Miss Webster and Chérif

by Patricia Duncker

  The church at Great Blessington was always chosen as a compromise for Christmas. The faithful were not sufficiently numerous in any one of the three parishes to merit separate services at each church, but the united congregations could never have eased themselves into either of the two smaller churches at Bolt or Little Blessington. Entire families, lured by carols and sentimental handmade cards produced by desperate primary school teachers during the run-up to the feasts, turned out, replete with pushchairs and babies in red bobble hats who always started yelling during the lessons. A lukewarm love of tradition began to manifest itself among the people. The Baby Jesus launched himself once more upon the unsuspecting world in a flurry of stars, camels, shepherds and wandering kings. Chérif delighted in the camels. He also noted the proof of approaching climactic chaos in the front windows of Ottakar’s, which presented a desert, much like the one where he had been born, backed by pine trees and fir cones. North and South embraced one another across the rickety crib stuffed with cotton wool.

  The spending spree gathered pace and intensity. Chérif had been conned into purchasing a holly wreath, which Miss Webster now affixed to the cottage knocker in a series of red-ribboned nautical knots. She pulled on her gardening gauntlets to avoid being spiked by the greenery. Chérif ambushed the old lady with an unexpected request. ‘I would like to go to church at Christmas,’ he announced. And then added, ‘with you.’

  ‘Would you really? Well, that’d cause a sensation. The midnight carols? Or the early morning mass?’

  Chérif didn’t understand the difference. He had asserted his desire to attend in the hope of pleasing her. The only other Muslim in his seminar group was a Pakistani hippie from Peterborough, who actually wore a retro Afghan coat and who had told him that Christians had everybody on board to switch on the Christmas lights, which were a sign of hope and not specifically Christian. Everybody goes, man, women and men together, whole families, any religion, especially Jews, they love candles and call it the festival of lights, everybody all mixed up, and you don’t have to believe in anything, it’s cool, man.

  ‘When do you switch on the lights?’

  ‘Midnight. We have all the lights off. One candle comes in. Saintly little face of innocence illuminated from beneath. “Once in Royal David’s City”, then full boom for “O come, O come Emmanuel”. You have to light each other’s bloody candles. All the Christmas tree lights go pop and there we are, in a cosy glow clutching the Light of the World. Candles everywhere, and not a dry eye present on account of that odious little shit who sings soprano. Rumour has it that he strangled one of Mrs Harris’s cats.’

  Miss Webster scorned the midnight carols with all her vindictive angry soul. Chérif had learned to deal with the rapidity of her occasional explosions, which were beyond him linguistically, by grabbing hold of the two or three phrases that meant something. Candles. Midnight. Lights on. And one of the singers was a murderer.

  ‘Let’s go to the midnight carols,’ he beamed at Miss Webster.

  ‘OK,’ she shrugged her shoulders and straightened the trailing red ribbons on the festive wreath.

  And so it was that at eleven-fifteen on a Christmas night of white frost, when the grass crackled and the trees loomed spectral, edged with white, that Miss Webster and Chérif, muffled and wrapped tightly into gloves and hats, set out across the fields towards the church at Great Blessington. Miss Webster thumped ahead in her galoshes. Chérif got his feet wet. For the crisp white coating upon the path was but skin-deep, and the earth waited beneath, marshy with creeping damp.

  ‘You should’ve worn those wellies I got for you at the army surplus. OK, they’re a bit big, but you could have worn two pairs of socks.’

  Miss Webster assumed that all men possessed enormous feet and ordered size twelve. They battled through the crunching air. The old woman had wrapped a mohair shawl around her shoulders, which made her look like a refugee from all the catastrophes of history: earthquakes, tempests, wars and rumours of wars. Chérif suddenly took note of her fragility as she negotiated the stile, and offered her his arm. This was not a habitual gesture. She accepted with a nod of surprise.

  The grey flints of the church flickered and glistened in the lights of the cars pulling up down the lane. They saw its bulk floodlit, then darkening suddenly as if it were the backdrop to a son et lumière enacting the Christmas story. Voices were carried great distances by the still frost.

  ‘Can we say Merry Christmas yet?’

  ‘Oh, you should have told us you were coming. We’d have picked you both up.’

  ‘I’m driving. Patrick’s drunk.’

  ‘We got there just in time ...’

  ‘Did you see the peacocks earlier?’

  ‘She heats her shed. Can’t say I’d bother.’

  ‘Oh, good evening, Miss Webster.’

  A little gust of embarrassed silence settled around them. Then everyone greeted Chérif and shook hands ostentatiously in a magnanimous burst of The Christmas Spirit. Only one person was ungenerous enough to wonder if he were a suicide bomber, well wadded with explosives, who, upon the mention of ‘captive Israel’ would fling himself upon the vicar, yelling ‘Allah Akbar’. Good manners, that most English of rural, village instincts, asserted itself over paranoia and racism. The boy is very beautiful after all. He is the stranger in our midst. Would we turn from the black kings, the wise men following the star? No, we would shake their hands and claim kin. They knew of His coming before we did.

  ‘Welcome to Great Blessington.’

  ‘So nice you could come.’

  ‘Chilly, isn’t it? Aren’t you brave to come out on foot?’

  ‘Oh Miss Webster, you must both be soaked. You came across the fields.’

  For behind them through the wet grass, intermittently revealed by the arriving cars, gleamed a long wake of darker green, the ploughing of the winter field, evidence of Miss Webster’s leadership initiative, the pretty Arab trailing in her mighty wake. Everyone looked impressed. Then the vicar pounced.

  ‘Aha, Chérif! What a pleasure! Thank you for escorting our Miss Webster. Hello everyone. Have you met Chérif? This is Miss Webster’s lodger. He’s studying at the university. Maths, isn’t it? Come in, come in.’

  Deck the halls with boughs of holly. Chérif had never seen a church decorated for Christmas; he therefore witnessed the Aladdin’s cave of glittering tinsel for the first time. Swags of heavy sliced green, powder-puffed with fake silver glitter, shimmered in the lights. Great Blessington possessed a magnificent medieval rood screen, illuminated for festivals and reproduced in colour in all the county guide books. Here was St Barbara, holding out a miniature version of the church in her right hand, and here was St Catherine, bowling her wheel before her, like a giant hoop. Behold St George in patchy silver armour with red frills, waggling his lance at a marvellously restored monster, all fire and teeth and rolling eyes, a dragon beloved of the children, who had to be restrained from stroking him and smacked if they managed to do so. The assembled choir of saints surrounding the altar were too numerous for a monotheistic religion. You could miss the hand of God the Father in the crowd. The simple golden cross, a priceless trinket, wired up to various secret alarms, had no one nailed or roped to its shining intersections. The crucifix stood empty, the Holy Ghost masked by holly and pine cones. And so in the packed church, peopled by imperfect humanity, scuffling children and the smell of wet conifers, Chérif beheld a market scene, utterly different from the empty, carpeted spaces where he had been told the Lord was to be found.

  ‘Sit on the edge of that pew,’ rasped Miss Webster, manhandling him into the seat, ‘then we can escape before the mulled wine and mince pies.’

  Everyone was more or less settled as the vicar intoned the bidding prayers. The event resembled a television variety show with the vicar as master of ceremonies. Women took a leading role in the performance. Chérif gaped at this odd quirk of Western Christianity, which was very unlike the Catholic chapel near his village. The
Holy Fathers were desert saints he recognised, an all-male community of simple, barefoot men of God, skilled in medicine, friends with the marabout, and expert at car mechanics. They originally came from obscure corners of France, trained in Rome and then departed to the Sahara, where they spoke little and prayed day and night. But this never seemed peculiar. Indeed, it was expected. These men were the guardians of the deep wells. They shared everything they possessed with his people and had no fear of whatever alien creed foamed and boiled in the surrounding sands. They extended their brown-flecked hands regardless and whipped the children for stealing what would have been freely given. Chérif recalled those holy men, who had been folded away in his memory, when years later, wandering in the desert, he came upon the ruins of the monastery of St Jérôme dans le Désert. For when the time came the Holy Fathers faced their martyrdom at the hands of the Islamic insurgents, fearless and stoical, their eyes lifted to the endless dunes. Even their murderers knew that they were God’s servants. Yet nothing stayed their hands. For even as we bear witness to God, shall men know that our word was of God. By their works ye shall know them.

  But who were these women in camel jackets with large gold buttons, who boomed with great authority, ‘And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots’? The spectacle appeared increasingly bizarre. Chérif concentrated hard. ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.’ None of this seemed at all likely. Miss Webster, meanwhile, glared at the congregation; from time to time she caught a familiar eye and bared her teeth in an unnerving smile. The midnight carols. What on earth was she doing here? She hadn’t been to the midnight service since her mother died. Good God, there’s Dr Brody. He looks a hundred. And his wife so much younger than he is. Perverted, really. Whose child is that kicking up blue murder? She swivelled round, intensifying her lasered gleam. Ah, don’t know them. Jolly good, he’s taking the thing outside. With any luck it’ll freeze quietly. Miss Webster would have guarded the inn door like a savage mastiff and sent everybody packing to the stables.

  The candles were being handed round. Chérif wasn’t sure what to do with his and fell to sniffing it out of mild curiosity.

  ‘And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.’

  The lights didn’t go out all at once. There was a flickering, then a series of clicks; the overheads, huge orbs suspended on iron chains, gradually dimmed. The gigantic pine tree nuzzling the pulpit remained a blaze of fairy points reflected in the shiny boxes of fake, empty presents sheltered beneath the green. The choir’s lead soprano, also known as Miss Webster’s odious little shit, sashayed down the aisle. His cassock was a little too voluminous and he waddled slowly, already well advanced past the font before the church plunged into shadow, his candle held out before him, like a raised sword.

  Once in royal David’s city

  Stood a lowly cattle shed

  Where a mother laid her baby

  In a manger for his bed.

  Mary was that mother mild,

  Jesus Christ, her little child.

  The church held its breath. Miss Webster hoped that the evil-minded ten-year-old would walk up the inside of his cassock. He sometimes careered down her lane on his mountain bike, spattering her door with pebbles. She contemplated digging hidden potholes, disguised with cardboard and a thin shell of earth. It would all look like an accident. Someone was trying to catch her attention. Time to light our candles. Chérif held out his taper obediently, anxious to get it right.

  ‘Merry Christmas, my dear,’ hissed Miss Webster.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ he whispered back. The choir rose to its collective feet and began the roar of joyous conviction.

  And our eyes at last shall see him . . .

  Who is God and Lord of All.

  Not for the first time Miss Webster decided that her religion was a mystery cult followed by the half-baked and the barking mad. How on earth did one baby represent the salvation of the world? They got to ‘O come, all ye faithful ...’ when she spotted two of the vicar’s groupies creeping off towards the parish rooms to heat up the vats of spicy wine. Sing, choirs of angels, Sing in exultation. Miss Webster booted Chérif in the shins.

  ‘Quick! Let’s get out of here!’

  They scuttled forth, their retreat masked by universal jubilation. When the congregation united round its festive paper cups of sweet mulled wine, received opinion was of one voice. How good to see Miss Webster back again. How far-sighted of her to bring her young man. He’s a very lovely boy, isn’t he? Nobody remarked that Miss Webster never came to the midnight carols, or pointed out that it was very odd to see a young Muslim in the church in the first place. They all brimmed with ecumenical conviction: we are the People of the Book, united by our faith in the one true God – but each to his own revelation. And outside in the white frost, beneath the black sky speckled with Christmas stars, their eyes raised to the glow of the city, miles away in the fold of the earth, Chérif and Miss Webster bolted for home.

  5

  Attentat

  Sometime in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2003, probably between midnight and one-thirty, Chérif fell victim to Karen’s mother’s rum punch. The thing tasted like fruit juice: cucumbers and lemons floated on the surface, oranges stuffed with cloves circulated gently in the golden liquid, served in an enormous Italian bowl with a silver ladle. Everyone helped themselves to copious spoonfuls. No one warned him. Chérif had never taken a fanatical stand on the subject of alcohol. He downed the odd beer from time to time, but never drank spirits and in the students’ union he rarely touched anything stronger than Kaliber. He was a man who genuinely preferred tea. And now, after all, given that he was entrusted with Miss Webster’s car, he thought of himself as a responsible person. The first signs of something seriously awry dawned upon Karen following an outburst of wild dancing and a passionate kiss bestowed full on the lips, delivered as a postscript to the midnight rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Karen was a little surprised. Unlike all her previous boyfriends, Chérif liked to take things as slowly as she did. The fact that she never had to fight him off counted greatly in his favour. He held her hand. He kissed her on both cheeks as the French do. She expected matters to warm up in the New Year, but never with such boisterous rapidity. By twelve-thirty he was dancing with anyone of either sex who would take the floor – polished boards, the rugs pulled back, all the furniture pushed against the wall. The guests yelled, ‘Look at Chérif!’ and ‘Watch out for the Wild Man!’ as he boomeranged off the bookshelves and into the American bar. Chérif took these cries of encouragement as a sign that he was not only being entertaining, but had also been fully accepted by Karen’s family and friends. He flung himself into the fray, and at one-thirty, leaped the sofa, crashed into the wall, dislodging a picture, which smashed into a heap beside him, then passed out.

  Karen, still afflicted with a mouth tasting of ashes and a crashing headache, rang Miss Webster at around midday on New Year’s Day. Miss Webster, like many schoolteachers, proved startlingly liberal on sexual matters. When Chérif asked, yes, actually asked, if he could stay out all night on New Year’s Eve and go to Karen’s party, she had assumed that tonight was to be The Night of Joy for both of them.

  ‘My dear, you’re well beyond the age of consent. It’s only good manners to let me know, but you don’t need to ask my permission.’

  Permission. Consent. Yes! She says yes. Chérif dressed himself up very carefully and pushed off at eight on New Year’s Eve in Miss Webster’s car. But alas, he did not return in one piece. Karen brought him home in a taxi. The rain quietly spotted the windows and the grey day never lifted its face to greet the New Year. Chérif crept into the porch, unable to speak; his face was now a very strange colour and no longer golden. A splendid black bruise, handed out by the aggressive end of the sofa, pursued its stealthy cour
se across his left cheek and eye, darkening the bloodshot socket. He had one arm thrown around Karen’s shoulders, and as they staggered through the front door they ruffled the row of upturned outdoor boots, laid out on wooden pegs like war trophies, and collapsed into the front room to a drumbeat of falling wellingtons.

  ‘Where’s my car?’ demanded Miss Webster.

  ‘In Mum’s garage. It’s fine. Chérif will bring it back when he can drive again.’ Karen offered a row of explanations. ‘He’s OK really. He wasn’t in a fight. He fell down behind the sofa. And that’s where he spent the night.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I spent the night on the sofa,’ said Karen miserably,’ ‘and Mum’s furious. Someone was sick all over the carpet in the bathroom.’

  Miss Webster’s rising laughter gurgled in her throat. She passed it off as a cough and propelled them into the corridor.

  ‘Black coffee,’ she snapped. ‘He can’t go to bed until he’s drunk some black coffee. Take him along to the downstairs shower and push him in, then bring me everything he’s wearing and I’ll pop it in the washing machine. Go along. Now.’

  The phone rang. Chérif and Karen lurched along the passage, locked together like debutantes in the three-legged race on Parents’ Day. The phone hissed and whirred; then an alien voice gabbled in French down the line.

  ‘Meeses Webster? Ah, c’est vous! Bonne Année, Madame Webster. Prospérité, bonheur, santé, bonne santé avant tout. Ici c’est Saïda à l’appareil.’

  Merde.

  ‘Saïda! Quelle surprise. Et Bonne Année aussi. Mes meilleurs vóux ...’

  Miss Webster’s command performance merited an award. Yes, Chérif was quite well. He had just stepped out to get some fresh bread and coffee. What a charming boy! So helpful. No, of course not, I love having him here to stay. Company in the evenings. Oh yes, such marvellous results from his first semester. He studies very hard every evening. You should be proud of your handsome son. No, he has lovely friends. Yes, as far as I know he’s been keeping up with the mosque. I don’t ask too much about that sort of thing. But he mentioned an Asian friend from Peterborough, who is also a Muslim, and we stuck to Ramadan with passionate fanaticism. And how is the hotel? Not full for Christmas? Oh dear, that’ll be the result of those awful bombings. People do take fright. Quite unreasonable really. Lightning never strikes twice. And how is Abdou? Ah yes, good ... good. Yes, of course I’ll get him to ring you. Would this evening be all right? What time? And we mustn’t forget that you’re an hour ahead. You see, when he gets back I’ll start cooking ...