Miss Webster and Chérif

by Patricia Duncker

  ‘They know you’re here, don’t they?’

  Carmen fixed her miserably.

  ‘I told them you’d know. I told them. I told them that you used to be a private detective and that you find everything out in the end.’

  ‘What on earth are you doing here? Working for them?’

  ‘I’m in cold storage. Deep cold after this little fiasco.’ Carmen made it sound like a tragic destiny. ‘I have to work for them. Or I’ll be sent to prison. It was their price. Are you going to tell them I’ve cracked and told you?’

  ‘My dear girl, who would I tell? I don’t know them. Or even who they are. And the only one I’ve ever met was a plain-clothes officer so frightening I flung him out of my house as quickly as I could.’ Miss Webster reflected for a moment. Carmen Campbell really was trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. ‘You’d better watch it here. You’ll end up decapitated. Saïda’s probably hired a dozen contract killers to hunt you down. She sported a vindictive glint, or so it seemed to me. You’d better be careful. These people aren’t civilised. They’re mired in the Middle Ages.’

  This speech disturbed both of them. Miss Webster stared at the house, which had neither electricity nor indoor sanitation.

  Carmen waited a moment and then replied, ‘That’s not true, Miss Webster. I came here to find sanctuary and they took me in. No one has ever judged me for what I did. I work hard. I try to repay the debt. It’s very difficult for me. I had to learn the languages. I only know English. And I’ve never lived outside all the time before. Goats and camels are hard work and it means you have to be outside no matter how awful the wind feels. I’m a jazz singer. I come from London.’

  They stared at the Sahara Desert and imagined England. The old woman from the country of dark soil and big skies and the black girl from a nice suburban neighbourhood and a church-going family found themselves thinking of strangely linked, yet different things. Carmen remembered EastEnders going out up to three times a week and the theme tune from Thunderbirds Are Go. Miss Webster remembered frost on the lawns in the mornings and her Michaelmas daisies, pale purple against the red-brick walls of her vegetable garden. Carmen recalled the sweaty smell of the Northern Line and the CDs packed under the bathroom sink in Pepper’s flat. Miss Webster saw her potting shed and Chérif’s dark curls shining through the glass, as he planted out the seedlings. Carmen saw her name in huge blocks of red neon scudding across the forthcoming events electronic notice-board at the Royal Festival Hall, and remembered pounding the floor of the taxi in triumph with her high heels. Miss Webster relived the great recycling wheelie bin debate, which took place on the gravel in front of the village shop. Carmen heard her mother’s voice calling down the staircase and imagined the smell of chillies and onions cooking up together. Miss Webster recognised the trees beyond her cottage, swaying in the autumn storms.

  ‘You should go back, go home.’

  ‘I can’t.’ Carmen turned to face Miss Webster, who now saw that the young woman’s huge brown eyes were awash with tears. Without any hesitation Elizabeth Webster held out her handkerchief and opened her arms.

  ‘You poor girl, you poor wretched girl.’

  They walked silently to and fro in the riverbed, Carmen crying uncontrollably, Miss Webster supporting her, speechless and moved. She realised that this was not repentance or regret, but homesickness, the most terrible longing that can ever seize our hearts. We are called home. Our desire to return, to go back to the place we recognise as our source, our first beginning, arises from our bitter rage against the old enemies, our only common foes: time, age, death. We long to burst over the threshold and find the dead still present, waiting for us with their arms outstretched. We must believe that we will find our welcome assured and the world unchanged. Carmen tasted the full measure of her loss. She would never, ever be able to go back or go home. They sat down at the edge of the palm groves in the shadow of a cracked mud wall. The sound of water rushed behind them. The late afternoon light brushed their faces.

  ‘I don’t usually break down like this. I’m not weak and feeble. I’ll be all right in a minute.’ Carmen sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. ‘You know, it’s great being able to talk English again. To someone English.’

  Miss Webster nodded. ‘Use the handkerchief.’

  ‘You wouldn’t grass me up, would you?’

  ‘No, my dear. It had never occurred to me to grass you up,’ she replied in stately tones. And indeed it hadn’t.

  ‘Miss Webster? Can I ask you to do something for me? To post a letter? In England. So that it won’t have foreign stamps.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Carmen dashed back across the wadi into the house and returned with a large smudged white envelope sealed up with wide brown tape. Miss Webster took out her glasses and looked at the name and the address. Percival Leroy Jones.

  ‘But I know this man,’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Everybody knows him. He’s very famous. He’s always on telly,’ crowed Carmen, full of pride.

  ‘But I know him personally. He was at the airport last year. In Casablanca. Looking for you.’

  ‘For me? Looking for me?’ Carmen’s childlike tone registered pleasure, gratitude and alarm.

  ‘He said he didn’t think he’d find you and he obviously hasn’t. But he came. He was here.’

  ‘Send him my letter.’

  ‘Is he your father?’

  ‘No,’ said Carmen, as if she was scoring a crucial point in the argument, ‘he was my manager. And he’s my friend.’

  She pronounced the word friend as if it should be spoken only by princes, as if it was the one thing that was faithful and infinite, a loyalty and a passion that surpassed all other bonds, forgave all things, and knew no betrayal.

  They became aware of a figure on the far horizon, coming out of the desert, a small cloud of dust rising behind him. He was still a long way off, walking slowly across the stony crest beyond the dunes. He carried a tall stick with which he flicked the battered scrub bushes. Carmen waved, but he did not respond. The sun was behind him. He may not have seen them.

  ‘He spent the night crying. We got very fed up,’ said Carmen.

  Elizabeth Webster gazed at the hunched silhouette of the person who became steadily more unknowable, even as his familiar shadow stretched behind him, lengthening against the gold. The boy she knew was translated into a stranger. He reached a rock in the wadi twenty yards away and then stopped. Miss Webster was not prepared to put up with any more emotional scenes.

  ‘Come here, young man. Sit down in the shade of these palms and start talking. You have some explaining to do.’

  The boy wove an erratic trail across the space between them, avoiding her eye. Carmen got up, her beads and skulls rattling.

  ‘I’d better go and leave you to it.’

  She swished away down the mud tracks into the palm grove and vanished. The boy obeyed and sat down in her place beside Miss Webster, staring at his hands, clutching his stick. They were no more than four feet apart, and yet the distance seemed impossible to breach. The palms above them rustled and stirred. A little tornado of sand whipped down the wadi between the stones; then the wind dropped completely. The gigantic silence leached all emotion out of the space between them and the sky lifted a little, darkening at the core. She could hear the birds’ wittering, far away in the fronds of the great rushes that marked the end of the river that had perished in the dust. Behind all things there lurked a silence so huge that it sucked the breath from her chest back into the austere and endless waste of rock and sand. Before her lay nothing, nothing but an indifferent ferocity that stretched away across the earth, harrowing and infinite. She looked at Chérif, or whatever his name was, crouching before her, making himself smaller and smaller, clutching the smooth grey dip of the rocks.

  ‘Well? Speak.’ Elizabeth Webster took no prisoners.

  ‘Madame Webster, you can never forgive me.’

  ‘That’s up to me,
whether I intend to forgive you or not. We haven’t got that far yet. I actually need to know what you’ve done. And how you did it.’

  There was a grim and dreadful pause. Then Chérif began his confession, speaking very softly. Elizabeth had to lean forward to catch every hesitant word.

  ‘We changed passports. My cousin gave me all his documents – his student visa and his immigration papers. I practised his signature. We paid someone in Casa to change the photographs. He’s a Kenyan. He also specialises in British documents. You have to pay a lot in Euros. It wasn’t hard to do. Everyone knows us here, but no one does in the city.’

  ‘But your letters home? You sent weekly e-mails. Saïda told me that you were very conscientious.’

  ‘I told my cousin all about my course. I would anyway. He wrote the e-mails in the Hôtel des Voyageurs. They’ve got electricity and Internet access. He sent them to me. I tidied up the French and sent them back home from the Fac. So he did write to her every week.’

  Yes, thought Elizabeth, with a concocted pack of lies. The dimensions of their duplicity astounded her. If someone willingly hands you their identity and their life, even the life chosen for them by someone else, you cannot be said to be an impersonator or a charlatan. Chérif had become two people. The crunch came with the cash. Miss Webster went on to the offensive.

  ‘You took Saïda’s money.’

  The boy shrank down into the rock.

  ‘I will pay back every centime.’

  ‘You’ll have to.’

  The vast silence clamped a band across Miss Webster’s mouth. The cruel words she had prepared in the taxi drained away into sand. The light drew the shadows out across the golden dunes. Two camels appeared in the wadi, apparently free, nibbling the scrub. She watched each step, stately and deliberate, as the creatures belched and grunted their way down into the muddy puddles in the gulch. They raised their noses towards the palm grove and stared at Miss Webster. The light deepened and gleamed. She looked out into the vast arching blue. And after all, what mattered most to her? His company? Having someone else in the house? Speaking French in the mornings? Becoming addicted to very sweet thé à la menthe at ten o’clock every night? Taking an interest in the world again? In fact, who he actually was had never really mattered. She had never known who he was. She had accepted him nevertheless.

  ‘By the way, what is your real name?’ she asked gently, in a spirit of cautious enquiry.

  ‘I am Mohammed ben Yacoub. Chérif calls me Moha. Everybody calls me Moha.’

  Elizabeth Webster suddenly smiled.

  ‘I think I might have to go on calling you Chérif.’

  He looked at her, doubtful, but encouraged that she intended to continue speaking to him and might therefore have a use for his name. He had fully expected a bevy of gendarmes to emerge from the date palms and arrest him for fraud. Saïda would hardly accuse her own son. The role he had to play was therefore that of both villain and scapegoat. It was useless to argue that the idea had not been his, or at least not in the beginning. Besides, he had no real regrets. They had swapped lives for the sake of chemistry, mathematics and the love of a woman. The trick had been a daring risk, and they had pulled it off.

  Miss Webster sensed this little rush of pride and stared him down.

  ‘You must have known you would be found out.’

  ‘Yes, but we thought that Saïda would come round. We thought that she would accept Carmen in the end. Especially when she saw the baby. She loves her son and that’s her first grandchild. My cousin doesn’t want to leave the desert. He hated being at university. He’s happy now. The desert is his home.’

  ‘And where, young man, do you imagine your home is?’

  He had no answer to that. This boy, she realised, had never lied to her. Here he was, still exactly as he had always been: complex, reserved, ambitious, anxious to succeed in his studies and increase his chances in life, a boy who wanted to work and who would always, like a responsible son, send money home to his family.

  ‘Who else knew about this deception, Chérif? Apart from your criminal Kenyan?’

  He did not flinch at the borrowed name. He had adopted his cousin’s name as part of an alternative identity. The spliced graft had taken. He loved the name. It had been upon his lips as soon as he could speak.

  ‘Carmen of course. No one else at first. Maman and Papa found out at the end of Ramadan last year. They wanted to tell Saïda then, but the hotel was going badly and she’d had lots of bookings cancelled. And my parents were frightened about the money. Saïda can be very extreme. Maman had quarrelled with Saïda anyway – about her cruelty to Carmen, because she refused to see the baby. And then they weren’t speaking to each other. So she would have to ring up and say, “My son had tricked you. Your son is still here in the desert and he has married the Black English Witch.” And Ma just couldn’t face it, so my parents didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Did you even think what the consequences could have been?’

  Chérif looked blank. Then he spoke the pure truth.

  ‘I wanted to go to England to study. My cousin didn’t. He is in love with the desert and his new wife. We did this because it was the only solution to our lives. The only way out.’ This was wishful thinking after the event, but at that moment it seemed to Elizabeth that it had indeed been the only possible solution. And the right one. The messenger with mutilated hands had sent her to the desert. And she was now convinced that her purpose was to bring back Chérif.

  The giant silence lapped against her face. Chérif sat gazing at the last light on the golden dunes. The camels had strolled away, out of sight, and all across the domed earth a deep blue light flooded the night sky. Here was the first star. Abdou was still out there, somewhere in the grove of still palms, dozing in his taxi. A terrible stillness engulfed the world. This must be put right. And I can now make a decision that will ensure all manner of things shall be well. She stood up. Chérif picked up his stick and stood beside her. He spoke from the heart.

  ‘Before we take our leave, Madame Webster, I beg you to forgive me. I have betrayed your trust.’

  ‘There is nothing more to forgive, Chérif. The person who needs to forgive you is your aunt. You owe her a lot of money. You never pretended to be someone other than you are. You took your cousin’s name. That’s all. I loved having you to stay at the cottage. I even enjoyed watching the endless news.’

  ‘You have been more than a mother to me, Madame. You have been my friend.’

  Elizabeth looked at the boy’s heartbreakingly beautiful face. Her lip curled. She bit back the ironic response that had risen to the back of her tongue. This was not the moment to cut the boy’s feet from under him; instead she patted his dusty elbow. His jacket stank of goats.

  ‘Of course we are friends, Chérif. We will always be friends. Now listen to me carefully. Come round to the hotel on Sunday at the end of the day. Get Abdou to send me a text and I’ll come out to meet you. Don’t try to get in. The gardener is probably programmed to shoot you.

  ‘I’m going to see your parents and your aunt. You all owe her nearly £10,000. I’ll find out how much she paid for the visa and the plane tickets. I think it’s best if I buy her out now. Then she hasn’t got a weapon against your cousin and Carmen. You’d be amazed at how rapidly angry people calm down at the sight of vast sums. We’ll settle up later.

  ‘You’ll have to re-register at college under your real name or your cousin will be awarded your degree. I’ll put my mind to it. And you’d better visit everyone you know. We’ve only got until the end of the month. After that we’re going home.’

  Chérif stared at her, dumbfounded.

  Suddenly he saw the old woman with disturbing distinctness. What had she meant to him? In the beginning she had been an eccentric curiosity, a convenience, a house and a television set. But her tart and subtle tongue became a drawn sword in his defence. He had never negotiated the alien world alone; he had been accompanied every step of the way. The hot w
ind lifted and fixed her spiky white hair, which now stood up all around her head. The light washed her lined face with gold. She stood before him, transfigured. She was studying him with amusement and interest, as if he were a recent archaeological discovery of questionable provenance but great beauty. Respect is a powerful element in the connecting web we build between us and it is closely threaded with authority. The power of the old woman startled him into seeing her, as if for the first time.

  ‘Mais qui êtes-vous?’ he demanded. She had never looked so arresting, or so strange.

  ‘I’m the messenger,’ she said, and laughed out loud at his surprise. The darkness rushed across the desert towards them. ‘Till tomorrow then.’

  She strode off down the dusty path into the irrigated network of palm trees and gardens. Dim lights were coming on in the houses. He watched her go until she disappeared from sight into the shadows of the red earth walls and the giant date palms.

  Acknowledgements

  All the places and persons described in this novel, apart from Dr Broadhurst, who plays himself, are entirely fictional and any resemblance to an actual town or person is coincidental. My main source of technical information concerning the Sahara Desert was Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle, Sahara: The Life of the Great Desert (HarperCollins, 2003). My greatest debt is to my guides, Fettah and Yussef, who showed me the desert where they live and were unfailingly helpful, courteous and funny when everything went wrong.

  I would like to thank the following people for their help, encouragement and support: Barbara Carson, Sheila Duncker, Peter Lambert, Jacqueline Martel, Michèle Roberts, and Janet Thomas. Thank you to my editor Alexandra Pringle, the team at Bloomsbury, especially Victoria Millar, and to Kate Jones and everyone at ICM. Thank you to Claude Châtelard for her French expertise. Needless to say, all the remaining errors are my own.