“Not this brother, I hope,” Jasper quipped. “Unless you’ve run away from your new wife already?”
Gabriel smiled.
Joan persisted: “Did you find something to wear? You were fretting, I seem to remember, about finding something elegant but warm.”
Annie chewed a mouthful of lamb at length, as if hoping for inspiration, then swallowed, reaching for her glass, and said, “We stopped off in Rome and I got a dress there.”
That at least was not a lie, Gabriel thought.
“It must have been a wonderful day,” Joan went on. “I always think winter weddings must be so romantic. Did it snow? Winter Wonderland and all that?”
Annie turned her glass between her fingers before saying, “Mmm. It was lovely. No snow, but a great day.”
Gabriel frowned at her. Rolf frowned at him.
“I don’t think it’s romantic at all,” said Marie. “I’ve never understood why anyone could possibly want to get married in the winter. The bride must have been perishing, poor thing.”
“Oh, she was,” Annie said, turning her eyes to Gabriel. “Perishing.”
Pressed for more details, Annie got off to a halting start, but then the words, the fables, began to flow out: she described the wedding, related key moments and amusing anecdotes, and even made Rolf and Gabriel smile indulgently when she looked to them for confirmation that this or that had been the funniest, most touching moment. It was altogether bizarre: a conspiracy of invention.
The wedding chat exhausted, the guests turned their attention back to Gabriel, pushing forth suggestions of how he should use his time and telling him he must see this and this, and mustn’t miss that.
Mesmerized, exhausted, he had never worked so hard to be courteous to people who meant nothing to him, but he would have feigned interest in a babbling parrot if it would help him regain his sister’s respect. Looking at her face now was like gazing up from within a deep pit to see her peering over the rim, down at him.
“Why did you say all that about the wedding?” he asked her from the back of the car after they’d left. “You don’t have to protect me, you know.”
“I’m not protecting you. I’m protecting myself. Besides, one lie is much the same as the next. I went with the happy lie.”
“But how can you sustain it? Isn’t Marie a close friend of yours?”
“Yes, and I’ll tell her . . . in my own time.” After a moment she said, “I mean, they’ll think we’re a very odd family.” Rolf put his hand on her lap. “But we’re not . . . or we weren’t, or at least I didn’t think we were.”
Gabriel knew better than to speak, since he was the one who had given the family this new perception of itself. He looked out. The night lights of Muscat told him little about the town, but when they continued on foot, after parking the car, the dark, quiet alleys that led to the house spoke louder. This was a secretive place; much was held in behind the thick walls. Probing deeper into the warren of back streets, Muttrah felt like a den. His den. He and his shame could hide out there, he thought, for quite a while, undisturbed.
When they came into the house Annie went to the kitchen; Rolf followed her, while Gabriel, near-blind with exhaustion, said goodnight and went up the stairs, but stopped when he heard Annie say to Rolf, “I wanted to tell them. I wanted to say, ‘This is why he is here. This is what he has done.’”
“But you didn’t,” Rolf said, in his most pragmatic tone, “and you mustn’t. He didn’t come here to be judged, and you, my darling, you of all people, must not judge him.”
“Why not? Why should I not? Everyone else does!”
Gabriel could not move without revealing that he was still on the stairs.
“This is how we change,” Annie went on. “I turned my head and he became someone else. Do you think I should try to save what’s left of him? Of my Gabriel?”
“I think it’s best you let that Gabriel go.”
“I wish I could. And I wish I could leave. Get away. If I don’t, I’m afraid I might hurl a glass across the room and cut his face. I want to cut his beautiful archangel face!”
Gabriel went on up. Short of breath, he passed his bedroom and climbed to the top of the house, where a wooden door led onto a small rooftop balcony. He stepped out and stood, fingers in hip pockets. In spite of stars aplenty, galaxies crowding, and a glow coming off the streetlights on the seafront, it was still, somehow, a dark night. Between the stars, the sky was black as oil and deep. Perhaps all Arabian nights were this black.
He tried to root himself in place, not time, to blot out why he came to be there. It took quite an effort to strip away the circumstances, but a slow intake of warm night air and the sight of a minaret along the bay brought him properly to Oman. He thought about the invaders and the traders sailing into this cozy cove over the centuries. Arriving in their long wake, he felt the history in the soles of his feet and saw it in the towers that overlooked the town from the surrounding hills. The three Muscat forts, Rolf had said, were built in the sixteenth century when the Portuguese, alarmed by the size of Oman’s navy, occupied this coast to protect their route to the Indian Ocean. Now it was one of the busiest waterways in the world, and the lights Gabriel could see on the blinking horizon were oil tankers, no doubt, plying back and forth.
The dinner party had been the first social event he had attended in months, the first time he had been part of light conversation, had eaten a meal in lively company. It was a relief that nobody had known anything about anything. He had been prepared to face further reprobation, and even though a bunch of strangers could inflict no greater humiliation than he had endured in his own tight neighborhood at home, he was grateful for his sister’s discretion. In Muscat he could breathe, was breathing already, in spite of Annie’s froideur. How deeply aggrieved she must be, he thought, to go to such lengths to disguise the events that had brought him here. She had almost convinced Gabriel that Max’s wedding had been a grand shindig, so much so that, listening to her describe it in fantastical detail, he had vicariously enjoyed what had not happened, and never would.
“Max, Max, Max,” he said out loud, and the warm Muscat wind curved around him, like a longed-for embrace.
A shuffle of bare feet in the stairwell made him turn: Annie, coming to join him. Good. Perhaps they could talk here, with only the sky to eavesdrop. But no one emerged. He had heard her, he was sure of it. Stepping toward the door, he put his head inside. No Annie.
It was Geraldine who kept Annie awake, not Max. Geraldine, the perishing non-bride.
She had been, in Annie’s view, an entirely predictable event. Ten years earlier, she could have described to a T the woman who would one day drag Max away from his piano for just long enough to get him to the altar. Geraldine had made herself indispensable from the start, as if she had seen too many films in which able, slightly frumpy but frightfully sensible women take on those men who are not quite tuned in to the diurnal workings of a life and manage to make them function by reminding them to eat, show up for appointments, and change out of their pyjamas before leaving the house. Geraldine almost certainly seduced Max first—it would not have occurred to him to do so, and if she did not exactly propose to him, he most likely proposed under nifty direction. Everyone rejoiced: the family now had less cause to worry about Max because, with Geraldine’s help, the world made more sense to him, and he to it.
She had been endearingly excited about getting married and went for the full hoopla. This otherwise sensible woman in sensible clothes became altogether giddy when talking wedding dresses, bridesmaids, and banquets. Her dull purposefulness was lost in the romanticism of the event, and she even counted the days, she coyly admitted, from ten months