The Gulf Between Us Read online

  It was quite encouraging that he was interested in something new, something beyond the question of how long it took to get through to the gas company or how odd it was that they were diverting all their calls to India and whether he was ultimately having to pay for the cost of the phone call. The plight of gay teenagers and what they might be forced into was definitely a more worthwhile preoccupation than my non‐existent fatal diseases. It was also possible for him to talk about it in a tone that wasn’t peevish. On the other hand, he was one of the most antisocial people in the world, so if Matt’s sexuality had driven him to going to meetings, he must be finding it very painful.

  The radio and television stations were still leading their bulletins with news of the telegrams that the crown prince, Shaikh Rashid bin Hassan al Majid, had sent to other crown princes: fraternal greetings on the occasion of foreign national days, best wishes for the success of forthcoming diplomatic encounters. The fact that his telegrams were still being listed ahead of the prime minister’s presumably meant there hadn’t been a family coup, but there were none of the usual pictures of him in the Hawar Daily News. In any normal week, you would have expected at least a couple – Shaikh Rashid attending a passing‐out parade at the HDF barracks, Shaikh Rashid visiting the women’s craft centres in Hassan Town. Matt thought he’d probably left the country.

  ‘Did you talk about this before?’ I asked him one night after dinner, when we were sitting on the veranda. ‘About what might happen if you were discovered?’

  ‘All the time. He thought he was like that gecko,’ he gestured up to where the creature was hanging with its feet on the ceiling, basking translucently in the stored evening warmth of its upside‐down world: ‘he thought he could be different, turn things up the other way, persuade people to see them from his point of view.’

  ‘What, you could get away with it?’

  Matt shrugged. ‘Being heir apparent can make you think you have a lot of power – growing up believing that your country is also your family business.’

  ‘But you surely didn’t think it could somehow survive people knowing?’

  ‘Sometimes, he almost convinced me. I figured – well, he knows more about Hawari politics than I do, plus he’s very charismatic, plus this society is probably a lot less rigid than we think it is.’

  ‘Where do you think he is?’

  ‘Who knows? Some place where they mess about with your hormones.’

  Maddi had left, too. Millie was home from hospital now; I’d been to visit earlier that day. Her right cheek was stitched together in three different places, making her face look twisted and lopsided. It was shocking at first, not least because she’d been so beautiful, but Peter had spent all his free time since she was injured researching the best surgeons and they were due to fly to New York in the next couple of weeks for a consultation. Millie said if the plastic surgeon could fix it so that people didn’t avert their eyes when they saw her, she’d be happy.

  Katherine told me in the kitchen that they were trying not to get Millie’s hopes up too much, but the surgeon was cautiously optimistic. ‘Obviously she’s not going to look quite like before. Fortunately she never took this modelling business very seriously: she always wanted to go to university. This man we’re going to see, who’s our first choice, thinks from the stuff he’s had from her doctors at the HDF that he’ll be able to get a good result. So we’re all a lot more cheerful than we were. Except Maddi, of course. She still seems very low.’

  ‘Perhaps she’ll improve now she’s back with Will.’

  ‘Yes. He’s very busy, though, isn’t he? I hope he’ll ease off a bit once she gets back. They think work’s very important, don’t they?’ she added, as if it was a generational thing, rather than that my son was especially self‐obsessed.

  I was used to thinking of Will as my trouble‐free child, the one who did all the right things, became head boy and cricket captain and protected his less brilliant, less sporty younger brother. It was difficult to get my head round his new incarnation as the sulky uncooperative one. I didn’t like Katherine’s imputation that he wasn’t capable of making Maddi feel better, but I was worried she might be right.

  As she carried the tea outside, Katherine said, ‘Look, I haven’t said anything before now – with all this going on – but I’m sorry about this business with Matthew.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s been quite hard for him. It was a serious relationship.’

  ‘Will he have to leave?’

  ‘Yes. In the new year.’

  ‘He was always going to London, though?’

  ‘Yes, in March. A couple of months won’t make that much difference. The hard thing is the ending of the relationship, the way it happened.’

  ‘Does he know what’s happened to Shaikh Rashid?’

  I sat down next to Millie, under the bougainvillea. ‘He can’t get hold of him. We think he’s probably not here.’

  ‘But meanwhile you’re going to be in London for Christmas!’ Millie said mischievously. ‘Sorry, I think we’re not supposed to know, but Maddi told me. I don’t think she could resist.’

  ‘It’s fine. I don’t mind you knowing. It’s James who’s anxious about it – although I’m not sure how he thinks we can continue to keep it quiet if we’re staying together in London.’

  ‘How exciting! Have you found a flat?’

  ‘I suspect Fiona Eckhart actually found it, but yes. It’s in Knightsbridge and it’s enormous and has something called a wet room, which is sort of a supercharged bathroom, and something else called a multimedia suite. And a hot tub on the terrace. It has whole rooms I didn’t know existed.’

  ‘Is an outdoor hot tub going to be much use to you in December in London?’ Katherine asked.

  ‘That’s what I said, but James told me it’s exactly when you need one.’

  ‘God, Annie,’ Millie said, ‘how glamorous! It all sounds pretty serious!’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought so, when he was here.’

  ‘You did a good job of keeping it secret…’

  ‘He was very insistent about it. I’m relieved you know: I haven’t been happy about the secrecy, because it puts me in a false position. But I did promise not to tell – so if you could avoid saying anything?… It was easier when he was here, because I was so caught up with him I didn’t have time for proper conversations anyway. Everything seemed so easy, and exciting. Now it’s harder, not least because we’re finding it quite hard to keep up the intensity over such a distance.’

  ‘How often do you talk?’

  ‘Every day, but it’s my morning and his night and I’m distracted because I need to get Sam to school, and he’s had a day on set and he’s often quite hyped up. We often find it difficult to hit the right note.’

  This morning we’d both started speaking at the same time. In the slightly ratty pause that ensued, it was clear to me that he wanted to offload whatever was bothering him, so I gave way. I couldn’t help reflecting, though, that my son was embroiled in a sex scandal which could destabilize a whole country and our residence permits could be cancelled at any time, resulting in deportation, and my daughter‐in‐law was depressed, perhaps clinically, and war was about to break out up the coast, possibly unleashing hideous weapons … and James wanted me to be upset because Rosie was getting the laugh?

  But this was a futile way of thinking. He was a celebrity, which meant that the tiniest things that happened to him were thought to be hugely important. That must be very unsettling to a person. He was doing well to maintain as much interest in the wider world as he did.

  I suspected the technology had been invented to bring us together before we were evolved enough to deal with it. (All human beings, I mean; James and I weren’t specially unevolved.) Globalization works for a lot of things, like finance and food and entertainment (or at least, it sort of does, apart from the downsides), but it’s not much good for love affairs. You can’t conduct a reliable relationship over thousands of miles and however m
any time zones, even with the use of a mobile phone. James was winding down when I was revving up, and after a couple of weeks of half‐communicating, of umbrage seeping down the line, I was struggling to remember what it had been like when he’d been here.

  Katherine sympathized, when I said some of this. ‘I always used to ring Maddi at Oxford when she was about to go into a tutorial. Or that’s what she said, anyway. I expect she was just doing something more interesting.’

  ‘Once you get to London you’ll forget all about the phone calls,’ Millie assured me.

  I thought that must be true. James had been so effusive in Hawar, so convinced that there was something precious, unique between us. It seemed impossible we could get together and not feel that again.

  Eleven

  The sunlight sliced through the intense December blue sky, bouncing off the oleanders and hibiscus and the fluttering leaves of the tangelo trees with their swollen, fat‐skinned, bitter fruit. The compound pool was as blue as James’s eyes, for which journalists have reached many times over the years for comparisons – cornflowers, blown glass, lagoons – but which were today perfectly recalled by the pool at Al Janabiyya compound. The vegetation shivered with light.

  School had broken up for Eid and what we had to call the festive season in a rush of end‐of‐term concerts and class parties, plays and reports. Matt, Sam and I were flying to London the following morning; this was my last swim before I finished packing.

  The previous evening I’d been looking again at the internet pictures Fiona had sent of the flat. ‘It’s huge: we’ll spend half our time looking for each other,’ I told James.

  ‘No, we won’t, because I’m going to lock you up. You can be my sex slave.’

  I had been relieved to learn that Fiona wouldn’t actually be moving in with us. She was renting a mews house round the corner and flying back to LA for a week over Christmas. James did want to bring his cook, despite having a long list of restaurants at which it was imperative we eat. He said she understood his dietary requirements; I replied, perhaps a bit tetchily, that I thought I could probably recognize a carbohydrate.

  ‘But you might fry things.’

  ‘I don’t “fry things”.’

  ‘You won’t notice she’s there, I promise.’

  He assured me I could cook Christmas lunch, if I was that bothered about it – which, yes, he could see I obviously was and that was fine.

  The only drawback would be having to deal with Fiona when I first arrived, because James couldn’t get into London until the following morning, but I hoped this wouldn’t involve much more than getting the keys. I privately planned that if there were to be any future in this relationship, Fiona would have to become a bit less ubiquitous.

  I decided to do one more lazy length. As I slowly breast‐stroked towards the tennis court, Cheryl opened the gate and trotted up the steps to the poolside.

  ‘Hiya!’ she called out. ‘Might actually get a bit of a tan today.’ The air was clear of humidity, so that for once the sun wasn’t diffused into a damp haze. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ I called back from the water.

  ‘Good. It’s great for your serotonin levels to be exercising. After all your troubles. How is Matthew?’

  ‘Fine,’ I lied.

  She put her bag down. ‘Such a shame he won’t be able to have children.’

  I hate talking while swimming, especially to someone who isn’t even in the water, but I couldn’t let this pass. ‘Well, he might,’ I said. ‘All sorts of things are possible.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he minds – it’s probably different for them – but it’s sad for you.’

  I gave up on my last length, and swam to the steps.

  ‘I don’t think it’s any different,’ I objected. ‘For them, as you put it. He’s brilliant with kids.’

  ‘Hmmn,’ she said, working out if the sunbed was facing the right way.

  ‘And I’m not that bothered about perpetuating my genes. That’s not why I had him.’

  Cheryl spread a towel on a bed, unpeeled her sundress and settled down. She looked along the length of her honed body approvingly, wriggled her toes, pulled a water bottle from her bag and stowed it beneath the bed, then opened a magazine. It was one of those hectic celebrity things, artificial and gossipy, that make you feel slightly queasy if you look at them too long. Someone must have brought this one in from abroad because you couldn’t buy them here, on account of all the cleavage and thigh.

  Cheryl squinted at the magazine in the sunlight. She had a thing about being younger than she really was, which meant she didn’t need reading glasses. I climbed out of the pool.

  ‘Oh, look,’ she called out, as I picked up my towel. ‘There’s an article here about James Hartley and Rosie thingy.’

  I dried off, smiling at hoarded memories of a peach dawn, the lines of James’s body, scrambled sheets.

  ‘I told you. I did, though, didn’t I? It always happens on film sets. Did I ever tell you about that time in the Hawari Players?… No, well, best not… Tel’d kill me…’

  Even now I didn’t register what she was saying. She turned the magazine round to face me, showing me the spread, and I wound the towel under my arms and came over. I still thought I was humouring her.

  As I came closer I could see a double page, a photograph pasted skew‐whiff across the centre fold: a man leaning back against a red Ferrari, a woman facing him, her face half‐hidden.

  I gasped. I couldn’t help it. Something inside me went into spasm. They were kissing.

  Minutes earlier, this very image had been sliding in and out of my head: the way James’s head tipped when he moved in to kiss me. Me. Not her.

  Cheryl flipped the magazine to face her. ‘She’s young enough to be his daughter. Honestly!’

  I slumped on to the sunbed.

  Cheryl tutted and peered at the small writing, turning the page at an angle. ‘Here, you read it,’ she said, thrusting it at me.

  ‘Huh?’ I was disintegrating.

  ‘Don’t get it wet, mind. At least three of my step class want to borrow it.’

  I glanced down and the page swam in front of me.

  ‘Really, what can she see in him?’ Cheryl said irritably, applying sun screen to her legs. ‘Publicity, I suppose. But look at her: she’s gorgeous. No, aloud!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Read it aloud!’

  ‘I… don’t think I can.’

  I’d already read it, taken in the glib, bouncy prose:

  So, it seems all the rumours about James Hartley and Rosie Rossiter are true! The proof is here in these pictures, taken in Hollywood this week.

  James and Rosie, his latest co‐star, were completely wrapped up in one another as they shopped on Rodeo Drive.

  The couple are back in LA after filming their latest project, Now Eden, in the small Persian Gulf state of Hawar, where they had a narrow escape when the film set was attacked by Al Qaeda suicide bombers. Six people were killed and friends of the couple say the tragedy helped bring the pair of them together.

  ‘What they went through out there was pretty bad,’ said one. ‘They turned to each other for help through the trauma.’

  I shook my head in disbelief. He’d spoken to me this morning. And yesterday, and the day before that. When had this photograph been taken?

  I tried to think whether there had been any change in his attitude. He’d been a bit distant, maybe, but then he was on the other side of the world.

  Did these magazines fake photographs? Could they have made this up?

  ‘Are you all right, love?’ Cheryl was looking at me with concern. ‘Oh, no! It was such a long time ago… Surely you didn’t think… ?’

  Keep your dignity, my mum used to say. Don’t let people see how hurt you are. That was bloody stupid advice.

  ‘James and Rosie finally tore themselves out of their passionate clinch,’ the sickening prose breezed on, ‘and went back to their shopping. Looks like things si
zzled in the desert heat. And they’re sizzling still.’

  I dropped the magazine on to my lap. ‘It wasn’t even hot.’

  ‘What? What does it say?’

  ‘It says when they were here it was hot.’

  ‘I mean about them.’ Cheryl snatched up the magazine and peered again at the picture. ‘I suppose she gets a lot of help to look like that: nutritionists, personal trainers, that kind of thing,’ she said sadly.

  ‘And that the bomb was Al Qaeda, when everyone knows they were shi’a. And that those two suffered trauma because of it.’

  I stood up shakily, feeling like my body didn’t belong to me any more. I had to get back to the house. Out of the reach of Cheryl’s perplexed sympathy. Away from this poolside with its sunshine on the water and this luridly coloured magazine glittering in front of me.

  ‘I have to make a phone call.’

  I stood in the middle of the sitting‐room floor dripping on to the carpet, phone to my ear, drumming my fingers on the back of the armchair. I couldn’t think straight: my mind was whirling away across the ocean… It would be five o’clock in the morning in Los Angeles.

  James would probably have his phone off. Or he’d be expecting this call and there’d be some divert to Fiona, who’d probably set up this whole thing, because nothing happened without her… She was probably the so‐called friend. Yes, that was it: she and Al Maraj had probably organized this between them. They’d always disliked me.

  Maybe he’d changed phones … I knew he had a phone specially for me. I was the only person who had the number. (I wondered now if Fiona had it, or Al Maraj.) Maybe he’d thrown it in the trash now. New relationship, new phone.

  ‘Annie,’ he groaned, ‘darling, it’s like night time… You OK?’

  ‘No.’

  I expected him to interrupt then, to offer some glaringly obvious, completely plausible when you thought about it explanation of why he’d been kissing Rosie on the street in Hollywood.