The Engagement (3 page)

III

I
hated houses like this. Shutting the door of the pink bedroom, I retraced my steps along the dim upstairs hallway. Furlike dust covered everything, every coiled, frilled detail: the carved eaves around each closed door, the banister of the staircase and its railings. At college we barely studied Victorian architecture. It was considered mildly embarrassing, too full of pomp and sagging grandeur, too historical. If anyone referenced the aesthetic it was to be ironic. But walking down the steep stairs, I tried to draft a plan of the layout in my head. The first floor was one long rectangle, bedrooms on either side; the ground floor opened onto the entrance hall with its two grand adjacent rooms, and farther along, to each side of the staircase, separate corridors led left and right.

Alexander had switched off the entrance hall’s light, and in the dark I placed each step carefully, feeling for the stair, until my foot landed hard on the tiled floor. I could not tell in which direction to go now.

I paused, listening.

Past the left-hand corridor was a faint light. I walked toward it and entered what must have been the old servants’ wing. The dimensions were tighter, the ceilings lower. It smelled of earth.

“Hello,” I called.

“This way,” Alexander answered.

I followed his voice into a kitchen, large enough for a fleet of cooks and unchanged since their departure. Scuffed red linoleum on the floor and cream cupboards running to the ceiling, lining each wall. An antique Aga was embedded in their midst. Beside it stood my host.

“You are here,” he said softly, almost bowing. “You are actually here.”

Yes I am, I thought. And I should have known it would be like this, the house matching his faded decorum.

He looked like a teenager who’d shot up without broadening. On his long, thin torso his apron was too small. Behind him a frying pan spat but he stood as if overwhelmed, a strange, sweet smile on his face. “Are you hungry, Liese?”

“I am.”

“And you eat meat?”

“I do.”

“I suppose I should have asked.” His voice was tight as he tried to sound casual. “It’s a scratch meal tonight, but an English specialty: kidneys. Tomorrow I promise to cook properly.” He turned back to the stove. “Do you mind a slightly pissy taste?”

I hesitated. “Is there an alternative?”

“A not so pissy taste.”

“Oh.”

I remembered how in the different places we met, properties for sale or rent, he would occasionally look in people’s pantries, scan their cookbooks.

After our first liaison, Alexander phoned once a week to tell me when he’d be in town. Each time I gave him a different address. He would knock on the door and I would lead him into a “spacious
3
BR entertainer’s town house, showcasing stylish architectural vision in a dream lifestyle location.” Or a “refurbished bluestone church featuring infinite breathtaking possibilities.” Or the bay window of a “freestanding Victorian with tuck-pointed facade and excellent rear access.” (All the copy eventually sounded like singles ads.) That he had to pay me was taken for granted. He would hand me a white envelope with cash inside it. I would spread a towel on the bed, undressing myself, then him.

In the beginning he was serious, worried he might somehow cause offense—even in the most basic moments all that breeding never quite left him—whereas I had to fight the itch of comedy. I considered charging him exorbitantly just to touch me but throwing in fellatio for free, or adding a tax if he gave over the money in a way that struck me as begrudging. Why not be paid for degrees of penetration, with a surcharge for other objects? Or a fee for different surfaces, including penalties for carpet burn?

I owed money, you see. And every morning I woke with this figure imprinted on my eyelids. Debt’s gnawing was like a small insect burrowing deeper and deeper toward my brain. Cash was the only analgesic.

So we would be lying on someone else’s bedspread, their photographs and ornaments arranged carefully on the bedside cabinet, the things they wished to keep from view still hidden inside, and I’d be thinking, I can’t believe I’m doing this. Using these rooms was the transgression, taking his money just an element of our game. This game involved leaving normal life and returning unscathed. (Back in the office, the towel we’d used jutted from my bag; my workmates believed I’d taken up swimming.) I assumed Alexander knew he was my sole customer ever. I also assumed he preferred I didn’t mention that to be the case. It was a game until it was not. Then we were anyone—everything. Total strangers, trying to forget our own names. It always worked best to imagine we’d never see each other again.

“All right.” Alexander was scanning the kitchen, crossing off an invisible checklist.

On the shelves of the cream cupboards, among the crockery, were prize ribbons from various agricultural shows. There was also a promotional calendar, turned to the June pinup of an award-winning bull.

Lifting the pan off the stove, Alexander found it hard to meet my eye. He started toward the kitchen door. “Please follow me.”

Back in the hallway, the darkness was intense, almost alive.

After a few steps I brushed a wall.

“I’m sorry, come in this direction,” his voice beckoned.

Finding the ties of his apron, I kept hold of them, moving forward as he did. The cooking had brought out the kidneys’ odor. It was fetid, like walking into garbage cans.

“I know my way around with my eyes closed.” He flicked a switch, and a chandelier flared on, a hundred sulfur-tinged droplets illuminating the dining room.

Along one wall, French doors were festooned with bustles of magenta velvet. The other walls held a crammed assembly: mounted fox heads, carved emu eggs on silver stands, antique sporting trophies, and engravings of favorite stallions, their legs splayed like rocking horses. In the center of the room was a long table that could have seated twenty but was set for two. Three white camellias were in a crystal centerpiece, the arrangement slightly awkward.

Alexander deposited the pan of kidneys on a sideboard, alongside a toaster and loaf of bread. “Please, sit.”

“Thank you.” My back to him, I listened as he carved two slices of bread, putting them in the toaster’s slots.

“Sorry,” he was tapping his fingers on the sideboard, “it gets too cold if I do it in the kitchen.”

His sensitivity was not without charm. He was taking this seduction seriously, but we’d already bypassed all the normal intimacies and as he stood behind me striking a match, I tried not to shiver. He leaned closer, then over me, his thick fingers trembling as he lit the table’s candles. He turned off the chandelier, and the room seemed to jerk. From behind me again, he poured wine into my glass.

I felt him watching me drink, checking my reaction. “It’s delicious.”

“I thought you would like it.” The toaster made its electric
ping
and Alexander served the kidneys on two plates. “Please, start.”

I raised the fork to my mouth. This meat was soft and firm and dense and
pissy
. “That’s powerful,” I offered.

He untied the apron and sat down opposite. “The kidneys have been souring in there.”

My eyes were still adjusting. “In where?”

“In the animal,” he said. “Some people perfume them with wine and herbs, but I think they should taste of what they are. Why pretend it’s something else? The animal is the animal. Past generations respected animals by not wasting anything. The heart, the liver, the lungs, the bladder even.” Talking about what he knew—meat—seemed to relax him. I wondered if he was entirely serious or whether this gruff butchery chat was a way of covering his shyness. Either way, Alexander could not disguise a hopeful look: the introvert’s pleasure at the prospect of being drawn out. “Usually we eat the outer flesh,” he explained earnestly, “but this is the inside of the animal and it smells like the inside of the animal. The kidneys don’t get any light, any air; they don’t get any exercise.”

This was
Pygmalion
done with offal. “How did you learn to cook?”

“I didn’t really have a choice.” He shrugged. “No one else could.”

Alexander refilled both our glasses. “People today get their tidy little plastic-wrapped piece of steak at the supermarket, and they don’t even know what part of the animal they’re eating.”

I was looking at him as if for the first time. He had a nerdish hold on his enthusiasms, and his face was flushed—the zeal had risen to the surface. So this is what interests you, I thought. It was moving, in a way. Until now I’d not had much idea of what he cared about.

A clock panted, as if the house itself were drawing breath.

“I’ve been thinking of inviting you here for a while, Liese.”

“It’s very nice to leave the city for a few days.”

“I wanted us to spend some time together.”

I glanced down so I’d appear to be the one who was embarrassed.

“Okay.” He clasped his hands together. “Where are we up to in the story of your life?”

“Well . . .” I smiled, as though touched he cared. He wanted me to fall for him—or to act it out, at least. He was paying to woo me, a routine much more intricate than pretending we’d never met before and would never meet again. My announcement that I was leaving the country had excited Alexander’s interest in my past, and I wondered which past would now advance things between us—one full of dirty stories or my actual, very normal Norwich girlhood. Here in the dark I could use either.

“This”—he gestured around the room as if we were sitting in a palace—“this must all seem very . . . well, I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable.” His head to one side, his lean neck veered from the business shirt. “What I’m trying to say is, I don’t take all this seriously. I mean, I don’t let it define me.”

“No, of course not.”

“Because these places can, if you let them.” He paused, waiting for me to ask the right question, then proceeded regardless. “The house was built by my great-great-grandfather, son of a Scottish blacksmith.” Nodding toward a portrait over the fireplace. “He came at sixteen and made himself a wool baron. From nothing. He died with a hundred thousand acres.”

“Is he buried in one of them?”

“Not one that I own anymore.” He seemed distracted by the thought.

“And you live here . . . by yourself ?”

Alexander smirked. “I’m not married, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I laughed like the thought hadn’t occurred to me. “Do you ever find this house too big?”

“Why? Is this another place you wouldn’t sell me?”

“To be honest, I have more experience with modern architecture.”

He studied the tabletop. “I’ve read some girls can make a lot of money in your field.”

“Property’s really more lucrative at the top.”

“You
help out
in your uncle’s business.” His intonation suggested real estate was a known front. “But I meant your other field.”

“Oh.” So not my Norwich girlhood, then.

“Some of you put yourselves through university, finishing up with the degree and even investment properties.” Alexander smiled briefly, turning his wineglass in his hand. “Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that your different jobs show you have a certain amount of get-up-and-go, of ambition, and I don’t think that’s any bad thing.”

I wondered whether I was meant to take this as a joke.

He looked up at me. “Have you set a date to leave Australia?”

“Not yet.”

“You’ve bought the ticket?”

“Soon.” In fact, hopefully next week.

“I see. Where are you planning to go?”

Moving the kidneys around on my plate. “I’d like to travel home through Asia. I’ve never been—”

Alexander straightened. “You’re not going to try to work there?”

I hesitated because actually I was. A designer friend in Shanghai reported new buildings were going up daily, that it would be easy enough to find a job.

“I only ask because I imagine in your trade there’d be a hell of a lot of competition.”

“Yes, possibly.”

“Not that you wouldn’t have advantages.” Perhaps he was trying to stay positive, but his wholesome face looked strained.

“Thank you.”

“Tell me about the brothel you worked in.”

Had I told him a story about one during our meetings?

One Monday morning my uncle’s receptionist, Maria, announced to the office that over the weekend she had been to an open day at a local brothel. All the women had instantly stopped work to gather around her cubicle, eager for the details. “Do they hold these events often in Australia?” I’d asked hopefully. (It wasn’t like one could learn how to ply this trade by reading up in the library.) No, the open day was a one-off. The brothel, the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, was being listed on the Australian stock exchange, and this was part of the publicity campaign. For a “gold coin donation”—one or two dollars dropped into a bucket—that would go to a charity aiding sexually abused children, a “hostess” with a cigarette in one hand and a rum and Coke in the other, who may or may not have been a hooker, led around Maria and a group of fifteen others.

Apparently it was as though all the brothel’s staff had been coached to use the words
hygiene
and
safety
as frequently as possible. In the industrial-size laundry, the visitors were told they could have been in the bowels of a hospital—all linen was washed at highest temperatures with antibacterial disinfectant. By the bright yellow, six-foot-high bin where condoms were relegated, they heard about trained hazardous-waste specialists. By a spa bath, about regular inspections from an environmental health officer. Then, taking in a bed custom-made to accommodate four people, they were given assurances of rigorous monthly STD checks. Everyone nodded solemnly, presumably wishing they could just see the people fucking.

“The brothel in which you worked . . . outside London,” Alexander tried to jog my memory.

I didn’t say anything.

“Did you have to line up in a row and get picked? I mean I-I imagine you were always picked first.”

“It wasn’t that sort of place.”