Miss Webster and Chérif (20 page)

‘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  ...

But Miss Webster never heard the return conversation, which would, in any case, have been conducted in his own language, rather than French. Chérif claimed that he rang back on Karen’s mobile, as he could not bring himself to run up a bill on Miss Webster’s phone. He sank into a demoralised hangover, brought on by disgrace.

‘Chérif says he can’t thank you enough.’ Karen slumped down at the kitchen table. ‘Is his mum furious too?’

‘Luckily for him,’ said Miss Webster, grappling with her Italian percolator, ‘she knows nothing whatsoever.’

Miss Webster rarely entered Chérif’s room, except to hoover. The photograph might still be hidden there, but she never looked again. Every time she did enter the room she shuddered, appalled by the sudden explosion of pink floral horror which still coated every surface. She returned to a project abandoned nearly a year earlier: a knitted quilt in orange, red and gold squares. She found the completely mindless task of knitting three dozen squares, all exactly the same apart from the colours, marvellously soothing. She menaced the boy with the massing web of Saharan shades, which were destined to replace the unchanging floods of roses.

‘It’s lovely,’ he said, stretching the quilt out over his knees as it grew across the sitting room. He noticed that she simply stitched the different squares together at random.

‘No rhyme or reason to the whole damn thing,’ said Miss Webster, turning on all the lights. ‘I can’t be bothered.’

‘C’est comme la vie,’ said Chérif, suddenly gripped by unnecessary philosophical revelation. ‘You think there’s a pattern, but there isn’t.’

‘There probably is a darker purpose,’ replied Miss Webster grimly. ‘We just can’t see it.’

And the world news in the illuminated square before them was indeed darkening. There were desert shots of Western troops massing in the Gulf, and sinister grey ships in small convoys slicing the blue. In the last days there shall be wars and rumours of wars. Miss Webster checked her emerging bulbs. A white bank of snowdrops sheltered by the woods on the left side of the garden fluttered in full bloom. Against the dead leaves and browned grass they braved it out, facing a wretched month of wind and rain. War was coming. But the green points and clumps of daffodils, gathered in groups on her lawns, rose up in planted ranks like dragon’s teeth. Nature could not wait; the growing time had come. War is not a natural thing, Miss Webster muttered to her daffodils. It can be stopped.

They sat watching archive footage of the Iraqi national flag and Saddam Hussein making defiant speeches of heroic resistance, which Chérif actually understood.

‘
Great Iraqi people
,’ he translated the text into a version that was significantly different from the subtitles, ‘
heroic people of glory, faith, jihad, sacrifice and bravery ... Peace be upon you ... Dear Brothers, the Zionist aggression is perpetuated by a common arrangement between the Zionist entity and the American administration
... He speaks classical Arabic. Like the great poets in history.’

‘Really? And how do you know about these great poets?’

‘From the librarian in Tamegroute. He ran a small class for us. We learned lots by heart because he wouldn’t let us touch the books. It’s very beautiful. Listen.’ And he recited the verses in Arabic.

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.

‘Good heavens.’ Miss Webster had no idea what he had just said; it was as mysterious and peculiar as Saddam Hussein’s mad paean to the Iraqi people’s love of self-sacrifice. They switched channels. Al-Jazeera broadcast the entire speech. Chérif followed the thunderous dictator, who now appeared dressed in military attire, transfixed by every modulation in the titanic rant. Miss Webster concentrated during the Koranic interludes, which were sung, like Gregorian chant, but otherwise she sat wondering what she would do if the war came to Little Blessington. It wasn’t likely, but it’s just as well to be prepared.

‘I’d hide you,’ she assured Chérif, ‘in the cupboard under the stairs. There’d be lynch mobs out, looking for foreigners.’

For the first time since he had come to England real fear flooded Chérif’s face.

‘Mobs?’

‘Well, maybe. It’s always better to expect the worst. The power would go first, of course. But we’d be OK. I’d get out the camping gas and we have the wood stove. We’d need candles and a stock of gas bottles.’

‘What if the water goes off?’ Chérif began to imagine disaster. Miss Webster did not live near a well. The desert people always lived near wells. But she remained unperturbed.

‘We’ll divert the stream in the woods. It’s only twenty yards away. Water isn’t a problem in the country. And we can dig latrines, like soldiers do at the front. Heating’s more difficult.’ She warmed to her theme. ‘Masking tape. The Iraqis have the right idea.’ They watched the market stalls in Baghdad loading up with brown tape and paraffin. ‘Tape up the windows so that all the glass doesn’t fly out and slice you up when the bombs drop.’

Chérif had never lived in a city and the house where he was born had bars and blankets across the windows.

‘Why don’t they just leave Baghdad?’ he asked, incredulous, as they watched amazing images of people carrying on with their daily lives, negotiating the shopping, buying spices, opening up their restaurants and garages.

‘They don’t have the option. They can’t leave. They’d be shot. Anyway, you don’t want to leave everything that’s familiar. Everything you own. I’d never leave the cottage. I’d rather die here.’

She looked around at her books, pictures, heavy lined green curtains, the framed photographs of landscapes in France, the new DVD player, and realised that she was speaking the truth; this was her tomb, her pyramid, the final resting place.

‘We would go out into the desert if the soldiers came,’ said Chérif, reflecting on his own fate.

‘It’s as well to have a plan,’ Miss Webster declared. ‘The soldiers always do come in the end.’

Newsnight
began with Paxman slumped at an angle across the desk. Saddam Hussein had apparently written two novels, which were being reviewed. Miss Webster bounced on her sofa with joy, for the titles were delightful:
Zabibah and the King
, which had been published anonymously, but widely acclaimed as a work of genius, and
The Impregnable Fortress
, heralded with universal eulogy and published under his own name in 2002.

‘He should have called the first one
The King and I
,’ she crowed. ‘When on earth did he find time to write them?’

‘You don’t have to do much if you’re a dictator,’ said Chérif. ‘You seize power and then just sit there. The secret police do the rest.’

‘So young and yet so cynical,’ grinned Miss Webster.

‘
Do these novels tell us anything useful about the inner workings of Saddam Hussein’s mind?
’ Paxman demanded of the unfortunate Iraqi intellectual in exile who had just read and summarised both literary productions. The scholar paused, baffled. His main area of expertise was economics.

‘
No, not really
,’ he said. Then he added, ‘
Novels don’t tell you anything. They’re not real. They’re just stories
.’

Paxman raised his eyebrows and rearranged his expression into a sneer. ‘
Thank you. We’ll bear that in mind
.’

And the world moved on to other things.

But no one doubted that the war was indeed coming. Too many soldiers had been moved into place. What kind of courage would be needed now to think twice and turn back? A massive anti-war demonstration took place in London. Eight coaches left from Great Blessington at six in the morning. Miss Webster and Chérif gaped at the crowds, people with dogs and children in pushchairs, battling grannies in dated red hats, entire families with similar faces – many of them had never carried a banner before in their lives. Yet house prices in their damp corner of England rose week after week, in an elegant and steady arc. As the war seeped closer people longed for stability, safety and a walled garden. It was as if two forces, the impulse to kill and the desire to purchase, had found a rising rhythm and begun to dance. Karen kept busy. Her list of appointments – viewings, surveys, valuations, estimates – filled up every day. Her mobile phone tinkled tunes incessantly as she tore from place to place, measuring up conservatories and sitting rooms, calculating every inch of habitable space, assessing flood risk, harassing solicitors, demanding sealed bids on her desk by Friday morning. Often the house she priced up was sold even before she could print off the particulars. She dropped round to visit at the cottage almost every late afternoon during February and March and sank down, exhausted, beside Chérif at the kitchen table. He fair-copied lecture notes and she wrote descriptions of bedrooms. Miss Webster supplied tea and advice.

‘“Spacious landing. Access to loft with internal loft ladder.” Does that make it sound as if the ladder comes down when you open the loft door?’ The language of estate agents’ details created a domestic code, disturbing and opaque, with financial implications.

‘No. Put loft ladder fixture. Then they can’t remove the thing.’

‘I’d better ask them.’

‘“Kitchen, 12’ 6 10’, with slate floor to patio.”’

‘Nice big kitchen. Does the slate continue on to the patio? Sounds wonderful.’

‘It does, but it wasn’t pretty. Not to me. The particulars are just a map really. You have to see it all with your own eyes. And the floor wasn’t a selling point. I thought it looked cold.’

‘You can’t carpet kitchens.’

‘But I like your pottery tiles. They’re not black and shiny.’

Chérif listened to the women talking and fluttered the pages of his textbook. He paused over the image of a stone fragment covered in unintelligible designs.

‘What’s that?’ asked Karen.

‘It’s a Sumerian tablet. It was discovered in Iraq. It’s still in the museum there.’

‘Which will soon be blown to bits by the Americans, I expect,’ said Miss Webster. They all peered at the fragile, doomed treasure. ‘Can you stay to supper, Karen?’

Miss Webster cooked lamb stew with saffron rice. She had mastered just the right combination of lemon, garlic and ginger.

‘Put on the second CD.’

Carmen Campbell, Best of
had been a request Christmas present to Chérif. They discovered that the new DVD also played CDs and the singer’s smoky, liquid voice oozed through the dining room and washed against the dresser and the kitchen cupboards. Strange, suggestive, insinuating, that voice haunted their chilly spring. Miss Webster became deeply attached to the songs, their ghostly chants and angry eruptions. No, passion never counts as crime. Carmen Campbell lined the walls of Miss Webster’s mind, her uncanny presence was never questioned. She settled there, and made her home. Miss Webster could no longer imagine music that did not benefit from the anarchic attack of several thousand amplified volts. She had passed, imperceptibly, into the electronic age.