He had always known he would see her again. Even so, he could never have been ready for it.
Her phone beeped. She reached for it, read a text. Her hands were shaking. No longer composed and unflappable, like in the old days. It confused him. All this confused him, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, as long as he kept her in his sights.
She held the phone briefly to her chest, before putting it back into her bag.
“Hello again,” he said, standing over her.
Her eyes jumped up, but her expression flattened. Disappointment, clear as day.
“May I?” he asked, sitting down.
“No.” She stood up. “I’m sorry, I . . . I’m meeting someone.” She slipped past him, left the lounge and headed off to the left, in the direction of the ladies’ restroom. He followed as far as the lobby, where he collided with a woman who, like him, had her eyes on the flash of Irish skirt disappearing around the corner. “Sorry,” she said, and changed direction to follow it.
Back at the office, he stared at the map.
The following afternoon, she sprouted like a porpoise from the deep waters of Wadi Shab, just as he arrived at the pool. Without seeing him, she kicked under again and disappeared. Always her strong suit: disappearing.
His three women, gasping for breath, had collapsed on a rock nearby, and Abid—no better man, he thought—was sitting near the water with an American woman, whose voice droned tonelessly: “The skeleton of a monstrous highway spans the mouth of Wadi Shab, one of Oman’s beauty spots, an eyesore, built by Indians for the Chinese.”
With one eye on the fluttering water, he wondered why this woman was telling Abid what he already knew, but she went on, “The new colonialism. China is sucking the ores out of Africa and the fish from the Pacific, and here in Oman . . .”
Seeing him arrive, Abid jumped to his feet to greet him, and it was then he noticed that the American was speaking into a palm-sized Dictaphone. She glanced at him—it was the woman who had bumped into him the day before—and went on talking to herself.
His luck was in. He had taken a chance that they would set off on their second day, as most tourists did, including his three charges, Heather, Betty and Sue. Back in Muscat, he had grabbed the trio of Englishwomen like a kid grabbing sweets—he had to be on the road in order to run into her again—and had set off along the standard route, confident of eventually crossing paths. His clients weren’t as nifty as he would have liked. It had been slow-going in the wadi, as he led them along a sandy track through a gathering of palm trees, then out into the widening gorge. They had struggled across the stones—he was going too fast—and exhaled relief when they reached the shaded path that ran between the canyon walls. At ground level, the cliffs were smooth as ice, and almost as white, but farther up, beyond the reach of flood waters, they were gnarled and pockmarked with narrow caves. Hetty, as they called Heather, and Betty had rested on a concrete slab under a lip of rock, while Sue, the younger one—at sixty-two—contemplated jumping into the square pool below the path, until he asked how she planned to get out again, given the sheer walls that surrounded it. So they had carried on, dipping their heads to get past overhanging rocks and had finally emerged, hot and sweaty, at this silvery pool, where he had found Abid and the American and everything he was looking for.
The porpoise came up for air, shook her head, wiped her face, and saw him.
“Hello again,” he said.
“Hello.” She swam toward the stony, crescent-shaped beach.
The American looked up. “You guys know each other?”
“Yes,” he said.
“No,” she said, squeezing her nose. “We’ve never met before.”
“Now that’s just not true,” he teased. “We were at Bimmah together yesterday.”
Like a basking shark, she hovered above the stones in the shallows. “But not before then.”
“If you insist.”
“Well, if you insist, you’ll know my name.”
He stiffened. Caught.
Abid put a hand on his shoulder. “Let me introduce—this is Thea, and here is Kim. And this is my very good friend, Jibril. Like the angel.”
He leaned forward to shake Kim’s hand, saying, “Gabriel.”
“Pleased to meet you. Are you like the angel?”
“My mother clearly hoped so.”
“There’s a hill in West Cork called Mount Gabriel.”
All three looked down at Thea. Yes, he thought. Thea.
“I came across it recently when I’d ended up in Schull by mistake,” she went on, “and had to complete a loop to get back to Durrus—along the back road that skirts Mount Gabriel.”
“Where were you trying to get to?” Gabriel asked.
“The last house before America.”
He smiled, transposed, transported already, by that dry gaze.
She lowered her face into the water; let her body float like a corpse. Gabriel noted that she had thickened a bit, like him, around the waist.
He turned to Kim, nodded at her Dictaphone. “Journo?”
“Sure am.”
“Special guests of the ministry, then?”
“Well, I’m the guest.” Kim jerked her head at Thea. “She’s along for the ride.”
So why the nervousness, he wondered, at the hotel, when she had looked like a cat on the edge of a highway?
“Thea and I were in Iraq together back in the eighties,” Kim explained unprompted, “and haven’t seen each other since, so I asked her to meet me here.”
Thea lifted her head and said derisively, “Asked?”
“Well, lured, I guess.”
“Lured,” Gabriel repeated.
“And it worked!” Kim shaded her eyes to look at Gabriel. “How about you? Doing the guided tour too, huh?”
“Yup.”
Thea pulled her knees under her. “Chuck over my towel, would you, Kim?”
Gabriel caught it and handed it to her as she made her way to the nearest rock, where she sat, drying her legs. Her eyes were drawn up, and up, until they found the azure sky. “It’s easy to forget, down here, that it’s a sunny day up
