The Gulf Between Us

by Geraldine Bedell

  Once inside the house, Karen went into professional estate agent mode, eyeing up fixtures and fittings. I tried to see it through her eyes: low‐slung, flat‐roofed, with sliding glass doors protected by flyscreens opening on to a long front veranda. An L‐shaped, open‐plan living space: sitting room, dining room, hall; a big kitchen at the back; four bedrooms off to the side. It was a house plonked down in the desert in defiance of the weather, a building that would have been at home on the outskirts of any number of cities in America, an outpost of the empire of suburbia.

  She peered over my shoulder as I reached for the milk. ‘D’you always keep your flour in the fridge?’

  ‘It’s because of the weevils. If the flour gets hot, they hatch out and infest.’

  ‘Ugh!’

  ‘I think they’re there, potentially, in all flour,’ I said defensively.

  ‘They’re not, though, are they? You never hear of weevils in England.’

  ‘D’you know there’s a man in your garden?’ Andrea asked, frowning out of the kitchen window.

  ‘That’s Babu. He’s the gardener.’

  Andrea made a face. It is true that Babu is not terribly attractive, but he’s very poor, and not helped by spending all day in the dirt.

  ‘You have a gardener?’ Chris said, as if this were typical of my recklessness.

  ‘Only for two hours once a fortnight. He doesn’t do much, as you can probably see.’

  I keep him on mainly because I can’t think who would employ him if I didn’t. He grows a lot of marigolds, which I hate, and every year I ask if we could possibly have something different and he nods vigorously and says ‘Yes, madam,’ and comes back a month later with the same old smelly orange weeds, which he then arranges in a straight row on either side of the path. I used to ask for tomatoes (thinking if at least I got those I’d be prepared to put up with the marigolds) and he’d nod and say yes but they never appeared. I planted them myself a couple of times, but they died. I won’t go so far as to say they were sabotaged, but it was mysterious.

  I knew I ought to do something about this situation – all Babu does is water the grass with what we call sweet water (i.e. not salty) from the springs that account for the greenery in this little corner of the emirate, and this is hardly very complicated – but I don’t speak Urdu and he doesn’t speak English, at least not the words ‘no’ and ‘marigolds’.

  ‘I expect you have to be firm with them,’ Chris remarked, throwing himself into an armchair and picking up a copy of the Hawar Daily News, ‘these people.’

  Maria, who had just come in, showed no sign of having heard this remark, in which case she has better manners than my brother, because he’d almost certainly realized she was there when he made it. She shook everyone’s hands limply, as though it was for them to take the initiative with the shaking, and said, ‘Welcome, madam, welcome, sir.’ I should say here that I’ve been trying to avoid being called madam for as long as I’ve known Maria. When I first took her on, a week before Will was born, I said to her firmly, ‘Please, don’t call me madam. Call me Annie.’

  She answered gravely: ‘Yes, madam.’

  Possibly it was some kind of test, which I failed. She could see what kind of easily exhausted person she was dealing with. In retrospect, I can see that she was marking out her territory, making sure she was on familiar ground, because there were things that you could do with a madam that you might not be able to do with an Annie – things like the potato tax, for example, whereby ten per cent of any vegetable purchase disappears soon after arriving in the house. I know there are certain women in Hawar – like Antonia Horwood, who’s always saying she only employs girls straight from Sri Lanka whom she’s trained herself – who would be appalled that I have never, in twenty‐three years, confronted Maria about the wandering veg. Sometimes I fear that Maria herself doesn’t realize I’m being generous about the potato tax and assumes I haven’t spotted it. But my guess would be that she doesn’t want to know that I know: she wants to outwit me, even only in a small way and now and then. She wants, at some level, to be in charge.

  This is a cause of sadness to me, because Maria and I have quite a lot in common and perhaps, in different circumstances, we might have been friends. We’re both women on our own in a foreign country (though Maria, whose husband is still in Colombo, usually drunk, has the distinct advantage over me of a handsome Pakistani lover in the Hawari Defence Force). But there’s too big a difference in our circumstances, too much that embarrasses me, because there’s no reason to do with intelligence or aptitude why Maria should be a maid and I shouldn’t. So I pay her extremely well, and don’t say anything about the potato tax.

  I carried the tray of tea into the sitting room, feeling disappointed. I’d hoped Chris and Karen might find something appealing about Hawar, might bring themselves to say something different from the glib, dismissive things they’d been saying for the past twenty‐five years. I’d invested all this time here, trying to make our lives work, and I resented their presumption that that was a mistake. I know that in some ways Hawar is charmless, that expats are drawn here mainly to make money and don’t bother to learn Arabic (I’m not excluding myself here; it’s a language in which you can make a dozen different words out of the same three letters, so you’d have to be some kind of genius to master it) and then they complain about not being able to get to know the locals. I know there are lots of things wrong with life here and that many people view their stay as a kind of unfortunate interlude from civilization. Their posting, they call it, as if there were no choice and the decision to spend three years or so seeing something of the world and getting richer were foisted upon them, an act of sacrifice for the public good. Which is not a very attractive attitude, and doesn’t make for a very attractive place: a lot of misfits and money‐obsessives, flung together on this barren peninsula on the edge of a shallow sea, thinking about how quickly they can amass enough to get away again. But I go on thinking – perhaps I have to go on thinking – that if you can get past the arrogance of some of the Americans and Europeans, then it’s as interesting as anywhere. More interesting, even, because in a couple of generations Hawar has gone from being a simple tribal society to a multicultural melting pot. There is Islamic civilization here, and pre‐Islamic, come to that, if you know where to look for it – but Gulf culture has been semi‐dormant for centuries, battered by the climate, suppressed by other people’s empires, exhausted by neglect and poverty. And now it’s no longer poor and has pushed itself into the modern world while trying to hang on to its identity, Islamic, tribal, hospitable, proud. How could that not be interesting?

  The Franklins’ pool gleamed in the darkness, an unearthly blue puddled yellow and red with the reflections of flares hissing in the hibiscus. The fairy lights Katherine had threaded through the bougainvillea blinked like stars among the papery flowers spilling over the terrace and the side wall.

  The house dated back to the 1930s – which made it very old for Hawar – and was originally built for some British protectorate‐era official. It was situated on a quiet, dusty street behind the Gulf Hotel in central Qalhat, and had leaded art deco windows and a large walled back garden, big enough for a pool and an area of planting beyond. The kitchen and dining room opened out on to a deep terrace covered with bougainvillea like a prickly magenta waterfall.

  ‘Twenty‐three is young to be getting married, nowadays, isn’t it?’ Karen observed airily, when we parked the car down the street, which was already lined with cars, and made our way towards the house.

  ‘Sure, but they know what they’re doing,’ I said uneasily.

  ‘They like doing it properly, anyway, don’t they?’ dad said. ‘With their wedding list at that General Trading shop and everything?’

  ‘Have you talked to him about it?’ Karen asked. ‘I mean, it’s obviously not as if she’s pregnant or anything, because they’ve been planning it for months.’

  ‘Of course she’s not. And no, I haven’t. I coul
dn’t possibly.’

  If I were to ask Will why he was getting married, it would come out sounding like I was asking why he was marrying Maddi, which wouldn’t have been what I meant at all. I loved Maddi: I’d watched her learn to swim underwater at the age of two and start school at the British Primary School with Will at four and fly off to boarding school in England at eleven. And though Will had stayed in Hawar and gone to the International School, they’d always been able to pick up in the holidays from where they’d left off at the start of the previous term. They were the only two children from their infants’ class whose parents still lived in Hawar and, when they’d coincidentally applied for the same college at Oxford, there seemed to be something almost fated about it.

  But I didn’t love Maddi just because she’d been around a long time. I loved her because she was truthful and unobtrusive and generous. And she and Will were both clever enough to understand the risks involved in marrying so young, so I had to assume they’d thought it through and had no doubts. Will didn’t talk about his feelings much, but he was intelligent, and so was Maddi, and they must have decided they couldn’t live without each other. I may have had my doubts about romance – or about how much emphasis had been put on it in my case – but Will and Maddi had lots of other things going on in their lives. They weren’t relying on it to save them.

  Besides, I still wanted to believe that romance could work, for them if not for me. It was too deeply ingrained in my way of seeing the world for me to slough it off. I knew that what I’d once assumed – that I didn’t have to cultivate much character, just wait passively, looking nice, because love would come along and reveal me as someone of great depth, would make me matter – was rubbish. I’d have realized that sooner if I’d ever said it out loud, but I didn’t, because it was implicit in everything I thought and did and too deep‐seated for me even to spot that the foundations of my life were cracked.

  So I married too young, when my sense of myself was still fuzzy. If I’d been the person I am now I think I’d have seen Dave more clearly. But that was then, and it was different for Will and Maddi, I thought: if you already had a sense of yourself, if you were competent and could cope with what was thrown at you, love might affirm the best things about you, make you feel more yourself. Bring out the best in you. I hoped that was what they felt, that they made each other believe in the future.

  The Franklins’ garden was packed, and quite a lot of the guests were unfamiliar, which was unusual for Hawar, where there’s a tendency to see the same people at every party. Maddi’s cousins had flown in from South Africa, along with a sizeable contingent of Franklin relatives from Britain and around twenty friends of Will and Maddi’s from university, plus quite a lot of people who used to live here and had moved away but had come back for the wedding. I spotted the Woods, who now lived in Singapore, talking to the Helgesens, who’d flown in from Dubai, and Mark, Will’s best man, who was staying on Al Janabiyya compound with my friends the Grants, talking to Maddi’s grandmother, who had once been a famous opera singer and was still beautiful… the garden was noisy with knots of jollity and the atmosphere was exuberant. You don’t get many big family weddings in Hawar expat society. Love stories here more often involve the middle‐aged and are tainted with boredom and betrayal, embittered exes and quarrels about money.

  I picked my way round the pool, leading Chris, Karen and dad towards Peter, who was helping out the staff with the barbecue at the back. He preferred being busy: Katherine was host enough for both of them, adept and charming, and he’d once confessed to me, when slightly drunk, that on occasions like this he felt slightly superfluous. He kissed me – ‘whoops, two is it?’ – while half concentrating on turning steaks and asking the others whether they’d managed to see anything of Hawar. Andrea looked him up and down and veered off to talk to Matt on the other side of the garden.

  ‘Oh, all those bits of old cloth and basket,’ he said knowingly, when Karen described what we’d been doing. ‘Very interesting.’

  ‘What is interesting,’ Chris said, ‘is the price of booze. Annie took us to that Nip Inn place this afternoon. Crazy prices, for a country where they don’t want you to drink.’

  ‘They don’t mind us drinking,’ Maddi said, joining us half way through this and kissing everyone, ‘as long as we don’t look drunk. And they make a fortune out of Saudis coming for the alcohol.’

  ‘Why do they black out the windows then?’

  ‘I guess so people don’t have to look in if they don’t want.’

  ‘What, so they don’t mind the shops being there as long as they can’t see in?’

  Maddi shrugged. ‘Perhaps it’s a way of being tolerant. Sort of having it both ways.’

  ‘Bit bloody hypocritical, if you ask me. Either you have a religion or you don’t. It’s not meant to be a bloody pick’n’mix counter, is it? “I’ll have the Quran but without the public executions.”’ Maddi started to say that public executions are nothing to do with Islam, but Chris bulldozed on. ‘You should be against it, anyway, you women. Just be grateful we don’t kill you if you have sex with the wrong person.’

  Maddi gave up. ‘I think you have the wrong idea of Hawar,’ she smiled.

  ‘Oh yeah? You saying it’s not stuck in the past, the Persian Gulf, then?’

  ‘Arabian Gulf,’ I said automatically, ‘we usually say Arabian.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Chris said dismissively. ‘Gulf of Whatever. Even their calendar’s stuck on fourteen twenty something.’

  ‘1423,’ said Maddi.

  ‘ – and, to be fair, Britain probably wasn’t very civilized in the middle ages.’

  ‘How was the rehearsal?’ I asked Maddi, changing the subject.

  ‘Well, I hope Andrew’s done a wedding before because he seems to think the service mainly consists of bad jokes. I’m sure there wasn’t so much about frogs in blenders at the last one I went to.’

  After this I introduced Chris and Karen to the Helgesens and my dad to Maddi’s grandmother and left them for a bit. Andrea seemed to be getting on well with Matt, Sam and Faisal, although when I spotted her half an hour later, the younger boys had gone and she seemed to be pinioning Matt into a corner mainly by means of her breasts.

  ‘She insisted on wearing that vest!’ Karen grumbled, coming up behind me. ‘It’s very revealing. And as for those sequins… She’s got so much flesh, it’s hardly necessary to expose it like that. It’s not as if we don’t all know it’s there.’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘I wish she’d dress a bit more like the Franklin girls.’ Karen looked across at Millie, who was wearing an elegant green linen dress that emphasized her coltishness. Katherine had been a model before she married and Maddi and Millie had inherited her long legs and Slavic cheekbones.

  ‘Girls go in for that preppy look here. It’s different for Andrea: she lives in London.’

  ‘Not everyone in London dresses like a cheap prostitute.’

  ‘Nor does Andrea.’ I thought privately that if Karen stopped making such a big deal of it, Andrea’s need a) to have a lot of flesh, and b) to expose as much of it as possible, might well subside. But now didn’t seem the right moment to say, so I suggested we went to get some food instead. I got my dad a plate while I was about it.

  ‘Oh, thanks, but nothing for me,’ he protested when I took it over to him. ‘Leave it for the young people.’

  I promised him he wouldn’t be depriving anyone of food and he took the plate and ate the steak, the salad and the baked potato, and then the chocolate mousse I also brought. While I was about it, I took Chris a steak and the largest potato left in the bowl, because I was worried by the way he kept haranguing people about Islam. I’d have to remember to warn him not to do that on Saturday because roughly a quarter of the wedding guests would be Muslim.

  I thought ruefully that I might have tried too hard to persuade my father and brother and his family that life in Hawar was easy and comfortable, might have been too successf
ul. Chris seemed to have gone in a day from thinking I was living in a dangerous nest of terrorists and white slave traders to thinking it was OK to be pissed in public and insult Islam. He clearly had no idea that our life here was also fragile, that we stayed on in Hawar on sufferance, and that while life may be comfortable, that comfort came with conditions, the first of which was to take care of not offending. All expatriates had to be sponsored by a Hawari, and sponsorship could be withdrawn. The whole basis of my life was provisional, dependent on the legal backing of a man I didn’t like and found it quite hard not to be rude to.

  In practice, of course, sponsorship was rarely withdrawn from Americans, Europeans or other rich expats, unlike Sri Lankan house maids who made accusations of abuse or Indian construction workers who dared to demand better working conditions. But the knowledge that it could be had a restraining effect: we were careful at the very least not to be drunk in public, or to insult the ruling family. Self‐censorship can be at least as powerful as the more obvious and open variety.

  By ten o’clock, Chris had drunk at least three times as much as anyone else at the party and I went in search of Karen to suggest it might be time to make a move. When he was in this state, he reminded me of when I’d had to fetch him from parties as a teenager. I used to wait for him in the street because he was too young to walk home by himself (too young to be at the parties, really, but my dad was all over the place after my mum died) and I could still recall the nervous anxiety that used to run through me at the prospect that he’d come out drunk, throw up in the gutter, shout in the street, go off in a different direction. That I wouldn’t be able to stop him and get him home, because he was twice my size. I seemed to have spent most of my late teens worrying about how adrift he was. And despite the financial success and the house and business and everything, I couldn’t get over a sense that he wasn’t much less vulnerable now.