The Engagement (20 page)

III

S
lowly I lifted myself out of the bathwater. The air was moist and streaked the mauve walls. An old towel hung on the rail; it scratched when I used it to dry my skin, all the while listening for some sign of where in the house Alexander waited. Placing my hand on the doorknob, I half expected it to be locked. It turned smoothly and I braced, walking into the master bedroom.

The view from the window was of perfect stillness: it could have been a painted screen, a pleasing country scene of sky and endless green.

My clothes had been removed. The dress and tights and underwear I’d worn the night before had been strewn around the floor. Now they were gone. I looked over at the bed we’d lain on. It was carefully made, the quilt of lilacs pulled taut. The bedside cabinet’s objects were in the right order; the commode waited for another invalid. Tightening my clasp on the towel, I put one foot in front of the other, moving fast along the frigid hallway to his sister’s old bedroom.

My suitcase was missing.

Opening a drawer of the chest, I found it empty. I opened a second drawer, a third: my clothes were gone. There was now no sign I’d ever been in this room. The furniture had been straightened, the curtains tied back. It was identical to when I’d first arrived, except that on the carefully made bed he’d placed a white dress.

The sight of it winded me.

I felt I had seen it in that exact position before—this cold white thing lying lifeless, yet not entirely dead. It was not the dress from the picture of his mother. It seemed cheap, like the ones on wire hangers in secondhand shops; an unnatural white with the label wilted gray from someone else’s sweat. This dress had a high sheer collar and a lace bodice trimmed with tiny plastic seed pearls. The sleeves were puffed. The sateen skirt was long and full. Even touching it to pick it up was repellent, but he’d left me nothing else to wear.

I unzipped the dress like it could hurt.

The fabric stuck to my still-damp skin as I threaded myself inside, and soon I was caught in tulle and boning, caught in the dress as in a white wave.
I left home to escape, and here I am being rolled.
Through the fabric I made out weak pink sunlight—and I found myself wondering whether soldiers packed white flags before leaving for battle. Sewn into the lining of their knapsacks, hidden in the way of oxygen masks on airplanes—did they try not to look at them while the bullets flew but feel good knowing they were there?

Downstairs Alexander would be waiting for me and I would have to do as he said, be who he required.

With the dress half on, I breathed in the scent of other brides: their joy and fear and hope and remorse. This closeness made me sick, the smell so personal.
You win. I lose.
I will love, honor, and obey you
. A wedding or death? I supposed the choice was simple. This dress would be my white flag. All the air leaving one’s lungs just to say the words:
I do, I surrender.

Walking down the grand staircase, I assumed Alexander would be waiting at the bottom. It was bad luck for him to see me like this before the wedding. It meant we would need to marry as soon as possible. I’d use the flowers from last night as my bouquet. When the staircase turned, I turned too, the great arched window behind me as I descended. No music and no one watching.

The entrance hall was empty. I paused, listening.

He’d lit a fire in the drawing room, and I went to it, trying to feel the flames’ heat.

In my head, I began composing an explanation for my family
. By the time you read this, I will be someone’s wife.
I realize this seems sudden but I think you will approve.
The elastic ruffles of the dress’s sleeves cut against my flesh.
My husband, Alexander, is the owner of a vast cattle property that has been in his family for five generations. I know
—
imagine me a farmer’s wife!
 . . . This was the kind of note the teenager in those photographs would write, I thought dully, full of breathless exclamation marks and little turns at bragging.
You should see my engagement ring, it’s huge!
I needed instead to reassure them
: Alexander is hardworking and very traditional. In some ways,
I’ve truly never been happier.

If we now raced to Reverend Wendy’s church and made our vows, there could still be a party in England. So sitting on the sofa, I started to list the people I would want to invite to my wedding, then I listed the people I had to invite. The second list was long and kept growing. I preferred the idea of an intimate ceremony, but I would need to ask my extended family: my aunts and uncles, my cousins and their spouses, most of whom we’d put at tables some distance from Alexander’s acquaintances. Then there were my parents’ friends, whose offspring seemed to marry relentlessly, for whom it would be a snub not to send an invitation in return. . . . I was listening for some sign as to where in the house he was.

Before you marry, it seems, your life flashes before you. I thought of the other designers in the office, and the students I’d known at college, and my friends at school, such as I’d had them: the secrets and the promises, and the murky, junglelike nature of girlhood; the drawing of treasure maps and wedding dresses, and he loves me, he loves me not. . . .
I am sorry if I’ve ever caused you worry
—
if anything happens to me, please remember I think the world of you.

Alexander was standing in the doorway, expressionless. He’d put on a jacket to match the dark gray trousers he’d been wearing, and I realized it was the suit I’d seen hanging upstairs. There was a flower in his lapel, a steel-gray silk tie loose around his neck.

I met his eye and he turned away, moving slowly toward the fireplace, as if still absorbing bad news. He stared at the flames. When he spoke his voice was flat: “Liese, you know, I hope, that I think you are an exceptional person.”

A pressure behind my breastbone.

For a moment he said nothing further, shaking his head. “I have been thinking hard about this. You, you mean everythin
g to me, but I can’t . . . I just don’t think I can go through with a wedding.” He glanced over with a look of pained innocence. “I knew you would be disappointed.”

Suddenly I did feel something identical to disappointment, and even through my fear this infuriated me, it disgusted me. “But why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you calling this off ?”

“Surely I don’t need to explain,” he said softly. “Still, it doesn’t come easily.”

“Tell me the reason!” I heard myself shouting.

He hesitated.

“There isn’t just one reason. I just do not . . . I am just not convinced that the two of us are going to bring out the best in one another, all right?” He sighed as though breathing were too much effort. “I’d like to believe it could happen, but I don’t feel convinced.”

“You think I will drag you down?”

Alexander’s doleful look was confirmation. “I didn’t say that.” He sighed heavily again. “Ending what . . . we have was always going to be hard. Oh, God, Liese, please don’t cry.”

With those words I started weeping—I wept to be sitting wearing a dress this white. I’d never thought I would, and probably never would again. And then I kept on weeping, after a while not entirely understanding why. Was it because, after everything I’d been through, I was at last free? Or because I was not
not
free? Was I crying at what I had suffered, or because I’d be suffering it no longer? I’d been imprisoned, tormented, and now jilted. Taking the ring from my finger, I threw it at him.

It hit the carpet and eddied under a chair.

“I can understand why you are upset,” he said calmly.

My face was collapsing. The sobs came from deep within.

At that moment, Alexander seemed to know me better than any soul on earth. What if I
was
the girl in those photographs, whom no one would ever love? What if I had met my match and realized it too late?

“It’s all right, Liese, it will be all right.” Alexander stood beside me, his hand stiffly patting my shoulder. “You are going to find someone who can appreciate you in all your . . . dimensions, who can give you the things you need.”

We stayed with me clutching him and leaning my head against his chest.

When delicately he disengaged, unclasping my hands from his white dress shirt, Alexander moved to the bureau. He picked up a folder. Inside was a neat sheaf of papers: the letters. Through the exhaustion of regret, he said, “I want you to understand I will always keep your secrets safe. I will never let your correspondence fall into the wrong hands.”

“
My
correspondence?”

“Yes.”

Wiping my eyes on the dress’s sleeve, I stopped sobbing and stared at him.

“It’s been you writing to me, hasn’t it, Liese?”

A chill moved over my skin.

“I feel so foolish not to have realized,” he said, “because of course they are your letters. They have to be.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Oh, come on.” He nearly laughed. “It’s over. You don’t have to pretend anymore.”

“You’re lying. You sent them to yourself !”

Frowning as though he could already view this from a great distance: “How would I have found your photograph?”

“You told me you were going to—remember? When I didn’t have one to give you.”

“But who’d actually do that? Only someone who was mad.”

He must have planned this moment all along, I thought, and now as he played it out, dropping the first sheets of paper into the flames, their corners erupted in toxic color, and I felt disbelief. What was the point of fighting his story? These letters had been his insurance. He could play-act wanting to marry, then produce this evidence so as to never go through with it. He’d brought in his minister; he’d found a wedding dress. But it was all an elaborate performance, a grand amusement, and to satisfy what neuroses?

I would leave his house and return to the room above my uncle’s garage to finish my packing. I would board a plane out of this country and spend the flight, then months, years, wondering what it was that had happened here between us, while he’d go on unscathed, a seemingly eligible pillar of the community.

Alexander watched me.

“I don’t really understand why you did this,” he said. “Did you mean to arouse me or yourself ?”

I wanted to hit him.

“If it was for your own pleasure then you’ve got some sort of problem. I mean, do you hate yourself that much?”

I knew what Alexander was doing, that he said these things to make me lose all balance. Yet as he held the last piece of paper above the flames, I stood up from the couch and tried to grab it. Those letters had changed everything; all the strict, dull landmarks of my childhood—the circling streets, the playground, the ornamental cherry and holly and claret ash—were now alight and, in my mind’s eye, would stay that way. But although I’d remember the places the letters described, and what my body was said to have done there, how would I recall what the letters said about me and who I was? This was like waking and grasping a dream’s string of visions but not their cumulative meaning. I’d gone inside my head—I’d been taken right inside my head—and as I watched this last page burn I felt that the essential revelation was lost. And with it went the clue to who had won.

“Come with me.” It was all he said.

By the back door, where his father’s shotgun was usually kept, my suitcase waited. While I’d been sitting in the bath he had packed my clothes, folding within them the unmarked envelope of money.

Picking up the case, he told me plainly, “There’s a train leaving Marshdale station in fifty minutes. If we move fast, you’ll make it.”

He could not look me in the eye, and suddenly I was too uneasy to look into his.

“So, you’re ready?”

I’d expected to at least change out of the dress. “Just as we are?”

“Just as we are.”

I followed him into the crisp, cold light. It seemed absurd that the trees were still growing, that the sun kept powering on. The sky matched the dirty brightness of my gown, and all the colors of the garden appeared more brilliant than before. In the whiteness, buds burst from the camellia bushes as if competing for attention. A speckled bird hung from a globe of rich petals, bending the branch double. Grass shivered underneath waiting for a fall.

Alexander opened the Mercedes door, glancing past me as I got in.

The car rolled slowly over the land: we had nothing left to say as he steered between the poplars, his knuckles pale against the wheel. We passed the markers I’d seen only three days earlier—the bone-colored fields, the flocks of pink birds, those mountains faded blue in the direction of the sun. On the crest of the rise, I could make out the dark canopy of the national park and the highway running in the other direction. The indicator started its second by second pulse. I leaned back to watch the road. The dashboard clock said 3:09 in electric red. Our time was up.

Acknowledgments

I
wish to thank the State Library of Victoria for the support of a creative fellowship.

The extract on
page 89
from Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings” is from
Collected Poems
(Faber and Faber, 1993; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), quoted with the permission of the publishers.