“Oman doesn’t need a tourist industry, and it doesn’t want one either.”
“You mean you don’t want it to have one.”
“Exactly. The fewer people who know about it, the better. And you’ll agree after we’ve had lunch in Wadi Shab.”
Gabriel did agree. Jutting ridges, brown and bare, followed the stone riverbed on either side, like spirit guides. On a sandy patch in a grove of date palms, they stopped for a picnic, and sat with Abid, the driver, enjoying flatbread stuffed with cold lamb.
Gabriel squinted up at the fronds that were giving them shade. “I could really get to like this place,” he said, thinking about the little house in Muttrah that would soon be seeking a tenant.
“Well, don’t.”
A few months earlier, Annie had longed to share this with him—her letters had been full of what they could do if he ever managed to visit—but now they were merely in cahoots. Playing roles; playing at being on holiday. Lying to each other every day, every minute from the moment they got up.
“Sleep well?”
“Yeah, not bad,” one or the other would say, though both had tossed and fretted.
“Hungry?”
“Umm, starving.”
And they would sit over a nice Omani breakfast, which Annie would force down and Gabriel would eat, though the void in his belly could never be met. He had thought it would be easier with Annie, but it was hardest, because he loved her the most. There was so much he could not say. He could not ask, as he would once have done, about the other emptiness—the baby that would not come—because that too was his fault. He could see it, clear as day. Annie had not yet conceived because she was so thin. She had lost a lot of weight. Skin and bones were no home for a baby, Nature knew that, and Annie was not eating properly because of him. He imagined sometimes that he would come down one morning and she would be standing there, holding down the news with rosy cheeks and a sucked-in grin, until it burst out of its own accord: “We’ve done it!” The whole family could then rejoice. Good news. New life, new birth; a fresh start for all of them. Meanwhile, Gabriel could not mention the thing that wasn’t happening.
They couldn’t even admit that they were haunted by the same thoughts and no longer knew enough of each other to discover that their very nightmares were moving up and down the house, from one restless mind to the other, changing very little along the way.
Stag nights. Max hated stag nights. He had no stomach for all those relentlessly slopping pints, the forced conviviality, the putrid jokes and mandatory inebriation, but even that was nothing compared with the humiliation that the mob, the groom’s own friends, inflicted on their helpless prey. Never having been part of a pack, he couldn’t understand the pack instinct, the inherent, irrepressible violence of men, one to another. Neither could he grasp the point of initiation ceremonies seen the world over, from sailors inflicting Neptune’s sadistic pleasure on every innocent who crossed the Equator, to the Japanese delight in televisual abasement, and the cruel rituals with which Western men initiated boys into gangs and men into marriage.
Max didn’t get it. Gabriel and Annie knew this, and tossed and turned and wondered.
Annie wondered, often, what had become of the wedding dress that had been hanging on the back of a bedroom door, pristine, glittering, ready for the excited bride to lift her arms and dive upward into its silk on her wedding day. Whatever had Geraldine done with it?
She came into the room, swiftly and with purpose, like a wave racing to the shore. Rolf was kneeling over photographs spread on the floor of the diwan, but Gabriel’s eyes followed her as she came across the room, barefoot, silent, wearing the same blue kaftan with a silvery panel of embroidery down the front. She was about his age, he reckoned, but she didn’t look in his direction when she took an apple from the fruit bowl on the dining-table and bit into it.
“Rolf, introduce us, would you?” Gabriel hissed at Rolf who, with half-moon spectacles on the end of his nose and tilted forward over his pictures, reminded him of a mole in a children’s story. No sooner had he spoken than she had left the room.
“I’m sorry?” Rolf didn’t look up from his work.
Gabriel was stretched across the cushions, reading. “Who’s yer woman?”
“What woman?”
“The one who just came in.”
Rolf lifted his chin. “Someone came in?”
“She walked right past you,” Gabriel whispered.
“I didn’t see anyone.”
Gabriel looked at him deadpan. “That’s wearing a little thin.”
His brother-in-law went back to his photos. “This again? There is no woman, Gabriel, apart from your sister.”
“You sure about that?” Once again, he went through to the kitchen: empty. So he took the stairs four at a time and checked the two bedrooms on the second floor and the bathroom. Rolf was right. There was no woman, and yet there was. All the time. Even when Gabriel couldn’t see her, he was aware of her. Yet he could hear no footfall, no sound. Odd, how she made no noise.
In subsequent days, the swift passes by their unmentioned guest became unnerving and increasingly perplexing. She wandered about, coming in and out of rooms, but Gabriel’s were the only eyes that followed her if she moved, and noticed if she did not. That the others failed to acknowledge her was not a little disconcerting. In fact, they were remarkably adept at turning their heads a fraction too late to see her. He couldn’t fathom their reasoning. This was no time for practical jokes and Annie looked no more in the mood for games than Rolf did. So what then? Why the denials? It seemed too deliberately cruel to be some kind of retribution. Since Annie had derived no satisfaction from slapping him, perhaps this was her way of making him suffer—tantalizing him with visions, trying to make him crazy with sightings of an apple-eating beauty, like throwing poisoned cheese at a hapless mouse.
This, however, was not the way to hurt him. On the contrary, he was gaining strength, somehow, from the woman’s presence. Her un-present presence. Instead of feeling more adrift, less attuned to reality, he was beginning to feel connected, if not to the world or to his sister, at least to himself.
He felt bolstered, and for the first time in weeks he had something fresh to think about: a new preoccupation. It was a delightful conundrum to ponder during those wakeful nights, wondering about their motivation, where they had found her, what she would sound like if she spoke and feel like if he touched her. He thought about touching her, about calling her bluff, since she too was playing a role, teasing him with glimpses—there again, gone again, real and not-so-real. By arrangement or whimsy, she was messing with his head and that too was flirtation; a delectable flirtation. He wanted to respond; he wanted in. Annie and Rolf meant to humiliate him, perhaps, but their motivation was of less interest than the woman herself. She was in the house, and they were lying.
During another bad night, he went downstairs, treading quietly to avoid disturbing Rolf and Annie, but also hoping to disturb the secluded guest—to catch her out. He might steal upon her munching cornflakes in the kitchen, making up for all the meals she missed during the day when she was hiding in whichever cupboard they kept her. By the window in the small kitchen, he poured himself a glass of water and stood looking out into nothing. He didn’t hear her coming; he didn’t need to.
A flush of desire seeped through him. It had been too long. Nothing Sandra could do, tried to do, had brought back the comforting rush of heat. His impotence was simply another by-product. He could not allow himself any release. He had to live his brother’s life, depriving himself of the joys Max no longer knew and even striving on his behalf. Before he’d left Ireland, he had been playing himself ragged to perfect Bartók’s Second, which Max had been