Miss Webster and Chérif (30 page)

Authors: Patricia Duncker

‘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 wind 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.

I wrote a substantial part of this book while I was one of the writers in residence at the Château de Lavigny in Switzerland, run by the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation, and I would like to thank the Committee for their hospitality. I am grateful to all the other writers who were there with me for their good company.

This book would not have been possible without the women behind Miss Webster, who are Miss Joyce Caiger-Smith, Miss Rachel Cary Field, Miss Kathleen Cusack, Miss Persis Freer, Miss Barbara Wetherall, and Violet D’Oyen Fitchett, known as Miss Vi.

A Note on the Author

Patricia Duncker is the author of the novels
Hallucinating Foucault
(winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize),
The Deadly Space Between
, and
James Miranda Barry
,
as well as collections of short stories and essays.
Her work has been shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. She is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester
.

By the Same Author

Fiction

Hallucinating Foucault

Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees

James Miranda Barry

The Deadly Space Between

Seven Tales of Sex and Death

The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge

Criticism

Sisters and Strangers

Writing on the Wall: Selected Essays

Edited