The Engagement

by Hooper, Chloe

  “All right.” Alexander was scanning the kitchen, crossing off an invisible checklist.

  On the shelves of the cream cupboards, among the crockery, were prize ribbons from various agricultural shows. There was also a promotional calendar, turned to the June pinup of an award-winning bull.

  Lifting the pan off the stove, Alexander found it hard to meet my eye. He started toward the kitchen door. “Please follow me.”

  Back in the hallway, the darkness was intense, almost alive.

  After a few steps I brushed a wall.

  “I’m sorry, come in this direction,” his voice beckoned.

  Finding the ties of his apron, I kept hold of them, moving forward as he did. The cooking had brought out the kidneys’ odor. It was fetid, like walking into garbage cans.

  “I know my way around with my eyes closed.” He flicked a switch, and a chandelier flared on, a hundred sulfur-tinged droplets illuminating the dining room.

  Along one wall, French doors were festooned with bustles of magenta velvet. The other walls held a crammed assembly: mounted fox heads, carved emu eggs on silver stands, antique sporting trophies, and engravings of favorite stallions, their legs splayed like rocking horses. In the center of the room was a long table that could have seated twenty but was set for two. Three white camellias were in a crystal centerpiece, the arrangement slightly awkward.

  Alexander deposited the pan of kidneys on a sideboard, alongside a toaster and loaf of bread. “Please, sit.”

  “Thank you.” My back to him, I listened as he carved two slices of bread, putting them in the toaster’s slots.

  “Sorry,” he was tapping his fingers on the sideboard, “it gets too cold if I do it in the kitchen.”

  His sensitivity was not without charm. He was taking this seduction seriously, but we’d already bypassed all the normal intimacies and as he stood behind me striking a match, I tried not to shiver. He leaned closer, then over me, his thick fingers trembling as he lit the table’s candles. He turned off the chandelier, and the room seemed to jerk. From behind me again, he poured wine into my glass.

  I felt him watching me drink, checking my reaction. “It’s delicious.”

  “I thought you would like it.” The toaster made its electric ping and Alexander served the kidneys on two plates. “Please, start.”

  I raised the fork to my mouth. This meat was soft and firm and dense and pissy. “That’s powerful,” I offered.

  He untied the apron and sat down opposite. “The kidneys have been souring in there.”

  My eyes were still adjusting. “In where?”

  “In the animal,” he said. “Some people perfume them with wine and herbs, but I think they should taste of what they are. Why pretend it’s something else? The animal is the animal. Past generations respected animals by not wasting anything. The heart, the liver, the lungs, the bladder even.” Talking about what he knew—meat—seemed to relax him. I wondered if he was entirely serious or whether this gruff butchery chat was a way of covering his shyness. Either way, Alexander could not disguise a hopeful look: the introvert’s pleasure at the prospect of being drawn out. “Usually we eat the outer flesh,” he explained earnestly, “but this is the inside of the animal and it smells like the inside of the animal. The kidneys don’t get any light, any air; they don’t get any exercise.”

  This was Pygmalion done with offal. “How did you learn to cook?”

  “I didn’t really have a choice.” He shrugged. “No one else could.”

  Alexander refilled both our glasses. “People today get their tidy little plastic-wrapped piece of steak at the supermarket, and they don’t even know what part of the animal they’re eating.”

  I was looking at him as if for the first time. He had a nerdish hold on his enthusiasms, and his face was flushed—the zeal had risen to the surface. So this is what interests you, I thought. It was moving, in a way. Until now I’d not had much idea of what he cared about.

  A clock panted, as if the house itself were drawing breath.

  “I’ve been thinking of inviting you here for a while, Liese.”

  “It’s very nice to leave the city for a few days.”

  “I wanted us to spend some time together.”

  I glanced down so I’d appear to be the one who was embarrassed.

  “Okay.” He clasped his hands together. “Where are we up to in the story of your life?”

  “Well . . .” I smiled, as though touched he cared. He wanted me to fall for him—or to act it out, at least. He was paying to woo me, a routine much more intricate than pretending we’d never met before and would never meet again. My announcement that I was leaving the country had excited Alexander’s interest in my past, and I wondered which past would now advance things between us—one full of dirty stories or my actual, very normal Norwich girlhood. Here in the dark I could use either.

  “This”—he gestured around the room as if we were sitting in a palace—“this must all seem very . . . well, I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable.” His head to one side, his lean neck veered from the business shirt. “What I’m trying to say is, I don’t take all this seriously. I mean, I don’t let it define me.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Because these places can, if you let them.” He paused, waiting for me to ask the right question, then proceeded regardless. “The house was built by my great-great-grandfather, son of a Scottish blacksmith.” Nodding toward a portrait over the fireplace. “He came at sixteen and made himself a wool baron. From nothing. He died with a hundred thousand acres.”

  “Is he buried in one of them?”

  “Not one that I own anymore.” He seemed distracted by the thought.

  “And you live here . . . by yourself ?”

  Alexander smirked. “I’m not married, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  I laughed like the thought hadn’t occurred to me. “Do you ever find this house too big?”

  “Why? Is this another place you wouldn’t sell me?”

  “To be honest, I have more experience with modern architecture.”

  He studied the tabletop. “I’ve read some girls can make a lot of money in your field.”

  “Property’s really more lucrative at the top.”

  “You help out in your uncle’s business.” His intonation suggested real estate was a known front. “But I meant your other field.”

  “Oh.” So not my Norwich girlhood, then.

  “Some of you put yourselves through university, finishing up with the degree and even investment properties.” Alexander smiled briefly, turning his wineglass in his hand. “Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that your different jobs show you have a certain amount of get-up-and-go, of ambition, and I don’t think that’s any bad thing.”

  I wondered whether I was meant to take this as a joke.

  He looked up at me. “Have you set a date to leave Australia?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You’ve bought the ticket?”

  “Soon.” In fact, hopefully next week.

  “I see. Where are you planning to go?”

  Moving the kidneys around on my plate. “I’d like to travel home through Asia. I’ve never been—”

  Alexander straightened. “You’re not going to try to work there?”

  I hesitated because actually I was. A designer friend in Shanghai reported new buildings were going up daily, that it would be easy enough to find a job.

  “I only ask because I imagine in your trade there’d be a hell of a lot of competition.”

  “Yes, possibly.”

  “Not that you wouldn’t have advantages.” Perhaps he was trying to stay positive, but his wholesome face looked strained.

  “Thank you.”

  “Tell me about the brothel you worked in.”

  Had I told him a stor
y about one during our meetings?

  One Monday morning my uncle’s receptionist, Maria, announced to the office that over the weekend she had been to an open day at a local brothel. All the women had instantly stopped work to gather around her cubicle, eager for the details. “Do they hold these events often in Australia?” I’d asked hopefully. (It wasn’t like one could learn how to ply this trade by reading up in the library.) No, the open day was a one-off. The brothel, the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, was being listed on the Australian stock exchange, and this was part of the publicity campaign. For a “gold coin donation”—one or two dollars dropped into a bucket—that would go to a charity aiding sexually abused children, a “hostess” with a cigarette in one hand and a rum and Coke in the other, who may or may not have been a hooker, led around Maria and a group of fifteen others.

  Apparently it was as though all the brothel’s staff had been coached to use the words hygiene and safety as frequently as possible. In the industrial-size laundry, the visitors were told they could have been in the bowels of a hospital—all linen was washed at highest temperatures with antibacterial disinfectant. By the bright yellow, six-foot-high bin where condoms were relegated, they heard about trained hazardous-waste specialists. By a spa bath, about regular inspections from an environmental health officer. Then, taking in a bed custom-made to accommodate four people, they were given assurances of rigorous monthly STD checks. Everyone nodded solemnly, presumably wishing they could just see the people fucking.

  “The brothel in which you worked . . . outside London,” Alexander tried to jog my memory.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Did you have to line up in a row and get picked? I mean I-I imagine you were always picked first.”

  “It wasn’t that sort of place.”

  “I see.” He waited for me to expand. “It was a nice sort of place?”

  “It was a nice brothel, exactly.”

  He nodded. “An exclusive one?”

  “Very exclusive.”

  “But it was time to move on and so you decided to come to Melbourne and strike out on your own?”

  “More or less.” For some reason I couldn’t get in the mood. I hadn’t drunk enough to make a confession and lie back on his table, hitching up my skirt.

  He looked at me as he sometimes did in the apartments, searching for a higher truth. It was always daytime when we met, and some places did not run to blinds or curtains: unless the room had little natural light, we saw each other in too fine detail. This made me want to blindfold him. If he wouldn’t close his eyes, I wouldn’t either. Really I preferred to face away.

  “During your career has there ever been anyone you regretted working with?”

  “Hmmm.” I made as if to remember. It didn’t take much; he was happy enough doing this routine alone.

  “Presumably you’d be very fortunate not to look back with, I don’t know, dismay at some clients.” He was nodding, still trying for a story. “I just wondered if there was anyone you wished you hadn’t taken on.”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  I hoped he’d take my reticence for part of the performance.

  “I’m not trying to embarrass you.” Alexander considered a puzzle within the candle’s flame. “But yes—so, are you studying yourself ?”

  “Ah, no.”

  “I thought you might be using the extra funds to take a course, fine arts or literature maybe?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, with the money you make from your profession.”

  “Alexander,” I tilted my head flirtatiously, “are these the sort of questions to ask a girl the first time you bring her home?”

  While we’d discussed the rigors of my imaginary profession before, now, out of bed, I did find some hard-wired prudery kicking in. “I don’t think of myself in those terms,” I explained firmly. My keywords were eros, cash, debt reduction. “And I suppose talking about it like this with you feels strange.”

  “Does it?”

  My fingertips touched my collarbone as I brushed back my hair. “It makes me shy.”

  “I’m sorry, really,” he said, although he didn’t seem sorry. He seemed put out, frustrated that I was blocking him, even though it was done in a teasing style.

  Alexander met my eyes briefly. “Do you have to give away a large cut of your pay?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “To a pimp.”

  “No,” I said sarcastically. “I’m an independent contractor.”

  “Well.” He arranged his knife and fork side by side on his plate. “It must give you a lot of freedom. You can move around from place to place. Meet people.” From the neck up, he had reddened, turning as dignified and stiff as the man in the painting. “Good for you, being your own boss. Who wants to spend their life in an office?”

  In my old life, every morning by seven a.m. I was on the tube to the East End. For ten hours a day I stared at a black computer screen, manipulating the red, green, and yellow lines of computer-aided design to create walls and floors and windows. The program infected everything I did: if I dropped something on the ground I’d think, Control Z, the shortcut for “undo.” As I walked down the street, trees before me morphed into 3-D lines as if I were drafting the layers of their canopies; buildings rose in the air, rotating, zooming in and out. And when unwelcome visitors entered my thoughts, I drew a box around them and they were deleted.

  I reached across the dining table for Alexander’s hand but he did not move.

  “You have to be very brave to be in your line of work,” he said with pious generosity.

  “I suppose so.” Upstairs I’d discovered my mobile phone had no reception. I’d told my uncle—the first person who’d notice I was missing—that I was going on a hiking trip with an old friend from school.

  Alexander seemed to read my mind. “Presumably someone always knows where you’re working.”

  My expression must have shown that no one did.

  He stood, regarding my knife and fork, arranged differently to his. As the meat had cooled, its odor was of bodies. “I’m sorry this meal wasn’t more of a hit. I promise not to cook it for you again.”

  “It was delicious. I just wasn’t that hungry.”

  “The dogs will enjoy the leftovers.” He wiped his palms against his trousers before picking up my plate, and smiled, closed-mouth. “You might prefer dessert?” He waited a second by the door. “No. Tea or coffee, perhaps? I’ll give you a moment to think about it.”

  The table seemed very long.

  The candles were burning down; I reached out to stop a dribble of wax from falling on the wood.

  To become accredited as an interior architect in Australia I had only to do a short course. It would have taken a weekend, and I could have then earned more than I did shepherding around renters and buyers. But I kept finding reasons to put it off. In truth I was sick of the design work I’d been doing. Most of my clients didn’t want just shelter, they wanted a temple dedicated to themselves: a kitchen to nourish their spirits, a bathroom to nurture their souls.

  Why was selling these places easier than drafting them? Because these buildings were already built, the colors and materials chosen, their success or failure of no consequence to me. And the money Alexander gave me more than made up the difference in income. Plus I worked shorter hours and had access to locations for us to meet.

  Every time we parted I locked another door behind us, and I felt intense relief that soon gave way to exhilaration, but also the groggy realization that this had to stop. Although, an impish voice taunted, who exactly is getting hurt? He had a good time. I did too—and each day there were new headlines about the global economy contracting, about multitudes overseas losing their jobs and savings and homes. It was hardly a time to turn down work.

  “Live the dream!”—they don
’t stop telling you that after you’ve been fired and had your credit cards suspended. And no one says which dream to live: the good or the bad one? Seeing Alexander soothed the tedium of the office, gave it charge. All the tagged keys hanging on the back wall became magical, each one able to open onto a new exotic wood. So would I have considered expanding my operation? No.

  One detail about the brothel’s open day stuck in my head.

  The group was standing in a room lit green. The carpet, although new, was already worn down around the bed. A security guard who’d joined the tour had a rat’s tail of bleached hair winding down his neck, and wraparound mirrored sunglasses that he raised up and down in a vaudeville-style move to check out the more attractive visitors. He told the group each bed was fitted with a discreetly located panic button in case there was trouble. “If the girls can get to it, that is,” he added with a smirk.

  I stood up from the dining table.

  The door was ajar. He had turned on the hall light and I walked through the cold to the drawing room. Facing the doorway was a tall rectangular gilt-edged mirror, and all the room—and anyone who entered—was caught in its reflection.

  Had I considered being paid before?

  Of course I had. Even before I was fired. Each month the bills rolled in, an ever fiercer wave, and despite my daily commute to that computer screen in Hoxton, I was traveling further into debt. Rain streaked the office windows like exclamation marks: Do something! Act! But the money owing multiplied. It was like an organism with its own moods, its own weather, over which I had no control. One credit card and then I was offered another credit card, and it seemed a way to wipe the slate clean. I’d rather have fallen into debt for more sympathetic reasons, but in this world you can become insolvent by just trying to look your best. How else to find a mate than by getting poorer still, wearing the right clothes to the right club, and ordering the right drink to meet the right person? But why had I been doing this? Did I think a mate could bail me out? Or did I want children? Could I stay with anyone for longer than it took to conceive? Would anyone stay with me? These subterranean questions spooled on and on.