The Gulf Between Us Read online

  ‘I just didn’t expect an Arab country to be like this,’ Karen was explaining when I found her. She was sitting at a table at the back of the garden with Peter, Millie, Sam and Will.

  ‘Auntie Karen thought Hawar was full of terrorists,’ Sam explained.

  ‘Well, all we see on the news is Osama bin Laden.’

  ‘But auntie, he hasn’t lived in the Gulf for years…’

  ‘The thing about this part of the world,’ Peter said, gesturing for me to sit beside him, ‘is that people are very courteous, and part of that is to be respectful of people’s differences.’ He poured wine into a spare glass and pushed it towards me, smiling. Once, years ago, he put his hand on my knee at a dinner party. I had politely taken it off again and the incident hadn’t been mentioned since, but there was a frisson between us sometimes on evenings like this. I was grateful to him for never having tried again and for having been scrupulously polite ever since. Possibly he was grateful to me for not taking him up on his offer. I had never heard of him as being a man who had affairs and it was probably a momentary aberration, about which he now felt a little foolish.

  ‘I don’t think I could live here myself, though,’ Karen added, ‘it’s got no history.’

  ‘Oh, but apparently Hawar was the Garden of Eden,’ Millie said. ‘You can’t get any more historic than that.’

  ‘According to Hollywood,’ Peter said.

  As far as we knew – which means as far as the Hawar Daily News knew – the film James Hartley was coming to the Gulf to make concerned some secret uncovered by archaeologists about the Garden of Eden. James was playing a CIA operative who goes undercover to protect the secret and the oil‐rich Gulf state that’s suddenly been identified as the cradle of civilization. Surprisingly enough, there really is a theory that Hawar was the site of the Garden of Eden, which they make quite a lot of at the National Museum. It seems to be based on a single line from the Epic of Gilgamesh and I don’t think it has many adherents. Most scholars seem to think that, as far as it existed, the Garden of Eden was in Iraq.

  ‘Still,’ Peter added, ‘if James Hartley’s prepared to come here, we’ll overlook any inconvenient historical truth.’

  ‘James Hartley’s coming?’ Karen echoed. ‘To see you, Annie?’

  ‘Yes, sure,’ I laughed. ‘No, to make a film.’

  ‘But he knows you’re here? Does Ted know?’

  Peter sighed. ‘Katherine went over to the Al A’ali House today and the staff didn’t think they were coming for a few days. So it looks as though we might be able to get the wedding over before the hysteria starts.’

  ‘Oh my God! They’re coming that soon? – I never knew him: I’m younger, obviously – but Chris has told me all about it…’

  ‘No, right, well, it’s time to go,’ I said, standing up.

  ‘He was furious when they split up.’

  I said, ‘People are always furious when they split up. Often even when they’ve initiated it.’

  ‘But he didn’t.’

  ‘It was complicated.’

  ‘He asked her to marry him, you know.’

  ‘Only after it was all over. He was pissed off with me. He was just trying to get some reaction out of me when I wouldn’t come to the phone.’

  Millie’s eyes widened. ‘Annie! Really? How could you not say?’

  ‘He didn’t mean it.’

  ‘Is it a thing people do without meaning it?’

  ‘In this case, yes. He’d have reconsidered soon enough if I’d said yes.’

  The party was thinning out, to my relief. I extricated myself from the group at the table, mainly by ignoring Millie’s excited questions about how exactly James Hartley had proposed to me and what exactly I’d said and whether we’d ever spoken since (‘on the phone’, ‘don’t be silly’ and ‘no’ were the answers). I rounded up Chris, dad and Andrea, and drove the family back along the Corniche to the hotel, waited in the car outside until they’d disappeared through the revolving doors, then headed home. Will had promised to bring Matt and Sam back from the Franklins’ in the Jeep, and I hoped the party had continued to break up after I left, because although it wouldn’t occur to the boys, this was the last‐but‐one night of this part of our lives, and I wanted us all to get home and make the most of it. I wanted to relish (secretly: they’d have been appalled if I’d told them) my sons with their apparently insatiable needs for tea and toast and their enthusiasm for taking on the world as they lolloped towards adulthood. They were growing away from me, I knew – they’d had their own ideas, preoccupations and privacies for a long time now – but they were still capable of being shaky and fearful, almost childlike, and I knew that home (and let’s face it, that meant me, because who else had there been?) still gave them much of their security and sense of themselves. I had achieved something here, without even realizing that I was doing it, and I wanted to relish it for one more night, the four of us together, not even noticing we were happy.

  Three

  The church was packed. The Franklins knew everyone who was anyone in Hawar and, with three boys, I knew everyone else. There were Hawaris in expensive silk suits or thobes and gold‐edged mishlahs, women in exquisite saris and shalwar kameez in chiffon, silk and beaded satin; designer outfits – Chanel, Valentino, Versace – from the upscale shops in the Pearl Mall and custom‐made clothes from the tailors in the souk. Hawar is never knowingly underdressed, and gold glittered around women’s necks and expensive watches on men’s wrists; diamonds sparkled as though fairy dust had been sprinkled over the congregation.

  Matt, who was an usher, led me to my place in the second pew, directly behind Will and his best man Mark. Maria, already in position a little further along, looked up, mouthed ‘Hello, madam!’ and returned to what seemed to be fervent prayer. I turned and smiled at dad, Chris, Karen and Andrea in the pew behind. My sister‐in‐law and my niece were whispering furiously at one another. Will swung around, smiled briefly at me, and then turned back to the front.

  ‘D’you think he’s OK?’ I’d asked Matt and Sam earlier, when he’d gone off for a swim after breakfast.

  Sam didn’t look up. He was drawing a cartoon of Mohammed Alireza on an ad in the Hawar Daily News. ‘He’s always been weird.’

  ‘That’s not true…’

  ‘Mum, you don’t have to have maximum emotion about it,’ Matt said. ‘You won’t make any difference.’

  ‘He looks so anxious…’

  ‘That’s just how he is.’

  Was it? They were all so different, my boys, and though I liked to think they were close at a deep and inarticulate level, mostly they found it easier to ignore each other. Matt was too emotionally unplugged to have much connection with Will’s focused ambition, and Sam was too busy being evasive.

  Now Mark was attempting to make conversation with Will by asking him questions about the church. Will rudely wasn’t answering so I leant forward and explained that the stained‐glass window over the altar had come from a house in Persia. I’m not sure how close he and Will were, really; I had a feeling he was more Maddi’s friend. ‘It was imported when the church was built,’ I added, ‘in the seventies.’

  ‘And the locals didn’t mind having a Christian church here?’

  ‘No, there’s a Catholic one as well. Which is much bigger – has a congregation of several thousand.’

  Maria’s one stipulation when she’d taken the job with me (I say this as if I was the one in control of the situation, which I wasn’t) had been five hours off on a Sunday for church. The Sacred Heart was where she went to meet cousins, old neigh‐bours from Colombo, friends. It was where she’d originally learnt that Dawn, the house maid I’d already employed and whose references I’d diligently checked, wouldn’t be returning from her month’s holiday in Sri Lanka to take up the job. It was where, in effect, it had been decided that I would employ Maria Rozairo instead. She always went off on a Sunday wearing a lot of make‐up.

  ‘There used to be C of E serv
ices in the British embassy originally,’ I added, ‘but when the expat population started expanding in the 1950s, they had to move on to the tennis courts.’

  Will let us talk among ourselves. He clearly didn’t want to join in a discussion about how much that would have been a test of faith in July. I wished he might have been less tense, might have seemed to be relishing his wedding more visibly, but I told myself his anxiety was excusable: this was the day that Katherine and Maddi and he had spent the last year planning, finally here, all its perfectible moments needing to be knitted seamlessly together.

  Andrew billowed into the church and I found myself wondering if he was wearing shorts under his surplice. He wore shorts an awful lot, for a vicar, not that I suppose there’s anything against it in the rulebooks. He wafted about lighting candles and shifting things in a slightly look‐at‐me manner, but then he caught Will’s eye for a moment and I was struck by the unpleasant thought that he felt Will needed encouraging.

  I resisted the temptation to lean forward and hug my eldest son. I put a hand on his shoulder instead and he half nodded in acknowledgement. It shouldn’t have surprised me that he was tense: he’d spent his entire adolescence trying to get life under control, as if he thought it might slither away from him if he didn’t pin it down. Even when he hadn’t been studying or at cricket nets or doing clarinet practice, he’d been making lists of batting averages by county and the top ten players for Manchester United or the best rugby clubs in the world.

  He could have been a county cricket player himself, if he’d had a county. That was what Katherine thought, anyway – ‘Such a pity he didn’t go to school in England,’ she’d said a few months ago, watching him open the bowling against the Bahrain Cricket Club. I couldn’t have afforded to send him to school in England, even if I’d wanted to, but it seemed to me that he could hardly have done better than he had at the International School or, come to that, under the local Indian cricket coaches. He’d made the best of our slightly awkward circumstances – of being part of a household headed by a mother in a place where that was barely acceptable, of having less money than any of his friends. Now, though, for some reason, a memory came to me of driving him home from a cricket match when he was about fourteen. He’d turned to me abruptly and asked if I’d ever had the feeling I was on an aeroplane but it was the wrong flight to the wrong destination, and I was surrounded by people who were appalling.

  I’d said yes, without really thinking, because I imagined he was talking about living in Hawar. Afterwards, though, I wondered if he’d been trying to tell me something else. But the moment had passed and, though I tried, I hadn’t been able to re‐open the conversation.

  Matt and Sam, handsome in their new suits from Soft Hands Tailors, joined me in the pew. Yvonne Carlisle, music teacher at the International School, launched gamely into Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary and Maddi came swishing elegantly down the aisle on Peter’s arm, shooting me a swift, almost shy look as she passed.

  At the chancel steps, Andrew looked at Will and Maddi gravely, then half smiled, as if he understood why they were there, what they meant by it. Then, ‘God our Father,’ he began, ‘you have taught us through your Son that love is fulfilling of the law.’

  The smallest bridesmaid, the daughter of the Franklins’ house maid Magdalena, shifted from foot to foot beside me, pointing her slippered toes in front of her, admiring her skirt.

  Andrew’s voice was rich and he found resonance in the familiar rhythms, but I lost track. Even as I tried, as Matt said, to have maximum emotion about it, the whole thing seemed to flash past in seconds, sand through my fingers. I remembered afterwards that the sermon was more like a best man’s speech than a sermon and that people laughed, but I couldn’t recall the detail of it. I stared at Maddi, her high‐necked silk jersey dress backless under her veil, hoping that beneath their poise and restraint, she and Will felt teeming passion, that they were so shaken by love that the world looked different.

  The Al A’ali house was one of the oldest in the emirate, built in the early twentieth‐century colonial style, with large square rooms cooled by ceiling fans, teak pillars and joists, galleried verandas and wide shallow steps that led down on to the lawn. It was named after its previous owners, one of the leading merchant families in the emirate (the gas company, the aluminium smelting plant, the Gulf’s biggest retail furniture business) although the house was originally built for the British Resident and had later been occupied by the British Council. The Al A’alis had bought it in the 1960s and lived in it for twenty years before incorporating it into the Sheraton as a kind of villa‐annexe with a private cook and butler. When they sold the hotel to the prime minister, Shaikh Jasim, in the early 1990s, the house had gone with it.

  You could see why it would have appealed to James Hartley, or to the people who organized things for him; why it would have seemed a more atmospheric place to stay than the modern villas on the beach where I’d initially assumed they’d put him, even though they’d been built to accommodate heads of state from the Gulf Cooperation Council.

  Fortunately, though, he didn’t seem to have arrived – there was no sign of any of the film people in the house – and I could concentrate on the wedding.

  After dinner, I wandered out on to the lawn, thinking about Dave and how absent he was, even though Will had referred to him gracefully in his speech and various people had said to me during the day that they expected he was looking down on us. It wasn’t a hope I shared: the idea that he might have acquired some power to see through dimensions – even if he was too dead to do anything about it – was alarming. He did in fact stick around for a couple of nights after the car crash: I’d heard him in the house, blundering about and knocking into the furniture, but Dr Al Rayyan said that this was quite normal, one of the tricks that grief plays on the bereaved, and that I might also spot him in the street. I never did, though, and bashing into chairs seemed a much more typical manifestation.

  I hadn’t wanted then to think he might be able to see us, and I still didn’t – because if he could, would there be anything to stop him seeing everything, right through into the heart of me?

  Most of the guests were outside, talking, strolling in the light of flares around the edges of the garden and lamps hanging from the trees. Over on the veranda, Will and Maddi’s friends were lolling on Persian carpets sharing a shisha. The scent of apple tobacco hung in the air.

  Maddi’s grandmother, the former opera singer, marched up with my father in her wake. ‘I’ve taken Ted on,’ she announced loudly; she was a bit deaf; ‘otherwise he’d happily spend the whole evening by himself in a corner.’

  My dad made some feeble noise of protest.

  ‘… which is ridiculous when there are all these interesting people to talk to! People in such lovely costumes, from all over the place. We were just speaking to a lovely lady from India who’s a Parsee. Do you know about Parsees?’

  ‘A bit…’

  ‘Very old religion. Ancient! She was telling us. D’you know about the bodies on the mountaintops?’ Before I could answer, she went on: ‘Tricky, I imagine, if you don’t live near a mountain.’

  ‘Or any vultures,’ dad said, making an effort.

  ‘Quite. Very difficult, to have a religion today.’ She gestured grandly, operatically, across the lawn. ‘All these different nationalities, beliefs – must be hard for everyone to live together. There’s got to be some give and take: God, Allah, Ahura…’

  ‘Mazda,’ dad supplied, ‘like the car.’

  ‘Precisely! You say the name of your God and people think of a car. That can’t be easy for the Parsees! Come on, Ted, let’s go and meet some others!’ And she led him off, but he didn’t mind, because she’d barge up to anyone and introduce herself and then him, her dear friend Ted, even though they’d only just met, and it was more interesting than spending the evening in the corner.

  Over by the shrubbery, Cheryl was talking to Karen about fitness.

  ‘You’re
so right that it’s never too early – otherwise you find you’re forty with a whole lot of flab and cellulite and you don’t know where to begin. You’d never credit how some people let themselves go… I went back to Singapore last year and met a couple of old friends who’d really… well, it’s the sun, partly – but it was horrible. I mean, it made me feel slightly sick… Anyway, Annie, darling, we were just saying how amazing you look. That Salman of yours at Soft Hands has done a really good job. Pale colours are so good on you, what with you not having very strong colouring yourself. Have you ever had your colours done? I know this brilliant woman – but you probably don’t need it, you’ve got good instincts. You always look attractive, even when you’re obviously not making any effort. You’d never guess you had those grown‐up boys. And wasn’t Will’s speech lovely? I only hope Kyle’s that nice about me when he grows up… But you’re like me. Lucky with your genes. I always think I’m younger than my biological age, and you’re the same…’

  ‘Chris asked Matthew to dance with Andrea,’ Karen complained to me, ‘and now she’s saying she doesn’t want to! Honestly, I don’t know what it is with her…’

  ‘Maybe we should just leave them to sort it out for themselves?’ I said vaguely, smiling back encouragingly at Dr Al Rayyan, who was waving across the grass.