Miss Webster and Chérif

by Patricia Duncker

  Chérif had, unfortunately, grasped both sides of the debate. He heard and understood the wretchedness of the abandoned Don José. Behold a man who has sold his honour for too cheap and transient a bargain. Miss Webster purchased the bilingual text of the opera in a pocket edition on sale in the foyer. She worried that Chérif might not understand the plot. But alas, this story was all too appropriate to the questions the boy asked himself, as his life unfolded in unexpected ways; he inhabited an entire landscape of ethical dilemmas about which Miss Elizabeth Webster knew nothing. Does a man have the right to desert his family and his duty for the sake of an illicit love? Surely he cannot cast aside a woman once he has chosen her? Does he have the right to do so should she prove unfaithful? If riches are spread freely at your feet, it is wrong, surely it must be wrong, to trample upon them? For the eternal ironies of art and its meanings, often so radically different for each one of us, sitting side by side in the dark, jostled dangerously between the old woman and the boy. The stage audience watching The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisby mocked a very different play from the one viewed by the audience in the stalls, who had just seen the jeering aristocrats snatched, by a hair’s breadth, from a similar fate. How easy it is to mistake a bear for a bush.

  Chérif peered at the words in the hushed gloom of the circle. He could just about make out the French.

  L’amour est un oiseau rebelle

  Que nul ne peut apprivoiser

  Et c’est bien en vain qu’on l’appelle

  S’il lui convient de refuser.

  Love is a rebellious bird

  Who cannot be tamed,

  And you call to him in vain

  If it suits him to say no.

  Indeed, some of the ninth-century Arabic poets at the court of the Caliph, whose work he had once learned by heart, had said much the same thing. Chérif remembered the first scene, where the gypsy danced around the soldier, as he witnessed the last, the murderer circling the woman. How had it come to this? Don José had been warned.

  L’amour est enfant de bohème,

  Il n’a jamais, jamais connu de loi

  Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime,

  Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi.

  Love is the gypsy’s child

  Who has never known the law

  If you don’t love me, I will love you

  If I love you, be on your guard.

  Here were the stated terms of engagement. Why could he not resist temptation? And yet, and yet. When can lies, treachery, betrayal, deception ever be justified? Herein lay Carmen’s strength; she was treacherous and unfaithful, but she did not lie. If you are a servant of God then you must also be bound to the Truth, for all Truth is of God and is God. Therefore you must walk in the light of Truth. But what course of action should you take if Truth and duty part company, never to embrace again? What if you are party to a lie, and become that lie in your own flesh? How can you ever retrieve the Truth and the Light, as the world grows dark around you? Chérif sat mesmerised by the erotic opera, caught up in the drama, and the horror of this lesson, which remains one of the oldest commonplaces in every system of ethics that exists on earth. Strait is the gate and narrow is the way. One step aside and you aren’t in the shit up to your knees, but to your neck.

  He watched Don José fall off the path to righteousness with a mighty crash. But he also perceived, quite clearly, the magnetic power of the temptation in the gypsy’s fabulous breasts and stamping feet. The Romanian soprano had trained hard at the Sevillanas, for as she led the women of the cast cavorting across the disordered tables, the serpent sex uncoiled its savage length and loosed its jaws. A suggestive frisson of applause rustled through the auditorium. The stage shook with their vibrating shouts, their skirts swirled, but only a glimpse of black-gartered stockings with a tiny rose tucked above the knee appeared, disappeared, as their block heels hit the boards in perfect time. One single glimpse was enough.

  Chérif and Miss Webster were, even before they spoke, utterly divided concerning the moral of this opera, performed more often than any other in the world. Miss Webster reconfigured Chérif’s passionate internal debate between duty and desire as a battle between order and chaos, enlightenment and revolution. She felt the gypsy’s power, but being able to resist it herself, with no difficulty whatsoever, did not recognise the need for anyone else to struggle like a madman caught in a noose. Elizabeth Webster had no sympathy with weakness or indecision. Choose the right. Do it. Only men who were idiotic and irrational loved unreliable women. And this one even admitted that she wasn’t to be trusted. Carmen represented one of the marginaux, the parasites on the edge of society; she associated with contraband criminals and lived in caves. People like that never settle down in houses. But that doesn’t give this soldier the right to stab her in the heart. She wasn’t a hypocrite. She had warned her hapless lover; she told him the truth. Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi. That Don José, he was clearly useless as a soldier since he’d allowed her to escape in the first place. And someone stab-happy with a knife clearly had no business peddling a rifle. Basta! Case closed. She gathered up her programme and handbag and gave Chérif the plastic numbers for their coats and shopping.

  ‘What a bloodbath! Let’s run for it.’

  Out in the cold air they escaped the crowds and turned up St Martin’s Lane. They needed a taxi going north. London exhaled an evil, suffocating damp. Miss Webster put up her brolly and Chérif carried the bags. All the taxis had either disappeared or were already taken. They strode up towards Long Acre and Covent Garden, by which time the rain was streaming off Miss Webster’s black umbrella. Water glossed the pavements; everything around them speeded up, hurrying for home. They stood on a street corner in the drizzle, weighed down by shopping bags, gazing to left and right. Exhausted irritation had taken hold of Miss Webster, who was beginning to niggle at the bit.

  ‘What a dreadful melodrama, don’t you think? Were we supposed to feel sorry for that drivelling soldier?’

  Chérif had identified completely with Don José. He tried to discriminate, to judge carefully, as Miss Webster herself had taught him to do.

  ‘He was wrong to kill her out of jealousy. She was not his wife.’

  ‘And he’d have been right to kill her if she was?’ This came out more sharply than Miss Webster had intended.

  ‘He would have had more justice on his side.’

  ‘Really? So if a man thinks he owns a woman he can slit her gullet with impunity? Is that what you learned in the mosque?’

  Chérif tensed, pale with tiredness. His lips tightened.

  ‘I didn’t say that. No, we don’t learn that.’

  ‘But it’s what you all think, isn’t it?’

  She was addressing a political system, which stretched across all continents, cultures and religions, and back through centuries of lost time. He was thinking of his own family and a small community of men and women who negotiated a precarious existence on the edge of the greatest desert in the world. But it was this hammering together of all Muslim men into an undifferentiated lump that cut Chérif to the quick. He knew plenty of men in his village who believed they had the right to beat their wives senseless if they so desired, on more or less any occasion. He also knew women capable of handing back every blow they received with interest. He knew men who adored their wives and called them ‘la gazelle’, and he knew one man who dreamed of his wife’s face, her slim wrists, her huge widening eyes, whenever he was apart from her. He had seen that man brave the censure of the entire village and all his extended family for the love of a woman who was not of their people, and pass up all hope of blessings, paternal and maternal. He conjured up Fatima and Saïda, both women who owned land and property, and heard them laying down the law, criticising their husbands and their children, matriarchs in their own families. His respect for Miss Webster was undiminished, and he was appalled to realise that, for no reason he could grasp, he had forfeited her good opinion.r />
  Miss Webster had lived in the kingdom of this world for nearly seven decades. She was a battle-scarred veteran of the sex wars, fought mostly in the workplace. Chérif had scarcely even begun to grasp the fact that he lived in a war zone, for all his life he had been protected by the armour of his identity as the eldest, indeed the only, son. The little that his family had was his by right. But, as in the case of Don José, and as Chérif himself well knew, with privilege came responsibility. He now feared that his judgement was unstable and his moral sense radically at fault. One night at the opera had made every bold decision – the entire discourse of passion, daring, sacrifice – appear not only foolhardy, but potentially fatal. The cards which foretold Carmen’s death now seemed, in his paranoid imagination, to predict a cruel, even-handed destiny that would be his as well.

  ‘If you wait here, I’ll find a taxi,’ said Chérif, his face blank. He propped the bags up against the wall beside her and walked away into the swaying darkness. Miss Webster bit her tongue and watched him go.

  Now, Miss Webster wore glasses for reading only. Her long distance vision was perfect. She saw exactly what happened and was able to make a detailed statement to the police. Chérif was striding fast, directly into the rain. He was aiming for the lighted two-way street up ahead. The alleyway down which he marched was dark and narrow, no cars could pass there, no bright shops or bars illuminated the wet pavements, there were only deserted offices and locked metal shutters. But it was not pitch-black. Up ahead gleamed the streetlights, and overall the ubiquitous orange glare. She saw three men, two wearing anoraks with the hoods pulled up so that their faces were obscure, but the third, a black man, possibly of West Indian or African origins, was not wearing a hood, and he was the first to stop and address Chérif. They were too far away for her to hear what they were saying. The black man had his hand raised, pointing. The other two were white. She was utterly certain. They were not wearing gloves and she saw their naked white hands. One was smaller, fatter than the other, but they were both white men. The black man was the leader. They were all young, twenties maybe, no older. Their jackets were dark, dark blue or black, and one was a waterproof, because it shone slick in the rain. The black man’s anorak had a white strip at chest height all round the jacket, and that glowed slightly yellow in the dark. One of the white men grabbed hold of Chérif and pushed him back so that he stumbled in the gutter and fell.

  Then all three set upon him like a pack of dogs. Chérif lashed out at their legs, but was rapidly overwhelmed. One was kicking him in the kidneys and he curled shut like a seashell to avoid the blows. The scene unfolded in silence and slow motion. The boys tried to rip off his new jacket, his new black leather jacket with the Bruce Lee kung fu writing on the back. Miss Webster abandoned the shopping, cast the umbrella aside and pounded down the alleyway with the agility and panache of a woman half her age. She was wearing Hush Puppies, and the hiss of the traffic on the wet streets masked her approach. They didn’t hear her coming until she fell upon them. She pitched into the fray, her handbag whirling like a cat-o’-nine-tails and caught one of the hoods a nasty crack across the cheekbone and the side of the face. The rapidity and ferocity of her attack was so unexpected that two of them sprang back, alarmed. Her short white hair and smart green coat with gold buttons seemed an unusual outfit for a street vigilante. Even more horrid and startling, a terrible squeaky yell resounded around the empty buildings as she joined battle.

  ‘Get off him, you stupid bullies!’

  The black man thumped her in the stomach and she collapsed, like a winded doll. Chérif had wrapped his arms around his head, but was struggling to get up. The stakes had suddenly evened up, if only slightly. Neither of them saw which of the three men produced the knife. He clearly intended to slice the whirling handbag free from Miss Webster’s manic clutch, but failed and stabbed her arm instead, cutting into the green tweed, through the cardigan and silk blouse and deep into the thinning flesh beneath. She let out a screech, then a howl – but she would not let go.

  ‘How dare you stab me!’ She sat up, embracing the green leather bag, her best, the one with the gold clasp, as if it were a long lost child, and accused her assailant of those most fearsome crimes, dreadful to witness on the streets of England: insolence and bad manners. ‘Who on earth do you think you are? How dare you! Now piss off.’

  And amazingly, like Banquo’s murderers, they did, flying away into the rainy night. Chérif’s face was masked with blood, a red curtain falling across his cheek and running down under his chin. A deep cut above his left eye furrowed into his black curls, which hung ugly and lank, plastered with blood and rain. Blood trickled round his left ear. They sat absolutely still in the gutter for a moment. The old lady spoke first, clutching her gouged arm.

  ‘Oh dear. I’ve left all the shopping on the street corner. And my umbrella. Your face looks bad.’

  And then they just sat there, side by side in the gutter, for many minutes, without saying anything, drenched by the thickening rain. Chérif clutched his head and lifted himself on to the edge of the pavement, the blood running over his fingers. Miss Webster remained in the gutter, where the water making for the drain had to find a path around her and flowed forth beneath her bent legs. Both stockings were ripped at the knees; through the shredded holes loomed a pair of nasty scraped cuts. She had been dragged forwards when she fell.

  Then a man walked past them on the other side of the narrow street. He was so close they could have grabbed the edge of his raincoat, but he almost walked straight past them. People have a right to sit bleeding in gutters if that is what they wish to do. But something about the odd combination of the Arab boy and the respectable old lady did not look quite right. The stranger paused, stared, doubled back and crossed over to their side. He addressed Miss Webster.

  ‘Excuse me. Are you all right?’

  ‘No. I’m not all right. I’ve been stabbed. Would you be so kind as to call an ambulance and the police?’

  Both Miss Webster and Chérif continued to sit there in the gutter, puzzled and shocked, frozen like the miraculous statues of silent saints who have just begun bleeding copiously to the Glory of God the Father. The stranger drew away from them, pulled out his mobile phone and began to summon the emergency services.

  ‘Do you think that we can ask him to go and fetch our shopping and my umbrella if they’re still there?’ whispered Miss Webster.

  ‘No. He’s busy,’ murmured Chérif. ‘I’ll go.’

  Chérif had staggered halfway down the street before the stranger began shouting. But neither Chérif nor Miss Webster could understand what he was trying to say. The rain fell heavily now, and they could not decipher complex meanings, or make sense of what was said to them. The world drifted away into the great desert distances, upon a sea of blood. A miracle! The shopping, astonishing to behold, leaned saturated against the wall, but bearing up well inside its posh carriers. Chérif could no longer locate Miss Webster’s black umbrella, which had taken wing and bowled away towards Leicester Square. The traffic surged back and forth and people pushed past him, ignoring the wreckage of his appearance. He set off back towards her, aware that he could neither walk nor see straight, but not yet fully conscious of the hammering pain that surrounded his head like a helmet of wasps, waiting for the signal to close in.

  The emergency services were arriving just as he returned. Miss Webster, still propped up in the gutter, was now encircled by paramedics in luminous yellow jackets with reflecting white bands. She could neither turn her head, nor move, but his return did not go unremarked. The Good Samaritan pointed straight at him. A moment later the police surrounded him and grabbed all the shopping. He yelped with pain as a blue man bent his arms into unnatural positions.

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Got him!’

  ‘Well done, Missus, you clearly landed quite a blow.’

  Chérif realised that he was being arrested just before he collapsed. His chief worry centred on the shopping.
Where were they taking Miss Webster’s new suit and towels? What about the shirts and trousers she had bought for him? The last thing he heard was Miss Webster taking on the Metropolitan Police with the same energy and venom with which she had despatched the unfortunate Mrs Harris.

  ‘That’s my lodger, you incompetent idiots. And take your hands off my shopping.’

  Miss Webster’s voice was the last thing he heard before the world closed down and the lights went out with a snap. It was also the first thing he heard, even before he dared to look up at the shabby green screens surrounding his trolley in Accident and Emergency.

  ‘Oh good, you’ve come round. I told them that you’d lost a lot of blood. Can you see anything out of your left eye? It’s practically closed over. We’re in Casualty. I’ve had fourteen stitches. My knife wound is spectacular, but I think your injuries are actually worse.’

  Miss Webster had switched to information overdrive, like an accelerating car. Chérif could not speak, or even acknowledge the fragile old woman perched beside him in a green plastic armchair. She wore one of the new shirts they had bought for him, a chunky tartan lumberjack pattern in brushed cotton. It sagged over her narrow shoulders. Miss Webster, bent on explanations, talked nineteen to the dozen.

  ‘Do you realise that they tried to arrest you? They actually accused you of mugging me! Now, is that likely? Surely if you’d fled the crime scene you wouldn’t come back carrying the victim’s shopping? Sorry about nicking your new shirt. Those swine wrecked my cardigan and my blouse was a dustbin job too. They nearly cut all your clothes off you, while you were out for the count. But I stopped them. Did the bastards get your wallet? Not the doctors, the muggers. Your new jacket’s on the chair there. I’ve sponged off all the blood, otherwise it stains. I can’t reach it. I won’t be able to lift anything substantial with my right arm for at least two months. Dreadful. How are you feeling?