The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  In memory of departed friends,

  Josh and Kirstin

  Epigraph

  Well! And what if she should die some afternoon,

  Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;

  Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand

  With the smoke coming down above the housetops;

  Doubtful, for a while

  Not knowing what to feel or if I understand Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon … Would she not have the advantage, after all? The music is successful with a ‘dying fall’ Now that we talk of dying – And should I have the right to smile?

  T. S. Eliot, ‘The Portrait of a Lady’

  Contents

  Cover

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  Part Two

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  Part Three

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for The Legacy

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Fleur knocked on my door and I must have been asleep because it seemed to wake me. I guessed that she had heard something of the argument the night before. It hadn’t sounded very loud at the time, but that morning it occurred to me that the whole world was dimmed and muffled. The light was very faint, just leaving night behind.

  I let her in. We looked at each other.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ she said, and came back a few minutes later with tea in a cup on a saucer. The delicacy of the china was somehow wonderful, transparent even in the dull light. Strength, fragility, all at once.

  She sat down in the chair at my desk – I was sitting on the chaise longue – and lit a cigarette. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I know you don’t like it, but too bad.’ She smoked it half down. ‘I’ll go with you. To the hospital.’

  I sat there, quite still. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Have you looked in the mirror?’ she asked.

  I smiled at her, or started to. It hurt.

  She finished the cigarette and stubbed it out in a dented metal saucer she had brought in with her. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll call Carl.’

  I didn’t complain.

  She went downstairs and shut her door. The sound of her voice came very faintly through to my room, only because I knew to listen for it.

  My dress from the night before lay on the floor in a pool of silk. It was pale oyster grey, with a split up the side that had shown the bruise on my upper leg like an ugly pressed flower. Gil had stayed by my side all night to shield the view. His fury when we walked in the apartment door had been fast and strong, a striking snake.

  I’m being dramatic again.

  Fleur came back up carrying the newspaper and handed it to me. She had a magazine as well, and she sat down with it. She picked up the little amphora on my desk and held it in her hands, turning it over, then set it down again.

  ‘I don’t like him coming here. I wish you would go to the hospital this time.’ She sighed, a short sigh, a sort of huff. ‘He’s coming anyway, and he’ll stitch you up.’

  I must have flinched at that.

  She narrowed her eyes at me, then picked up her magazine and put her feet up on the desk and started to read. She was wearing striped socks, three colours repeated. I spent a while studying the contrast they made against the white surface.

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ she said, without looking at me. She turned a page. ‘Dad’s gone to the gallery already. His bag is gone so I think he’ll stay upstate.’ The statement caused her visible effort.

  I hadn’t heard him leave.

  There are no mirrors in my room, so I didn’t need to look. Carl was Gil’s cousin, a plastic surgeon with a practice a few blocks away. He faxed through prescriptions for Gil, antibiotics or whatever, and I suspected that he faxed a few for Fleur too.

  The morning suddenly had some structure: I was waiting for Carl to arrive. Then I would wait for him to finish. Then he would leave. That was about all I could think through.

  He seemed to take a while. I’d read through the whole style section but couldn’t remember a word of it, I found when I came to the last page, except a vague sense that black and white together were in vogue. I closed and folded it when the buzzer rang and Fleur went to answer it.

  I heard them talking. There was the sound of water running in the kitchen sink. Carl came into the room carrying a brown leather case, an old-fashioned-looking doctor’s case, and Fleur stood behind him holding a basin. Steam rose from it. Carl was wearing a white shirt and the pants of a grey suit. His teeth were very white when he smiled at me.

  ‘Ingrid, Ingrid,’ he said, chiding me.

  I started to smile. It hurt, but I kept it up as well as I could. I tried to arrange myself with confidence. My limbs moved stiffly. He dragged the desk chair over to the chaise and sat himself down. Fleur put the basin on the desk. It sat right where her feet had been before. I looked down at them. She had put on soft black ballet slippers that were scuffed around the toe.

  Carl smiled his white smile at me and shook his head ever so slightly. ‘Those stairs!’ he said, turning his head an inch and giving me a sideways look. ‘A real nuisance.’ His voice shook a tiny bit and I glanced at him quickly.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, keeping it vague.

  The muffling that had been there earlier was gone, and I didn’t like the new sharpness in the sounds I was hearing. I frowned. He gave me a tiny medicine cup full of bright red liquid and I drank it. It felt warm.

  ‘Now,’ he said, drawing out the word, and got to work.

  It was only three stitches in the end, tiny little strips of sticky tape that held my face together in a line just above my eyebrow. I knew that because I did look up at the mirror later that afternoon in the bathroom, brushing my teeth. I looked away quickly but I saw them.

  Carl kissed my hand gently when he was finished. Once his bag was closed he stood up and became very chatty, telling me how much he was looking forward to having us all round to dinner next week.

  I nodded. ‘Thanks, Carl,’ I said, ‘thanks for coming over.’ It sounded wrong. ‘For coming by.’

  ‘You’ve got everything you need?’ he asked. ‘Can I send Fleur out to get anything?’

  Fleur raised her eyebrows sarcastically. She was back, leaning in the doorway with folded arms. ‘We’re fine,’ she said. I nodded again.

  ‘Rest,’ he said. ‘You must have one hell of a headache.’ His sideways smile again. He left, taking the stairs quickly, in a rhythm, da-dum, da-dum.

  A small bottle of the red liquid sat on my desk, its medicine cup showing the trace of what I’d drunk earlier. A little Alice-in-Wonderland drink, I thought, and reached for it. Drink me.

  Fleur poured herself one too after I’d finished. ‘Cheers,’ she said, and drained it down.

  I lay on the chaise and closed my eyes. It didn’t hurt. I heard Fleur laughing at something she was reading in her magazine, and I smiled.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at school?’ I asked her.

  She laughed at me, the same laugh. I opened my eyes. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at school?’ she echoed, mocking me.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘No. I don’t have to go today.’

&nb
sp; ‘I’m not going today either,’ she said, and flicked a page. ‘Mondays are a waste.’

  A minute passed. ‘I’m going to the studio later though,’ she told me. ‘Not for long. I’ll be back for dinner. We can order Thai.’

  We ate that night sitting at the island in the kitchen, only because she refused to bring the food upstairs to me and once I was down there in the kitchen I wanted to stay with her.

  ‘You’re looking after me,’ I said to her, only realising it was true as I was saying it. She chewed and swallowed and didn’t say a thing. ‘It’s supposed to be the other way around,’ I said.

  ‘Sometimes it is,’ she replied.

  I’m not sure what she meant, whether I sometimes looked after her, or that stepmothers in general sometimes looked after their stepdaughters. At the time it sounded comforting. The muffling came down again as I went to sleep on the chaise in my room but one of my thoughts was sharp through it for a moment. I knew both that she was too young to be looking after me and old enough that she would not be prepared to do it for much longer. I wondered how far she would go to protect me. I wondered how much I had looked after her, and what kind of loyalty that had bought me.

  Our shared cup sat on the desk, line of red against the plastic. Not at all like blood or rubies, although it suggested those. Like liquid plastic, unmistakably artificial cherry red. The amphora on my desk was back exactly as it had been before she picked it up, at the same angle, the same spot. She was clever. I knew that already.

  I knew that trusting her laid burdens on her that were unfair, but I let myself be unfair. The sounds of the traffic outside and far below floated up softly, cars coming and going and sirens wailing in a fading cry. I lay there with my Alice bottle and thought about the story I could tell, the curse that I could lay, the scrolls that I could fill. I could engrave it all on plates of steel, as tall as my body, stacked up against the walls.

  Those mirrored, shining doors dissolved and I fell into a dream that was all about escaping on a boat across a river. The island city dropped away behind me. I felt a joyful sense of freedom until I saw the man at the stern of the ferry, his hand held out for payment. Then I knew that the river we were crossing was the one no-one ever crossed back from, and I grasped his outstretched hand in supplication. He smiled at me, a cruel smile I knew well, and coins fell down around me, welling up around my knees, golden in the shadows.

  Part One

  1.

  There were three letters addressed to me on the kitchen counter when I arrived home that Thursday afternoon in August, white and cream envelopes bright against the blue tile. One stood out as I looked through them: a long envelope, thick with paper contents.

  The notepaper inside was a heavy stock, its creaminess matching the envelope. It bore embossed initials: RH.

  A message was there in Ralph’s scrawling hand, challenging any reader to make out a word. I took out the envelope’s other object, a plane ticket. One way, business class, Sydney-New York. I laid them both out on the counter.

  Julia –

  There’s a return waiting for you here. I hope you’ll listen to an idea I have.

  Please do come. Saturday? I hope you’re well.

  My love,

  R.

  It was an overly theatrical kind of gesture, even from Ralph. The address was printed on the back of the envelope but I knew it well. Garden Court. Kirribilli. I ran my fingers over the inked-on letters, their imprint on the paper’s surface.

  The house was quiet and empty. The kettle began to screech and the sound turned into a song note. I turned off the gas but as my hand moved to do it I fought an impulse, quick and lively as fire, to pick up the paper and touch the corner to the flame. It would have burnt nicely. The note drew out all the old, warring feelings. To burn it or to cherish it, keep it safe in a drawer forever. I left it there on the counter for the moment and gave in to blaming myself for being so instantly unsettled.

  Outside the window the lawn sloped down to the shade of the trees at the end bordering the fence. Its vivid green defied the drought; Jenny, my aunt, swore that it was the toughness of the breed of grass, but I suspected her of extreme over-watering. Beyond the trees the hill began to drop down to the sea. I went out onto the verandah. The grass seemed to hold the twilight like a pair of hands, the light seeping through them and away like water. Or sand. The fine, white grains of the beach. The letter from Ralph was making me think in overdrawn metaphors.

  Down at the bottom of the lawn where the trees marked the border there was a stone Diana, half the size of life. At least, I had always thought of her as Diana. As she faded away into the twilight I supposed that she could be any classical woman figure, a girl or a goddess, appropriately robed for the purposes of garden art. She might have been part of a fountain once. Beyond the trees the line of the horizon showed, the sea standing up like a wall of water, beginning to lose its distinction from the sky as night came on. I had come from the city across the water and the smog was still there on my clothes, a fine grit on my skin.

  My aunt, who owned the house, was sitting a little way over on the lawn in a wooden folding chair. In a second chair was Keith, the owner of the gallery that showed her paintings. The lawn glowed green. They both held cups of tea, and they were talking quietly. Jenny, grey-haired, sat tall in her chair. Keith leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He raised his hand in a questioning motion, gesturing into the distance. My aunt nodded. Words drifted up faintly, muted by the grass and space. I went back inside.

  The walls of the house were filled with paintings, Jenny’s work as well as others, most of them gifts exchanged over the years. They made an odd mosaic, small frames hung next to and underneath large canvases. My aunt’s work stood out with its signal blue, abstract and devoted to line. The house had been a precious refuge when I had been smaller, and still felt like one at times. Some people have family homes that their parents have lived in forever, that they can always go back to. My parents weren’t around – father long dead, mother far away – and had moved frequently anyway, but this house was one of the true constants in my life.

  Jenny came into the kitchen from the verandah. The sound of Keith putting the chairs back in place against the wall clattered in, and then he stood in the doorway and said hello.

  ‘We’ve been discussing the next show,’ he told me, one hand clasped over his other arm, tall body bent against the door frame, slightly hesitant as usual. He had a warm, open face that smiled easily, intelligent eyes. ‘Your aunt here seems to think she needs a whole six months to prepare.’ His tone was friendly, not seriously impatient.

  ‘I don’t paint as fast as I used to,’ she said.

  We all laughed at that: Jenny had always worked very slowly, in contrast to the finished effects of her paintings with their swift flashes of colour.

  My aunt rubbed her hands a little at the joint of her thumb as she said goodbye to Keith. The quip about her speed of painting had some truth to it. The beginnings of arthritis had started to slow her down.

  ‘So you have the time you wanted?’ I asked her after Keith had left.

  She sighed quickly and pulled the screen door so that it was really shut. ‘Oh yes. More or less.’ She didn’t sound satisfied. Her hair was cut straight and blunt just above her shoulders, and she ran her hand through it, as if planning to tie it back, and stopped.

  I held the note in one hand. ‘It’s from Ralph,’ I explained to Jenny. ‘He’s asked me to go see him, on Saturday. So I think I’ll go.’

  Even as I said it I knew that the invitation was not like water to a thirsty soul, the way it felt, but more like a slug of whisky to a recovering alcoholic. Was there a difference, after all? That’s how it went, my self-rationalisation.

  ‘OK, good. It’s been so long, hasn’t it?’ Her voice was carefully casual.

  ‘He’s sent me a ticket to New York. I don’t know what he’s thinking.’ I had some idea, of course, but didn’t want to put it into words.


  She put her hand out and rested it on my forearm. I covered it with my own for a brief second. ‘New York?’ A troubled look crossed her face. ‘Let me know how it goes.’

  She finished her gesture with a brief pat to my arm, picked up the mug of tea I had poured, and wandered slowly back down the hall to her studio. The biggest room of the house, during the day it was always lit with sun through its many windows and a skylight in the ceiling. The door was panelled in glass patterned to blur the view of what was inside, as though someone had pressed their fingers all over it while it was still drying. She closed it behind her. The glass panels showed smudged pieces of colour and light. It looked like the Bonnard painting of his wife in the bath, one of the only reproductions my aunt had in the house. In the painting, each tile of the bathroom wall glowed with wet, iridescent colour, the rainbow of an oil slick.

  I looked back down at the note, resolving to put it on the dresser in my room, determined that it would not go into one of the drawers where I would treasure it even if I pretended otherwise. Instead it would probably sit there for months gathering dust. That looked more like not caring. The difference was not much at all but, I told myself, I had my pride.

  It seemed like a long drive to Kirribilli, even though it was only a few miles. I managed to take a couple of wrong turns on the way. I’d driven there many times, but always from another direction, never from my aunt’s house. It was around eleven on Saturday when my car pulled into the driveway. The house looked paler, peach walls more bleached by the sun. The frangipani trees around the front were bare and ugly. I knocked. A beautiful boy of about eighteen opened the door. A fuzz of golden hair was cropped close to his head. His feet were bare, and he was wearing a black sleeveless shirt and a sarong in bright batik colours. He had the calm smile of a Buddha.

  ‘I’m looking for Ralph —’

  Before I could finish saying his name, the boy cut me off. Julia, yes, of course, come in.’ The way he spoke over Ralph’s name made it sound as though he thought I was looking for myself.