The Engagement (5 page)

Lying here now, stretched out, ready, I could make out his heartbeat, sense his hands inches from mine. I was determined not to say his name aloud, not to be the one to speak first.

“Alexander.” When finally I broke, my voice was plain, although he’d want me to be scared, girlish. “Alexander, stop it.”

Still I waited—there was the faintest ripple of glass as the wind charged by—and only slowly did I realize that the sound of his watch was in fact my watch, with its cheap mechanism; the sound of his breathing was really my own lazy breath, the heartbeat belonged to my body. This room now seemed to shrink, closing in until it was as small as a room in my head. He had been here, and now he was not. Turning off the lights, Alexander had disappeared, leaving me to lie alone in the pure dark.

IV

T
hat first morning I lay still in the tall single bed, waiting for proof I was awake. The room was narrow, boxlike, with high pressed-metal ceilings. Over the years scouring sunlight had turned the pink walls sallow, this country’s light aging everything. In the bright white sky out the window I watched the green cloud of a cypress pine. The tree’s branches were swaying, but only silence, or whatever dream had tagged me in my sleep, now reverberated. I listened harder. It was unnaturally quiet, and I wondered if Alexander was still in the house.

I did not want to get up and start this whole routine again, but unfolding slowly into the cold I stood and walked to the window. Surrounding the house was a formal garden dominated by a vast lawn. From this vantage I could make out circular patterns where someone had recently mowed. The lawn was framed by a privet hedge; then further, as far as I could see, there was flat, verdant farmland—no other buildings, just fields, bleak in their sameness, with no sign of those mountains.

Old houses make me self-conscious. I knew I couldn’t be seen, but somewhere there were eyes. I made the bed, straightening the frayed satin edge of the blanket, plumping up the vintage pillow—admiring the frugality of rich people—and I did these things as though a camera were embedded in the ceiling’s cornice.

Everything now was performative: I was
brushing my hair
,
dressing neatly
. Then I was
closing the door quietly behind me
and
walking down the grand staircase
, through the house’s formal area to the servants’ quarters. A line of bells was still mounted on the wall, showing where in the front of the house the help were required:
conservatory, dining room, yellow room, best bedroom, day nursery.
Here at the back, extra dingy rooms seemed to have been added as the household’s staff multiplied, although as far as I could see, only one person was now in residence.

In the kitchen, Alexander had washed last night’s dishes, stacking them neatly by the sink. Above the sink a window looked onto an orchard. Long grass grew between twisting, bare trees. To the glass he’d stuck a note:

Checking cattle—back by midday. Make yourself at home.

AC

So he hadn’t been able to face me. It was hardly a surprise. If I’d been quicker-witted I’d have realized the morning after was always going to be fraught. Sustaining the intensity of our city appointments was near impossible. So what had I expected?

A dirty weekend, actually, for which I’d be paid.

I opened a door of the refrigerator: vegetables in the salad drawer, and half a dozen bottles of champagne. I opened the other door: a freezer filled with labeled containers, each one holding meat. An inventory was taped to the inside of the door listing dates and contents, as though some mad creature—with two brains, three loins, seven hooves—had just been vanquished. Alexander had drawn little boxes next to each item; some were ticked.

The clock struck, and I jumped before laughing to cover my nerves,
laughing loudly like there was no problem
. It was nine o’clock. He was not supposed to be back for a few hours, but listening, I now heard something else. A door slamming?

“Alexander?” I called.

There was no answer.

Peering out of the kitchen, down a thin corridor, I called again. “Hello?”

The entrance hall was empty. Through a clear patch of the front door’s stained-glass panel I made out the circle of pebbled driveway; only Alexander’s car was parked there. Whatever I’d heard must have been some corner of the house heaving with age. I turned the front door handle and cursed aloud. It was locked.

There was no key in the door, on the ledge of the glass, or anywhere else that I could see. Irritation washed through me, and when it had passed I could feel something else: my heartbeat.

I walked back to the servants’ quarters. Past the kitchen, I found a cloakroom. Here there was another door. It was battered, finger-stained; the handle moved but would not open.

It was sick, I know, but I thought of my wrists being tied.

On one of our first meetings, we were in the lavish bedroom of retirees who were moving permanently to a coastal property. Standing by their French provincial bed, Alexander took off his tie and weaved it nervously through his hands. “Have you had a busy day?”

I’d been uploading photographs of different properties to the agency website. “It was okay.”

The tie was navy with a print of light blue squares. “Many sales?”

Not wanting to talk, I held out my wrists.

“Oh,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

I waited while he fumbled with the knot. “I’d have thought a farmer would be good at this.”

“Sorry, nearly there.” Alexander glanced up; he was genuinely trying to get it right. “Perhaps I-I should tie you
to
something.”

The carved bed head had no rails. Across the room was a Louis ­Quatorze–style chair, and if I lay on the carpet, the smooth bedspread would stay undisturbed. These were the shortcuts I was still learning. (Once after taking a shower together, I’d found myself saying good-bye at the door only to have to return and painstakingly wipe each drop of water off the glass cubicle.)

I positioned myself, wrists next to the chair leg.

As he bent over me—leaning as he might over a sheep that needed tethering—I supposed we were both thinking how bad the other was at this game. I was admonishing myself for not quite taking control, or not taking control in quite the right way. It was supposed to be the person paying whose hands were tied, wasn’t it? And obviously it would have been better to undress before being disabled. Very politely Alexander went about removing which of my clothes he could, carefully folding them so they wouldn’t crease, and then he did the same with his own (and socks were never sexy things). He came down to me in a teetering fall, rigid, like a toppling statue. There was the slow summoning of conviction. He seemed too straight to leave me tied up, but I struggled, focusing on the oriental wallpaper patterned with a little peak-hatted, plaited man in a pagoda. His own precious piece of real estate.

But the locked door—I stood staring at it.

Had Alexander “forgotten” I was here?

Turning, my footsteps echoed with a confidence I did not feel. Despite the grime and bits of comedy, this house still knew its power. And all the decoration—the friezes, the plasterwork—seemed an elaborate distraction, not unlike my host’s manners, the ornament leading you further from the actual man. He’d left me no option but to snoop around.

Off the grand entrance hall were two rooms: the dining room and the drawing room.

The air in the drawing room had a kind of shimmer to it, a live quality that I figured was dust. After inheriting the house Alexander had evidently changed nothing. Every object was in its pedantic place, including the squat couch upon which, the night before, I’d started to undress. All the cushions were now perfectly straight, their geometry punitive.

A bird made a call like a whip—I glanced out the window.

The garden went mute; nothing moved.

When I turned back to the still room, the kookaburras and cockatoos, frozen on branches in their glass case, seemed too alert. I looked again out at the garden, where I presumed the birds had once lived, then back to the uncanny decor, which felt as alive as the birds. That was the way of antiques—a chair picked up some force from all the people who had sat in it, a vase from the hands that had touched it. They carried absence. The absence of those who’d previously used the objects in this room was palpable. People were needed to keep them under control.

I walked across the hall to the dining room.

Above the fireplace hung the portrait of Alexander’s great-great-grandfather—muttonchop sideburns, rosacea, a death stare. You don’t need looks to start a dynasty.

Around him framed sepia photographs gave an Australian history lesson: colonial prosperity to Edwardian dissipation. After the old man did the hard work his progeny were mostly at leisure—at shoots, hunts, tennis games, balls.
Arabella Presented at Court
,
read a handwritten inscription under one picture. I guessed this thin-lipped woman in a tiara and elaborate gown was Alexander’s great-grandmother.
Unpacking the Rocking Horse
: her six lace-collared children stood in a pile of straw surrounding the carved horse.
Fun for All!
: two young men in three-piece suits spun a skipping rope for long-faced girls in white dresses and hats, the house rising up in the background, watching. Then a series of a man playing polo, and this same man riding an elephant alongside a laughing woman—both having a grand time as the money slips away.

I imagined Alexander returning to this house after visiting me, letting himself in and having all his pedigree shine back at him. Each room would be cool on hot days, a balm against whatever aspects of our meeting left him uneasy. At any moment we could have been caught in one of those apartments by whoever else had a key. But he’d gotten away with it. He’d transgressed and returned to this life unscathed, no one any the wiser.

Down the corridor to the right of the staircase, I found a room Alexander must have used as his office, a large leather-lined desk at its center. Facing the door were tall filing cabinets marked
tax/accounting, cattle, sheep, export/asia, export/arabia,
and arranged on the desk in careful stacks were account books, lists of forthcoming cattle sales, cropping records, spreadsheets on exchange rates, a calculator. There was also a newish computer set to a weather satellite; swirling cloud patterns moved across the screen.

Along one wall were high bookcases full of volumes with leather bindings now turned to suede. I moved a few steps forward to inspect this library, as if the books were my true interest. He seemed to know a little about a lot, and I tried to guess which ones he had read. Even the newer books were at least fifty years old. His father’s, perhaps? The various titles on cattle and sheep breeding included the huge tome
Merino
. This was near Margaret Mead’s
Coming of Age in Samoa
, while on the shelves out of reach was Churchill’s
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
, and, detailing the locals’ more recent past, a lot of books about mining by someone called Blainey.

I stood staring at the spines.

I was in his house, in his element. Around me was every clue to who Alexander Colquhoun was, and yet I felt my picture of him disassembling.

The few posh boys I had known at close quarters seemed to have a vacancy about them. They were nice, dull, ground-down souls, although maybe their class stopped them from opening their treasure vaults to girls like me. Alexander was their antipodean cousin. Surely his blankness was just blankness, not a screen for something else.

“I’ve never been with a prostitute before,” he said after our bondage session, as if apologizing for the awkwardness.

I’ve never been a prostitute before, I thought. The word itself seemed to make me one.

“Often I feel I don’t quite know who you are,” he went on.

The owners were due back any minute, and to palm him off I asked lightly, “Do we ever truly know the other?” I was whoever he found me to be; certainly I’d given up on finding myself. It looked like being just more of the same. Channeling this other person—this prostitute within—seemed far more rewarding. But now, standing in his study, I saw my problem: I’d been subsumed in my role, and this had been a kind of idiocy, leaving me deaf and blind to the clues my client handed out.

I picked up his appointment book. Page after page where apparently he saw no one, then a small “
l
” on the days we had met alongside the addresses of various properties. I opened bills he’d folded into the book’s pages, receipts for the farming chemicals Omethoate or Trifluralin or Ester 680, scanning them for some sign. Who are
you
?
I picked up his account books, looking down the neat columns, as though I were capable of understanding any irregular expenditure.
Who are you?
I even started riffling through a pile of tractor brochures, wanting to shake some fruit from the high branches to identify the tree.
Often I feel I don’t quite know who you are.

Why did I not know? I did not know because I had not bothered to find out. That was the truth. People think sex is a good way to understand another person, but it’s like studying someone’s shadow to determine how reliable or smart or confident or sincere or knowing or dangerous they are. Alexander seemed “normal enough”—whatever gauge that was—and I hadn’t particularly wanted to get into his parents having neglected him, or how he’d roamed around the farm like a feral prince until the day he went to one of
those
boarding schools, one he’d hated.

He had hinted at these things, the barest details of his story, during our assignations, although I half felt I could have predicted them. I could have told you there was something about him that other children would not have liked. Stiff, cerebral, he’d have been bullied and would have annoyed those bullies further by reacting with hauteur, by not seeming to particularly care he was being harassed. And I don’t know why, but I imagined the harassment was in keeping with the public-school model. Older boys walking past younger boys’ rooms, slowly dragging a cane across the doors, and the younger ones peeing themselves as they waited to be beaten. It put a kink in their tastes.

After some false starts, after I had a better idea of what Alexander wanted, the two of us got together in places made as nice and inviting as they could be for sale. On some sectional couch a couple had labored over choosing together, or hoisted on their marble kitchen bench, the knife block within easy reach, the uptight, careful Mr. Colquhoun became a different man. Or rather different men, and this seemed the perfect arrangement. I might have a craving to see him—whoever he was—and inevitably there’d be the call. Past a certain cursory tour of each new property, I figured we had no need to pretend we’d come together for any other reason than desire. Desire and its most creative expression. Every step of a staircase, for instance, could offer some startling new position, or angle, or matching of parts. A plate-glass window was a kind of brace and vertiginous stage (one squirt of Windex and the city views were again uninterrupted). As far as I was concerned we were discovering the meaning of modern architecture, giving it a purpose. And then there was the money, the aphrodisiacal cash waiting at the end.