Читать книгу Of Sea and Sand - Denyse Woods - Страница 8

In theory, Gabriel had come for a month; in practice, he knew he would never go back. Glancing out, and seeing jagged black mountains appear on the right of the aircraft, he gasped. He had thought he was beyond any such reaction, believing himself to be numb and numbed, too detached for wonder of any sort. Awe, he thought, was a luxury enjoyed by the emotionally alert, by those of enhanced perception, whereas he was dulled, blunted, now and forever, amen. And yet he had gasped when he had looked through the aircraft window and seen those magnificent angry edges scraping the blue-blue sky. It looked to be an inhospitable environment down there, but it could hardly be worse than the environment from which he had come.

He had been dispatched to stay with his sister in order to recover—not from a breakdown or a bout of serious illness (although he felt as if he’d had both) but from guilt. Shame, too. Pointless, he thought. What cure for shame? A change of scenery could hardly be expected to wipe it out. No, the only thing that could repair the damage was for time to go into reverse, to undo his steps and allow him another direction. Unfortunately, air travel could not offer the same facilities as time travel but, still, he had come away; although he could not undo the remorse, he could at least escape his parents’ wordless agony.

His heart burned. This was the beginning of an odyssey, one that had already failed, because it could not do otherwise, but he would nonetheless trudge along its way, going wherever it took him, never, ever, turning back. He would not even look over his shoulder. He would not return to Ireland, or see again her lumpen skies, her slate headlands or creamy beaches. It was a heavy price, yet no price at all.

His brother-in-law met him at the airport with a cursory handshake—scarcely a welcome; more an acknowledgment of his arrival. Gabriel, it seemed, had traveled three thousand miles to receive the same chilling treatment he’d been enduring at home. The airport building was small, dusty. Men wearing long white dishdashas and skullcaps stood around chatting, but offered a nod and a greeting, “Welcome to Muscat. Ahlan,” as Rolf led the way out into the sunshine and across to the parking lot.

As they drove into town, Gabriel noticed, along the shoreline, bundles of white boxy houses, like a crowd that had rushed to the coast and been brought to a halt by the sea. Muscat looked like an outpost, a place on the edge. The edge of the sea, of the land, of Arabia. An ideal place to cower.

“This is Muttrah, actually,” Rolf said. “The town is spread out, and old Muscat is farther along, beyond those hills.” He pulled in behind some buildings. “We have to walk the last bit of the way.”

The March heat was manageable. Gabriel welcomed the sun on his shoulders—some warmth at last—as he followed Rolf along narrow, scrappy streets, where small shops were opening their shutters to the day and shopkeepers nodded as they passed. Space nudged itself between the compacted thoughts in Gabriel’s head, spreading their density, making elbow room. For weeks he had felt compressed, as if the air were tightening around him and would go on doing so until he was unable to think at all; a kind of mental suffocation.

They turned up to the right and followed a curved lane, with houses pulled tight on either side, until they came to a corner house. “This is it,” said Rolf. “We won’t be here much longer. Our new place will be ready soon, but for now . . .” He pushed open the low wooden door and stood back.

Gabriel dipped his head and stepped straight into a white living room. Immediately he saw Annie, and felt relief. She came through a doorway at the back, wiping her hands on a tea towel. They embraced. “How are you?” she asked.

“Wrecked.”

They were close, Annie and Gabriel. No better person, he thought. No other person. If there was any hope for him at all, it lay in the understanding and soothing ministrations of his sister. At least he could bear to be with her.

“Come, come,” Rolf said, trying to get past them.

“Nice,” Gabriel said, looking around. The whitewashed room was sparsely furnished, with bench seating, draped in fabrics the colors of sunsets, along two sides, and a narrow window allowed one beam of sunlight to target the floor. A breakfast table and chairs stood near an entrance that led into a small kitchen, beside which another opening led to the rest of the house. They had impeccable taste. Annie was a stylish bird, he used to tell his friends—and Rolf was Swiss, a perfectionist in all things esthetic; and they had money, which helped. Rolf had been working for an oil company for years and had accrued his wealth on a fat expat, tax-free salary, which he generally referred to as “grocery money.” His only real interest was painting.

Annie stood, watching her brother.

Gabriel smiled. There was something in her he adored. Simplicity, perhaps; the way she got things right. He liked Rolf too, a pragmatic artist twelve years her senior.

She did not return his smile. She said, “Funny, you look like the same person you were two months ago.”

It cut right through. So this was how it was going to be.

She went into the kitchen. “Tea?”

“Great, thanks. Mam gave me some for you. Tea, I mean. Bags and . . . well, leaves.”

“Rolf, would you show Gabriel his room?”

Gabriel followed his brother-in-law up a narrow whitewashed stairwell to a room that stood alone on the top floor. “A little tight,” said Rolf, “but cooler in the hot weather. It gets the sea breeze.”

“It’s perfect. Thanks.”

Rolf seemed on the point of saying something. Gabriel hoped he wouldn’t. He was only just off the plane, for Christ’s sake. Couldn’t they keep the recriminations until later? With a blink, Rolf seemed to reach the same conclusion. “Bathroom one floor down, I’m afraid. Come down when you’re ready.”

Gabriel moved backward to the bed and sat on its hard surface. His hands were trembling. In his own sister’s house, he was shaking. What had he hoped for? Compassion? Yes, a little. He scratched his forehead, entertained, almost, by his own narcissism, because only undiluted ego could have allowed him to expect open arms and a shoulder to lean on. And he was fearful now, because if Annie could not forgive him, no one ever would.

He had a quick shower, changed into lighter clothes, and went downstairs. Rolf and Annie were in another room—long and quite formal, with a blood-red hue about it, set off by dark red rugs and drapes. The seating, which ran along the wall, was low and soft and covered in cushions and bolsters.

“Nice,” he said.

“This is the diwan,” said Annie. “We use it all the time, but in traditional houses it’s like the reception room, used for special occasions.”

“Ah, like the Sunday room at home. Never used except when the priest calls.”

They were sitting rather stiffly in front of a tray (thermos jug, three glasses, bread and fruit—he was hungry suddenly), looking like stern parents who had discovered their teenager had been smoking pot in his room.

Gabriel tried to lighten the mood. “You two look like you’re about to give me a major telling-off.”

Annie leaned forward to pour. “What good would that do?”

“Might make you feel better.” He sat down.

“You think so?” she said, one eyebrow arched, her eyes on the stream of urine-colored liquid flowing from the jug.

They sipped their tea as Gabriel looked around at their accumulated artifacts: Eastern rugs, heavy timber chests, daggers with adorned silver hilts. How easily Annie wore this life, he thought. He envied her. He wished he’d done it. Got out. Away. Before he’d had to.

The tea was served in the small glasses and bitter without milk. He was a man who enjoyed a great wallop of milk in his tea, but he would get used to it, just as he must get used to other things. Like the light—so very bright, white almost, and cheering, as it shone through windows high in the wall. Gabriel felt the change of air, of country and continent, in his blood, which already seemed to be flowing thinner through his veins. “So this is an old-fashioned sultanate, yeah?” he asked. “And the sultan deposed his own father?”

Rolf nodded. “Twelve years ago, in 1970.”

“Sounds pretty cheeky. There’s no dissent?”

“He’s doing a lot for the country,” said Rolf. “There were nine schools in 1970, but schools and hospitals are opening every week now, and transport is improving, with new roads heading out in every direction. So of course he’s popular, but he’s low-key.”

Annie was nibbling on a corner of bread—nervously, Gabriel realized. Christ.

Rolf cleared his throat and grasped at conversational straws. “So, umm, you’ve escaped the deep freeze.”

Gabriel nodded. “That’s long over.”

Annie’s curiosity dived around her rectitude, like a rugby player getting over the line. “What was it like?”

“Bloody cold is what it was like. We didn’t have the snow they had in Dublin, but even in Cork people struggled to get about. Ice everywhere.” He wanted to add, Just like there is right here.

“Sandra wrote and said there was a lovely atmosphere, everyone helping out and being cheerful and stuff.”

“Yeah, I cleared quite a few driveways.”

And that was all it took for Annie to swerve right back into disapproval. “I should hope so. But doing good deeds for the neighbors won’t change anything.”

“Annie,” Rolf said quietly.

Gabriel turned to him with a sheepish glance. “Thanks, Rolf, for . . . fixing this. I hope it wasn’t too much hassle getting me that certificate thing.”

His brother-in-law lifted, then dropped one shoulder in a half-shrug.

“What does it mean—a ‘No Objection Certificate’?”

“It’s a type of visa. Oman is loosening up a bit, but you still have to be sponsored by an employer to get in.”

“So how did you pull it off? Do I have to work for someone?”

Rolf shook his head. “I explained your—our—circumstances to a well-connected friend of mine, Rashid al-Suwaidi. He owns an import‒export company and has other interests. He organized the paperwork.”

“Did you have to . . .”

Rolf gave him the hard eye.

“You know—baksheesh, or whatever it’s called.”

“Bribe him, you mean? He’s a friend, Gabriel. He did it for us. So for God’s sake don’t make any trouble for him.”

Gabriel raised his hands in apology.

Rolf stood up. “Baksheesh! Is that the extent of your understanding of this part of the world? The Arabs understand friendship better than any nation. Don’t forget that. I must go to work, Annie.”

“Don’t be late,” she said anxiously, as if she feared being left alone with her younger brother.

After he left, silence settled on them, like sepia over a print. Although it had been ages since they had had any proper time alone together, Annie had little to say, it seemed, and Gabriel even less. “So, you like it here?”

“You know I do.” With one finger, she pushed a corner of flatbread, smeared with honey, across her plate. “Even more than I expected, in fact. I’ve made great friends.” She put down her glass. “It’s a pretty good life, all in all.”

Annie was the only remaining person whom Gabriel could look straight in the eye, but it pained him to do so now, because there was only sadness there, and he could see a weight around her, as if the dense atmosphere that had been strangling him was also hugging her, curbing her movements. And that was him. He was the very density that restricted her.

She cleared her throat. “So, what do you want to do while you’re here?” she asked, as if he were some kind of tourist.

“What is there to do?”

“Well, there’s loads to see—mountains, desert, sea. People go fishing and snorkeling, but Rolf paints when he’s off work, which might be a bit dull for you.”

She made it sound like a personal reproach, which was another low blow. It had been Gabriel, after all, who had picked Rolf out of the crowd in a pub and had engaged him in conversation at the bar. Introductions were made, drinks were bought, and Annie was unobtrusively proffered. “Come and join us,” Gabriel had said to the visitor. “I’m with my sister.” With a formal nod and almost a click of his heels, Rolf declared himself to be enchanted when they were introduced at the small round table in the corner, though Annie was less impressed. He’d looked like an old bloke to her, but Gabriel had persevered, inviting him back to their home for supper, after which Rolf took over, wooing Annie in a quiet, discreet sort of way. Gabriel knew, instinctively, that he was the perfect life partner for his adored second self, and when the time had come for Rolf to leave Ireland, Annie found it inexplicably difficult to let him go. She had become accustomed to his presence, to the quiet fuss he made of her, to his curious English and his solid, attractive frame, so Gabriel told her to follow, even though that meant going to Oman, where Rolf had been working for some years. To her own surprise, she was easily persuaded. Her job in the bank was dull, the news always bad, with one or another atrocity reported daily from Northern Ireland, and the Republic was gray, grim, and sinking deeper into recession. The Arabian Gulf and the twinkling white town of Muscat, which Rolf had described, were, in contrast, attractive propositions.

They had married after a short courtship—it was the only way for her to reside in Oman, and now, two years later, she was hoping to become pregnant.

“You should get some rest,” she said suddenly. “You look exhausted. Aren’t you sleeping?”

A sliver of concern shows through at last, Gabriel thought. “Are any of us sleeping?”

“We’ve been invited out this evening. Dinner with friends,” she said. “I accepted on your behalf.”

Annie was slight, always had been. Pale of complexion, with short brown hair and livid blue eyes (unlike either of her brown-eyed brothers), she looked younger than she was—gamine; more like twenty-two than twenty-eight. Her long spindly fingers, like spiders’ legs, were never still—as now—rolling bits of torn-off bread between her fingertips. She kept her eyes on her hands when she went on, “There isn’t much in the way of nightlife. The Intercontinental, mostly. So we socialize a lot in one another’s houses. . . . Anyway, our friends are keen to meet you.”

“I’ll bet.”

She looked up. “You don’t think I’ve told them? Good God, why would I do that?”

“You haven’t said anything?”

“No. I didn’t feel I had much choice. Anyway, it’s bad enough that my friends at home are gossiping about us over their coffee-breaks.” She rubbed her hands together in an abstracted way. “Still, the story’s losing its legs now.”

“Who told you that?”

“Aunt Gertie. She’s been great. Writing every week. She’s the only person who seems to realize what it’s like for me over here, out of the loop.”

“You’re far better off.”

“Oh, am I? Away from Mam, at a time like this? Have you any idea how hard it was to come back last month? Only I had no choice, had I? Because you needed somewhere to run away to!”

This was not it, not it at all. Gabriel had believed he was coming to Muscat to be comforted by someone who loved him unconditionally, and therefore forgave him. Instead, she was hissing and spitting and twisted with hurt. There would be no reprieve here.

“It’s so hard at times like this,” she said, her voice breaking, “being away.”

“I suppose.” It seemed fair that she too should be allowed to believe that this was worse for her than for anyone else in the family. There had been a lot of that going on.

“But as far as our friends here are concerned,” she continued, “you’re on holiday, so perk up. Make an effort, please.”

Dinner with friends, Gabriel thought, going upstairs to rest. The prospect made him sweat, but at least they wouldn’t have to sit across a dining table, just the three of them, trying to duck the elephant.

It was difficult for Annie. She loved Gabriel; adored him. Sometimes she wondered about that, about whom she loved most and to whom she owed the greatest loyalty. Gabriel was a part of her, an extension. He had come the same way with her; they had come the same way together until he’d delivered her into Rolf’s safe hands. Into contentment. Initially, she had worried about finding love enough for both men, but had discovered room in her heart to accommodate her brother and her husband in comfort. Neither pushed the other aside; they could remain shoulder to shoulder, it seemed, and her loyalties need never be truly strained. As for their older brother, Max, well, everyone loved Max, and so did she, but when they were growing up, he wasn’t affectionate, cuddly, or approachable, and he’d always had work to do. By the time she was a teenager, she’d found him irritating, even embarrassing, and he was no fun; the grooves in his forehead were deep by the time he’d turned thirteen. Gabriel was the soft one, amenable. He and Annie looked out at the world from the same point of reference.

Annie had suspected, when she was younger, that it was on account of her partiality toward Gabriel that she believed him to be so much more talented than Max, but this was fact, not affection. Everyone knew it. Gabriel was hugely, instinctively gifted. He never had to work as hard as Max, but because his focus could meander, the gift eventually became limp. Where Max had passion, Gabriel had fun. Where Max was competitive, Gabriel was laissez-faire. If his big brother had outperformed him, if he had achieved greater things, it would have been because Gabriel allowed it. But for all his work, all his hours on the piano stool, Max’s playing had none of the edge of Gabriel’s sharp, intuitive expression. His interpretation, one teacher had said, was close to perfection. And yet, although applause and admiration were heaped upon him, he had had enough by the time he turned sixteen. He wanted a life, he had told his devastated parents, not the career of the concert pianist for which they, and the School of Music, had been grooming him since he was four. And so Max went after the laurels that everyone—teachers, examiners, and relatives—knew were rightfully Gabriel’s. But Gabriel, Annie used to tell her frustrated parents, had another gift—for living and giving, for friendship and humor.

They valued that not at all. Perhaps they were right.

Max had only his work, and they all admired him for it. They loved his peculiarities, his stooped frame hanging over the keyboard come what may, and the way he forgot to eat, sometimes even to wash. They loved him for his poor attempts at telling jokes, though he had no timing, except when he played, of course, and even that had been acquired through hard work. Perfection was the only mistress Max had ever sought.

Recently he had almost, almost, found her.

“This is my brother, Gabriel.”

Annie waved in his direction as they stepped into a square hallway, and a tall, dark-haired Frenchwoman reached out. “Gabriel, how lovely,” she said, shaking his hand. She looked like a long black pencil. “I’m Stéphanie. Come and meet the others.”

In a broad living room, two other couples stood up as they came in. He didn’t take in their names, but tried hard, for Annie, to adopt some kind of great-to-be-here expression. Keen. He had to seem keen, to appear as though he had come of his own volition, but the assembled guests, it turned out, weren’t particularly interested in him. Small talk rushed in behind the introductions. Expat gossip. He sat mute, feeling like a prize idiot. Baksheesh. Ignorant bastard. Books about Oman had been thin on the ground in Cork, but Annie had left a couple behind, which Gabriel had read while waiting to leave, so he knew about the Portuguese, the British, and the battle of Dhofar. He knew to expect desert and mountains and longed to learn something of Bedouin ways. These had been his expectations of Oman—rudimentary, perhaps, but not unreasonable—and yet the first word he had assigned to this culture was “baksheesh,” which came from he knew not what preconceived notion. He still felt the sharp sting of his worldly brother-in-law’s rebuke.

He turned his attention to the assembled company: Stéphanie’s husband, Mark, was a dapper Englishman, even sporting a silk cravat; Joan, a woman in her forties probably, wore a long skirt and cheesecloth top, and looked as if she had fallen off the hippie wagon, keeping the clothes, but rejecting the lifestyle, to live in air-conditioned comfort in the Gulf. Her husband wore pristine whites and had such highly arched eyebrows that he looked like he was about to take off. Marie, clearly a good friend of Annie, and her husband, Jasper, also English, were warm and engaging.

It wasn’t until they were seated at the dining-table that they turned their attention to Gabriel, with a rush of questions. How long would he be staying? What did he hope to do during his holiday? How was he finding Muscat? He had little to say on that score—all he had seen of Muscat was a small airport with two huge sabers over the entrance, some gray-gold hills and a short stretch of seafront, where he had walked with Annie in the late afternoon.

Joan, leaning her forearms on the edge of the table, said, “Annie was telling us that you’re a musician.”

“A teacher, actually. I teach piano.” They all looked at him, expecting more. “At the School of Music in Cork.”

“So are you in between terms right now?” Stéphanie asked, perplexed.

Fair question, since it was mid-March, but how was it, he wondered, that people sniffed out the holes in any story without even knowing there were any to be filled? “No,” he said. “I’ve taken a leave of absence.”

That silenced them, but a change of topic only made things worse when Joan said, in a pert, determined tone, “Annie, I haven’t seen you since before Christmas! How was your brother’s wedding?”

“Not this brother, I hope,” Jasper quipped. “Unless you’ve run away from your new wife already?”

Gabriel smiled.

Joan persisted: “Did you find something to wear? You were fretting, I seem to remember, about finding something elegant but warm.”

Annie chewed a mouthful of lamb at length, as if hoping for inspiration, then swallowed, reaching for her glass, and said, “We stopped off in Rome and I got a dress there.”

That at least was not a lie, Gabriel thought.

“It must have been a wonderful day,” Joan went on. “I always think winter weddings must be so romantic. Did it snow? Winter Wonderland and all that?”

Annie turned her glass between her fingers before saying, “Mmm. It was lovely. No snow, but a great day.”

Gabriel frowned at her. Rolf frowned at him.

“I don’t think it’s romantic at all,” said Marie. “I’ve never understood why anyone could possibly want to get married in the winter. The bride must have been perishing, poor thing.”

“Oh, she was,” Annie said, turning her eyes to Gabriel. “Perishing.”

Pressed for more details, Annie got off to a halting start, but then the words, the fables, began to flow out: she described the wedding, related key moments and amusing anecdotes, and even made Rolf and Gabriel smile indulgently when she looked to them for confirmation that this or that had been the funniest, most touching moment. It was altogether bizarre: a conspiracy of invention.

The wedding chat exhausted, the guests turned their attention back to Gabriel, pushing forth suggestions of how he should use his time and telling him he must see this and this, and mustn’t miss that.

Mesmerized, exhausted, he had never worked so hard to be courteous to people who meant nothing to him, but he would have feigned interest in a babbling parrot if it would help him regain his sister’s respect. Looking at her face now was like gazing up from within a deep pit to see her peering over the rim, down at him.

“Why did you say all that about the wedding?” he asked her from the back of the car after they’d left. “You don’t have to protect me, you know.”

“I’m not protecting you. I’m protecting myself. Besides, one lie is much the same as the next. I went with the happy lie.”

“But how can you sustain it? Isn’t Marie a close friend of yours?”

“Yes, and I’ll tell her . . . in my own time.” After a moment she said, “I mean, they’ll think we’re a very odd family.” Rolf put his hand on her lap. “But we’re not . . . or we weren’t, or at least I didn’t think we were.”

Gabriel knew better than to speak, since he was the one who had given the family this new perception of itself. He looked out. The night lights of Muscat told him little about the town, but when they continued on foot, after parking the car, the dark, quiet alleys that led to the house spoke louder. This was a secretive place; much was held in behind the thick walls. Probing deeper into the warren of back streets, Muttrah felt like a den. His den. He and his shame could hide out there, he thought, for quite a while, undisturbed.

When they came into the house Annie went to the kitchen; Rolf followed her, while Gabriel, near-blind with exhaustion, said goodnight and went up the stairs, but stopped when he heard Annie say to Rolf, “I wanted to tell them. I wanted to say, ‘This is why he is here. This is what he has done.’”

“But you didn’t,” Rolf said, in his most pragmatic tone, “and you mustn’t. He didn’t come here to be judged, and you, my darling, you of all people, must not judge him.”

“Why not? Why should I not? Everyone else does!”

Gabriel could not move without revealing that he was still on the stairs.

“This is how we change,” Annie went on. “I turned my head and he became someone else. Do you think I should try to save what’s left of him? Of my Gabriel?”

“I think it’s best you let that Gabriel go.”

“I wish I could. And I wish I could leave. Get away. If I don’t, I’m afraid I might hurl a glass across the room and cut his face. I want to cut his beautiful archangel face!”

Gabriel went on up. Short of breath, he passed his bedroom and climbed to the top of the house, where a wooden door led onto a small rooftop balcony. He stepped out and stood, fingers in hip pockets. In spite of stars aplenty, galaxies crowding, and a glow coming off the streetlights on the seafront, it was still, somehow, a dark night. Between the stars, the sky was black as oil and deep. Perhaps all Arabian nights were this black.

He tried to root himself in place, not time, to blot out why he came to be there. It took quite an effort to strip away the circumstances, but a slow intake of warm night air and the sight of a minaret along the bay brought him properly to Oman. He thought about the invaders and the traders sailing into this cozy cove over the centuries. Arriving in their long wake, he felt the history in the soles of his feet and saw it in the towers that overlooked the town from the surrounding hills. The three Muscat forts, Rolf had said, were built in the sixteenth century when the Portuguese, alarmed by the size of Oman’s navy, occupied this coast to protect their route to the Indian Ocean. Now it was one of the busiest waterways in the world, and the lights Gabriel could see on the blinking horizon were oil tankers, no doubt, plying back and forth.

The dinner party had been the first social event he had attended in months, the first time he had been part of light conversation, had eaten a meal in lively company. It was a relief that nobody had known anything about anything. He had been prepared to face further reprobation, and even though a bunch of strangers could inflict no greater humiliation than he had endured in his own tight neighborhood at home, he was grateful for his sister’s discretion. In Muscat he could breathe, was breathing already, in spite of Annie’s froideur. How deeply aggrieved she must be, he thought, to go to such lengths to disguise the events that had brought him here. She had almost convinced Gabriel that Max’s wedding had been a grand shindig, so much so that, listening to her describe it in fantastical detail, he had vicariously enjoyed what had not happened, and never would.

“Max, Max, Max,” he said out loud, and the warm Muscat wind curved around him, like a longed-for embrace.

A shuffle of bare feet in the stairwell made him turn: Annie, coming to join him. Good. Perhaps they could talk here, with only the sky to eavesdrop. But no one emerged. He had heard her, he was sure of it. Stepping toward the door, he put his head inside. No Annie.

It was Geraldine who kept Annie awake, not Max. Geraldine, the perishing non-bride.

She had been, in Annie’s view, an entirely predictable event. Ten years earlier, she could have described to a T the woman who would one day drag Max away from his piano for just long enough to get him to the altar. Geraldine had made herself indispensable from the start, as if she had seen too many films in which able, slightly frumpy but frightfully sensible women take on those men who are not quite tuned in to the diurnal workings of a life and manage to make them function by reminding them to eat, show up for appointments, and change out of their pyjamas before leaving the house. Geraldine almost certainly seduced Max first—it would not have occurred to him to do so, and if she did not exactly propose to him, he most likely proposed under nifty direction. Everyone rejoiced: the family now had less cause to worry about Max because, with Geraldine’s help, the world made more sense to him, and he to it.

She had been endearingly excited about getting married and went for the full hoopla. This otherwise sensible woman in sensible clothes became altogether giddy when talking wedding dresses, bridesmaids, and banquets. Her dull purposefulness was lost in the romanticism of the event, and she even counted the days, she coyly admitted, from ten months out. When Annie had gone home for the summer, to avoid the murderous Omani heat, she shared in Geraldine’s excitement—somebody had to, since her brother frequently forgot that they were getting married at all and seemed bewildered whenever his fiancée mentioned entrées or invitations. So Annie became fellow plotter and even helped Geraldine select her dress. It was at least elegant, which could not be said of any other item of her clothing.

What of Geraldine now? she wondered, sitting up in her bed.

She got up, as had become her habit, and went to the kitchen, where she sat, desolate, pretending to wait for the kettle to boil. For all his oddities, Max was never a caricature; he wasn’t a nerd, quite, though his eyes were round and protruding, and his smile vaguely goofy. He was thin and gangly, and always wore drab V-neck sweaters (dirty gray and dull olive), with check shirts, inoffensive corduroys, and heavily rimmed glasses. He enjoyed watching soccer (he supported Liverpool, because his younger brother did), had few friends, and he liked for everything to be nice and for the people around him to be happy, so that he didn’t have to expend energy on their concerns. Most of the time, he simply wanted to think about musical scores.

He was an unassuming person and Annie liked him, but she loved Gabriel more. She still hoped that nobody would ever find this out. When she was little, having a favorite brother felt like a sin; as an adult, it felt unfair. But Gabriel was so much more accessible than Max and he knew her so well.

Until recently she had always believed that she knew him too. Now she had learned that there was something in Gabriel that none of them had known or seen, not even himself. She wanted to pretend that it had nothing to do with him, that he too was a victim, an innocent. It didn’t work. What he had done was part of him, was in him. It had come out. He could not disown it any more than Annie could, because there it was—out, for all to see, and horrible. She could not swallow when she thought of it, and often woke at night sweating, waving her hands over her head until Rolf took them and calmed her.

She felt ashamed: guilty by association. The truth was, she hadn’t wanted to be the one to put Gabriel back on his feet, but there was no one else to do it, and she owed it to their parents. Her job, and Rolf’s, was to gather him in, as only family could, and reconstitute him. Not punish him, but fix him, then put him back into the world with the fervent hope that he would never do anything like it again. The black patch that had shaded all their lives would surely pass over, having dumped its storm upon them.

But this visit—Gabriel coming for an indeterminate stay—was difficult before he had even arrived. Her anger with him bordered on disgust, tinged with hatred. That was it. That was why it had been so hard to smile when he had come in, looking forlorn, from the airport. She had wanted to shake him, but she had hugged him instead, saying, “How are you?” when she meant, How could you? Oh, she’d already said it, many times, in Ireland. It had become the broken record, an unspoken mantra, a plea. Even when she held him against her, feeling the steady embrace of the brother who had protected her, comforted her, seen her through bullying schoolgirls and broken hearts, all she could hear in her head was, How could you, how could you, how could you?

In her dreams, she hit Gabriel. In her dreams, night after night, she hit him, over and over, and woke exhausted from all the slapping. It never served to reduce him, or what he had done.

“We must take you to Nakhal,” Rolf said to Gabriel over breakfast the next morning. “It’s a beautiful spot, with hot springs and a fort. I like to paint there.”

Whenever he wasn’t ordering spare parts for heavy plant machinery down at the refinery, Rolf was painting. Self-taught, and good, he was neither immensely successful nor struggling, but he was generally preoccupied with his canvases and colors, and Annie knew how to live with that. She had come well prepared for life with an obsessive.

“Great, yeah,” said Gabriel. Tone of voice was everything, he was learning. In Cork, he hadn’t spoken much of late. No one had wanted to hear what he had to say, and they had had nothing to say to him, so he had been getting the silent treatment, far and wide. But not this far, he hoped. Here, he would surely find his voice again.

“So what will you do today?” Rolf asked him.

“I have to go to the house.” Annie wiped some crumbs off the table and into her palm. “Check on the painters.”

“I’ll go with you, so,” Gabriel said, looking around the neat front room. “I don’t know how you can leave this place, though.”

“It’s too small,” said Rolf. “The villa is very nice. You’ll like it.”

Gabriel didn’t like it. It was in a new suburb made up of low houses with high walls, big gates, and yards too young to have sprouted so much as a weed. The house was spacious, open-plan, and had a huge window overlooking an uncultivated space, the kitchen was wall-to-wall with dapper American units, and the three square bedrooms each had their own bathrooms.

“But this is the best bit,” Annie said, flicking a switch in the hall. “Air-conditioning! It’ll make such a difference. It’s pleasant now, but the summers are . . . well, they don’t call this ‘hellish Muscat’ for nothing.”

“How do you cope?”

“By leaving. I’ll get away again this year, for the hottest months. Go to Switzerland and then home. Poor Rolf has to stick it out, though. It’s like a furnace.” She led him down a corridor to one of the bedrooms, where easels were stacked against the walls, and canvases, used and unused, stood in clumps. “And, look, Rolf can have his own studio now. Honestly, I cannot wait to get out of Muttrah.”

“But it’s lovely there. Authentic.”

“Maybe, but that house never felt right to me.”

When they got back home, Annie went to the kitchen to make lunch, while Gabriel stood in the front room facing the wide, narrow window, hands in his pockets. Annie was right. There was something odd about this place. He had come indoors, yet felt as though he was still outside. Warmth permeated his bones, like the heat of direct sunlight, even though he was in the cool indoor umbra. Someone passed through the room behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. Whoever it was had gone to the kitchen, but all he could hear was Annie banging about.

Gabriel shivered.

There was something odd about this house.

They were invited out again that night, to a party in the home of soon-to-be-neighbors. Gabriel played it Annie’s way—he chatted and flattered, laughed at jokes he didn’t altogether understand, and frowned in concentration when the conversation turned to the atrocities just north of them, across the Strait of Hormuz.

“Saddam Hussein is as much of a tyrant as the Ayatollah,” said Thomas, a Dutchman, standing with a small group by the outdoor buffet. “They should both be wiped out.”

“I thought he was the good guy,” said Gabriel. It hadn’t impinged much on his existence, the Iran‒Iraq war, but now he was a lot closer to it—uncomfortably so—and he realized the only thing he knew about it was that the Ayatollah was a raving madman.

“Hussein—a good guy?” Thomas exclaimed.

Embarrassment drenched Gabriel; he had said “baksheesh” again.

“He took power in a coup, wiped out his own cohorts, and now the West is throwing him garlands!”

“No, no,” said Jasper, all earnest, “America is neutral! Just like the Soviets.”

Everyone laughed.

“Hussein’s tanks are Soviet,” Thomas explained to Gabriel, “but his intelligence is American.”

“The West has no choice,” Mark said flatly. “If Saddam doesn’t win this war, the Ayatollah’s fundamentalism will flow out of Iran, and God knows where that will lead.”

Gabriel glanced around the walled-in, paved yard, with a solitary tree in the corner, and noticed how the men were all standing together, while the women were chatting indoors, draped across the living room. Voluntary segregation.

“This is propaganda,” said Thomas. “America should not be assisting this dictator. If he’s still in power when this war is done, his own people will pay.”

“They are already paying,” said Jasper, “with their young men.”

“And he’s building a nuclear reactor,” said Thomas. “And using chemical weapons, according to the Iranians.”

Gabriel was aghast. “Chemical weapons?”

“Yes,” said Thomas. “We seem to be going backward, not forward.”

“World War One rolled up with a nuclear threat,” Jasper said grimly. “Something for everyone.”

That night, as the night before, Gabriel remained trapped in restless sleep, his dreams intrusive, his consciousness too close to the surface. This was the very state he feared—the wretched half-sleep that suspended and exposed him. That was when blackness came. . . . Live burial, coffin closed, closed on the living, sinking into quicksand, drowning in sand, in water, mud, like Flanders, Flanders-like mud. . . . Every type of burial. Always burial, always alive. It rushed at him from the depths whenever he was off his guard and had lost grasp of his own thoughts. Couldn’t control it. Couldn’t contain his thinking.

He opened his eyes. Turned. Threw off the sheet. Silence hummed in the background, in this quiet, quiet town. He wanted to switch it off. Silent Night Effect: Off.

Several times he shook himself, like a dog, head to tail, to throw off the sleeplessness. It will wear itself out, he thought. All I can do is wait. Time, Time, the Medicine Man. . . . He trusted in it, waited for it to do its thing. He would let time bleed him, imagine the blood flowing into the tin dish, like in the Elizabethan era, believing it would make him better, while in truth every hour was making him worse. Still, he would go on hoping for a lighter day. An easier day. He was, had always been, an optimist.

He closed his eyes and thought of Sandra, of making love to her . . . and of never making love to her again.

When the first shades of daylight pushed slowly across his walls, opening out the night, it brought some relief. Gabriel slept for an hour and woke again in a sunlit, breathless house. He got up and went downstairs, glancing into the diwan, where beams of sunlight slid in from high windows, slanted across the air, and landed, like children’s slides, on the red rugs.

The kettle was burbling in the kitchen, so he walked in, saying, “Sleep any better?” And as quickly realized that he was talking to a stranger.

“I didn’t know there was someone else staying here,” he said to Annie, when she came down some hours later, poorly slept and cranky.

“Huh?”

“Your friend. She was in the kitchen earlier.” She had been leaning against the sink, wearing a long blue kaftan.

Annie blinked at him. “What?”

“You could’ve told me you had another guest.”

“We don’t.”

“Well, she sure as hell wasn’t the maid. Not in a kaftan that was slit up to here.”

“You been dreaming, Gabe?”

“No. Tawny hair. Long legs, knobbly toes. Went upstairs. At least, I think she went upstairs.”

Annie picked up the coffee pot, took off the lid and inhaled, as if the aroma alone would keep her going until fresh coffee brewed. “You need to wake up, Gabriel. Red hair, long legs? Dream on.”

Perhaps she was right, he thought. Bad night, early sun, dazzling. . . . Maybe he had dreamed her. If so, he must do so again.

He helped Annie set up breakfast on the glass table in the front room. “I don’t know how you two can leave this house, I really don’t.”

“I told you. I don’t like it.”

“But why not?”

She shrugged. “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. Take away the enforced normality and there it was, right there, dead close. Behind a very thin veil.

“She wants to say,” Rolf began, “or perhaps it is me who wants to say, that she doesn’t eat or sleep enough, and we have to resolve that.”

“How?” Gabriel looked up at him again. “I can’t undo it.”

“No, but we have to get better. We must somehow get better, and Annie needs to tell you something.”

It was her turn to look up at Rolf. “Go on,” he said.

“Which bit?” she asked quietly.

“Any bit will do. Tell him about your dreams maybe.”

Gabriel could hear the wind outside, but nothing rattled in this stone house. There was no sound at all inside while Annie sat, her arachnid fingers playing with the hem of her skirt. Then, suddenly, she reached across and, with a swift swipe, struck Gabriel.

His jaw jerked. He had expected it, yet could never have expected it.

She sat back. “Feels slightly better than it does in my sleep.”

His hand went to his cheekbone.

“What Rolf means,” said Annie, “is that I’m so angry that sometimes I can barely speak. I love you, and hate you, and I hate myself. Mam and Dad blame themselves—did you know that? Do you know they feel such shame they won’t walk down the street?”

I’ll just sit here, Gabriel thought, and wait until it’s over. Let her have her release.

So Annie talked. He’d heard it all before—that is, he’d seen it in her eyes and heard it in his head—but if it would help her, he’d sit it out. His mind wandered—not to pianos or pubs, but to the woman, gone upstairs. Was she listening to this, learning things he would prefer she didn’t know?

“And now I’ve spluttered and ranted and I feel no better,” Annie was saying, with a depleted sob. “No matter how much I rage at you, awake or asleep, it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help, Rolf.”

From the start, Annie’s friends were determined to show her brother a good time, so Gabriel was invited everywhere: barbecues, garden parties, swimming parties at a beach club. These people seemed to have no cares and were enjoying themselves mightily. The women, unable to work, had little to do beyond child-minding and entertaining, so Gabriel quickly became the focus of their attention. Handsome, tall, and sad, he was a glorious distraction from the usual run of social events. They cooed at Annie. She was well used to it. Her good-looking brother had always drawn appreciation from her own sex and now, in his midtwenties, he looked better than ever. His expression, at once distracted and concentrated, and the ill-concealed distress behind his eyes, only added to his appeal.

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 wedding day. Whatever had Geraldine done with it?

She came into the room, swiftly and with purpose, like a wave racing to the shore. Rolf was kneeling over photographs spread on the floor of the diwan, but Gabriel’s eyes followed her as she came across the room, barefoot, silent, wearing the same blue kaftan with a silvery panel of embroidery down the front. She was about his age, he reckoned, but she didn’t look in his direction when she took an apple from the fruit bowl on the dining-table and bit into it.

“Rolf, introduce us, would you?” Gabriel hissed at Rolf who, with half-moon spectacles on the end of his nose and tilted forward over his pictures, reminded him of a mole in a children’s story. No sooner had he spoken than she had left the room.

“I’m sorry?” Rolf didn’t look up from his work.

Gabriel was stretched across the cushions, reading. “Who’s yer woman?”

“What woman?”

“The one who just came in.”

Rolf lifted his chin. “Someone came in?”

“She walked right past you,” Gabriel whispered.

“I didn’t see anyone.”

Gabriel looked at him deadpan. “That’s wearing a little thin.”

His brother-in-law went back to his photos. “This again? There is no woman, Gabriel, apart from your sister.”

“You sure about that?” Once again, he went through to the kitchen: empty. So he took the stairs four at a time and checked the two bedrooms on the second floor and the bathroom. Rolf was right. There was no woman, and yet there was. All the time. Even when Gabriel couldn’t see her, he was aware of her. Yet he could hear no footfall, no sound. Odd, how she made no noise.

In subsequent days, the swift passes by their unmentioned guest became unnerving and increasingly perplexing. She wandered about, coming in and out of rooms, but Gabriel’s were the only eyes that followed her if she moved, and noticed if she did not. That the others failed to acknowledge her was not a little disconcerting. In fact, they were remarkably adept at turning their heads a fraction too late to see her. He couldn’t fathom their reasoning. This was no time for practical jokes and Annie looked no more in the mood for games than Rolf did. So what then? Why the denials? It seemed too deliberately cruel to be some kind of retribution. Since Annie had derived no satisfaction from slapping him, perhaps this was her way of making him suffer—tantalizing him with visions, trying to make him crazy with sightings of an apple-eating beauty, like throwing poisoned cheese at a hapless mouse.

This, however, was not the way to hurt him. On the contrary, he was gaining strength, somehow, from the woman’s presence. Her un-present presence. Instead of feeling more adrift, less attuned to reality, he was beginning to feel connected, if not to the world or to his sister, at least to himself.

He felt bolstered, and for the first time in weeks he had something fresh to think about: a new preoccupation. It was a delightful conundrum to ponder during those wakeful nights, wondering about their motivation, where they had found her, what she would sound like if she spoke and feel like if he touched her. He thought about touching her, about calling her bluff, since she too was playing a role, teasing him with glimpses—there again, gone again, real and not-so-real. By arrangement or whimsy, she was messing with his head and that too was flirtation; a delectable flirtation. He wanted to respond; he wanted in. Annie and Rolf meant to humiliate him, perhaps, but their motivation was of less interest than the woman herself. She was in the house, and they were lying.

During another bad night, he went downstairs, treading quietly to avoid disturbing Rolf and Annie, but also hoping to disturb the secluded guest—to catch her out. He might steal upon her munching cornflakes in the kitchen, making up for all the meals she missed during the day when she was hiding in whichever cupboard they kept her. By the window in the small kitchen, he poured himself a glass of water and stood looking out into nothing. He didn’t hear her coming; he didn’t need to.

A flush of desire seeped through him. It had been too long. Nothing Sandra could do, tried to do, had brought back the comforting rush of heat. His impotence was simply another by-product. He could not allow himself any release. He had to live his brother’s life, depriving himself of the joys Max no longer knew and even striving on his behalf. Before he’d left Ireland, he had been playing himself ragged to perfect Bartók’s Second, which Max had been working on, as if he could somehow finish it for him. But for whom, he wondered vaguely, as he turned to the woman, had he intended to play it?

They made eye contact at last. Sitting on one of the high stools by the counter, legs crossed, one foot bouncing slightly, she looked at him steadily. The kaftan, slit to her thighs, fell over her knees. Her hand rested around a glass of water. This was no trick of his troubled mind—she was as real as he was. Absolutely solid. Her toenails showed the remains of brown nail polish. Gabriel was thinking fast. He needed to provoke a reaction, to shock her into revealing the game, but if he grilled her too harshly, she might take flight or raise her voice, causing a showdown that would bring Annie from her bed. He would then, at least, get some sort of explanation from this deceiving trio. Trouble was, he didn’t much want Annie to come.

There was an exchange, short and inconsequential: “You don’t say much,” he said.

No need to, she replied.

So she did, it turned out, have a voice, a language. In fact, a few languages, he discovered, when she came across to where he was leaning against the sink, and kissed him. It was so sudden that he was the one to pull away, but she followed, leaning into his mouth so that their contact wasn’t broken, and from within the closed box, the tomb in which he had been living, he stepped into warmth. He closed his eyes to reconfigure this, and when he opened them—she was gone. In the blink of a kiss, she had vanished.

Sleepwalking. Damn it all if he wasn’t sleepwalking. Annie was right, again. Trauma had shocked his body into altered states of mind and turned him into a sleepwalker. There was no arguing it: he was standing alone in the kitchen by the sink in the middle of the night, with an erection sticking out of his shorts—all dressed up and nowhere to go.

It might be revenge, he thought. Max’s revenge.

Desire was still there when he woke, his bedroom stagnant with late-morning airlessness. Restive and horny, he kicked off the tangled sheet, her kiss dragging off him still, squeezing him with frustration. Sleepwalking could not account for its lingering taste.

Annie and Rolf were sitting at the glass table, drinking coffee and eating dates.

“I wish you’d eat something substantial,” Gabriel said to Annie, sitting down.

“You look tired,” she said. “Didn’t you sleep? I thought you were taking pills.”

“I should leave. It’s not doing you any good, my being here.”

“You’re not here for my good, or yours. You’re here so that our parents don’t have to look at you all day long. Anyway, where would you go?”

“Africa, maybe? I’ve been thinking about volunteering for an aid agency.”

She snorted. The loving, tender Annie he’d always known was drifting farther into the distance. “You won’t find atonement in Africa looking after little children,” she said. “You won’t find it anywhere,” she added, more to herself than to him, and she sounded so aggrieved that a surge of despair rose in his gut.

He went into the kitchen, hoping to find at least a sense, if not a sighting, of their other guest. Though she might be nothing—a wisp, a non-dimensional fantasy working of its own accord on his sad little mind—he sought her out. The glass from which she had been drinking was no longer on the counter, but Annie could have moved it.

He sought her out again when they had left—Rolf to work, Annie to her villa—but this time he was looking for hard evidence, scrabbling around in search of shoes, toiletries, underwear, signs of a hidden life. There were none. Nothing. It came as a relief. It gave him ownership. Any signs of ordinary living on her part would mean that she was just another woman—and not a very nice one at that, if she conspired with Annie to toy with someone she didn’t even know. That would be a particularly nasty trick, one that became nastier with every showing, and he could not believe that Annie wished him such ill. That the woman should also be a mystery to Annie and Rolf was a far more attractive proposition, but the mystery made no sense. They had to see her. No one was damn well invisible.

The next time she came among them, he tried honesty.

“Listen, lads,” he said, with a glance toward the end of the room where she was actually sitting among the cushions her legs curled around her, gripping her ugly toes with her fingers, as if to hide them. “You should call this off, whatever it’s about. It isn’t very fair to her, or to me.”

Neither of them responded. It was as if he hadn’t spoken.

Perhaps he hadn’t.

All right, he thought. I’ll play along. They couldn’t ignore her forever. Poor girl would starve. Levity might work. “Don’t you think you should give the ghost some breakfast?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t start,” said Annie.

“You don’t want her going hungry, do you?”

Annie and Rolf glanced at one another. He hated the way they kept doing that but, undeterred, he kept up the banter. “At the very least a cup of coffee, no? Here, let me get her one.” He turned to speak to the woman, “Hi, I’m—Oh, shucks, gone again!”

“Gabriel . . .”

“Now, where the hell did she get to?” he asked, looking at them wide-eyed. “Darn it all if she doesn’t keep doing that!”

Rolf stood up, saying, “Non, non, she must be somewhere.” He looked under the table. “No one. Ah,” he stepped across the room and opened a closet, “she must be in here. . . . No again. What a mystery!” He poked his head into the corridor. “Perhaps she went through the wall?”

His antics made Annie smile. “Honestly, you two.”

Gabriel smiled also. If he could assuage Annie, engage her with talk of their wandering friend, that would do for now. “I swear to God,” he said, “there’s a woman in this house who loves apples.”

“Apples?”

“Yeah. Noticed your supply dwindling recently?”

“I eat apples,” said Rolf.

“Careful, Gabriel.” That flicker of a smile was still on Annie’s lips. “We don’t want the men in white coats coming to take you away, now, do we?”

For a moment they were there, back in their old relationship, when they had nothing between them beyond uncluttered affection. So their vanishing friend was at least serving a purpose, creating light relief, if nothing else.

When Rolf suggested, the following week, that he and Gabriel should take an excursion that Friday, Gabriel was torn. He wanted to see the country but he liked staying put too, enclosed behind the walls of the house, where he could take the air from his tiny stretch of roof, looking across Muttrah’s skyline. The town was laying claim to him, and he to it, as it became his quarter. Most mornings he wandered through the suq, acknowledging calls from traders who had come to know him, as he passed on his way to the Corniche, then walked out to old Muscat and back again, sidestepping cars and goats. As the district grew more familiar, so his surroundings embraced him.

Still, it was time to go farther afield and Rolf was restless, fed up with to-ing and fro-ing between town and their new villa, and desperate to get out to his waiting panoramas. Gabriel embodied a good excuse. So they set off early and headed up the coast. The mountains were reticent, as if shy of the very sea from which they had emerged.

“These are ophiolites.” Rolf waved at the craggy lumps that passed for hills along the road. They had a curious composition—tubes of rock compressed in and around one another.

“Looks like intestines,” said Gabriel.

“Well, yes. ‘Ophio’ is Greek for ‘snake,’ so this serpentine formation gives them their name. Oman is unique,” he went on, “in its geology. It used to be at the bottom of the sea. When the continental plates moved, the oceanic crust was pushed up and the land buckled, like a carpet rippling. So we have this extraordinary mountain range—the Hajar—and at the edge here, the Tethyan ophiolites.”

“Tethyan?”

“The Tethys Ocean separated Laurasia from Gondwanaland during the Triassic.”

“Gondwanaland and Laurasia?”

Rolf smiled. “Asia and Europe to you.”

They turned inland at Barka Fort and crossed the plain to reach the foothills. Children dallied by the roadside, sometimes waving, sometimes scowling, at the passing jeep, the girls in flowing patterned dresses, the boys big-eyed and curious.

“Where are we headed?”

“The Ghubrah Bowl. You’ll see. It’s quite amazing.”

The countryside dipped and humped as they made their way into a wadi—the Wadi Mistal—with foothills closing in until they were in a narrow gray gorge. Gabriel went with the sway as Rolf negotiated boulders and steep ridges along the zigzagging watercourse, but suddenly the limestone walls fell back to reveal a vast natural amphitheater.

“Wow.” Gabriel gaped at the surrounding rim of mountains and mishmash of hills. “I understand why you get so fidgety to come up here.”

“This is nothing. The view from Jebel Shams, now that—that view belongs to God.”

They headed out across the plain. Already Gabriel was impatient to stray between those bare ridges, where the creases, plump with greenery, were flush with goodness: streams and fruits and flowering trees. A small village was perched on the flank of the southern mountain, but Rolf parked before they got there and began to prepare for a hike.

They followed tracks, scrambling over scree and sliding rocks, while Rolf looked for his spot and Gabriel, in his wake, breathless and unfit, tried to keep up. Whenever Rolf stopped to photograph or sketch, Gabriel perched on a rock to rest, then dragged his feet when his grumbling brother-in-law scurried on in search of a more suitable viewpoint. He was a grumpy, irritable companion on this and other outings they would make over subsequent weeks, but Gabriel liked this Rolf—the one who was not in control; the one who had to be cared for, babied almost. He liked to make him tea on their burner and persuade him to put down his tools and his frustration. It was easier man-to-man, with no Annie, confusing the fact that they were friends as well as brothers-in-law. Out here, in Oman’s best wilderness, they were pals again. It was like going fishing together as they had in Ireland—Rolf hissing and fussing as he failed to get his catch; Gabriel calm, flinging his fly forward, absorbing the scenery, the feel of his boots in the cold river, while the trout, caught or not, were incidental to the day’s pleasures.

But that first afternoon, when they were trekking up a shambling hillside, Gabriel made one last stab at the subject that preoccupied him. “About the girl, Rolf,” he said, panting. “What’s the story?”

Rolf threw out his free hand in an irritated flurry. “Why do you keep on about this? There is no one coming into the house! I don’t know why you insist, but I wish you would leave it. Annie is worried already about you and this talk only makes her worse.”

“But I’ve spoken to her.”

Tapping his camel stick—the short hooked stick that many Omani men carried—against his thigh, Rolf turned. “Gabriel—”

“Look, I’m not kidding and I’m not thick either. There’s a woman in that house, Rolf, and you bloody well know there is.”

“There cannot be!”

“Why not? No one locks the doors—she could come in from the street any time.”

“But the women of this country would never do such a thing.”

“She isn’t Omani, she’s a Westerner, who parades around me like some kind of marauding prostitute, and I don’t understand why you allow it. What’s the point? Am I supposed to be learning something? I mean, is she there to tantalize me, like in some Hitchcock film?”

Rolf was looking down at him from a few meters up the track. “You’re dreaming, that’s all. Sleepwalking.”

“In the middle of the day?” Gabriel wiped sweat from his neck. “You’ll have to do better than that, Rolf. Sleepwalking, my arse.”

“What else can I say when we are only three of us at home?”

“Most of the time, yes, but you have a regular visitor. I’ve spoken to her. For Christ’s sake, I’ve even kissed her! So won’t you tell me, please, who it is that I’ve kissed?”

After a moment, Rolf turned away with a dismissive “She must be a jinniya then.”

“What?”

“This is jinn country.” Rolf hiked on up the track.

“You mean . . . some kind of ghost?”

“Jinn are not ghosts.”

“Well, do they have knobbly toes and legs as long as—?”

“You are exasperating me, Gabriel! It was a good joke for a day or two, but enough now.”

The slate-like hills threw back the dazzling light and the only sound—of stones rolling away from Rolf’s tread—scraped against the still air. Some of the rocks had faces like grinning gargoyles.

As they scrambled on, Gabriel had to wonder: Jinn country?

The journey back to Muscat seemed interminable. Gabriel couldn’t wait to get to the house. He hoped she would come and he hoped there would be no hint of her, and when finally they stepped into the dimly lit front room, he knew she was there already, ahead of him.

The following evening Annie’s tone had quite changed when she asked him if he had seen his jinn lady that day.

He never knew from which direction she might come, or when. At night, he lay on his back facing the door, nervous and expectant, like a virgin bride, or if he stood on the roof he faced the stairwell, because he wanted to see her coming. She never did it that way, though—creeping up like some kind of spook: she was either there or she was not, and yet he grew fidgety for fear of missing out, missing even her fleeting passage across a room. He wanted to see her, any time, every time.

Annie, noticing his distraction, became irritable one evening when they were having dinner in the diwan. “Gabriel, what is it with you? Even when I’m speaking to you, your eyes are jumping around and you keep wandering from room to room. You’re hardly ever still!”

“Just trying to keep track of your occasional guest.”

Annie stared. “You still think there’s someone here?”

“I know there is.”

Rolf tore up some bread. “So where is she now?”

“Excellent question.”

His sister shook her head. “You really think there’s some woman coming in and out of our house without us knowing about it?”

“Either that or you do know about it.”

“But it isn’t even possible! I mean, who is she? I’ve asked around, you know. No one knows anything about an expat on the loose, and she can’t be in Muscat on her own. She’d either have to be working or married to someone, or she’d never have got into the country.”

“I’m neither working nor married and I got in.”

“Yeah, and it wasn’t easy either. Sometimes I wish we hadn’t bothered!”

“Hey, don’t get miffed with me, Annie. How the fuck am I supposed to know what gives? This is your town, your house. You tell me what’s going on.”

“I don’t know.” She screwed up her paper napkin and threw it onto her plate.

Stalemate.

“I don’t like this,” Annie said quietly. “It’s this bloody house.”

“How do you mean?”

“There might be something here . . . a presence or . . .”

“Oh, not the jinn thing again! Look,” said Gabriel, “she didn’t come out of any bottle, all right? And if she had, it’d be pretty damn hard to get her back in again.”

“Don’t confuse jinn with pantomime genies.” Annie’s voice was still low. “People believe in them. There are loads of stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“It’s folklore.” Rolf spoke, waving his hand. “Local folklore.”

Annie shot a look at him, “It’s part of Islam,” then turned to Gabriel. “They’re in the Quran—part of the religion. It simply depends on where you’re from, doesn’t it? I mean, we have our ghosts, but Muslims don’t believe in ghosts. When they die, they go to Paradise. They don’t hang about like our lot can. Jinn, on the other hand, are around us all the time.”

“Us?”

“Yes. I mean, what about fairies? Irish folklore—the serious stuff—they’re exactly like jinn. Living alongside us. Our world and their world and never the twain shall meet, and yet they do. They cross over.”

Gabriel looked at her with a mix of astonishment and ridicule. “Fairies? Are you serious?”

“Not sprites with wings. That’s rubbish.”

“Oh, please don’t mention the Little People!”

“I’m just saying—a girl in my class in secondary school did a whole project on fairy lore and it was chilling. I didn’t sleep for two nights. It’s all the same stuff, you know.”

Rolf was lining watermelon seeds along the rim of his plate, equally spaced.

“And as for jinn, well, they’re like a third being,” Annie went on. “God made angels and jinn and humans. Angels from the air, humans from the earth, jinn from fire. But we can’t see them, unless they want us to.”

“Annie,” Gabriel said gently, “forget jinn and fairies. On the level—you haven’t asked some friend of yours to mess with my head, have you? Because I swear to Christ, if you don’t know who she is, then what’s she doing in your house?”

Annie held his eye. “Is she in the room now?”

Gabriel could see, beyond her listlessness, a longing to buy into this. “If she was, you’d see her—obviously. Like you must have done when she came down this morning and went into the kitchen while we were having breakfast.”

Still she held his eye, biting the side of her lip. “If this is some kind of joke, I want you to drop it.”

“You think I’d be up for joking?”

“Rolf,” she said, “maybe there is—”

“What, Annie? Maybe there is what?”

“Maybe this place has its own resident jinn. Some houses do. We should ask around.”

A droplet of cold sweat ran down Gabriel’s spine.

“That’s all nonsense,” said Rolf.

“Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?” his wife snapped. “But lots of people don’t.”

“What people?” asked Gabriel.

“It’s part of the scenery here. Good jinn. Bad jinn.”

“Do you believe in it?”

“About as much as I believed in that ghost at O’Mahony’s farm.”

Gabriel chuckled. “God, I hadn’t thought about him in years.”

“Which ghost is this?” Rolf asked.

“Why would you be interested?” Annie retorted. “You don’t believe in that stuff.”

“I like the stories.”

Gabriel and Annie exchanged glances. “It wasn’t so much a ghost as—”

“His foot,” said Gabriel.

Annie smiled. “On one of the landings of this old house we were sent off to every summer to learn Irish.”

“Everyone said the house was haunted,” Gabriel explained. “On certain nights, so the legend went, you could see the ghost’s foot glowing on the landing. Lots of people claimed to have seen it.”

“But you never did?” Rolf asked, with a supercilious smile. He turned to Annie. “Or you?”

“Don’t be so patronizing!”

“Ghost stories are always the same.” He shrugged. “Someone else sees something. Never the person who tells the story, the person right in front of you. Always second- or third- or tenth-hand. I have never met anyone who had this kind of experience directly.”

“Except Gabriel.”

Another drop of cold sweat slithered down Gabriel’s back.

He walked. Through Muttrah and Muscat and on up into the hills. Usually he could read Annie, because she allowed him to. He would have said that her curiosity about the woman was genuine, especially since there was a touch of fear in it. He wasn’t sure how well Annie could dissemble, but she was doing a persuasive job with this talk of jinn, and he had to be on his guard. This too could be part of the charade.

Over subsequent days, it became clear that Annie’s interest was indeed sincere, though she wouldn’t let on in front of Rolf. One afternoon when she was ironing, she asked Gabriel again, with faux-nonchalance, if his jinn lady was about.

“Nope.”

“You know, jinn are often good. Sometimes they help humans.”

Behind her eyes, Gabriel could see something akin to envy, as if she suspected he had touched on something that was denied her. “They say? Who says?”

“Oh—you hear stories. Sometimes at these women’s parties I go to, the Omanis tell stories. Exactly like we do at home. It’s just a different context.”

“What kind of stories?”

“They’re all, you know, quite touching.” She laid out the sleeve of Rolf’s shirt and ironed. “There was a nice one I heard about an old man in the hills who was injured in a fall, in a gully, and ended up with his arm broken and his leg crushed, but somehow he got back to his house, outside a remote village. No one knew how he’d made it. He said he walked, but he couldn’t have—his foot was smashed—so they said that a jinn must have carried him home. Then his leg got worse. They didn’t know what to do with it—it was suppurating and gangrenous—and he was getting sicker, and after a while, the villagers stopped going to visit him. Then one night he heard a voice calling him, so he crawled to the door, where he found a pot on the step with a sort of paste in it. He rubbed it into his leg, day after day, and it started to get better. He kept applying it until his foot was healed, and that was when a jinn woman appeared and said she had been looking after him, but that he must never tell anyone.” Annie shook out the shirt, flattened another sleeve and ironed the cuff. “When the villagers saw that he was cured, they hounded him until he told them how it had happened. The jinn was very angry with him then and said he would never see her again, and he never did, but he was able to go back into the hills with his goats. So you see—a well-meaning jinn, come to save him.”

Gabriel smiled. “Pure bollocks.”

“Maybe.” She held up the shirt, gave it a shake and put its shoulders around a hanger. “Every culture finds a way to explain the inexplicable.”

“Like Rolf said—folklore.”

“Oh, you know that, do you? You’re so worldly-wise, so all-knowing, that you can dismiss it just like that? Centuries and centuries of belief?”

“Centuries and centuries of storytelling. That’s where all the Irish fables come from.”

“Be careful, Gabriel. You wouldn’t want to be so scornful about something you don’t understand.”

Sometimes she was there; sometimes she wasn’t. She chose her moments; Gabriel chose to believe. He chose, also, to stay with her rather than with his sister.

The night before they moved to the new house, he told Annie he wanted to stay in Muttrah.

She was packing a suitcase, putting in the last of their belongings. “How do you mean?”

“I’ll pay the rent and hang on for a bit.”

“But why?”

“It’s central, which is handy when I don’t have transport, and you shouldn’t have to put up with me every single day.”

“I don’t mind that.”

“Really?”—

She rolled some socks one into the other. “I don’t . . . I haven’t exactly been good company, I know, or maybe as welcoming as I should have been but—”

He stood up and put his hands on her shoulders. “You’ve been everything you should have been, but I’m not really in the right frame of mind for lounging around the suburbs in between dinner parties and barbecues, and you need space. Us being on top of each other every hour of the day is proving counter-productive, wouldn’t you say?”

“Being on your own could also be counter-productive. Too much time to think.”

She believed, no doubt, that he thought a lot about Max and, if left alone, would do so even more as he tried to come to terms with what had happened—a laughable concept. None of them would ever come to terms with it, least of all Gabriel, and although he could have grieved for Max—that much at least, in his empty time—he did not. Even when he walked under that high, light sky, with seagulls coasting overhead and goats wandering about, even then he didn’t think much about Max any more, or of his parents, or his spoiled prospects and the prominent stain on his character. But he did want more time alone to think. To think and delight in this intriguing woman.

Annie resumed her packing, piling in clothes way beyond the capacity of the suitcase. “I suppose, if you’re going to stay for a while, it makes sense to have your own place,” she looked up, “but how long are you planning to stay?”

“A bit longer, if I can, but I don’t want to tread on your toes.”

“Don’t be stupid. I don’t own Muscat.” The suitcase lid, as she pulled it over the mound of clothes, was like a glutton’s jaw closing over a greedy mouthful. “What about money?”

They leaned on the suitcase. “I could get a job.”

“You’ll have to talk to Rolf about that. We can’t ask Rashid for too many favors.”

“Let’s sit on it.”

They sat on the case. “We’ve paid the rent until the end of next month,” said Annie, “so you might as well stay. But I hope this doesn’t have anything to do with that specter of yours.”

After they had made the final move the next day, Rolf dropped Gabriel back to Muttrah in the early evening. Walking toward his house was like walking from one world into another. He had longed for solitude these many weeks, and the dark alleys were like a squiggled path leading out of his head. When the time was right, he planned to make his way back into it by another route.

In the empty house, he sat in the dim light of an inadequate lamp and waited.

He had left the front door unlocked when he went to bed, then lay, listening, and staring across the darkness toward the doorway.

He didn’t see her come. When the mattress dipped by his hips, his eyes struggled to fix on her outline, but her warmth spread over to him like a low mist. He found her wrist and gripped it in an uncompromising hold. “How much are they paying you?”

It was the first of many questions; she answered none.

And yet she lay like this in a stranger’s bed. . . . What were the limits, he wondered, and the rules? What would she allow? With a restraint just short of painful, he contained the urge to make love to her, because he would have done so with neither tenderness nor affection, only with the desperation that had festered over months of enforced celibacy. In all that time he had enjoyed not one shared spasm of pleasure, no intimate release, and yet turned on, again, at last, by the woman lying alongside him, he managed to hold back.

The drip-drop of conversation became as tantalizing, over the next few days, as her body. It wasn’t that she didn’t speak—she did, in short, neat sentences, although when he thought about it after she’d left, he was aware more of her having spoken than of having heard her voice. There was no substance to any of it. She answered questions with questions and spoke in vague terms about little of consequence, which explained nothing about anything. She was there and that was all; she didn’t know much else. Not even her own name. Apparently.

When he said one day, “They say you might be a jinn,” she put her hand on his thigh. This was more dangerous than ice on the roads. If someone was trying to frame him, this was the way to go: one accusation of rape or assault and he’d never see the light of day again. But even that didn’t stand up. His family hated him, for sure, but not forever. They couldn’t wish to have him jailed for a long spell in some distant outpost.

“Why do you keep coming here?”

She needed to be away from somewhere else, she said.

“Like me,” he muttered.

She could hear the sea, she said.

“Not possible.” He ran the backs of his fingers along her neck. “The sea is as languid as jelly out there.”

Her eyes lost focus, as if she were listening to something on a frequency unavailable to him, and she insisted that she could hear the sea.

“I wish I could.” A snapshot of the Irish coast followed the thought—the white of the Atlantic throwing itself against the last rocks of Ireland. “I remember standing on a walkway near Mizen Head when I was a kid, near the lighthouse there. A small bridge crossed a gully and we’d been told—me and my brother and sister—that you could see seals frolicking in the surf far below so, heads hanging over the railings, we watched and watched, the waves breaking up in this gash in the rocks, sending up bubbles of foam, until finally we saw a flash of silvery brown slithering around down there. The sea was throwing itself about, deadly dangerous, but the seal was having a lark, diving into the gush of nasty-looking waves, like a kid in snow.”

Don’t talk, she said. Listen.

Gabriel held himself still, eyes closed, until he heard in the far-off faraway the sound of the sea battering his island.

He woke alone. He could barely move, such was the depth of the sleep from which he was emerging, as if he was swimming up from the fathoms. He hadn’t slept so well since the last time he’d got drunk.

He had thought she meant to seduce him; instead, she had brought him sleep. Solid, fretless sleep.

In the wake of a dream about home, he had the impression that he had just walked from one room into another—from their family room in Cork to this bare bedroom in Muscat. His mother was right there, beyond his reach yet still close, still loving, as she had been in the dream. Restored by one good night, Gabriel allowed himself to think about his mother. He was able now to look into her face, the face that had turned to him when he had arrived home that morning, disoriented, inebriated, and found her sitting at the table against the wall, one elbow leaning on the patterned plastic tablecloth, her quilted robe buttoned to the neck. Her eyes had been hanging on something he couldn’t see, because he did not yet know. Fearing his father had died, he asked her what was the matter, and she had lifted her eyes and tried, but failed, to say his name.

The family room—with its aging green couch and brown-tiled fireplace, and a large television in the corner with a plant on top, the fronds of which were pushed sideways, like a comb-over, to stop them flowing across the screen—that room had been the hearth of his life. There, on the day of his Confirmation, spruced up in his school uniform, he had retreated to watch television, until his mother had scolded him for not playing with his cousins. There, he had lost his virginity, on the floor between the couch and the fireplace, when his parents were at the pub and his girlfriend’s body was hot along one side where the flames had warmed her skin. There, his home had dissolved forever when he returned hung-over from his pals’ flat and found his mother destroyed. “In God’s name,” she had said, “what have you done?”

Later that day, in the same room, his father had pushed him, shaken him, shouted until Gabriel feared they would both burst into flames.

They had breakfast together, he and the woman. After a walk along the Corniche, he had returned to the house, where she soon joined him as he lay curled on the bench in the front room, sobbing. Limp, he was, with self-pity. His life, wreckage. He missed his work, the pub, his parents, but missing Max was another form of branding. Sometimes he fancied he could smell his own flesh burning. The abyss beneath him—the only thing he could see—was a huge thing, empty and dark. He felt himself floating into it, limbs outstretched; it was the only place for him, this great hole into which his soul tumbled.

And then she was there, holding him back, as if by his shirt-tails.

“Can’t buckle,” he said, sitting up. “Have to get Annie through.”

Recovered, he had made coffee and heated bread, while she sat at the counter feeding him slices of watermelon. Her lack of appetite, in food as in conversation, meant she ate only apples and sipped warm water. Gabriel, for now, appreciated being in a room without words. Most words, when it came to it, were superfluous. All the language that had poured out of Annie had done her no good, but in silence her anger had been truly chilling. This was better—a few chosen, necessary words. And touch. He pushed his companion’s kaftan back over her knees to stroke her thigh. They kissed. His resolve weakened. Let them frame me, he thought. There could be no stopping this when she was creeping inside his clothes, and into his heart.

He told her, afterward, that she was the most beautiful creature he had ever beheld. Then he laughed. “Beheld? What’s with the virginal language? I’m coming on all Catholic again. Behold the Angel of the Lord. Behold the Virgin Mary!” Gabriel chuckled. “Mind you . . .” His lover was hardly virginal, but in some respects she shared characteristics with apparitions of the Virgin, from Lourdes to Fatima: she was an incontrovertible fact to a chosen few, air to others, and deeply controversial.

Light on his feet, he wandered through Muttrah, knowing no malevolent eyes were upon him, no whispers breaking out behind. He went every morning to buy bread and came back to eat in the bare kitchen, listening to the voices in the alley—the woman next door, with her tendency to screech, the boys running along the lane, the bleat of goats. It was cozy. Tight. No prying eyes. No bloody foreigners.

He was, by all accounts, having an affair with a woman no one else could see. A woman who had coasted into his life, into the room in which he stood, and, just like that, had saved him and doomed him all at once. Had he been at home, he would have assumed that he had fallen into a liaison with a high-class call girl, set up as an elaborate joke at his expense or even as some kind of punishment, but who would have any motive to tease or torment him beyond his own shores? Either way, he went with it. It took some time to get used to her selective invisibility, but when he came to grasp her occasional nature, he embraced it. That no one else believed in her became an abstraction, a curiosity, because the woman in question was clearly defined in his eyes, and her flesh was quite, quite solid. To him, she was real to the point of distraction.

Since his lover had no known name, he called her Prudence, after the woman who wouldn’t come out to play. She liked it, especially when he explained he’d taken it from a great song by a great man. “She was a real person, Prudence was,” he said. “Mia Farrow’s sister. Lennon wrote it when they were in India with the Maharishi, because Prudence wouldn’t leave her hut and he was worried about her. Thought she must be depressed because she wouldn’t come outside, so he penned “Dear Prudence.” Brilliant song. Inspired.”

His appreciation of silent companionship had been short-lived. Her reticence, a few days in, was giving him a new respect for conversation, enunciation, and indeed his own voice. He had taken to rambling—the inevitable result of spending time with someone who had little to say—and his capacity for drivel astounded him. He had never realized he knew so much about nothing in particular or that he was quite handy at impersonations. One afternoon when he was telling Prudence about his most peculiar student, he began imitating him—rather accurately, he thought. The humor, however, was lost on her.

He spent most of the week in the house, venturing out only to get food. He even lied to Annie, saying he had a stomach bug and could not go over to see them. “Stay in bed,” she said. “It’ll pass.”

He stayed in bed. They made love, a lot, and Prudence slept a lot, and Gabriel feared leaving the room because sometimes when he did she was no longer there when he came back, and then he would have to kill the shapeless hours until her return. Boredom set in. He had no work, no friends, and the house had been stripped of all but necessary utensils. All books, games, and magazines had moved to the suburbs. Walking was the only thing to do when she was gone, and it used up the energy, the pent-up desire that made him jittery. Sometimes he would dive into the suq to make contact with living, working people, and chat to the shopkeepers in the shaded alleys. They would talk to him in their limited English and taught him to say “Hello, how are you?” in Arabic. Other times he would go farther afield, out of town and into the hills, hiking for hours until, suddenly panicked that he’d been gone too long, he would hurry home, passing shrouded women and floppy-eared goats, arriving back, hot and frazzled, to find that Prudence was there, or not.

One afternoon Annie called over, and sat on the rampart of the roof with him, the sea breeze ruffling her spiky hair.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Still not pregnant. How’s your stomach?”

“Still rumbly.”

“I hope you kept yourself hydrated.”

“I kept myself hydrated.”

Prudence stepped out of the house and moved to another corner of the roof.

Annie did not react, not in any flickering way Gabriel could detect. Instead she looked at her toes, dusty in her sandals. “I’m getting desperate, Gabriel. Rolf is pushing forty.”

“Yeah, but you’re only twenty-eight. You’ve loads of time,” he said, unsettled by her desperation, since he could do nothing about it. “And there are so many likely causes right now. You’re stressed and unhappy, but it will happen.”

“I wish I had the luxury of that kind of certainty.”

“Putting pressure on yourself isn’t going to help, is it?” Gabriel glanced sideways at Prudence, willing her to go away. This was family stuff, private.

“How can I not stress about it?” Annie’s eyes were brimming. “Rolf longs for a family and it just . . . it isn’t happening and I’m worn out with all the trying, and the disappointment that comes back every time. It’s crushing. I’m even sick of having sex!”

Gabriel flinched. Prudence was sitting on a low wall, her face to the sun, well within earshot. He hadn’t given the logistics of her mysterious comings and goings much thought—how she got in and out of the house, that kind of thing—because he didn’t care, but Annie would never speak of something so personal in front of a stranger. So either she knew Prudence, very well, or she was genuinely oblivious of her presence.

“Sometimes I worry that our marriage won’t survive the strain,” Annie went on, staring straight past Prudence.

There were limits even to Gabriel’s skepticism.

He had to find out more about jinn.

Chocolate-colored mountains rimmed Muscat—a wall encasing him. His own chosen prison wall. Sea on one side, mountains on the other. Beyond, he knew, was desert. Space. Anonymity. He would see it soon. These arrogant hills would not contain him for long. In the desert, he might find his real thoughts, the ones concealed by the disdain of others. There, he might shake off the weight of shame and meet himself. Find the person who had destroyed his own brother. Even discover the why of it. Envy, they said. In Cork, it was widely peddled that Gabriel had resented Max’s success, modest though it was, which he had achieved by overcoming mediocrity with sheer hard work, while Gabriel let his talent dribble away, boozing and fucking. That was what they said, what even his parents thought, though they would not have used those terms, and it was true that beneath the blasé veneer, Gabriel did care about his so-called gift. Of course he did. He cared that he had ditched it when still too young to value it. So perhaps he had wanted to make Max pay. How else to explain what he had done, three days before the wedding? Under the broad blue sky of the desert, in solitude and silence, he might find out what had sparked that one warped, thwarted idea, so ghastly to him now that he hesitated to look over his shoulder in case it was right behind him. Like a devil on his back. It was a devil—something nobody could look at, face on. His own sister seemed wary of being alone with him in case it popped up, joined them, his disgusting idea. We all have them, he wanted to say, we all have putrid imaginings, beyond our control. The difference was that he, and some others, had carried it out. Perhaps, in the wilderness, he would have a biblical encounter with himself and slay his own sins, like Jesus had done.

He snorted. Where was this religious stuff coming from?

Abid, their driver, was a tall man with a thin mustache and a glint in his eyes. He glanced over, smiling and curious, while he drove. He had offered to take him out for the day. Annie had probably engineered it, concerned that Gabriel was becoming too reclusive, so now they were on the Nakhal road, heading into the grooves of landscape.

“Nakhal is a nice place,” Abid told him. “The fort is two hundred and fifty years old. It is built on a big rock, to keep them safe.”

There were forts in a state of collapse everywhere. On every excuse for a hill, there stood at least one tower, looking all around over the humps of its own ruins.

“One of the ways they pushed back the enemy,” Abid gesticulated, “at Nakhal is—they poured down boiling date honey over them.”

“Agh, Jesus!” Gabriel grimaced. “Talk about sweet torture.”

Nakhal was surrounded by an ocean of date palms, fed by the falaj, Abid explained—an ancient irrigation system of channels bringing water from al-Hajar. The fort curled around its own rock base, like a creeper climbing a tree, until the main tower sat up on its perch with a 360-degree view of al-Batinah Plain on one side and al-Hajar Mountains on the other. A purple cloud had gathered over their peaks.

“It will rain,” Abid said, frowning.

“Have we time to check out the hot springs before it does?”

“Of course. Yes.”

Down by the river, Gabriel pulled on his trunks and fell backward into the water. His body exulted. He was getting used to the contrasts in this country—the way crevassed slopes of gray rock were suddenly interrupted by a bulge of green, and blinding white gravel riverbeds invariably led toward a suburb of Paradise hidden in an S-bend.

Abid sat on the bank, munching hard-boiled eggs and bread. It took only one prompt from Gabriel: “My sister has been trying to explain to me about jinn,” he said, lying in the shallows, and Abid was off, one story hurrying after another, flowing out in his imperfect English.

“There is a house in Muttrah,” he began, “a house like any other, where no one lives any more. The family who owned it, they tried to live in there, but every time they brought their things and put them inside the house, the jinn removed them.”

“How do you mean?”

“The family would come home and find their belongings outside. On the street, on the roof. So they would bring them back in again, but whenever they went out, they came home and even the furniture was outside the house. They said, ‘No more!’ and left, but another man, he came and said he would live there. He did not mind about jinn. Jinn, you see, are weaker than men. They cannot control us. We have the stronger soul. So he moved into the house and he brought some things, and for two days everything was fine. Until one night, he was thrown from his bed. The wall pushed him out. He was very frightened, but he stayed another night. And the same thing—something pushed from behind and he fell on the floor. Still he would not leave. He did not want to be weaker than the jinn, but he had no sleep and was afraid of being hurt, and he was becoming crazy. His sister, she say, ‘Come to my house, and you will sleep like a baby.’ So he went with her and slept for two days and then he went back to his house—and, ya Allah! All his belongings were in the street. He left then and that house is still empty. The jinn have it now. They wanted it. They have it.”

“So . . . in this case, they were stronger than the humans?”

“This man had a weak soul.”

He had another story, and then another, in which jinn were angels of mercy.

The warm waters of the spring were tingling on Gabriel’s skin. “So they’re not evil? I mean, dangerous?”

Abid wobbled his head. “Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Men are stronger, so bad men can use jinn to do bad things to their enemies.”

“You mean like casting a spell on someone?”

“A spell, yes.”

“And you believe in them?”

“God made man and jinn to worship Him. They are like us—Muslim and Jew and non-believer.”

“Have you ever seen one?”

Abid looked down along the gurgling river. “Yes.”

“And?”

But Abid got up, wiping the dust off the back of his dishdasha.

“So humans can see jinn, yeah?”

“If the jinni wants you to see him, you can see him. We must hurry.” Abid was heading back to the car. “It will rain soon.”

A black cloud had darkened the river, which no longer seemed so tame; in the gloaming, it looked very much like a hideaway for spooks and specters. Gabriel felt edgy as they set off for Rustaq to see another fort, especially when a few drops of water on the windscreen suddenly became slashing rain that thundered down onto the jeep.

With a glance at the sky, Abid invoked Allah as the vehicle bumped off the stones and back up to the track. “This is not good. It has been raining in the mountains. The wadis will flood.”

“Flash floods? Really?”

“Don’t worry. It will be fine.”

They managed to get across one wadi, where the river was rising, before coming to another just as a great torrent of brown water came roiling past. Abid drove back to a more elevated spot and parked. They could go neither forward nor back. “We have to wait.”

“So this is a flash flood?” Gabriel asked, raising his voice to be heard above the lashing on the roof and watching the slow flow of sludge. “Not exactly flashy, is it?”

“But it is very strong.”

Raindrops bounced around the bonnet, furious.

“How long will we be here?”

“A few hours maybe.”

“How many hours?”

Abid shrugged. “Five. Six.”

“Jesus.” They might be there all night. Omanis were loose with time. It was an elastic concept: five, six hours could mean ten, or two, and Gabriel loved it. He’d be happy to get into the groove of a time-loose existence—but this flood was keeping him from her.

From her, his jinniya. No way. For one thing, she had an Irish accent. She wasn’t Eastern in any respect. Irish jinn—now there’s a concept.

The water, thick as mud and full of debris, pushed past, with sporadic rushes, as if upstream someone was sweeping out a lake.

Unprompted, Abid began to talk again. His uncle, he said, had married a jinn and had a jinn family—female jinniya, he explained, always gave birth to jinn children—and they lived alongside his human family in another house beyond the orchard, but no one knew about them until his uncle died. He had divided his estate between his jinn family and his human family, since the Quran insists that all wives and children should be equally cared for, but his mortal children could not accept this. His eldest son even moved his own family into the house where the jinn lived. Abid shrugged. “For the jinn wife, it’s punishment time. After the funeral—fourteen days—any time the family has a meal, huge dust comes and spoils it. And then the house, the windows are rattling, shaking, showing her anger. Still they won’t recognize her, so she sends her boys to cry outside the door and the human family couldn’t do anything to stop this, so his sons went to find out what was the problem and she came to meet them. ‘I came only for one reason,’ she told them. ‘My children they have human brothers and if you don’t recognize them, I will make sure you will disappear from this world. One by one.’ The dead man’s sons laughed and told her that jinn are not strong enough to do that, but she said, ‘I have the power. My husband made me that promise, that my family would be recognized, and if a human promises something, he should do it.’”

Abid looked up and down the watercourse a little uneasily. “Jinn live sometimes near riverbeds. Places where not many people come. Like this. They come at the end of the day.”

He seemed a little spooked; Gabriel was fairly spooked himself.

“Very soon after that,” Abid went on, “one of the sons, his little baby disappeared. Two months old. The whole village went searching, looking, until finally, when it was almost dark, a young girl heard a baby crying deep in the oasis and found him on the ground beside a tree. The son’s wife, she took her children and moved back to her mother, saying she would never again go near that place, but the husband, he stayed, until one night he woke and there was a fire burning in his room. It happened many nights—fire burning, like that. So he left also, and the jinn family stayed, undisturbed until today. Still now, nobody goes there. It is full of jinn.’

“So humans can marry jinn?”

“Yes.”

And have children, Gabriel thought, and therefore have sex.

Back in Muscat, late that night, Gabriel checked every room in the house, and the first-floor windows, before locking the front door and the door to the roof. Then he waited, more apprehensive than usual, his chest tight, his bedsheets cold and crinkling. He thought about Annie, her longing to conceive, and shivered.

He didn’t want a jinn-child roaming the earth, the issue of this beautiful creature and his mangled conscience, and he fell asleep wondering what kind of a jinn he might create—evil or good?

When he woke, Prudence was lying with him. He went downstairs—the door was still bolted from the inside. Doubts pricked at him, but not enough to stop him going back upstairs to do what they did best.

“Come out with me,” he said to her afterward. “You always speak of the sea. Let’s get a blast of sea air.”

There was no moving her. She couldn’t go from where she was, she said, and it made sense that she didn’t want to be seen around town with him. It would be all over the expat community within hours.

She had to stay, she insisted, where she could hear the sea.

“You’d hear the sea a whole lot better if you were walking beside it,” Gabriel insisted, and with a faint sense of irritation he got up and left the house before she did.

On Yiti Beach, Annie stood by the water, loose waves fussing over her feet. Marie and Jasper’s pretty daughter was playing in the sea with Thomas and Margarethe’s trio of blond babes and Rashid’s moon-eyed sons.

“Gabriel was almost washed away in a flash flood last week,” Rolf said behind her, to their gathered friends.

“Oh, you have to be so careful!” Marie was sitting in the deckchair next to Gabriel’s. “It can be dangerous. You shouldn’t go driving around the country, especially when the weather isn’t good.”

“It was fine. I was with Abid. We sat it out.”

The children’s high-pitched screeches, their simple joy, held Annie there, adrift from the reclining adults who, apart from Rashid and his wife, Sabah, were oiling themselves against the blistering sun. Annie tried not to mind. She and Rolf were the only couple she knew in Oman who had no children, but she tried not to mind.

Yiti Beach, east of Muscat, was accessible only by 4x4, but worth every jolt of the physical shake-up that had to be endured before getting there. At one end, two huge rocks lifted out of the shallow waters and Annie stood gazing at them, her hands on her haunches, her toes sinking into the sand.

“Walk?” Gabriel asked, coming alongside her.

They paddled toward the jagged humps of rock.

“It’s nice to meet Rashid at last,” he said. “I owe him.”

“He’s a lovely man, and Sabah is a good friend of mine. She’s teaching me Arabic. Or trying to.” Annie raised her chin. “They’re called the Sama’un Rocks. Sabah told me they were inhabited by a jinni called Sama’un and that people used to leave gifts at the base at low tide.”

“Like an Irish shrine. A few pennies for a miracle.”

“I suppose.”

“So what does Sama’un have to offer? Sight for the blind? Cash for the strapped?”

“Fertility for the barren.”

Even through sunglasses, she could feel Gabriel’s eyes shoot over to hers. “So that’s why you organized this little expedition.”

“Don’t tell Rolf.”

The rocks were turning to a shade of burnt orange in the late-afternoon sun. “Do you know what gifts he likes, your Sama’un?”

“Dead goat, probably. Anyway, he’s gone now. Legend has it he took off after the British tried to bomb his rocks in the fifties.”

They paddled all the way to the rocks, where some fishermen were sitting on the sand mending their nets, then returned to the party. Rolf pointed toward the muddy lagoon farther along the strand and told Gabriel it was good for waders. “Fantastic bird-watching.”

“Fantastic everything,” said Gabriel. “Is Sultan Qaboos ever going to let tourists in?”

“I hope not,” said Marie.

“Give him time,” said Jasper. “There’s no infrastructure yet for tourism.”

“I do love your name,” Stéphanie said, out of the blue, looking at Gabriel with her fox-like eyes. “Were you named after the angel?”

Gabriel threw Annie a weary look. The question of his life. “Remember to put that on my tombstone, won’t you?” he said to her. “‘P.S. He was not named after the angel.’” He turned back to Stéphanie. “An uncle,” he said. “Sort of.” He sat on a towel and perched a sunhat on his head.

“Sort of?” said Marie, as Jasper handed her flatbread, stuffed with lamb and salad. “Thanks, darling. How do you mean ‘sort of”?”

“In that he wasn’t actually called Gabriel himself. My uncle. Our uncle.”

“How then can you be named after him?” Stéphanie asked in her tetchy French accent.

Rashid wandered back from where he had been playing with his younger son and sat on the sand near Sabah who, in spite of the heat, remained cloaked in her abaya.

“Go on, Gabriel,” said Annie. “It’s a nice story.”

“Oh, do,” said Marie.

Clearly unsettled at finding himself the center of attention, Gabriel hesitated.

Annie felt a pull of compassion. He had probably grown accustomed to averted eyes in recent months, but now these people were staring, waiting, as if asking him to account for himself, not simply for his name.

“Our mother’s brother, Jack, died with the name ‘Gabriel’ on his lips.”

“He said it over and over, during his last days,” Annie put in.

“But no one knew who Gabriel was,” Gabriel went on. “Jack’s wife was called Helen, their sons were Declan and Paul, and nobody in the family knew anything about a Gabriel, so they had no idea how to fetch him. Still, he kept asking for this Gabriel. Even years later, my mother couldn’t speak of it without welling up, because she couldn’t forget the way he had looked at her, pleading. She asked him where he was, this person, but Jack could barely speak.

“So, determined to find this man, she went through all Jack’s papers, his address books, his desk, and one day she even pulled every single book he owned off the shelves and looked through them for a note or a name on the flyleaf, anything.”

“That’s one of my earliest memories,” said Annie. “I must have been about four, and I remember all these books falling off the shelves at Jack’s house, raining down on us, with Mam leafing through them, like a madwoman.”

“What about his wife?” asked Stéphanie. “Did she not know?”

“She’d left him years before,” Annie explained, “so it was just Mam nursing him through his illness. He was only forty-nine.”

“And all the time she was looking for Gabriel,” said Gabriel, “it turned out she was expecting me.”

“Did she ever find him?”

Gabriel shook his head. “No. My namesake has never been tracked down or been found lurking in old papers. Not one clue. The family concluded that there must have been a son. Our cousins, Declan and Paul, still wonder if some bloke will one day roll up on their doorstep claiming to be their brother, but Mam has her own theory.”

Marie swallowed a large mouthful of food. “Which is?”

“A love affair,” said Annie.

“Ah,” said Stéphanie, “of course.”

Annie nodded. “It wasn’t spoken about, but it was fairly obvious why his marriage had failed.”

“When I was born,” Gabriel went on, “she wanted to pay homage to the love she had witnessed for the unknown Gabriel.”

“So you were named after a stranger,” said Stéphanie.

“Yes, and the only thing Mam knew about him was that somebody loved him, a lot, and that’s good enough for me. Better than being the namesake of some twerp with wings.”

“In the Quran,” Rashid said, vaguely, gazing down the strand, “the angel Gabriel is called Jibril.”

By day, Prudence stayed around more often, wandering about the house, eating the apples or lying on the cushioned bench, sleeping, staring, smiling if he passed. She even read, or at any rate flicked the pages of his few magazines, leafing through them again and again. He suspected she didn’t see what she was looking at; it was a movement, something for her hands to do.

“How does it work for you?” he asked one afternoon. “Do you decide, ‘I’ve had enough now, I’m going home?’ Do you call it home, wherever it is that you go?”

When she was with him, she said, she knew of nowhere else, and she came because she wanted to be in that quiet place, where she could listen to the sea and lie with him.

Dutifully, Gabriel phoned his parents every few weeks, the calls coming toward him, days out, like a slow-moving storm that could not be avoided. His parents’ voices would echo and bounce along the line and only the expense of the call saved him from anything more than fleeting inquiries. His father’s anger had not subsided. He said each time, “I’ll get your mother,” and she would say each time, “Is it very hot?”

Dutifully, he visited Annie as often as he could bear to leave the house, because he wanted to see her and to work on her. One weekend she intimated that, come the end of their lease in Muttrah, he would be moving in with them.

“Actually,” he said carefully, “I’d like to take on the lease myself. It’s working out so well.”

“In what way is it working out well? You have no friends, no music. No work. What do you do all day?”

“The solitude is good for me. It’s helping.”

“Helping with what? You’re not ill.”

“Christ, Annie, I’m ill as a dog!”

Her dead eyes turned back to the dishcloth she was running across the table. “Then you should be here, where I can look after you.”

“No.”

She looked up.

“I mean—no, thanks. I’m better alone. Really.”

“Your jinn lady keeping you busy, is she?”

He was not so dutiful, however, toward Max, whom he betrayed on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. Irrational though it was to be in love with a woman he knew nothing about—who claimed, indeed, to know very little about herself—Gabriel was nonetheless gliding through the days in happiness. Prudence soaked through his pores and flowed through his limbs. Every time they made love, he betrayed his brother with exultation and oblivion. He delighted in her presence, quiet though it was, and relished her ignorance. She knew him not at all. There was scarcely a person in Ireland who didn’t know what he’d done. Even the nation’s favorite broadcaster had churned it over with his listeners, many of whom rang in to the show to express their heartfelt outrage that he escaped with only a warning. It must truly have been a living nightmare for his parents. He had crippled them. The depravity had been momentary, perhaps, but its gruesome consequences would be lifelong. His every relationship had been compromised, damaged or destroyed, and any future relationship would feel it also. But Prudence knew nothing. He asked her. He said, “If I told you I’d done something despicable, would you still come?”

It was nothing to her, she said.

“I could be dangerous.”

She pointed out that she could leave any time.

“You leave too often.”

When she lay with her back to him, letting his hand curve over the hill of her hip toward the dip of her belly, he felt good, rich, lucky. Luckier than he had any right to be. When he pressed into her, he reached his own hearth, that safe place where no one could touch his conscience. And then the fucking took over. He loved the way she twisted, stretched, coiled herself around him; he liked the power of giving her pleasure, and denying it, enjoyed her soft gutturals when he succeeded and when he desisted. Although she was generous, bringing him off in the kitchen, in the stairwell, in the diwan, he gave more than he took, because he had to hold her attention; he had to keep her coming.