The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘Ralph,’ I repeated, and went inside.

  It was warm in the house. The familiar hallway stretched away dimly, staircase sweeping grandly up to one side. Light from the stained-glass panels on the door made patterns on the floor. The boy had disappeared. I waited. He emerged from a door off the far end of the hallway, and held it open for me. ‘In here,’ he said. There was a brightness showing through the door, and I caught the sound of running water.

  We walked through into a large space of greenery, a glass-roofed conservatory. When I had been to the house before, the family had never used this room, although Ralph’s father had liked gardening. Plants were everywhere in shades of dark green, lightened in some places by paler ferns, delicate against the larger, stronger leaves of what looked like huge aspidistras. The sun shone through the glass but was caught and dappled by the plants, some of them growing tall towards the roof. The light seemed to have had the warmth bleached from it, while a thick, humid heat came from some other source. The sound of water came from a fountain over towards the far corner, half-obscured by plants, a large stone urn decorated with garlands of stone flowers. My skin softened with the dampness in the air.

  Two cane armchairs sat in front of a black, lacquered table. Ralph was seated in one of the chairs, his legs crossed. All the contours of his body, the angles of arms and legs, were dear and familiar and brought about a dull ache in my chest. I’d seen him sit like that a thousand times, in this house, at mine, on a dining table next to a spilt glass of wine late at night in some forgotten kitchen, in the seat next to me in class, across from me at the campus bar. I had missed him and it consumed me now like a sudden thirst. At that first sight of him it seemed impossible that I’d gone without seeing him for so long. It had always been like that when I saw him after a long break, I reminded myself warily.

  The boy walked to a trolley near the chairs and put ice from a silver bucket into two glasses with a clink.

  ‘Ralph,’ I said.

  He lifted his arms and said my name in reply, the rest of his body still and cross-legged in the chair. I kissed his cheek, his high cheekbone against the skin.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said. ‘Sit down. I’m so glad you could make it.’

  I sat.

  ‘Won’t you have a drink? Wine? Or do you want some whisky?’ He gestured towards the boy and smiled. ‘This is Aaron.’

  Aaron fixed a gleaming smile on me and brought me a glass. It smelled like brandy. I was already feeling lightheaded from the heat. The glass was very cold in my hand.

  I asked him how he was. It couldn’t be a casual question anymore. He had always been thin, never quite filling his clothes. His clothes now were as expensive and well-cut as ever, and they hung from him loosely. A beautiful, coffee-coloured shirt. He gave me a smile with one side of his mouth, lips closed. His eyes had the same brightness, brown filled with light.

  ‘The new drugs have done wonders for me, although you may not be able to see it. A couple of months ago I was a lot worse.’

  He had inherited this thing with his heart, a kind of arrhythmia that made it sometimes beat too slow or too fast, out of its proper pattern.

  ‘And you’re still working?’ he asked, as though it were a peculiar hobby.

  ‘Yes, in the bookshop. It’s going well.’

  ‘And you’re still living over in Mosman with your aunt?’

  ‘Still living there.’

  ‘And Mark?’

  ‘He’s still around.’ I waited. ‘I am thinking about moving,’ I said, not sure how many details I wanted to offer. The topic of moving in had been raised again recently with Mark, without much real intention.

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Moving,’ he repeated, with a faint disgust. ‘It’s always so … unsettling.’

  I waited. ‘It’s hot in here,’ I said. My dress was sticking to the seat, and my legs sweated inside tights. I remembered reading his note in the kitchen and my urge to burn it and felt the satisfying heat of the flame against my hand as surely as if I had done it after all.

  ‘I’ve asked you here to talk about Ingrid,’ he said after a minute, as I had known he would. ‘I want you to go to New York. I can’t, you know.’

  And he explained his idea to me.

  ‘I’d just like to know some basic things. What was she working on? What’s the place like where she was living? What did she like to do there? Maybe you can meet some of her friends. You can give my, you know, regards to Maeve and Gil. I’d appreciate that. It’s just been very hard …’ He paused, and started again. ‘I have a lot of regrets, you know, about not being part of her life for the last few years. I just thought that if I could know a bit more about it, it might be easier to let go.’

  I looked at him.

  ‘Does that make sense to you at all?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and it did. I’d thought similar things myself over the past eleven months. It was coming up for a year since her death.

  ‘So you want a kind of report on Ingrid’s life?’ I asked.

  ‘Anything you can tell me,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect a whole dossier. I know it’s sort of voyeuristic. But I don’t mean it to be like that.’

  Aaron moved around the green room behind us, watering plants from a watering can and spraying the leaves with a fine mist from a bottle.

  Ralph looked away. ‘Gil won’t tell me anything. No-one’s been any help.’

  ‘What about Eve?’ I asked, meaning his mother. ‘Isn’t she going there for some reason or other anyway?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘She’s not travelling so much anymore. She spends more time in Sydney.’

  I asked if she was there, at home, at the house. He said she wasn’t.

  ‘We’ve swapped in a way. It’s funny. About six months ago. She was sick of the house. I was sick of the flat. She’s always loved it – she had owned it for years before I took it. So she moved in there and I moved back here. It’s just me and Aaron now.’

  Aaron looked over briefly at the sound of his name, turned back to the plants.

  I’d brought the ticket with me with the idea that I might have wanted to give it back. It was in my hands now.

  ‘It’s not refundable,’ he said. ‘I knew you would hate to waste it by not going.’

  I laughed.

  ‘I can’t put you up at the Plaza,’ he said apologetically. ‘But I have a place for you to stay.’

  It was an apartment that his uncle, Robert, owned in the West Village and stayed in every now and again – he lived most of the time in London, where he ran a couple of restaurants. I had spent some time in New York years earlier, in a year I had spent travelling after finishing high school. It was one of the usual extended around-the-world trips that Australian eighteen-year-olds did: the States, Europe, London, home. In England they had called it my ‘gap year’, as though it were an empty space. More recently I had visited New York with Ralph for a couple of weeks, not long after Ingrid had met Gil Grey, when we were all still friends.

  I thought about the city: the subways, the park, the long, straight avenues and little streets downtown. It took some courage. I thought about the hole in the ground down there at the end of the island.

  ‘I know you’re not back at law school,’ he said. I didn’t ask how he knew that. ‘I’m sure they can do without you at the store for a little while. Just go for a couple of weeks if you like. Take a walk around the Columbia campus. Take a camera. Tell me what’s new in the Prada shop. Or wherever she shopped at. J. Crew. Who knows. Do what you like.’ He shrugged, but he kept his eyes on me.

  ‘Aren’t you curious about Fleur?’ he asked. ‘We never did meet her. I’d love to know what she’s like. Did you know she’s taking photographs now, no painting?’

  He was persuasive. It might not have worked if a range of factors hadn’t been in place. I was tired of the pattern my life had fallen into: not tired of Jenny and her house, which I couldn’t really imagine leaving for Mark
’s flat. I was tired of Mark. I’d taken on more hours at the bookshop after deciding to take the semester off with the dim idea of doing some writing, a script, an outline, something – it was a love story, a mystery, it changed every month – in reality knowing I couldn’t face the mountain of reading and assignments for each week’s class. It was quiet at the shop and Martin often let me go home early. Not much writing had happened. It was another kind of gap year, not like the deliberate coming-of-age overseas journey I’d taken at eighteen, but a kind of hiatus that might never come to a close, a drifting sense of purposelessness.

  It wasn’t much to do with Ingrid, my decision to go. She had been shut away into some cupboard of memory by then and the thought of opening that door wasn’t all that interesting. It was just the idea of leaving that was appealing.

  But all that might have been irrelevant. On the drive home I tried to remember just one other time that I’d said no to something Ralph had asked me to do. None came to mind. My flight left in three weeks’ time.

  Just a few days earlier Mark had noticed the thing that made me realise that I really was tired of the way things were going. He was wearing a towel around his waist, and rubbing at his hair with another towel to dry it.

  ‘It’s been weeks since you’ve taken anything, Julia,’ he said. He threw the towel in his hand over his shoulder. ‘I’ll start to think you don’t care anymore.’

  He walked into the kitchen in his bare feet. Cups and plates clinked together. The hallway he came from was in shadow, fighting the sunlight at the only time of day when any light would get remotely close. The morning sun shone brightly through the windows behind me. I stayed sitting in the big old leather chair, the possession of his I coveted most wholly.

  He was right, and I hadn’t even noticed. It had been weeks since I’d taken anything.

  Mark and I had literally run into each other two years earlier in a bar in Potts Point not far from the bookshop where I worked. He had managed to spill half his beer down the front of my dress, bumping into me by accident; he bought me another drink and hung around while I sat there looking like a wet T-shirt competitor, which he seemed to like, and I didn’t mind. When he turned his head a certain way after the second round the light had caught his dark brown hair and made it look just like Ralph’s. My heart had skipped, guilty and alert.

  The first time he stayed I’d taken a big thing – keys – without thinking about it, and realised later that I’d meant for him to come back for them. I had been happy to see him at the door the next day, standing there framed against the evening. He had stayed again, taking his keys with him this time when he left. And leaving behind, unintentionally, a pen I had removed from the pocket of his jacket. It was a small thing. I’m not sure if he ever did notice that it was gone.

  It started early with me, not like most girls who begin shoplifting when they turn thirteen and get shamed out of it when their parents have to collect them from the store security office or, worse, the police station. It began with playing with the objects on my mother’s dresser, the fascinating arrangement of perfume bottles, boxes, powders, the silver-backed hairbrush and mirror. That was back in the days when she still wore French perfume and brands you could buy at the chemist, before she switched to jasmine oil and clary sage. I stood there when she was out and examined them all in detail, and made sure I always put them back in precisely the same position. It was a kind of puzzle. One day she came home unexpectedly before everything was back in place. The front door opened and shut. A bracelet of blue beads was in my hand. My fingers closed over it. Everything else was as it had been. I thought about hiding under the bed – why was I so afraid of discovery, I wonder now – but instead slipped out and joined her in the kitchen where she was taking off her coat and opening the fridge.

  ‘Darling!’ she said when she saw me, as though she was surprised to find me home. She hugged me briefly and the beads pressed against me through the fabric of my dress where they sat in my pocket. They were open pockets, two of them sewn onto the outside of the dress, with a rounded shape and a large button on each one. I was afraid the bracelet would fall out. It didn’t.

  She didn’t say anything about the lost bracelet. I thought about putting it back but I didn’t want to, and I was afraid of being caught in the act of replacing it. It had come from a box containing many bracelets, and it wasn’t one she often wore.

  It was months before she mentioned it.

  ‘Have you seen that bracelet of mine with the blue beads?’ she asked my father one morning. She had just finished dressing, and she was putting her earrings in as she spoke. She pulled the second one through her ear. ‘Do you know the one I mean?’

  My father hadn’t looked up from the paper. He made a noise that might have signalled a negative answer.

  Peter, my brother, looked at me accusingly from the floor where he was lying stretched out with a book in front of him. My mother stalked back to her room and came out again with nothing on her wrists. She didn’t mention the blue beaded bracelet again, and I enjoyed the victorious feeling of having got away with something.

  It turned out that I was good at taking things in a way that people didn’t notice, and good at not giving myself away on the occasions when they did. It became a rare event as I grew older.

  Mostly I took books from Mark’s house, just occasionally – that wasn’t so pathological – and always left them in a pile in the corner of my bedroom where he’d pick them out and take them home again when he was ready.

  Ralph gave me things so often that it didn’t feel necessary to take anything. Whatever it was I wanted from him was so big and so impossible that taking an object would have only made the desire more mortifying.

  I took only small things from Ingrid – a pencil from the pocket of her bag, a hairclip – but my heart was never in it and these tokens exuded no power. I put them back. The happiness she got from finding the hairclip I had replaced in her bag made me feel like a benevolent angel. That was new. Ingrid had snapped the clasp in and out when she found it, a piece of metal fixed against the plastic imitation tortoiseshell. It was shaped like a leaf, an autumn leaf. She fixed it into place, and the shine of the plastic showed against her gold hair. I regretted returning it then. The beauty of the object emerged when it was on her, once it was joined to her, something I had missed when I had taken it and viewed it alone.

  Some part of me was waiting for something of hers to present itself that would be worth taking. It wasn’t something that would be found by looking. After a while I forgot about it and the desire passed.

  Mark handed me the paper when we said goodbye that morning, making sure I was taking something. It was still folded up in its place outside the door to the flat, freshly delivered. I hesitated before taking it. Mark wasn’t good at giving things. He was writing a thesis, a doctorate in Philosophy that was all about revising late twentieth-century theories of gift and exchange. Doing all that reading had screwed with his own ability to give anybody anything without being overwhelmed by anxiety about what kind of moral and ethical structures he was condoning or violating. So even the newspaper was weirdly extravagant. At birthdays the issue with gifts became irritating, but most of the time it was OK with me; it encouraged a very minimal sense of emotional obligation, which is what I suppose he intended in a way. Our involvement was like that – always tentative, both afraid of risk in our individual ways. From the most cynical angle I was continuing on with it to prove something to myself or the world: that I was over Ralph and capable of sustaining an adult relationship. Or a semblance of one.

  He kissed me goodbye, still wearing the towel. I put the paper on the back seat of my car and didn’t look back at it.

  2.

  Before Ingrid became our friend, Ralph liked to tell the story of his first meeting with me. I was working in a video shop up at Kings Cross back then, a shift that started in the afternoon and went through until late at night. The shop was on the border of the Cross and the less sle
azy neighbourhoods surrounding it, the only video place within a mile that wasn’t dedicated solely to pornography. It was late on a weeknight and quiet. I was eating a bar of chocolate I had taken from the stack for sale on the counter and watching a Humphrey Bogart movie on the TV set up high on the wall, with the sound turned down low.

  The shop was a cavernous space with low ceilings and shelves placed too close together. You entered it by walking down three steps from the street. A red neon sign blinked in the window: ‘VIDE MANIA’. The ‘O’ in ‘VIDEO’ flickered on now and again. Seen from inside, read backwards, the sign always suggested a Latin exclamation to me. Ingrid saw it too, when she was there. ‘Video, videre, visi, visus!’ she would chant triumphantly, reciting her principal parts.

  ‘What about mania?’ I asked her once. Ingrid paused for a moment. ‘Maneo, manere, mansi, mansus!’

  Ralph was sitting in the corner reading, and he rubbed his forehead and observed her doubtfully. ‘You can’t form “mania” from that word.’

  Ingrid frowned and looked back to the window. The fluorescent light made her yellow hair unusually dull and her red coat was redder than ever. The ‘O’ on the sign winked and surged. Her face was reflected for a moment perfectly in the window – beautiful in its classic way, features made harsher by the light – and mine behind hers, dark hair and brows, blur of white skin and vermilion mouth.

  At high school I had been teased for being a goth by the girls who looked superficially like Ingrid – tanned and blonde – because of my colouring: hair so dark it was almost black, and skin that only burned, never went golden brown. And I wore black in the same way that they wore pink or light blue. It didn’t quite make sense to me as an insult – I lacked the black eyeliner and masses of silver jewellery that the real goths wore. Ingrid wasn’t like those girls, which I didn’t see right away; I worked out after a while that the same types at her school had come up with reasons to exclude her too, and that she looked down on them fiercely.