Isolation shook him. There was little difference between this and home. He might as well have stayed in Cork, enduring ignominy until people lost interest, because to come this far and still find himself alone was proving equally hard.
He wondered what his mates were doing right now. Having a pint, perhaps, while at the School of Music the evening students would be coming in, scales up, scales down; the sonorous moan of a cello would be escaping the old walls; the river outside would be black and cheerless, but the city would be humming with traffic and the pubs filling with customers, as pints were poured and lined along the counters. All this he had denied himself.
Welcome to exile.
“Are you playing or not?” his snappy sister asked. The one he didn’t recognize.
He ambled back to the table and picked up his cards. It might have been a shadow, he supposed; shadows, after all, tended toward blue, and she wore blue. Loneliness could make you mad. His own self-respect and the respect of others had gone forever. Perhaps he should go help starving kids in Africa. Or work in a Romanian orphanage. Live a life of contrition. Contrition—that strange Catholic concept. It was all coming back to him, the Catholic stuff. Had the schools, against the odds, managed to instill such a belief in sin that now, now he had really committed one, he grappled and clung to that discarded morality?
It wasn’t a sin, a voice said, it was a mistake. A voice. Her voice—the woman who had not yet spoken.
Rolf was standing over them. “You two,” he was saying, “this is enough now. You must stop this tiptoeing. It’s like living with paper shapes.”
Annie threw down her hand.
“So talk now,” Rolf went on. “Courtesy serves no purpose here.”
Gabriel glanced at his hand, and also put down his cards. It was a good hand. A pianist’s hand. His thin sister, her eyes bigger than they used to be—the rest of her had shrunk—was staring past his shoulder. He swung around, expecting to see the other woman, but Annie was looking at the wall.
“I don’t know how you can imagine I have anything to say,” he said to Rolf. “I’m deeply sorry, but I’ve already told you that, told everyone that, and it isn’t good enough, so what’s the point of repeating it?”
“But Annie has plenty to say, haven’t you, Annie?”
She held her fist against her mouth. Take away the enforced normality and there it was, right there, dead close. Behind a very thin veil.
“She wants to say,” Rolf began, “or perhaps it is me who wants to say, that she doesn’t eat or sleep enough, and we have to resolve that.”
“How?” Gabriel looked up at him again. “I can’t undo it.”
“No, but we have to get better. We must somehow get better, and Annie needs to tell you something.”
It was her turn to look up at Rolf. “Go on,” he said.
“Which bit?” she asked quietly.
“Any bit will do. Tell him about your dreams maybe.”
Gabriel could hear the wind outside, but nothing rattled in this stone house. There was no sound at all inside while Annie sat, her arachnid fingers playing with the hem of her skirt. Then, suddenly, she reached across and, with a swift swipe, struck Gabriel.
His jaw jerked. He had expected it, yet could never have expected it.
She sat back. “Feels slightly better than it does in my sleep.”
His hand went to his cheekbone.
“What Rolf means,” said Annie, “is that I’m so angry that sometimes I can barely speak. I love you, and hate you, and I hate myself. Mam and Dad blame themselves—did you know that? Do you know they feel such shame they won’t walk down the street?”
I’ll just sit here, Gabriel thought, and wait until it’s over. Let her have her release.
So Annie talked. He’d heard it all before—that is, he’d seen it in her eyes and heard it in his head—but if it would help her, he’d sit it out. His mind wandered—not to pianos or pubs, but to the woman, gone upstairs. Was she listening to this, learning things he would prefer she didn’t know?
“And now I’ve spluttered and ranted and I feel no better,” Annie was saying, with a depleted sob. “No matter how much I rage at you, awake or asleep, it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help, Rolf.”
From the start, Annie’s friends were determined to show her brother a good time, so Gabriel was invited everywhere: barbecues, garden parties, swimming parties at a beach club. These people seemed to have no cares and were enjoying themselves mightily. The women, unable to work, had little to do beyond child-minding and entertaining, so Gabriel quickly became the focus of their attention. Handsome, tall, and sad, he was a glorious distraction from the usual run of social events. They cooed at Annie. She was well used to it. Her good-looking brother had always drawn appreciation from her own sex and now, in his midtwenties, he looked better than ever. His expression, at once distracted and concentrated, and the ill-concealed distress behind his eyes, only added to his appeal.
Keeping pace with the hospitality offered by others, Annie also entertained him, taking him out and about in a company car. It was a question of keeping up. When asked, socially, where they had been and what they had done, she had to have answers. She couldn’t say, “No, I haven’t taken him to Bimmah yet,” and “No, we haven’t done the wadis,” because then they would ask why and she was all out of lies. Creating a convincing wedding scenario had left her exposed. Sooner or later she would let something slip or contradict herself, and someone would say, “But you said . . .” She longed to be honest, to say, “I’m not taking him anywhere because I can’t bear to be with him, because he has let me down more thoroughly than anyone could imagine.”
Yes, that was the weight on her shoulders: disappointment. The one person who should never have disappointed her had rocked their shared foundations to the point where she could no longer look down. So she took Gabriel first to the Bimmah Sinkhole, some way along the coast, where a comma-shaped pool of sparkling green-blue water reflected the layered limestone walls of its deep crater. Wiry Bedouin boys jumped off a protruding rock on the edge and dropped like stones into the water below, throwing out a great splash, while their friends cheered.
“Tempting,” said Gabriel. “What a way to cool down.”
Annie peered over the rocky ledge. “Don’t be stupid. Those kids know what they’re doing.”
“How deep is it?”
“No one knows for sure. Divers haven’t even got to the bottom yet.”
“Maybe there is no bottom.” Gabriel couldn’t take his eyes off the pool, still and mysterious, a dazzling eye on the orange landscape. “It’s like liquid emerald.”
“That’s because the water is both salty and fresh apparently.” Annie pointed to where it disappeared into a low cave. “The channel leads out to the sea. The boys swim through it sometimes. Not to be recommended.”
The sea, behind them, made for a bland horizon.
Gabriel was still staring into the sinkhole. “She’ll be here.”
“Who?”
“Hmm?”
“You said someone will be here,” Annie said.
The sun was burning a hole through his scalp, the sweat soaking