The Gulf Between Us

by Geraldine Bedell

  But he didn’t say anything, just made a sleepy grunting sound.

  ‘I know about you and Rosie.’

  ‘Huh?’

  I was trembling, my damp bikini chilling on my flesh in the brisk air conditioning.

  ‘I’ve seen the picture, James.’

  ‘What?… Shit!’

  ‘Why are you surprised? It was in a magazine.’

  ‘Christ, Annie, it’s the middle of the night. I can’t talk about this now.’

  ‘But we’re supposed to be going to London tomorrow. Or we were.’

  ‘What?… Annie?’

  I imagined him in a big bedroom with ocean views and pale wood floors on the other side of the world, tangled up in his million threads per centimetre linen sheets.

  ‘You’re having an affair with Rosie! You can’t still expect me to be coming to London.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘Is that all you can say?’

  ‘Calm down. You’re overreacting.’

  ‘How? How can I possibly be? You tell me I’m beautiful and you love me and what we have is unique and then you fuck Rosie…’

  ‘It is unique.’ He was finally waking up. ‘I do love you.’

  ‘No, you don’t. How can you possibly?’

  ‘This is … trivial. It doesn’t make any difference to my feelings for you. Christ, Annie, I didn’t ever say I wasn’t going to sleep with anyone else for the rest of my life. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘That is so pathetic.’

  ‘But everyone does it.’

  ‘No, they don’t.’

  ‘Annie, you have no idea what my life is like. I get women propositioning me all the time.’

  ‘You said you hated all those actresses. You said they use you. And that Rosie would sleep with you but you wouldn’t even know if she liked you!’

  ‘Exactly. It’s just sex, Annie. Meaningless. You have to understand: it doesn’t make any difference to us. If you hadn’t seen that picture you wouldn’t have known. I didn’t think you got those magazines there. They’re rubbish.’

  ‘Have you never heard of the internet?’ When he didn’t answer, I said: ‘So you knew the picture had been taken, then? You knew it was around?’

  ‘The thing with Rosie is nothing. It doesn’t alter my feelings.’

  ‘It alters mine.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I love you, Annie.’

  ‘Was it going on when you were here?’

  ‘No, I’ve explained,’ he said this wearily, as though I were the one being tiresome, ‘it’s a fling.’

  ‘You know what’s really galling? You insisted on keeping our relationship secret but you made sure you were photographed snogging Rosie in the street. She’s not using you: you’re using her. You hope people will think you’re younger.’

  ‘It was designed to get people talking about me and Rosie and the film, that’s all,’ he said irritably.

  ‘The film’s not out for months.’

  ‘These days you have to start the publicity really early. It’s quite an art. This was just part of it. You know, a stunt.’

  I didn’t believe him. He’d already admitted they were having an affair. ‘The point is that I’m not good enough to be seen with you in public, but Rosie is.’

  ‘How often do I have to tell you? This – being with you – is really important. Different from being with anyone else. I see it as being for ever.’

  ‘Except when you’re off having sex with starlets.’

  ‘I’m a highly‐sexed man, Annie. You’re not here. Look, if it bothers you, I’ll look into treatment. They can do quite a lot now for sex addiction. I know several people…’ You could almost hear his brain calculating the PR value of sex addiction rehab.

  ‘It’s not about sex,’ I said exasperatedly, ‘or not entirely. It’s about thoughtlessness. Complete inability to see things from my point of view. You didn’t think about the effect of this picture on me. And I doubt any treatment would make a difference: the selfishness is too deeply ingrained.’

  ‘I told you, I didn’t ever think you’d see it.’

  ‘That seems to have been a bit of a punt. What with you being globally famous and all… And what about other people? Didn’t it occur to you that the reasonable conclusion might be that you were ashamed of me?’

  ‘Look, some people don’t think this is the right relationship for me, but I don’t care…’

  ‘Yes, you do. You think I’m wrong for your image.’

  ‘Annie, let’s talk about this when I get to London. I can explain it. Having sex with Rosie, with other women, doesn’t alter how I feel about you. I don’t have that understanding, any of that history with them.’

  ‘I’m not coming to London. It’s over.’

  ‘We had a great time in Hawar, didn’t we?’

  ‘It was an illusion. I didn’t realize I was seeing someone who thought I was just one of a whole series of sexual options.’

  ‘You don’t want to stay there, though, surely, for the rest of your life?’

  ‘It’s over,’ I said, and put down the phone.

  I stumbled round the armchair and fell into it, picking up the cushion and holding it to me for protection. He was as bad as those married men who played footsie with you at dinner parties, as desperate to prove he could still pull. How could he understand me so little as to think I’d settle for something so second rate? He must have a very inflated idea of himself.

  My mobile was ringing again. It was James. I switched it off and, while I was about it, unplugged the land line. Then I went slowly into my bedroom, peeled off my bikini and ran the shower.

  ‘You look terrible,’ Sam said when I came out three quarters of an hour later, all cried out, at least for the time being.

  ‘I’ve got bad news…’

  ‘Not Matt?’ he asked in alarm.

  ‘No, no, nothing like that… It’s London. We’re not going. It’s over. With James.’

  ‘God, mum, what kind of timing is that?’

  ‘Sorry, no choice.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He’s having an affair with Rosie.’

  ‘The stick woman? Oh God, no … Really? How did you find out?’

  I explained. ‘He didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with it, either. He was incredulous that I might have thought he wouldn’t sleep with anyone else. He seems to take the view that if you get a lot of offers, you’re bound to accept some.’

  ‘’Course, some gay men manage it,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Have relationships that aren’t monogamous, I mean. Not Matthew, obviously. He’s lovesick.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it may be the future of pair bonding in advanced societies, but it’s not going to work for me.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you? That he was intending to sleep with other women?’

  ‘No: d’you think we’d have been wasting our time going to see him in London if he had? He was too busy telling me how wonderful I was.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Only yesterday, he’d talked about the future. Not just Christmas in London, but how we might arrange to see each other afterwards. How I could come to LA, and how his next movie was probably going to be shot in Tuscany, and we could meet there… I should have realized that when he talked about wanting me to be his sex slave, he was describing his desires exactly: he’d have been happiest if he could have kept me in a cupboard.

  ‘Why does he want another woman?’ Sam asked. ‘You’d be more than enough hassle for most people.’

  ‘It was the same when we were young,’ I said sadly. ‘All him, him, him.’

  ‘What, did you forget?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose I did. All I could remember was that I hadn’t quite trusted him. That would seem to be because he’s not trustworthy.’

  ‘He did like a lot you, though. You didn’t imagine that.’

  It was possible, I thought sourly, that he had felt as much as he’s capable of feeling. Unfortunately, that wasn’t all that
much.

  ‘He’s a bit of a sad fuck, really, isn’t he? We should go to the flat anyway. He owes us.’

  ‘Sorry, Sam, but no.’

  ‘So what’s happening tomorrow?’

  As soon as I thought I could manage the conversation, I called my dad.

  ‘I’m really sorry, I know it’s a lot for you and I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t really need to get away…’

  I was sick of Hawar. Sick of the emir and crown prince and prime minister gazing down at us from the wall of every public building, fraudulently smug in their mishlahs. If they’d had any real confidence they wouldn’t have had to remind us who was in charge every time we turned our heads. They were forever neurotically asserting Hawari nationhood because for most of its history Hawar hadn’t been a nation at all, only an unpromising tract of desert bounded by a couple of mountains, a wadi and the sea, occupied by tribes that were sometimes feuding, sometimes allied. Power had shifted and eddied for centuries before the British laid a grid over the land in an effort to make it more manageable, more amenable to an empire that had since faded. Perhaps now power was shifting once again. The Al Majid knew they had either to reform or to retreat into Saudi‐style stasis – but reform threatened them, because of popular Islamist opposition, and not reforming threatened them too. It would be easy, if you were an organized and determined opposition, especially if you had no compunction about the methods you used, to bring the country to its knees. All you’d have to do would be to sabotage the desalination plant. Citizens had got used to having water in their taps, to bright green lawns and hedges of hibiscus and pomegranate all the way up the Seef road, to frangipane trees overhanging the gate to the souk on Bab Al Hawar filling the air with creamy perfume. Those things felt like a right now. But you only had to go ten miles into the desert to see how preposterous it was.

  ‘So, is James coming with you, then?’

  ‘No, that’s the point. James and I have split up.’

  And decadent, that was another thing about it. Hawar was decadent. Where there should have been debate, there was a vacuum – except that now, religion was swilling in to fill the empty space with apocalyptic terrors and prohibitions and the fatuous promise of a historic, preordained moment.

  ‘He’ll be coming round, though? Because I’ll have to clean up.’

  ‘No, dad. When I say it’s over, I mean it’s over.’

  ‘For good?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he said it didn’t mean anything… ?’

  ‘Dad…’

  ‘OK, OK, but you can understand me being a bit thrown, when you’re arriving tomorrow!’

  I called Will and then Karen to tell them that we would now be staying in Thornton Heath rather than Knightsbridge. I used Sam’s phone because I kept getting a beeping noise on mine when I was talking to dad and I suspected it was James.

  ‘I’ve only just got my head round your last photograph crisis,’ Karen complained. ‘What is it with you lot? And where are you going to stay, because you know what Chris is like about Matthew…’

  I promised Karen we wouldn’t be bothering her.

  ‘No one ever thought it would last with James anyway,’ she said.

  ‘I feel so stupid,’ I told Will, ‘so shallow, like some sort of stupid fan, fooling herself into thinking she could have a relationship with a film star.’

  ‘That’s not fair. He wanted you to believe he was letting you in to something beyond all that.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t think there is any beyond. How’s Maddi?’

  ‘Oh, you know… You don’t need all that now…’

  He was wrong, I thought as I finished my packing. Knowing I was involved in other people’s lives was exactly what I needed. I might own some fairly ridiculous underwear, in the circumstances – scraps of black lace and ribbon that I’d bought at the absurdly named Lovely Ladies designer lingerie shop in the Pearl Mall and which would now only be removed by me, which hadn’t been the plan when they were purchased – but at least I wasn’t emotionally adrift like some people. While I may be lacking in the lingerie‐removing department, some people were lacking in the ability to relate to other human beings department. At least I could take refuge in the knowledge that I was meshed in a double helix of worry about my children, implicated in all their happiness and trouble, which is better than worrying that you might one day be minimally less famous; better than pathetically sleeping with young women to pretend you aren’t getting older; better than having your whole identity rest on something that could slide away on a bad box office receipt.

  I tried very hard not to think of all the things I’d been planning to do in London and now wouldn’t do, the districts I’d hoped to get to know that would now forever be posh people’s districts. (I didn’t want to be one of the posh people – at least, I don’t think so – but I didn’t like the idea that some things were closed off to me. You can’t reject things when you’ve got no experience of them, otherwise you end up like Anwar.)

  I tried very hard not to think that this was it. That this had been my last chance, and now the boys would move on and I’d be on my own, always offered the worst room in the hotel, shown to the back table near the kitchen where they put the ugly old sad people, because I was a lone woman and no one wanted to look at me.

  Matt found me sitting on the end of the bed by my open suitcase at eleven o’clock when he came in from having a drink with Jodie.

  ‘Sam told me.’ He sat down next to me. ‘What a bastard.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sorry about the flat.’

  ‘It’s OK. Sounded a bit gross anyway.’

  I squeezed his hand. ‘Who wants a stupid multimedia suite?’

  ‘Yeah, and water coming out of your walls?’

  ‘Oh, well,’ I stretched out my legs in front of me, pointing my newly painted toes, ‘I was feeling guilty anyway. It seemed tactless to be happy when you were so upset about Rashid. At least now I won’t have to worry about being inappropriately cheerful.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Matt said, ‘we can look forward to a Christmas of unrelieved misery, with only Uncle Chris’s homophobia to give us a bit of a laugh.’

  Twelve

  We flew into London to the sort of pointless, indeterminate weather in which England specializes at the turn of the year, on a day that couldn’t make up its mind what to do with itself and dribbled away its few hours of daylight in a kind of irritable funk. The plane cleared the clouds at the last minute to reveal an overcrowded landscape of ring roads, retail sheds and light industrial units. By the time we left the airport in our hire car, the motorways were clogged with rush‐hour traffic, steaming in the drizzle.

  I felt worse than I had the day before. The shock had worn off and underneath there was the sharp pain of realization that I’d fallen for a person who, for all that he’d had his face on the side of buses on every continent, was hopelessly weak and trivial.

  Travelling felt more than usually unreal: I couldn’t see past the neon‐lit interiors of Hawar International Airport to the point of it. Why were we still going to London? Why had we been going in the first place? How had I ever believed in any of it? I bought a lipstick in duty‐free, in an attempt to assert myself against the cavernous artificiality of airport life, to have something that I owned, that was part of me. But it didn’t work: I didn’t feel any less like an alien. I walked automatically to the gates, got on the plane and had already started turning right towards economy before Sam tugged me into first class. I could have made some grandiose gesture with James’s tickets – i.e. thrown them in the bin – but he’d never have known, it wouldn’t have made me feel any better and the boys wouldn’t have forgiven me. The first‐class experience was wasted on me, though. Champagne was the last thing I felt like drinking, I wasn’t hungry and, when you came down to it, you were still breathing recycled cabin air for three thousand miles before being herded and processed through passport control and baggage reclaim then released back into the world.
<
br />   At this point, you can often feel as if you’ve got your life back. You’ve been in suspended animation, in a place where time is meaningless and space is empty, and then all of a sudden you’re on the M25 and it’s five o’clock. But I was still in a stricken blur when Karen called, on Matt’s phone because I hadn’t bothered to switch mine on after the flight. I thought James might well rate his seductiveness highly enough to think it was worth continuing to pester me.

  ‘No, it’s still over,’ I heard Matt answering. ‘No, it’s OK, granddad doesn’t mind.’ There was a lot of talking at the other end, and then he said, ‘Hmmn, OK, well, I’ll tell her.’ He rang off. ‘She says she needs to talk to you because granddad’s gone mad and been to another one of those gay meetings.’

  ‘It’s a famous sign of insanity,’ said Sam from the back seat. His Walkman batteries had run out.

  ‘She says you’ve got to make him move into a flat.’

  ‘Somewhere with no gay people,’ suggested Sam. ‘Like Warlingham. They’re not allowed in.’

  We drove into Thornton Heath, down streets I’d known all my life but which were now alien. When I was growing up they’d been uniformly white and lower middle class, narrow‐minded and resistant to difference. But now they’d become the confusing, slightly run‐down outskirts of a world city. The shape of them was still there, like a skull beneath the skin, but the surface was completely different. Did the people who attend the Ghanapathy Temple walk along the road to shop at the Bismillah Grocery? Did they eat at the Hummingbird restaurant next door? (The Hummingbird advertised itself as the gateway to the Caribbean, which, to judge by the view through the grimy windows, seemed to be setting people up for quite a lot of disappointment.)

  In the streets, men and women in all kinds of dress, much of it unsuited to the weather, seemed to slide past one another uneasily, looking as if they were keen to get somewhere less public and stressful, as if they hoped they were only in transit. As we drove over the bridge across the railway line, we saw a sign saying ‘cash for crap’, and Sam said: ‘Why don’t they just buy up the whole place?’

  Dad had cooked a stew, which was perfuming the house with gravy. He took me upstairs to show me which bit of the wardrobe I should use.