She turned, smiled. “Hello.”
“Hello, you.”
The intimacy ricocheted. Her smile slipped into confusion; she edged away.
Bringing his voice, his being, up from depths, he managed to say, “What kept you?”
She looked back. “I’m sorry?”
“What kept you so long?”
“I . . . I think you must be mistaking—”
“Not that I’m complaining,” he added quickly, moving closer. “It’s so great to see you.”
“—me for someone else.”
Their voices bounced around the buff brown cylinder in which they stood. He put his hands on his waist, smiling. “Oh, come on, I’ve thickened out a bit, but I haven’t changed that much, have I?”
“I’m afraid I don’t . . .” Another glance up at the other tourists.
Who was she with? And what was she doing? How could she not recognize him? Know him?
“Must be some mistake,” she said, and stepped unsteadily away, avoiding the small underwater boulders which stood in her way. Ripples in multiple arcs set off from her shins across the pool, like an eager armada. Distracted, she watched them go all the way to the wall beyond.
A young Omani family was coming down to the water, but their little girl, about six years old, was stranded halfway, too nervous to tackle the vertiginous steps in either direction. She cried, but her parents teased her affectionately and wandered over to the water’s edge. Unable to bear her isolation—halfway up, halfway down—he went over to the steps and up to her, offering his hand. After a moment’s hesi-tation, her deep brown eyes considering him, the child held out her little hand and allowed him to lead her down.
As he did so, the woman in the flowing skirt came past them with a cursory nod and made her way up the steps. As soon as the child was safely with her parents, he hurried after her. This required a change of tack, but he didn’t mind—the rules had always been fluid. He didn’t mind about anything anymore.
The child’s father called up to him in English, thanking him for rescuing his daughter. “Not at all,” he called back from the top. “She’ll be climbing Everest before you know it.” The family’s laughter burbled up from the pit.
“You’re Irish?” The woman had turned on the landscaped path at the sound of his voice.
“Yeah.”
“So we possibly have met, but I’m afraid I . . .” She gesticulated toward her head, as if it wasn’t the one that should have been on her neck. “Must be jetlag—I flew in early this morning. I’m afraid I just can’t place you.”
Through the dark screens of their shades, his eyes caught hers. She was looking at him sideways, as if playing her life backward and forward through all the people she had known, the places she had worked, in search of him.
“I knew you’d come back.”
“Come back? Oh, I’ve never been to Oman before,” she said, with obvious relief that it was he who’d got it wrong, “This is my first time. I gather January is the best month to visit.”
If she hadn’t been so beautiful still—her auburn hair twisted up in a twirl—and her chin as flawlessly curved, he would have argued, but he was too overcome. “Right,” he said, nodding. He’d play it this way, her way, whatever way.
She appeared to be alone. Reaching into her bag for her camera, she leaned over the rim of the sinkhole and photographed the water in a distracted manner. Then she looked at her watch and took a deep breath; a nervous breath.
He tailed her along the path to the parking lot. “Are you. . . here on business?”
“Holiday. With a friend,” she added, then veered off to the restrooms with a dismissive “Bye, now.”
When she came out, he was leaning against his 4x4, chatting to her taxi driver, who had confirmed that she had arrived that morning—but where had she been in the interim and why was she here now? Long-standing questions were finally, suddenly, within grasp of their answers.
With a glance in his direction, she got into the taxi.
He leaned over and looked in at her. “See you around,” he said, because he would.
That afternoon at the Grand Hyatt, thanks to the indiscretion of her taxi driver, he found her in the tea lounge, where she was sitting deep in a couch, staring up at the perplexing centerpiece—a life-size bronze statue of a horseman with a falcon perched on his wrist. Newcomers always stared at it in this way soon after noticing that, every time they looked back at it, another angle of the statue seemed to be facing them. They turned so slowly, the horse and the man and the falcon, that people didn’t immediately realize it was revolving.
Taking a seat under one of the canopies, which aped Bedouin tents on either side of the entrance, he watched her, unseen. She kept glancing around the ornate hall—at the cream and gold décor, the broad staircase and the huge stained-glass window—and seemed even more agitated than she had been that morning. Every time people came over from the lobby or up the stairs, her head swung around in jittery expectation.
Who? he wondered. Who?
The Vietnamese waitress, wearing a long skirt with a slit right up the side, placed a cup and saucer, napkin and teapot on his table. Around him, men and women did business, their global conversations spreading out in threads, face to face, phone to phone, wireless to wireless. The world at work.
“When are you flying back?”
“. . . not organized like a European market . . .”
“And this is Thierry—he’s in charge of our after-service.”
Omanis. Gulf Arabs. Western women wearing Eastern modesty. Prudence also had dressed with decorum, he noted now, and had changed since that morning into a long-sleeved navy shirt and a straight linen skirt, with big earrings and silver bangles—good look, elegant but funky. She had aged even less than he might have expected. It was so thrilling, so surprising, to see her out in the world that his mouth was
