a lovely man, and Sabah is a good friend of mine. She’s teaching me Arabic. Or trying to.” Annie raised her chin. “They’re called the Sama’un Rocks. Sabah told me they were inhabited by a jinni called Sama’un and that people used to leave gifts at the base at low tide.”
“Like an Irish shrine. A few pennies for a miracle.”
“I suppose.”
“So what does Sama’un have to offer? Sight for the blind? Cash for the strapped?”
“Fertility for the barren.”
Even through sunglasses, she could feel Gabriel’s eyes shoot over to hers. “So that’s why you organized this little expedition.”
“Don’t tell Rolf.”
The rocks were turning to a shade of burnt orange in the late-afternoon sun. “Do you know what gifts he likes, your Sama’un?”
“Dead goat, probably. Anyway, he’s gone now. Legend has it he took off after the British tried to bomb his rocks in the fifties.”
They paddled all the way to the rocks, where some fishermen were sitting on the sand mending their nets, then returned to the party. Rolf pointed toward the muddy lagoon farther along the strand and told Gabriel it was good for waders. “Fantastic bird-watching.”
“Fantastic everything,” said Gabriel. “Is Sultan Qaboos ever going to let tourists in?”
“I hope not,” said Marie.
“Give him time,” said Jasper. “There’s no infrastructure yet for tourism.”
“I do love your name,” Stéphanie said, out of the blue, looking at Gabriel with her fox-like eyes. “Were you named after the angel?”
Gabriel threw Annie a weary look. The question of his life. “Remember to put that on my tombstone, won’t you?” he said to her. “‘P.S. He was not named after the angel.’” He turned back to Stéphanie. “An uncle,” he said. “Sort of.” He sat on a towel and perched a sunhat on his head.
“Sort of?” said Marie, as Jasper handed her flatbread, stuffed with lamb and salad. “Thanks, darling. How do you mean ‘sort of”?”
“In that he wasn’t actually called Gabriel himself. My uncle. Our uncle.”
“How then can you be named after him?” Stéphanie asked in her tetchy French accent.
Rashid wandered back from where he had been playing with his younger son and sat on the sand near Sabah who, in spite of the heat, remained cloaked in her abaya.
“Go on, Gabriel,” said Annie. “It’s a nice story.”
“Oh, do,” said Marie.
Clearly unsettled at finding himself the center of attention, Gabriel hesitated.
Annie felt a pull of compassion. He had probably grown accustomed to averted eyes in recent months, but now these people were staring, waiting, as if asking him to account for himself, not simply for his name.
“Our mother’s brother, Jack, died with the name ‘Gabriel’ on his lips.”
“He said it over and over, during his last days,” Annie put in.
“But no one knew who Gabriel was,” Gabriel went on. “Jack’s wife was called Helen, their sons were Declan and Paul, and nobody in the family knew anything about a Gabriel, so they had no idea how to fetch him. Still, he kept asking for this Gabriel. Even years later, my mother couldn’t speak of it without welling up, because she couldn’t forget the way he had looked at her, pleading. She asked him where he was, this person, but Jack could barely speak.
“So, determined to find this man, she went through all Jack’s papers, his address books, his desk, and one day she even pulled every single book he owned off the shelves and looked through them for a note or a name on the flyleaf, anything.”
“That’s one of my earliest memories,” said Annie. “I must have been about four, and I remember all these books falling off the shelves at Jack’s house, raining down on us, with Mam leafing through them, like a madwoman.”
“What about his wife?” asked Stéphanie. “Did she not know?”
“She’d left him years before,” Annie explained, “so it was just Mam nursing him through his illness. He was only forty-nine.”
“And all the time she was looking for Gabriel,” said Gabriel, “it turned out she was expecting me.”
“Did she ever find him?”
Gabriel shook his head. “No. My namesake has never been tracked down or been found lurking in old papers. Not one clue. The family concluded that there must have been a son. Our cousins, Declan and Paul, still wonder if some bloke will one day roll up on their doorstep claiming to be their brother, but Mam has her own theory.”
Marie swallowed a large mouthful of food. “Which is?”
“A love affair,” said Annie.
“Ah,” said Stéphanie, “of course.”
Annie nodded. “It wasn’t spoken about, but it was fairly obvious why his marriage had failed.”
“When I was born,” Gabriel went on, “she wanted to pay homage to the love she had witnessed for the unknown Gabriel.”
“So you were named after a stranger,” said Stéphanie.
“Yes, and the only thing Mam knew about him was that somebody loved him, a lot, and that’s good enough for me. Better than being the namesake of some twerp with wings.”
“In the Quran,” Rashid said, vaguely, gazing down the strand, “the angel Gabriel is called Jibril.”
By day, Prudence stayed around more often, wandering about the house, eating the apples or lying on the cushioned bench, sleeping, staring, smiling if he passed. She even read, or at any rate flicked the pages of his few magazines, leafing through them again and again. He suspected she didn’t see what she was looking at; it was a movement, something for her hands to do.
“How does it work for you?” he asked one afternoon. “Do you decide, ‘I’ve had enough now, I’m going home?’ Do you call it home, wherever it is that you go?”
When she was with him, she said, she knew of nowhere else, and she came because she wanted to be in that quiet place, where she could listen to the sea and lie with him.
Dutifully, Gabriel phoned his parents every few weeks, the calls coming toward him, days out, like a slow-moving storm that could not be avoided. His parents’ voices would echo and bounce along the line and only the expense of the call saved him from anything more than fleeting inquiries. His father’s anger had not subsided. He said each time, “I’ll get your mother,” and she would say each time, “Is it very hot?”
Dutifully, he visited Annie as often as he could bear to leave the house, because he wanted to see her and to work on her.
