The Engagement (6 page)

I opened a drawer of Alexander’s desk. I knew it would be of no help, but I was doing it anyway, to satisfy those watching. People always put what they want to hide toward the back, and I went there first. Old check stubs, business cards. I could feel my heart beating faster. A second drawer: white paper, blue ballpoint pens, perfectly sharpened pencils.

I opened the last drawer; it was full of correspondence. A neat pile of envelopes all with his name in an old-fashioned script—
Mr. Alexander Colquhoun
. I weighed the letters in my hands, wondering if I should read them.

A sound, or what I imagined was a sound.

I returned the letters and closed the drawer.

This moment felt too familiar. I was standing in a stranger’s house, looking through his things. In the past four months this had become standard. I would be naked, boiling a vendor’s kettle to make postcoital tea. And as I drank that tea, or helped myself to a green apple from a careful arrangement meant for display, perhaps Alexander would be wearing the vendor’s bathrobe.

Now, looking again at the computer screen, I felt a hit of self-­revulsion.

Suddenly I was conscious of being beneath this sky moving in color-coded fronts across the weather radar. I was beneath Alexander’s clouds, his ozone, his atmosphere. With a rush of vertigo, I sensed my imprisonment.

In the entrance hall, I tried the door handle again, even though I knew it was locked. The reality of this situation struck me with a mixture of dread—fierce, immediate, intuitive—and something close to hilarity; a kind of sick humor, a humor that made me feel sick. Of course this would be happening, I thought, of course it would.
Here was the punishment for my own transgressions. I was now utterly in a stranger’s house, and this time I did not have a key.

Laughing while feeling nauseous, I pictured a brothel’s panic button—the lesson I hadn’t learned—and again I tried the handle, and again. At school I’d laugh whenever the teachers reprimanded me, and my nerves came across as insouciance, and the teachers would get angrier, and the absurdity made me keep going—just as it did now.
Of course this would happen.
I pulled at the handle in case I had misunderstood its mechanism. No.

Had Alexander calculated no one would know where I was?

In the dining room French doors, sheathed in their moth-eaten velvet, led to the veranda. I pulled aside the curtains to try each door handle and found every one of them also locked. Last night’s silver candlestick was still in the center of the table, and just as I pictured myself smashing a window I noticed a little hook partly hidden behind the curtains, upon which hung a key. I stuck the key in the keyhole. Pushing out onto the veranda, I took in lungfuls of fresh air.

I rushed toward the driveway where the Mercedes, Alexander’s maroon sedan, was parked. I went to the driver’s side, thinking even as I did so, You’re overreacting. There’s no real problem; stay calm. My fingers on the cold handle, I attempted to open the door. It wouldn’t, of course. And what if it had? I wasn’t exactly going to hot-wire the car. I looked around. Just garden. A still and vast garden.

A bird flew overhead, and the day was so silent I heard its beating wings.

Spreading in meticulous symmetry from the house were the planting beds and pathways that had once been carefully designed and landscaped. They were now in disrepair, but I found the picture oddly reassuring.

Upon the lawn were trees set out like characters in a play: an elm, a chestnut, an oak, all sharing in the house’s air of regret, their canopies having fallen—and that was it. The plants were from an English garden. I could have been standing in a park back at home, one that no one visited. It was completely empty except for three or four wooden benches discreetly placed under the trees, and birds—the wrong birds. Gray parrots with hot-pink bellies strutted across the damp grass.

A wind came through and swung the empty branches. Then the stillness again, everything waiting. The view from my bedroom window had shown that beyond the garden was flat farmland as far as the eye could see. This was a little lesson on infinite-point perspective—I was standing right under those swirling electronic clouds surrounded now by vanishing points.

V

I
returned the key to its place and waited in the kitchen. When I heard the sound of an engine approaching, I watched through the window as a dirty white utility truck pulled up with two lean black dogs chained to the back, balancing. Alexander stepped out of the driver’s side and I felt my heart in my chest like it was a distinct creature. Its shivering made me nauseous. I studied this new stranger, his frame bulked out by farmwear as he walked toward the house. His gait was less diffident. One of the dogs—a young one, I suppose—started barking. Alexander turned and growled at it. He walked on, and when it barked again he pivoted round fast, raising his long arm. The dog yelped in anticipation of a belting, then slunk down, cowed.

Soon the back door to the house opened and then he was in the kitchen, and as I greeted him I could smell his sweat and dogs and aggression. Unshaven, with skin flushed from the wind, he wore dirty jeans and a wool-lined suede vest over an old blue rugby top. He had taken off his boots and now stood, straight-backed, in thick gray socks, his lips parched, his eyes remote—the king returned to his castle. I’d thought he might hold last night against me, but he came and stood very close.

“Have you been waiting for a certain someone?”

I realized I always looked up at him, and he down at me. “Yes.”

“I like that,” Alexander said. “I like the idea of you here in the house, waiting. Did you miss me?”

I nodded.

“But only a little?” He measured some reluctance, shaking his head. “I missed you a great deal.” His smile was gallant, bemused. “And what, may I ask, have you been doing?”

My heart was still uneasy in my chest. “Not a lot.”

“Relaxing, perhaps?” He waited.

I waited too, not wanting him to know I was shaken by his little play with the locked doors.

“Forgive me for leaving you here alone. I’ve had a busy morning.” At the sink he got himself water, and the glass appeared fragile in his hands. His right knuckle was cut up, scratched. “A ewe got trapped,” he explained, when he saw me notice. “An elderly ewe in an elderly fence.” Putting the glass down, he walked to the fridge and took out three plastic containers. A picnic basket rested on the benchtop, and he put the containers into it. “Liese, I thought I might take you on a drive.”

“Where to?”

“Well, if you wouldn’t mind, the national park, although first I’d like to show you the farm. Would that suit?” He looked like a hard man, but the way he spoke could be almost effete. “You’ll need some different clothes. Please, come with me.”

From the cloakroom’s bluestone walls hung rows of oilskin coats, stiff with grime. Underneath the coats were compartments full of riding helmets and work clothes and old boots covered in ancient dust. Alexander reached into one compartment and handed me a heavy khaki woman’s shirt and trousers. Taking them, I paused.

The gun I should have known would be in the house rested against the wall. A double-barreled thing.

Alexander watched me hesitate. “Would you prefer I turn around?”

I shrugged.

After last night there were no coy flourishes, no suggestive moves, and as he watched me strip, his expression was wry but appraising, as if he were evaluating my condition: the muscle and flesh and skin tone. I stood in my underwear, expensive lace contrivances I’d selected for the role, goose-pimpled from the cold stone under my feet, trying not to tremble while holding his gaze.

“You seem nervous. Is something wrong?”

“I’m freezing.” The moment broke, and I hurried to cover myself.

His eyebrow went up in a little parody of concern. “You’re sure there’s no problem?”

Mentally I weighed the thick envelope of cash upstairs. “What could possibly be wrong?”

Alexander’s expression gave nothing away. He chose a jacket, a sheen of wear around the collar and wrists, and placed it over my shoulders. A perfume then of lavender and dog. My arms through the sleeves, he half lifted me around and carefully fastened each button. In such a small space he took up most of it; his face was in my face. I hadn’t seen him unshaven before.

Turning, he checked what I kept glancing at. “Don’t worry, it’s not loaded,” he said. “Oh, and by the way, there’s a trick to this door.” He leaned his shoulder against the heavy timber while turning the handle, both pushing and pulling. It opened with a heave, the glass panes shuddering. “Although I might start locking it.”

Outside, the back of the house showed its workings: extensions, erected through the decades, jutted out in different styles as if the house itself had periodically mutated. Stacked against the bluestone walls was an assortment of gardening paraphernalia; a project involving the parts of an elaborate concrete fountain seemed to have been abandoned.

“How to put this?” Alexander stopped to growl at the barking dogs. He was carrying the picnic basket, which he now fixed at a distance to them on the open bed of the truck. “I mean, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but some odd things have been happening.”

“What kind of odd things?”

He squinted. “Someone’s been writing to me.”

The letters I’d found in his desk drawer. “Writing things you don’t want to read?”

“Correct.” He opened the truck’s passenger door and I climbed in.

The vinyl dashboard was equipped with a CB radio and a large knife in a worn leather sheath. It was covered with dried mud. So was the steering wheel, and the floor, and all the upholstery.

He closed the door and I watched for him in the rearview mirror. Did his slumped posture mark a bad mood?

“Anyway.” Settling into the driver’s seat, he smiled. “I should have introduced you to Zinc and Florence.” As the engine rattled to life, the dogs moved around in the back, straining against their chains.

I put on my seat belt. He did not put on his. We were closer now physically than I really wanted us to be.

Alexander steered the truck through an old carriage gateway, marked by two tall bluestone columns. The garden ended abruptly and I stared with barely seeing eyes at vast tawny fields separated by cypresses that acted as windbreaks. It was a relief to be out of the house, but I wasn’t feeling myself, nor did I feel like the character I’d been hired to play. Around us his land seemed to stretch uninterrupted in every direction.

“You’re very quiet,” he said.

“Where are the mountains?” I asked.

“Which way is the sun?”

“I have no idea.”

“It’s behind us—northeast, so we’re driving southwest.” Alexander took us down another dirt road, stopping at an iron gate. He waited, expecting me to climb out and open it.

I did not move.

On his side of the truck, in the distance, was a herd of black cows.

“Okay, allow me.” Giving in, I stepped into the wind and cold. My shoes were not designed for the mud underneath them.

“Be careful where you walk,” he called over the engine.

“Why?”

“A cow calved by the gatepost.”

I looked at him.

“Placenta,” he added, straight-faced.

At the next paddock we adopted the same procedure, with me taking tentative strides to open and close the gates. This paddock looked just like the last. Cows and their calves stood in various configurations. In the paddock after that were a dozen bulls, blue-black with yellow eyes full of disdain. And after that, sweet-faced ewes, then rams, formally dressed with their horns on.

As we kept driving Alexander didn’t bother with any tour narrative, and I couldn’t have absorbed one anyway. Something about these scenes shocked me; I suppose I’d imagined animals in bonnets and breeches, leading chaste Beatrix Potter lives under the nose of a lusty, distracted farmer. The reality shut me up. These creatures stared back at us with silent reproach. They looked resigned. Resigned to living in a paddock for a few years until someone hit them on the head. Nothing to do but eat grass, have babies, and stand there, waiting.

It was a revelation that Alexander spent his days with these animals like this, the days he didn’t spend with me. Each new paddock furthered my sense of the land and his labors multiplying underneath us. The elements were communicating things I couldn’t understand, and our silence deepened.

He was showing me his country, as he’d promised in the letter. And what was my side of the bargain? Was I meant to be scared, or in awe, or manufacturing an air of infatuation? From one angle, if you weren’t frightened of Alexander—and my fear was losing its grip as I slipped back into taking him for granted—and if you liked his style of looks, his brooding, and his substantial landholdings, the task of seeming to fall for him wasn’t too difficult. Why did he even need to pay someone to spend the weekend with him? I hoped the reason was that he liked paying, just as I liked being paid. An affair is such a nebulous thing; one never knows exactly where it begins or ends, or where one is in it from one day to the next. Here the terms were clear. There were rules and therefore definition.

“I suppose you’ve had many girlfriends?”

The question surprised him. “A few.”

“But never Miss Right?”

“She has been elusive.”

I smiled as though I understood. “So after you finished high school you came back to the farm?”

“Yes.”

“Did you go backpacking first?”

“Go what?”

“Don’t all Australians do that?” A nervous laugh.

He kept staring straight ahead. “I had a lot of responsibility from a young age. After my father died, this place was mine to solve. . . . There were problems at the start.” His jaw tightened. “Serious financial problems as well as other things I had to deal with.”

I felt resentment coming up from the ground like it was a kind of crop.

“How did you know what to do here? I mean, had your dad taught you to be a farmer?”

“Hardly.” Alexander’s tone was dismissive. “His generation weren’t interested in getting their hands dirty. He was raised to be a gentleman, sent to Cambridge, and in his head at least he never came back. He inherited twenty thousand acres from his father, who’d been a wastrel. I inherited seven thousand. . . . No, there were no helpful lessons. He hated farming.”

“You weren’t close?”

“My father was never here, and he wasn’t the type to write—not even a postcard.”

We came to some thirty cows standing together in a yard. Each one had a red cross marked on its flank. “None of these girls are in calf,” Alexander told me matter-of-factly. “They’re on their last chance. One more service and then they’ll have to be culled.”

“How many . . . services have they had?”

“One.”

Each cow looked so vulnerable—each one with a different face, different features—some standing primly, others dejected, their legs sagging. Their voices were doleful or insistent, and nothing much like the
moo
noises nursery children learn.
Yes
, they seemed to call,
we hate it here too
.

“Did you ever think of not coming back to the farm? Of, say, taking a different job?”

Alexander sighed. “Perhaps I’d have studied law. I’m interested in people and what they do, in different ideas of right and wrong.”

“You could have sold this place and done law.”

“No, I couldn’t,” his voice earnest. “I never could have done that.”

There was another silence.

“Liese,” he said, “we’ll have lunch shortly, but first I’ve got to move these ladies into another paddock. Would you mind unchaining the dogs?”

They were in the back, barking and straining at their leashes.

He cocked his head to the open window and growled,
“Sit down!”
The barking stopped. He turned back to me. “They’ll be fine.”

A gust of cold hit my face as I got out of the truck. The dogs had golden eyes and gleaming fur and sharp teeth, but they sat quietly. I swallowed as I reached around to unclip one, then another chain.

“Getawayback!”

They leaped into the grass.

Alexander drove after them, instructing the dogs in shouts of “Pushemup!” or “Goaround!” and the occasional angry “Getoutofit!”

I pulled the jacket he’d lent me closer. This farm was as bleak and as dun-colored as home—the fens with some gum trees. On the Norfolk flatlands the wind was personal, trying to get into
your
brain, to make
you
give up. Here it felt no different.

The dogs drove the cows—their soft faces concerned, their lumpy bodies jostling—through the gate.

I closed the steel bolt behind them.

Returning to the truck, I was again dodging cowpats and the deeper mud. Something about this farce and the way Alexander sat in the driver’s seat, his shoulders slumped, made me think: You’re crazy, this man is no one to be scared of. He’s a farmer who wishes he wasn’t a farmer. Deeply lonely—like most who need to pay for company—and in flight from his own melancholy.

Shivering from the wind, I
settled back into the passenger seat. Perhaps the two of us weren’t so dissimilar: we were both less than comfortable in our own skin, both had taken pleasure pretending to be people we weren’t.

As we drove off, Alexander turned to me, his smile full of expectation.

Just smile back, I thought,
try to be pleasant and get the cash at the end.

The only problem was part of me was starting to feel bad about taking this man’s money. I liked being paid. I liked it very much. After our first meeting, when to my surprise he’d agreed to my higher fee, I found myself making constant calculations of how many hours we’d need to screw before I could pay off my creditors. Debt filled my days with arithmetic. Each note seemed a surrogate for our adventure, and as a means of savoring the experience, I treated them with extra care. The cash was alive when I slipped it into my wallet, and still alive when I checked it the next morning. Finally I was saving money. However, the envelope hidden back in the house now felt like punishment as well as reward. Alexander’s sadness seeped through his clothes, and I was not entirely convinced my fee was well earned, or even, looking around, that he could afford it. But I was trapped by the cash the way one can be trapped by guilt—despite my reservations about keeping his money, I doubted I could actually leave that much of it behind.