The Gulf Between Us Read online

  ‘Yes, thank you. I’m sorry; I was all over the place.’ I took a deep breath and looked into his eyes, which were the eyes of someone I knew, someone I’d turned to long ago, when Chris and dad were being impossible, when my mum was dead and everyone expected me to look after them, to cook and iron and worry on their behalf and talk to people on their account and cope. I hadn’t been up to it, but James had helped, not least because he offered me escape, into something entirely different, sexiness and irresponsibility. ‘It was… only,’ I hesitated… but I could do this. ‘… Matt had just told me he was gay.’

  ‘Blimey! What, at the wedding?’

  ‘Yes, about two minutes before you arrived.’

  ‘Oh, great timing on our part, then…’

  ‘It would have been weird whenever.’ I smiled. ‘But I’m not usually that inarticulate.’

  ‘You weren’t. Not at all. But… so… this was… a surprise?’

  ‘A shock, I think, more than a surprise. In a way, I can’t believe I didn’t realize.’

  He looked at me carefully, then smiled. ‘It’s great to see you again,’ he said, ‘really fantastic. You know, I’ve never known anyone like you…’

  ‘No?’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘I’ve missed you. And the thing is, Annie, you’re as sexy as ever…’

  ‘James, I’m sorry,’ Fiona Eckhart interrupted, joining us, ‘but we probably shouldn’t keep the chef waiting much longer.’

  ‘No. He’s been flown in from Spain specially,’ he explained. ‘Besides, you’ll be wanting your barbecue. But, look, I’d really like to see you again.’

  Fiona tutted. ‘Please, James, don’t go making any arrangements without checking your schedule with me first.’

  We walked slowly back up the beach, it seemed to me prolonging the short distance, to where Diane was flapping a recycling sack ready for James’s beer can with a lot of important rustling. Al Maraj and Rosie seemed to have exhausted the conversational possibilities and were fidgeting but if James noticed how keen they were to get away, it didn’t bother him. ‘How is Thornton Heath?’ he asked Chris genially. ‘I never get back.’

  ‘No, well, you wouldn’t, would you?’ Karen pointed out. Chris took the opportunity to explain that, actually, he and Karen lived in Caterham now, and they were trying to get dad to move as well but he was very stubborn, even though they’d be able to get him a really good deal, because of being in the estate agency business – at which of course they’d done very well in recent years, thanks to property prices, which were likely to continue because whatever people said, there really was no prospect of a slowdown in the foreseeable future.

  ‘Chris,’ I interrupted, ‘I think they have to get back.’

  James kissed all the women on both cheeks, adding a hug for me. The others all shook hands. Al Maraj looked at me in a way that seemed unnecessarily astringent, although I wasn’t the one who’d set out to make people look stupid.

  ‘I hope we haven’t ruined your day,’ I said, walking with James back down the beach. ‘You were probably planning to swim here.’

  ‘Oh, we can swim anywhere.’ To be honest, their boat was nearly as big as the island. ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to be at this reception at the embassy tomorrow night?’

  ‘No, ’fraid not.’

  He frowned. ‘They haven’t done a good job of getting together people I actually want to see. Look, will you come for dinner?’

  ‘Sure.’ There was something anxious in his improbably blue eyes. I smiled. ‘Call me.’

  As soon as the tender had chugged away, they all turned on me.

  ‘What were you talking about all that time?’

  ‘How friendly were you before?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ (That was Karen.)

  ‘Well, he’s obviously madly in love with you still,’ Antonia declared.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  ‘If he’d looked at me like that…’ Diane said, grinning and raising her eyebrows at Alain.

  ‘Are you seeing him again?’ Antonia demanded.

  ‘I don’t know. Fiona Eckhart says they’re going to be very busy.’

  ‘You’ll have to bring him over to supper. I’m sure he’d like to see a bit of local life.’

  ‘Darling,’ David said, ‘you are not local life.’

  ‘We were very young,’ I explained, when Diane asked me why on earth we ever split up. ‘And, to judge by his casting opposite Rosie, he still is.’

  ‘She’s very pretty, isn’t she?’ Karen said wistfully.

  ‘I think she looks like a head on a stick,’ Matt replied. ‘I bet she won’t eat much of the specially flown in Michelin‐starred lunch.’

  ‘That Al Maraj doesn’t say much, does he?’

  ‘Probably just as well,’ I said, ‘because when he does he’s quite unpleasant.’

  ‘He and Fiona didn’t like it at all when James was talking to you.’

  ‘No, he glared and she got more tense than she was already,’ Diane agreed. ‘Obviously, they can see there’s unfinished business…’

  ‘I told you he’d want to see you again,’ dad said.

  ‘You lot!’ I laughed. ‘You wouldn’t be this interested if he was still a plumber.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Antonia said, ‘if he looked like that…’

  ‘Anyway,’ Diane said, ‘he’s not.’

  We ate the steaks while the others asked a whole lot more questions about my not very interesting Friday nights in the King’s Head and Saturdays at the pictures twentysomething years earlier. When we’d exhausted that – which didn’t take long, to be honest – we talked about how cold Al Maraj and Fiona Eckhart were and how much more likeable James was, how unaffected, despite being so rich and famous, and also very good‐looking, which always helps.

  It came as no real surprise to anyone that I didn’t tell dad about Matt before the family left for Dubai that evening. We stayed on Al‐Hidd until nearly sunset, then cruised back to the Marina Club over water spattered crimson and orange. Andrea still hadn’t managed to get up on waterskis, despite a couple more attempts. Chris had succeeded on his second try and said that waterskiing wasn’t nearly as difficult as everyone wanted you to think.

  By the time I’d driven the family back to the Sheraton, there wasn’t time for them to do much except shower and change while we loaded their bags into the Jeep. I organized a taxi and we followed it out to the airport.

  ‘They often say,’ Karen observed at check in, watching Matt unload the luggage from the trolley, ‘that with, you know, people like that, Matt, there’s a fear of the opposite sex.’

  ‘All his friends are girls,’ I objected. ‘Jodie, Maya, Lucy…’ I should have realized that wasn’t normal.

  ‘I wonder if they can tell, just by looking at each other? Not that there can be many of them here. It’s against the law, isn’t it?’

  ‘There must be the same numbers as anywhere else,’ I said, hating myself for having been inveigled into this conversation, in which ‘they’ were once again a sort of sub‐species.

  I remembered Matt coming home when he was thirteen and announcing that a boy at school had told him that there’s an Arabic saying: ‘a girl for babies, a boy for pleasure, a melon for ecstasy’. It was the sort of rumour that did go round among westerners about the Arabs and might easily have been put about in the first place by Hawaris, to amuse themselves at our expense. But for all I knew there could well be a powerful homoerotic current running through Hawari society, in the coffee shops, mosques, the rooms from which women were banished…

  ‘In Soho, you sometimes see them walking down the streets, holding hands,’ Karen said with distaste, ‘all over each other. It’s very annoying when you come out of the theatre. At least they don’t do that here. I mean, I’m not against it in private…’

  In fact, it was perfectly acceptable for men in Qalhat to walk down the street holding hands, though you saw it less now than you used to. It was
men and women who weren’t allowed to touch in public, although I’d seen couples in thobes and abayas holding hands on the beach. As ever, the whole thing was more complicated than it looked.

  ‘We should go through,’ Chris said, coming up with the boarding passes.

  Karen patted my arm. ‘You’re doing very well, considering.’

  At home, Matt unloaded the waterskis and I cleared out the cool box, wondering if I had somehow made him gay, or if he’d been born gay, or if it was a combination of the two, and if so, what had triggered it, whether something in the womb, or subsequently. Not that there was much point to these thoughts: I wasn’t going to come up with the answer. Later, I heard the clatter of a keyboard from his room. I put on the dishwasher and poured a glass of wine, sat down on the sofa and looked around. Apart from the fact that Will had gone, everything appeared normal: furniture, curtains, books, magazines, a pair of Sam’s flip flops in the middle of the floor. I hadn’t had much sleep, so that may have accounted for it, but I felt as though my world, which for so long had been uneventful and even quite boring, was suddenly subject to entirely different forces, as if I could no longer rely on gravity to hold things down. We were being shaken up and jolted around in space and there were no rules for landing, or none that we could make sense of. Matt was gay. James Hartley was in Hawar. He’d said I was sexy. It was as if the poles had flipped: anything could happen.

  Five

  ‘Darling, no, he didn’t! But that’s so mean! Your hair’s gorgeous!’

  Matthew seemed to have got gayer. Did he used to laugh in that high‐pitched screechy way? Did his phone conversations require quite so many exclamation marks?

  Perhaps he felt that he had permission to be camp now. Much as I loved him, and even though I could see that it might also be permission to be himself, I thought I could come to find this a bit trying.

  ‘Morning, madam.’ Maria slid into the kitchen, kicking off her sandals on the back step in a single, practised flippy movement.

  I wondered if she already knew about Matthew – if, perhaps, she’d known before. She knew Dave was dead before I told her, though she’d pretended not to.

  ‘Madam, was lovely wedding,’ was all she said now, clearing away the breakfast plates. ‘Maddi look very beautiful.’

  She swayed across the kitchen, plump and slow and erotic – which is not, perhaps, the ideal mode for someone whose main job is housework. But she’d been great with the kids, especially when they were young, making up in lusciousness for what she lacked in speed. When she rolled down the track from Al Janabiyya compound to the main road and the bus stop, swinging her arms as if inviting the world into herself, she seemed to be in rhythm with the earth.

  ‘And Will handsome,’ she went on, ‘and he made very good speech.’

  Maria had two children of her own in Colombo. They were grown‐up now, both graduates, but they’d been four and five when she came to work for me. They’d lived with Maria’s mother, safely away from Maria’s husband, who could be violent when he was drunk, which was most of the time. The revelation of the children’s existence, a month after Maria started working for me, had upset me: it was no wonder she was so loving to Will when her own children were a thousand miles away, missing being held because she was holding him. I immediately said we’d pay for her to go home for a month every year, rather than the two years required by the employment laws. The following day, she’d come to me and asked for the money instead.

  That was when I realized how unalike we really were. I agreed, obviously – how could you not? – although I was appalled. But I was humbled too. I simply couldn’t imagine what it would be like to think like this. To need to. Maria came from a place where seeing your babies was not the most important thing. It was disturbing that two such different ways of understanding the world could exist so closely. Under her placid winsomeness, her sexy torpor, Maria was raw with life’s harshness in a way that made me feel inadequate.

  ‘Father Andrew make good address too…’

  ‘I’m not sure he calls himself Father,’ I said vaguely, looking around for the car keys.

  ‘And film star come.’ They were under the Hawar Daily News. He was everywhere: his photograph took up half the front page. ‘Madam know him.’

  ‘Yes, but not for years, since I was about Matt’s age.’

  ‘He will come here, madam?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably not.’

  ‘He is not married, madam.’

  ‘Sam,’ I called, ‘are you coming? Only we’re going to be late.’

  At school, staff kept dropping by my desk for a chat, wanting to know what James Hartley had said to me at the wedding and whether he’d changed much and if I was going to see him again, interrupting my internet investigations into the legal status of homosexuality in Hawar.

  As I suspected, being gay or, at least, doing anything about it, was against the law all over the Gulf. In Hawar, homosexual activity carried a maximum penalty of ten years’ imprisonment, but it appeared that no one had actually been charged for more than a decade – although in 1995, a dozen Filipinos had been deported without trial for ‘engaging in immoral activities’, which seemed, reading between the lines, to have involved some kind of gay sex party.

  In theory, homosexuality was a serious crime. You certainly wouldn’t have wanted to get caught. But the authorities didn’t appear to be over‐zealous in their attempts to root out gay men. Or not, anyway, at the moment. It was always possible things might change: parliament was given to flexing its muscles from time to time over cultural matters, largely because it didn’t have much power to do anything else. There had been a big fuss last year about the rights of government employees to wear beards and, a few months before that, some MPs had been behind the street demonstrations that eventually stopped a concert by a female Lebanese singer, on the grounds that she was supposed to be a bit raunchy. The Gulf may have been the only place in the world where young men can be persuaded to demonstrate because a woman is showing too much cleavage.

  ‘Are you OK?’ We were in the dining hall and Diane had been describing our day on Al‐Hidd to Sue.

  ‘What? Oh, yes.’

  ‘You were miles away.’

  ‘Probably thinking about James Hartley!’ Sue said.

  I wondered if I should tell them now about Matthew – after all, it was the pretending that was poisonous. That was what I’d decided: that it was a good thing that he’d come out, so that the secret wouldn’t sit like pus under his skin. But I wasn’t sure I was up to dealing with the fuss today – with Sue’s officious concern, with all the questions when the news went round the school. It was bad enough having everyone ask me every five minutes about James Hartley, without them wanting to know about Matt as well. They’d find out soon enough. That was the sort of place it was. Plus, we were surrounded by small children. It was easy enough to find reasons to avoid saying anything. So I didn’t explain, and then regretted it later, thinking that all the time I didn’t say, the knowledge was suppurating.

  Shopping malls are an art form in the Gulf: despite the desert outside, you can shop under Italian colonnades where roofs mimic blue skies scattered with cirrus clouds (never in reality seen in this part of the world) or wander through a fantasy of Arabia, created out of stained glass, pink concrete and crenellations, where Debenhams, Accessorize, Marks & Spencer, J. C. Penney, Virgin Megastores and assorted other international brands vie for attention behind plate‐glass windows. We have fewer of these gruesomely themed edifices than most of the other Gulf states, because of having less oil and so less money for crazy development. This seems to me a good thing, although not everyone agrees. Cheryl says it’s ridiculous that you have to go to Dubai for top‐grade sportswear.

  The Pearl Mall, through which I was walking later that day, was positively restrained, with its skiddy marble floors, spotlights, water pouring down stainless steel columns and white sculptures on the ceiling in the shape of dhow sails. The really big re
tailers don’t bother with Hawar, so the shops in the Pearl Mall tend to be stylish rather than brash – although, unfortunately, also prohibitively expensive. I was only taking a shortcut to the French baker’s in Seef Road, mainly because it was deliciously cool inside. It was also empty. The Pearl Mall is never crowded, even in the evenings, when the local families come out to shop and be seen, but this was lunchtime, and there was no one here apart from a few Hawari women idling near the shops selling Dior and Versace. I was thinking about all the signs of Matt’s difference over the years, things I’d chosen to miss or overlook: his attempts to get out of football practice at primary school, the time he’d been to play with his friend Ben after school – he would have been about six – and ended up spending the afternoon with Ben’s sister Amy and her My Little Pony collection instead. ‘Matthew’s the only boy I’ve ever met who likes My Little Pony!’ Amy had announced breathlessly when I arrived to pick him up. Then there had been that silk scarf he’d bought in a second‐hand shop in London and worn for months when he was fourteen, which now seemed like code for something he couldn’t say… I was so deep in thought I almost missed Andrew, even though he was wearing a lime green T‐shirt.

  He was looking in the window of Al Fakhro Shoes. When I stopped to say hello, he said he’d been looking for a pair of Converse trainers, but his feet seemed to be too big.

  ‘There’s a better place, in the souk, where the boys go. You know where the gold souk meets the materials souk?’

  ‘Near the old post office?’

  ‘No, that’s the other end. I could draw you a map…’ I groped in my bag for a pen and paper.

  ‘We could have coffee,’ Andrew suggested, ‘if you’ve got time?’

  ‘Sure…’ We walked towards the other end of the mall, shoes slapping on the marble, surrounded by cool empty space, assaulted by the artificial brightness.

  In the Starbucks outlet at the far end of the mall, a young Hawari couple were whispering at a table in the back corner, half in shadow, the young woman’s abaya pushed backwards across her hair. They looked up briefly, then went back to each other.