The Gulf Between Us

by Geraldine Bedell

  ‘Why do young people feel this need to “come out” anyway?’

  ‘These are deep feelings. Matt doesn’t want to be misunderstood.’

  ‘Why do they need to make their private lives public? I don’t know – when I think what we went through, the shelters every night, everyone thinking about dying…’ What was he going on about now? ‘There wasn’t any room for all this then. Now they think they have a right. They’ve got to be true to themselves,’ – he pronounced this scathingly – ‘or they’re missing out on something. As if they’re entitled to happiness! As if everything in the world is there to serve them! They talk about fulfilment, as if that’s a right. They don’t know the half of it.’

  Whatever he was saying here, it seemed to be only tangentially to do with Matthew.

  ‘I don’t know, there’s you drifting around without a husband…’

  I sometimes thought he believed it was careless of me to have let Dave die. He almost certainly believed it was selfish not to have taken up with someone else, because it was all much of a muchness anyway, all dwindled to dullness in the end… Except, if that were the truth, why would you bother?

  ‘What am I supposed to do if he wants to go to gay clubs?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t suppose he’ll tell you anyway.’

  ‘So every time he goes out I’ve got to imagine him at gay clubs?’

  ‘If it’s a problem, he doesn’t have to come.’

  Dad sat back. His eyes looked rheumy. ‘I can’t say what I feel about it now. It’s too soon. If he did come – which I’m not saying he will – I wouldn’t want it shoved in my face.’

  All this shoving, as if Matthew were an item of heavy plant instead of a boy. What constituted a shove? How discreet would he have to be, not to force his homosexuality on his grandfather’s notice? This morning he’d come down to breakfast singing ‘Diamonds Are Forever’. Now he was out, I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought he was anything other than gay. It was impossible to avoid it – not shoved in your face, but visible on Matt’s, along with (and was this new, or another thing I’d previously failed to see?) what appeared to be tinted moisturizer.

  Karen rushed up the moment I came out on to the pool terrace, pulling a linen shift over her head. She must have been watching for me.

  ‘Have you done it?’ she breathed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where is he? Is he OK?’

  ‘Yes, he’s coming out here in a minute.’

  ‘Is he still having Matthew to stay next year, because I know I said before that we had room for him, but you know what Chris is like…’

  I didn’t bother to point out to Karen that an entire male corps de ballet with their tops off in the spare bedroom would be unlikely to persuade Matt to move in with Chris.

  Karen pulled down her shift, irritated that I was trying to minimize the gravity of the situation, to make my side of the family seem less troublesome than it actually is. ‘I hope you went easy on him,’ she warned, as if he were her dad instead of mine; ‘it’s difficult for him. He’s not like you people here.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Lots of money and anything goes.’

  In Karen’s view, I’d lost my moral bearings: I lived among people who were profligate, deracinated and out of control and they had corrupted me. Hawar was a louche place where money came and went and everyone, including me, had too much to pay it proper respect. I don’t know where she got this idea: I suppose it suited her and Chris to believe that I was richer than I was, to insinuate that I’d acquired comfort too easily, almost by accident, by happening to live in an oil‐rich part of the world where money sloshed about recklessly.

  Many people do, it’s true, leave Hawar with chalets in Verbier, houses in Notting Hill, forests in Wales, yachts in Cannes, portfolios of investments. I was not unfortunately going to be one of them. I owned a small house in Devon which I rented out and where I thought I might perhaps live eventually. I was fond of it, but it didn’t make me rich. The cost of living is high in Hawar, much higher than in Europe, and I wasn’t particularly well paid.

  Circumstances hadn’t been as much against Chris and Karen as they liked to pretend, either: they’d owned a successful estate agency business through the longest housing boom in history. Chris was a good salesman, since he had a knack of believing anything he was saying, at least while he was saying it, and Karen was clever with money and made sure they didn’t spend too much.

  ‘And anything goes is so much not how things are here,’ I added.

  ‘All I mean is your dad’s lived in Thornton Heath ever since he left Rotherhithe; he’s not been on the other side of the world, mixing with all sorts. He grew up believing you had to hold tight to your values, or you’d end up in poverty and chaos. They had no bathroom, you know: no bath or inside toilet. They had to work hard to keep up appearances.’

  ‘I know this, Karen, he’s my dad…’

  ‘He thinks you act like the rules don’t apply to you…’

  Did he? Perhaps. Certainly that’s what Karen herself thought – that I’d been ranging round the world, free of constraints. All this mixing with people who sent their children to boarding school and had offshore investments was getting above myself. And, looking at it like that, Matt’s sexuality was just retribution, only what I could expect for not having hung on tightly enough to my values (though I noticed she conveniently didn’t specify which ones I’d let go).

  None of it was fair. I was a school secretary who’d been married to a photocopier salesman. In Hawar, where most European expats were bankers, lawyers, general managers, IT experts or other professionals, that put us a long way down the social ranking. It wasn’t as if I’d escaped into some racy classless world where background didn’t matter: Hawar was probably more class‐conscious than Britain. Here you were thrown up against people whether you wanted to be or not: sometimes it seemed important to keep your distance, and class distinctions were a reflexive, no‐thought‐required way of doing it. The people the boys called Team England – the sort who already knew someone before they arrived because they’d been together at prep school, or they used to live next door to a lovely family in Fulham who’d been in Dubai – might, like Antonia, tolerate me. They might accept I’d acquired a kind of status simply as a result of having stuck it out here for so long. They might even have warmed to me since Dave, with his drinking and his irredeemably lower‐middle‐class job, had gone, or after Will had gone to Oxford and then married one of the beautiful, Marlborough‐educated Franklin girls. But they would never have made the mistake of thinking I was one of them.

  ‘Here’s dad,’ I said wearily, seeing him come out of the hotel into the heat.

  He made his way across to us, awkward in his flip flops. I moved up the sunbed so that he could have the shaded part.

  ‘Are you going to have a last swim?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I gather Ann told you?’ Karen said.

  ‘Yes, thank you Karen.’

  My sister‐in‐law shrugged and applied suncream to her legs.

  In the end, I went off for a swim, because the silence was too awful.

  Three‐quarters of an hour later, I was back in the hotel lobby, waiting for the others to come out of the changing rooms. Matt and Sam were with me, though Sam was scowling because he didn’t think he should have been dragged away from doing something more important with Faisal, like sitting in his bedroom.

  ‘I told granddad, by the way,’ I said to Matt, ‘about you being gay.’

  ‘Oh, right. Is he speaking to me?’

  ‘I think we can safely say he didn’t see it coming, but he’s fine.’

  ‘You mean his worries about me marrying an Arab girl and converting to Islam have faded?’

  ‘There is that. You may have to be a bit sensitive, though.’ ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well, you know…’

  ‘I’m gay and I’m fabulo
us, mum. It’s my birthright.’

  But he kissed me on the top of my head.

  Dad shuffled up to us, saying ‘Hello there!’ without meeting anyone’s eyes. Matt kissed Karen, slapped Chris on the back, said cheerily, ‘Hey, granddad, how’s it going?’ then busied himself with the bags, which he and Sam were taking out to the airport in the Jeep.

  The others came in the Toyota with me.

  ‘Dad doesn’t want to talk about it,’ Chris said as we pulled out of the parking space.

  I looked in the rear‐view mirror. My dad was staring out of the window.

  ‘No one wants to talk about it except you,’ Andrea said. ‘Matt’s gay, dad, get over it.’

  ‘Bottling things up is bad for you,’ Karen said sententiously.

  Andrea turned her attention to the guards at the bottom of the driveway. She waved, and they waved back. ‘Hey, mum, we didn’t get blown up after all!’

  ‘You can laugh at me all you like, Andrea, but the fact is that there are a lot of people in this world – in this part of the world – who don’t like anything modern and think their ideas are God’s ideas. How they know that I’m not sure. But if you think that, you can do anything.’

  By the time we reached the airport, the boys were parked and had unloaded the bags. We met them in the terminal, where Matt was inspecting the queues at check‐in and deciding which was the shortest. We waited in line while he kept up a rattling stream of consciousness about security procedures and the pros and cons of e‐ticketing and how to get a bulkhead seat and the likely in‐flight entertainment and what time it would be when they got to Gatwick. My dad seemed to have receded, physically and emotionally: he was hanging back as if he wanted to dissolve into the queue, as if he’d already given himself up to being washed along gleaming corridors and moving walk‐ways, through gates and tunnels, to being as inconspicuous as possible in front of officials inspecting papers and faces for identity fraud.

  I wished that Matthew didn’t have to make so much noise, or so mindlessly, even though I knew he was only doing it to cover his grandfather’s embarrassment. It was better to be brash and loud than see in his granddad’s eyes that he was feared. I wondered whether he’d had to do this before – if this was why gay people so often seemed shouty – and how often he’d have to again. Would it eventually cease to be a performance and become ingrained, identity fraud?

  ‘If only you were coming with us,’ Karen sighed, touching my arm. ‘I don’t like to think of you here, especially with the war coming and everything. All the chemical and biological weapons. And you’ve got to admit, it’s a bit weird, spending all your adult life in a foreign country, not belonging?’

  Was it weird? Would my life have been less weird if I’d lived it somewhere else? I liked the outsiderishness of Hawar, being accompanied by strangeness, by the busy whirr of the air conditioning units and the wailing mosques. I liked strolling through cold marble malls on the edge of a thick, salty sea, surrounded by men in dazzling white and women shrouded in black, liked seeing the evening sun flaring in a cloudless sky, falling lazily into the sea, and the shock of things not being as they were set up to be by childhood. Of course, none of it was exactly a novelty now, none of it jolted me out of my assumptions any more, but there was still a feeling of being more alive that came from seeing things from a different latitude.

  ‘Still, I suppose there have been advantages,’ Karen reflected. ‘It would’ve been hard for you at home, having three children and no husband… Even so, Ann, you do need to think ahead. Soon the boys won’t need you in the same way any more, so you’ll have to start putting yourself first. You don’t want to become a burden.’

  In the annoying way that she sometimes had, I thought as I drove home, Karen was right. The boys had filled up all my available space for as long as I could remember, but even though Sam still had two years left at school and Matt would need a home when he was at university (and possibly, knowing his predilection for clean towels, for some time after that), they needed me less and less. Will was already married; the other two would become more and more detached. The years of feeling comfortably harried and put‐upon were coming to an end, along with the security of ready‐made decisions: if something was good for the boys, then we did it, and if it wasn’t, we said no, and it was easy. I couldn’t go on thinking like that without my life diminishing, becoming a half‐life, slightly pitiful.

  All the same, whatever putting myself first meant, it clearly wasn’t going back to Thornton Heath and working in the estate agency, which would have been Karen’s solution. Not even with Karen’s assurance that so much of it was on commission that it was like working for yourself.

  I wasn’t sure that finding yourself in the Gulf was that much weirder than finding yourself anywhere. It was the yourself bit that was tricky.

  ‘It’d be fine, you know, if you brought someone here,’ I said casually one evening as Matt was leaving, allegedly to go round to Jodie’s. What I actually meant by this was ‘I hope there’s a relationship and you’re not just having sex.’

  He didn’t reply, but I pressed on anyway: ‘I mean, I know Will hardly ever brought Maddi back but that wasn’t because I didn’t approve, and obviously the same rules apply to you…’

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ he said vaguely. ‘Gotta go, or I’ll be late.’

  He didn’t say: ‘Ha! You got me bang to rights! I’m off to a private gay party.’

  Perhaps he wasn’t. As far as I could see, his life was too staid and orderly to leave much room for illicit meetings with promiscuous men. He went to work during the day, and sometimes in the evenings he saw his friends. More often than not, he stayed in and watched television or emailed people from school who’d gone off to college. I wished now that I could have told dad he was gay a bit earlier in his visit, so that he could have seen how unthreatening his sexuality was, how it manifested itself mainly in a lot of dancing round the kitchen to Radio Hawar.

  Will and Maddi were due back from their honeymoon early on Wednesday morning, and were planning to spend the day in Hawar to open their wedding presents and tie up loose ends, then stay overnight at the Franklins’ and catch a flight to London the following morning.

  I left school promptly when the final bell rang at two o’clock on Wednesday, calling Sam on the mobile as I walked out to the car. ‘D’you want me to pick you up?’

  ‘What, like now?’

  ‘Yes.’ We’d discussed this at breakfast. Was he on drugs? ‘We’re going to see Will and Maddi. Katherine’s invited us for lunch.’

  ‘Only I already ate.’

  ‘Sam, I said…’

  ‘Do I have to come? Yo, man!’

  I think this last bit was probably a greeting, and not meant for me.

  ‘Shall I give you a lift?’

  ‘Is Matt coming?’

  ‘Later, when he’s finished work.’

  ‘Is Will still pissed off with him?’

  ‘I don’t know… No, I don’t suppose so.’

  ‘Thing is, mum, Faisal and I have got stuff.’

  ‘What stuff ?’

  ‘On the computer, stuff.’

  ‘They’re expecting you.’

  In fact, Katherine had said, ‘Bring the boys if you like.’

  ‘They never speak to me.’

  ‘That’s because you don’t speak to them.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘Look, you don’t have to come now, but will you put in an appearance later? You should see Will and Maddi before they go back.’

  ‘So they’re going to be there?’

  ‘Sam, I know you’re not big on talking right now, but you could at least listen…’

  ‘Yeah, whatever. Keep it real!’

  I had to hope he wasn’t doing crack. There came a point when you couldn’t stand over them – a series of points, in fact, starting from when they wanted to ride their scooters out of sight in the Ladies’ Garden at the age of six. Giving them room to become themselves seemed a
process fraught with danger, although when Will and Matt had gone off, I’d always felt I had a fair idea of what each of them was up to – playing competitive sport (Will) and drinking lattes with girls (Matt). I had very little sense of what Sam was doing. Still less thinking. And though I felt that Faisal was probably a good influence, his attempt to turn my house into a sort of Japanese love hotel aside, he was pretty opaque too.

  Perhaps Sam was gay, I thought at the traffic lights, waiting to turn on to the Corniche. He was very artistic. Always drawing. And he hadn’t brought any girls home. He was always with Faisal. And just because Faisal was heterosexual, it didn’t mean Sam was.

  Or they could be bisexual. There probably wasn’t so much stigma attached to that for Arab men.

  Or – and this made more sense because Sam wasn’t very traditional – they could be post‐gay, which was something I’d found on an internet site run by American teenagers for people who didn’t need categories. Post‐gays sometimes fancied men, sometimes (less often, I think) women. They didn’t want to be pigeonholed or have to act up to stereotypes. Maybe Sam was one of them. He was very vague, generally speaking, so maybe, in his fuzzy world, gender was irrelevant.

  Clearly, I was going to have to ask him. And hope he didn’t just say something like ‘Yo, coz!’

  Will answered the door at the Franklins’, looking tanned – ‘which is amazing,’ Maddi smiled, putting a hand on his shoulder, ‘because he spent our entire honeymoon under water.’

  ‘Annie, darling!’ Katherine called out vaguely from the kitchen. ‘Peter’s not back yet – got delayed at some meeting – but do come through. I thought we’d eat by the pool.’

  ‘Maddi’s been telling us about spa treatments,’ Millie said, raising her eyes as I went into the kitchen. ‘We were just getting on to stone therapy.’

  Katherine put a bowl of salad into my hands and I took it outside on to the back terrace. Maddi followed with the plates.