The Gulf Between Us Read online

  ‘Will really spent most of the time diving?’ I asked as she adjusted knives and forks.

  ‘Apparently, it’s one of the best places in the world to learn.’

  That wasn’t quite what I meant. ‘And you don’t dive?’

  ‘I can’t bear it. I tried once when I was fourteen and had a panic attack… It’s all right, honestly…’

  ‘That your husband abandoned you on your honeymoon?’

  ‘Actually, it’s quite hard to abandon someone on an island you can walk across in ten minutes. We had loads of time to sit on our veranda on the water, looking at the stars and thinking Copernicus was wrong: the world obviously revolves round us.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  I remember sitting at a Greek taverna on a beach once, about eight years ago, waiting to pay the bill. The boys weren’t there: they must have already gone back on to the sand. I was idly finishing a glass of wine when a couple at a nearby table asked a waiter to take their photograph as they posed by the low fence separating the restaurant from the beach. I watched them, my mind vacant, drifting, until something about them, an intensity, a complete lack of posing, attracted my attention and I realized that, for them, being in this cheap restaurant on this not particularly special beach was as perfect as it gets. It was as if they were luminous with belief in each other. On his way out, the man caught my eye and smiled – not at me, particularly, or not me as an individual, anyway, not pityingly or kindly – but simply at another person who’d noticed, who’d got caught up in their happiness as it rippled out, a spreading circle of delight.

  I wanted to believe Maddi and Will felt like that, but sometimes I wondered. People don’t always marry for reasons of luminosity, even though they should, because marriage is hellish without it. But luminosity may, I suspect, be quite rare.

  As Katherine brought out the lasagne, I went back into the kitchen, where Will was making the salad dressing.

  Perhaps it was the fault of the conversation with Maddi about the diving, but I started off all wrong. ‘You didn’t say goodbye properly,’ I said to him, anxiety translating, somewhere between my brain and my mouth, into accusation.

  ‘Sorry… Didn’t I?’ he said vaguely. ‘You’d disappeared.’

  ‘Matt didn’t mean to come out at your wedding, you know.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Chris was being appalling. You saw what he was like, and Matt couldn’t help himself: it just slipped out.’

  ‘Yeah, well, he does like to upstage everyone.’

  ‘He was mortified afterwards.’

  ‘Perhaps he should’ve thought about that before he opened his mouth.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said helplessly. ‘It shouldn’t be a big deal. I mean, I don’t care who Matt sleeps with as long as he’s happy. And if I’m not fussed about it, I don’t see why you should be. Half the people you know must be gay.’

  ‘No…’

  ‘On the way here I was thinking that Sam could easily be gay, too – I mean, I don’t know – and if he were, that would be absolutely fine.’ He said nothing. ‘So what was so awful about it?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He stirred the dressing vigorously. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘He’d hate it if he thought he’d spoilt the wedding for you. That wasn’t his intention at all. He couldn’t keep quiet any longer – and, frankly, why should he have to?’

  ‘I’ve said I’m fine. Really.’

  ‘Well, please tell him that. Will?’

  ‘OK, OK…’

  He picked up the dressing and made for the door.

  ‘Did you really have no idea he was gay?’

  ‘No. Yes. I had no idea.’

  ‘Are you two coming out?’ Katherine called from the garden.

  How, I wondered, could I have produced one child who was so emotionally out there – for whom life was a sort of emotional rumpus room – and another who was so stiff and starchy? Will had emotions, I was sure, but he kept them out of sight. They were probably turbulent and spuming down there somewhere, at the bottom of some crevasse, but it was a mystery how you’d get to them.

  When we got outside, Millie asked whether I’d seen James Hartley since the wedding, so I explained about his having turned up on Al‐Hidd.

  ‘I bet he was the one who decided to come off that gin palace,’ Millie said, when I got to that part.

  ‘Mmn, I don’t think his friends would have been rushing to do it.’

  ‘He really likes you! You could see that at the wedding.’

  ‘He’s probably fascinated by how different we are. We started in the same place and he’s a multimillionaire and incredibly famous, and I’m not.’

  ‘I think it’s a bit more complicated than that,’ Peter said.

  ‘Yeah, well, perhaps he wants to get in touch with his past self.’

  ‘Sounds more like it’s you he wants to get in touch with.’

  After lunch, Maddi and Will opened the wedding presents from guests who hadn’t known about the list at The General Trading Company, or who’d wanted to bring something they’d chosen themselves. Being Maddi and Will, they were relentlessly charmed by everything, even their fourth gold latticework tissue‐box holder.

  ‘Lovely,’ murmured Millie, ‘one for every room.’

  Sam turned up at about five, slouching in, lean and louche. ‘What’s been keeping you?’ Peter asked genially.

  ‘Stuff.’

  ‘Oh, stuff.’

  Perhaps he was stung by Peter’s tone, because he muttered, ‘I got made editor of the school newspaper.’

  ‘The International?’ Will said, ‘but don’t you have to get voted?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s brilliant!’ I cried. ‘What, does the whole school vote?’

  ‘Uh‐huh.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were standing.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’

  Sam has always drawn cartoons for the school magazine, mostly satirical caricatures of the teachers, and they’re often the best thing in it. But as editor he would presumably have to deal with words as well. There was little evidence that he had much familiarity with those.

  ‘When d’you start?’

  ‘Around Christmas. It’s for a year.’

  ‘So he gets the last two terms to concentrate on exams,’ Will explained. His brother scowled.

  ‘What was your pitch?’ Maddi asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘What d’you want to do with the magazine?’

  ‘Oh, right. Like, be more in touch.’

  ‘With anything in particular?’ asked Will.

  ‘Events,’ Sam said pityingly.

  He dived into the pool, surfaced and swam to the side. ‘And Faisal’s my deputy, so it’ll be a laugh.’

  By now, everyone was ready for a swim. Will, who always preferred to have some kind of focus, organized a game of water polo, so I didn’t stay in long because it was highly competitive and I could tell he was getting annoyed with me for being useless and on his team. I sat beside the pool, flicking through Katherine’s copy of Vogue and trying not to mind that there was an in‐transit feeling to the fading day. We seemed to be marking time, waiting for Will and Maddi to leave. The period of their living with us was running out; this time, when they left, they would never come back in quite the same way. They’d no longer be coming home.

  Perhaps Peter felt as mournful as I did, because once Will got out and settled himself down with a book on the financial services industry, he started up a conversation with him about a meeting he’d had earlier with Shaikh Abdullah bin Ahmed at the Ministry of Trade, who’d kept him waiting in an ante room for an hour and a half.

  Sam, lying on his stomach on the next sunbed, muttered, ‘Typical bloody Arab.’

  ‘Sam!’ I protested, ‘you can’t say that!’

  ‘Why not? It’s true.’

  He doesn’t say anything for months and then when he does it’s racist.

  ‘No, Sam’s right: it is typical bloody Ara
b,’ Peter acknowledged. ‘The Hawaris use their customs against us. But we do it to them, too. We insist punctuality makes us more efficient, but it doesn’t necessarily. Not here, anyway.’

  ‘You still can’t say racist things,’ I objected. Peter seemed to be slightly missing the point. ‘Just because Shaikh Abdullah runs late, you can’t write off the entire population.’

  ‘Why not, when it’s true?’ Sam said lazily, without lifting his head. ‘Peter said. It’s their culture, innit? And they do it to us to wind us up, because they can. They want to prove they’re in charge.’

  ‘That sounds very silly,’ I said, ‘given that your best friend really is an Arab.’

  ‘It’s like dad, though…’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Some Saudi kills him in a hit‐and‐run accident…’

  I swallowed. ‘You don’t actually know that.’

  ‘OK, someone kills him in a hit‐and‐run accident, but even though the other car must have been pretty smashed up, no one finds it. Why would that be, now? Maybe because they don’t bother to look?’

  ‘Sam, that’s…’

  ‘You’re saying that there isn’t one rule for rich Arabs and another for the rest of us?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  I flushed. I didn’t want to go into this now. I needed to clear this up with Sam, but not here, not now.

  ‘It’s institutionalized that they’re better. The law operates in favour of them and against us.’

  ‘We get a very good deal, Sam,’ Katherine said, bringing out the teapot, followed by Magdalena with a tray of cups and saucers.

  ‘Yeah, OK, we do. If we were poor Indian construction workers we wouldn’t have any rights at all. There’d be no law at all then.’

  I said wearily, ‘What does Faisal say when you start talking this rubbish?’

  ‘He agrees. And it’s not rubbish, mum, and you know it.’ He lifted his head and became suddenly and alarmingly articulate. ‘He says it’s understandable when you think about it: they’re a hundred times richer than us, but their country has no standing in the world and they’ve got no say in how it’s run. They’re not even supposed to think about things, because their religion’s meant to have all the answers. All they’ve got to fall back on is a chippy sense of their superiority.’

  It was hormonal. He was just trying on attitudes. Sometimes his frustration exploded in random outbursts, emotional erections as unreliable and misdirected as (I presume) the physical ones.

  ‘Even if you think that, you can’t say it,’ I told him. ‘You’re wrong, but even if you were right, dismissing a whole population isn’t acceptable.’

  ‘What, so we don’t speak the truth any more?’

  I sighed: this wasn’t the time or the place to go into this. The fact was that, no, we did not necessarily speak the truth. Even though I had always emphasized the importance of honesty and been offended when I discovered Matt had concealed the fact he was gay, I’d consistently and deliberately lied to them. I’d decided it was better for the boys not to know their father had been drunk when he died on the Arad Road, or that he’d caused the accident, or that I knew perfectly well who else had been involved. It was easy to lie in Hawar, because the police had no desire to talk to the press, the authorities preferred not to acknowledge that anyone was ever drunk on the roads, and the death of an expat was a thing to be hushed up and forgotten as quickly as possible. I had colluded with the instinctive furtiveness of the place, intending to tell the truth eventually, not realizing how much a lie might fester.

  Fortunately, Matt arrived at that moment, matey and back‐slapping, hugging Will, talking noisily about the traffic and how good it was to see everyone, covering up any leftover awkwardness. Will was civil to him, if distant. But that was how he was, anyway: if Matt was a person who was habitually effervescent, slopping over the edges, Will was someone in an airtight container with flip‐top catches, dishwasher and microwave proof.

  Before there had been any chance for them to have a private conversation, the doorbell rang again and, a few moments later, Magdalena showed Andrew into the garden. He’d been passing and seen my car outside, he explained, and he’d realized Will and Maddi must be here. Katherine bustled around making more tea while he told us his news.

  ‘I was at the embassy for lunch,’ he said, his large body collapsing haphazardly into a chair, ‘and the emir’s had a stroke.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last night, apparently.’

  ‘It hasn’t been on the news…’

  ‘It wouldn’t be, Mil.’

  ‘He’s alive?’

  ‘Yes, but Richard doesn’t know in what state.’ He meant Richard Crossley‐Tennant, the British ambassador. ‘He’s in the Hawari Defence Force Hospital.’

  ‘Poor man,’ Katherine said, passing him a plate of Magdalena’s home‐made chocolate chip cookies. He took two; he doesn’t cook much for himself at the chaplaincy. ‘So is the prime minister in charge?’

  ‘Yes. The crown prince is in London.’

  ‘He’ll be heading back now, though,’ Peter said. The crown prince and his uncle were known to disagree about the future of Hawar. Shaikh Jasim was a conservative and viewed his nephew as dangerously radical, not least because he threatened his freedom to siphon off 10 per cent of any contract. The locals scathingly referred to the prime minister as The Elephant, on account of the fact that, in any negotiation, it felt like he was in the room.

  ‘Wasn’t the crown prince in some sort of trouble in London?’ asked Katherine vaguely.

  ‘He gave a speech,’ Peter said. ‘He was supposed to be on a private visit, but he spoke at some debate at the LSE. It was only a student thing.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Matt asked, ‘only a student thing?’

  ‘Yeah, dad,’ said Millie. ‘You should know better.’

  ‘The speech went a bit far,’ Andrew explained. ‘He hadn’t cleared it with Shaikh Jasim, Richard says.’

  ‘Perhaps because he wouldn’t have approved,’ suggested Will.

  ‘Oh,’ Katherine said, ‘I heard it was drugs.’

  ‘According to Richard, the Al Majid line is that the speech was a mistake because it gave the impression that there’s an argument inside the ruling family about the pace of reform, which there isn’t.’

  ‘Not much there isn’t,’ said Millie.

  ‘So what will happen if the emir dies?’ Maddi asked.

  ‘Or if he’s alive but too sick to run the country,’ Sam suggested brightly.

  ‘I don’t think Richard knows. The embassy’s known this was coming, but they were hoping not to have to deal with it for a while yet.’

  Millie said: ‘The last thing you want is regional instability when you’re trying to start a war. Specially an illegal one.’

  ‘I think we’re technically supposed to be trying to avoid the war.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Richard seems to think it doesn’t matter so much which one of them comes out on top, as long as one of them does. His main worry is that if the differences in the ruling family become too obvious, some of the shi’a, or the other disaffected young people, might think there’s a power vacuum and decide to riot and that then sunni–shi’a tension might spread to other parts of the Gulf…’

  ‘It’s ironic,’ Matt said, though generally he wasn’t bothered about politics, ‘that the British and Americans go round claiming they want democracy in the Gulf states, but they’re actually terrified of getting it.’

  ‘Come on, Matt,’ Peter said, ‘if the Al Majid are overthrown and Hawar gets some kind of democracy, the Islamists will take control, and that’ll almost certainly be the end for all of us. We’re all frightened of democracy.’

  ‘So,’ I said to Sam later, when we were at home, ‘are you gay?’

  ‘Mum, what kind of a question is that?’ He flicked the remote.

  ‘Only I know it can run in families.’

 
‘You’re nuts.’

  ‘And you haven’t brought any girls home.’

  ‘Would you’ve been happier if I’d done it in front of you?’

  There was no need to be vulgar. ‘Post‐gay?’

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘It’s for people who don’t want to have to live up to the stereotypes. Who think the whole obsession with sexual identity is unnecessary.’

  ‘Where the hell d’you get this from?’ He’d found The Simpsons now and he threw himself back in the armchair to show he was busy watching, although he’s seen most episodes at least five times.

  ‘If they fancy boys, they don’t also have to be camp or join the caring professions or whatever.’

  ‘Mum, I’ve got no idea what you’re going on about.’

  ‘Only it’d be fine.’

  ‘D’you want another gay son? Am I disappointing you in some way?’

  ‘No, but I don’t not want one. I wouldn’t want you to think…’

  ‘Look, I don’t fancy boys, OK? I prefer girls. This is the most embarrassing conversation I’ve ever had. Can I just watch the telly?’

  ‘OK, OK…’

  I went back to the kitchen.

  Seven

  I was driving to the Al A’ali House, thinking that quite a lot of things might be like theme park rides. You know how at the age of sixteen or seventeen you’ll try anything? Vertical drops that leave your innards behind, roller coasters that wrench you round while haphazardly upending you, nausea‐inducing spinners that hurl you about until you’re not sure if your bones are inside or outside. At that age, you want the sensations. But you don’t get many middle‐aged women on roller coasters. Maybe that’s because middle‐aged women know that death happens – or maybe there’s some complicated hormonal reaction going on, producing feelings of fragility and nausea. Maybe we just have more flesh to wobble and protest. Whatever, there comes a time when you can’t see why you ever thought it was a good idea to queue for an hour in order to experience a minute and a half of queasy terror. When you realize the importance of having someone on the ground to hold the bags.

  I wondered if spending time alone with James Hartley might be like that: something that once seemed thrilling but was now largely incomprehensible, which only made sense when you were seventeen.