The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  I laughed too. ‘No, we’ll have to watch it.’ I came back under the counter. ‘After Casablanca.’

  Ingrid’s chair creaked and she settled in. ‘What other classes are you taking?’

  I stared at her blankly for a moment, unable to remember, drawn to the empty silver oval around her neck.

  ‘Art history,’ I said, recovering. ‘Film – modernism. A class in English on the city in literature.’

  ‘Handy,’ she said, waving her hand vaguely at the shelves around us. ‘For studying. For film class.’

  ‘Uh, yes,’ I replied, looking at the stacks of crappy Hollywood romantic comedies and action movies with their faded covers. We had a small foreign section and a better ‘classics’ shelf than a lot of places, but it wasn’t what you would call an art house collection. ‘Sort of.’

  She smiled as though I had just agreed with her wholeheartedly.

  ‘Do you love Casablanca?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’

  I smiled and reached over to press PLAY on the machine.

  We were still talking in that broken way conversation works when you are watching a video with a friend – a comment here and there, a reply, a shared groan at the action on screen, a shared sigh – when Ralph returned an hour and a half later with food in a plastic bag. I had grown used to the long periods of time it took him to do simple errands. By then Ingrid and I had made a start on St Elmo’s Fire and were discussing the doomed career of Andrew McCarthy, and how James Spader had never done anything better than his role as Steff, the villain in Pretty in Pink. Ralph brought the warm night air with him from the street, but I shivered suddenly.

  ‘Judd Nelson!’ he said happily. ‘Thank god I missed Casablanca.’

  3.

  The following Sunday I went to the house again with Ralph. He’d been there much of the last week but had stayed at his flat the night before after a late night out. We had started the evening at a party in a huge house in Redfern, one of the sketchier neighbourhoods close to the University where students lived alongside housing commission flats and blocks of Aboriginal families, a Victorian mansion that had somehow escaped being made into flats and was now occupied by at least six students. Ingrid had been with us but had disappeared some time after midnight. At one point I saw her kissing Ed in the corner, and saw some other girl walk up to them and slap Ed angrily on the shoulder. They had stopped kissing then, and Ingrid had looked up at the girl, tilted her head to the side, then pulled her hair absently over her shoulder when Ed got up and walked after the angry girl. I never heard her talk about it.

  By the time we wanted to leave Ed was gone too, and I supposed that Ingrid had left with him – the angry girl was still there, now dancing with someone else in the front living room, all trace of fury gone. Ralph was worried about Ingrid. He spent half an hour looking through the house before he came downstairs. The music was terrible and I wanted to leave.

  ‘This place is big,’ he said.

  He was wearing a black T-shirt with ‘Cos cheap is how I feel’ written across it in another shade of black. It was worn and soft to the touch – a sudden memory of my hand against his back arrived and wouldn’t leave – but I didn’t touch him now. He was edgy and his eyes moved around the room, away from me. He didn’t want to hear about Ed.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he said.

  ‘No, it’s not. Come on. She’s not here.’

  He hung back and chewed his lip. I put on my coat. One of the people who lived in the house, a girl with stringy hair, stopped on her way past us. ‘Your friend Ingrid?’ she said. ‘She left a while ago – she was with a couple of people? Sylvia and Dave?’ Everything she said sounded like a question. ‘She tried to find you to say goodbye, I think …’

  Ralph nodded and followed me out the door. We walked a long way alongside the abandoned railway yards before finding a taxi that dropped me home and drove away with him. In the late morning on Sunday when I went to his flat he looked grey and gaunt. I wondered if he had come home not long before I got there. He brightened up after food and ate many pieces of toast, stacked up in a tall charred tower on a plate.

  My car was working that day. It was an old bug, probably like the one Ingrid wanted, except it didn’t go well most of the time. We drove over to Kirribilli, sky halcyon blue through the struts of the bridge.

  Ingrid met us at the door this time, Racer close to her side. She leaned against the frame for a second before coming forward to kiss us both.

  ‘Here you are – I lost you people last night in that huge house.’ She smiled and gave a little shrug. ‘Victoria’ll be here soon. There’s a friend of Aunt Eve’s here too, from America. She’s – you know her, Ralph! She’s amazing.’

  The smell of lamb roasting filled the house. The living room was connected to another room at the front and was usually closed off by two big sliding oak panel doors. Now they were open. There was a piano in the front room, sparse chairs and lots of books in bookcases around the walls. Rugs were layered on the floor as they were in all the rooms. Eve was the pianist in the family. Ralph refused to play for me, ever. The piano was being played now, although at first I took it to be a recording. It was softer than the piano ought to have sounded. Then I looked and saw a woman, seated, playing. Her back was very straight, her body still and her hands moved gracefully over the keyboard.

  ‘That’s Maeve,’ Eve said, looking through to the piano room. ‘An old friend.’

  ‘Play some more Beethoven,’ George demanded from his chair irritably. ‘Can’t stand that Debussy.’

  It sounded beautiful to me, delicate and somehow dampened as the sound made its way to us, as though over a great distance. The piece came to an end, or she brought it to a close, and she rose and came in to join us.

  I had thought before, at other times, that Eve was like a bird, and she was like one again today in bright ultramarine. Maeve was another kind of animal, something more than human as she moved across to us with a smooth, unhurried kind of walk. The long, simple dress she wore was black as a pelt. She shook my hand. I looked again and the fabric was green like a mallard duck’s neck and deep blue, dense feather-dark. Her hands were perfect, white and ringless.

  ‘It’s so lovely to meet you,’ she said in her pretty accent, New York and something else – faintly European – as though she were congratulating me. Her hair was blackish brown and fell to her shoulders with a stripe of grey running through it from her temple. In that moment her attention was very strong and then it was gone. She sat down in the velvet chair that I thought of now as Ingrid’s, and Ingrid stood beside her.

  ‘And how lovely for you, Ralph, to finally meet your gorgeous cousin,’ she exclaimed.

  He leaned down and kissed her cheek and she held his hand briefly.

  ‘Half-cousin,’ he said, reflexively.

  ‘Half-cousin,’ she repeated, faintly mocking. ‘Well. I can’t believe she’s been hidden away all these years.’

  ‘I haven’t been hiding,’ Ingrid said.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Maeve replied. ‘I’m just delighted that you’ve … made it across.’

  Eve looked a little smug and pressed her hands together. ‘We’re happy to have Ingrid here.’

  The doorbell rang then, a set of three chimes, and we all looked up. Ingrid went to answer it.

  ‘Victoria’s coming from the airport,’ Eve said, turning to Ralph. ‘She’s been working on a project – a shoot? In Queensland, I think. The Gold Coast?’ She made it sound like an obscure foreign country. I suppose to her it was. Eve’s travels took her overseas in the direction of Europe and the States, but never to Australia’s north. ‘Victoria’s a model,’ she told me.

  When the two of them came in together, Victoria looked like Ingrid put through a magazine makeover – long blonde hair a shade lighter and hanging unnaturally straight. Her dress was a kind of peach colour that matched her lips. I saw it a few days later on a magazine cover, on a wom
an that looked a lot like her. She had eyes just like Ingrid’s, blue and perceptive, but with the lashes heavily mascaraed black. She was the elder by just two years, and seeing them together like that – Ingrid’s hair coming loose from its medieval-looking braid, the lace hem on her skirt torn and ragged but still somehow regal – seemed to show me everything that Ingrid had worked to distinguish herself from.

  Victoria sat across from me at the lunch table. Once she established that I worked in a video store we had a topic of conversation. She liked movies and had thought about acting.

  ‘Have you thought about applying to drama school?’ I asked. ‘Like NIDA?’

  ‘Oh, that would be so great,’ she said, without enthusiasm. ‘It would be so hard to find the time though. My agent is looking into some roles for me.’ She smiled at me compassionately.

  Victoria’s fork moved and the food on her plate shifted around but she didn’t seem to chew or swallow very often. ‘I’m just lucky that way,’ she said out of nowhere. ‘I can eat and eat and just don’t put on weight. Not like Ingrid!’ Victoria wasn’t much thinner than her sister. ‘It’s all that sitting around, Ingrid,’ she scolded her, imperiously.

  Ingrid ignored her. The way she did this, with casual control, made it look as though the whole thing was a game – a cruel one – they had played since childhood. It made me wonder about the forms that Ingrid’s retaliation would take, if it ever came.

  ‘I love aerobics,’ Victoria said then, and smiled around the table.

  Maeve’s eyes widened. My initial feeling for Victoria had been aversion, but her sheer disregard for what any of us thought of her somehow made me like her more. Eve came in with a large fruit tart in her hands. It glistened with a heavy sugar glaze: apricots, strawberries, blueberries under gold. We were all quiet as she passed slices around and Victoria didn’t talk again as we ate.

  ‘I’m so impressed that Ingrid knows Latin so well,’ Maeve said to George when we had finished eating. ‘I had no idea you could come across that kind of education here, in high school! Although of course I should have known.’ She smiled across at Eve. ‘With my brilliant friend here. I’ve always thought how wonderful it would be to read Virgil in the original. The Aeneid.’

  George murmured his approval. ‘She can quote it for you. Just ask her.’

  ‘No,’ Ingrid said.

  When the table was cleared Eve said she wanted to hear Maeve play more. ‘Go on and play some Mozart for us. Or whatever you like.’

  Maeve stood smoothly. ‘Will you come and turn the music for me, Ingrid?’ she asked.

  They went together into the piano room. It was dark in there now – the day had turned overcast – and Ingrid switched on a standing lamp next to the piano. She stood next to Maeve as she played, turning the pages quietly. The music had the same dampened sound as it had before. When the piece came to an end Maeve looked up and smiled at Ingrid.

  Eve seemed happy, observing them. She was sitting next to me on the couch. ‘Maeve’s from New York,’ she explained to me. ‘She runs a gallery there – spectacular, a really wonderful space over in Chelsea. She’s travelling from here to the desert to look at some paintings. Some Aboriginal artists out there that she’s thinking about showing. Maeve!’ she called out. ‘Where is that place you’re going to? With the paintings?’

  ‘Utopia,’ Maeve said, without turning fully around.

  ‘Utopia,’ Eve repeated, satisfied. ‘Incredible.’

  ‘And somewhere called Well Twenty-three.’

  ‘Beautiful work,’ Eve remarked. ‘In the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘Utopia,’ Ralph said. ‘I hardly imagine it’s that in reality.’

  I tried to imagine Maeve out there in the desert and found that I could, more easily than I could imagine any of the rest of us. Except Ingrid – I could see her with a backpack and sunscreen across her nose and a look of perseverance in the heat and sun, red dust on her skin.

  Maeve kept talking with Ingrid, who was sitting beside her now on the long piano stool, looking down and picking something off her skirt. Maeve was inspecting her in a quiet, drawn-out way. She nodded at what Ingrid was saying, and didn’t take her eyes off her for a second.

  ‘Are you an artist too?’ I asked Maeve when she and Ingrid came back to join us. Ingrid looked to her, expectant.

  ‘No.’ She smiled at me ruefully. ‘I have to recognise talent in my job. And I realised pretty young that I don’t have any.’

  Ingrid frowned.

  ‘I love what I do,’ Maeve said to me. ‘It’s a joy, to nurture talent, to see it rewarded.’

  Maeve stayed for a week before she left for the desert, and a week afterwards before she went back to New York. She took Ingrid out with her during the day to galleries and for long afternoon teas at elegant places in the city, sometimes with Eve and sometimes just Ingrid. Ingrid was in awe of her, and deeply flattered by the older woman’s interest.

  ‘She knows so much,’ she said to me, a couple of nights after Maeve got back from the desert. ‘Maeve says that your aunt is really good.’

  ‘She is really good.’

  We were behind the counter at the video store, early in my shift.

  ‘Well, I saw some of her paintings in the gallery the other day. They are amazing.’

  ‘I like them.’ I wondered when Ralph was going to show up.

  Ingrid sat with her chin in her hands, looking out the window. ‘I wish I’d learnt to play the piano,’ she said sadly.

  ‘You know Latin,’ I said, although clearly this was no compensation. She sighed.

  Ingrid took to stopping by the video store most Wednesday nights from then on. She also started drinking with Ralph and me at the campus bar on Fridays. Scrabble and Monopoly were her games, and we played them at our corner table sitting on the same red couch and chairs. It had been the two of us before then, and now it was three.

  4.

  It became clear to me after knowing Ingrid a month or so that she knew more about Ralph’s state of health than I did. There was something solicitous every now and again in the way she acted towards him, a kind of concern that reminded me of the way Ralph bent over his father, handing him his glass of water or wine, cautioning him, watching him. One day at the house after lunch we were sitting in the lounge drinking, already slightly drunk, and Ralph came in with several old tennis racquets in his hand.

  ‘Who’s up for a game?’ he asked, bouncing a yellow ball up and down on the carpet. It made a kind of dull thud and didn’t rise very high. His face was alight and there was a silly, manic edge to his actions, a little too expansive and tense. It was late afternoon, mid-April, and warm outside. I yawned. George laughed and wheezed. Ingrid squinted at Ralph.

  ‘Where did you pull those out from?’ she asked.

  ‘Under the stairs.’

  Racer regarded the bouncing ball with a bored look and stayed by Ingrid’s side. She was holding a pack of cards, shuffling them between her hands.

  Ralph tossed the ball to her. She raised her hand too late and missed, and the ball rolled into the corner. They both waited, poised, for the other to go and fetch it. Racer raised himself slowly and walked with a stiff gait to the ball. He pushed it with his nose and eyed Ralph resentfully, and picked it up and brought it to Ingrid’s feet. She patted his head.

  Ralph reached down for the ball. ‘Julia, you come and play then.’

  There was a tennis court down in a level of the grounds that I hadn’t been to before, only seen from above.

  ‘Ralph, why?’

  He took my hand and pulled me up. ‘Let’s go.’

  Ingrid spoke to him then. ‘Ralph, don’t be ridiculous. You don’t play tennis.’

  ‘What would you know?’ he asked. ‘How would you know?’

  She looked to George. He shrugged and sat further back in his chair and called Racer over to sit with him. Ingrid stood up. Ralph let go of my hand. She pulled him by the elbow out the door, into the hallway near the stairs, and I hea
rd her whispering urgently to him, and his replies in a low voice. ‘I’m not a fucking invalid,’ he pronounced. They reached some kind of agreement.

  ‘We’ll go for a walk outside,’ Ingrid announced when they came back in, her eyes on Ralph. ‘Julia, will you come?’

  We walked down the terraced garden, down to the lower level overgrown with stringy ferns, and down a set of mossy steps, small concrete slabs full of cracks and breaks, to the tennis court. Morning glory vines and jasmine had taken over down here, and one long tendril snaked all along the ragged net, bluish-purple trumpet flowers blooming. Ingrid was wearing a white shirt of almost transparent cotton, cheesecloth or muslin with tiny dots all over it – Swiss dots, I heard her say once – and strings that dangled from the open collar, never tied. The light showed right through it and created a purplish penumbra around her. Stray hairs floated as though raised by static electricity. She held the old tennis racquet in her hand, turning it over and over, fingers on a loose thread in the weave. The frame was worn, showing the remains of yellow paint, wood underneath the colour of dry grass or old wicker. The surface of the tennis court was faded by the sun until it looked like a dried-out version of the moss on the stairs, blackish and hard. I didn’t want to step onto it.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked, bored with being part of a plan I hadn’t been involved in making. ‘Are you going to play?’

  Ralph shrugged. Ingrid had clearly won the argument. He tossed the ball to her and she hit it across the court, not hard, her arm a smooth arc through the air. The muscles in her shoulder and upper arm flexed. Ralph looked over at me. I couldn’t read his face. I picked up the other racquet – he had only brought two with us; the other one with practically no strings left remained in the house, watched over by Racer – and went to get the ball. I was no tennis player. Ingrid and I hit the ball back and forth for a while, lazily. I missed half the time. She never did. Ralph dragged up a battered old chair from the corner of the court and sat on it, leaning back with his arms folded behind his head, his feet in canvas tennis shoes crossed in front of him. He called out a random-sounding score to us every once in a while. My feet started to hurt. I was wearing flat black leather shoes with two side buckles and a skirt that didn’t leave much room for running or sudden movement. Ingrid’s feet were bare. Her toes flexed against the ground.