Miss Webster and Chérif (5 page)

Well, my sister, was this what you saw? My future and yours?

She had been forced out of the school five years earlier, lived alone as she had always done, and saw very few other people beyond the inhabitants of Little Blessington. She went to Waitrose once a week. She offered French literature classes to the University of the Third Age, but nobody was interested. They already had a retired professor teaching existentialism. And after all, her fate was not so strange. Many women find themselves alone in their late sixties. Husbands die, children grow up and move to other parts of the country – or turn out to be monsters. There are no insurance policies against loneliness. She had never built any close friendships with anyone; she was self-sufficient and suspicious. Other people either asked you for money or made you listen to their life stories. She had no idea which was worse.

So she joined the bridge club. This was peopled with her kind, a dozen elderly and well-heeled locals: embittered, ironic, eccentric and morose, too savagely disillusioned even to contemplate voting Tory, excellent at cards and intent on winning every game. They played for small sums. No one ever spoke at great length. Her usual partners were men of few words. Only one other woman was a member of the club, the leather-faced wife of a gentleman farmer. The bridge club got on well with Elizabeth Webster, who gave no fatal signs of being feminine and enjoyed a drink. They sent her one Get Well card during her three months in hospital and none of them came to visit her. The bridge club regarded her as one of the Fallen. Someone else took her place.

On the whole, Miss Webster did not like men. She had not liked her father. She did not like the headmaster, who had done his best to have her sacked. She was not fond of the vicar, who was earnest and sincere, yet medieval in his theology. He feared, with some justice, that the entire world was held fast in the grip of the Evil One and endeavoured to work Satan’s presence into his sermon on Christmas morning. She did not much like Dr Brody, who fussed and twittered. She did not like men who offered to help and assumed that she couldn’t start the car, carry the bags, shovel snow, chop down trees, decapitate the hedge. But there was now an exception. She admired the hideous man with the mutilated hands because he spoke her language and commanded her respect.

Her small store of bottles was dusty and undisturbed. She poured herself a large whisky. The phone rang. She let it ring and ring and ring.

And so it was, during that summer early on in the new century, that year from which a slice was simply lost, remaining alive became an enormous task that was almost too much for her. She knew that she was being difficult, but she found it impossible to admit that she was no longer self-sufficient, and that her odious, garrulous personal carer had become essential. The shopping grew in scale and weight until she felt like Sisyphus, facing the stone. Her sister finally managed to get through on the telephone, late one night when Elizabeth was sitting staring at the blank screen, too discouraged and demoralised even to turn on the news.

‘I thought something like this might happen to you. You were always so damned righteous when it happened to other people. Don’t expect any help from me.’

‘Have you rung up just to tell me that?’

‘You’ve got enough money, haven’t you? Make the best of it.’

It was an evil reckoning.

Why should we listen to you, you old cow? One of the children, caught smoking on the school steps had said that to her face. They were little vultures; they knew she was on the way out. They scented the kill. In her day the children had knocked on the staff-room door and begun their sentences with ‘Please, Miss, may I ...’ Now they arrived in their own cars, flirted with the younger staff and smoked openly, without let or hindrance, even when they were still wearing school uniform. She bit her lip. Meaning had evaporated from all her maxims and certainties. What mattered? Discipline, order, control. The younger children jeered at her from a safe distance. They skulked behind the privet on the way to the car park and made loud farting noises when she lowered her arse on to the driver’s seat.

Elizabeth Webster had been autocratic and sharp-tongued. Now she was an old woman. She was therefore fair game.

You need to know why this has happened to you. Or it will happen again. But nothing ever comes round again. I shall never stand before my class or have the small moments of power and satisfaction every teacher has. I shall never see my pupils succeed nor receive those happy cards when their exams are over. I shall never teach Racine or Flaubert or Gide or Camus or Colette again. Nor will anyone else. The textbooks with the helpful introductions and glossaries are all upstairs in unmarked cardboard boxes, left over from the convent. The soft words of judgement rang in her head. I shall never again be happy, I shall never again be young.

Elizabeth Webster conjured her own death out of shadows. He whirled before her, skeletal, black-winged. He failed to impress. His visual manifestation seemed stagy and predictable. She possessed no material goods about which she still cared, she loved no other human being; she could therefore afford to dismiss him. One irritable flick of her head and the strange rush of darkness receded. If the world really was clasped in the grip of the Evil One, as the vicar said it was, then the Almighty had failed to assert Himself. He too had been slack in matters of order, discipline, control. She realised, with gathering indifference and contempt, that she believed in nothing. She faced a world that was empty and unsafe. She was on her own.

She became everything she most despised: querulous, forgetful, indecisive. She tottered down the lane to the shop, propped her sticks in the umbrella stand, then found that she had forgotten what she was doing there. Everyone addressed her in hushed tones. When she tried to be waspish, she uttered platitudes. Her personal carer, a middle-aged mum who talked about her children and cleaned the kitchen, bathroom and downstairs shower with indecent vigour and energy, ticked her off for leaving any hot food on her plate or rotting half-eaten meals in the fridge. Elizabeth came to dread the sound of her key in the outer lock and her cheerful greetings. She insisted that she could manage for at least part of the week on her own and reduced the visits to Tuesdays and Fridays. Then she found herself seized with a sort of joyful paranoia and took to bellowing, ‘And how are we today then, dear?’ to the empty sitting room on the days when she was spared the carer’s presence.

Her brain was dissolving into a vegetal state. She read French aloud in the evenings to counteract the trend, but heard her own sentences trailing off. The language faded and became unintelligible. She could no longer understand anything that happened on the television. The
Radio Times
metamorphosed into a jumbled map of instructions written in cramped, meaningless numbers and codes. She slipped in and out of present time when images that she could not interpret lurched across the screen. She once actually confused
The Midsomer Murders
with the news, and sat there, transfixed, upon the green striped sofa, horrified that the BBC dared to show real bodies of rich people butchered in their desirable residences. She turned off the television and stared into space.

She forgot to wash, then found herself tugged back into the world by disgust at her own stench. She began to avoid her visitors. Someone on the parish council sent round his gardener to re-establish order in the undergrowth. The woods invaded her garden. She saw badgers and foxes cruising across the remains of her lawn. Their eyes glowed, phosphorescent in the light from the kitchen. She had long ceased to care, but the village was upset. Everyone remembered the luxurious perfection of Miss Webster’s cottage garden. The gardener must be sent in, for the look of the thing. As he hacked and pruned, Miss Webster realised that she loathed honeysuckle, mock orange, clematis and sweet peas. She wished her plucky row of gladioli at the bottom of the sea. She planned a world of asphalt and stone, clamped over the rampant upward thrust of green. I want a world where nothing grows. Once more, she had come to a halt. Everything else that progressed, evolved and flourished was an offence to her tired eyes. On the days when she was safe from the carer she no longer bothered getting up or getting dressed. She lived in the last house at the end of the lane. Few people ever passed. She settled down to face the wall.

Eventually she was roused by the itching on her scalp. Her unwashed long hair, descending over her shoulders like a witch’s crown, smelt dank and fishy in the August heat. She sensed her own uncomfortable descent into the lower depths. I’m falling to pieces, she grimaced at the mirror. Her sister’s mask-like face, all the lines stretched away, tucked behind the ears and underneath the chin, sneered back at her.

‘Look at you, you disgusting old crone.’

Elizabeth Webster flung all her hatred at the mirror, then staggered away to the bathroom to get dressed.

She took the bus into town, as she had not driven the car for months. It lay under green canvas in the garage, the battery irreparably flat. Elizabeth Webster never travelled by bus. Behold the lower depths of rural public transport. The huge blue vehicle grunted to a standstill, filled with exhausted, deranged and decrepit people. She had never seen any of them before. She didn’t have an appointment so she slunk into her usual hairdresser’s and sank into a seat by the door, waiting to be noticed. The girl who had always washed her hair in the old days was a sweet plump blonde called Sophie. She had been promoted to junior stylist in Elizabeth’s absence and now wore a smart white shirt, nail polish and a little badge. She didn’t recognise Elizabeth. But Elizabeth didn’t recognise her either.

‘Good afternoon, madam. Do you have an appointment?’

Elizabeth rose up unsteadily, clutching her sticks. She swayed over the small table, shabby and hesitant, still clutching a gossip magazine filled with celebrity weddings and conspiracy theories. Sophie rummaged through her list. The dryers roared behind her.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Miss Webster?’ Something in the voice made the girl look up.

Sophie forgot both her manners and how to be diplomatic in the face of catastrophe.

‘Oh Miss Webster! What’s happened to you? Your beautiful hair! It’s awful, it’s ruined.’

She rushed round the desk to take Elizabeth’s hand and to touch the tangled, filthy mess that was tied back with orange plastic strips torn off the bottom of a bin bag. No part of the ensemble that had been Elizabeth Webster had been heralded by anyone as beautiful, no, not for decades. Those on the receiving end of her tongue had called her a hatchet-faced bitch; beauty didn’t come into it. Those who admired her courage and asperity never dared to open their mouths. Not even to utter compliments. It took someone as simple and ordinary as the girl from the hairdresser’s, utterly unaware of the dragon’s teeth, to speak the truth and to recognise the extent of the calamity that had befallen the old woman. Her hair had indeed been beautiful – thick, gleaming, heavy, a clear lucid grey shot through with shafts of pure white. It had never been coloured, it had never been thin.

Sophie gathered her up and ushered her to a safe and private corner.

‘You’ve been very ill. I can see that you’ve been very ill. Come and sit down over here. I’ll fetch your sticks.’

Sophie plucked at the remains of the bin bag in horror. The shop barely noticed the intrusion. Elizabeth Webster looked dingy, ragged and frail. She had therefore become invisible. But Sophie could still see her, and it was this that moved Elizabeth to tears. Her face was wiped with warm scented towels; she allowed the kind young hands to scrub her mouldering scalp and spread out the disaster on the draining board.

‘Thank you, Sophie,’ she murmured again and again, ‘thank you.’

She had all her hair cut off. It was the only acceptable solution. A new face emerged beneath the scissors, with a spiky butch bob. She looked like Gertrude Stein, square, unsmiling, resolute. As she stared back at the unadorned and shrunken head, which now looked curiously fresh and naked, she managed to hint at a smile.

‘Thank you, Sophie, thank you very much. That will be fine.’

She missed one appointment with Dr Broadhurst and the hospital began a campaign of harassment. His assistant pestered her with troublesome phone calls at odd times, catching her off guard. They offered her a row of emergency appointments, pinned her down to dates and times and arranged for the day ambulance to pick her up. She retaliated, arrived early in a taxi, and sat down, savage in the waiting room. For the first time she sallied forth without her sticks. She felt insecure without them, but refused to yield.

I come and go as I choose. The consultant’s assistant eyed her up, irritated. And so she alighted once more in the quiet room looking across the gardens towards the beech trees with the doctor sitting, calm and expectant, before her. She touched his damaged hands without looking down at them, as if she were verifying his identity. The uneven purple skin felt dry and scratched, like the bark of an old tree. He turned them over. The rough surface of the doctor’s palms marked the distance she had travelled.

‘Your haircut is very smart.’

‘None of my clothes fit.’

‘Good excuse to buy new ones. Are you eating three meals every day? I bet you’re not.’