Miss Webster and Chérif (22 page)

‘What is this place?’ he asked.

‘A memorial. Mostly to men, but there are some famous women here too, who served England, or this culture. It’s a dictionary of faces.’

‘That’s odd. We don’t make images of people except on television or in the newspapers. We don’t even take photographs. No one at home has a camera.’ Miss Webster looked at him sharply. She saw the shadow in the sand before her, the two smiling boys, the endless desert rolling towards eternity.

‘Really? No photographs? I see.’

Shakespeare perused their faces as they hesitated before him. The lights seemed to glitter on his gold earring. He cut a strange figure: knowing, rakish and fat.

‘Almost everybody here is dead,’ remarked Miss Webster. ‘It’s a mausoleum.’ They sat side by side on a bench staring at a very odd portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, who appeared to be wearing a ballet tutu. He posed like a dancing model on the catwalk, his legs tapering, elegant, misshapen.

‘Who was he?’

‘A courtier, a poet. He laid down his silk cloak in the mud and puddles so Queen Elizabeth could walk without getting her feet wet. Or so the story goes.’ Chérif smiled knowingly. So Sir Walter was a flatterer.

‘Then Elizabeth banned him from her court for getting one of her ladies pregnant. I think I read that in Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
. It’s at home if you’re interested. The good Sir Walter got the Queen’s lady up against one of the trees in the royal park and Aubrey says she was urging him on, or begging him to stop – history doesn’t make that clear – crying “Oh sweet Sir Walter, sweet Sir Walter ...” and as the danger and the pleasure increased the cry became “Sweeserswater, sweeserswater  ...”’

Chérif fixed Miss Webster with a wicked grin. ‘I saw a film on Europe 5 before I came to England that was about Queen Elizabeth. That film reminds me of you.’

‘Does it indeed?’ Miss Webster was very flattered. Elizabeth was not beautiful and all her hair had fallen out, but she had been very powerful in her time and had never married. An ability to make extempore speeches in Latin clearly proved useful and apart from some obvious errors in foreign policy, her royal career had been largely successful.

‘Yes,’ said Chérif with real affection, ‘you remind me of Walsingham.’ He pronounced the name ‘Walseenghum’. The image of Elizabeth’s ruthless spymaster loomed before Miss Webster. She got up, less flattered, but vastly amused by this tactless, if astute assessment of her character.

‘Well, there he is.’ She indicated the thin, discerning face, surrounded by a stiff, expensive ruff. ‘He was a clever old bastard.’ She paused. ‘You were doing pretty well in those days if you died of natural causes in your bed and not on the scaffold or with a knife in your eye.’

Chérif looked at Walsingham with fresh respect.

‘Did he kill many people?’

‘Doubtless. That was his job. But he probably didn’t do it himself. He hired assassins. It wasn’t a question of personal revenge. He was the head of Elizabeth’s intelligence services, so he was protecting the state. Or at least I suppose that’s what he thought he was doing.’

They met the royal killer’s cold gaze, steady but enigmatic, fearless of judgement across four hundred years. Then Chérif said something that seemed quite extraordinary to Miss Webster, simply because he had never before used the discourse splattered across the television news, the easy words with unstable meanings.

‘In Islam it is considered wrong to kill for a personal reason. You can only take life when it is demanded by jihad.’ The fact that he had raised the subject at all was completely out of character. The seriousness of his tone was decidedly sinister.

‘And what circumstances might unleash this jihad?’ Miss Webster’s lips curled in a sneer. He commanded her full attention and her feet stopped hurting.

‘It cannot be for personal gain,’ he said firmly, ‘but to protect all the community.’

Miss Webster instantly smelt something odd, and inauthentic, about these comments. Who had he been talking to? Or, worse still, to whom had he begun to listen? Well, at least he wasn’t arguing for honour killings and liquidating women who disgraced the family name. She decided to go no further in this business, or at least to shelve the discussion for the present. Suddenly, she employed those very English weapons: devious good manners and a rapid change of subject.

‘I think there’s a café downstairs,’ she said sweetly. ‘Shall we take the lift?’

Chérif had never been inside a large concert hall or an opera house. The local Edwardian gem where they had supported Carmen Campbell to the last thunderous echo had been his first indoor theatre. This auditorium was constructed on an entirely different scale. He gazed about the wondrous gilt cavern in amazement. It was like a sports stadium or the huge amphitheatres built for fights where Rocky and Spiderman took on the monstrous champion. The steep pitch of the circle and the balcony above was unnerving, but dramatic. Once seated you forgot all about it as the people around you grappled with their bags and programmes and climbed past your knees. He spied on the bustle in the orchestra and watched the bassoons tuning up, fascinated. Miss Webster sank back, exhausted. At last, let someone else do the work. Bring on the dancing girls. How could she have imagined that she could spend the entire day on her feet, trekking round shops and galleries and then be in a fit state for a two-hour drive home?

‘Chérif,’ she hissed, preparing the future, ‘do you mind driving at night?’

‘No. I’ll drive home,’ he volunteered at once.

She nodded with relief and began to decipher the programme.

‘Bugger it. I chose Bizet’s
Carmen
because I thought it would be sung in French and you’d understand it easily. But it’s all in English.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

And it really didn’t.

Miss Webster could still retrieve the process of deliberation that had led her to choose
Carmen
. The fact that it ought, at least, to be sung in French was fundamental to her decision, but like many ordinary people who rarely go to the theatre, she discovered that she was also governed by unexamined expectations. Everybody knows the tunes. A torrid tale of adultery with a toreador. And the fast piece gets her comeuppance when he stabs her in the end. Pure melodrama with lots of colourful dancing, enjoy the show and lay your brain to rest. Also, it’s mercifully short. One interval, we’ll be out by eleven, home by one-thirty or two at the latest, buy the early edition of the papers somewhere on the motorway, sleep it all off tomorrow.

She had forgotten that Carmen is a gypsy, and that both the play and the opera conjured up untamed female sexuality, then mounted a genuine debate as to whether said sexual energy should be allowed to rove unchecked. She had forgotten that Carmen never was married to Don José, but that she seduced him away from his duty as a soldier and the good girl of the village whom he was destined to marry. And it had escaped her completely that the final murder was Don José’s last perverted, desperate gesture, to salvage his lost honour; the murder of the woman who represents uncontrolled desire and embodies his enemy within, an erotic freedom which puts all his psychic structures in question.

The ENO production turned out to be sexually explicit and even somewhat shocking. The singer playing Carmen, a voluptuous Romanian soprano with a fabulous profile and a voice that took the roof off the back of your throat, lifted her luminous, terrifying eyes to the doomed soldier. Her sexual presence, musky with excitement, exploded across the stage. Miss Webster remembered that the Opéra-Comique, where Bizet’s
Carmen
received its first performance, had functioned as a marriage market for nineteenth-century bourgeois French families. You hired a box, displayed your marriageable daughters in low-cut evening gowns, and interviewed prospective suitors in the intervals, all the business conducted in a respectable fashion – public, elegant, proper and discreet. This opera contained some scenes that actually took place in bedrooms. No wonder the whole thing had degenerated into a public scandal.

Miss Webster was not and never had been a feminist. She saw no reason to court any kind of solidarity with the abject victims of this world. And she had no time for other women who whinged about their lot. As she grew older her misanthropy darkened, until she no longer bothered to be polite to anyone, of whatever sex, who dared to say anything stupid. She was therefore disposed to like the character of Carmen, whose intelligence manifested itself as self-interest combined with uncompromising honesty. Carmen’s tendency to work the crowds, and the magnificent
habanera
, her chosen method of manipulating the mob, seemed not only understandable, but even rather brilliant. That gypsy stood up for herself, whatever the opposition; the first person she knifed was another woman. Full support on that score too, the bitch had probably asked for it; and in any case the victim then demonstrated her worthlessness by scrabbling about for the soldiers, rather than fighting back. Whatever else she had done in her life that might be counted dubious, Miss Webster had never grassed anybody up, not even her hated sister.

But Carmen presented Miss Webster with an intractable problem. Sex. Do not think that Miss Elizabeth Webster had never been pursued, for many gentlemen had come a-courting and a-calling. Indeed, fifty years ago she had dominated the Young Farmers’ Club Dance, with her light step, her sharp wit and her very pretty, narrow waist, which she showed off in all its slender glory with broad white plastic belts and great swirling skirts in rainbow rings or wide stripes. Her daring taste in patterned stockings and high-heeled shoes with naked toes titillated the county gossips. If Miss Webster had ever caught her convent girls wearing some of the shoes she used to wear they would have been whisked away to the abbess before you could even gasp Hail Mary. No man ever forgot her once he had seen her dance. And whoever looked at the frumpy younger sister when Elizabeth Webster took the floor? Old men saw her dancing and remembered their youth, women gazed at her ankles, envious of her glamour, young men composed poems too sexy to be sent to their cold muse. Why, oh why had that lovely girl never married? A dozen suitors lurked on her doorstep, daring the quick flicker of her tongue. But Elizabeth Webster had no need to proclaim her power over others, neither men nor women. She was too self-confident and self-sufficient for that. She didn’t enjoy being kissed, and she wasn’t interested in sex, which seemed like an interruption of her privacy, a state she valued more highly than anyone’s company. Therefore she saw no reason whatsoever to continue doing it – this odd, fumbling activity that proved to be sweaty, interminable and inconvenient, full of slimy hazards and noxious smells. Alors non, merci. And so that door closed for ever.

Miss Webster suspected that Carmen’s serial passions for soldiers and toreadors revealed a primitive desire to finger forbidden goods, to pull a prize that other women wanted. Her character proved infantile and naïve, and the woman no better than an uncontrolled child in a sweet shop. I’ll have that, and that, and that – simply because I can. Miss Webster had never known the passion that flames and dies. She could credit neither its integrity, nor its force.

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.