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 into his shirt. He couldn’t remember how to speak.
“Gabriel?”
He pulled back his shoulders and looked up at the harsh brown hills. “I . . . tourists. They’d come in their hordes if they could only get into the country.”
“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
