The Engagement Read Free

seem worse.
    Leaning against the vanity, my head spinning, I tried to breathe deeply. One of the washbasin’s taps had a red enamel disk, the other a disk that read cold . Icy water spurted from both. Splashing my face, I raised my eyes and caught myself shiver in the small mirror. Feeling like an intruder, I did not look quite right. I did not look worth the money.

II
    F our months earlier my uncle had asked me to show a buyer around some properties. “Gentleman’s wanting a pied-à-terre,” he said with appropriate scorn, handing over a large envelope of door keys, each of which was tagged with an address. I printed out a map. The buyer, Alexander Colquhoun, came to the office and we walked together to the office car.
    Blandly handsome, he was also lanky, awkward; if he’d had a hat he would have held it in front of his groin, fiddling with its edges like a farmer from an old movie. In the car he sat very straight, as though only unlocked at the knees and hips. I wondered if he hadn’t been dressed against his will in Sunday best: the stiff new city clothes and freshly cut hair gave him a dorky, jug-eared look—but handsome, he was definitely handsome.
    “You’re English,” he said, like it gave us some bond.
    “Yes.”
    “London?”
    “Most recently.”
    “And how do you like Australia?”
    “Oh, I love it.” Staring straight ahead, I drove through the fog of heat, sensing he guessed I barely knew where I was going.
    Not that it mattered. The whole point of this country was that nothing particularly mattered. Compared to London, the streets of Melbourne seemed almost casually occupied. There was a lack of critical mass. There was a lack of critical anything. People felt obliged to tell me that the Economist had ranked this “the world’s most livable city.” Miles from anywhere else, the population believed their town to be enchanted—and I wished someone would wave the wand over me.
    I had come to start a new life: for the past six weeks I’d trailed my uncle, learning his ways. To succeed in this job, he advised, one needed to be hardworking, honest, a good communicator, and, most important, attractive. That was the main prerequisite, so I began dressing in a close-fitting gray suit and fawn heels, the plastic name tag Liese Campbell pinned to the breast of my white shirt. My uncle had assigned me to his rental division. Driving a newly leased VW Polo full of property brochures, I’d arrive at some stranger’s house to unfurl and plant my flag in his front garden bed: OPEN FOR INSPECTION. Then, in the orange glow of afternoon, I held a clipboard while in trooped couples, divorcées, students, down-on-their-lucks, all of them thinking, Choose me, write my name on your form. Here, “real estate,” as they called it, was a type of public theater—all the community felt entitled to look through their neighbors’ houses. Meanwhile, I inhaled the rising damp and reeled off platitudes about these caves.
    That was basic training. After a few weeks my uncle moved me to the higher-end properties; he thought my accent would lend some class to the proceedings, a colonial thing. This was a course in improvisation, and the people I met, conceivably also taking the course, were acting the need for shelter. I was acting that I wasn’t out of control. Lifting Ovid from the shelf of a “deceased estate,” I’d started reading Metamorphoses like a self-help book. Somewhere within its pages would be a story of a thirty-five-year-old woman who could change at will into a bird or a fawn or a real-estate agent. Why not? There was something about being in other people’s houses, a frisson of freedom: perverse, I suppose. Released from my normal life, I stood in rental properties monologuing on courtyards, laundry facilities, parking spaces—
quoting prices I could not afford, as if these figures were a test of one’s true inner worth.
    Tenants—especially men—listened to the spiel and took me seriously. If a