The Engagement (16 page)

Probably I was just giddy, so close now to freedom, but I had to ask, What am I returning to? The apartment above my uncle’s garage? The daydream about China, where, in reality, I’d have to keep designing shiny boxes? Or, most likely—if I went home and tried to regroup—my old bedroom in Norwich, where every morning through the wall I’d hear the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner hit the door frame, my mother’s way of saying, Get out of bed! Start sending around your CV! I’d have to walk along our cul-de-sac to the post office, dodging the neighbors telling me how their sons-in-law had also been laid off, knowing they still saw me as a big, plain lummox of a girl, not very popular and a bit standoffish. That was the irony of the letters: growing up, I had been the opposite of the neighborhood slut; I’d been barely visible.

Those letters . . . they worked like a riddle at the edge of my brain.

I had not told anyone I was seeing Alexander.

He claimed he had not told anyone either.

If he had not written them, a third person was trying to drive one of us mad.

Was there anyone who could hate me that much?

Quite possibly. I’d left home at eighteen, and with a late bloomer’s sheer will cured my accent, the slow-talking upswing, the provincial manners; I’d lost weight and learned to walk and dress and even smile differently. The experiment had worked: I was desirable. And it was intoxicating to have this sudden power after the years with none. How ought I use it? One standard of feminine success came down to me from 1950s movies, the heroines of those films sloughing off suitors as though it were a sport.

So yes, I could think of a number of men who at one stage or other would have liked to write me abusive letters, although most of them were now married with small children—they’d no longer have the time.

In Australia I’d effectively put myself in quarantine. Making Alexander pay for sex was meant to set up a firewall. The terms being clear, theoretically we could both gain considerable pleasure without either of us getting hurt. However, I
had
come here to start a new life, and perhaps, despite our struggles, I was about to do it, to become a person who could commit to another. This new me would surrender. All these years, I’d believed that marriage extinguished identity. That it was a tether to the worst parts of someone else: their insecurities and vanities and futile emotional weather. But one can’t avoid the horror of another person. A real person is horrifyingly, excruciatingly real! And yet, what real person does not want to fall to her knees with another in a great, ecstatic, transcendental show of giving up the self ?

I looked around, making out, just, the edges of the hedged garden where Alexander had proposed. So, was I trapped? Who
isn’t
trapped? If marriage was a trap, I had felt trapped outside the trap. Being forced into matrimony, being given this sort of nudge, was probably the only way I was actually going to do it.

I reached out to cut another camellia and focused on the sleeve of my jacket, my borrowed jacket. Alexander had left muck stains when, after the birth, he’d held me close. The sleeve’s outer fabric was stiff oilskin, but it had a soft padded lining—and all at once this material felt different against my body.

Had he truly never solicited prostitutes prior to our meeting? His sexuality now seemed too complicated for a nonprofessional to have to deal with. Who had owned the assorted clothes I’d found upstairs if not other women? Well, my rational self explained, he is pragmatic: no point disposing of garments like this jacket that are perfectly useful. The day before, Alexander had also made me put on old clothes. He had watched me dress in another woman’s shirt and trousers before we left the house to tour the farm. He had proposed to me, staring into my eyes with great longing, while I wore this outfit, and so, taking me in his arms, dancing, he’d inhaled someone else’s perfume . . .

I cut another flower. These anonymous letters weren’t a deflection from his own past, were they? There had been others here before me. Maybe he’d paid them, maybe he hadn’t, but they had been kept in this house with him. And they’d left possessions behind, clothes and makeup, which he’d hung on to as mementos. My chest was tightening: what if the letters regarding my ghosts blinded me to what was in plain view?

I stood, both hands holding a random bouquet.

“You are taking a long time.”

Alexander was standing on the veranda, observing me. Behind him the dining room’s chandelier was ablaze, and through the French doors I could see the long table lined with plunder.

Freshly showered and dressed in clean clothes, Alexander came down into the garden. He firmly took the pruning shears, then the pile of flowers, out of my hands. His features were gray and shadowy. “You’ve trimmed half the garden.”

I looked down at the stems I’d been holding—some were almost branches—and heard myself ask, “Have you really never been married before?”

He began trimming leaves off the stems. “No, I haven’t.”

“Engaged before?”

There was a long pause.

“I thought our pasts weren’t relevant, Liese?”

“But you’ve decided you know mine. So have you?”

He shook his head. “Frankly,
you’ve
not really got any right to be jealous. None at all.” More quick, efficient cutting, then with his boot he swept the debris into a plant bed. “You’re trembling. Come back indoors.”

On the mahogany dining table there was now an elaborate tiered vase of silver and cut glass. He had chosen it to complement the rest of the table’s spoils, but together these things looked awkward, as if in trying to re-create a memory from childhood, he’d tried too hard. Alexander transferred the camellias to the vase.

In the light, I noticed he had shaved. His skin was smooth again, except for a tiny nick to his cheek. I was standing next to him in another woman’s clothes, and despite myself, despite every reservation, something in me caught. I was moved to kiss his wound, to show him real affection.

He blocked me, suspicious. “What is it now?”

“Nothing!” I smiled but felt foolish.

“The birth made you feel maternal. Is that it?”

“No!” I exclaimed. But
was
that it? That regardless of everything, I wanted life inside me?

“Arrange the flowers, please.”

The camellias were in the vase, and there didn’t seem much else I could do; I shifted around the stems.

Alexander crossed his arms. He seemed dismayed that the birth had brought out something base in me. “A normal woman would see that, and sex would be the last thing on her mind. Just about anything seems to get you started, though. It’s lucky you
do
make me pay, Liese.”

I left the camellias as they were.

“No, no. It looks like you’ve found an old jam jar and stuffed them in. How hard can it be?” he asked, glaring at the arrangement. “Isn’t it a basic feminine art?”

“If you’re displeased you can always fire me.”

He seemed genuinely surprised. “What are you talking about?”

“Just fire me.”

Straightening, he stared at me with something close to loathing. “No, I don’t think it works like that. ’Til death do us part, et cetera.”

Why Alexander had suddenly turned poisonous again I did not know. Perhaps it was the pressure of the approaching guests, their judgment of me. He walked around switching on the room’s plug-in radiators, putting fresh candles very straight into the candlesticks, brushing invisible fluff off the napkins. If I would not admit the truth of my past, he would rather we didn’t speak at all. He had held a picture in his mind of how this day would be—the leisurely breakfast, our cooking for the engagement party, his consoling and supporting me over the mysterious correspondence—and I’d not lived up to it. Even my drawing breath now seemed to irritate him. I had become too familiar, as though we’d been long married already.

“You must have really provoked that man to get him into this state.”

I could see a sheet of paper on the sideboard, as if he’d just set it down after rereading. “But you think
he
was abusing
me
.”

“That doesn’t stop me wondering how the hell you let him. Some freak who can barely even spell.”

A freak like you? I thought.

“And please don’t start going on about the letters with the guests.”

“Why would I?”

He was rearranging the cutlery, making every knife and fork, every dessert spoon and fork, exactly symmetrical. “I mean, some of my friends know the history of our relationship, but this correspondence is a private matter.”

“You said you hadn’t told anybody.”

A gruff sigh. “After the letters began coming I needed counsel.”

Feeling myself start to sway, I reached for the back of a chair. The air around us tasted stale again. My face was hot and stinging. How infinitely and exquisitely embarrassing. People other than Alexander now believed I was a hooker. And my fantasy—in a sense, the contents of my mind—had been made public.

I spoke just to hold on. “Why don’t we call the police?”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“Isn’t this a crime?”

“How, exactly?”

“Slander comes to mind—”

Alexander snickered. “You want me to call the police and say, ‘Help! Until recently my fiancée was a prostitute, and now one of her clients is writing dirty letters to us’?”

“No, I’ll call the police and say, ‘This
abuser
, this curb-crawler, is holding me against my will!’ ”

“If you like.” He took the accusation calmly, but pushed the chair I’d been clasping hard under the table, straightening it. “The rest of the district, those who don’t already know your résumé, would certainly find out about it quickly.”

I saw a chance. “You’re ashamed of me.”

“No, I’m not.”

“If you’re so ashamed, why not just let me go?”

“But I’m not ashamed.” Alexander returned to full patrician mode. “I’ve simply realized we will need to keep our life very private.”

“So you won’t be defending my honor?”

“How can I?” His expression was free of all affection. “The nutcase who wrote these letters could be anyone. What do you want me to do, open the White Pages?”

I knew then that I must never be let out. In his latest plan I would not leave this house, for if we were walking down the street of a nearby town someone might recognize me. In his imagination, any man he saw even fleetingly in a shop or restaurant window, anyone he met at a party or a cattle sale, could once have paid me for sex
. We won’t go anywhere together,
I thought I heard him say, although his lips were not moving
.
With you as my wife there will be nowhere I can take you.

“Then, for God’s sake,” I asked quietly, “why marry a whore like me?”

He picked up the letter and folded it inside his pocket. “Because I love you.”

PART THREE

I

I
knew before now. That our game had gone too far.

This was the moment I realized: Alexander and I met outside an apartment for sale in Toorak, a supposedly exclusive Melbourne suburb. I greeted him professionally and let us both into the building’s foyer. We rode the elevator to the right floor and found the right door. Inside he handed me the usual envelope of money and I was already recalculating my debt as I took off my jacket, looking around the room to refresh my memory about an incident that had never happened. The owners had moved overseas, but to make the place desirable each room was full of rented furniture. Decor at the height of fashion, say, seven years ago—mainstream versions of 1960s space-age design which invited sex that was clinical and stylized—the kind that people think they ought to have.

I began a story along these stark lines, and soon Alexander had pushed aside a hired tulip table to kneel in front of me as I perched on a hired armchair. My legs around his shoulders—I was close to losing myself; shutting my eyes, trying to disappear—I heard a knock on the door.

We both stopped still.

There had been close calls before. Once we’d been about to start when we heard a key turn in a lock. I’d scrambled to put my clothes back on just as a cleaner bustled in carrying his strap-on vacuum. With my panties now in Alexander’s coat pocket, I’d negotiated with the man to call back when the inspection was over. Then I’d returned to the room in which Alexander was waiting, only to find him standing in his suit, barefoot. At the time I’d thought he was too nervous to finish dressing. But when I put my hand under his shirt to still his heartbeat, I found it perfectly calm.

Now the knocking began again—the quake of the timber panels and the metal safety chain rattling.

Alexander leaned over me, deeper inside me.

Unable, really, to move, I did not know if I should call out that this was a bad time. I didn’t know if by not calling out, whoever was on the other side of the door would think no one was home, take a key from his pocket, and open it. I did not know who had spare keys. Could my uncle? Had he seen the office car parked out front and, as my phone was switched off, stopped to give me a message? I did not know if it was a friend of the owners checking that the place was clean. Or someone from downstairs who, hearing the noise above, wondered what was going on.

“Who is it?” Alexander didn’t lower his voice.

Shaking my head, I mouthed, “I’ve no idea.” The knocking sounded angry. It was as though this person knew what we were doing.

“Is it another client, early?”

“Be quiet.”

“Someone who couldn’t wait?”

He was staring into my eyes, aroused by my panic. Did I wonder then if he was mad?

“I want you to open the door.”

“Please . . . be quiet.” I tried to pry his hands off my skin without making more noise.

“Go and open the door. Open it and let him see you are busy.”

Cautious Alexander was asking me to do this? I’d understood that the longer our trysting went on, the more likely it was to end in disaster. What I hadn’t registered was that some part of Alexander thrilled to the idea of being found out. He actually wanted people to know.

Eventually the knocking had stopped, and by the time it did I’d decided our game was over. I’d leave Australia. It was my only choice. I could think of no other way to end this.

 • • • 

I was sitting at the white dressing table, replaying this episode as I combed my hair. I put down the comb and picked up a lipstick. I drew a mouth. I took a pencil and gave myself eyes, and with a brush, cheekbones, making a mask behind which I could hide. When I’d received his invitation here, I was caught between wanting to push this thing—and my earnings—as far as I could and the desire to be done with it.

Was there an easy way to put him off ? I was always on the verge of confessing the truth—that one side of me wasn’t even very interested in sex, resented it in fact—and that this side actually found it mortifyingly teenage to be caught all day on a rat wheel of lust, perpetually fussing over one or another moist, swollen private part. Being in heat was like seeing the world through magic glasses; there was always another sexual dimension, each one more strenuous and absurd than the last. “To be honest,” I’d tell him, “I could happily do without the whole thing. You want to know who I am? That’s it.”

Smoothing my dress, I left the bedroom, pulling closed the door.

I walked slowly down the grand staircase, listening for the humming of pleasantries in the rooms below, my hand on the carved wooden balustrade with one invalid finger, the ring fixed tight.

In the drawing room, Alexander sat with his back to the fire. He’d switched on various lamps, and the soft light made the furniture’s upholstery appear less frayed, the birds in their glass case soothing shadows.

“You look beautiful,” he said.

An open bottle of champagne waited by a tray of six flutes.

I sat and took the glass he handed me. “Your guests are late.”

“They’ll be here soon.”

“What’s that sound?”

“Curlews.”

“At night?”

“Yes.”

The calls came spinning through the pitch-black and stayed in the air. Alexander did not speak further and neither did I. I was waiting to see who he’d invited—and then, after a while, to see if he had actually invited anyone. He was waiting, I supposed, for me to crack. Twenty minutes, then half an hour went by. The bottle of champagne was drained without fanfare.

“No one’s coming, are they,” I said finally.

Arranging his blazer cuffs, smoothing beige trousers: “They will.”

“It’s just going to be you and me.” I shook my head in disbelief. “Who did you imagine we were waiting for, Alexander?”

“I am waiting for some friends of mine.”

“Who are they?”

“People I know,” he said plainly.

“What do these people do?”

“When you meet them, you can ask.” His smile suggested that I should be quiet.

“Have they phoned to say they’re delayed?”

He began opening another bottle. “No.”

I listened to the clock marking time. I’d banked on the arrival of four people—one of whom, surely, would help me. But with each minute I grew more desperate. I thought again of the knocking at that apartment.

Afterward I’d found an envelope stuck under the door, marked
to the occupier
—a bill, perhaps, although seeing it waiting there I’d imagined it was the harshest possible rebuke for having sullied other people’s homes. And even through this guilt, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that Alexander was trying to find the limit to which he could push me. Did he have it in him to arrange for someone to come and knock? To hire an actor to pretend that he knew me?

“Are you expecting my ex-clients?” I now burst out. “Is that who the table is set for?”

“Would you like that, Liese?” he asked quickly, eyes alert. “What do you think we’d all talk about?”

“Your mothers, probably.”

“Really, is that right?” He nodded as though the guess were reasonable. “That reminds me: I’ve found something I want to show you.” Putting down his glass, Alexander walked to the bureau and produced an old leather photo album. Undoing a copper clasp, he held it out to me as a teacher would a storybook. There was a portrait of a woman in white, costumed as if for a coronation, the dress’s train spread before her and a bouquet of roses cascading to the floor.

My stomach knotted: obviously this was his mother. She was fair-haired, fair-faced, and gazing at the photographer with an expression of invitation much too liberal for one’s wedding day. Anyone seeing that look would have expected this marriage to have problems.

“What do you think of the dress?” Alexander asked.

“The dress is very nice.”

“I agree.” He paused. “Actually, I imagine it’s packed away somewhere in the house.”

“Shall we try to find it?” It would be a chance to get him out of the room—this time I would grab a coat and run.

“I’ll have to think about where it might be.” Stalling, Alexander bit his lip and took in the photograph once more. “She was so lovely, so kind. . . . Would the other men say similar things about their mothers?”

“I really couldn’t tell you.”

“But what’s your professional opinion? You said yourself you’ve had to talk to a lot of men about their families—”

The dogs began to bark and howl, followed by the sound of a car’s wheels on the gravel. An engine was turned off. A door slammed. Footsteps—footsteps outside the house. In the dark this person approached the front door, then stopped, coughing. Both of us sat braced. The guest started rapping on the door’s brass knocker.

“Oh, it’s you,” I heard Alexander mutter when he answered it.

“Who were you expecting?” a woman replied.

He didn’t say.

“Are you going to invite me in?”

Walking into the room, this thin, flat-chested woman looked familiar in some way I couldn’t place. Long, blondish hair was clipped in chunks at the back of her head, crimson lipstick streaked her pale face; she was attractive, and had been very attractive, but her face showed the signs of someone who, having tried, had at last given in. She was dressed in a vintage burgundy pantsuit that was made for someone shorter, more buxom, more flamboyant. Over this she’d incongruously thrown a khaki padded vest, bulky as a life jacket.

“This is Liese.”

I was smiling dumbly.

His hands on his hips, Alexander added defiantly, “Liese is a close friend of mine.”

“That’s very nice,” the woman said.

“Actually, we’re engaged.”

She laughed, a high, uneven sound. Glancing at us both—one, then the other. “Brilliant.” She clicked her tongue. “How brilliant.”

Was she Alexander’s wife, or his ex-wife, or his ex-fiancée? Her outfit could have been from the wardrobe upstairs.

Picking up the champagne bottle, she poured herself a generous glass, and still amused by something—perhaps me in a white dress, given what she’d heard—held it up in ironic tribute. “You’ll have to marry at St. John’s. Have you been there, Liese?” She opened a corner cabinet, found an ashtray, and lit a cigarette in jerky, fluttering movements. “It’s the local church. Alex’s great-great-grandfather donated the stained-glass windows—some of the finest Victorian glass in this country.”

I was mute, still thinking, Surely this woman—whoever she is—can help me.

“It will be their wedding of the year!”

“Liese,” Alexander said sharply, “would you mind giving us a moment?”

As I moved toward the hall, with plans to go upstairs and get my money, the woman sniggered.

“You really know how to pick them, don’t you.”

“What do you actually want?” Alexander tried not to shout.

“I need to pick up some things.”

“So get them. Just go and bloody get them.” Alexander peered out the window at the driveway.

The dogs resumed their maniacal noise: another car was on the gravel. As Alexander went to greet the new arrivals, the woman put down her drink. “Excuse me,” she said dismissively, and soon I heard her running up the stairs.

A middle-aged couple followed Alexander into the room. Dressed almost identically in pressed jeans and navy turtleneck sweaters, they were the same height, the same austere build; even their hair was styled in standard-issue gray helmet cuts. The woman, however, wore a cross of beaten silver around her neck.

“Sorry to be late.” Already she was regarding me with curiosity. “We called continually but your phone must be out. The Barrett-Joneses tried calling too. Willow has her usual stomach problems—they send their apologies.”

Alexander turned to me, his eyes a cold blue. “My love, the Reverend Wendy Smythe. Wendy is our local minister, and Graeme, her better half.”

“Congratulations.” Her tone was no-nonsense.

I opened my mouth but no words would come.

She nodded. “It must be a lot for you to take in.”

With the arrival of the woman upstairs I’d gained my first witness; if she proved unreliable, I now had two more to choose from. I took it my imprisonment was effectively over: you don’t abduct someone with plans to release and hunt them down in the national park—because
yes
, that was where my mind had gone—then invite a bunch of spectators.

Gazing now at my soon-to-be-ex-fiancé, I found myself affecting a kind of awestruck, moist-eyed simulacrum of love. My voice, softer and higher than usual, finally worked. “Oh, Reverend, I’m the luckiest girl alive!”

The minister positioned herself on an overstuffed gentleman’s chair. “Have you set a date?”

I felt myself flush as if on cue. “No, it’s all been so sudden.”

“When a committed bachelor finally finds Miss Right there’s no time to waste.” Alexander passed the guests pâté and biscuits. Beckoning for me to sit next to him on the couch, he squashed my hand in his. “If I had my way, we’d all be down at the church tomorrow morning. Liese is more cautious, but I’m hoping to persuade her to speed things up.” He was hiding unease with joviality. “Wendy, what are you doing,” he said, glancing at his watch, “say, tomorrow afternoon?”

The minister turned to her husband, signaling he should laugh. The sound he made was nervous. Like a humble servant in a play, he had the habit of ducking his head whenever I met his gaze.

“Enough about us,” I said. “Graeme, what do you do?”

It took a moment for him to register that he’d been asked a question.

“He plays the guitar and sings for our elderly community,” Reverend Wendy explained.

“A troubadour!”

Graeme blushed. “I try to keep the set upbeat and bright, that’s all.”

As his wife detailed his musical program, I nodded and smiled. I found it easy enough to play the chaste bride (especially when I saw how much the act was irritating my fiancé). My exit strategy solved, I could not resist fucking with him a little. He’d paid for a whore, not a prim bride-to-be. Mock gentility seemed appropriate. I held my champagne flute, a little finger flaring, and took delicate, lizard sips, smiling straight through his scowls to assess this situation. I had wanted to cry with gratitude upon seeing other people, but all the while the minister spoke I felt a new disquiet. She regarded me knowingly with two very seasoned eyes.