The Gulf Between Us Read online

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  The Gulf Between Us

  Geraldine Bedell is an author and journalist. She lives in London with her husband and four children. The Handmade House was published by Penguin in 2005.

  The Gulf Between Us

  GERALDINE BEDELL

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published 2009

  Copyright © Geraldine Bedell, 2009

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re‐sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-91905-8

  ‘The Italians call it a coltello, the French a couteau, the Germans a Messer, but the English call it a knife and when all is said and done, that is what it is.’

  Englishman on the Grand Tour

  Acknowledgements

  While I was writing The Gulf Between Us, my husband was working on a book arguing that creativity is an essentially collaborative process. A novel might seem to be the exception, but, in this case, that would not be true. In particular, I am extremely grateful to my agent Georgia Garrett and publisher Juliet Annan for their joint and several insights, thoughtfulness and good sense.

  Many thanks are also due to the various people who gave me help, literary and other, in the course of writing: Elaine Bedell, Clive Brill, Alex Clark, Jonty Crosse, Henrietta Davies, Naomi Leon, Hen Norton, Freddie Norton, Meg Rosoff, Nader Shaheen and especially J—, for his diligent checking of the Arabic and things Arab. Any remaining mistakes with the number of ‘a’s in the transliteration are mine.

  Without my eldest son, Freddie, this book would never have been written. I am very grateful to him for his inspiration, as well as for being so tactful with his view that the ending was awful when he didn’t have the complete manuscript.

  Most of all, I want to thank my husband, Charlie Leadbeater, for putting up with my spending so much time in Hawar. Without him, nothing would be possible.

  One

  I was thinking about happiness. (I was meant to be thinking about menus but my mind had wandered.) Specifically, I was thinking about how no one knows what to believe in any more, let alone where to look for it. How there are so many different routes on offer, especially in a place like this where people come from all over, bringing their contradictory ideas with them. The particular route I had – I won’t say chosen; been encouraged to believe in – was that happiness would result from another person’s coming along and spotting me, identifying something uniquely perfect, if admittedly not very visible, about me. And that would be that. Sorted. This happens all the time in books, and then they end because there’s nothing more to say. There’s never any suggestion of having been spotted by the wrong person, or of having accidentally let something else go. Never anything about the person dying and leaving you on your own with three children.

  It was staggering that I’d gone along with this as long as I had. At least my children had been exposed to soap operas and reality television and the internet and weren’t girls, so they hadn’t been encouraged to think that if they sat and waited in a spirit of passive good‐naturedness someone would turn up and solve all their problems. Which only made it more mysterious that Will was getting married, now, when he was so young and there seemed to be no pressing reason for it.

  I’d just come back to this point about Will and the wedding when Katherine said something that made me stop thinking about happiness, that made me scrape my coffee cup noisily into my saucer.

  ‘I saw Adnan last night,’ she began, ‘and he said James Hartley’s got the Al A’ali House from the beginning of October.’ She looked around complacently over the top of her clipboard.

  ‘But surely he’ll stay in one of those suites on the beach they built for the GCC summit?’ I replied stupidly, given she’d just said he wouldn’t.

  ‘So he’ll be there for the reception?’ Matt asked, looking up. Until now he’d spent the brunch reading the film listings in the Hawar Daily News, even though there are only two cinemas in Hawar.

  ‘I know,’ Katherine said, ‘but they’re being understanding and I think we can too. It’s not every day…’

  ‘We’ll have to invite him to join us,’ Matt said, ‘at least for a drink. We can’t be in his garden and ignore him. It’d be rude. Maybe he’ll bring some producers and casting directors and people? Maybe I’ll be spotted.’

  ‘You don’t need spotting,’ I muttered irritably.

  ‘Bloody film!’ Peter Franklin probably would have been reading the Hawar Daily News himself if he hadn’t been the bride’s father and required to look interested. ‘I’m sick of it already and they’re not even here yet. You’d think nothing else had ever happened in Hawar.’

  ‘Well…’ Matt said.

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve missed it, Matthew, but we’re about to have a war.’

  ‘He’s been saying we’re about to have a war for at least eight months,’ Katherine told Matt cheerfully: she was too pleased about James Hartley to be put off by the imminent explosion in the region of chemical and biological agents; ‘ever since Bush started going on about his axis of evil. Which if I remember rightly was in January. And here we are in September, and it still hasn’t happened!’

  Peter raised his eyes to the roof of my veranda, meaning to convey that if his wife thought we’d got away without a war then she was stupid.

  Matt shrugged. I don’t suppose he really thought there was any chance of avoiding the war, but he might have believed it wouldn’t touch us in our tiny, strategically insignificant emirate. In 1991, he’d been eight: all he could remember about Desert Storm was journalists flying in and hanging around the hotels, making their way into the bars, lounging by the pools, doing pieces to camera against the sunset. It had all seemed rather glamorous, as if for a moment we were at the centre of a world that usually ignored us. And it is true that the epicentre, if that’s the right word, of the American invasion of Iraq was going to be about 400 miles away, assuming things went to plan, which with wars is always a bit of an open question.

  I considered backing Peter up – pointing out that we didn’t know how many weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein had or how far they could travel or what mass exactly they could be expected to destroy. But we were organizing a wedding and it hardly seemed the moment. Besides, I was still thinking about James Hartley.

  ‘An
yway, he won’t be remotely like whatsisname, you know,’ Peter warned his wife.

  ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know! Porchester.’

  ‘Why I’d be familiar with the name of a time‐travelling professor of genetics who doesn’t actually exist…’

  Katherine ignored him. ‘Anyway, he might be. Like Porchester. We haven’t met him yet.’

  ‘Er… Mum has,’ Matt said.

  ‘Annie? You’ve met James Hartley?’ Katherine stared at me in a way that was, under the circumstances, bordering on rude.

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘When? How?’

  ‘We lived in the same street.’

  ‘They went out,’ Matt said, without looking up from his paper.

  ‘No!’

  It is true that James Hartley is a film star whose name is known to remote tribes without telephones and I’m a mother of three who’s quite good at making lists, but why the incredulity? He had to come from somewhere. And I’m not so hideous.

  ‘Well, you kept that very quiet!’ Katherine said offishly, as if I’d lied to everyone, which I hadn’t – although I hadn’t made a big thing about it either. I knew that once the word got out I wouldn’t be able to go into Al Jazira to buy a lemon without people asking me about it and whether I’d be seeing him when he was here and why didn’t I throw a party for him?

  ‘We’ll definitely have to invite him, if you know him,’ Katherine said.

  ‘Knew him… It was a long time ago. And perhaps Maddi and Will won’t want a stranger at their wedding?’ I looked at them sitting side by side on the sunlounger in khaki shorts and white T‐shirts, like twins dressed by their mother. Their knees were thrust up in an awkward posture that made them seem eager, as if they were somehow on call for the future, his dark head and her blonde one glossier than everyone else’s.

  Sam chose this moment to push open the sliding glass door, still in his pyjama bottoms, but no top, so you could see every nubbly ridge of his skinny, sixteen‐year‐old ribs.

  ‘Morning, Sam!’ Katherine said brightly. Perhaps breeziness first thing in the morning is allowed if you have daughters. Not that it was first thing in the morning for anyone except Sam.

  Sam muttered something, which might have been ‘Yo, coz,’ took a croissant from the table and slid to the floor with his back against the door. I silently handed him a plate.

  ‘James Hartley’s staying at the Al A’ali house, and he’s arriving in time for the reception!’ Matt said loudly, as if addressing a person of limited faculties.

  His younger brother blinked, which was quite a lot of response from him.

  ‘I still don’t really understand how the Sheraton could have done this,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if it hasn’t been booked for months.’

  ‘Well, Adnan did sort of mention it a while back,’ Katherine admitted, ‘but I didn’t think anything would come of it.’

  So she’d known. She hadn’t bothered to alert me. Presumably, though, Maddi and Will wouldn’t want to be upstaged by a film star at their own wedding?… That was what I was hoping, anyway, until Maddi said how exciting she thought it would be to have James Hartley at the reception. Evidently, Katherine’s news hadn’t come as much of a surprise to her – which must have meant that Will had also known. I should have been better prepared for his keeping things from me: he may have been my child, my first‐born, but he often seemed alarmingly alien – a large‐limbed, stubble‐faced, rangy creature powered by purposes of his own. What was he doing, with his top grades, his three musical instruments and cricket blue, his Oxford degree and job offer from an investment bank, at the age of twenty‐three, before he’d even started work, before – surely – he had any idea who he really was – getting married? Why the rush? And why – although this may of course have been related – had he started going to church on Sundays, despite no previous record of spiritual questing or interest in the numinous?

  I certainly wouldn’t have predicted a couple of years ago that he and Maddi would have wanted all this – the Friday brunch with the parents, the succession of menus and lists, the hassle about where to sit my brother. And if I couldn’t have anticipated something as fundamental as their wanting to get married and in the most traditional way possible, how could I predict what feelings they’d have about inviting James Hartley? Perhaps, like Maddi’s mother, they imagined he’d be like his most famous role, and that Hawar was about to entertain a laconic, sexy genetics professor with his own quantum teleporter.

  ‘I expect if he’s taken the house knowing there’s a wedding reception he’ll have made plans to be filming, or something,’ I said vaguely, writing ‘tabbouleh’ next to the word tabbouleh on the menu provided by the Sheraton.

  ‘You must be curious to see him, after all this time?’ Katherine said.

  Obviously, I was curious to see him. Obviously I’d thought about whether we’d meet and when and how that would be and if he’d be as interested to see me as I was to see him. I was intrigued to know how much of the person I used to like and still thought of fondly would have been dermabraded and permatanned off, turned into an artificial construct, a high‐grossing film star. I was fascinated to see whether with all that teleporting he’d managed to keep his personality intact, so that I could still recognize him. Obviously I don’t mean physically. Everyone would recognize him physically.

  But I also thought that if we invited him and he didn’t come – and really, why would you bother with an expat wedding in a small Gulf state if you were him? – then people would be disappointed and think the event had been a failure. And if he did come, it would be almost worse: breezing in with his aura of celebrity, of being cleaner, shinier than everyone else, upstaging everything because that was what he did, that was his job, and no one being able to concentrate on what really mattered, which was Will and Maddi.

  ‘We can’t have a wedding in his garden and not invite him down for a drink,’ Matt said again.

  Why couldn’t we? It wasn’t his garden; it belonged to a hotel. And we’d booked it first. Just because Adnan had made a mistake with his system, I didn’t see why we had to start inviting random hotel guests to our party.

  I didn’t say so, because it would have revealed how nervous I was about meeting him. The fact was that when it happened I wanted to be able to concentrate, to make sure he didn’t get the wrong impression, didn’t imagine that I’d made mistakes, married for the wrong reasons (like, say, to get away from home, or out of insecurity, or thinking I was getting something I wasn’t). I didn’t want him to think I’d come to Hawar without properly thinking about it, or that I’d got stuck, staying on basically for my children who now didn’t really need me any more or that it had taken the death of my husband in a car crash for me to stop feeling disappointed, to get a sense of what I wanted from life, or that, by the time I had, it was too late, so that I was now marooned in a backwater, without either a career or a man.

  While this was one possible interpretation of what had happened to me, there was another one, which was equally plausible: that Hawar was no more of a backwater than anywhere else, was in fact full of people of different nationalities and views (about happiness for a start, as I had been thinking only recently) and was consequently as fascinating and demanding as anywhere else.

  I looked around at my children – Will handsome beside Maddi, Matt carelessly sprawled, Sam gnawing his third croissant in an endearingly feral way, hair flopped over his face – and I thought that even though I might not have had the first idea what I was trying to achieve most of the time – somehow, I had done this. Helped to, anyway. It wasn’t failure, nothing like it. They were nearly men, and they had the ability to feel adult emotions, love and all it led to. They had their own points of view. It didn’t matter that this was a very ordinary thing to have done, that people had been having children and bringing them up for ever. It was still incredible, and while James Hartley might have had a private jet, he hadn’t done it.

  That was
the side of me I’d have preferred him to see, but I could appreciate that it could take some setting up.

  I kept on telling the boys that Adnan’s alleged mix‐up did not oblige us to invite James Hartley to the wedding reception, and, at times, I almost persuaded myself it was true. But not quite, so after a couple of days I delivered a note addressed to James to the offices Gulf Films had set up in the Diplomatic Area. A glamorous young Hawari woman took it from me and I imagined her passing it on to a phalanx of fierce assistants employed solely to guard James Hartley’s privacy.

  The last time James and I had communicated, he’d said he never wanted to speak to me again. You had to assume he’d probably got over that now, but it was still difficult to get the tone right. I explained about the double booking and hoped that he’d join us for a drink, along with any of his colleagues and friends who were with him. (For all I knew, there could be a girlfriend, even a small harem. He’d been photographed with enough women over the years; it was hard to imagine he’d managed to fit them in serially.) I wondered whether he’d actually see this careful composition. He was dyslexic and probably paid for people to read things to him now.

  I drove home afterwards along the Corniche, peeling along the edge of the emirate, the sea to my right heavy with the weight of salt, gleaming dully through the thick air like an opaque mirror; then on up the Jidda Road, through palm groves and smallholdings to Al Janabiyya compound. I was thinking as I drove how odd it was that James Hartley had never married any of those beautiful women. Presumably he hadn’t needed the security, once he got successful. The plethora of people available to sleep with him must have been enough.

  As I turned into the compound, I saw Andrew’s Jeep parked by our wicket fence. He lived in central Qalhat, along with most of the posh expats in Hawar – people like Peter and Katherine Franklin, who regarded compound living as a bit suburban and preferred more authentic and often inconvenient older houses in proper streets in town, as long as they were equipped with new air conditioning and perhaps also had a pool in the back garden. The chaplaincy did not have a pool and Andrew couldn’t afford to join any of the sports clubs or hotels so he liked to come out to us and play on the tennis court and swim in the decent‐sized and prettily landscaped pool we shared with the nineteen other households on Al Janabiyya compound.