I was thinking about happiness. (I was meant to be thinking
about menus but my mind had wandered.) Specifically, I was
thinking about how no one knows what to believe in any more,
let alone where to look for it. How there are so many different
routes on offer, especially in a place like this where people come
from all over, bringing their contradictory ideas with them. The
particular route I had – I won’t say chosen; been encouraged
to believe in – was that happiness would result from another
person’s coming along and spotting me, identifying something
uniquely perfect, if admittedly not very visible, about me. And
that would be that. Sorted. This happens all the time in books,
and then they end because there’s nothing more to say. There’s
never any suggestion of having been spotted by the wrong
person, or of having accidentally let something else go. Never
anything about the person dying and leaving you on your own
with three children.
It was staggering that I’d gone along with this as long as I had.
At least my children had been exposed to soap operas and reality
television and the internet and weren’t girls, so they hadn’t
been encouraged to think that if they sat and waited in a spirit of
passive good-naturedness someone would turn up and solve all
their problems. Which only made it more mysterious that Will
was getting married, now, when he was so young and there
seemed to be no pressing reason for it.
I’d just come back to this point about Will and the wedding
when Katherine said something that made me stop thinking
about happiness, that made me scrape my coffee cup noisily into
my saucer.
‘I saw Adnan last night,’ she began, ‘and he said James
Hartley’s got the Al A’ali House from the beginning of October.’
She looked around complacently over the top of her clipboard.
‘But surely he’ll stay in one of those suites on the beach they
built for the GCC summit?’ I replied stupidly, given she’d just
said he wouldn’t.
‘So he’ll be there for the reception?’ Matt asked, looking
up. Until now he’d spent the brunch reading the film listings in
the Hawar Daily News, even though there are only two cinemas
in Hawar.
‘I know,’ Katherine said, ‘but they’re being understanding and
I think we can too. It’s not every day . . .’
‘We’ll have to invite him to join us,’ Matt said, ‘at least for a
drink. We can’t be in his garden and ignore him. It’d be rude.
Maybe he’ll bring some producers and casting directors and
people? Maybe I’ll be spotted.’
‘You don’t need spotting,’ I muttered irritably.
‘Bloody film!’ Peter Franklin probably would have been
reading the Hawar Daily News himself if he hadn’t been the
bride’s father and required to look interested. ‘I’m sick of it
already and they’re not even here yet. You’d think nothing else
had ever happened in Hawar.’
‘Well . . .’ Matt said.
‘I don’t know if you’ve missed it, Matthew, but we’re about to
have a war.’
‘He’s been saying we’re about to have a war for at least eight
months,’ Katherine told Matt cheerfully: she was too pleased
about James Hartley to be put off by the imminent explosion
in the region of chemical and biological agents; ‘ever since Bush
started going on about his axis of evil. Which if I remember
rightly was in January. And here we are in September, and it still
hasn’t happened!’
Peter raised his eyes to the roof of my veranda, meaning to
convey that if his wife thought we’d got away without a war
then she was stupid.
Matt shrugged. I don’t suppose he really thought there was
any chance of avoiding the war, but he might have believed it
wouldn’t touch us in our tiny, strategically insignificant emirate.
In 1991, he’d been eight: all he could remember about Desert
Storm was journalists flying in and hanging around the hotels,
making their way into the bars, lounging by the pools, doing
pieces to camera against the sunset. It had all seemed rather
glamorous, as if for a moment we were at the centre of a world
that usually ignored us. And it is true that the epicentre, if that’s
the right word, of the American invasion of Iraq was going to be
about 400 miles away, assuming things went to plan, which with
wars is always a bit of an open question.
I considered backing Peter up – pointing out that we didn’t
know how many weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein
had or how far they could travel or what mass exactly they could
be expected to destroy. But we were organizing a wedding and
it hardly seemed the moment. Besides, I was still thinking about
James Hartley.
‘Anyway, he won’t be remotely like whatsisname, you know,’
Peter warned his wife.
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know! Porchester.’
‘Why I’d be familiar with the name of a time-travelling
professor of genetics who doesn’t actually exist . . .’
Katherine ignored him. ‘Anyway, he might be. Like Porchester.
We haven’t met him yet.’
‘Er . . . Mum has,’ Matt said.
‘Annie? You’ve met James Hartley?’ Katherine stared at me in a
way that was, under the circumstances, bordering on rude.
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘When? How?’
‘We lived in the same street.’
‘They went out,’ Matt said, without looking up from his
paper.
‘No!’
It is true that James Hartley is a film star whose name is
known to remote tribes without telephones and I’m a mother of
three who’s quite good at making lists, but why the incredulity?
He had to come from somewhere. And I’m not so hideous.
‘Well, you kept that very quiet!’ Katherine said offishly, as
if I’d lied to everyone, which I hadn’t – although I hadn’t made
a big thing about it either. I knew that once the word got out I
wouldn’t be able to go into Al Jazira to buy a lemon without
people asking me about it and whether I’d be seeing him when
he was here and why didn’t I throw a party for him?