The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  Ralph showed up two nights later at the video store. He brought a tub of good ice cream and a bottle of top-shelf gin and tried quoting Bogart at me again when he came in the door. I ignored it.

  ‘Is Ingrid coming?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘She’s doing something else. Theatre? I don’t know.’

  I brought out two paper cups. The glasses had all broken in the cramped sink out the back the very week before; Ingrid, trying to be helpful.

  ‘It’s just you and me, kid.’ He leaned on the counter on his elbows. ‘Are you going to ask me back?’

  I opened the counter for him and he stepped through. He went to pull up a chair. I opened the bottle and the seal cracked. I felt his mouth on the back of my neck – I flinched with surprise and pulled away – and he was behind me, standing there. I couldn’t tell whether I had imagined it. He took the bottle from my hands, his eyes on me, and poured.

  ‘So how’s Tom? What’s he like?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, he’s great.’

  ‘You have a huge hickey on your neck.’

  I pulled up the collar of my dress.

  ‘Good for you.’ He drank his drink.

  ‘Do you have a problem, Ralph?’

  ‘No, no.’

  I looked at him and saw a dark pink, bruised mark on his own neck near the line of his collared shirt. ‘You have one too!’ I gasped in mock horror and laughed. He laughed too, but he didn’t meet my eyes. He finished his drink and poured another.

  It was that very night that the shop phone rang and it was Ed calling.

  ‘Hi! Ed. How are you? How did you get this number?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to find you for a while – I knew you worked at some video place in the Cross – Look, it doesn’t matter – is Ralph there?’ His voice was strained. I knew it couldn’t be good news.

  ‘He’s here. I’ll get him.’

  I held the receiver against my chest. Ralph was absorbed in reading the back of a video case and chewing a piece of chocolate. I didn’t want to give him the phone.

  ‘Ralph?’

  ‘Hmm?’ He looked up.

  ‘It’s Ed. For you.’ I held the phone out to him. ‘On the phone.’

  ‘Ed?’ he asked. ‘Hi, Ed. What can I do for you?’

  His face went pale as old ash. He listened and nodded and said, ‘OK. Thanks. No, it’s OK, thanks.’ He hung up.

  ‘It’s Dad.’

  I nodded.

  ‘He’s at the Royal North Shore.’ He gathered up his coat and his books.

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ I asked. He shook his head. I handed him his bag as he left.

  I caught a cab to the hospital a couple of hours later and looked through the doors into the waiting room. Ralph was there, sitting in one of the uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs, next to Ingrid, his head resting on her shoulder. It looked as though he was asleep. She was sitting up calmly, reading a book.

  If they’re waiting there, sitting there like that, I told myself, it must mean that it’s OK. For now, at least. Nothing was happening. I don’t know what I was thinking. Eve was nowhere in sight. I couldn’t bring myself to go in. I went home.

  Ed had called by the house that night looking for Ralph – or Ingrid; I always wondered – and found George at the end of a bad heart attack. He died early the next morning. I went around to the house later that day and, standing before the front door, went through some of the feelings I had experienced in the hospital the night before – a repulsion, an exhausting physical sense of rejection – but I made myself knock. Ed answered the door and let me in.

  Ingrid and Eve were sitting on the couch together with Racer at their feet. The dog was alert and worried. Eve had a grim look of resignation on her face. Ingrid rose when she saw me. ‘He’s upstairs,’ she said simply, and sat down again.

  Days passed. A week later, the day before the funeral, Ralph and Ingrid were together in the living room when I arrived. She was back in the velvet chair and he was sitting where Eve had been before. I could hear Eve on the phone in another room. They had just come back from the reading of the will, at their lawyer’s office in the city. Ralph was smoking, something I had never seen him do inside the house before.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ Ingrid said to him. He ignored her and stared at me. I sat down next to him.

  ‘How did it go?’ I asked.

  Ralph looked at his fingernails. There was a kind of electric charge to the air, similar to the one I had felt before when I came upon them alone, but subtly different. Ingrid had a new kind of seriousness in her face. She was wearing all grey, a formal silk shirt and wide-legged, tailored pants that reminded me of Katharine Hepburn. No-one spoke. Eve’s voice continued, muffled, from beyond the room.

  Ingrid cleared her throat. ‘Well, George left me some money,’ she said.

  I waited.

  ‘Quite a lot.’

  Ralph seemed to come back to life somehow, and I hadn’t realised quite how still he had been. ‘Oh, I’ve got my share,’ he said. ‘And Eve. There was enough to go around.’ He put out his cigarette. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘I’m starving. Julia, can you make us something to eat? Please don’t let Ingrid near that stove again.’

  A sense of happiness for her inched up on me but I felt apprehensive, seeing her own awed discomfort. George’s knowing winks to me, his sense of satisfied pride in Ingrid’s achievements, made a whole new kind of sense. With this inheritance he really had bought a role for himself as the executive producer of whatever she chose to do next, the glamorous production he had always imagined she would make of her life. There was something selfless about it – he wouldn’t be around, after all, to enjoy the show he had enabled – but it nevertheless felt like an act that bought gratification for himself at least as much as for her. Ralph seemed unsettled by the news, but not surprised. It was clear that he had known what was going to happen. It was only later I guessed he had been instrumental in achieving it.

  In the kitchen the good cast-iron pan rested in the sink with something charred onto its sides and base. There wasn’t much in the fridge apart from eggs and some old lettuce. I sniffed the milk. It was OK. There was a moment, when I saw myself standing there about to cook and care for them all, that I felt vaguely like a servant; a shadow that passed across my sense of myself as their trusted friend. It was the money, I told myself. I was more than ever the only one who didn’t have any. But the feeling passed. I opened the cupboards and pulled out a mixing bowl, put it back.

  ‘I’m driving to the deli,’ I called to Ralph, pulling my keys out. ‘Back soon.’

  Ingrid had been well off after her father’s death. Now, she was incredibly rich. George had left her enough capital to finance any adventure she desired, in the world of Ivy League PhDs or whatever else. They never discussed any actual figures but I knew that Ralph had enough to live comfortably without ever working for money – at least – and her share had been equal to his.

  ‘How much is it?’ I asked him once, after the funeral. ‘Could she buy a house if she wanted to? Could she buy a house like this?’ It was the only way I really knew how to measure money.

  He snorted. ‘Yes,’ he said sarcastically. ‘She could buy the whole block if she wanted to.’ This might have been an exaggeration.

  It became clear soon enough that he wasn’t bitter about the money – it had never seemed that way to begin with – but he was anxious about what Ingrid’s plans would be. It turned out that there had been conversations about the money before George’s death – at least one with Ingrid, and one with Ralph – in which George had declared his desire to enable Ingrid to pursue her interests and ‘explore the world’. But none of them seemed to have known how much money there was, except for George, or how much he would settle on Ingrid.

  Eve had the house and, as Ralph had told me, she had her share. She didn’t seem openly resentful about the money George had left to Ingrid, but I noticed her treating Ingrid differently after that, wit
h a thoughtful kind of reassessment, perhaps contemplating the results of what she had set in motion by bringing her niece into the family. I sat at the table one morning with her over coffee while Ralph and Ingrid were upstairs dressing. She was subdued, not wearing the jewel-like colours that she had always favoured but a pale pink knitted top with long sleeves.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, hand resting on her cup, ‘I told Maeve the news about Ingrid’s inheritance. She offered her congratulations and said it was “well done” on Ingrid’s part.’ Eve raised her eyebrows. ‘That was going a bit far, I think. I told her so. To suggest that it’s some kind of achievement – I’m not saying she isn’t entitled – but it’s not as though she had it in mind as some kind of goal. It’s an absurd idea. And Ingrid’s obviously shocked by the whole thing. George was so eccentric. Who could have known.’

  Was she asking me for reassurance, to agree that Ingrid had found her way into George’s affections with purely innocent intentions? I believed that she had, and it seemed as though Eve really did as well. She was saying something to me, to herself, about Maeve, I realised, more than about Ingrid.

  Ralph had little enthusiasm for travel – he was strangely opposed to it, and fiercely attached to his homes, the house and the flat, and his little routines. But Ingrid was wild for it. Having managed to get out of Perth, she wanted to see the world. The trip she had planned to Venice for the semester break was still going ahead and she was now planning to extend it, to spend more time in Europe and in England.

  ‘Rome,’ she said to me, her eyes bright and focused. ‘So much is there.’

  Eve had been planning to go with her but had changed her mind. She had travelled so much while George was alive and now her energy seemed depleted. It turned out that Maeve was attending the Venice Biennale with an artist from her gallery and she offered to show Ingrid around and take her to all the parties.

  Eve came off the phone with Maeve one night about a week after the funeral. ‘She’s delighted that you’ll be there, Ingrid,’ she said, clasping her hands together. She sounded relieved. ‘I’m so pleased. She’s going to call again tomorrow morning to speak with you – she wants you to stay at her hotel and she’s trying to arrange a room for you.’ The vague mistrust of her friend that she had communicated to me a few days earlier seemed to have dissipated.

  Ralph watched these plans take shape with a kind of grudging resentment.

  ‘She’s only going for six weeks,’ I reminded him. ‘She’ll be back.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ he said. ‘And then she’ll be off again.’ He smiled wanly.

  You have me, I wanted to say, pathetically. Instead I put my arms around him but he didn’t embrace me back; I pulled away and saw his solemn face.

  ‘It’s a good thing for Ingrid,’ I said. ‘She’s obsessed with getting away. It will … expand her horizons.’ It sounded even to myself as though I were quoting from some debunked text.

  ‘I know,’ he sighed. ‘We’ll have a lovely break, together. Won’t we?’

  By the time Ingrid left for Venice the money was starting to weigh more heavily with her. The seriousness that had been there in her face the day of the will remained. She sat with me in the video store one night reading her Italy and Europe guidebooks, stacks of them. She looked worried.

  ‘There’s so much to see,’ she said, and made it sound like a cause for terrible concern. ‘There’s a lot to know. I don’t really know anything.’

  ‘You’re going to have a good time,’ I reassured her. ‘And you know lots anyway – right? Don’t you know about all those, you know, ruins from class?’

  She turned the pages of a blue-covered book. ‘There’s just such a lot there.’

  ‘You can always go back next time and see whatever you don’t make it to this time,’ I said. ‘Think of it as a fact-finding mission.’ I picked up one of her books. A ‘Shoestring’ guide. ‘You won’t need this,’ I said. ‘And won’t Maeve show you around anyway?’

  ‘She’s been going to the Biennale forever! I can’t wait to meet some of the artists.’

  Ingrid had a romantic fascination with artists; she’d shown a kind of awed respect for my aunt the few times they had met. ‘I’ve never met an actual artist,’ she’d told me after their first conversation. ‘It’s fascinating.’

  A lot of things were fascinating, and wonderful, and new to her in those first couple of months in Sydney. Thai food was amazing. The cocktail bars and art galleries of the eastern suburbs were cool and incredible. The crowded Oxford Street markets full of clothes and candles and junk were fantastic. It was a kind of willingness to be pleased and delighted that made it a lovely thing to take her somewhere new – there was always something fascinating about any place. She was self-conscious about her own enthusiasm – ‘I’m so uncool,’ she would laugh. ‘I know! OK, I’ll calm down.’ And five minutes later would be enthusing again – ‘It’s amazing! How old is this place? What is in this food? What is this drink called? Oh my god!’ After a while she adjusted to the city and stopped remarking so much on every new thing and I could see her working hard at being ‘cooler’ as she called it.

  ‘But I’m so uncool,’ I would say to her. ‘You won’t learn anything from me.’

  ‘No, Julia,’ she would protest. ‘You have no idea. I learn it all from you. Like … your steely gaze.’

  ‘My steely gaze?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That is ridiculous.’

  ‘See, that’s it, right there! Your withering stare! I love it!’ We were at a nightclub near Ralph’s flat, late at night, and she had to shout over the music. ‘OK – I’ll stop. I’m going to go dance.’

  ‘Go on.’

  I didn’t dance. It was one thing Ralph didn’t join her in either, to my surprise. He would watch her from wherever we were sitting or standing, and eye off whoever she seemed to be dancing with, but he didn’t ever interrupt.

  5.

  If I thought much about what Ingrid would be doing with herself in Venice and Rome and wherever else in Europe she was going on that trip, I imagined her seeing a dozen ruins a day, exploring every piece of the Colosseum, spending hours with the paintings in the churches in Venice. My own memories of Rome from visiting there in my ‘gap year’ were very hazy. The Colosseum had nauseated me. I couldn’t help thinking about the gladiators dying in a slick of blood, the horrors of the basement levels of the building that were now exposed to view. There had been a lot of good pasta, and good-looking men on the streets, seemingly everywhere, and scooters and little red cars. Bookshop windows filled with elegant arrangements, boxes of jumbled books on the street outside. I imagined that Ingrid’s experience would be a lot more studious and enriching than mine had been. I sometimes imagined a holiday fling for her.

  In her studies, her readings of the ancient texts and poetry she loved, she was intrigued by the idea of love and its potentially overwhelming power. The semester she studied Antigone she became obsessed with it, confused and fascinated by the story. ‘He’s already dead, her brother,’ she would say, her eyes distant. ‘So why? What is she going to prove?’ She sighed. ‘But what else could she do? What else was left to her?’ She pored over Ovid, the stories in the Metamorphoses of young women and men destroyed by their own desires, and she had a kind of awed respect for the grand passions of Edwardian romance. We read The Age of Innocence in the same class together and cried over the movie, watching it twice, once at the video shop late at night and again the next day at the Kirribilli house with popcorn made on the stove. She couldn’t stand the end – wouldn’t watch it the second time. ‘No!’ she said. ‘Why doesn’t he go in? It’s unbelievable. Why doesn’t she go down to him?’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Leave the room. I want to see it.’ She went out and banged things around in the kitchen.

  But she didn’t import this romantic view of things into her own love life. The only attachments she seemed to form were fleeting and half-hearted. She was always the one pursued, and
when she did give in to the pursuer it was with a kind of distant interest that never seemed to grow into real feeling or desire. I suppose now that I can’t make any judgements from what I could see though; and I wondered even then how she changed when the doors were closed and the lights were off with these boys she sometimes went out with (but rarely seemed to sleep with), when there was no-one else to see. And I wondered endlessly about the time she spent alone with Ralph.

  She didn’t ever seem surprised by the attention she got, the interest from men, and when she did respond there was often the sense that I’d had with her the first time we went out, that she was exploring an experience with a scientific determination rather than real, lived feeling. It was a strange counterpart to her very real enthusiasm for life in general.

  There were times here and there when I grew tired of being the face that was overlooked whenever I was out with her, and then I let myself call her narcissistic, but in fact it was strange how little it bothered me in general. I was pining after Ralph in those days and it was that competition with her that wounded me most. She won it without even trying, of course, and it wasn’t a victory she ever held over me and I couldn’t hate her for it.

  It seemed as though she probably wanted to fall in love, but hadn’t. So, when I thought about it, I wished for her a happy Italian romance with some exotic backpacker or art fan. Perhaps she would respond with more interest to men outside her familiar sphere, men from the world that she was so interested in exploring. Foreign accents were always very impressive to her; she loved hearing Maeve talk and she attended to the little differences in the words that Maeve used for familiar things. ‘Cream,’ Ingrid would say, ‘but she means milk really. Doesn’t she?’ ‘Bicycle. Motorcycle.’ If she could start falling in love with other people, I thought, instead of just appearing to entertain herself briefly with random admirers, maybe Ralph would leave off brooding after her. Not that I imagined that he would turn to me; I knew very well that she was a unique exception to his usual interests, which were men, especially ones who seemed straight, and occasionally women, but always anonymous, or so casual as to be virtually that.