The Engagement (13 page)

The crystal doorknob was faceted like the diamond I did not want.

Turning it, I walked into a large and bright and cold master bedroom. A row of tall sash windows gave a prime view of the dilapidated garden—the hedged rose garden at its center—and the acres of encroaching farmland. It was a scene blasted back on itself by the mirrored doors of an elaborately carved wardrobe. These doors also repeated the thick, floor-to-ceiling chintz curtains and matching bedspread, patterned with bouquets, great fistfuls of bleached-out lilac, which seemed straight out of an interior-decorating magazine circa 1985. All of it—even the regret—was a scene trapped in amber. I stood there frozen too. The room was powerfully feminine and I began to shiver.

I walked over to the nearest bedside cabinet. I’m not sure why, but I reached out to touch the woman’s silver hairbrush and matching hand mirror. Near them, a pair of fashionable reading glasses sat on a small tortoiseshell tray, and a book on Italian gardens was waiting to be read; resting upon it, a vase held a sprig with pale pink flowers.

I stepped back and noticed that just next to the cabinet, pushed against the wall, was a blue nylon-covered chair with thin plastic legs. The seat was very deep. The back was very high and straight, not unlike a chair they might have in a hospital. Then I saw the chamber pot beneath the seat.

The air became less breathable.

I glanced behind the first cabinet, trying not to disturb the little shrine, checking whether there were phone jacks in the wall, if there was any sign of a cord. Moving around the bed as though this place were wired, I went to the second, matching cabinet. Here, there was a glass.

It had water in it. Half crazed, I picked it up and drank.

This was where Alexander slept, I realized. The other bedroom down the hallway must have been his growing up, and perhaps he kept his best suit there, but he slept here. For now I noticed his money clip and cuff links by the glass. As I scanned the room, I saw that he’d moved the woman’s things to the back on the dressing table and chest of drawers. His effects were neatly arranged at the front.

Unlike elsewhere in the house, there was no dust on any of these belongings. It wasn’t like they’d been left untouched. The arrangement was
meant
to be this way.

I went to the wardrobe, toward my own reflection, and opened the doors. Why did I do this? Even glancing inside, inhaling camphor, I knew I wouldn’t find a telephone, but I suppose I was now looking for something else. A clue to set me free. At one end of the wardrobe were Alexander’s trousers and jackets—a careful palette of gray, navy—and at the other, a range of women’s clothes.

They looked expensive but out of date (although from the style it was difficult to tell their age, or that of the petite woman to whom they belonged). Some of the clothes seemed to be decades old, but when I studied them more closely, lifting the dry cleaner’s plastic wrapping, it was hard to say if I was taking in a silk dress from the 1980s or a modern version of a vintage dress, whether they were from before or after his mother had passed away. Skirts, blouses, and even women’s jeans were folded over wire hangers. A good deal of the clothes looked—what was the right word? My mother would call them
racy
: low-cut, sequined, sometimes slightly sheer. They were the clothes of someone very aware of her physical presence.

I had no blueprint of Alexander Colquhoun’s past; no idea in which corners the ghosts were, or who they were. I did not know whether he had always lived in this house alone, or if another woman had shared it with him—even another fiancée. The one thing I could sense for sure was that no other woman was here now.

Off this bedroom was an en suite bathroom.

It was straight out of the 1950s, tiled mint and mauve. A boom-time renovation, probably, in Deco-revival style. I was on the edge of hysteria, but still scanning the decor for my clue: the toilet and basin and recessed bath were all in matching mauve enamel, the bath itself set into the wall like a stage with a proscenium arch, the taps in the shape of serpents ready to disgorge water. This eye of mine, I couldn’t switch it off.

On the vanity were cut-crystal bottles and jars: a set a young bride might have received as a wedding present. They too were all pushed in careful rows to the back, replaced by a generic antidandruff shampoo, RapidShave, a Gillette razor.

Over the basin hung a mirrored cabinet. I opened its doors.

On the top shelf were the usual unisex things: scissors, antiseptic cream, an uncoiled bandage. He’d need these if someone scratched or bit him.

The makeup on the bottom shelf was cheap. CoverGirl foundation the sick orange color of rotten fruit congealed in a plastic tube. A darker, mocha-hued face powder in a jar had been spilled and now covered everything else like ash: the boxes of eye shadow and little compacts of blush. I reached in and picked out a lipstick, an old bright scarlet. Then I picked a recent brand, marked “Island Dawn,” a light pink, used only once or twice. And this is the thing that got to me: it was makeup from different times, for women with different skin tones and tastes and budgets.

In the basin below the cabinet, a tap dripped.

A rust stain ran from the tap to the plughole.

I doubled over, ready to retch.

Stumbling back to the bedroom, I saw in the wardrobe’s mirrored doors the empty green garden behind my own pale face. Turning to the high windows, I sensed that Alexander was no longer outside. He was back in the house, and I had to get out of this room.

In the hallway I put my hand to the steep railing and rushed down the stairs. Shafts of light played complex spools of grit on the landing. I turned and moved faster. When my feet hit the tiled floor of the entrance hall, I went straight to his office. That’s where his phone had to be, I thought, although I hadn’t noticed it the day before. He’d called me once a week to make an appointment, and I’d called him to accept his invitation here. I looked around at the filing cabinet, the bookcases, then back at the leather-lined desk. The computer screen was blank. No clouds now, the outside world had been switched off. Any telephone removed.

I stood fixed to the spot, and I remembered just yesterday finding his pile of letters.

Inside the desk drawer the envelopes were waiting, all with his name in the old-fashioned script. There were about eight of them—one for every week since Alexander’s offer had arrived. They’d been postmarked in places I recognized from working at the estate agency—suburbs where I’d scheduled appointments with Alexander. Had he brought the letters to our meetings, then found the nearest mailbox?

The first few started out polite, with just a few disapproving lines about my being on the make, then they turned into longer rants. For the author, the writing of them seemed to have become recreational—and almost confessional. They were full of a strange kind of private bile, a toxic stream of consciousness.

Riffling through them, I read:

 . . . the great slut up against fences on Saturday nights, all the kids practically cheering . . .

And then:

 . . . she never charged me much and some guys just swapped some junky thing, a 50p trinket or a perfume sample . . .

I heard myself howling without even realizing I’d opened my mouth.

 . . . these freaks did their weird sick things with her. They were her ideas, it excited her. Always a bit further, a bit further. Then it got dangerous . . .

I saw a reflection in the window and turned.

“Are you looking for something?” He was standing in the doorway.

“A telephone.”

“Why?”

“I want to call a car.”

He stared at me.

“I want to leave.” The voice that was mine now broke with fear. “Please, just let me go.”

Nothing—Alexander seemed not to hear me. I kept pleading, and he kept staring back with infuriating blankness. The two of us were separated by something impenetrable. I flew at him, furious at every cent I had taken, at every sold and bought moment built up between us.

“It isn’t true!” I screamed, throwing my whole body into hurting him. My hands. My nails. My teeth. But resistance only heightened his enjoyment, and wrestling the knot, I tightened it.

IV

“
T
hey’ve been coming for nearly two months. That first letter I found one evening, after returning from seeing you. I parked on the roadside by the mailbox and it was waiting there. I thought it was some prank.”

Alexander’s speech had become slow and mechanical, each sentence cranked from deep within.

“I even looked around to see if the person who wrote it was watching me. I’ve never, ever felt anxious before on this land and now I was glancing over my shoulder. On my own land. I’d be out checking the stock, not a soul in sight, and my heart would start pounding. And I’d get back into the truck, get in and just drive—drive and try to breathe. When I left here to do shopping, I’d walk along the main street watching men I’ve known all my life, wondering whether one of them had written it.”

He paused, turning to me, his face now gray. “But how could they have known? I had not told anyone I was seeing you.”

We were in the pink bedroom with the ring box still on the side table. The air smelled of sweat: I wasn’t sure if it was him or me, or the room itself. After our fight, after realizing I wouldn’t be permitted a phone call, I’d come back upstairs for the envelope of money, and within minutes he had followed me. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands.

“Liese, I’d speak to people about the weather, about grain prices—
Oh, yes, tough year, tough year
—and I’d be watching them for some sign that they’d heard about us. Were they sneering? Were they trying to get away?

“I ran into a couple a few weeks ago who live twenty-five miles from here—it’s a good property, I went to school with him—and they seemed to look at me differently, as if they’d been told something. Usually they invite me for a meal, not that I want to go. The wife always tries to set me up with some large school friend of hers—but this time they didn’t mention dinner. She was curt. Without her knowing I intended to propose, I imagine she’d think I was taking advantage, treating you like you were just dispensable.”

He was shaking his head. “Everyone—the station manager and his lewd wife, the vet acting all pally, even that bitch who runs what she calls ‘Providore,’ her grandmother was a maid here—I wondered if they knew.

“I mean, surely you get the picture? There are people in this district who’d get no greater pleasure than bringing down a Colquhoun. . . . You think it’s amusing, I know you do, but all my life they’ve been spreading rumors about my family. It’s a favorite local pastime.” His mouth, set tight, was tasting an old, bitter ingredient. “Basically my parents became ‘characters,’ their fights the stuff of legend: once, she threw him out, and he returned with a locksmith and had the locks changed before throwing
her
out. She didn’t even have a shopping bag of clothes, and this was a woman who was very proud of her appearance. Well, then he broadcast to the world all the details of her illness.”

“Was it the same illness?” I pictured the commode down the hallway.

“Yes, her head.” He tapped at his own.

“A second letter came about a week later, and this one’s tone was different. I thought of mentioning it, but to be honest, when we met I was watching you.”

In the sunlit apartments he’d sometimes gaze at me with a kind of remorse, like a man coming to, wondering if he’d made a bad mistake. Now he brushed his hand over his face to wipe this expression off.

“It’s terrible to admit, isn’t it? I was watching to see if this was a scam of yours. I assumed whoever had been writing was working up to blackmail. Did all your clients receive something similar? It would be a nice sideline to the prostitution, clever . . .” He seemed to half test the theory. “I wondered if you’d taken photographs of me, of us. This makes me sick to say aloud, but I’d started checking the rooms for hidden cameras. Once, when you were in the bathroom, I even looked through your phone.” He glanced up. “Did you know that?”

Visualizing it sent a pain behind my eyes. “No.”

“I didn’t find anything.”

“No,” I said again, realizing completely now that he believed every mad word of his story. That was the most frightening thing, the way he was discussing this, his conviction. I no longer had a sense that he was augmenting some fantasy. I had no sense that this was even sexual for him—the letters seemed to be anything but a turn-on. He was scared by them.

“By the time I got the third one, well, I was angry. It was pornographic, vile,
and yet, Liese—this is strange—it didn’t put me off. Funny, isn’t it? If anything, it heightened the attraction—and also, I suppose, my resolve to help you. It’s hard to meet compatible people. I already felt strongly for you, very strongly, and the idea of taking things further then came to mind: why not marry her?”

Alexander shared his insight with a kind of proud wonderment, for a moment enjoying outwitting the letter’s author. “All I want, all I’ve ever really wanted is to live quietly, for no one to even notice me . . . to notice
us
now. I mean, I imagine that would suit you too? A life far from your past?”

He shifted his weight, and the bed creaked. “It will be a chance for both of us to start again. You”—his expression verged on desperation, but I could not tell if it was desperate love or a desperate desire to control me—“you are the one. I’ve had my chances with
nice
girls”—he used the word sneeringly—“and it always turns out they don’t really understand me.”

The women’s possessions in his bedroom flashed through my head, the clothes hanging behind thin plastic, the makeup stiffening on the cabinet shelf. And then I thought of the servants’ quarters with its stained walls.

“I knew going into our engagement it wouldn’t always be smooth sailing.” Alexander shrugged. “I suspected you had something painful in your past you didn’t want to face. One day you might trust me enough to tell me what it is.” Nodding, reassuring himself. “What I’m getting at is, you don’t have to keep doing this anymore. I’m setting you free!”

My mouth was dry. There seemed nothing I could say.

Past him, out the window, I could see the cypress pine’s branches moving, spirals of needles twisting in the wind. The idea of hiding the money on my body and walking away from this house now seemed naive.

“When I was researching your line of work,” he reminded me, “I found out some terrible things. I don’t need to tell you there are a lot of bigots out in the world, real sickos who can’t have normal relationships with women.” He shook his head. “Whoever wrote these letters evidently needs to debase prostitutes any way he can.” Alexander frowned, thinking carefully. “I suppose if she’s just a piece of meat, this man feels all-powerful, or avenged, or whole—that’s the two-dollar theory, anyway.

“Every time I see a newspaper story now about some girl’s body found in bushland, I’m driven crazy imagining such a thing might happen to you. I’ve always hated men who hate women.” He looked my way, vehemence making his features sharper. “Mum had depression, and sure, sometimes she behaved embarrassingly. Perhaps she drank too much but she was kind. All my father ever did was bully her.”

The tree slowly waved through the glass.

“Liese, earlier, in the kitchen, you told me that perhaps the letters’ author was wounded, that he needed help.” Alexander’s tone was full of mock sympathy. “I’ve got no patience for that sort of horseshit. This business of ‘Oh, he had such a difficult childhood’ excusing bad behavior, it’s ridiculous. And I should know. The man who wrote these letters is a pervert. Nothing else, okay? I want you to take this seriously because he may even be dangerous. Until we find him, I will come into the house and check on you on the hour if I need to. That’s a vow. I will check on you by CB radio every half hour and you will tell me you are safe. If
ever
he comes near you again”—his teeth were clenched—“I don’t care, I won’t hesitate, I will kill him!”

“Did the first letter come after I told you I was leaving the country?”

Alexander regarded me blankly; my seeming calm was the wrong reaction.

“Or was it before?”

He thought about this. “Before.”

“Really?”

“No, no, wait! You’re right, it was after. Just a day or so after.”

The connection was so blatant I don’t know how he managed to keep up the front. Panicked by the idea of my departure, he’d created this “evidence” about my past, the past he wanted me to have, to justify making me his ridiculous wife-cum-whore-cum-slave. But the letters were also props to elevate the drama. And it followed that I was supposed to play along, to act frightened so he could storm around, then offer me protection.

“I wondered, actually, if this was your pimp writing.”

“My pimp, is that so?”

“I thought you must have left him in the lurch, gone out on your own, and now he’s sort of taking his revenge.”

Alexander leaned forward, the collar of his rugby top turned up almost jauntily, his fingers arranged in a thick-knuckled steeple. “We need to look at this from every angle. If you have to tell me about all the clients—the abusers, really—that you’ve ever had, what each of them wanted in all its detail, that’s okay.” His expression was one of bravery. “I’m not saying it won’t be painful, but I’m prepared to do it.”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Consider it a game. You like games.”

I shut my eyes.
Dear Nightmare, why?

“Too many to recall?” He exhaled. “Together we can work it out, who it will be.”

“Will
be?”

“It will be someone you saw more than once.”

No one. There was no one but him.

“Perhaps it was that man who liked to . . .” He broke off. “You remember . . .
that
thing.”

Who was he talking about? What had I told him?

As Alexander waited, his face turned taunting. “Liese, you
know
, don’t you? You know who’s been writing?”

It was exciting playing detective, and he would not back down.

“You suspect?”

I could barely look him in the eye. “Yes, I do.”

“If I showed you these letters . . .” He reached inside his jacket pocket. He had brought the correspondence upstairs with him. And he’d obviously intended this to be as disturbing as possible. “No.” Vigorous head-shaking. “No, I can’t do it to you.”

As he talked about why the letters shouldn’t be read, I watched his mouth moving, those plump lips that were wet with satisfaction, and I asked myself, How do prostitutes get fired?

They don’t give good service, presumably. They don’t laugh or moan or not look bored at the right time. They grimace at the sight of the man’s age, or his girth. They say his name as if it’s a chastisement, a joke, like his wife does. They humiliate him. They don’t humiliate him enough. They complain about the money: it’s too little, or—and something now exploded behind my eyes—or, in very rare cases, it’s too much.

Alexander was still talking, but I got up off the bed and started to unbutton my blouse. I felt the cool of the room on my skin, on the sides of my arms and chest. Around us hung a series of framed prints showing flowers with fairies hiding near the stamens, on the stems. Delicately I unzipped my jeans. I pulled them down and stepped out of them in a way that was meant to be balletic. On my body the bra and panties became small strips of burgundy lace—a gesture, really, toward the concept of underwear, an homage. He stopped to look at me. To really look.

“Liese, have you been listening?” he said. “You don’t have to do this anymore.”

Something in his voice, however, suggested I might actually need to do it just one last time. Reaching out, I took his hand. Such a thin man, the model ectomorph but with hands warped from farmwork, covered in raised veins and now with red under his fingernails after gutting the bird. I no longer wanted to be touched by him, but I placed this hand on my skin.

I felt him tremble.

Before when he’d moved his fingers over my body, I wasn’t frightened of him. Now they crept lower slowly, very slowly, and I tried not to flinch. His rough fingers were beneath the fabric of my underwear. He closed his eyes.

A draft coming from a gap between the window’s frame and its ledge made the curtains drift an inch, then back again.

I’d be doing a rental inspection, assessing the state of a tenant’s curtains, of the carpets, walls, bathroom fittings; marking their state on a form from one to ten—ten being the least putrid—admonishing some rich girl whose parents paid her rent about the upkeep of the bathroom, all the while recalling the time Alexander and I had spent in this very spot, contemplating what had happened, and what might happen in the next place. It was all I could think about.

We would be on the bed, or couch, or floor, and sometimes I wouldn’t have any story prepared for him. I’d even wonder whether we should try silence, but then he’d start asking whether I had anything I ought to tell him—“You don’t want to hear.” “I do.” “Are you sure?” Often I would begin my confession still without an idea of what to confess. I knew the names of the people who owned the houses and so once or twice I even adopted the sexual personalities I imagined they had. Someone with every inch of mattress covered in lace pillows would talk differently in the act of love, and want different things, to someone who, say, had a futon in a room painted deep turquoise.

Occasionally other people’s belongings also became our props: once during sex I was arranged in such a way it was possible to reach out and open the drawer of a mirrored bedside table. It was as though I’d intuited the toys would be toward the back, but I left the latex and baubles, instead pulling out a large feather, which I used in my story to some effect.

Steadily the things my imaginary clients liked to do became a wild half-guessing of Alexander’s desires, and the fulfillment of my own. Certain characters with very specific requirements reappeared in my tales. Their needs were extensive, and Alexander liked to hear about them blow by blow, so to speak. One client might have a favorite body part, another turn out to be obsessed with a series of positions, and a third need some combination of angles, rhythms, and textures that, I have to admit, bordered on genius. Then, when every possibility seemed exhausted, there came a john who liked to use only his fingers, touching me in very much the way Alexander was doing now.