The Gulf Between Us

by Geraldine Bedell

  There was no future here for Matt, and perhaps not for me either. Perhaps not – it was easier to admit it now – for any of us expats. The oil was running out. Hawar was located on a geographical and political fault line, where ways of life crashed into one another like continents. Western, Arab, Islamic, Christian, atheist, traditional, modern, family, tribe, oil, money, designer clothes under black abayas, education, repression, dictatorship. It was hopeless. Values bumped up against one another and we only pretended that they could knit together. In reality, the place was unsustainable: it was like living in a confidence trick.

  The phone rang, but it wasn’t Matthew. It was Sam to say he was at Faisal’s. He didn’t mention the photograph, so I didn’t either. I assumed he hadn’t heard yet. I didn’t want him to think he had to come home and be with me.

  I sat staring into space, willing Matt to come back from wherever he was, running over the conversation with the spooky Mr Al Buraidi, telling myself that if he believed Matt was alive and capable of making decisions about his future, then he probably was.

  And they hadn’t found him, so that was round one to Matthew. Although that wasn’t a very good way of thinking about it, because it was obvious all the other rounds were going to be to them.

  The afternoon wore on. Cars came and went through the compound. Children returned from school. Someone had a tennis lesson. The heat seeped out of the day. There were the sounds of distant splashing, the thwack of balls on the tennis court. Maria sashayed in, checked the house, and drifted out again. She looked at me sideways, but said nothing.

  At five o’clock I called James to tell him I didn’t think I’d be coming round.

  ‘Couldn’t you leave Matt a note to call you when he gets in?’ he asked when I’d explained.

  ‘But, James, he’s disappeared! I can’t just go off and have fun…’

  ‘I’m sure he’s fine. He’s probably with a friend. Or gone to the beach.’

  ‘Matt wouldn’t go to the beach when he was supposed to be at work…’

  ‘You’re not going to achieve anything sitting there. You might as well sit with me.’

  ‘I’d love to, really, but I won’t be able to focus on anything till he turns up.’

  ‘It’s a bit irresponsible of him to disappear…’

  ‘He must be distressed. He won’t know what to do…’

  ‘Are you sure the picture means what it seems to mean?’

  ‘This Al Buraidi bloke thinks so.’

  ‘Bloody paps…’

  ‘You could always come round here?’

  ‘He’s not going to want me there when he eventually turns up,’ he said, although I wasn’t sure he was right about that. Of all the people we knew, James was the most likely to have useful advice about having your picture in the newspapers. ‘Anyway, it’s too complicated,’ he added. ‘Cars in the morning. Briefing with Fiona, that sort of thing.’

  He was earning millions of dollars for this movie. When he dropped something, other people bent down to pick it up. He had, as far as I could work out, specialists to attend to all different parts of his body. How difficult was it to divert a car?

  Matt eventually walked in out of the dusk at six‐thirty, opening the front door and strolling in as casually as if he’d been at work, switching on a table lamp, heading for the kitchen. He was well into the room before he realized I was on the sofa.

  ‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’ he asked in surprise. ‘I thought you weren’t here.’

  ‘Matt, where’ve you been?’ I tried to keep my voice under control but it rose hysterically. ‘You weren’t at work.’

  ‘Oh…’

  ‘Your phone’s been off. I’ve been frantic…’

  ‘Sorry…’

  ‘Matt, come and sit down.’

  ‘Oh, right…’ He slumped beside me. ‘You know?’

  ‘Yes. Did you think I wouldn’t?’

  ‘I thought the paper didn’t arrive until tomorrow.’

  ‘Will saw it.’

  ‘And was he his usual tolerant and forgiving self ?’

  ‘There’s no need to be like that. He was worried. How did you find out?’

  ‘Rashid rang me, first thing. He warned me to switch my phone off and stay out of the way, so I went up to Saffar.’

  ‘Oh, Matt… !’

  ‘I know, I know – I should have rung you, but I never thought you’d find out so soon. I thought I had some time. Sorry, I didn’t think. You can see, though, why I couldn’t tell you who I was seeing?’

  ‘Yes. Someone knew, though.’

  ‘We were so careful… Apart from that time in London.’ He shook his head. ‘And I thought no one there would know who he was, or care.’

  ‘How long have you been seeing him?’

  ‘Two years.’

  ‘Two years! How?’

  ‘I met him at Shazia’s stables. Initially. And then that became a way of seeing each other: we’d go riding and meet in the desert, near Wadi Ghul. Shazia didn’t know. No one knew, except for this one bodyguard who helped.’ He rubbed at his forehead, pressed his fingers into his temples. ‘It’s my fault: that’s what I keep thinking. I suggested going to that club last summer. It can’t have been a coincidence – that we were photographed, I mean. Someone must have been watching. Friends of the prime minister, or people in his pay.’

  ‘He is gay, is he?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shaikh Rashid.’

  ‘– You’re asking me if someone I’ve been seeing for two years is gay?’

  ‘Sorry, no. It’s just that this bloke called…’

  ‘What bloke?’

  ‘His name’s Adel Al Buraidi. He says he works for the Al Majid.’

  ‘Ah,’ Matt said bitterly. ‘And what did he have to say for himself ?’

  ‘He seemed to think you should leave Hawar.’

  ‘Immediately?’

  ‘No, he’s given you till January.’

  ‘Or they kick you out, is that it? Is that why he rang you?’

  ‘I think he just couldn’t get hold of you. But that was the general idea.’

  ‘That means they’re going to get Rashid out of the country straight away.’…

  ‘He said Shaikh Rashid isn’t gay. He seemed to be implying you’d seduced him…’

  ‘Yeah, right, like I’d do that. He’s the crown prince, mum.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘Well, I’m only here because of Rashid,’ he said bitterly. ‘Hawar’s not exactly a big gay scene.’ He was trying to make a joke of it, but he was close to tears. That was when I realized that it hadn’t been a lark, or a fling. Shaikh Rashid hadn’t been a trick, or a fuck buddy. It had been serious, something for which they had taken risks. Now he was bereft.

  ‘We were stupid. We thought we could keep it secret. We wanted to think that together we were capable of anything.’

  ‘What will happen to him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He said he’d ring me this afternoon and he didn’t so they’ve probably taken his phone. That’s the only reason he wouldn’t be able to get a message to me – because he’d be trying.’

  ‘I’m sorry…’

  He shook his head. ‘Once the emir had his stroke… you could sort of see it coming. Whoever placed that picture knew what they were doing. They hung on to it until it could do Rashid maximum damage. It’s so unfair! He’s lovely, mum. If you met him – which I don’t suppose you will, now – you’d see how funny and generous and intelligent he is…’

  ‘He’s the crown prince. Surely they can’t push him around?’

  ‘D’you think Hawar’s ready for a gay emir?’

  Something about this question set off an echo in my head. Reminded me of something I’d heard only a few days before, from someone else entirely.

  ‘What?’ Matt said, frowning.

  ‘Nothing, I…’

  I couldn’t be sure, but I had a feeling Nezar Al Maraj had known. He’d also said something about the crown prince liking t
o ride at Wadi Ghul… And that probably meant other people had known too, whatever Matt thought – because Al Maraj didn’t even live here most of the time.

  I didn’t want to think about this now. ‘What about Sultan Qaboos?’ I asked. ‘He seems to manage OK.’

  ‘He got married. And as far as anyone can work out he leads an entirely blameless life: gardening and horses and Omani good works. No photographs in the Sunday Times. Anyway, he came to power in a different place in different times…’

  ‘It wasn’t that long ago.’

  ‘He was backed by the British, when that mattered, and there weren’t all these Islamists.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Mum, Hawar’s on a knife edge. Mohammed Alireza has a huge following. Rashid says it’s much worse than we think and the Iranians are probably funding him…’

  ‘And Rashid being heterosexual is going to make a difference to any of that?’

  ‘No, but being gay doesn’t help. His advisers will do their best to persuade him the only hope for Hawar is to get married quickly and persuade everyone he’s straight. Never speak to me again, and hope he can pull the country round behind him.’

  ‘And he’ll do that?’

  ‘I expect so.’ Matt sighed. He was only a boy, but love had barrelled into him with all its usual careless authority, and being young didn’t stop you getting beaten up by it.

  ‘Is it worth it? Sacrificing his happiness for Hawar?’

  ‘It’s what he was brought up to do: it’s what he’s for.’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps it is. It might really matter.’ Then he smiled and tried to make a joke of it: ‘Giving me up? Course it’s not.’

  ‘Someone must’ve had that photograph since the summer…’

  ‘Like I say, biding their time. Waiting for their moment. Which is now, because the emir is almost certainly too ill ever to rule again… And they’ve got Rashid exactly where they want him.’

  ‘What will happen to him?’

  ‘He always said they’d send him to a psychiatrist, although only because people like them don’t throw you down the stairs. It’s just another way of beating you up.’

  ‘Poor Shaikh Rashid.’

  ‘They don’t care, really, whether he’s gay or not. Well, some of them do. Some of them probably do think he’s mad or sick or possessed by the devil. But mostly, it’s political. The prime minister will be rubbing his hands: suddenly his radical nephew isn’t dangerous at all, because if he ever tries to do anything, to get rid of corruption, to support human rights, to bring the Al Majid under the rule of law, they can bring up the thing with the Englishman. So un‐Islamic. So decadent and western. So unlike the stern, manly Gulf Arabs. For the establishment, an emir with a past is really very useful. He might not be able to do anything significant ever.’

  ‘So it’s not worth it? If he can’t change Hawar, what’s the point?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looked exhausted. ‘Except this feels like a moment when this part of the world actually matters, when there might be more at stake than a tiny tribal shaikhdom.’

  I could tell he was in pieces. Shredded. I moved closer and put my arm round him, but he was too big, too scratchy, too muscular for me to make it better. He was a big man, torn up by love, and there was nothing I could do.

  Ten

  If we’d lived anywhere except Hawar, the fallout would have been much worse. We’d have had photographers trampling through the marigolds and reporters lurking in the carport with their notebooks, avid for information about us, eager to turn our silence into meaning. As it was, the local media – the Hawar Daily News and the other Gulf papers, the television and radio stations – had nothing to say about Shaikh Rashid’s visit to a gay club in London with his British boyfriend. The Sunday Times simply didn’t arrive that week. Officially, it hadn’t happened.

  I could tell everyone was gossiping, though, from the way they looked at me and asked in specially concerned voices if I was all right. Only rarely did anyone directly refer to the photograph, which reinforced my sense that I’d let the side down, got involved in something unmentionable. We expats were here on sufferance; there were rules that you didn’t transgress. This was way too shameful to speak of.

  Cheryl was one of the few who did, perhaps because for her, the relationship with Shaikh Rashid seemed to be a mitigating circumstance, as if it was less bad to be gay with a hereditary monarch than with anyone else. She did complain, though, that the whole thing was now so public that she’d been forced to explain to Tel that they had a gay living next door. That hadn’t been easy, she said reproachfully.

  Matt, who knew everyone was talking about him in low voices at parties and in the supermarket, that the phone lines were humming, confessed he was dreading going back to work on Monday. ‘I wasn’t out to everyone,’ he said. ‘Not all the Hawaris. Sometimes it’s just too much hassle – you know, the whole tedious double‐take. Every time you tell someone it’s the first time for them… And now they’ll all know, including the sicko homophobes.’

  I said something trite about his having done nothing wrong and owing it to himself to be positive and act normal.

  ‘Normal is seeing Rashid.’

  But the crown prince hadn’t called. His phone now gave an unobtainable signal and Matt’s emails to the secret address they’d been using bounced back. Every attempt to reach him disappeared into a vacuum, as if it had been soaked up by a huge indifference. There was more finality about it than if he’d died. The silence was resolute.

  Will, on the other hand, had called from London to object again to what he called Matt’s thoughtlessness. ‘I don’t know what’s got into him lately,’ Matt complained when he came off the phone. ‘He’s not making any sense. I mean, I know what’s happened to Millie is hard for them all, and Maddi’s not with him and stuff – but why is he hostile to me? Compared to me, he’s got everything.’

  Matt went to work on Monday looking pale, but said at the end of the day that it had gone better than he’d expected. Doug Reed had called him into his office and told him how good it had been to have him at Palm Publishing and assured him he had a job for as long as he wanted. Perhaps Doug had also spoken to the staff, because although one or two of the Hawaris and Pakistanis seemed to be avoiding Matt, no one actually said anything. I suspected his colleagues had become quite fond of him, even the ones who now had to disapprove.

  Neither Matt nor I could quite understand why the Al Majid were prepared to let him stay till the end of January. Perhaps they thought it would be easier to keep an eye on him here. Perhaps it was something to do with their pride in their gentleness, their measured and transparent methods of exerting their great power. At any rate, I didn’t have any more secret agent type calls from Adel Al Buraidi. What with the news blackout, the whole thing went superficially quiet, like a phoney war.

  ‘You know,’ James said one evening as we lay on the sofa, ‘if you need help with this Matthew business, you should ask Nezar. He’s in Paris right now, but you could always call him.’

  That explained why I hadn’t seen him. I’d been hoping to raise the subject of his vague and unhelpful warnings about Matthew. I murmured, ‘Mmn, thanks,’ and thought privately that if I needed help, I’d hope to get it from someone a bit more user‐friendly.

  ‘Amazing to think I originally turned down this part!’ James murmured, winding a strand of my hair round his finger. The French windows were open on to the garden and there was a warm breeze. ‘I only agreed because Nezar persuaded me… And then when I realized you were here, I thought you’d probably be with someone else and I’d feel all the same old jealousy and regret. It’s amazing I found you after all this time of thinking about you, missing you… Odd, isn’t it, that two people can have something that lasts and lasts? I could stay for ever.’

  ‘You haven’t tried it in summer,’ I pointed out as he pulled me towards him.

  The only slight drawback to these long, lazy evenings was James’s fondness for talking ab
out Thornton Heath: the crappy pub we used to go to on Friday nights, sitting in my bedroom listening to The Stranglers, walking down the High Street on Saturday. I said that while some of this had undoubtedly been OK (The Stranglers, mainly) the rest had been rubbish, and drab boring rubbish at that. But he laughed and said his memories of it were great, so it must have been me.

  We started making plans for Christmas. He had to be in Los Angeles until the 16th, which was the day we were expecting Eid to start, but he could fly to London and we’d come over from Hawar – he insisted on paying, he knew I could afford it and would I just shut up about the money – and we could meet at the flat he was going to rent for us. There were various restaurants he wanted to take me to – he said airily that he’d be able to get reservations, even though some of them were booked up months in advance – and we could go shopping – there were lots of things he wanted to buy me – and we’d have great times at home together, like this.

  I felt obliged to point out it wouldn’t be exactly like this: the boys would be there, and he said, ‘Yes, I know, with the boys.’

  He seemed genuinely determined to make me happy, to find the best flat, to plan a series of treats. He liked the idea of introducing me to luxury, telling me that this was a pleasure for him, because I made him look at things freshly, could be counted on to be enthusiastic, wasn’t jaded, like so many people. I didn’t myself know a lot of people who’d be cynical about being flown first class to London to eat top food in otherwise inaccessible restaurants and sleep with James Hartley. Still, if he thought this was some kind of testament to my niceness, I wasn’t going to disillusion him by explaining that in the real world it was nothing special.