Thea’s phone beeped. She opened the text from Alex: All home n having dinner in front of telly. Boys good. Me too. How you? V cold here, so enjoy! Thea stared at his words. The humdrum of marriage, the predictability, the rituals and routines were dull, dull, dull, perhaps, but also comforting, enhancing; thrilling in their intimacy. And yet, when an unknown person, an undeniably odd person, had crossed her path, she had allowed herself to be sucked in and titillated.
When she looked up again, Kim had taken out her laptop and was hammering away, her fingers like spiders scurrying across the keys. Spiders on a mission.
They wandered, with Abid and Gabriel, through the neat, modern suq of Nizwa, among rust-colored arcades where, in brightly lit shops, they browsed through jewelry and pistols, camel sticks and incense burners. Thea strayed from the others. By remaining aloof, she was punishing Gabriel, unfairly perhaps, but he could hardly have expected sympathy. In one shop, she mindlessly tried on an old ring, so the shopkeeper started bringing out ring after silver ring and placing them on the glass counter. Many were grubby, misshapen; she tried them all.
Gabriel’s arm came over her shoulder, offering a ring with a flat, square top. “Found it in a box at the back.”
She loved it, wanted it.
“Let me get it for you.”
“Absolutely not.” She parted with her cash as a warning to him.
“Quite right. Et dona ferentes. Beware Greeks bearing gifts.”
“You aren’t Greek.”
Elsewhere, he pulled out a musket with silver inlay and a long, thin barrel. “And this for your husband, perhaps?”
“Thank you, but he won’t ever need such a thing.”
They ate somewhere. A spartan place with chicken on the menu and soccer on the television. Kim sat opposite Gabriel, her eyes ablaze. Outwardly, her curiosity seemed no more intrusive than when she had engaged him in banter about the paranormal, but the questions were more incisive, more adroit. She was wasted in travel, Thea thought, and Kim clearly did too.
“So after all this time,” she asked him, “you really remain immune to the common folklore?”
Gabriel slid his fingers down his upright fork, flipped it around and did the same again, and again. He never stopped moving, fidgeting. If his hands were still, his knees jigged. “I grew up in Ireland,” he said, “and remained immune to our common folklore.”
“But in Ireland you never had the kind of experience you’ve had here.”
“Who says?”
“I . . . well,” said Kim, “I’m assuming.”
“Assumption is dangerous.”
Thea stared into the menu. Chicken, chicken. With rice. With roast potatoes. With couscous. On a kebab. In soup. With stuffing.
“I suppose it has already occurred to you that your lover was neither jinniya nor real,” Kim went on, “but some illusory creation of your own making?”
“Well,” Gabriel rested his elbows on the table, “there’s fantasy, and then there’s the real thing, if you get my drift.”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
“Oh, I am.”
“Perhaps she was some manifestation of your inner demons?”
The waiter came. They ordered.
“You must have some?” Kim persisted.
“Demons?” Gabriel handed the menus to the waiter. “Absolutely. But my demons are ugly devils, and she was—is—very beautiful.”
He was enjoying this, Thea realized. Toying with Kim in order to flirt with her.
Kim was not the same person Thea had known in Iraq. Neither was she anyone else. It was difficult to transpose her from the eighties in Baghdad to Oman in the twenty-first century, because then they had been young and game, starting out. Now they were slightly worn down and strangers of sorts, but it was lovely to be with Kim again and to like her still. This trip, it transpired, was a journey neither forward nor back. In the moment, they were friends again, and loyal.
On the overhead television some soccer player with dreadlocks scored a goal and leaped about in self-congratulation. “Abid,” Thea said, without any warning to herself, “in all your years in tourism, have you ever come across a hotel manager called Sachiv Nair? We knew him in Baghdad, but he grew up in Oman, and he might have come—”
“I knew him,” said Gabriel.
Kim’s eyes shot to Thea and back to Gabriel.
“You remember him, Abid,” he went on. “Worked with the Taj group.”
Chewing, with a scrap of bread in hand, Abid raised his eyebrows.
“Is he still here?” Kim’s voice was scratchy.
It was as well she interceded because Thea couldn’t breathe. It was as if she had imbibed some curious potion and it was rising in her, shading her from the neck up.
Gabriel ripped bread. “Mauritius, last I heard. But that was a few years ago.”
“Ah, yeah,” said Abid. “Tall guy.”
“He set up a hotel in Musandam Province,” said Gabriel. “Got married when he was based there.”
Oh, isn’t he just having a blast of an evening? Thea thought. Kim probing, and now this, for her, a stinging whip of words.
Kim ran her hand around the back of her neck. “He left his first wife?”
Gabriel shook his head. “He was a widower when I first knew him.”
Tiredness, melting into the inexplicable, made for a moulded confusion behind Thea’s sand-sore eyes. Sleep had not dislodged the dusty particles scraping the lids because there had been no sleep. She had tossed about, as had become the norm, her head buzzing. Sachiv—a widower! His children had lost their mother and the chess champion had probably never reached her potential. So sad, for all of them.
In spite of what she had said so adamantly to Gabriel in the tent, the past was not an empty room. Not at all. Kim’s cards, when they had started arriving in the autumn, had thrown her into a reflective, restless mood. Whenever she’d managed to catch a moment’s solitude, she had taken to sitting on the bench they had placed between two apple trees on a small hill beside the house, and gazed across the sloping lawn to the wooded valley below. A slow whirring had started up in the back catalogues of her mind, a slipstream
