The Gulf Between Us Read online

  I was going to ask dad to accept that Matthew was like that, was one of them? It was ridiculous. Anyone could see he wasn’t.

  I parked the Jeep and the boys jumped out and started unloading. Dad came across, miming wanting to help, and collided with Sam and a cool box. Then he tried to lift the waterskis out of Matt’s arms, though since they were already perfectly balanced, he only managed to upend them. He turned his attention to the beers, which were still in the back of the Jeep.

  I wanted to tell him impatiently to leave them to Sam, who is tall and wiry and fizzing with adolescent energy, but I knew he’d take it as criticism, would think I was saying he was past it, only good for standing by and watching. He didn’t know how to have a role without being subservient, without making an enormous fuss about not taking without giving; he was going to make absolutely sure we noticed he’d put aside all self‐interest, all pleasure, because he knew he wasn’t important enough to be there other than to be useful to the rest of us.

  I hated this lack of entitlement, which he’d spent his life trying to pass on to me, and which I often felt I was still struggling to overcome.

  Matt and Sam tolerated his attempts to help good‐naturedly. I wondered if they’d had practice at that, if their attitude to me had already become like their attitude to him, and had started to include pity.

  I left them all to it and walked down the jetty towards Diane, who is the year four teacher at school: plump, freckly, enthusiastic, always behind the celebrations of people’s birthdays and the nights out with the girls. Antonia was coming along the pontoon from the other direction from her own boat and called out to me: ‘Hello, darling! Wonderful wedding… Absolutely bloody hangover today, though …’ She looked across the marina to where Karen and Andrea were standing on a different jetty. ‘I think your sister‐in‐law may be over there. She seems to be having a row with her daughter, so I thought I’d leave them to it.’

  The Horwoods had the biggest ski boat of anyone we knew – David is the general manager of an Arab bank – which was no doubt partly why Diane had included them. Antonia greeted Matt and Sam without curiosity and directed them towards this vast craft. She couldn’t have heard about Matt’s coming out yet either.

  I rounded up Chris, who was inspecting the yachts, and Karen and Andrea, who were fighting in an angry undertone about whether Andrea should be wearing heels with her shorts. Diane organized everyone, distributing us between the boats: Chris, Karen and me with her and Alain, everyone else with the Horwoods.

  David and Alain started the engines, eased the boats away from the jetties and idled through the marina. I settled down at the back, not minding the engine noise as we let rip into the Gulf, grateful not to have to think, to be able to let go and be bumped mindlessly over the water, staring out at the expanse of sea as my hair whipped round my face and salt dried on my skin. I could taste the Gulf on my tongue; the hard brightness of the sky filled up my vision and rinsed my senses.

  After about half an hour, Alain slowed the engines as we negotiated the shallows and Karen moved to the back, to sit beside me.

  ‘Chris told me about Matthew,’ she said in a voice dripping with concern; ‘I’m very sorry.’

  ‘Uh‐huh,’ I said non‐committally. There was no way I could say out loud what I felt. Not to Karen – not, I suspected, to anyone. I was alarmed by how politically incorrect my thoughts seemed to be. I wasn’t going to give any opportunities to people who actually were politically incorrect.

  She put her hand on my leg, fingers damp on my bare flesh. ‘It’s such a shame… but, perhaps, you know, it’s just a phase…?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Perhaps he could see someone?’ she suggested. ‘Counsellor, therapist, someone like that?’

  She thought he was sick, needed therapy, was mentally ill.

  It made sense of why he’d been reluctant to come out before now, anyway. If people were going to assume you were sick in the head, you probably wouldn’t go out of your way to explain yourself to them. Matt was a perfectly happy person who had loads of friends, and who posed no danger to himself or to other people. So to be thought sufficiently psychologically disturbed as to be in need of help from mental health professionals must be quite upsetting.

  Clearly, it wasn’t a phase. You wouldn’t expose yourself to suggestions that you get your mind fixed if you weren’t absolutely sure.

  ‘I think he might find that rather insulting,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s not something that needs curing.’

  You’d think by coming out you might seize the initiative. But the reality was that Matt seemed to have ceded it. He probably thought he was saying ‘This is who I am, now live with it,’ but Karen was hearing something quite different. She now saw him as some kind of inferior, damaged being about whom she and Chris were entitled to speculate as much, and as publicly, as they liked, because he was less than whole. Given other circumstances, Chris and Karen could easily have been the sort of secret police officers in totalitarian regimes who get people locked up in asylums because they don’t like the look of them, or because they want their flat.

  ‘All I mean is that there could be a reason for it,’ Karen persisted. ‘It could be like… attention‐seeking.’

  I imagined the two of them in their room at the Sheraton, picking over Matthew’s sexuality – a whole new topic, with a satisfying range of accompanying emotions all the way from injury to self‐righteousness. ‘Will’s always been so clever and everything,’ Karen went on, ‘and then getting married, and to such a beautiful girl…’

  ‘I don’t think…’

  ‘Perhaps he does feel he’s, you know, gay – at the moment,’ Karen went on, ‘and I dare say he believes he can’t help it – but you do hear about people who get over it and marry and have children and lead very good lives.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s like any temptation, and it can be overcome?’

  I stared at her, then I stood up and said ‘This is Al‐Hidd. It’s just a sandspit, but very nice.’

  I felt exhausted already, and this was only my first conversation about it. Prejudice might well be unacceptable in some parts of the world (though not, unfortunately, here in Hawar) – but even in supposedly sophisticated places it was clearly far from non‐existent. Karen lived in London, a city about as tolerant as you could find, yet she not only felt that Matthew’s sexuality made him in need of curing, she was prepared to say so, out loud, and to me, his mother. She didn’t think there was anything to be ashamed of in that.

  Her hostility made me determined to stick up for him. Not that I hadn’t been already, but now I felt militant.

  ‘About your dad,’ she said quickly, glancing up at the others, at the front: ‘Chris doesn’t want to be the one to break it to him.’

  ‘He won’t be.’

  ‘When are you going to do it? Before we go to Dubai?’

  ‘Yes, perhaps. Or when you get back.’

  ‘What, next Sunday? We’re only here for a few hours!’

  ‘Oh, for Chrissakes, Karen, I’m going to do it, OK?’

  Alain must have heard something – perhaps only my tone of voice: he looked up and raised his eyebrows. I jumped over the side of the boat and waded to the shore, getting my shorts wet.

  Antonia was already on the sand, putting up an umbrella while Matt helped spread out towels. ‘I should ski,’ she urged him, ‘before David changes his mind and wants a beer. Matt’s promised to teach Andrea,’ she explained to me and Karen, who was trudging up the sand behind me.

  ‘To waterski?’ Karen sounded doubtful.

  ‘He’s very good.’

  ‘Really?’

  Antonia looked oddly at Karen and turned back to me. ‘Wasn’t the wedding terrific? The Franklins are such a lovely family,’ she said loudly, sensing something awkward, unspoken, in the atmosphere and deploying her usual tactic against embarrassment, which is to turn up the volume. ‘I hadn’t seen Millie for ages
, but she’s going to be beautiful, isn’t she, like her mother? And Maddi, of course,’ she added. ‘Katherine said Millie’s already been offered a bit of modelling work… And then it was all topped off by James Hartley turning up! Amazing, really… What was he like? Had he changed much?’

  ‘I only spoke to him for a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Is he as sexy as in his films?’

  ‘I suppose, yeah, quite,’ I acknowledged, not wanting to make him seem less interesting.

  Antonia handed me a beer from the cool box and stood up to watch Andrea trying to get up on her skis.

  ‘Honestly, look at her,’ Karen grumbled, joining us, ‘she’s not going to do it like that.’ Matthew was leaning out of the side of the boat, calling out instructions. ‘She’s like a porpoise, all bottom and middle. No, there she goes!’ Andrea flopped awkwardly into the water.

  ‘It always takes a few goes.’

  ‘She won’t diet. Then she wonders why she hasn’t got a boyfriend.’

  ‘How old is she?’ Antonia asked briskly. ‘Sixteen? Frankly, dear, boyfriends are not what you want at this age. My Flissi’s sixteen and she’s had several and they’re all ghastly. Either they’re spotty and inarticulate or they’re older and you wonder what they could possibly want with your daughter… Ooops.’ Andrea had fallen off her skis again.

  ‘I sometimes think everything she does is to spite me,’ Karen complained. ‘Eating chips on the way home from school and spilling out of those awful tarty clothes she insists on wearing – it doesn’t matter how self‐destructive it is, if it annoys me.’

  ‘That’s how they are at this age,’ Antonia said – ‘all over the place, looking for ways to hurt themselves because they think it’ll punish us, which of course it will. Just be grateful it’s not worse. She could be anorexic, or cutting herself…’

  You had to admire her posh bravura. Flissi had had a whole year off school, in and out of clinics, trying to get over her bulimia.

  Matthew was in the water now: we watched as he rose, dripping, from the waves, slim but muscular, like a minor deity on a monoski, zipping over the wake and back, jumping and landing, and I thought it was almost painful, how much I loved him.

  Diane and Alain came back from their walk to the other end of the sandspit. Sam was up on the monoski now, less flamboyantly; then Matt drove the boat so that David could have a turn. Alain started the barbecue and by the time the others came in, it was blazing.

  ‘God, did you see me?’ Andrea exclaimed, throwing herself down on a towel. Her eyes were red from the salt. ‘I was terrible.’

  ‘You’ll get up next time,’ Matt promised, taking a swig from a bottle of water and passing it to her.

  Panic passed like a shadow across her scoured features. ‘Um…’ she avoided his eyes, ‘d’you have another one?’

  ‘Good heavens, Matthew’s not got germs!’ Antonia said disapprovingly, though she pulled an unopened bottle out of the cool box and threw it to Andrea. ‘I thought young people didn’t care about that sort of thing… Mine don’t, anyway – Toby’s fridge in Bristol, honestly, it’s like some sort of salmonella breeding tank!’

  I walked down the beach, feeling awful. I was his mother. It was my job to stand up for him, to point out that being gay doesn’t make you HIV positive and anyway you’re not going to become infected from a water bottle. I was supposed to defend him.

  But that would have meant making an issue of it: telling people in the wrong way, sort of accidentally. Plus it would have ruined the day. No one would have been able to think about anything else. I wouldn’t have been able to protect my father in front of these people, who already intimidated him… Was that what Matthew would have wanted, for me to make a scene?

  I felt slightly sick. This had been my first mother‐of‐a‐gay‐person test and I’d failed. I could have said something but I’d said nothing. I was filled with self‐loathing.

  ‘Now, that is a boat,’ David was saying, his feet in the water, peering out to sea through his binoculars. He handed them to me, because I happened to be nearby. I looked politely, although I’m not that interested in boats.

  ‘Surely not other people?’ Antonia said exasperatedly, offering us an olive from a plastic container. ‘I really thought on Sunday we might have the place to ourselves.’

  ‘People with boats like that probably don’t have to work.’

  Diane squinted into the haze. ‘Oh God, it’s not full of call girls?’

  I handed her the glasses. I had a pretty good idea who it was, and I thought that they wouldn’t land here once they realized the sandspit was already occupied. They must have a crew on that gin palace who’d be able to think of somewhere else to take them?

  But the trouble was there weren’t that many places like Al‐Hidd off Hawar. Most of the islets had been seized by members of the ruling family and now had palaces on them, fenced round with gold‐tipped wrought iron. Here, you could almost have been in the Indian Ocean, the sand was so white and fine, the lapping water so warm, the sky so endless. You’d never have known you were in the Gulf, with its busy lanes of tankers and warships, its aluminium smelting factories and desalination plants stringing the foreshore, its rearing cities and steaming tarmac.

  The launch slowed about a hundred metres offshore. The crew could be seen moving around the guardrails, preparing to launch a tender.

  I went back up the beach and fished a T‐shirt out of my bag. While James Hartley could conceivably persuade himself I hadn’t changed much when I was dressed in a dusky pink silk dress from Soft Hands Tailors in the souk and high‐heeled sandals from Mansouri Footwear in the Hyatt Tower, I didn’t think this illusion could be sustained if he had to look at me wearing only a bikini.

  ‘Will they try to throw us off the island?’ Karen asked.

  ‘Why on earth would they do that?’ Antonia said. ‘We were here first.’

  The tender was launched; four people clambered in and chugged towards us. As they approached, we could see that they were James Hartley, Fiona Eckhart and another woman, plus Nezar Al Maraj, who was steering. We hovered, not knowing whether to pretend we hadn’t noticed and were having a great time by ourselves or simply to stand and stare.

  ‘Mum, he’s stalking you!’ Matt said.

  James jumped out first and, leaving the others to pull the boat in, he bounded up the beach.

  ‘Annie! What an amazing coincidence! And – is it? Can it really be – Ted? I was trying and trying to find you last night. Where were you?’

  He hugged my dad, leaving him pink and breathless. ‘And Chris?’ he said, slapping him on the back, ‘you look great, mate.’

  I introduced everyone else. Nezar Al Maraj was wearing a pale blue linen shirt and khaki shorts, both obviously expensive; he had, I could now see, deep‐set eyes that looked as though they were probably capable of assessing any situation. In the light of a brilliant cloudless day, he seemed like someone who was generally in charge of things. I blushed, then felt a rush of dislike. He had made me look a fool. Nobody noticed, though, except perhaps Al Maraj himself, because they were all focused on James, who was shaking hands enthusiastically, still exclaiming at finding us here. It is odd to be beautiful: people want to stand next to you, to bask in your presence. They want you to like them, and they put themselves out to accommodate you, to make your life easier and pleasanter. James had always been handsome and I suspect that things had always been like this for him, long before he became famous.

  ‘And these are my sons,’ I said at last, ‘Matt and Sam.’

  ‘She doesn’t look old enough to have all these children, does she, Nezar?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You really do look fantastic, Annie…’ he said enthusiastically. ‘And this is Rosie Rossiter,’ he added, gesturing to the tall, gamine girl with hair scraped into a baseball cap, who’d picked her way up the beach behind him like some delicate wading bird.

  ‘I saw you in something last year,’ Diane said to her,
‘weren’t you that character who had the DNA of a plant?’

  Rosie grinned. ‘Yes, that was my first big role. Half human, half rubber plant. Now I’m James’s love interest. I suppose it’s promotion.’

  Everyone laughed, although she was young enough to be his daughter.

  Fiona shook her head at the beer Antonia was trying to press on her, although James accepted, as did Al Maraj. Probably some Hawari thing about hospitality.

  ‘Everyone’s delighted you’re here,’ David said ambassadorially, meaning in the Gulf rather than standing around on this bit of sand self‐consciously as if at some semi‐nude cocktail party. ‘We thought the film might fall through, with all this Iraq talk.’

  ‘Nearly did,’ James said cheerfully. ‘Nezar’s single‐handedly rescued this project three times since July.’

  ‘Everyone here is hoping your film will say something a bit different about the Gulf,’ Antonia explained: ‘We do get fed up when people at home think everybody here’s a terrorist.’

  ‘You can imagine the trouble with the insurers, with all this war stuff,’ James said.

  Alain frowned. ‘Some of us are still hoping there won’t be a war.’

  ‘Well, we can hope,’ Al Maraj said in a way that suggested hoping was a complete waste of time.

  ‘We’re trying to persuade Ann to come home if it does start.’

  ‘Dad, this is home!’

  ‘It won’t be like 1991, you know,’ Al Maraj said severely.

  I looked at him coolly. ‘We know that.’

  ‘Come down here, Annie,’ James suggested, walking towards the shore. I blushed at the brazenness of his attempt to get me on my own. ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked with concern, as soon as we were out of earshot. ‘I was a bit worried about you last night.’