The Gulf Between Us Read online

  Sex, that’s why. Sooner or later, someone would work out how to harvest the pheromones and turn them into a weapon.

  There was no one at home. My dad had mentioned something earlier about going to the library and the boys had escaped into town. I made a cup of tea, skimmed through dad’s Daily Mail, then started to make some mince pies.

  I had to think of this trip as a punctuation mark, I decided as I weighed out flour and butter. It might not be much fun in itself, but by the time I got back to Hawar I’d be over James. The fuss about Shaikh Rashid would have died down. The next time a flaky film star attempted to seduce me, I’d know better.

  The doorbell rang. I wiped my floury hands on my apron – I was in the middle of rolling out – went up the hall, opened the door and was astonished to see Nezar Al Maraj on the front step.

  This was so much not what I expected that I nearly fell over. I couldn’t have been more surprised if an orange tree had sprouted in dad’s front garden, bright‐fruited among the soggy ground cover and privet.

  ‘I’m sorry to call round like this,’ he said. ‘Your phone’s off.’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘I don’t want to interrupt…’

  ‘It’s OK, no one’s in…’ He looked at me expectantly. ‘Er, well, I suppose… come in…’

  He stepped into the hall, waited till I’d closed the front door then followed me down to the kitchen. I felt suddenly hot and bothered. The kitchen was airless. The gas cooker was pumping out its gas mark 8 heat for the pastry.

  ‘You’re cooking.’

  ‘Mince pies.’

  He hovered by the table.

  ‘Sit down,’ I offered, pointing to a stool. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I turned away to fill the kettle. I couldn’t think what to say.

  But I didn’t have to make it easy. He must have come for a reason.

  ‘I’m sorry about James,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Well, yes and no,’ he admitted. He was honest, at any rate. ‘I guess this isn’t what you were planning,’ he said, as I pulled at a stuck cupboard door. It jerked back suddenly, nearly throwing me off balance.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with it,’ I said huffily. ‘I’d rather be here than force James to take time out from his other girlfriend.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, great.’

  Why was he here? He’d got what he wanted. I put the teapot on the table. That was it, then. Tea made. Now what?

  He stared at the teapot and then at me, but still didn’t speak.

  ‘Look,’ I said wearily, ‘I know you thought I was in the way…’

  ‘No! That’s not true.’

  ‘But if you’ve come to gloat, you needn’t. There’s nothing you could possibly say to me that I haven’t already thought.’ He tried to interrupt, but I pressed on.

  ‘I know I was bad for his image…’

  ‘What?’

  I hesitated. The kitchen seemed suddenly much too small – crammed with jars, scraps of paper for shopping lists, postcards, plants, an unused, dusty spice rack, a toaster shedding crumbs. The air was too thick to breathe. I started again: ‘I know you thought my affair with James was a mistake, and it turns out you were right. But it wasn’t a mistake because I look too old or fat in photographs. It was a mistake because James is spoilt and egocentric.’

  ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘And you don’t look old or fat.’

  I stared at him. He wasn’t handsome – certainly not in the way that James was. But against the formica worktops and lino‐tiled floor, he seemed to suck the energy out of the atmosphere, to blaze like a geranium on a drab windowsill on a murky afternoon.

  ‘I know you think I went after him,’ I blundered on, ‘but actually, he made all the running. I was quite cool, in fact, because I couldn’t see how he could possibly be serious. I thought it would be a one‐night stand. Then, you know, a fling. Unimportant.’ He tried to interrupt again, but I wouldn’t let him. ‘He was the one who kept going on about the future, saying the relationship was so special and different and he wanted us to be together. He suggested we come to London – I wouldn’t have dreamt of it – and he was the one who talked about what we were going to do afterwards. He kept making plans and he was the one who used the word “forever”. And not just once, either. Not me: I wasn’t pushing the pace.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I did try to warn you, that evening in the desert.’ He looked up at me. ‘I was useless. And I asked Fiona to warn you, too. The thing is, I couldn’t be sure of my motives. And, I thought, this once, James might think about someone other than himself.’

  I poured the tea uncertainly. He wasn’t really making any sense.

  ‘I was in a state. And I didn’t think you’d believe me if I told you what he’s really like. I know how persuasive he can be when he puts his mind to it.’

  I tried to imagine Nezar Al Maraj in a state. It seemed improbable. He hadn’t looked in a state.

  ‘Has he done this before, then?’

  ‘Never in quite the same way – you were a special case, because of the past, and because – well, because you are. But James thinks the world was created for and around James Hartley. Other people are incidental. He can use them or dispose of them or whatever.’ He sounded bitter. ‘I hoped you might have already known that. He said you were the one who left him – I think that’s been quite unusual for James – and I thought you might have remembered it. But if not, I thought I probably couldn’t persuade you.’ He toyed with his mug, pushing the handle from side to side. ‘He does love you, you know, in his funny way. He appreciates how beautiful you are, and funny and wise…’

  ‘Wise?’ I said bleakly.

  ‘ – Unfortunately he hadn’t worked out what being with you would entail.’

  ‘No. Fitting in shagging the other women was always going to be a problem, I guess. But, look, it’s over, OK? I’m out of the way. I’m not going to cause any more trouble.’ It had suddenly occurred to me they might think I was going to kiss and tell, to sell my story to the newspapers.

  ‘Annie,’ he said suddenly, ‘will you have dinner with me?’

  I stared at him stupidly. ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I’m not that sort of woman.’

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘You know. The sort who sells her story.’

  He stared at me in confusion. ‘Any time,’ he said, as if that were the issue. ‘Tonight, tomorrow, after Christmas…’

  And now, slowly, dully, I began to understand why he might have come.

  I stared at him. ‘But you’ve…’

  ‘No. Whatever you’re going to say, no.’

  ‘But you laughed at me the first time we met…’

  ‘I didn’t want to stop talking to you.’

  ‘Oh… well, it certainly didn’t feel like that. I thought you were ridiculing me for my Arabic. And the second time, if I remember rightly, you hardly said anything at all.’

  ‘I could see how things were going with James. I didn’t think I could compete. And I was miserable because I thought he wasn’t good enough for you.’

  ‘So you come round here when I’ve been dumped…’

  ‘You dumped him, I think. He’s been ringing me every half hour asking how he can get you back. I’m afraid I haven’t given him any very useful advice. I thought it might do him good to try to work it out for himself.’

  ‘I’m not desperate, you know!’

  ‘No,’ he agreed gravely.

  ‘And you’re homophobic.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t like Matthew being gay. You kept saying something awful would happen.’

  ‘Annie, it has. Matt and Rashid may never see each other again, and Rashid’s been damaged politically.’

  ‘Well, then,’ I faltered, ‘you messed that up as well. All those vague, dire warnings… It was just confusing!’

  ‘I k
now, I’m sorry, I didn’t know how much to say.’ This was awful. Embarrassing. I wished he’d just leave. ‘You still haven’t said.’

  ‘Said what?’

  ‘About dinner.’

  Dinner? ‘No,’ I said quickly, ‘no, no, no. It’s too late. We haven’t even been polite up till now. It’s hopeless… you can’t just come here and ask me out, after everything…’

  ‘Look, I know it’s probably too soon after James, but I wanted to see you and I couldn’t help myself.’

  I thought I heard a key turn in the front door and I didn’t reply.

  Al Maraj stood up. ‘Well, James is obsessed with you too, in his pathetic way, so…’

  Then he heard it too: the creak of the front door where it needed oiling, the sound of my dad wheezing slightly as he let himself in from the cold.

  ‘Ann?’ he called querulously down the hall.

  ‘In here, dad,’ I called uncertainly.

  He shuffled into the kitchen, unwinding a scarf.

  ‘You remember Nezar Al Maraj, dad?’

  Al Maraj put out his hand and dad took it uncertainly.

  ‘Aren’t you James’s friend?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘I’m the producer of his latest film.’

  ‘Well, you can tell him from me that he’s behaved appallingly. Upsetting Annie. You can tell him if that’s what being rich and famous does for you, you can keep it.’

  ‘Dad…’

  ‘Well, it’s true. What he’s done to you is terrible. He’s not the person we used to know.’

  ‘Actually, dad, he is,’ I said wearily.

  ‘I was just leaving,’ said Al Maraj, easing himself out from behind the kitchen table, where he somehow seemed to have got stuck.

  ‘You’re not the one who doesn’t like gay people?’ dad asked suspiciously.

  ‘No,’ Al Maraj said, ‘I’m not. Annie, sorry to have disturbed you… no, it’s fine, really, I can see myself out.’

  ‘What was he doing here, then?’ dad asked, before Al Maraj had even got to the front door. ‘He didn’t finish his tea.’

  ‘He was just passing.’

  ‘Passing? On his way to where?’ He picked up the teapot and weighed it in his hands, to see if there was another cup in there. ‘Oh good, you’re making mince pies.’

  I looked down at the pastry, which was yellowing and sweaty, crusting around the edges. Despairingly, I gathered it up in a fat ball and threw it in the bin.

  Thirteen

  A late, low‐slung shaft of sunlight was slanting across the wallpaper in the lounge. I slumped into an armchair and stared at the dust motes dancing in its light, a blizzard of them, so thick that it was surprising that they didn’t clog up your nostrils and stick in your throat. They whirled pointlessly about, fragments of people and things. It seemed astonishing that they were there all the time, that human beings could coexist with so much debris.

  I kept trying to think of it as a joke – you wait fifteen years for a man to come along, etc. – but my heart wasn’t really in it.

  Al Maraj? Thinking I was attractive from the beginning? I couldn’t have been that obtuse, surely?

  I really wanted to go on believing he was an opportunist, that he was just saying that stuff, that he thought I was desperate and would sleep with anyone. But I could see that that didn’t altogether make sense, because he wasn’t anyone. He was highly presentable and quite the most interesting person I’d met in ages, and he was perfectly capable of getting an attractive girlfriend, without having to confuse women in steamy kitchens in order to entrap them on the rebound.

  Then I felt cross with him for not making more effort in Hawar if he’d thought I was attractive all along. Did he seriously think I was going to fall for someone who appeared to be permanently in a bad mood?

  Eventually, I admitted to myself that even if he’d been making quite a lot of effort I probably wouldn’t have noticed, because I’d been so ditzy, so dazzled by James’s condescending to pay me some attention. My intuition about people, about which I’d always rather prided myself, had taken itself off on an extended break. This made me feel foolish, so I concentrated on remembering the things about Al Maraj that had previously dismayed me: how much he scowled when I was with James, how he’d failed to warn me that my son was having sex with the crown prince. It was all very well for him to claim now that he’d been trying to alert me, but if you wish to inform a person they are dating a sociopath and that their son is on the point of destabilizing a small nation, it is advisable to do something other than glare.

  I tried to suppress the other feeling his visit had left me, a sort of light‐headedness, like you get with flu.

  With the boys, I did my best to turn it into a joke. Who’s the least likely person you can think of to ask me out? (They didn’t guess: that’s how unlikely he was.)

  They soon got fed up with that. Sam had only met him once anyway, and said he couldn’t be arsed to get excited about another man I wasn’t sleeping with.

  Matt pointed out that he was rich, which I told him was irrelevant given that a) I was perfectly capable of earning my own living and b) I had always thought he was horrible and while I was prepared to concede that this could be an overstatement, he was undoubtedly inept.

  Will was too preoccupied to bother about my non‐relationship with Al Maraj. Previously, whenever I’d tried to open a conversation about Maddi’s depression he’d been dismissive, implying I was wittering on like a woman who didn’t understand graduate jobs. He didn’t have time for a depressed wife. But now, in the kitchen before lunch on Christmas Day, he was more open, which made me think things must be quite bad. It was one thing to admit they had troubles to his friends, another to confess them to me.

  ‘She’s got no energy or enthusiasm,’ he complained. ‘You watch over lunch: she’ll just slip out of conversations into her private thoughts. She never used to do that. She’d’ve thought it was bad manners.’

  ‘Perhaps it’ll pass. It can’t be easy, her first Christmas away from her family.’

  ‘She’s twenty‐three.’ He didn’t say ‘and she’s with me’, which was what we were both thinking and which should have been enough.

  ‘Even if the Franklins had been in Hawar,’ he pointed out – they were in New York – ‘she could hardly have taken any more time off work.’

  I think Maddi was genuinely making an effort to join in over lunch, but she often fell silent and gazed absently into the middle distance. Her hands were even worse than they had been earlier in the week, the skin around her nails peeling and raw. I couldn’t think that Christmas in this small, stuffy house was helping much, with everyone feeling disappointed they weren’t in Knightsbridge with a film star, and my dad in a state of high anxiety.

  ‘Aren’t you doing too much food?’ he’d asked as I prepared Brussels sprouts.

  ‘I’m not sure there’s any such thing as too much for the boys.’

  ‘I won’t want too big a meal, though.’

  ‘No, well, you can have whatever you like.’ I threw the last sprout into the colander and smiled at him. ‘It’s Christmas.’

  ‘I don’t want to be overfaced…’

  ‘No one’s going to make you eat.’

  ‘You won’t want to be wasting food, though. Throwing it away.’

  ‘If there are any leftover vegetables, I’ll make soup,’ I promised through gritted teeth.

  ‘All I’m saying is don’t go to any trouble for me. I can have whatever’s left over.’

  His efforts to prove how undemanding he was could be very demanding. In the end, with a bit of encouragement, he ate a perfectly normal size dinner. Afterwards, I persuaded him to sit down with me in the skirling light of the coal‐effect fire in the lounge and stop fussing over the boys while they washed up. He continued to fret that they might be dropping the best plates or putting away all the cooking utensils where he’d never find them again, but at least in here with me he wasn’t telling them that. When at l
ast he exhausted the potential for disaster of the washing up, he turned his attention to what might happen when Chris and Karen and Andrea arrived to play games. (Someone could knock over the tree and tread baubles into the carpet.)

  In the event, though, the day passed off without major mishaps. The food was good, the wine that Will and Maddi had brought was delicious and probably horribly expensive and the vegetables turned out to have been prepared in more or less the right quantity. In the afternoon, Andrea arrived with her parents and the karaoke machine she’d been given for Christmas, and we were still up at one o’clock singing the greatest hits of Robbie Williams and Britney Spears. Chris, who had a good voice, was so keen to keep giving his ‘Angels’ that he refrained from getting completely pissed, and was less rude than he might have been. He didn’t say anything overtly homophobic. Maddi didn’t burst into tears; in fact, she brightened up quite a lot after she’d spoken to her family and sang ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ several times with Andrea, complete with choreography. Even Matt didn’t look too mournful and, in fact, was livelier and funnier than he had been for weeks and only mentioned Shaikh Rashid where he fitted naturally into the conversation. Dad made an obvious effort not to worry out loud more than once every hour. And I tried not to think about Nezar Al Maraj. So I guess everything went according to plan, except that it was unquestionably Plan B.

  It was past ten o’clock when I stumbled into the kitchen on Boxing Day. Dad had had an exceptionally late night for him and the boys never got up before ten if they could help it, so I was the first downstairs.

  Or so I thought. The kettle was already boiling by the time I noticed the envelope on the kitchen table. It said ‘Mum’ on the front in Matt’s handwriting. I picked it up and tore it open. I knew already it wasn’t a good letter. Otherwise it wouldn’t have appeared on the kitchen table first thing on Boxing Day morning when the person who’d written it should have been in bed.

  Whatever it said – and I kind of knew what it said – was going to ruin this torpid, slightly hungover morning.