves laid out with brioche, jams and sweetbreads, rosettes of fine charcuterie, folded ham arranged in patterns, and rondelets of goats’ cheeses for the Germans, cakes of all sizes, glistening with icing sugar, topped with crushed nuts and almonds. Miss Webster contemplated the barren tables and the departed feast. She fished another book out of her red rucksack. This was not the airport novel, which she had, appropriately enough, abandoned at the airport, without investigating the conclusion.

  Miss Webster was now reading a satirical novel entitled Das Parfum about an eighteenth-century murderer. She read very little modern German writing and had always preferred teaching French classics at the school. But Das Parfum fulfilled a different, stranger need. It had been a huge European bestseller during the 1980s. Miss Webster always ignored bestsellers until they were nearly twenty years past their best before, sell-by date. Her logic was this: if the tale survived the hardest test – that of immediate contemporary time, and was still there re-jacketed, garlanded with quotations of praise and decorated with red stick-on medals, 300,000 copies sold, then the effort would probably be repaid. Yet anger and disappointment usually awaited her, and this odd quirk became a trial of her temper and patience. She read on, in irritated discontent. What had seemed clever and slick to an audience ravished by capitalism and greed, a moral tale of fatuous mass hallucination, no longer intrigued and beguiled. Malicious cunning and scented duplicity seemed cold and out of place in the world transformed since 9/11, a world where the smiling outsider embodied the new threat, those smooth and handsome Arabs with their plausible stories and their faultless manners. Miss Webster gripped the book more firmly. The threat might stroll through your door, late one autumn night, pretending to be other than he is. Why fear the hunched mass of immigrants, waiting outside housing offices, cringing and alarmed? Or the hook-handed mullahs preaching up a storm in the leafy London streets? Their game is clear enough. And why read this long-winded, outdated bestseller that warns us all about self-delusion and unhinged desire? Why blather on about surface scents and naked virgins? The world we know is melting in explosions and black flame from the burning oil rigs. The tale in her hands seemed self-indulgent, misogynist and old-fashioned.

  And yet.

  It is a rare thing that has come to pass if a book fails utterly to speak.

  The little girl offered a small plate of cakes and dried apricots. The coffee proved disgusting. Miss Webster ignored the empty dining room and went on reading.

  Amidst the otiose and florid prose lingered one passage where the creature, Grenouille, the frog, his very name a lazy and irritating joke, wandered the Cantal Mountains in search of unpolluted air. He withdrew from all society and hunkered down on his bed of straw in the deepest bowels of a cave. Miss Webster suddenly saw herself again, as she had been just over a year ago, subdued and inconspicuous, locked away at the end of a green lane, swathed in roses and honeysuckle, her body rigid with resentment, clamped fast within the English dream. She had come to a dead halt many years before her heart, dying of cold and isolation, had flared its own warning and ceased to beat. That’s right, sighed Miss Webster, if you care for no one you can never be betrayed.

  She swallowed her bile and her orange juice and laid her novel down. She ha
d ventured too far into the Garden of Allah to turn back now.

  ‘I must go out.’ She addressed the empty tables. ‘I must find Abdou and go out into the desert.’

  ‘Vous désirez, Madame?’ The young girl appeared again at her elbow, wielding a coffee-pot that looked like a medieval siege engine.

  ‘Is that thing full?’

  ‘Oui, Madame.’

  ‘Then you’d better give me some more. With no chicory in it tomorrow morning. Do you understand?’

  ‘Oui, Madame,’ stammered the hapless maiden. She sensed, correctly, that Miss Webster was back on the warpath.

  ‘Ici les Grands Taxis du Désert. Je suis absent pour l’instant. Veuillez laisser un message après le bip sonore.’

  ‘Abdou. This is Elizabeth Webster. Please ring me at the hotel as soon as you get this message.’

  Miss Webster sat upon her bed upstairs, changing her shoes; then the shouting began. At first the gardens slumbered, filled with silence, harbouring nothing but birdsong and a light wind. The morning cool slowly burned off the jasmine and the watered grass. She unpacked her yellow hat and scarves, hesitated over her suncreams. Someone rang the porter’s bell at the gate. She remembered that bell, clanging in the hot night, when she had first come to the desert. It had been a signal for the dozing children to pounce upon their next victim. There was a pause. She waited. She listened. Then a dreadful stream of unintelligible invective poured out across the distant gardens. Miss Webster stepped on to her balcony to get a better look, but could not see the gates. Above the seven palm trees at the edge of the old walls she could see the rocky frontier of the desert, where all green and living things ceased to be. She felt the sudden quick breath of hot wind upon her face. The shouting rose half an octave.

  It was a fight between a man and a woman, possibly in not quite the same language. The exchange of insults became ever more furious. Miss Webster was puzzled. This was not a country where women spoke their minds in public. As if in answer to her question, a young voice, high and clear, yelled in perfect English:

  ‘And fuck you too, you shitty Islamic git!’

  Once more, and the implications were not lost upon her, she heard an English voice. Miss Webster snatched up her hat and raced downstairs. But by the time she reached the hotel entrance the battle of the gateway was over. A man she had never seen before stormed through the gardens, still fulminating, his nostrils dilated and his face purple.

  ‘C’était qui à la porte?’ demanded Miss Webster. The man, whom she guessed must be the gardener, was wearing a baseball hat that was slightly too small for his bald head. His skin swelled and glistened beneath the elastic. A vein throbbed in his throat.

  ‘J’ai mes ordres, Madame,’ he bellowed. ‘I’ve been told not to let the Black Witch into the hotel. Not under any circumstances. Ever. The woman is accursed.’

  ‘The Black Witch?’

  Events had taken an unexpected supernatural turn. Miss Webster surveyed the enraged gardener. He was probably younger than he looked, but in the huge O of his mouth the incisors were blackened and many teeth were gone. His tattered blue jacket vibrated with aggression.

  ‘Does the Black Witch come from England?’ she enquired politely.

  ‘She comes from hell,’ roared the gardener.

  ‘Well, that may be where she’s going, but it cannot be her country of origin.’ Miss Webster delivered this reflection in perfect measured French. The gardener stopped in his tracks, confused. His eyes bulged.

  ‘She wants you!’ This final explosion proved too much for him. He fell silent and stood biting his lip.

  ‘So this young English girl asked for me and you refused to let her in?’

  He immediately began raving once more.

  ‘She is a witch. Une sorcière, je vous dis! She will ensorcellate your eyes and steal away all your money, so that you have pains in every limb.’

  Miss Webster had never heard of a financial loss that resulted in osteoarthritis, and decided that the oddness of this exchange was due to a lack of linguistic expertise on both sides. The gardener made a perfunctory bow and stormed off in the direction of the kitchens. Miss Webster peered through the iron gates. There was no one waiting outside. The gates were now padlocked. No one could get in. She had become a prisoner.

  She returned to the gates at midday and gazed out into the gathered heat. Adbou was still stubbornly silent, his mobile switched off, and she had already filled up the tape on his home answering machine with pleading and threats. There were the seven palms, steady and rustling in the hot wind. There lay the desert, outstretched before her, shimmering ochre and red, the heat haze gently veiling the shelf of rocks. At her feet were little pools of sand swirled into whirlwinds by the desert’s breath. A gaggle of ragged cacti peppered with black plastic sacks fluttered on the rim of the dirt roadway. No one loitered beneath the walls. The Black Witch, whoever she was, had left no trace upon the sand. The begging children, once hidden in the shadow of the oleanders, had also abandoned their posts. The vast eerie silence, which spread like a stain through the dusty air, swept over her. She leaned against the gate and accepted the great stillness. The silence was almost solid. The wind brushed past her like a great cloak, rimmed by the blue heavens. Rock, scrub, dust and wind lined the silence and emptiness. The great silence presented itself neither as frightening, nor comforting; it was simply there, endless, present, shouldering against the old walls of the kasbahs, the green minaret of the fourteenth-century mosque, and the white block buildings of the old colonial town. Here, clasped in the desert’s embrace, the town wavered and shimmered in the rising heat. Miss Webster decided to act.

  She drew forth her new mobile phone and began, carefully, laboriously, just as Chérif had taught her, to compose a text message. ABDOU PICK UP HOTEL TOUT DE SUITE. DEPART DESERT. TOP FEES PAID. WEBSTER. His mobile number was already in her directory. Select. Send. TOP FEES. That’ll get him here faster than rubbing a lamp three times. If there aren’t any more tourists, he’ll be back. Miss Webster decided to ignore his defection at the airport. This is a crisis situation, but I’ll get to the bottom of it all. She strode back towards the hotel. Hardly had her feet touched the first step leading from the cupola into the hallway, when a trumpet fart from behind the walls and a dim roar shook the iron grilles. A cloud of red dust and a thump announced the arrival of a battered, unmarked black Citroën. The windsurf boards with bottle caps, which had proved their salvation on the night of the bombs, were still there on the roof rack, tackled up like spare masts. As the dust cleared Miss Webster beheld Abdou, who surged forth from his taxi, still wearing the exotic white kaftan of last night’s debacle, and commenced a desperate clamour at the gates. He managed to sound like a crowd intent on riot.

  ‘A miracle,’ she murmured.

  ‘Madame Webster,’ shrieked Abdou, who had spotted her on the steps, ‘come away to the desert. Very urgent!’

  As she settled among the shiny orange cushions clutching her bags, hats and veils, Elizabeth Webster realised that she had nothing whatsoever left to lose. Chérif’s suitcase lurked behind her, safely stowed in the boot. If Saïda accused her of conspiracy to defraud and deceive, Miss Webster’s incorruptible innocence would withstand any amount of interrogation. Now she really had undertaken the classic task of the detective, finding out not only who done it and why, but what they had done in the first place. Beneath her shuddered the unsteady diesel roar of the taxi, and before her, the immense expanse of space and time, the great wilderness of eternity. What profit a man – or indeed a woman – if she lose her life, a life passed in pique, irritation and defensiveness, and die with no heirs and a great deal of money in the bank? Stride forward into the light; get to the bottom of things.

  ‘Thank you for answering my text message so promptly, Abdou.’ He must have been parked in the palm grove.

  ‘What text?’ snarled Abdou. ‘I didn’t get any text. I’ve been sent to fetch you. The English woman wants to speak to you and the
hotel won’t let her in.’

  ‘Ha! The Black Witch!’ Miss Webster produced her trump card. She was already making discoveries. Abdou actually turned round in his seat, taking his eyes off the potholes, and gave Miss Webster a flashing tour of his new teeth.

  ‘Don’t call her that,’ he growled, ‘that’s a bad name. She’s a good woman. As good as you. As good as anyone. Just not as rich.’ He turned up the pounding music.

  Miss Webster held her tongue. She was captive amidst the cushions and Abdou’s response gave her pause for thought. Clearly there were two sides to the affair and the dramatis personae of the desert town had placed their bets. The gardener had lined up alongside the hotel, Abdou had pitched in with the witch. They lurched past the last shacks outside the walls and rumbled away into the hot, windy spaces. The rock cliffs rose up about them and the red earth paled in the glare. It was the time of day when travel is inadvisable. Miss Webster cradled her survival supplies: two large bottles of still mineral water and two packets of dates. She pulled out her map to determine their route, steadied her dark glasses and arranged her white veil across her face to avoid breathing red dust. When Abdou glanced at her in the mirror she looked like The Mummy Returns, in the monster’s initial gruesome phase, before he gains enough power from his victims to regenerate completely and to take on human shape.

  She gazed out across the massif. This resembled a lunar terrain: huge blocks of hulking stone flanked the battered road. The earth had been reworked in ochres, reds and golds, but the heat drew the colours together into a shimmering watery curtain that hung before them, sheathing both the desert and the road. They lumbered round a high hairpin bend to the roll of 1970s disco music. Miss Webster looked out into the shining, unstable landscape before them and saw, far below, the immense empty space into which unfurled the giant palm groves that marked the valley of the Drâa, a long snake of green in the lost world of red dust and dark rock.