Miss Webster and Chérif (4 page)

So that’s what had poured out of her – a torrent of enraged filth. The doctor met her eye, suddenly serious.

‘It’s quite normal. It often happens. I had a patient with early dementia who told us all that we were rotten, rat-arsed cunts and meant every word of it.’

‘I haven’t got dementia.’ Elizabeth Webster was decisive.

‘No,’ he agreed, ‘you haven’t.’

‘Then what have I got?’

‘You haven’t got anything that we can understand. You just came to a dead halt. And you were very ill indeed. And then you became very angry. And now we have to find out why.’

She looked him in the eye. Her lips hardened into a thin white line. Her chin came up.

‘But if you do know why, you’re under no obligation to say anything whatsoever. You’re in hospital, not under arrest.’ He was being conciliatory, humouring her.

‘Don’t patronise me.’ She warned him off.

‘Wouldn’t dare,’ said Dr Broadhurst and spread out his ghastly hands before her in a gesture of surrender.

There was a long pause. She saw someone in the gardens, shouting silent orders above the sputter of a mower. She smelt the cut grass of high summer and heard the buzzing from within the great yellow corneas of the daisies. The world glowed magnified, surreal. She sensed something huge, eyeless, breathing, close to her. The doctor sat at ease in the uncanny silence. And now the revolt that was boiling within her began to take shape. She was not under any obligation to apologise for who she was or to justify herself. She had no immediate answers or explanations, but she had that huge, long rage of the warriors who are never defeated, the wounded who die with their swords bared and bloodied, their eyes fixed on the approaching enemy. Miss Webster’s insurrection took the form of refusing to play ball with the eminent consultant. Why should she do all the talking?

‘Speak,’ she commanded.

‘Have a chocolate?’ He held out a lavish box decorated with a range of snow-capped peaks, each separate segment of dark, bitter chocolate wrapped in silver paper. She ignored him.

‘I speak French,’ he began to explain, apropos of nothing at all, ‘because my wife is Swiss. She speaks French and German and we have a house at Vevey, above the lake. Your GP told me that you were a French teacher and that you had a passion for the language. That is why I spoke to you in French. You wouldn’t listen to English any more. I thought that you might listen to the language you loved, if not to me.’

She nodded. He was telling the truth. Suddenly he leaned across the desk as if he were confiding a secret.

‘Miss Webster – or Elizabeth – you haven’t yet said that I may call you Elizabeth – I don’t think that you are mad. I know that you have not had a stroke. You have had – or are having – a complex form of complete breakdown. Your heart is affected, but the attack was not caused by any form of heart disease. I am a cardiologist, but I am also a psychiatrist. Whatever is wrong needs to be acknowledged, and I really cannot know what is wrong until you tell me. You need to know why this has happened to you, or it will happen again. And you will die, unknowing.’

She did not answer him. Instead she stared past the doctor’s shoulder at the huge copper beech swaying in the gardens, the branches stretching low on to the fresh damp grass.

‘You may call me Elizabeth,’ she said.

He nodded, pleased.

‘I want to go home.’

He rubbed his repulsive butchered palms together.

‘Good, good,’ he said.

She was obstinate and courageous in front of Dr Broadhurst, but it was quite another matter entering the house she had left behind her on a windy night in March, nearly three months earlier. She came back in the ambulance. Dr Brody was waiting on the doorstep. He had read ‘deceased’ rather than ‘discharged’ on the fax that arrived in the surgery, and rang the hospital in a panic. Now he stood, wrong-footed, embarrassed, fiddling with the keys, hoping that no one had betrayed his mistake in an excess of black humour. Miss Webster was preoccupied with more basic problems than her own death, which she had always assumed would be beyond her power to organise and control. She had practised walking in the hospital, but was still dangerously unsteady on rough ground. The lane with its dips and puddles presented a frightening terrain. She concentrated on keeping herself vertical with the two canes they had given her and avoided the doctor’s eye. He had seen her at her worst in the hospital: toothless, hair unwashed and tortured into thin grey plaits, stinking, abusive, unkempt. She had suddenly become old and mad.

Now she was wearing a shabby pair of trousers, borrowed from the hospital and her once smart cardigan, which swayed about her bony shoulders in horrid folds. Her grey skin dangled in slack sheets around her neck and jaw. The bridge was back in place, but it no longer fitted and a sinister new row of puckered lines furrowed her upper lip. Her watch, carefully returned to her in a labelled envelope, now hung loose upon her wrist. Some of the jewellery she had been wearing had disappeared. Her gold and pearl earrings, which had once belonged to her grandmother, had clip-on fixtures. The women of her family took the view that only prostitutes had their ears pierced. Jewellery often simply vanished in the hospital. No one had ever seen the little clips of pearl and gold. Or so they said. She had been a trim but solid woman, five foot five, weighing in at eleven stone. Now she staggered towards her own front door like a dilapidated spider, propped up by walking sticks.

‘No, I can manage.’ She pushed back the doctor and the staff from the ambulance.

Someone had had a go at the garden. The foxgloves and hollyhocks were enormous, but the smoky blue ceanothus had been clipped and contained. The French rose, wrenched away from the windows, sported a fabulous torrent of pale pink blooms. Unscented. The old climbing roses had no scent at all. All their beauty was in opulence. Dr Brody dealt with the ambulance. She looked at his hunched back and balding head. He too was getting old. An old man helping an old patient, a retired spinster who used to fit all the polite clichés: game old bird, sharp as a button, spry and fit for someone her age, iron constitution, never misses a thing, she has a clever way of putting things, never wastes her words. Wasted. She had been laid waste. She had stopped dead in her tracks and the horror hurtling along behind her, like a convoy of articulated lorries, had simply piled into her back. She was flattened in the crash.

‘Miss Webster? May I help you in?’

Dr Brody, whom she had told to stick the thermometer up his own arse and go fuck himself, was bowing and bobbing like an eighteenth-century gentleman. How on earth was the old girl going to manage? Surely she had been discharged far too soon? She could see it on his face. Someone had cleaned out and re-stocked the fridge. There was a carton of milk, a packet of processed cheese, eggs, butter, half a dozen tomatoes. The vase to the left of the television was full of fresh-cut garden flowers. She sank into an upright wooden chair that faced the windows and the open meadows beyond, so that she did not have to confront the kindness of unseen hands or the obnoxious bouquet. She could not stomach unsolicited generosity. She felt the bile rising again. Down
hysterica passio
. Let me rot. Leave me be.

Dr Brody was fussing, making suggestions. She heard the gentle stream resolving into words such as ‘tomorrow’, ‘your personal carer’ and ‘meals on wheels’. She made one last tremendous effort to remove him from her front room without shouting.

‘Thank you, Dr Brody. I shall be quite all right.’

She tried smiling reassurance. Smile at them. Then they go away and leave you alone. But the smile had become a fixed rictus before she could persuade him to leave. He backed out through the porch and into the lane, still distributing offers of assistance. She shrank into her trembling heap of oversized and disinfected clothes, then closed her eyes.

She did not retire, she did not resign, she was pushed out, rejected as one of the unrepentant ancien régime facing a new dispensation. The three schools in her neighbourhood had been restructured; St Winifred’s, the old Catholic girls only, where she had been French mistress for over thirty years, was absorbed into a much tougher catchment area. Elizabeth Webster had been educating the nation to the best of her abilities. This meant the discipline of grammar, the rigorous pursuit of beauty in poetry, civilising the wild and discouraging drugs and eye make-up. The teachers at the convent had been like the nuns, authoritative, sincere, possessed of a vocation. But now the language of education was transformed around her; here was a new breed of teachers who had not heard the call, did not much care about their subjects, were given to fiddling with their computers rather than reading books, yet were busy moulding their careers in education. They carried clipboards and worried about the school’s position in the league tables. She was told that she could not go on teaching the old syllabus. What use was Corneille? Racine? Molière? She was urged to modernise. The language of
l’informatique
, economics, journalism, that’s the coming thing. Business French will be of more use to them. They have to understand the finance pages.

Ce prince dont mon cóur se faisait autrefois

Avec tant de plaisir redire les exploits

À qui même en secret, je m’étais destinée  ...

Racine no longer made their hearts beat faster. She used to pack at least half a dozen Catholic girls, desperate for sex, their heads full of
Phèdre
, into assorted colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Now they wanted to do Media, Film and Communication Studies at universities of which Miss Webster had never heard. What is to be done? Elizabeth Webster fought a quiet but incisive campaign of rational resistance. She was, to use their jargon, ‘managed out’ over a period of two years. They reduced her timetable, then accused her of not pulling her weight. She was offered a tight-fisted early retirement package. They were liquidating the dinosaur. Time to take care of your roses, dear.

Elizabeth Webster did not go quietly. She made a scene in the headmaster’s office. She involved the union, who thought she was mad, but did their best to improve the package. She refused to be thanked or given a retirement present. In any case she hardly knew any of her colleagues any more. Only one of the nuns still sat on the board of governors. The old guard had all been eased out and were glad to go. The young new teachers regarded her as an unnecessary antiquity, a dated porcelain piece of little value that would soon fall from the shelf of its own accord. That was the order of things. She was being brushed aside by a giant wave of ignorance and mediocrity, all action taken in the name of a great love for lists and systems. She packed up her classroom and her office in one afternoon and drove off in a rage. She took all the literature textbooks. No one tried to stop her. She sent back her keys by registered post and never set foot in the building again. Her anger remained, undiminished.

But anger proved to be an expensive luxury. Elizabeth Webster had never married. Women of her generation made a choice: marriage and children, or an independent career. Her mother chose marriage, the large country house and the two daughters. The inexorable logic of family life took hold and the mother had then, over decades, been gently but firmly bullied into her green grave. Elizabeth’s younger sister made off to Canada as soon as she could save up enough money for the ticket and never came back. She married a rich man, but she still went out to work. The Christmas photographs of houses, dogs and children became ever larger and more affluent over the years. Finally they came by DHL Express, wonderfully wrapped in stiff gilt frames. Miss Webster’s younger sister took her husband’s name and attended the family funerals. These two things represented her concessions to convention; she tolerated nothing else. She abhorred the death-bed scenes and waited until all was quiet before booking her flight. She too now spoke beautiful French and she dressed with great taste in strong colours and matching accessories. In middle age she paid for a facelift and wore the kind of high heels that Elizabeth had banned, even in the sixth form.

‘I was always terrified of becoming like you. You more than Mother, although she was bad enough.’ Her sister was all candour and unpleasantness as soon as they had tucked their father neatly into the soft loam. ‘I used to wake up dreaming that I had become you. My husband tells me that I screamed and screamed.’

And with that she sauntered back to her land of short, humid summers, emptiness and blizzards. Her responsibilities towards hearth and kin were now complete. The Christmas photographs stopped that year and Miss Elizabeth Webster never heard from her sister again.

What am I like that you were so afraid of degenerating into a resemblance? She got up and looked into the mirror above the telephone. There she saw a stranger’s face, old, wizened, shrunken. The eyes glowered misty and huge, the nose protruded like a d×mon’s beak, the hair sank crushed and lifeless against the scalp. She had once nourished a very handsome chignon, which she could coil up into an elegant roll and secure with a tortoiseshell comb. Her appearance could not be considered elegant once she turned forty. She was too solid for elegance, but at least she had been smart and suitable, a middle-class English lady of a certain age, fitted out with all the trimmings, like a well-painted dumpy steamer, managing her affairs, brandishing car keys and briefcase, her savings accounts bulging and replete. Now she looked like a plague victim.