The Gulf Between Us Read online

  The pair of them were sitting on our veranda, dressed in shorts and tennis shirts, rackets propped up against their chairs – Andrew, as usual, looking too big for the space around him, even if that was outdoors. The way his leg was draped over the arm of the garden chair reminded me of those slinky toys the boys used to have when they were little: if he tipped slightly to one side, his whole body might come behind, rolling over on itself.

  They got up and ambled over to the carport to help me unload the shopping.

  ‘OK if Andrew stays for supper?’ Will asked.

  Andrew’s hands, as he picked up several bags, seemed oddly outsized, for a vicar: more suited to scaffolding, or rugby, or piano.

  ‘Sure.’ I was pleased by Will’s friendship with Andrew, if perplexed by the amount of churchgoing that went with it. Until now, my eldest son hadn’t been a great one for hanging out. It wasn’t that he hadn’t had friends, exactly, more that they seemed to be a by‐product of more purposeful activities: the cricket team, the school string quartet, further maths groups. His relationships usually seemed to involve an awful lot of work, usually practising something or other – bowling, or the works of Haydn – but with Andrew he seemed happy merely to sit and talk, or even stare into space. They seemed to be at ease with each other, although I found Andrew rather formal and proper. Will (who could probably come across as a bit formal and proper himself ) told me this was all wrong and I hadn’t understood him at all.

  Even Will’s relationship with Maddi seemed to be rather hard work these days. As we went indoors, he told me the pair of them had spent the day trying to sort out flights for her South African cousins, who’d originally said they weren’t coming to the wedding but then decided they were, although only if they could get aisle seats on a particular flight out of Cape Town.

  ‘Don’t they have travel agents in South Africa?’ Matt asked, from the sofa, where he was curled up with his best friend Jodie and a girl from the year below at school called Maya, watching a re‐run of Sex and the City. ‘Thank God you’re home,’ he added to me, making a point of taking the Lord’s name in vain since Andrew was around. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘When you talked about your gap year, there was a lot of stuff about earning money and challenging experiences. I don’t remember the part about watching fictional women in Manolo Blahniks discuss their orgasms,’ Will said. He hadn’t had a gap year. He can also be a bit of a pain.

  ‘I didn’t want to overwhelm you with the possibilities,’ Matt said, yawning. ‘And I have been earning money. I’ve had a hard day at the office.’ He had a job with a local publishing house, working on a publication he said you had to describe as a high‐net‐worth‐lifestyle title. ‘I’m only in Hawar because of you and your wedding. Otherwise I’d be trekking through Borneo or somewhere by now, insh’allah.’

  Jodie raised her head from his shoulder and looked at him sceptically. She was working at the Presbyterian Mission Hospital before going off to Columbia University to study to be a doctor and she thought Matt’s days writing captions about unaffordable consumer items were a risible way for him to be spending his time. Generally speaking, she treated him as if he were her slightly hapless younger brother. Matt seemed to like this.

  ‘How’s your dad?’ I asked her, meaning ‘Does he know when the war’s going to start?’ Jodie’s father was a senior officer at the American military base.

  ‘It’s no good, mum,’ Matt disentangled himself from the girls and cushions and got to his feet, ‘he’s not going to let Jodie know when he’s invading because she’ll only tell.’

  ‘He’s fine, thank you,’ Jodie answered. ‘Busy. And no, he hasn’t given me a date for the invasion, mainly because he doesn’t have one, but I think you’ll be able to get Will and Maddi’s wedding over and done with.’

  ‘And the film made, I guess?’ Maya said. ‘I mean, someone must have said it’s safe to bring James Hartley here?’

  ‘I have to make my mother a cup of tea,’ Matt informed the girls, ‘before she starts going on about how at our age she’d been working for three years.’

  ‘And in a proper job,’ I pointed out, ‘not just to earn money to go to Costa Rica. But it’s fine. You carry on with what you’re doing.’

  He followed me into the kitchen anyway. ‘Actually, I had a very draining day,’ he said as he put on the kettle. ‘How many interesting things are there, frankly, to say about boats?’ He held out a mug inquiringly to Andrew, who was unloading the shopping on to the counter, then leant back and looked at him as if he found him very puzzling. ‘Are you, like, you know, meant to convert people?’

  ‘If you want to be converted, I can give it a try,’ Andrew said good‐naturedly.

  ‘You’ve done him, haven’t you?’ Matt nodded at Will. ‘How did you manage that, then?’

  ‘Trade secret.’

  ‘Well, don’t come near me.’

  ‘Oh, I can do it from a distance.’

  ‘Probably only when people are weird in the first place.’ He ducked to avoid the orange Will threw at him.

  ‘Boys…’ I said warningly. ‘And Matt, you’re not being helpful. If you can’t make me a cup of tea without provoking food throwing, you’d be better off watching television.’

  Matt changed the subject. ‘Granddad rang again just before you got home.’

  ‘Oh, no, what is it this time?’ My father, who lives in south London, thinks it’s extravagant to phone the north of England, but this was the third time he’d called Hawar in a week.

  ‘Just the usual – when are the Americans going to invade Iraq, and is it likely to be before the wedding?’

  ‘I hope you told him no?’

  ‘Plus, he can’t quite bring himself to say so, because he knows it’s wrong, but I think he’s also wondering how he’s going to avoid people who look Muslim.’

  ‘Yes, well.’ I stuck the labneh, milk and butter in the fridge. ‘Is Sam around?’

  ‘No, he’s out with Faisal.’

  Sam was always out with Faisal these days, although there isn’t really anywhere to go in Hawar, at least at six o’clock on a Wednesday evening. The Pearl Mall? The Corniche? Everywhere you might have thought of loitering around in a moody adolescent way was full of Hawari families. Sam was reticent about what they got up to, but he was reticent about everything.

  Their main interest, as far as I could work out, was setting up web fanzines for indie bands that had no fans. Sam and Faisal communicated with people like themselves in Stockholm or Munich or Carlisle, but only as long as the numbers involved remained tiny: as soon as any band they’d adopted started to acquire a serious following, they had to drop them. While it seemed rather pointless trying to publicize groups you didn’t want anyone else to know about, it also appeared unlikely to lead them into any serious trouble.

  Will and Andrew had booked the compound tennis court for six o’clock; Matt went back to the girls and the orgasms. I took a glass of water out on to the back porch and sat down as the muezzin started calling in Ghafir, the nearest village: the dusk call that begins in the violet light and ends in darkness and seems to be full of longing. I leant my head back on the wall and felt the night collect around me. All the plants in the garden that looked tired during the day, the life leached out of them by the heat, seemed to start breathing again in the dusk, to acquire solidity, density, weight: the oleanders, the palms that looked like banana trees but that were actually palms, the fluttery bougainvillea. It’s the best time of day: the yearning call from the mosque, the dusk that comes as a relief, enveloping the garden, making it suddenly substantial, lush.

  Then Cheryl pushed through from next door.

  ‘Ohmigod, Annie, is it true?’ She stood with her hands on her hips, her legs slightly apart as if tensed for activity, wearing a pink check Lycra vest and matching three‐quarter exercise pants. I blinked at her silhouette, a vision against the vegetation; ‘about you and James Hartley? – I mean, I know you look great and I’ve told y
ou before, all the men I know say you’re sexy, but…’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  One of the boys once told me that all the cells in the human body die off every seven years, which meant that James Hartley had been, roughly speaking, three different people since I’d known him. (Annoyingly, they seemed to have been getting better‐looking, which is not what usually happens.)

  ‘Are you going to get him out here to Al Janabiyya? You should have a party.’

  ‘I imagine they’ll be very busy.’

  Cheryl came up the porch and sat down. ‘What’s he like, anyway?’

  I hadn’t seen him since he was nineteen. Everyone kept asking me what he was like, but I’d known him for three years when he was an apprentice plumber in Thornton Heath, which is a very different thing from being a film star in Hollywood… I didn’t see how I could possibly have anything useful to say. He’d always wanted to be an actor. And I hadn’t taken it seriously, because I hadn’t thought it was a thing plumbers from Thornton Heath did. This wouldn’t have been interesting to Cheryl, but it was what I thought when I remembered James Hartley – that I’d been stupid back then: half‐formed, clueless about most things. I hadn’t allowed myself to think big. I’d believed there were certain things to which I shouldn’t presume. Most things, in fact. This wasn’t a particular failing of mine: most people I knew were the same. It wasn’t even conscious. We had imbibed it, swallowing it as naturally as if it had been part of the fish‐fingers or baked beans or salad cream we had for tea. It had turned out that James had been much more exceptional than any of us realized, not so much for having deep blue eyes and an impressive bone structure as for, somehow, from somewhere, having managed to pick up a sense of entitlement. And that did make him different.

  Over dinner, Andrew told us about a visit he’d made to the Dariz Palace earlier in the day. It seemed that even the emir was excited about James Hartley’s arrival, despite the fact he should really have had other things on his mind, such as running the country and persuading the Americans not to invade Iraq. While Andrew was describing the various parties Shaikh Hassan was intending to throw in James’s honour, I found myself wondering if he (Andrew, not the emir) had found whatever he’d been looking for when he came to Hawar. It seemed an odd place for the Church to have sent him, when the Anglican needs of the emirate would so obviously have been better served by someone older and less ambitious, with a wife who was prepared to join the gardening club and organize cake sales. Andrew’s parishioners wanted the Church to carry them back spiritually and emotionally to Bournemouth or Bridlington or wherever they’d grown up – places where there was obviously a God, and he was fairly British.

  It may be that the Church was like the Foreign Office, which tended to send us either dynamic youthful ambassadors, or older, tired Arabists getting their one head of mission before retirement. Andrew reminded me of the younger diplomats: he had the same kind of restlessness. He’d tried to bridge religious divides by forming alliances with various mosques, as well as with Father Joseph at the Sacred Heart. Unfortunately, this wasn’t what his parishioners mainly wanted from religion. People in Hawar pushed past one another in the souk, worked together, even lived together, if you overlooked the fact that the white expats who dominated Andrew’s congregation tended to have spacious villas on compounds, while their Filipina or Sri Lankan house maids, who mainly worshipped at the Sacred Heart, occupied breeze‐block servants’ quarters in their back gardens. But this was generally felt to be enough proximity. Religion was one of the many ways of honeycombing Hawari society, of making coexistence possible. It was like compounds for expatriates, or the women’s quarters in Arab households: a way of dividing people, allowing them to get away from one another, remember who they were. In the confusion of people, in the babble of Arabic and Malayalam, Sinhalese and Filipino, Urdu and dozens of other languages, religion was a way of asserting a separate, more secure identity.

  After dinner, when Will was driving Andrew back to the chaplaincy, Matt said, ‘Have you noticed how Andrew always acts like someone’s trying to catch him out?’

  ‘That’ll be you, then.’

  ‘Me?’ He pretended to be shocked. ‘Really, though, what d’you think they talk about? I mean, tennis may be fascinating’ – Matt loathed tennis: he said it was too hot and he couldn’t bear the responsibility – ‘but it can’t keep them going all the time.’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re clever. Maybe their minds run on a different track. Sort of more elevated.’

  ‘What, like a monorail at a theme park?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway, he’s good for Will and you shouldn’t be hostile.’ Matt, who’d only left the International School in the summer, still had friends living in Hawar – Jodie, for example, to whom he was very close, and Maya, who might, I thought, be his girlfriend, or at least be heading in that direction. Will had left the International School more than three years earlier and his friends were scattered across the world, studying or working. The only young men here of his age were the equity dealers and commodity brokers whose idea of a good time was to get smashed in Trader Vic’s on Thursday nights and shag the HawarAir crew. And that wasn’t his thing.

  Will had been ten when his dad died, and I’d worried ever since that the loss had ruptured his confidence. He had, I suspected, too little of that blithe sense you should have in your childhood, your teens and early twenties – a belief that life basically works out OK. Obviously, it doesn’t, always, but that seemed a hard lesson to have had to learn at ten. I worried that his life had been shadowed, making him different from other boys. In which case, it had probably been a mistake to keep him here in the Gulf, which was so unreal, an affluent bubble in a cloudless sky, confected in a few decades from desert subsistence into cities, hotels and high rises. Hawar could hardly have been more insecure. Apart from its painful environmental fragility (built on petroleum revenues, dependent on air conditioning) it was also politically precarious. Nothing about it made any real sense – its modern cities rearing up out of pitiless desert, its archaic hereditary dictatorships – so how could you expect it to give you a secure sense of identity? How could you base your sense of yourself on somewhere so shiny and unresolved, built on a kind of lottery win and so much at odds with its surroundings? Will was an Englishman in the desert and a stranger in England. He might be getting married to get something clear about himself.

  Two

  ‘There were a lot of Arabs on that flight,’ my father said, pushing his trolley into arrivals at Hawar International Airport. He blinked and looked around the hall, absorbing the fact that there were even more of them here – all over the place, adjusting white or red‐checked ghutras, folding back one side with an air of judicious activity or fiddling absently with worry beads. ‘I mean, I don’t know why they checked my shoes.’

  ‘The shoe bomber was white,’ Matt pointed out. ‘He had a British passport. Anyway, they’re not supposed to discriminate.’

  ‘I hardly look like a terrorist, though,’ dad said plaintively.

  I thought it was typical of my brother and his wife to have let him come through immigration and customs into this packed arrivals hall on his own, to be buffeted by the press of unfamiliar people – Arabs, Keralites waiting for the Cochin flight, proudly self‐contained men in spotless white thobes and Armani sandals, hungry‐looking labourers in dusty brown shifts watching anxiously for cousins, brothers, kin. My father’s knuckles were closed tightly over the handles of his trolley, as if he thought someone might try to take it. He had the pale, hollowed‐out, lost look of someone just tipped off a long flight.

  ‘This has changed,’ he said, making conversation, not wanting me to see how rattled he was. ‘It used to be brown.’

  It was the old 1960s building he remembered, its walls swathed in brown formica. He hadn’t been back for twelve years: it was too hot, he’d protested, whenever I’d suggested it, and the humidity was exhausting for someone his age. H
e hadn’t been sure either about the way you were thrown together with people you wouldn’t necessarily spend time with at home.

  That one time he had come, he’d been to dinner with some posh people who kept on referring to the locals as towelheads, which even he knew wasn’t right – he knew you couldn’t do that these days – and he thought they might have been joking but he couldn’t tell. Matt had said afterwards they were being ironic, ‘or at least semi‐ironic’, but what did that mean? That they knew you weren’t supposed to say ‘towelheads’ but they were going to anyway? Because they could? Because the rules somehow didn’t apply to them? Because he was there and he might be shocked? Or because they thought he might secretly sympathize? It was all too much of a minefield and he couldn’t overcome the sense that they were poking fun at him. He was blowed if he wanted to get into it.

  I took his arm and steered him gently through the mêlée of men with foreign purposes and women in abayas, the shiny black cloth over their heads and clothes drawing attention to the flash of eyes, softness of skin, the shape of lips as they drifted past, wrapped up in mysterious lives. Matt stayed by the barrier, waiting for Chris, Karen and Andrea.

  We had a statement airport now, with glass‐walled walkways and moving ramps and waiting areas upholstered in blue and gold, the colours of the national flag. In place of the old rattling boxes wheezing out of the walls, there was silent air conditioning, purring softly, barely there. A steel superstructure flung gleaming arms above, arcing across the hot sky; below, the shops glittered with borderless merchandise, repulsively enticing: designer bags, scotch whisky, flash watches, globally marketed perfumes.