The Gulf Between Us Page 24

  ‘You shouldn’t have given up your room,’ I said.

  ‘No, it’s nice to have you here.’ He spun the door handle round. ‘You remember this doesn’t work?’

  ‘Dad, you could get locked in here!’

  ‘I keep a screwdriver in the bedside table.’ He paused. ‘I was hoping James would fix it, actually. He used to be handy.’

  ‘We’ll get it done while I’m here.’

  ‘Oh, well, it’s OK, I’m getting on now. I’m used to it.’ He changed the subject, because he didn’t want me to fix it, he wanted me to have a man who’d fix it. ‘So, no word from Matthew’s friend, the shaikh?’

  ‘No. Matt thinks he’s probably abroad, having – being made to have – some kind of therapy.’

  ‘Will that help?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a famous cure for homosexuality, no.’ ‘People get very upset about gays, of course. I told you about that boy I met?’

  ‘At your meeting?’

  ‘Terrible, what happened to him. We had a couple at the last one.’

  ‘A couple of what?’ I opened my suitcase and immediately saw two dresses I’d been planning to wear to the sort of restaurants at which a person like me would normally only be able to get a table with several months’ notice.

  ‘Gays. I got talking to them at the end. You wouldn’t have known. Well, apart from the bright jumpers.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’d have known anyway. I seem to have terrible gaydar: Matthew, the crown prince…’

  ‘They were just like a normal couple. Had a mortgage and everything.’

  ‘Yes, well, I suppose they would.’

  ‘I expect Matt wanted to be normal too?’

  ‘Yes. Difficult with a prince, though.’

  ‘We don’t seem to be very good at hanging on to people, do we?’

  I looked up at him. ‘Matt and Rashid were separated for no good reason. And if you mean James, he’s not a person you’d want to hang on to.’

  ‘It’s a shame, though,’ he said, spinning the door handle thoughtfully, then went downstairs to see to the potatoes. I sat on his candlewick bedspread and looked around. He hadn’t decorated since my mum died and there was dirt in the corners of the skirting board, crusting around the edges of the faded wall‐paper. I should have booked a hotel: neutral territory, somewhere that didn’t have all these cross‐currents of expectation, obligation, anxiety.

  I disappointed him. I didn’t have a husband. I’d brought up Matt to be gay. Will was too busy to come and see him. Sam didn’t speak. I was going to spend the whole time we were here apologizing to him for us, and to the boys for having brought them to this old man’s house with its smells of Bisto and Glade.

  And then I felt mean, because he was my dad and their granddad, and it wasn’t so hard, surely, to see things from his point of view for a week or two over Christmas.

  Still, it wasn’t what I’d promised them. It was small, over‐heated rooms, steamy with their grandfather’s anxiety: Were the boys going out? After dark? Did they know about all the gangs round here? Loitering between the house and the station, mooching about, looking for trouble? It wasn’t safe. They should stay in.

  Maybe that was why the boys were being so obnoxious at breakfast the following morning.

  ‘Does this tea taste dusty?’ Sam asked, which it did. Matt held up the tub of butter substitute as if it was a fascinating anthropological object, never previously seen by civilized peoples. He was perfectly familiar with butter substitute; he was just being brattish, making out that nothing so cheap and nasty had ever come within his ambit.

  They ought to have been able to deal with this, I thought crossly. It wasn’t as if I’d inflicted it on them deliberately. I didn’t want to be here any more than they did: they could have made an effort. Although it was pretty annoying that the muesli tasted of polythene and all the flakes and fruits were indistinguishably limp.

  I was quite relieved when they both announced that they’d decided to go into town. Sam was meeting Faisal, who was in London with his family for the Christmas holidays, and staying off the Edgware Road, as Sam said pointedly, near some shops.

  I decided to drive to the supermarket. I knew my dad would think when I got back that I’d bought too much, too expensively, but would insist on trying to pay for it all the same. But at least I could prevent the boys having to eat food that had been stored in grubby Tupperware since the last time we’d been here.

  While I was out, I switched on my phone again. There was a voicemail message from James insisting that I’d overreacted, that I didn’t understand, that if we could only get together he could explain everything and make me see there was nothing wrong with our relationship. The way he said ‘our relationship’ made it sound like something technical and fixable, with defined and manageable limits. I erased this message and listened to a couple of others, from Maddi and Antonia, both saying they wanted to see me.

  Maddi was at work when I called her back and she sounded more energetic than she had in Hawar. I don’t think listlessness is allowed in management consultancy offices. Even so, I thought I detected a tinny, synthetic quality in her voice. She invited us all to dinner at the flat and she and I also arranged to have lunch near her office on Wednesday.

  ‘Darling,’ Antonia exclaimed when I got through to her, ‘how thrilling that you’re here too! We’re staying in this new club place in Notting Hill, and we’re having a few friends over on the Friday after Christmas, so naturally, I thought of you…’

  I hesitated. The last time I’d been to dinner with the Hor‐woods, Antonia had sat me next to Adel Al Buraidi. I asked if he’d be coming this time.

  ‘Oh, yes, he is rather good‐looking! And he said he’s been helping you…’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Over this difficult business with Matthew… Putting in a good word. Anyway, he can’t, unfortunately, he’s not in London. But I have got someone I’m absolutely dying for you to meet… Now, where are you again?’

  ‘Near Croydon.’

  ‘Really? I thought somewhere in town? Knightsbridge, I thought Di told me…’

  ‘It fell through.’

  ‘Oh… ? Croydon? That’s a bit of a funny place. I don’t know anyone who lives there…’

  ‘No? I do.’

  ‘Must be a bit lonely, all the same? Can you get to London from there?’

  I assured her it was possible. I didn’t particularly want to spend an evening with the Horwoods but I felt I ought to take every opportunity to get out of the house, where nothing seemed to have changed much since I was sixteen. James had got away, and spectacularly, but I was back in Thornton Heath in my dad’s house, stuck. Going backwards, if anything. Sam told me recently that when the universe has expanded as far as it can it will ping backwards like an elastic band, hurling the stars and planets together in a sort of reverse big bang. The big crunch, I think it’s called: anyway, my life was crunching – flying backwards to the same old house with the same old responsibilities, dependent on my dad, no different from when I’d been an adolescent. All that remained for me now was to become as helpless as a small child before finally attaining the status of primeval atom.

  Karen arrived as I was unloading the shopping, explaining that she’d been out of the office looking at a property, and thought she’d pop in.

  ‘I’m so sorry about James,’ she said, following me up the path.

  ‘Don’t be. He’s appalling. If he hadn’t been famous I’d have noticed sooner.’

  ‘You don’t think he had a point?’

  ‘What?’ I was struggling with the key in the front door.

  ‘You know, that you couldn’t really expect him to behave like ordinary people?’ She nodded at the lock. ‘Your dad says that always sticks.’

  I got the door open, put the bags down in the hall and went back for the rest of the shopping. ‘I can’t see that being photogenic and remembering a few lines entitles you to go round treating people as thoug
h they don’t matter, no.’

  ‘You should’ve got more out of it,’ Karen followed me to the car. ‘At least got him to buy you something.’

  ‘I didn’t think of it as a business opportunity.’

  ‘No, well, I expect that’s where you go wrong. Why you haven’t been able to get a husband, despite being nice‐looking and quite intelligent. You don’t look out for yourself… God, this street is awful,’ she looked up and down it; ‘you’ve got to persuade him to move.’

  ‘You’re the estate agent, Karen. If you can’t, I don’t see how I can.’

  ‘How can he bear to live in a road where people park their cars in their front gardens?’ We went inside. ‘And this kitchen! It’s not even hygienic. He wants something more modern.’

  ‘He says it was good enough for mum, so it’s good enough for him. Deep down, he doesn’t think he deserves anything better. He might move if you could find him a hovel. Tea?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask.’ She settled herself at the kitchen table, while I stowed the shopping and boiled the kettle. ‘How’s Matthew?’

  ‘Miserable.’

  ‘Yes, well, I suppose it was a bit sordid, having his picture taken under a big GAY sign.’

  ‘Well, it was sordid of the paper to print the picture.’

  ‘All this fuss and publicity hasn’t changed his mind, then?’

  ‘It’s not a choice, Karen.’

  ‘Yes, I did say that to Chris… Still, it’s a shame. Not what you’d want, is it? For your child?’

  ‘That depends on the child.’ How were you supposed to get through to people? ‘It’s part of him, like being so straight is part of Will, or not communicating is part of Sam.’

  ‘It’s going to make life harder for him, though, you’ve got to admit.’

  ‘Only if people think it should.’

  ‘Well, I know you like to have an answer for everything, Annie, but let’s face it, it is harder, or he wouldn’t be moping around right now.’

  Will and Maddi were renting the upstairs half of a converted house in a terrace of brick cottages in Battersea, on a narrow street that would once have been inhabited by factory workers but was now occupied by graduates who drove Volkswagen Golf convertibles to the country at weekends.

  ‘It’s like being part of Team England,’ Will had admitted ruefully when they’d found the flat through someone who’d been two years ahead of Maddi at school. A part of him liked that, in the same way I would have liked staying in Knightsbridge – something that might have been closed off to us, but wasn’t – but I think a part of him also felt like an impostor.

  At this time of year, all the neatly painted doors were decorated with tasteful Christmas wreaths. ‘And all the girls who live here wear the same clothes,’ Will said when I remarked on this: ‘cashmere, mainly: loads and loads of cashmere.’

  ‘All the men wear the same clothes too,’ Maddi pointed out. ‘Suits,’ she added, ‘like you.’

  ‘I still think we should be living somewhere a bit more edgy.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘It looks like they’re camping,’ Sam whispered to me when we left our coats in the bedroom, which, like the sitting room, was still full of unopened boxes and pictures stacked against the walls. Maddi asked us to excuse the mess, saying she’d spent so much time in Hawar since they moved in, she hadn’t had time to get things straight. I was disappointed that Will hadn’t used the time that she was away to organize the flat for her, so that she might have felt she was coming home rather than to some half moved into developer’s painted shell.

  One way and another, we weren’t a particularly animated party. Matt was mostly morose at the moment, anyway, but tonight his mood wasn’t helped by the fact he was tense with expectation that Will was going to say something tactless and dismissive about Rashid. I’d nearly exhausted my reserves of wryness about James. Maddi admitted her mind kept wandering to Millie and her parents, who were due to arrive in New York in a few hours. Sam would have preferred to be somewhere else. And, for quite a lot of the meal, Will was. As soon as Maddi put the bowl of Moroccan chicken stew and green salad on the table, his mobile rang and he excused himself to answer it in the bedroom. He stayed there for half an hour.

  ‘Does he do this often?’ I asked. Maddi smiled ruefully, without any attempt to make excuses for him.

  Eventually, I got so irritated I left the table and made indignant faces at him round the bedroom door. He waved his hand, to show he was coming. A few minutes later, when he still hadn’t appeared, I went back.

  ‘What, so I’m supposed not to take calls from my boss?’ He put his phone back in his jeans.

  ‘It’s not like we come round every week. Can’t you say you’re having dinner?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘Look, I know they pay well…’

  ‘It’s not about money,’ he said irritably, ‘you don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s an Arab Bank. They must realize you have a family?’

  ‘Are you two coming out so we can have pudding?’ Sam called through, ‘or is Will on the phone again?’

  I knew Will thought I didn’t understand the pressures of his graduate job, that I was applying the values of another time and place – when husbands finished work at five o’clock and came home for tea and didn’t think about their jobs till next morning – but this was unfair. I could see exactly why he wanted work that preoccupied him. I just thought he ought to be able to manage it without being rude.

  ‘Someone in Saudi asked me the other day if I was anything to do with you,’ he said grumpily to Matt when he rejoined us. ‘I told you this would happen.’

  Matt raised his eyes to the ceiling. This was what he’d been waiting for. ‘You could just say you’re not,’ he suggested; ‘disown me.’

  ‘Oh, I did. I pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about and changed the subject. But he knew I was your brother all right.’

  ‘I didn’t fall in love with Rashid to hurt you.’

  ‘You should’ve thought.’

  Maddi started talking loudly over them about the Iraqi sanctions and how much opposition to them she’d noticed this time in Hawar – ‘posters of starving children and collecting boxes outside the mosques’. Sam, who’d started reading the papers in his role as editor of the International, pointed out how incredible it was that the Americans had lost the moral argument with a mass murderer; and, for what was left of the evening, they squabbled about what the Al Majid should say and do about the sanctions, which I suppose was better than squabbling about each other.

  A couple of days later, I met Maddi for lunch at a fashionable restaurant near her office, where the walls were roughly plastered, the floor was stone and the tables and chairs were made of deal. It was probably lovely in summer, but on a rainy day in mid‐December, the atmosphere was chilly and damp.

  Maddi was wearing expensive black trousers, a green silk shirt and a soft camel coat, but the first thing I noticed was that the flesh around her thumbnails was red raw and the skin was torn where she’d been picking her cuticles.

  ‘Sorry Will was so useless at dinner,’ she apologized, as soon as she sat down. ‘He’s in the middle of some deal and he’s a bit stressed.’

  ‘I wish he wasn’t so angry with Matt,’ I said gloomily. ‘It’s not as if his clients aren’t all super‐rich: they’re probably quite sophisticated. I don’t know what he’s so worried about…’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s got you, a great job, somewhere to live. Look… you don’t think… ?’ I hesitated – ‘I know this’ll sound stupid, but you don’t think that there’s something a bit homophobic about it?’

  She looked up from the menu, startled.

  ‘I know,’ I said quickly, ‘it doesn’t really make sense. He’s twenty‐three and he’s got a degree: he’s not the kind of person you’d think would be bigoted. And he’s always been very generous towards other people – but he overreact
ed at the wedding and he’s been completely irrational about Shaikh Rashid. And he is religious – I wondered if maybe that has something to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t seem likely. He hasn’t been to church since we left Hawar.’

  Neither of us wanted to discuss Will, because we couldn’t seem to do it without criticizing him. And if things had been bad enough for us to form an alliance against him, that would have implied that I’d failed in his upbringing and that she’d decided to marry someone self‐obsessed and inconsiderate. I changed the subject. ‘How’s your work?’

  ‘OK,’ she said cautiously. ‘I could do with a bit of Will’s commitment myself: I can’t seem to take it as seriously as I should. I seem to get very impatient with the meetings, the hours discussing tiny little things, the office politics… They let me have all that time off, so I feel I owe them, but I can’t get excited about it. They’re one of the top graduate employers, they reject hundreds of applicants a year, and I should feel lucky to be there. If I don’t, their view is that there are plenty more where I came from. And they’re right about that… and I know Millie’s going to be OK, and I shouldn’t let the fact that she came so close to dying get to me, but there’s a fault line in my life – or that’s how it feels – before the bomb and after. And my job doesn’t seem to matter as much as I’d expected.’

  As I left the restaurant, City workers were reeling unpredictably through the afternoon gloom. A group of screechy girls in Santa hats scattered off the kerb in front of me, dodging a gang of young men shouting about how rat‐arsed they were. Being rat‐arsed seemed to be the main aim of the day, and it didn’t matter much what happened after. Being run over by a bus would only prove you were really, really lashed. Snatches of tinny Christmas music filtered out of bars and boxes wrapped up to look like presents sat in the windows of the shops along Bishopsgate. I had a pang of homesickness for Hawar, where Christmas only lasts a day and a half and you don’t have all this effortful, dismal jollity.

  The train rattled ponderously through the south London suburbs. I trudged back to dad’s in the drizzle, rain dripping off the bare trees on to the shiny pavements. Why had I ever thought that this was a good idea, that Christmas in London would be fun?