“Dunno. It has a kind of atmosphere, I suppose.”
Rolf joined them in ebullient mood. As he sliced a mushy peach with meticulous care, he told Gabriel about a particular spot near Nakhal where he liked to paint.
Gabriel watched him fuss over the fruit, then suck its gooey slices into his mouth, disintegrating on his lips. She—the woman in the kitchen—had been holding an apple and, with her eyes fast on him, had bitten into it. Silently. No crunching. It confused him that he could not hear her munch in the dead quiet, but then she had dipped her head, walked past him and out of the room.
Annie was right. Must have been a dream, since dreams have no sound.
“Over and over,” Rolf was saying, with his forceful enthusiasm, “I’ll paint the Ghubrah Bowl until I catch its light and pin it down. You will see, this weekend, how it changes.”
After he had hurried off to work, Annie and Gabriel sat in silence. Annie turned her engagement ring around her finger with her thumb. Voices and screeches filtered in from the street.
“Well,” she said eventually, “I’ve a lot to do, packing and so on.”
“I can help.”
“It’s fine. You should go out, explore the town. You’ll only get under my feet otherwise.”
So Gabriel took himself through the suq where, for the first time, he properly opened his eyes to the Middle East. The narrow alleys, mostly shaded by corrugated-iron sheeting hanging over the shops, were busy enough, though nobody seemed to be in much of a hurry to get anywhere. There were scarcely any women about, and those he glimpsed were shrouded in black, so it was mostly the men who were buying the groceries, and sitting on the steps of their own shops—Indians, Arabs, Africans—calling out to Gabriel, some of them, in unintelligible Arabic. When he came to the seafront, the Corniche, he set off toward the old town, expecting to find it around the bend. The hills, which hugged Muttrah like a protective ring of friends, glowed in the morning sun, and below them white buildings—old merchants’ houses mostly, with roofed balconies and intricately latticed railings—curved along the sea in a graceful arc. Dhows bobbed about in the port, their prows raised and their back-ends boxy, like grand old dames wearing bustles. Gabriel stopped by the railing and, for a moment, could almost feel Max beside him, leaning on the railing also, his spectacles on the end of his long sweaty nose. He would have loved these beautiful boats. As kids, they had messed around in dinghies and talked of sailing the world together when they grew up.
On the horizon, oil tankers were waiting offshore. Muttrah formed a perfect natural harbor, a horseshoe of sea pressing into the coast. As Gabriel walked on, Muttrah Tower looked down on him from its perch on one of the hills.
Old Muscat was not where he’d thought it would be. He went around another bend, and another, until finally he skirted a hill and saw a gathering of houses tucked into the mouth of a ravine. A fort perched over it—al-Jalali Fort, perhaps, which had once looked out for the little town and its inhabitants. Gabriel’s legs were beginning to feel the walk, but he wandered between the low houses, climbing back streets, lifted by every minute of solitude and by every face that passed him wearing no expression of condemnation.
That evening, when they were all in the diwan—Rolf reading, Annie and Gabriel playing cards at a low table—Gabriel nudged Annie’s knee with his foot and nodded toward the door.
She glanced over her shoulder. “What?”
“Your mysterious guest.”
Annie looked around again, and back at him.
Gabriel spread out his hand. “Don’t you think we should be introduced?”
“What are you on about?”
“I just saw her go into the kitchen.”
“Gabriel,” she said wearily.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Dreaming again, am I?”
His sister’s shoulders seemed to retract, come closer to her body. “There’s nobody here except us.”
“In this room, maybe, but there is somebody in the kitchen.”
Annie put down her cards, pushed herself up from the floor and went through to the kitchen. Gabriel followed. “Nobody in here either.”
Perplexed, he leaned over her shoulder.
Annie gave him a sharp, steady look. “Don’t start having visions, Gabriel. We have quite enough on our plates at the moment without you going doolally.” She went back to the diwan and, as she sat down, Gabriel caught her rolling her eyes at her husband, which forced him to acknowledge the other dialog that was going on—the one between the two of them to which he was not party, the one about him. That look of impatience and irritation accentuated his exclusion.
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.
