I was driving to the Al A’ali House, thinking that quite a lot of things might be like theme park rides. You know how at the age of sixteen or seventeen you’ll try anything? Vertical drops that leave your innards behind, roller coasters that wrench you round while haphazardly upending you, nausea‐inducing spinners that hurl you about until you’re not sure if your bones are inside or outside. At that age, you want the sensations. But you don’t get many middle‐aged women on roller coasters. Maybe that’s because middle‐aged women know that death happens – or maybe there’s some complicated hormonal reaction going on, producing feelings of fragility and nausea. Maybe we just have more flesh to wobble and protest. Whatever, there comes a time when you can’t see why you ever thought it was a good idea to queue for an hour in order to experience a minute and a half of queasy terror. When you realize the importance of having someone on the ground to hold the bags.
I wondered if spending time alone with James Hartley might be like that: something that once seemed thrilling but was now largely incomprehensible, which only made sense when you were seventeen.
I was wearing a new, simple navy dress, which I was hoping was deceptively demure, provocative in its refusal to be provocative. It was, I thought, an outfit that was putting up a bit of a challenge – ‘OK, only take me on if you think you’re really seductive.’ Matt got it – he said I looked great, and he’s gay, so he does notice – but for all I knew, the signals might be too complicated for James, who might just think I wasn’t making enough effort and looked like someone’s secretary, which is what I am.
The door to the Al A’ali house was opened by a tall North Indian, with James crossing the hall not far behind him, wearing a pale blue shirt that emphasized the splashy, Hockney‐in‐California colour of his eyes. He’d hardly put on any weight over the years: his chest and shoulders were more solid but his waist and hips were slim and his neck hadn’t fattened – unlike the necks of most middle‐aged men I knew – or gone scrawny.
He hugged me for a moment – holding on slightly too long again – and led me into the drawing room, which was lit by at least fifty fat candles, guttering against the dark wood and the Persian carpets. They were Qashqais – my favourite – and, a little nervously, I started chattering away about the door‐to‐door carpet salesmen who try out their merchandise on your floors, rug after rug until they spot a weakness, then up and leave without any money, so you can find out how you feel about it. The annoying thing about carpets is that you almost never go off them: if you like one, you’re going to like it even more a week later.
I was prattling and James didn’t know anything about carpets and didn’t have much to contribute to my stream of consciousness, so it was a relief when the handsome waiter came in with champagne.
James indicated a place on the sofa and I sat down. He sat next to me, knees closer to mine than you’d put them if you were trying not to give someone the wrong idea.
‘I want to know all about you,’ he said. ‘Everything. Why are you here?’
‘You invited me.’
‘No, I mean in Hawar. Why did you stay on?’
‘I hadn’t planned to…’ Fourteen years ago, everyone had assumed that I’d leave, including me, because I had three children under the age of eleven and my husband was dead and it seemed unlikely I could live in an Arab country without a man. Some people (Chris and dad) couldn’t understand how I could live here with a man, what with the heat and the Hawaris.
But then, one afternoon, about a week after Dave’s accident, I was driving home along the Corniche and, for no good reason, perhaps simply because everything was off balance, I didn’t turn off up the Jidda Road to the compound, but carried on driving towards Saffar, which was still a fishing village then, toppling into the salt flats at the western tip of the emirate, the houses made of gypsum, the roads rough. I parked the car at the point where the road petered out, and walked along the rubble track to the place where palm trees sprouted along the shore and the land and sea seemed to wrap into each other. An old Hawari was crossing the mudflats on a wooden cart pulled by a white donkey, a pile of conical wooden traps behind him. There was near‐silence, aside from some rustling palm trees, the occasional shout of a child in the village behind, the soft squelch of wheels through muddy wet sand. I stood for a long time, losing track, watching the sun sink through the sky like a slow weight until it touched the water, seeing the horizon spit up its oranges and pinks, its yellow and mauve livid lights. I felt the heat sink out of the day and the darkness fold over.
That was the day I decided to stay. The idea wasn’t completely irresponsible. Sue had offered to keep me on at school, which I knew would take care of the rent and mean that Anwar would sponsor me. So I could stay legally, and I could afford to stay. And standing there on the shore, it occurred to me that I didn’t need protection – at least not the kind my dad and Chris were talking about – in Hawar, where so much that was meaningful was veiled in politeness. With everything so quiet and reflective and the sea and sky seeming to pour back their colours into each other, I realized that it would be perfectly possible to live here.
‘You haven’t regretted it?’ James asked, when I explained some of this.
‘Well, no, although you always wonder how things might have been different.’
‘Yes,’ he said, so meaningfully that I blushed. ‘It must have been hard, though,’ he added, ‘being on your own.’
‘I wasn’t really. I had three children.’ I didn’t want him to feel sorry for me, or think I felt sorry for myself. He said something then about my obviously being a great mother, which was just flattery, because all he knew about my children was that one of them was gay.
Most of the time, as I confessed to him, I believed I was only getting it half‐right – unlike, say, Maddi’s parents, who’d known what they wanted from the outset, and had cultivated various accomplishments, musical instruments and off‐piste skiing. I hadn’t known that off‐piste skiing even existed, and I’d brought up my children haphazardly… But the truth is that you can only be self‐deprecating and oh‐I’m‐rubbish‐really about motherhood up to a point, because you run the risk of suggesting your kids are failed kids, useless and disappointing, whereas in reality they’d have to become murderers or heroin addicts or something for you to feel that, and probably even then you wouldn’t.
‘Well, I think you’re incredible,’ he said at last. ‘And you always were determined. I knew you’d be brilliant at whatever you put your mind to.’
I raised my eyebrows, trying to look lightly amused in a sophisticated way, as though film stars were always paying me compliments. I asked about him, to give myself a moment to reestablish my composure, although, in reality, I knew what had happened, because I’d read the profiles. I knew that he’d only been in Los Angeles a few months when he’d got his first part in a low‐budget movie, and that three years later the director Brett Berkovic had cast him as a drily witty time‐travelling professor of genetics, a role he’d since reprised five times.
‘It’s mad, all that,’ he concluded. ‘But you’re in the real world,’ he added, as though that was something to admire. ‘You have all these kids and people to worry about.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘that won’t work. That real world stuff. I’m not going to feel sorry for you because you’re too busy to get out to your ranch in Arizona more than twice a year.’
‘OK,’ he said, smiling. ‘So, anyway, we seem to have established that you were prepared to go abroad with Dave, even though you wouldn’t with me?’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘I want to know where I went wrong. People generally find me fairly attractive.’
‘You are,’ I smiled. ‘You know you are. You always were.’
‘Well, then?’
‘I suppose…’ I glanced at him uncertainly, but he seemed genuinely to want an answer. ‘I suppose I felt left out. It was your decision to go.’
‘But I asked you to come…’
‘Only at the end. I didn’t feel it was about me.’
‘It was always about you.’
‘I thought at the time I couldn’t trust you. Now… well, I think that perhaps it was myself I couldn’t trust.’
‘OK, maybe that’s acceptable. That’s quite gracious. I think we can live with you taking the blame for messing up our relationship.’
I remember thinking at the time that James was selfish, but what had seemed like self‐obsession then now seemed more the kind of youthful drive and ambition that would allow a person to become successful. I’d grown up in a very enclosed world, where you were a bad daughter if you didn’t pop in to see your parents every day. I’d been too insecure to contemplate leaving Thornton Heath; I’d lacked the imagination to envisage a larger world. I could have had a bigger life, an oxygenated life, only I’d been too frightened to take it. I had turned down experience and adventure, while James, very sensibly, had gone ahead and seized it.
The waiter arrived to say that dinner was served and we moved into the dining room, although I wasn’t in the least bit hungry.
Over sashimi followed by sea bass – at which we only picked – we made general conversation, a lot of it about the film and Al Maraj’s ambitions for it.
‘Nezar’s idea is that Arab investors won’t put much money into an industry they know so little about,’ James explained, doing rather a good job of pretending to be discussing matters of general interest while actually staring at me and touching my ankle with his toes. He’d kicked off his sandals under the table and his flesh against mine sent little shocks of sensation through my body as he shifted his feet. ‘They need one or two films to release well, so they can see that the business can make money – and he’s obviously hoping that this is going to be one of them.’
‘It’s asking a lot, though,’ I observed, trying to ignore his toes just above my ankle, ‘that the Arabs should get involved in an industry where they’re so often seen as the enemy.’
‘I suppose that’s partly the point – to prove to Hollywood they aren’t the enemy, and to show the Arabs that Hollywood can help demonstrate that to the rest of the world.’
‘It’s ambitious, anyway.’
‘That’s Nezar, though. Look what he’s achieved here, making a film in a location that’s about to become a war zone.’
‘He seems rather stern,’ I said carefully, ‘as if he disapproves of a lot of things.’
‘Does he? Like what?’
‘Well, me, actually.’
‘He’s probably jealous.’
‘Of what?’
‘He probably thinks you’re going to distract me.’ He pushed away his plate. ‘I hope you are.’
‘Oh, and how do I go about that?’
He smiled. ‘You haven’t changed.’
‘I’m afraid that’s not true in any sense…’
‘– You’re fun, you’re incredibly sexy. You’re not after anything.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure…’
He grinned. ‘You see: that’s what I mean. Most women are too serious. At least, around me. They think they’re going to get noticed. I often feel like a kind of soapbox. Women use me to stand on, so the paparazzi can get a better view of them. I can never tell whether they’re genuinely interested in me or if I’m just a career opportunity.’
‘I think you can safely assume they want to be with you. People generally speaking would.’
‘You’d be surprised.’ He looked at me intently. ‘You know, I haven’t had a proper relationship – not one that’s been really meaningful – since you.’
I didn’t quite know how to respond.
‘I meet a lot of women like Rosie.’
‘You’re dating Rosie?’ I said in alarm. ‘Isn’t that illegal?’
‘What?’
‘Isn’t she underage?’
‘Oh, I see.’ He grinned. ‘I’m not dating her, though she might if I were interested – which I’m not, because I’ve got my mind on other things – but the point is, I wouldn’t know whether she was just using me to claw her way up. She’s very ambitious.’ He smiled. ‘Shall we stop pretending we’re hungry?’
‘The waiter will be gone soon,’ he murmured, as he steered me into the drawing room, his hand in the small of my back.
‘I have to tell you, though, that I’m jealous,’ he announced in a different tone, as we sat down to wait for the staff to finish clearing up: ‘I consoled myself all those years with the idea you wanted security – that you didn’t want to leave home – but now I find that as soon as I was out of the way you ran off to the desert.’
I didn’t want to talk about Dave. ‘If I remember rightly,’ I pointed out, ‘you wrote me a letter saying I was dull and that it would serve me right if I married someone at the insurance company and lived in Thornton Heath for the rest of my life. What was I expected to do after that?’
‘Did I? How appalling. I can’t believe that was me. I don’t write letters.’
‘It was very badly misspelt.’
‘Oh, right. Probably was, then.’
I had a sudden swooping sensation of familiarity as he bent his head towards me; a jolting moment of recognition, of the shape of his skull, the blur of his face as he came close. I registered shock that this was happening, that James Hartley was about to kiss me, and then he was, and then a few moments later he broke off, scooped me off the sofa and in a single movement only possible for someone who did weight training, carried me towards the stairs.
I burst out laughing. He’d done this the first time we’d ever had sex – lifted me off the sofa and carried me up the stairs of my house when my dad and Chris had gone off to visit my nan in Frinton. I’d thought then (you have to remember that this was well before the gesture was rendered ridiculous by too many schlocky movies and also that I was only seventeen) that this was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to me. I’d been scared about sex – about getting pregnant, about sexually transmitted diseases, which they implied at school were rife, about sleeping with a boy who if he wanted to have sex with you had probably slept around with slags, about being a slag, about getting it wrong and not knowing what to do. But I’d been excited too, and James’s carrying me upstairs had misted up the lens, made it hazy with romance. My ankles may have bashed on the banister and my shoulder scraped along the woodchip wall‐paper but I was a princess being carried away from a tower. Clearly I was not a slag.
‘You can put me down, though, now.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m heavy.’
‘No!’ he lied. ‘Not at all! Same as ever.’
Oh no, I thought: he’s going to trip over the corner of one of these Persian carpets and cut his head open on some piece of Indian carved furniture and it’ll wreck the shooting schedule and cost the producers a fortune, or at least their insurers… and maybe he’ll need plastic surgery and never look as good again and his career will be finished and it’ll all be my fault.
And then I thought that was typical. Here I was, being carried upstairs like Scarlett O’Hara or a princess from a tower, about to be seduced, and I was thinking about insurers.
The staircase was much wider than the one in my dad’s house in Thornton Heath and this time I didn’t graze any part of my body on the fixtures and fittings.
And then a door slammed downstairs.
‘Oh,’ said someone. ‘Oh, right.’
I couldn’t see a thing, but you would have to guess that the person was pretty pissed off.
James spun round. I thought he was going to drop me. Even action heroes can fall over, especially when they’ve been drinking champagne.
‘Nezar!’ he said, out of breath (he had been lying about my weight) ‘bit busy, as you can see.’
‘Ah‐hah,’ said Al Maraj, or something like that. ‘Hruff. Hmp. You’ve got a five‐thirty call.’
‘Fiona said six.’
‘It’s five‐thirty.’
‘James, can you put me down?’
‘No, we’re going up.’
Why were we whispering? We could still be heard.
‘Good evening, Mrs Lester,’ Al Maraj said coldly.
‘Annie,’ I offered, over my shoulder. ‘For God’s sake, James, put me down!’
He finally did then, but awkwardly, so my foot twisted slightly as I landed and I staggered, like a drunk person.
‘Good evening.’
‘I suppose this was bound to happen,’ he said – sneered wouldn’t actually have been too strong a word, ‘but, really…’
But really what? And why was it bound to happen? Did he think I’d thrown myself at James? Did he always shag old girlfriends?
Al Maraj turned and went back out, slamming the front door.
‘What odd behaviour,’ I said. ‘Is he allowed to barge in, just like that?’
‘He uses the house as an office. He’s got a room here.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘He was supposed to be out. It didn’t come up. It’s a big enough house. I thought you knew.’
That seemed to be too many reasons, not all quite fitting together, but I didn’t say so. I was wondering if there was any chance of getting back to where we’d been before.
James must have been too, because he said, ‘Now, where were we?’ and lifted me up again, although it was quite a lot harder from a standing position.
‘We need a stunt couple,’ I suggested, but he didn’t smile, just took a deep breath and trudged on up the stairs.
It’s a funny thing about sex that it’s physically quite limited. There are only so many things you can do: a limited number of body parts to pay attention to and a finite number of positions, only some of them wholly practicable. Emotionally, on the other hand, almost anything could be going on. It’s perplexing that the same physical process can leave you feeling so entirely differently. Unfortunately, given the sameness of the moves, you can’t always be completely sure what emotional variant you’re getting. Unless there’s some transcendent moment when you look into one another’s eyes and divine the intensity and scope of the other person’s feelings, you can’t be one hundred per cent sure their mind hasn’t floated away to tomorrow’s shooting schedule or whether to buy the latest Ferrari.
I suppose I hoped that by having sex with James, I’d be able to answer that question everyone kept asking me, ‘What’s he really like?’ I’d acquire some special insight from shagging.
It didn’t happen, though the shagging was good, in the sense that he was very expert (much more so than I remembered; evidently, he’d had plenty of practice). But despite our neatly timed orgasms, I can’t say I really lost myself. I didn’t ever forget that I was having sex with a film star, and I’m not sure he forgot I was either.
I caught myself almost feeling sorry for him. People must expect so much of such a perfect body, of a man whose sexiness was hyped around the world. That could be quite paralysing: how could he not be conscious of being James Hartley? Of the fact that just by getting into bed with you a woman had achieved most of what she was going to get out of the encounter, so that it almost didn’t matter what happened subsequently? She’d still have been to bed with you. And whatever did happen would almost certainly be a disappointment, because being good‐looking and a competent actor did not in fact mean that you were a sex god. How could you hope to live up to your image? But at the same time, how could you not try? You’d have to put on a performance, to concentrate on being James Hartley, suave and sexy; and in the process, you could easily forget to focus on who it was you were in bed with.
‘Sorry about the morning,’ he said sleepily, at last. ‘Look, stay here as long as you want, OK? They do breakfast downstairs for us, and I’ll get them to leave everything out for you – or you can get anything sent over from the hotel.’
A few minutes later, he was asleep. I lay looking at his outflung arm, thinking you could pick any part of him and admire it.
Perhaps if he’d asked me to go to America in a different way, he might have got a different result. Or perhaps, by the time Dave asked, ten months later, the fact that James had left, done something entirely different, made me realize I could too. I remember joking that I couldn’t keep turning down men who wanted me to go abroad with them. And writing in my diary that this was my best chance of happiness.
I could see now that I’d been quite insecure.
It was a mystery why James was lying in bed beside me, and I had no expectations of anything much beyond the here and now. But I didn’t have any regrets; I didn’t feel insecure any more. James and I weren’t unequal, because, for all his ability to get women into bed, he seemed needy, as if he thought there was something he wasn’t getting while he hurtled and lurched from relationship to affair, movie to movie, shedding bits of himself like skin in all the different beds he slept in. He believed I was the opposite – that I was grounded, I’d had relationships that had lasted, children to slow me down and make me take things at their pace. The certainty and durability of my emotions seemed, I think, tantalizingly different to his own fleeting, opportunistic, expedient relationships.
What seemed only a very short time later, a telephone rang in my left ear, and I stirred into consciousness of lying shoulder to naked shoulder with James Hartley, his hand lying lightly against my hip. The bedroom door opened and someone – one of his staff, I think – brought in a pot of tea and two cups on a tray and James was awake and out of bed and in the shower.
I stretched and yawned and made myself sit up and look at my watch, which said five o’clock. James came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, and I had to take him in bit by bit, because it was all too much at once.
He sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Thank you for a great evening.’
‘It was no trouble.’
‘I’d really like to see you again.’
‘OK…’ I said cautiously, ‘that can probably be arranged.’
‘The thing is, though,’ he added awkwardly, ‘I think we should keep it quiet. Just for now.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Once people start finding out, it will change.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No, because you haven’t been in this situation before.’
‘You think?’
‘Have you been out with someone like me?’
‘I’ve been out with someone exactly like you.’
‘I mean a movie star,’ he said, getting dressed.
‘Well, not often, no,’ I accepted, though it was a bit early in the morning for him to be pulling rank.
‘So you don’t know what it’s like.’
‘I see,’ I said tightly. ‘What is it like?’
He came back to the bed. ‘Look, Annie, I want to get to know you again. I don’t want to lose this feeling.’
‘No, it’s a very nice feeling,’ I agreed.
‘But we will if other people get a piece of it. Which they will, once they start finding out. So all I’m saying is that we should keep it quiet for a bit. Keep it to ourselves.’
‘Al Maraj already knows,’ I pointed out. ‘And the staff here. And Matt and Sam knew I was having dinner with you last night, and you can be sure they’ll have noticed I didn’t go home.’
‘I don’t mean Nezar. Or Fiona. And obviously I’m not asking you to lie to your sons. Just generally. Gossip gets out of hand so quickly, and the papers will print anything if they can get away with it. And then even you start to believe what people are saying… Anyway, I don’t mean for ever. Just till we get to know each other a bit better.’
‘Oh,’ I said disappointedly. ‘I was about to come downstairs with you.’
‘Really? We only have coffee. And then go out to the cars.’
‘If you don’t want me to, I won’t.’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. Look, fine, come down if you want. But you’re not even dressed…’
‘It’s not as if I’ll waste time choosing what to wear.’
He smiled. ‘No. You’ll have to find your clothes, though. They’re all over the shop… Look, I’ve got a couple of things to run over with Fiona, so I’ll go ahead. But you come down when you’re ready. And if we’ve already gone, I’ll call you later.’
Once he’d left I went into the shower and stood under the steaming water, thinking that one of the big attractions of sleeping with a global sex symbol was telling people about it. But of course, he knew that.
I retrieved my clothes from the floor and put them on, found a hairdryer and ran my fingers through my hair, cleaned my teeth with a new toothbrush I found in the bathroom, then went downstairs into the dining room, where James was sitting in the corner reading a script, and Nezar Al Maraj and Fiona Eckhart were standing by the table. Everyone looked up when I appeared. Fiona frowned, Al Maraj looked disapproving, and James said with embarrassment, ‘Oh, hi, Annie. You’ve met everyone?’
‘Yes. Morning.’
Fiona pursed her lips. ‘Nezar, what is it with this country? We still don’t have permission for filming at Wadi Ghul…’
‘It’s where the crown prince likes to ride, I’m told,’ he said, staring at me. I stared back. ‘Good morning, Mrs Lester. Coffee?’
‘Annie. Yes, please.’
‘But I thought he wasn’t even in the country?’ Fiona asked.
James was sitting in the corner armchair, frowning at a script. ‘Wasn’t he in trouble in London?’
Al Maraj handed me a coffee cup. ‘He gave a speech,’ he said. Did I imagine it, or did he shake his head at me? What, in despair?
‘Would you like some breakfast?’ He indicated the dining table, which was piled high with enough bread, pastries, fruit, juice and cereal for at least ten people.
I was starving, even though it was nowhere near breakfast time. I hadn’t eaten much at dinner. I helped myself to a chocolate croissant and took it over to a small table in the corner.
James glanced up from his script, smiled at me encouragingly, then went back to his reading.
There were two chairs at the table and, as soon as I’d sat down, Al Maraj came over and joined me.
‘James told me about your son,’ he said quietly.
I frowned. ‘You mean Matthew?’
‘Yes.’
I looked over at James but he was still engrossed. Al Maraj leant forward. ‘This is a difficult time politically,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s doubtful whether the emir will recover from his stroke.’
‘Right…’
‘Matthew should be careful.’
‘Er, well, it’s sad, about the emir, but I’m not sure what it’s got to do with Matt.’
‘Homosexuality is illegal in Hawar.’
‘I know that.’ Did he think I was stupid? I was the one who lived here. ‘I think he’s careful.’ Why was he hectoring me like this? Was he homophobic? Did he want to make me feel bad? ‘No one’s been arrested, have they?’
‘What?’
‘For years. They haven’t arrested anybody.’
‘That’s not the point…’
Wasn’t it? Why not?
He frowned and said, ‘Hawaris aren’t ready for the whole gay lifestyle…’
‘That’s a shame, given how many gay Hawaris there are. But if you mean they’re not ready for Matt, you’ve got him wrong. He’s not the campaigning sort.’
Al Maraj sighed, as if I were missing the point. ‘Tell him to be careful. That’s all,’ he said, and looked at me hard. Why did he keep doing that? I looked back, equally hard.
Fiona said the cars were waiting. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Lester.’ She whisked past with her arms full of clipboard.
‘Annie.’
She smiled thinly.
‘Can we give you a lift anywhere?’ Al Maraj asked.
‘Her car’s round the back,’ James said. I think even he wanted to get rid of me now. But he dropped a kiss on the side of my head, somewhere near my ear, and whispered that he’d call, and then they were gone and I was left alone with a small mountain of food.
I sat down to gather myself for a moment. I could see it might take a little time to work out what this thing with James amounted to. He seemed keen enough – almost painfully so – when we were on our own, but awkward and embarrassed in company. Still, it was probably worth investing a bit of patience in trying to understand him and the exigencies of his celebrity. He had to be careful with people, clearly. He was used to not giving too much of himself away. Being famous was a bit like burlesque – you showed a bit of yourself and then had to whirl away again to hide it.
The guard shuffled out of his post to lift the barrier into the compound, smirking as if I’d proved something of satisfaction to him personally. Western women are sluts, presumably. I wanted to lean out of the car and say, ‘I was with James Hartley, actually,’ to see if his expression would change (it would have) but obviously I didn’t.
I slid the car quietly through the compound, left it in the carport and let myself into the house, closing the front door quietly behind me.
I could hear Matt talking in his room and, for a moment, I thought he might have someone in there. I’d reiterated the point about it being OK to bring someone home and he’d said: ‘Really, mum, you’ve been fantastic about all this, but I don’t think you’re ready yet for gay sex.’
What did he mean? Was gay sex particularly noisy, or intrusive in some other way I hadn’t thought of because of having a limited sexual imagination?
I did remember once seeing a television programme about the trial of Oscar Wilde and there was quite a lot of fuss in that about semen and faeces mixed together on the sheets at the Savoy. So perhaps he had a point. Perhaps I would be ready for gay sex when he did his own laundry.
The trouble was that for as long as he didn’t bring anyone home, I was left thinking he was having random and promiscuous sex with men he met in coffee shops and at private parties or down some back street of the souk. My investigations on the internet suggested that gay men generally speaking had a lot more casual sex. I’d come across an online diary by a gay man (I don’t know who was in charge of the censorship software in Hawar, but he was incompetent) who claimed devotion to his boyfriend was consistent with his also having something called tricks – which seemed to be one‐night stands – and something else called fuck buddies – who were friends he had sex with every now and then, like other people might meet for a coffee. He thought heterosexuals got themselves into a muddle about monogamy.
So perhaps Matt assumed I wouldn’t understand the whole business of tricks and fuck buddies, and he was right, I wouldn’t.
He didn’t seem to have anyone in his room. He’d been on the phone. Now he wandered into the kitchen. ‘And what time d’you call this?’
I put the kettle on. ‘You’re up pretty early yourself.’
‘Website training.’
‘Were you on the phone?’
‘What? Oh, that was Jodie. Trouble with Adam again.’ Completely unconvincing. There were some things, clearly, that he wasn’t going to tell me.
‘So, it was a success then,’ he said, getting butter and milk out of the fridge, ‘with James Hartley?’
‘Yes, thank you. Although Al Maraj didn’t like my being there and Fiona Eckhart could barely bring herself to speak to me this morning.’
‘You’ve rattled them.’
‘They might just be rude.’
I poured two mugs of tea and handed one to him. ‘Matt, we agreed – James and I – that we wouldn’t say anything to anyone at the moment about seeing each other.’
He frowned. ‘It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it? You already did.’
‘I don’t mean to you. To anyone outside.’
‘Why not? Is there some kind of union rule? You must have had a certain amount of Botox before you can officially date a film star?’
I laughed uneasily. It hadn’t occurred to me that this might be about the way I looked. ‘It’s more that he’s kind of public property and people feel they’ve got a right – you know, to take a view.’
‘So you don’t want me to tell anyone?’
‘Please.’
He poured some orange juice. ‘Pity. It’s the only glamorous thing that’s ever happened in our family. I could have been glamorous by association.’
He took his juice and went back to his bedroom to finish getting ready. By the time Sam had to get up, fifteen minutes later, he’d already left the house.
‘You stayed out last night,’ Sam said in an accusing tone, as soon as he walked into the kitchen.
‘Uh‐huh. Toast?’
‘Is it because he’s famous?’
‘Is what because he’s famous?’
‘Is that why you stayed the night with him?’
‘How can I possibly know? He is. I can’t do anything about that.’
Sam sat down at the table. ‘Or are you attracted by his money?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Sam! I’m not going to get any money out of it. We’re not getting married. It’s an affair.’
‘That’s disgusting.’
‘No, Sam, it isn’t.’
‘You dumped him when he was a plumber.’
‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.’
‘Well, if you can’t see what it looks like, I’m not going to explain it… Why’ve you made me toast? I don’t want toast.’
‘You always have toast.’
‘I want muesli.’
‘OK.’
I removed the toast.
‘You realize people will talk about you?’
‘Actually, they won’t, because we’re not going to tell anyone.’
‘Why not?’
‘People will gossip.’
‘What, so he’s ashamed?’
‘No! It’s… fragile.’
‘You just said it was a silly affair.’
‘I don’t remember using the word silly. All I meant was I’m not sure it has much chance and…’
‘No, well, he could go out with anyone.’
‘Well, thank you for that support.’
‘What is he doing with you, though?’
How do you explain passion and regret, pleasure and nostalgia, a sense of something left behind and lost to a sixteen‐year‐old? Sam didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that I might have sex that wasn’t either procreative or dedicated to holding a family together.
‘I don’t think he’s had much in the way of real, sustained relationships.’
‘So he’s not very good at having girlfriends? What, can’t he hold on to them?’
‘Sam, you’re being needlessly hostile.’
‘You’ve got to admit it’s weird.’
I put the milk jug on the table and said wryly: ‘That should make it easier to keep secret.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Sam said through a mouthful of muesli, ‘I don’t suppose it will last anyway.’
When Khaled brought the post later that morning at school, there was a letter from dad. He said he’d had a lovely time at the wedding and how nice it had been seeing me in the Gulf looking so well and that James Hartley had obviously thought so too. He wondered if I’d had the chance to see him again and hoped everything was all right with Matthew and he was sorry if he hadn’t taken it as well as I’d hoped at first but it wasn’t something people of his generation found easy, because there didn’t used to be so many gay people. Now it felt as if a lot of them had suddenly come from nowhere. He didn’t know if there really were more but it was hard to believe that that many people had been pretending all that time, so perhaps something really had changed because they say all the fish are turning female, which is something to do with plastic bags and hormones, so you have to wonder what’s being done to us.
I don’t think he was really trying to say that Matt was an early warning of environmental catastrophe. I think he was trying to apologize.
For me, everything that day passed in a bit of a blur. It was like jetlag only with something better to look back on. I worked mechanically, avoiding actual conversation with people whenever I could in the hope that no one would notice that I was drifting around in a daze.
Will called half way through the morning, except that it was early morning for him and he was on the bus, rattling into work. He wasn’t very focused, either: I could hear him rustling the FT even while he was telling me that work was fine, the flat was fine, Maddi was fine, fine, fine, fine… I knew his mind was really on the day’s meetings and all the other hectic City stuff he’d have to deal with once he got into the office – instant info, breathless exchanges, just‐in‐time trades. But I couldn’t really blame him because he was talking to a brain‐furred school secretary in a global backwater, and she wasn’t making any effort either.
At lunchtime, Karen rang. ‘Don’t tell Chris I’ve called you,’ she said in a rush, ‘because he thinks it’s too expensive, but I’m worried about your dad. He’s called Gay Switchboard.’
‘Chris?’
‘No, Ted!’
‘He’s not planning to come out as well?’
‘Annie, please! It’s not funny. Chris won’t talk about it…’
‘Were they helpful, at Gay Switchboard?’
‘I don’t know! They gave him a number for some other organization and now he’s going to a meeting.’
‘That’s OK, isn’t it? He’s not making you go with him?’ ‘Don’t you think it’s weird?’
‘I don’t know… Not if he’s got questions…’
Actually, I couldn’t imagine my dad going to a meeting of any kind, least of all one about gay people.
‘I think he might be going senile.’
‘I don’t know, sounds the opposite of senile to me: making calls, going to meetings.’
‘Oh, I should have known you’d be like this!’ Karen sighed bitterly. ‘It’s all very well for you. You don’t have to deal with him. And Chris didn’t want gays in his family in the first place…’
‘He’d be much happier if he stopped being so bigoted.’
Until Matt came out I’d hardly been aware of prejudice. I suppose I might have suffered, relatively, from being female: sometimes I suspected I’d been beguiled by romance as a means of corralling and containing my sexuality. But this was no one’s fault – no one had specifically said, ‘Let’s keep Annie Lewis’s sexuality under control by making her watch soppy films and read romantic novels.’ So I hadn’t noticed, because I’d grown up with it and hadn’t questioned it and anyway it was a really nice idea. But now Matt’s coming out had exposed me to rampant and barely‐disguised prejudice, to which, incredibly, I had previously been oblivious. I felt as though I had been sensitized, and would forever more have to examine people’s responses more carefully, for hidden thoughtlessness.
‘Yes, well, he’s how he is… Annie? Are you still there?’
I explained that I’d had a disturbed night and promised that I’d talk to her properly about it when she’d found out exactly what kind of meeting was involved.
James called in the middle of the afternoon, as he’d promised. He was affectionate, but clearly rushed, snatching a minute when he was off the set to speak to me. ‘Look, I’ve only got a sec,’ he apologized, ‘but there’s this trip to the desert being planned for Friday, on camels or something. Nezar’s organizing it. Would you like to come?’
‘With Nezar?’
‘And a few others. Not a big group, though.’
‘I’m not sure they’ll want me.’
‘Don’t be silly, of course they will. Anyway, I’ve asked you now… Look, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got to go.’
‘So,’ I told the boys over dinner that evening, ‘it’s obviously good that he’s asked me out again, but less good that it involves a load of other people.’
‘Maybe you’ll like them once you get to know them,’ Matt said unconvincingly.
The main reason I didn’t like them was that they obviously didn’t like me, and I couldn’t see that changing.
‘I thought this James Hartley affair was supposed to be a big secret,’ Sam said. ‘So why’re you going out in, like, a big group?’
‘I suppose Al Maraj and Fiona Eckhart and those people don’t count.’
‘What, so his friends can be trusted and ours can’t?’
‘Not really … they’re part of the deal. The whole James Hartley thing.’
‘Oh well, I suppose even a crap date will be something to look back on afterwards.’
‘Sam, why are you being so hostile?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m not. Go. But do you really think anything’s going to come of it?’
‘I don’t know.’ I thought teenage boys were supposed to like irresponsible shagging. ‘That’s not really the point.’