Miss Webster and Chérif

by Patricia Duncker

  Praise for Miss Webster and Chérif

  `An enchanting novel, filled with all Duncker's trademark wit and intelligence' Daily Mail

  `The kind of novel you want to give all your friends – the elderly, to show them all is not lost, and the young, who have everything to gain' Telegraph

  `An accomplished piece of work with a bite to it . . . amusing and witty, with fine descriptions of the North African desert' Bookseller

  `This is a sparkling, redemptive novel which I read in one go and then again with relish' Independent

  `A finely poised novel about anxiety and the fragile threads of understanding between people and cultures' TLS

  `Most entertaining . . . She succeeds in bringing a touch of mystery to the English countryside' Time Out

  `The skill and craft of Duncker's writing is plain in every chapter . . . in the rigour of the writing, the conscious blending and bending of genres – English detective story, post-9/11 morality tale and comic travel romance' Irish Times

  `Miss Webster herself is a brilliant creation, with a ``tart and subtle'' tongue that would make a sailor blush' Glasgow Herald

  `A witty comedy of manners' Independent on Sunday

  `A gem of a book . . . Funny and sad with some wonderful characters, this book will beguile a plane journey and you will still be reading it as you wait for your luggage' Oldie

  `An intelligent, entertaining read . . . Duncker provides a memorable character in Miss Webster' Sunday Morning Post

  `On the surface, it reads like a mystery, a thriller . . . but we are familiar with the dark intrepidity of Duncker's imagination and her skill in writing suspense and the uncompromising nature of her polemic . . . it continues Duncker's successful and compelling marriage of lightness of touch with profundity of intent' Niall Griffiths, New Welsh Review

  Miss Webster and Chérif

  Patricia Duncker

  For my students 1987–1991

  Hassan, Mohammed & Chérif

  ‘Allah removed all surplus human and animal life from the desert so that there might be one place for him to walk in peace ... and so the great Sahara is called the Garden of Allah.’

  (Desert Saying)

  Abbas, I wish you were the shirt

  On my body, or I your shirt.

  Or I wish we were in a glass

  You as wine, I as rainwater.

  Or I wish we were two love birds,

  Who lived alone in the desert.

  No people.

  Abbas Ibn Al-Ahnaf (750–809)

  You sing about love,

  Your very flesh is consumed,

  And you look quite ill.

  Let me praise friendship,

  This candle burns more softly, but it’s constant.

  Slow heat – that’s the way it shows.

  Abbas Ibn Al-Sabah (?780–843)

  Contents

  Praise for Miss Webster and Cherif

  1 The Messenger

  2 Taxi Driver

  3 The Visitor

  4 Unsuitable Music

  5 Attentat

  6 Desert

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  1

  The Messenger

  She heard an English voice. Rising above the surrounding babble of security announcements in different languages and the distant honking taxis, the English accent, harassed and irritated, yet full of expectant self-assertion, gave her an immense rush of reassurance. Someone English, close at hand. She pinpointed the voice.

  ‘I don’t think that’ll do any good. We’ve tried all the main airlines. I’m going to ring the consulate again and insist. They keep saying that it’s a matter for the police.’

  He was tall, narrow-shouldered, wearing a white linen suit that had creased a little in the small of his back. He sported a cream hat, wedged on the back of his head, which made him look theatrical, as if he were playing the part of a colonial inspector. An Arab in a shiny pink shirt with a neatly clipped moustache was leaning in towards him, anxious, fidgeting. Was this an airport official? No, insufficiently dressed. He was wearing sandals, the thongs tight over his bare toes. An undercover customs officer? Unlikely. Security guard? No uniform. Not armed. There were guards swaggering through the airport in desert storm battledress, carrying Kalashnikovs. A guilty travel rep, who has mislaid one of his flock? In which case I hope you give him hell. The Englishman turned and brushed against her inquiring hand which was raised to intercept his elbow. She retreated in shock. He was a black man, an old black man in a white linen suit, his coiled hair white at the temples.

  ‘Oh, excuse me,’ she murmured, pretending that she had taken him for someone else.

  ‘May I be of any assistance?’

  The English voice never faltered, neither did the urbane and knowing confidence. He had registered her recoil, her alarm. He had read her correctly. She was afraid of him. She had thought he was white. The voice coloured with irony, and the gesture, for he actually bowed towards her, gleamed suave and contemptuous. He had the excessive certainty of a gentleman.

  ‘Are you in difficulties?’

  This was too much for Elizabeth Webster. Tears flooded her words.

  ‘I’ve missed my plane. They said I’ve missed my plane. We were too late leaving Gatwick. I was meant to join my group here. The transfer to Ouarzazate has gone without me. I can’t find anyone here who has ever heard of me.’

  This came out as an existential declaration. The two men surrounded her with a cloak of courtesy and concern. The Arab man began waving his hands. His glossy shirt shimmered in the dingy lights.

  ‘This is most unfortunate. I am sure that something can be done. Please do not upset yourself.’

  She dug about for a handkerchief in her floral carrier bag and withdrew a small plastic bottle of Evian, a sachet of salad dressing and a yellow biro. Unaccountably, the Arab man accepted all these as legitimate offerings.

  ‘Do you have your travel schedules?’ The black man took over. ‘Or your ticket?’

  Helplessly convinced by his Englishness, Elizabeth Webster handed over all her vital documents: tickets, passport, insurance, driving licence, faxed confirmations from The Magical Adventures Travel Company, list of medicines and allergies, vaccination certificates and Foreign Office travel advice, downloaded from the Internet, suggesting that North Africa was a highly undesirable holiday destination. The tall black man sorted through them, trying to identify the airline that was responsible for abandoning fragile old ladies in North African airports. He registered her name: Elizabeth Webster; date of birth: 2 June 1933; domicile: some appalling rural backwater where the local shop wouldn’t even stock the national press and the vegetables were long past their sell-by date.

  ‘You flew in with Royal Air Maroc?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And now you have to change to another airline? Or do you stay with Royal Air Maroc?’

  He looked round the sandy marble hall with its huge dome and the fountain dripping recycled water on shining wires. The space rumbled and boomed, full of scurrying Westerners and local boys trying to hustle them into taxis. She had come downstairs and was now outside the security zone.

  ‘Aren’t the Magical Travels responsible?’ demanded the pink Arab man.

  ‘No, they’re not. They have to meet her at the other end. She hasn’t arrived yet.’

  The Arab man filched all her documents and snatched the tickets. His pink shirt now appeared detestable. Elizabeth Webster discovered that she was not happy watching him clutching her private papers. Ha! He had deciphered the additional computer printout.

  ‘She’s been re-registered. She’s on the six o’clock flight. Loo
k here. It just hasn’t been called yet. I’ll go and check.’

  And he trotted off to check-in, clutching her passport and tickets. He was a little overweight and his buttocks wobbled. She watched him spiriting away her national identity and expensively purchased holiday rights with a little surge of alarm. She stepped closer to the Englishman and forgave him for being black. He seemed calm, even protective.

  ‘Shall we sit down?’

  Two backpackers suddenly liberated a small table by the kiosk selling fresh orange juice and scuttled away. The black man pulled out the chair for her and settled her bags between them.

  ‘An orange juice perhaps? Or a coffee?’ She had not yet acquired any foreign currency as the dirham proved to be non-transferable and was therefore worthless outside the country. He brushed her objections aside.

  ‘They accept Euros. At an extortionate rate.’ She confronted a small plastic glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.

  She ventured a conversation. ‘Are you looking for someone? I couldn’t help overhearing –’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied gloomily, ‘and it’s hopeless. We’ve lost all trace.’

  He spread out a newspaper cutting on the table, beside her floral carrier bag and plastic glass. The headline read CRIME OF PASSION KILLER GOES FREE. A grainy picture of a sullen street girl in dreadlocks glared back from the middle of the text. Runaway. Jumped bail. Spanish courts. Miss Webster gave up. Why were the Spanish courts bothered? Didn’t they let you go with three months suspended sentence and an understanding reprimand from the judge for killing off the women taken in adultery? So was this man her father, mired in grief, hunting down her fleeing passion killer? Perhaps the pink Arab worked as a private detective. She arranged an expression of sympathetic tragedy and held it up in front of her face. To each his own sorrow. The strange hunt faded softly back into the papers on the table. I have my own sadness. This is not my affair. They sat silent, anxious among the booming announcements: Arabic, English, French, Spanish. All unattended luggage will be treated as a security risk and may be removed or destroyed.

  ‘Are you on holiday?’ The black man was clearly wondering why she was alone.

  ‘My doctor told me that I should go far away,’ she murmured.

  Far away from what? She no longer made any sense. The black man in the creased white linen suit nodded his assent, baffled, humouring the mad. She sounded deranged, even to herself. ‘You see, I wasn’t at all well.’

  He bowed. For indeed, she gleamed an unhealthy yellow, unnervingly thin, her head adorned with a curious arrangement of white punk spikes, bobbing at an angle as if she had caught the first whiff of Parkinson’s.

  ‘Ah. You have been ill.’

  The voice – and he was rapidly dissolving into nothing but the voice – managed to convey respect and concern. She didn’t have to go into details if she didn’t want to do so. On the other hand the voice made it clear that she could have flung an entire nervous breakdown into the abyss between them. The black man possessed a golden tooth, somewhere up to the left. He smouldered slightly, now that she was close to him, exhaling an interesting perfume. What was it? Opium pour homme. She peered at the stitching on the pocket of his suit. The whole thing was handmade, tailored to fit. He smelt of wealth. He would not abandon her until her situation was resolved. He would carry her bags. The cool patrician patina of the English middle classes hit her again like the first wave of a typhoon. Another moment and she would break down and gabble. She blinked. No, the gentleman was still there, still listening, still black. He was a sort of miracle.

  ‘Yes. I have been very ill,’ she whispered with relief.

  In fact she had come to a full stop; not on the street or on the bus, which would have attracted attention, but in the privacy of her own sitting room, slumped before Newsnight on her green striped sofa. The television, still murmuring gently, retreated to a great distance. George Bush was addressing The World. ‘States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world ... The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.’ The scene cut to a stage-managed international conference around a horseshoe table with pink curtains as a backdrop. She could still hear it, far away, as her blood stilled and her eyes became fixed. The flickering blur accompanied her into a dark place of buzzing silence. The midnight serial-killer movie played itself out with no one aware of its terrors and expensive special effects. The lights still burned above the fireplace and in the kitchen, but the curtains upstairs were never drawn that night. Elizabeth Webster sat, silent and rigid, surrounded by all her possessions, magnificent and colossal as the embalmed pharaohs, far embarked upon that journey from which there is usually no return.

  Yet when the early spring dawn came, she was still there.

  The television hummed to itself, the screen presented a young girl hugging a labrador, surrounded by gaudy radiating colours, the lights dimmed. The jubilant birds in her garden and in the meadow that confronted her house celebrated a new day. They were the first things she heard again in her own flesh. She sat paralysed, confused. She had lost seven hours of time. She could not remember what had happened, or where she had been.

  The first person to approach the house was the postman. Sometimes, when she had not spoken to another human being for many days, she apprehended him in the tiny space of the porch and assailed him with conversational clichés. But on that day he slapped down three offers of car insurance, one for MasterCard, and a special reduced subscription offer. Join The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and receive a free gift – an illustrated pamphlet on migrating species. He had to double this over to get it through the letter box, but as it hit the mat he pushed off back down the lane. He did not notice that the curtains remained closed downstairs and that the lights were still burning. He passed on, moving from house to house.

  Elizabeth Webster was unable to stir her limbs or see clearly, but her hearing strengthened as the morning advanced. By nine o’clock she was capable of extending her right hand, crisped like a dead chicken’s claw, towards the telephone, which perched beside the sofa. The telephone had a row of numbers, ordered alphabetically and buried in the small computer’s brain: Council tax, CPS Gas Supplies, Garage, Gardener, Hairdresser, Shop, Surgery. One button, waveringly disturbed by her clenched knuckles, resulted in a dialling tone and then a voice.

  ‘Great Blessington Medical Group. How can I help you?’

  But she could not speak.

  A sort of burr, burr, burr, gathering strength and resonance, emerged from her throat.

  ‘Hello? Is anyone there?

  ‘Hello?

  ‘Hello? Who’s there, please?’

  Click.

  But the receptionist at Great Blessington Medical Group was mistrustful of mystery calls. Someone was trying to get through. She rang 1471 and then traced the call, so that when the phone rang and rang in the eerie, illuminated stillness of the sitting room, Elizabeth Webster knew that her muffled yell for help was being slowly heard.

  ‘It’s Miss Webster.’ The receptionist checked the name back against the computer’s list of patients’ numbers, carefully ordered by village and doctor in attendance. The practice now boasted a website and on-line services. ‘I remember her. She won’t come in for check-ups. Aged sixty-nine. Forcibly retired at sixty-four. Ex French teacher at the convent. Lives alone. Very high blood pressure. They must have dragged her out of the classroom. I bet she’s had a stroke.’

  Behold Dr Humphreys banging on her front door twenty minutes later, thirty-four years old with a young wife and twins. He didn’t get much sleep at the best of times and felt as if he too had lost seven hours the previous night. He lurched around the porch as if swimming through soup. He didn’t know the retired old lady who lived alone at the end of a rough un-made-up track, the last cottage before the woods, a little brick and flint building facing the meadows,
covered all summer in sweet peas and climbing roses. Here it is, the greening process of spring just beginning. Why do I always end up with the tricky home visits? She’s one of Dr Brody’s patients. The old boy should set the date for his retirement party. Then we can get someone younger for the practice who’ll help me out with the rural clean-up jobs.

  ‘Hello? Miss Webster? Hello?’

  Curtains still closed, lights on. She’s had a fall. Quick, round the back. He could look in through the kitchen window. Behind the garage, down past the dustbins, through the flickering hard sunshine beneath the apple tree. He peered through the uncurtained back window.

  There she was, still upright, grey-faced, eyes fixed. She must be dead. She may have been dead for hours. I thought the surgery said she’d phoned in for help. Dear God, she’s dead. He attacked the back door in a panic. It was open. Dr Humphreys flung himself through the kitchen, bouncing off the solid wooden table, disturbing every cup hanging on the dresser, across the dining room, and into the warm cluttered space where the morning breakfast show on the television stuttered into the weather forecast and a list of forthcoming programmes to a ludicrous accompaniment of banal music. Out of respect he turned it off. Then he noticed that her eyes had moved. She looked dishevelled, shifty, distressed, as if she had spent the night drinking. He knelt quietly beside her and took her hand. The hand transmitted a rush of glacial cold. She must be dead. But she was looking at him.

  ‘Miss Webster? You are not at all well.’

  But she did not reply.

  He felt for her pulse and then called the ambulance. She was very much alive, but had come to a dead halt. When the ambulance men lifted her tenderly on to the stretcher a pond of urine rushed down her legs and saturated the red blanket.