The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘OK.’ I hit the ball one last time and it collided with the net. ‘I’m finished.’

  Ralph came over to me and took the racquet from my hand and leaned down to pick up the ball. Ingrid didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t look at him directly for long, just in glances, but she seemed to be watching him closely in her peripheral vision. Ralph threw the ball up in the air a few times, catching it, and bounced it. He tossed the racquet once or twice, spinning the handle around. He grinned at me, showing his teeth and that one overlapping incisor. I stood there. Ingrid was standing still, waiting. He tossed the ball up suddenly and served it to her, graceful and fast. She didn’t move much, just one foot to the side, and reached out and caught it lightly in her hand.

  She started strolling back to the house and he moved fast to catch up with her. They walked up the stairs and across the next terraced level close together, shoulders almost touching. Ingrid swished her racquet backwards and forwards against the grass and ferns on the ground. I watched them from behind. They were the same height and for a moment they looked like brother and sister, the blonde and the brown, and I was reminded that they were cousins. I felt a kind of detachment even then from my own sense of displacement, for surely it ought to have been me walking closely beside him, watching over him. This feeling of exclusion was painful in its own way but also had such an aura of inevitability that it was hard to hold on to any resentment; it wavered and flickered. At times like this it was hard to remember that Ralph and I had been friends first, before Ingrid, especially when she so often seemed to make a show of including me so graciously, as if she were politely extending an invitation to join a longstanding family. They both turned their heads at exactly the same moment towards me.

  ‘Are you coming, Julia?’ Ingrid said, still smiling at something Ralph had said.

  She kept her eyes on me but he turned his own towards her, where they rested on her face. I quickened my pace and caught up with them, not walking beside them but one step behind.

  I wanted to ask Ralph about it later, the whispered conversation in the hallway, the protests against tennis, but decided that he would tell me if he wanted to.

  This knowledge Ingrid seemed to have about Ralph’s illness was part of the sense of a quickly growing intimacy between them. His fascination with her only seemed to grow stronger. He stayed at the house a lot now, enduring the cold war between his parents that had been part of his original reason to leave a year before.

  ‘It’s much better at home with Ingrid there now,’ he told me one night at the video store. ‘They both love her so much. Dad loves her even more than Eve does.’ He always called Eve by her first name, and sometimes ‘Mother’ to her face. ‘I think he wants to adopt her. If he could legally I think he would.’

  ‘They both love you. It never made any difference,’ I reminded him.

  ‘That’s true. But she’s come to us … fully formed – she didn’t have to grow up with us, did she?’

  I thought of Ingrid. She seemed to present a state of being in formation, with a contour all her own and yet not fully formed at all, and eager to take shape. It was this sense of vivid potentiality in her that was so attractive to George, I knew, seeing the end of his own life and hers just really beginning.

  ‘Anyway, they both love her and it makes them nicer to each other. She breaks the ice somehow. Maybe because she doesn’t pay attention to them and the arguments, you know. All the tension. She’s so. focused on herself and what she’s doing. And she loves the house. She takes the dog for walks and she cooks.’

  ‘She cooks?’

  ‘OK, she cooked last night and it was terrible – I didn’t know you could do that to pasta. My god. But it was a nice effort.’

  He squinted at the TV screen. ‘Anyway, don’t worry, I’m not giving up the flat.’

  ‘I’m not worried.’

  I hadn’t been, and now I wondered if I ought to be.

  I pictured them at home together – for some reason I could only imagine them sitting on a bed together, in Ralph’s old room or the guest room that had now become Ingrid’s, with her framed prints up on the walls and her yellow crocheted bedspread too small on the big bed – drinking cups of tea and whisky, smoking with the window open, talking into the night, yellow lamplight around them.

  I spent a night like that there myself with Ingrid, one evening when I’d gone over to meet them and go out but Ralph hadn’t shown up. We had waited for him and eventually given up. I made an omelette for us at about eleven o’clock and Ingrid watched me very carefully, as though I were performing a mysterious operation.

  ‘What did you eat, growing up?’ I asked her.

  ‘The microwave was a big thing in our house,’ she said, with a little smile. ‘There was someone to cook, a nanny, sort of, after our mother died, for a while, and then a lot of microwave food or takeaway.’ She picked up a fork and inspected it. It was a minuscule thing, designed for oysters or something like that. ‘What is this for, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Cake?’

  ‘A very tiny cake.’

  I wanted to ask about her dead mother and father but couldn’t bring myself to do it. This would be one of the things she talked about with Ralph during those midnight chats.

  Afterwards we sat up in her room. I sat on the floor on the thick, sea green carpet and she sat on her bed just like I had imagined, and braided her hair and opened the casement window over the bed, a princess in old, washed-out jeans.

  ‘It’s very different here to the house I grew up in,’ she said. ‘That was very … suburban.’

  She looked at me. ‘Your father’s dead too,’ she said.

  I straightened. My father had died in a car accident when I was eight. I didn’t have many good memories of him – moody, distant, rarely affectionate. He had kissed me sometimes before I went to bed, on the side of the head, with his hands on my shoulders pulling me towards him. That was the good memory.

  ‘Ralph told me. Sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s OK.’

  ‘And your mother’s away.’

  ‘What else did he tell you?’ I laughed, uncomfortably.

  ‘She’s some kind of hippie. Or a Buddhist.’

  I sighed. My mother, Rachel, was a source of embarrassment. ‘I’m not sure what she’s doing now. She’s living up north in a commune or something. I’m not in touch with her much.’ She sent me postcards every once in a while. ‘You’ve met my brother, though. Peter.’

  We had run into him one night at the pub. It had been a little bizarre, since his world usually didn’t cross with mine. He was four years older and finishing his medical residency. The way we had grown up – dysfunctional, uncommunicative parents – hadn’t created a close bond between us like it seemed to do with some brothers and sisters. We had each retreated to private worlds that excluded others. But we liked each other well enough. Jenny, my mother’s sister, brought us together every once in a while, for her birthday, Christmas, an occasional lunch when she wanted to try cooking something that only worked when it was made for at least six people, like paella. She wasn’t exactly like a mother, at least in the fraught, critical way of mothering that was my only guide from experience. But for as long as I could remember she had been the only constant, caring presence in our lives. We relied on her to keep us glued together.

  ‘I’m close to my aunt,’ I told Ingrid. She nodded.

  ‘I always wished for an aunt,’ she said. ‘We barely knew that Eve existed. But I wished for one when I was little. I thought it was a nice idea.’ She picked at the bedspread.

  ‘We were lucky like that.’

  Ingrid had gone back to looking out the window with her hungry gaze. From this room you could just see the water, a piece of blue in the daytime framed by trees. It glittered out there in the night.

  She changed the subject and told me bits and pieces about what it had been like to grow up where she did, the particular horrors of her girls’ high schoo
l. She made tea and brought it upstairs on a tray, using the good china with cups and saucers and a jug for the milk. The cups were old and thin, traced in a pattern of roses and vines. I saw the care she took with them, with the whole process, and thought about the suburban world of microwaved food and whatever else it was she was escaping. The way she had folded herself into this life of old money and heirloom china made more sense. I loved the house too – it was like coming to visit a place in a novel, the sense of another world of beauty and wealth taken entirely for granted by those in it – but she had managed to move in and make it her own. Her quiet pride in possessing the thing sat alongside a sense of wonder that she had actually accomplished it.

  She shrugged gently and handed me my cup. ‘Aren’t these beautiful?’ she said. ‘The whole place is so … beautiful.’ She twisted the teapot around by its handle. ‘Ralph is so lucky.’ She looked up at me. ‘And you.’

  For all I knew she saw me as part of it, belonging here, here first.

  ‘It’s all pretty far away from the way I grew up,’ I said. ‘We were more with the microwaved food, like you said. It’s only in the last few years that my mother has given that all up.’

  Ingrid talked a little about how much she liked living with George and Eve. Her mother had been dead for a long time, since she was a little girl, and her father hadn’t been around much. An engineer with a mining company, he had spent long periods away from Perth. It sounded like a kind of freedom in one way, but it was clear that Ingrid had found it lonely and liked being in a house where family were more present.

  ‘Isn’t it tough sometimes?’ I asked. ‘You know – with how they don’t get along?’

  She frowned at me, as though confused. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not really.’

  George loved her especially, and lived in exaggerated awe of her brilliance. Ralph had always been an average-achieving student, and happy enough with that, but Ingrid came first in all of her classes, with high distinctions every time. I wondered sometimes if Ralph was resentful of the attention George paid to Ingrid and the way he would extol her intellectual accomplishment. But he didn’t seem to be – he wasn’t ambitious in that way, and George seemed to accept that.

  They had money, but even so there was surprisingly little expectation of Ralph finding something useful to do with himself after university, some kind of work or creative pursuit. There didn’t seem to be anything like that. At the time I didn’t understand how potentially serious Ralph’s illness was, but George and Eve did, and now when I look back it’s as though I can see them consciously deciding not to push him. But they also just adored him, and seemed to take as much pride and pleasure in his elegance, his charm and his wit as they would have in any other kind of achievement.

  George had his own ambitions for Ingrid, and it was he who first hatched the idea of her going over to the States to study. He had paid a brief visit to a schoolfriend at Harvard once, years before, and had come away with a lifelong respect for the American Ivy League universities. ‘They know what they’re doing over there,’ he’d say. ‘Energy. New ideas. Great stuff.’ It didn’t seem as though he had any frustrated academic desires himself – he was not a man of letters, he informed me once, but a man of numbers, and proud of it, but happy that someone was doing the intellectual and creative things that he appreciated. George saw himself as an old-fashioned patron of the arts and loved to see his name in theatre and concert programs on the list of ‘special supporters’ or included in the ‘producer’s circle’ reserved for the most generous donors. Eve brought the programs home from performances and George left them out not-so-discreetly for us to see. Ingrid wasn’t creative herself, however much she admired artists, but George seemed to see her life itself as a kind of work of art in progress – fascinating, unpredictable, an enthralling performance – and wish for a role for himself as enabler or producer. ‘She’ll make something of it,’ he said to me once, with a knowing wink. ‘She’ll go far.’

  Ingrid was already making plans for her honours year and thinking about following that with graduate study. ‘Harvard! Princeton!’ George would exclaim. ‘Why not!’ Ingrid sometimes talked about Oxford or Cambridge, and of these possibilities George was scornful in his cantankerous way. ‘They’d be lucky to have you. Bloody stuffy old Brits. They’ll treat you like a colonial – never anything but that.’ The sound of some old injury to pride came through whenever he talked about the snobbery of the English. ‘But the Americans. They’ll love you. You’ll knock them dead, my girl.’

  Ingrid often brought her books down to the dining table when she was working on an essay or a translation for class. She and George would both be sitting there sometimes when I came over, Ingrid sucking on a pencil, hunched over a notebook, and George reading the newspaper at the other end of the table, strolling over every once in a while to pick up one of her books in Latin or Greek and peer at it through his half-moon reading glasses, chin tucked in. ‘Marvellous,’ he’d sigh, and chuckle or shake his head, and rest his hand on Ingrid’s shoulder. He could recite a few lines of Virgil from memory but knew no languages other than English.

  The tea kept us awake that night in Ingrid’s room – strong, fragrant Earl Grey – but we were both yawning by 2 am.

  ‘You should stay here,’ she said.

  I went to sleep in Ralph’s bed. It was freshly made, the sheets stiff and clean.

  When I went downstairs in the morning, stupefied with oversleeping, he was there in the kitchen in a T-shirt and old pants, making toast.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  He laughed and offered me some burnt bread. ‘I didn’t want to wake you up.’

  Ingrid came in then, rubbing at her eyes. ‘Put the kettle on, will you?’ she asked, and reached up and pressed her lips to his cheek. His hand rested briefly on her hair, her neck, full of hesitation and restraint as he dropped it back to his side.

  These moments between them were strange to watch. All his adoration and desire seemed to slip off her like water and she showed no sign of recognition, or reciprocation or rejection. She simply seemed to accept it, like a just offering. I could never tell whether what I saw was a carefully modulated public performance, or how it related to the way they were together when they were in private. Those evenings spent talking into the night on her bed over tea and whisky. There was no missing her love for him, but no telling how far it went. That could have been something to do with the fact that they were cousins and there might have been some kind of incestuous boundary she didn’t want to cross, but it didn’t quite seem like that. I suppose I should have been more scandalised by the fact that Ralph was clearly in love with her, but he embraced other kinds of perversity with such ease that this particular one didn’t stand out.

  He refused to talk about it. For a long time I didn’t bring it up. Then we were all out one night at the campus bar, not sitting at our usual low table with the couch but somewhere else, near the windows, and we were waiting for Ingrid to come back with our drinks. It was the week before the last week of class, mid-June, so close to the end we might as well have been already there. She was taking a long time and Ralph was cranky and impatient. He drummed his fingers on the table and lifted his eyes now and again to scan for her. We both saw her then, halfway to the bar, talking to a guy in a red shirt from our film class. He was good-looking, pushing his longish hair back behind his ears and nodding at something Ingrid was saying. Ralph’s face was dark. It was unusual for him to show jealousy so openly and I grew brave.

  ‘What’s going on with you and Ingrid anyway?’ I asked him.

  ‘There’s nothing going on with me and Ingrid,’ he said without much expression. ‘Don’t be so fucking insecure, Julia.’ It was the first time he had spoken to me with any real sharpness. To my horror, I felt a prick of tears and quickly blinked them back.

  Ingrid appeared and put the three glasses awkwardly on the table, spilling some from all of them, and sat down. She raised her glass and clinked it
against Ralph’s, as if waiting for him to toast. He lifted his own glass and drank, silent. She raised her eyebrows and looked at me.

  ‘Cheers,’ I said. ‘Here’s to the end of semester.’ She smiled. ‘And happy travels,’ I added. Ingrid was planning a trip during the break, to Venice. I put my bag on my shoulder and stood up. ‘See you soon,’ I said. ‘I have to work on my essay. For class.’

  Ralph caught my wrist in his hand. ‘No, don’t go.’ I tried to pull my hand away. ‘Don’t,’ he said, voice low. ‘Finish your drink.’

  ‘You’re hurting her, Ralph,’ Ingrid said, steadily.

  He released me. I picked up my glass and left.

  The guy in the red shirt was in front of me when I was halfway to the exit.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I was just talking to Ingrid. She’s your boyfriend’s cousin, right?’

  ‘She’s his cousin – half-cousin – he’s not my boyfriend —’ My drink started to spill as someone bumped my elbow. It was crowded.

  ‘Steady,’ red-shirt guy said, and put his hand against my shoulder. ‘Is he gay then? I wondered.’

  I remembered his name. ‘Tom,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah! Hey, how’s class going for you? Have you finished your essay?’

  We stood there for a while, talking. He bought me another drink and we stood at the bar, being jostled by people. I looked to my side and Ralph was there, asking the bartender for a drink. I looked away but he had seen me.

  ‘Julia,’ he said in a rush. ‘I’m sorry -’ He looked across and saw Tom. ‘OK, forget it.’ He took his two drinks and dropped money on the bar.

  Tom had a lot to say about the French New Wave. I was happy to hear it. We went to see his friends play in a band in a basement somewhere in the city. I didn’t think any more about Ralph.