The Gulf Between Us Read online

  ‘I still think they should do something about that bloke,’ Rosie said.

  ‘Yeah, well, they did lock up him up, but then three years ago they let him out again. And he’s got a good story. A fight for the purity of Islam.’

  Jens said: ‘That’s not exactly a political programme, is it?’

  ‘No, but then the Americans are basing their entire foreign policy on a story about being involved in a vast project to end tyranny. And most of us base our lives on stories about love.’ He looked at me. ‘We’re all a bit fond of illusions.’

  ‘You don’t mean that!’ Fiona objected coquettishly, ‘that love’s an illusion?’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘No! You don’t believe that at all.’

  ‘How long does the average Californian marriage last?’

  Fiona frowned.

  ‘Six years,’ he told her.

  ‘So, what, you think arranged marriages are better?’

  ‘Any rational person would have to conclude they were.’

  ‘I notice you haven’t agreed to one…’

  ‘I think he may be winding us up,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps love’s not quite as dangerous as thinking God wants your nation to sort out the world,’ Al Maraj said, ‘but it’s not far off.’

  After dinner the camel handlers taught us a Bedouin game which involved chasing one another around the edge of a circle, similar to the nursery game I knew as duck duck goose. Later, Al Maraj produced a guitar that Hamad had left for him, and he played and we sang Simon and Garfunkel and Beatles songs, to which he and Dymphna knew all the words. I tried, and failed, to imagine them singing along to one another in the office.

  It wasn’t so bad. I’d have preferred to have James to myself, to be out here in the middle of nowhere with no one knowing what we were doing. And if we had to have other people around I might have chosen different characters, ones who didn’t give the impression that they were policing us. But James was sitting beside me, holding my hand in the voluptuous darkness and the sky was teeming with stars.

  Before we climbed into our separate sleeping bags, I got out my torch and suggested we go and sit at the foot of the jebel for ten minutes and look up at the sky. We padded across the shale and settled ourselves at the bottom of the hill, close together, pointing out the constellations we knew, noticing stars that were normally invisible, exclaiming at the milky way as it slid thickly across the sky.

  ‘It’s fantastic to be with you again,’ he murmured, slipping his hand down the back of my waistband. ‘Frustrating, but fantastic all the same.’

  ‘Oh, look, a shooting star. Like you.’ The star fell across the sky and faded.

  ‘No, that’s not me. Not really. I only want to be down here with you.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘We understand each other, don’t we?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘I understood about your dad adjusting to Matt being gay, after all. I know why you find Chris so annoying but you still can’t bear anyone criticizing him…’

  He kissed me. And then – perhaps coincidentally, but I had my doubts – someone coughed in the campsite. From his minders’ point of view, if that was what Al Maraj and Fiona were, this was a perfect date, because there was absolutely no chance of sex.

  ‘Tell me about Fiona,’ I whispered. ‘Is she in love with Al Maraj? I thought it was you at first, because she so obviously didn’t like me, but now I think maybe she doesn’t like me on his behalf.’

  He seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘You think she doesn’t like you?’

  ‘She tends to give that impression.’

  ‘Oh…’ he said doubtfully. ‘Well, she’s worked for me for a couple of years. She’s very good. Organizes my whole life. I don’t know about her and Nezar. You think she fancies him?’

  Is it a man thing, not to notice what’s going on around you, or was James particularly thick?

  ‘You spend all your time with them. I thought you might tell me.’

  ‘Yeah, come to think of it, she is always going on about how wonderful he is. But then, he is… Anyway, she won’t have much luck there.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No. He’s always working. And you heard him over dinner.’

  That’s what I mean, you see. No idea that not everything people say comes pure and unfiltered from the source, like spring water, that some things might be complicated by nuances, depths of flavour, calling for some discrimination. It was pretty clear to me that not only had Fiona been flirting with Al Maraj, he had also been flirting back.

  I woke up at dawn with a stiff neck and James snoring softly in my right ear. I wriggled out of my sleeping bag, pushed on my trainers, and went round the back of the jebel to wash in the bowl of water that had been left out.

  Fiona was already there. ‘Morning,’ she said, brighter than usual. ‘Sleep OK?’

  ‘Not badly,’ I answered politely. I hadn’t slept much at all.

  ‘Enjoying catching up with James?’

  ‘Mmmn.’

  ‘He’s an enthusiast, of course. Gets very caught up in things.’

  ‘Uh‐huh.’

  What did she mean? She made James sound like some kind of innocently frolicking dolphin, and me as an entanglement in which he might unfortunately be caught.

  ‘It makes it difficult, sometimes,’ she confided, ‘you know – dealing with him. To be honest, I thought at first this thing with you – but you’re good for him. Sort of steadying… I can see why… Because he’s hopeless, really. Not steady at all. And you’re not quite what I thought you were, and perhaps you should… Anyway,’ she dusted herself down, ‘better get some tea.’

  I blinked at the back of her, wondering what all that had been about. Completely incomprehensible. Was she trying to apologize for previous offhand behaviour? Or was it a warning? But if so, what about?

  I went back to the camp, where Al Maraj and one of the Bedu were crouched over a fire in a hollow in the ground. ‘Morning,’ Nezar said cheerfully, ‘we’re just making Arabic bread. The Atkins lot won’t like it. There’s tea.’

  ‘Charming as this is,’ Fiona announced, joining us, ‘I am glad I am not a Bedouin person.’

  The Bedouin person looked up at her.

  ‘You don’t find you see things more clearly out here in the desert?’ Al Maraj asked.

  ‘Not specially. And I certainly don’t want to be seen more clearly – at least not unless someone can provide me with a mirror.’

  Al Maraj said, as Fiona had intended he should, that she looked lovely. Actually, he said politely that we both looked lovely. She stalked off again.

  When everyone was up, those who were allowed ate the Arabic bread. There was labneh for those who were OK with dairy. The Bedu got the camels saddled up again while we were eating, and we trekked back by a different route. I noticed Fiona slid in behind Al Maraj this time and I also positioned myself better, tucking in behind James; but this route was narrower, mainly along a wadi, and we had to travel single file, so it didn’t do either of us much good.

  When we dismounted at Umm Hisin, Fiona reminded James he had a meeting with Todd at noon – perhaps in case he got any funny ideas about coming back with me. Ours was the last car back at the house; as we came up the drive Fiona was waiting, holding her mobile, and, as we opened the doors, she was already explaining that because of the bombings, the scenes that were due to be shot in Oman had been brought forward, which meant that James and Rosie would have to fly down to Muscat tonight.

  So having engineered a date with virtually no touching, Al Maraj and Fiona had now organized for him to leave the country.

  Obviously this wasn’t about me. It was about international terrorism – or local terrorism, anyway – and several major corporations needing to get a film made. All the same, I felt his friends wouldn’t mind at all that he was being whisked away, were probably delighted that we were being thwarted by the shooting schedule. I knew the film crew meant to have left
Hawar by Ramadan. I felt sad, all of a sudden, and wistful: James and I were going to have so little time.

  Nine

  Cheryl had been out of the country on the day of the bombing, but as soon as she got back she jumped over the low picket fence dividing our properties, pushed through the foliage and came into my kitchen. ‘Isn’t it terrible?’ she was already asking as the flyscreen clattered behind her, ‘you just don’t expect it here. I was even a bit worried about flying back from Sri Lanka – you really should go, Annie: the windsurfing’s great. You need quite a strong core, but you can work on that – but Tel said that was silly and we weren’t even flying HawarAir. You think they’ve got everyone in prison, don’t you? They used to lock them up before they did anything like this. Still, Tel says they will have arrested half of Ghafir now. Taken the opportunity. Poor Millie Franklin…’

  I’d been to visit Millie that morning; she’d come out of the high dependency unit the day before. Despite the stitches, she didn’t look as bad as I’d expected and she was surprisingly cheerful, eager for news about James Hartley. I told her about his having invited me to camp in the desert with his colleagues: the outing had been so chaste that this hardly seemed to be giving anything away. I also told her he was now in Oman, but not that he’d been ringing me every day, whispered calls behind my bedroom door which left me staring up at the bedroom ceiling, incredulous that this was happening to me, here, now, when I’d almost given up.

  ‘He must really like you, to have invited you out with all those film people,’ she said, determined to be encouraged anyway. ‘D’you think he’s been in love with you all this time?’

  ‘No!’ I laughed. ‘He’s had loads of other girlfriends.’

  ‘Precisely! He’s never found one who’s good enough to stick around. You wait!’

  I smiled, knowing I only had to wait until this evening for James to tell me again that he’d never felt like this about anyone else, and that when he got back he’d prove it.

  Katherine joined me in the corridor as I was leaving the hospital. ‘Your friend Diane Bonneau called to say she’s having some people round next week – is that right – for her birthday? And she said if any of us wanted a few hours out of the hospital… Only I think it’d be good for Maddi. She seems very low. Would you mind taking her?’

  I said that of course I’d be delighted, although I privately doubted that a thirtysomething’s birthday party was really what she needed.

  I called Will when I got home and told him Katherine thought Maddi was depressed.

  ‘I speak to her all the time,’ he said defensively. ‘Katherine’s just making a fuss. What, does she think I’m not helping?’

  ‘No one’s saying it’s got anything to do with you. It’s understandable: Millie could have been killed.’

  ‘There’s a lot of pressure, working for an investment bank. I’ve only just started and now I’m involved in this big Saudi deal and all I do is work and sleep.’

  ‘Will, it’s fine,’ I said gently. ‘It’s fine.’

  James arrived back from Oman on Wednesday and invited me to meet him at the Al A’ali House as soon he’d finished his personal training session at six o’clock.

  I arrived a few minutes early and the door was opened by the tall Indian.

  ‘Who’s that, Sandeep?’ Fiona called out, and then poked her head out of the dining room, peering over the top of her glasses. ‘Oh,’ she said, when she saw me. ‘Is James expecting you?’

  ‘I hope so…’

  ‘He didn’t mention it. Does Nezar know about this?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  ‘I’ll have tea, thanks, Sandeep. Annie?’

  I protested that I didn’t need tea and I was quite happy to wait in the garden but Fiona flapped her hand at me. ‘Come through. You know, I was just thinking, if James read all the letters from women claiming to have known him before, he’d never get anything done.’

  ‘But I did. Know him,’ I said. I was obliged to follow her, but I loitered in front of a painting on the dining room wall. It was by a contemporary calligraphy artist, cobalt brushstrokes soaring into white space.

  ‘Beautiful,’ Fiona said briskly, nodding at it. ‘Apparently it’s called I Follow the Religion of Love.’ She tidied some papers on the table. ‘Which I believe is a quote from an Islamic poem by a medieval mystic.’

  ‘Ibn Arabi?’

  ‘Of course,’ she straightened up from her work and looked over the top of her glasses again, ‘James wouldn’t have been able to tell you that.’

  ‘No, well, I only know it because I’ve lived here twenty‐five years.’

  ‘That it was a quote from a poem, I mean. I’m not sure James has ever noticed the picture at all.’

  I shrugged. He had other qualities.

  ‘You know what Cary Grant once said?’ Fiona carried on. ‘He said he’d like to be Cary Grant, too.’

  I couldn’t really see where this was going, paintings and Cary Grant.

  ‘It’s the same with James. He’s fed up with trying to live up to everyone’s idea of James Hartley. And the thing is, he imagines you understand something about him that he doesn’t even understand about himself.’

  ‘And you don’t think that’s right?’

  ‘Annie, there probably isn’t anything to understand. He thinks he can be different with you, that you don’t need things from him, because you knew him before…’

  ‘I’ve always thought that when two people are attracted, it’s more a sort of a chemical thing,’ I said, still staring at the picture.

  James himself arrived at that moment, slightly sweaty but irresistible in tennis whites – which was probably as well, because Fiona was needling me and I didn’t trust myself not to say something offensive. There was no mileage for me in quarrelling with her. She was probably only being obstructive because she thought that’s what Al Maraj wanted. Besides, being in Hawar and looking after James and making sure the film got made must have required the logistical capacity of a four‐star general, and I could see that she didn’t need me wandering about getting in the way and messing things up.

  James had to sign some letters before he did anything else, according to Fiona, so I hung around for him down by the pool. Then we swam. He had to do a lot of what Americans call laps, because it was part of his fitness regime, and I couldn’t keep up, so I made my way up and down the pool at a statelier pace a couple of times and waited for him to finish.

  ‘Was Fiona giving you a hard time?’ he asked with concern as we slopped back up the path to the house in our flip flops. ‘You looked pissed off when I arrived.’

  ‘No,’ I lied, ‘though I guess for her I’m an unnecessary complication.’

  He pulled me towards him. ‘You feel very necessary to me.’

  Upstairs, with the windows open on to the garden and the muslin curtains blowing in the breeze, the sex had the same rhapsodic, masterclass quality as before. And, like the last time, I wondered if James was pretending to be James Hartley, even when he was saying all that stuff about how great I was and how he hadn’t felt like this before.

  ‘Annie, what are you doing for Christmas?’ He leant up on his elbow on the scurfed‐up sheets. ‘No, don’t answer. Why don’t we spend it together in London?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I could rent a flat.’

  ‘What about Matt and Sam?’

  ‘Them too, obviously. We could have some quality time. No schedule, no pressure. Just a couple of weeks, being normal.’

  Normal? What was normal for James? Not the same as normal for me, that was for sure. And what about the whole secrecy thing? Surely someone would notice if he shacked up with me for a couple of weeks? Some of those people he claimed hung about on street corners all over the world, waiting for him with their long lenses.

  I didn’t say this, because I was too busy processing the information that he wanted to extend our relationship beyond his stay in Hawar. He’d told me more than once
how real our affair felt, implying that it was of a different quality, more solid and dependable than the switchback flings he had with younger, more ambitious and temperamental women. But for that very reason, I had learnt to think of it as an interlude, an aberration. DCOL, I believe it’s called. Doesn’t Count On Location.

  Up to this point, I’d been mildly sceptical about the idea that we were keeping our affair secret because it was too precious to expose. When he said being with me felt like coming home, I was pleased, but I was also careful to reason that it was an easy enough thing to say. I had some kind of hold over him, for sure: he seemed to think we had some kind of connection, that I understood something crucial about him that very few other people did. But I’d thought this was mainly sentimentality about the past on his part. I wasn’t really suitable, and he would find reasons to move on. In the pool, for example, I’d asked him if he wanted to come to Diane’s tomorrow, and he’d looked pained and said, ‘Annie, I’d love to, but you know how it is…’

  ‘Yeah: you want to see me, but you don’t want to be seen with me.’

  He shook his head, as though the secrecy was something that had been imposed on him and he was battling hard against it. ‘It’s tough for me too.’

  I’d turned away, disappointed. And that was how I’d imagined it would end: as something that was too complicated to explain to other people and too difficult to accommodate. I thought he’d take the opportunity of leaving Hawar, of the enforced separation, to bid me a regretful, sentimental but slightly relieved goodbye.

  This, though, did not currently seem to be his plan. He wanted to try to keep things going. I can’t say that my doubts all fell away, but there seemed no harm in hanging around to find out whether there was some way to knit our lives closer together. If he was prepared to put in this much effort – inviting me to London, getting a flat – it would have been churlish to tell him I was working on the basis that the relationship had no future. Especially since I very much wanted to believe it had.