Miss Webster and Chérif Read Free Page B

daily task of interpreting the world, had opened up before her.
     
     
    She knew when he was there because he always showed her his hands. They were his trademark, his password. She relaxed whenever she saw the browned claws and yellow nails smoothing the pillows, cradling her wrists. She was being held in place by a gentle monster who meant her no harm. He gave her a sequence of daily injections. At the end of a week her sight began to clear. She knew morning from evening. She watched the sunset in the basin’s glass.
    ‘When will you speak to me, Miss Webster? May I call you Elizabeth?’
    She squeezed the burned scabs.
    ‘Thank you. Would you like a chocolate?’
    She tried to shake her head. But nothing moved.
    ‘Did something happen to you on the night you fell ill? Can you remember?’
    She saw her small green rooms, the vase to the left of the television, her little bookcase with all her treasures, her Larousse and three different French dictionaries on the bottom shelf. The television was murmuring gently, wars and rumours of wars. She heard the climbing rose scratching against the window. A quiet night in a cold spring, the damp settling on the closed daffodils, the security lights at the end of the muddy lane illuminating whenever one of her neighbours came home. No. Nothing had happened. There was no reason now why anything should ever happen.
    ‘Dites-moi, chère Madame, pourquoi vous n’êtes pas heureuse.’
    He spoke perfect fluent French. She felt a little shock go through her when she heard the language again. She clutched at her beloved other mother tongue. She watched the late-night films; she tried to ignore the subtitles. She read Le Figaro magazine and she had recently discovered Le Passant Ordinaire to which she still subscribed because, although she loathed the revolutionary politics, she liked the art photographs and the uncompromising articles, spattered with technical terms from psychoanalysis. But since she had retired from the school and abandoned the embarrassment of grammar, the horror of dictation and the evils of free composition, she had not heard the language spoken. She had not heard the rising chimes, neither murdered by recalcitrant children or perfect in the voice of her student assistant, a young graduate from Caen, who wore very expensive suede shoes with pointed toes. She tried to eliminate the vision of those shoes and concentrated hard on the distorted claw, which settled on her wrist.
    ‘Prenez votre temps, Madame.’
    He had noticed the reaction. He was helping her towards the language that she loved; a territory she had once lost for ever now reeled into view. She whispered the words. The burr, burr, burr began, cleared. Her heart filled up like an empty cistern in heavy rain.
    ‘Je ne sais pas,’ she gasped. I don’t know. I am unhappy. I am angry. I am lonely. I am old. I don’t know. Dr Broadhurst sat very still, leering slightly, Patience on a monument, smiling at grief. Je ne sais pas. Je ne sais pas . I don’t know. I don’t know. She said it again and again, for the sheer pleasure of hearing the words of denial and doubt. These were her words. He waited until she fell silent.
    ‘But when you do, you will tell me, won’t you?’ He continued quietly in French. She squeezed the claw, now clamped firmly in her own freckled, bony grasp. The wooded passage through her shadowed mind opened out into fields, filled with purple flowers and summer light. She heard bees amidst the buddleia.
    ‘How long have I been here?’ she whispered.
    ‘Deux mois,’ said Dr Broadhurst, ‘two months.’
    It was summer in a new century. She curled on her side, dreaming time, all ports astern, clear seas before her. Then she realised that the sensation of swaying upon the swell was perfectly legitimate. She was floating on a waterbed, set to a long slow wave. She glared at the doctor’s uncanny repulsive face.
    ‘Mais qui êtes-vous?’ she demanded.
    ‘I’m the messenger,’