The Engagement (19 page)

“Liese, you are my chance to be well again, my chance at happiness,” Alexander said, his glance adding,
If you understand you are the object meant to guarantee my contentment, you will be all right.
He smoothed his hands against his trousers. “Please raise your glasses, ladies and gentlemen, and join me in toasting my new life and bride-to-be.”

His cough told the guests they ought to stand.

Numbly I joined them, and taking my shoulders, Alexander pulled me toward him, kissing me on the mouth: a kiss like he needed resuscitation. With it, I tasted the swan, and I was suddenly woken and filled with horror. Was I being kissed by a man deeply in love with me, or by a devil doing a perfect imitation of a man deeply in love with me?

His sister was the only one still seated. “You’re just like he was.”

The minister and Graeme paused, their champagne glasses frozen in the air.

“Even the way you speak, the things you say.”

“Not now, Annabel.”

“Dad would have liked nothing more than to lock her away for good, get her out of his sight. He’d have been proud of how well you managed it.”

Alexander turned to his sister. “Did
you
want to care for her after the crash?”

“Didn’t she . . . ?” I started clumsily. “I thought your mother had died?”

“That’s what he told you?”

“Well, she is dead now, Annabel.”

“And to think you meant the world to her. When you were a child you’d cry if she went out, and wait on the stairs until she got back.” Annabel’s large eyes, rimmed with tears, settled on her own son, who had clearly heard all this before. “But, Lachlan, after Grandpa died, your Grandma had to live with her injuries for many, many painful years, and your uncle moved her out of here and put her in what was ironically called a
home
—”

“She was well looked after.”

“Took her from her surroundings where she recognized everything, was comfortable, and put her with every village idiot—”

“I didn’t see you around here volunteering to wipe up her messes.”

“Lachlan, before you ever do that to me, please kill me first!” She’d started crying, leaning her wet and red face against the table. In her mother’s clothes she looked both very old and young.

“It’s difficult,” the minister tried to intervene, “when a parent becomes infirm—”

“Although then,” Annabel spat, “your uncle could bring his little whores around here without anyone bothering him.”

Silence—even the night sounds from the garden cut out.

She turned to Alexander, mouth loose and twisting. “You bring them in and then dump them however it best suits you.”

His features shifted into blankness. “It’s late. I think it might be time for you to go.”

“You need help, can’t you see? You are not well, you need help!”

“Annabel, we don’t have to do this.” He said it almost sadly. Moving to the door, he switched on the light.

The room was sulfuric. Everyone looked their worst. Even the furniture turned faded and dusty.

“And you”—Annabel reached for me, foundation streaking her cheeks—“can’t you see he’s sick? You should leave with us now. You should leave while you still have the chance!”

The minister and Graeme were on either side of her, trying to coax her from the table. Lachlan, his mouth a thin line of resignation, picked up his mother’s bag of pilfered objects and headed outside.

Annabel lurched past her minders and grabbed my hand. “Come with me!”

Alexander stepped in to pry her off.

“Come on!”

The woman’s raw, wet face was right in mine, chunks of her wild hair in my eyes, my mouth. We were now out in the hallway. No corner was left for my own hysteria. I would have to hide in hers.

“Come
on
.”

I looked from sister to brother.

“Yes, yes, I will,” I said, nodding. “I will. I’ll come with you.” Putting my hand to her arm I joined with her. The money was still upstairs, but it no longer mattered. “I’m coming, don’t worry. I’ll come.”

She was heading toward the doorway, calmer now that she believed she was saving me. And I was calmer too, despite my savior walking so unevenly that I was holding her up. I brushed her rib cage and felt how starved she was. Graeme stepped in and took her other arm, and the three of us moved a little further along the patterned tiles, navigating the octagons and hexagons bursting underfoot in dusky blue and umber and beige. When we were closer to the door, her son returned and, shifting me out of the way, took his mother’s free arm. The two of them led her outside.

The minister was standing in the doorway, the dark night behind her. “Thank you,” she said, as if I’d just been playing along with Annabel and the trick to get her into the sedan. She nodded to Alexander. “We’ll take it from here. Graeme can come and collect her car in the morning.”

“I think I should still go with you,” I suggested firmly.

“Lachlan’s got her tablets. There’s no need.”

Alexander had put his hand tightly around my arm.

“But I
want
to leave with you.”

The minister glanced at him. “There’s no room in the car.”

“I’ll squeeze in.” He was holding me the exact way I’d just held his sister. “Please!”

Reverend Wendy cleared her throat and turned to walk down the stone steps. Past her the garden was a chessboard; between the trees were moonlit patches like chances.

“Liese, congratulations again,” she called over her shoulder. “I think you are so lucky, and I look forward to talking over your marriage questions soon.”

And with that, Alexander closed the broad front door. I was screaming to those outside. The sound was echoing, but my fiancé ignored it as he started pulling me slowly up the stairs to the master bedroom.

II

T
here was only silence and the dripping tap’s
to die, to die, to die
. On the vanity waited his new envelope. It was A4, a generic mustard color available from any post office or stationery store in any part of the world, but it had not been mailed.
by hand
was written like a sick joke in neat capitals on the top right-hand corner, and in the same script that usually addressed Alexander was substituted my own name:

Miss Liese Campbell

c/o “Warrowill”

Marshdale

Victoria

I was sitting in the en suite’s bathtub in water so brown it seemed to have been pumped from deep underground. Neither of us moved to turn the tap tighter. I could barely move at all. Each part of my body felt tender and swollen.

Alexander stood by the mirrored cabinet, hunting through old and new beauty products. The room was so cold the mirror had turned opaque, and condensation rolled down the walls’ mauve tiles. But even through the bath’s mist, morning light from the window meant that if he cared to look he could see each part of me: breasts sloping, flesh folding around the midriff, the webbing of cellulite, the veins stretching under my skin.

In the dark the night before, he’d worked his fingers underneath my clothes, between skin and flesh. Then, not just his fingers, his fists, to get more leverage, his touch so rough it felt like he wore gloves, as if a hide protected him from any sensitivity to another. It had not bothered him that I was unresponsive, barely moving, barely breathing. And now this intercourse—or whatever our strange overnight battle had been—meant I felt him on my body, in my body, and it wiped out any will. Thoughts of surrendering came and they were sweet.

“Just try to relax,” Alexander said.

He selected a grimy-necked bottle of bath oil and knelt beside the bath on a matching mauve mat so as not to wet his good trousers. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, and leaning forward, he poured the thick liquid onto my back, my shuddering back. He replaced the bottle’s cap and started moving a flannel over my skin, rubbing very gently.

“Not enough,” he told himself, unscrewing the cap again and tipping more oil onto his palm, washing my arm, arranging me so his hand slipped under my armpit, touching the side of my breast.

“Relax,” he ordered again.

I did not move.

Taking my shoulders, Alexander positioned me so my neck was against the bath’s rim. “There, like that.” His face was very close. I could see the color of his teeth and smell the night’s drinking on his breath. His hands, muscular knots, wrung out the flannel in the brown water. He started on my legs and bottom. He seemed to be feeling for where the muscle was, the bone and tendons, which parts were best and most tender—the prime cuts.

Keeping the flannel between my legs, his hand began to contract. “You didn’t tell me this person has been writing to you too.”

“This person has not been.”

“It’s the first time? Is that what you’re claiming?”

I wanted him to take his hand away. “Yes.”

“So he has written this and delivered it all the way out here?” Alexander waited. “And not even to the door, right inside the house and straight to my desk?” When I didn’t answer he took the cloth from my sore skin, passing it to me. “Perhaps you should clean yourself.”

Drying his hands, he picked up the envelope and, making a play at nonchalance, studied it. He was angrier than I had realized—or angry again, or angry still—his face gaunt and dark, like someone had sketched it in pencil, then forgotten to erase the lines. He turned the envelope over, examining it, and the acting out of this—his ignorance as to its origins, his futile search for some clue—was almost camp. The visit from his sister must have brought too much reality, forcing him further into this game.

“How, Liese, do you figure this courier got in without starting up the dogs?”

Breathing very shallowly so the bathwater did not move: “I couldn’t tell you.”

“Could you have put it there when you looked through my desk drawers?”

“No.”

“But you were in my study last night.” Exhaling, he made a hissing noise. “I found papers all over the floor; the room was ransacked.”

I shook my head, trying to keep the water calm.

It was true that after my failed escape in the car I had entered his study. I’d wanted to take the letters as proof. Proof of what he’d done to me. Alexander’s refusal to acknowledge that they were his creations made me think he wasn’t so much lying as splitting. It was Alexander who sat down at his desk, but it was someone else, a stranger, who started writing—and this stranger seemed to know Alexander’s fantasies better than he did. Each new dispatch was a more dire self-provocation. Each revealed desires he could evidently express no other way: I was to be just a catalog of body parts, serving or servicing some man’s needs. What sane person would dream about another becoming less than an animal, a lump of meat, a
thing
?

“Are there signs that anyone broke into the house?” I asked quietly.

“None.”

“What if it was one of the guests who left it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well.” I was ready to give up. “Perhaps it was a ghost.”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“One of your ancestors.”

He said nothing.

“Your father, maybe?”

His father had often been absent and yet he’d never written to his son, not even a postcard, Alexander had said. As a boy, did he sometimes write to himself, as if from his father? Did he still? The letters seemed to belong to a voice in Alexander’s head, a voice with power over him. And I wondered if he would obey it.

He remained silent.

“Or are the letters from your mother?”

It seemed obvious enough; too obvious, really: I was lying in her bath after all, surrounded by her effects; one set of makeup from before her accident, another for afterward. If he felt guilty about turning his mother out, putting her in a home, was his remedy to keep me, the poor substitute, here and unable to leave? The letters were full of old-­fashioned misogyny. The sort of thoughts a mother who does not want her son to marry might have, the thoughts a loyal son might imagine his mother would write to him anonymously.

“No, I don’t think that’s correct either.”

Then the letters must be from you, I wanted to say. But why?

At the beginning of this weekend Alexander had claimed, “I just want to know who you are, who you really are.” Had he orchestrated all of this, each mad installment, to see me behave in every possible way, to witness my whole range—and to prove how much of it he could control?

Both of us were staring at the envelope. That was the sick thing: despite my fear, my terror really, it
was
tempting to unseal it.

He passed it to me.

“I don’t want to.”

“There isn’t a choice.”

Slipping my fingernail underneath the edge, I pulled out the contents.

The first photograph was so out of focus it looked like the two figures—the man and the woman—were hovering in space, their outlines trembling. Where were they? There was something familiar about the room, I’ll admit that, perhaps because the space was so generic. I studied it closely in case the dark parts of the image surrendered some secret: the shape of a vase, a corner of furniture. I was focusing on anything but the couple in the picture. The man—a stranger—and the woman a stranger too, although she shared my features. Or the features I’d once had.

“I” was in a series of poses from a girlie magazine, chubby arms above my head and broad pelvis tilted, acting out a teenage idea of abandon. My face, blurred from the wrong exposure and baby fat, was contorted in a way that was almost comical—it showed someone desperate to be lost in oblivion. The man, despite his intimate proximity, was almost an afterthought.

Who was he? It didn’t even matter. His features were obscured, and the photographs were ordered so each was succeeded by one in which their . . .
our
 . . . positions became more extreme, more grotesque.

Glancing through them I wasn’t so much horrified as stunned. Just as Alexander had paid me to furnish his fantasies, he must have hired someone to produce custom-made pornography. Not that simply anyone would know how to manipulate such images. Could the computer downstairs be used to do it? With the right program, I supposed—and the right investigator, for somehow an image of my younger face had been found to put on this woman’s body. It was my face, although in the later shots usually it was covered by coarse wavy hair, much longer than my own hair had ever been. I guessed the face had been digitally altered, sometimes very subtly, to get the expressions just right. . . . Had Alexander photographed those expressions without my knowledge? Instead of looking for a camera in the rooms we used, as he’d claimed, had he set one up himself ? Even then he’d have needed to erase twenty years to return me to a self this ungainly.

Such a project would be ridiculous, surely? It would be insanely expensive and spiteful, and yet I could think of no other explanation. Why had he done it? To make my past suit him. To make me doubt my own memory until I only remembered this—these exercises that could leave anyone who did them unconscious or worse. Then he could keep me here in the house, his thing, forever locked into his story.

My face. The look on it.

“Show them to me,” he said.

I did not move, I could not.

Bending down to the bath, Alexander delicately took the pictures out of my wet hands, a connoisseur viewing his most precious images. But as he started to glimpse through them he appeared perplexed; his eyes closed in a scowl of concentration, the equation he was forced to contemplate was impossible. These photographs—each pose in each photo—penetrated, and his body slumped. He looked like he’d just absorbed a blow.

“It’s you,” he said. “You’re barely recognizable, but it is you.”

It was as though he had truly never seen them before, and for a moment I thought he would cry. His reaction seemed completely, unnervingly genuine. And watching his face filled me with panic:
Just give me some sign,
I wanted to call out,
tell me what I’m meant to do
,
how you
want me to act!
I
would have followed any direction. Right then I’d have played any part as long as he didn’t hurt me. All this—the letters, the photographs—must have ultimately been done so that he’d lose control. Surely that was the point.
So do it
—
scream!
I thought.
Just scream!

The tap continued its dull thud:
to die, die, die.

I was sitting now in tepid water, hunched over, trying not to shiver and waiting for the worst. Whatever it was he’d brought me here to do.

Alexander put the images back into the envelope. He opened the door and carried them out of the room.