The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘With Fleur, you know,’ she said, gently gripping her sushi with chopsticks. ‘It might not have been appropriate with her.’ We nodded. Fleur was still just a teenager. I imagined weirdly adolescent scenes of Ingrid going over to his place while Fleur was at school or with her friends, making sure that by the time she came home they were dressed and presentable, or gone, as though the roles were all reversed.

  Ingrid’s face glowed and I remembered the reverential tones she’d used when she talked about Grey on the phone that time from Florence, and when she arrived back in Sydney after that trip.

  ‘I’m learning so much,’ she told us now.

  ‘You make it sound as though you’re here for a study trip,’ I said. ‘Are you having fun?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said smugly, and smiled and sipped at her drink. ‘It’s all wonderful.’

  Ralph was quiet, and exuded a possessive, careful attitude towards her that I recognised from the first weeks after he’d met her: handing her the menu, taking it from her to hand to the waiter, watching her glass to see when it emptied, draping his arm briefly over the back of her chair. She seemed as careless of it as she had always been.

  Grey arrived when we were halfway through eating. Ingrid’s face lit up, and Ralph looked at her and then at Grey, who was approaching from behind me, and back to Ingrid. He made as if to stand up and Grey motioned him down. ‘No, no, don’t get up.’

  He kissed Ingrid quickly on the cheek and on the mouth, his hand on her shoulder, and then sat down next to me.

  ‘I’m sorry to be running so late,’ he said. ‘I’d glad to see you’ve eaten, you’re not starving.’ A waiter appeared with a menu and he looked at it briefly then ordered, a complicated series of instructions.

  He turned to me and shook my hand. ‘It’s good to meet you.’ His smile was very charming. It was then that his name became really fixed for me – I could never think of him after that as Gil, as Ingrid called him, but only as Grey, as Maeve always referred to him, the colour I always saw him wearing and the colour of his serious eyes. He had fine-boned hands and the gentleness of his handshake surprised me.

  He reached across and shook Ralph’s hand. ‘And Ralph. What a pleasure.’ Ralph murmured a reply. ‘What are you drinking? Let’s have some wine.’ He glanced at the wine list and ordered something as another waiter passed by.

  Ralph looked on the verge of ordering a second martini but didn’t. I wished for another one myself.

  Ralph’s little proprietary gestures towards Ingrid stopped. He met my eye only once for the rest of the evening and showed a mix of feelings – fear? Doubt? It was hard to tell.

  Grey asked the appropriate questions about our flight and our hotel. ‘How is it these days?’ he asked, as though he were making enquiries about a mutual friend. I wasn’t sure how to answer – to me it was an alien palace, another world of marble and gold edges from the New York places I had known in my time here before.

  ‘I love it,’ Ralph said. ‘Great memories, you know.’

  He had told me about staying at the hotel with his mother the one time he had been to the city before, when he was ten years old. Tea in the great dining room was a magical experience then, and he would look out onto the park for hours from their room, watching people making their way along the winding paths while his mother talked endlessly on the phone.

  Grey had done some consulting work there, it turned out – ‘Helping them find some actual art to put on the walls.’ Whatever was hanging in our room was forgettable. When we arrived back there later I looked critically at the prints: sepia-toned images of flowers about to bud, gold frames against the thickly striped wallpaper.

  I asked him whether Fleur was coming. ‘I’ve heard so much about her.’

  ‘She’s out with some friends,’ he said. ‘Seeing some movie or other.’ He smiled, raising his eyebrows in mock bewilderment. ‘Something at the Antonioni retrospective downtown. Blowup?’

  ‘I’m looking forward to seeing the show.’

  ‘Excellent. Ingrid, you’re going with them, yes? Later in the week?’

  She nodded.

  Grey seemed to know my aunt’s work and asked me about her, and asked after Keith.

  ‘We have a lot to thank Keith for,’ he said, and met Ingrid’s eyes. They shared a look, Ingrid’s eyes wide and blue and in love.

  There was an intimacy between them that it was more usual to see in couples who had been together for a longer time. It made Ingrid seem older, or brought out something more mature in her, as though she were doing her best to grow up for him. She was wearing a black dress that wrapped around and tied at the side, with a low V-neck and sleeves that came halfway down her arms like wings. It looked like angora. Her skin was golden against it, her hair dark gold as it fell in ropes over her shoulder.

  ‘Do you need a cab?’ Grey asked when we left and were standing on the pavement outside. A sharp wind had come up and the temperature had dropped.

  I looked at Ralph. He said, ‘Thanks, no, we’re going to walk around a bit. Find somewhere to get a drink.’

  Ingrid looked at him, hesitating. I wanted to ask her to come with us. I was about to, when Grey stepped out past me and hailed a cab. He put his hand on Ingrid’s back and reached out the other to shake Ralph’s hand – ‘Again, a pleasure. See you again soon.’ – and gave me a wave, a kind of salute.

  Ingrid raised her hand, encased now in a fine, black, leather glove, and smiled at me, then grabbed my hand and embraced me quickly. ‘See you soon. I’m so glad you’re here.’

  Grey shepherded her into the car. It waited for a few seconds before pulling out into the traffic. I watched them through the window – her hand reaching out to clasp his across the back seat, and then, swiftly, shockingly fast, the shape of him leaning across to kiss her, covering her body with his, hands disappearing into her hair and inside the red coat. I thought of that delicate hand of his, resting on her back, and saw the tension in it now, the desire to get her away, the desire. The car pulled out.

  Ralph stood with his hands deep in the pockets of his dark brown overcoat, a long brown scarf knotted around his throat. He shivered.

  ‘I’m freezing,’ I said.

  He gave a little smile with the corners of his mouth downturned.

  ‘We’re not really walking, are we?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘of course not. Let’s go and order something from room service. My sashimi tasted like nothing.’

  We ordered hamburgers and ate in the big, dreamy living room back at the hotel with just one lamp for light. Ralph smoked and barely touched his food. The jet lag had killed my appetite and the food sat there mostly uneaten. We talked about Grey and Ingrid, trying to guess how old he was. Ralph said forty-five. He looked more like late thirties to me.

  ‘Why isn’t he involved with someone already?’ Ralph kept asking. ‘New York must be full of single women.’

  He wasn’t recently divorced; Ralph had found this out from Eve. Fleur’s mother had died years before and he hadn’t remarried. And Eve was sure that he hadn’t been involved with Maeve, although she couldn’t understand why. At that moment Maeve was carrying on some long, mysterious affair with an Italian tycoon who was still married but had been separated from his wife for at least two decades. ‘It suits them all,’ Eve would shrug.

  According to Eve – according to Maeve – Grey was very dedicated to his daughter and to looking after her career. I asked Eve about it one day after lunch, while Ralph sat by looking morose, as though he’d heard it all before. It was a week after Ingrid had left for New York, a warm afternoon with the curtains all closed against the sun and the big French doors open onto the garden. Fleur’s success was largely Grey’s doing, his and Maeve’s, Eve told me. He and Fleur had been living outside the city after his wife’s death, in a small town on the Hudson filled with artists and antiques dealers. Fleur’s mother had died from cancer, Eve thought, a swift and shocking kind of death, when Fleur was just a baby. Maeve was run
ning a café with a gallery space with two other business partners in a building filled with artists’ studio spaces. She and Grey struck up a friendship, and she was over at his house one day when she saw Fleur painting in the courtyard outside, the story went. Fleur painted for hours every day, outside on the flagstones of the yard in the summer and in a studio room inside when it was cold – big, colourful works on paper.

  Grey had started buying better-quality paper for her by the time Maeve saw the paintings, but it was still basically those big sheets of construction paper that all kids paint on – they were having a hell of a time conserving those very early works now, Eve said – and Maeve knew when she saw them that she was seeing something special, something unusual. ‘She saw that this girl had a kind of artistic vision that was more than what you would expect to find in a kid’s finger painting. She had a sense of design, composition,’ Eve said. ‘Even then she was refining visual concepts, building on themes, expressing something – all with that kind of complete freedom from conventional form – all abstract, pure shape, pure colour, line …’ She stopped. ‘They are very impressive pieces,’ she said. ‘Even those very early ones. I’ve seen them, at Maeve’s gallery. You can see what she saw in them. But you can also see that it took Maeve’s eye – she’s so clever like that – to see that in them, to see what their real value and potential was.’

  Maeve convinced Grey to show a few of Fleur’s paintings at the café, and the response from viewers was extraordinary. ‘Everyone wanted to know who this artist was – was it someone from town, was she showing someone from the city,’ Eve said. At first they hadn’t put up the pieces for sale, and then offers started coming in. There was a write-up in the local paper, and then a critic from the New York Times was there one day and saw the show, and that’s when it really all exploded. A big collector from the area saw the paintings and wanted to buy them.

  ‘For a while they weren’t sure what to do,’ Eve explained. ‘Fleur was – four, five? I can’t remember. I think she was a brilliant child, gifted artistically, obviously, but smart as well. They talked with her about it. It wasn’t like they were taking her finger paintings away and seeing what they could get for them. She had some understanding of the process that was happening – she felt that if people liked looking at her paintings then they should be able to have them to look at. She could always paint more was how she looked at it. And she was so prolific – it’s unbelievable, the consistency and quality and just the sheer amount of the art she produced in those years.’

  The critic from the Times persuaded Grey to consider a larger show at a New York gallery. By then they had accepted offers from several collectors of well over ten thousand dollars each for some of Fleur’s paintings – three of the works based around a red triangle that would become her most famous image.

  ‘There’s been some really nasty speculation about what happened to that money,’ Eve said. ‘But it went into a trust fund. It was a college fund. It makes sense when you think about it. You want to provide for your children however you can – you can’t imagine what it costs to send a child to school over there – but there were a lot of people after that first New York show who said that Fleur was being exploited. I’ve met her,’ – she raised her eyebrows at me – ‘once, at Maeve’s, and I don’t believe for a second that that child was letting anyone push her around, even in kindergarten.’

  Maeve went into partnership with the New York gallery, one of the first to make a name for itself over on the Chelsea side, and moved to the city. She became a kind of surrogate mother to Fleur, Eve told us – she never had children of her own – and was involved in decisions not only about Fleur’s career as an artist but also about her life, her schools, her activities. Grey kept the house on the Hudson but bought an apartment in Manhattan as well, and Fleur started school there. By the time of her next show, when she was almost seven, she was an art-world sensation. Fleur stayed with the gallery. Maeve took it over, with Grey as a kind of silent partner or consultant as he built his own art-dealing enterprise.

  ‘So, together they engineered her career,’ Ralph said drily. ‘A real team effort.’

  ‘Well, she lasted the distance,’ Eve said. ‘She’s still painting.’

  Ralph looked at me. ‘She’s maintained a reputation, that’s true. So has Maeve. And Grey – he made quite a career for himself out of it all as well.’

  Eve watched him, her eyes shrewd.

  ‘But you like him, don’t you, Eve?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t say I know him all that well,’ she said. ‘But – yes – he’s a brilliant man. And has amazingly good taste.’

  Realising that this was the highest form of praise, Ralph seemed to give up. ‘Yes, he does,’ he said, ‘obviously.’ He set his glass down firmly on the table.

  We saw Fleur’s show at the Whitney with Ingrid a couple of days after the Japanese dinner. It was cold on the street outside the big concrete building but Ralph insisted on waiting for her out there. I went inside to look at the books on display in the foyer. They came in together ten minutes later, Ingrid in her red coat and hat and a long black skirt, pulling her gloves off her fingers one by one. She looked taller than ever, although her boots this time were almost flat. Her cheek was cold when she pressed her face against mine and I caught the faint scent of Fracas against the metallic smell of the winter air and Ingrid’s usual smell that always made me think of tea and crushed grass. I wondered how much time she was spending at Maeve’s.

  We caught the lift up to the second floor where the show was hanging. The early finger paintings were there, framed behind glass, painted on long rolls of paper that stretched out, some of them for metres. The later paintings were on canvas, some in oils but mostly acrylic, large square canvases in strokes of bold colour. Although my aunt painted abstracts and I liked her work, I didn’t like much other abstract art or know much about it. There seemed to be a lot of feeling in these square, spare images – handprints and fingermarks combined with heavy brushstrokes. In some the outline of letters, numbers, seemed to appear and then blur into something else.

  ‘They seem. angry,’ I said to Ingrid, when she had finished talking in front of one of them. I hadn’t been listening. But I looked at them again, and at the next series on the other wall, all purple lines drifting off into a white world, and I wasn’t so sure. ‘Some of them,’ I said.

  Ralph stared at the floor.

  ‘She’s the sweetest girl,’ Ingrid said, turning around to look back at the wall next to us, and smiled a secret-looking smile.

  Ingrid wanted to walk around the park after that – ‘It’s enormous. Julia, I had no idea how big it was. And so beautiful, even in the winter. I’d love to see it with snow.’

  She left with Ralph. Steam rose from manholes in the street, cloudy towers that dissipated as they rose and smelled faintly of rot, like the subway.

  We met up again that night at Maeve’s for dinner. She lived in a loft space over on the far West Side, close to the Meatpacking district with its blocks of butchers’ warehouses butting up against designer shops and expensive brunch restaurants. Ralph and I walked into one huge room containing kitchen, living and dining spaces, big and white with polished concrete floors and windows that looked south. A long black table ran along one wall, and that was the first thing I saw. We had gone shopping together the day before – I had insisted on buying things for myself, although he wanted to pay for everything – and when we got back to the hotel he’d presented me with a bag I had decided against as being too expensive. I held it now, the softest leather with a trim along the edge of silver tweed, and wore the dress I had bought for myself: floating black silk with ruching on the front like a smock.

  Maeve was wearing that duck’s neck greenish black that I remembered from the first time we met. Tiny sequins glittered around her sleeves. Ingrid was already there, seated in a black armchair. Grey stood at her side, one arm resting on the back of the chair, looking as though they were posed for a por
trait. She tilted her head up to look at him, showing her finely shaped profile. She stayed there when we came in, and it was Grey who came forward and shook Ralph’s hand. Another couple was there as well, an artist and his wife. Fleur was supposed to be coming but she hadn’t arrived yet.

  For some reason the jet lag had hit me hard that day and all I could think about was getting through to the end of the night and lying down to sleep, knowing that when I did I would stay awake until three, listening to the faint hiss of the heating pipes.

  The kitchen looked as though it was used only occasionally. Copper pans hung, gleaming, from a metal rack suspended over the stove. The refrigerator was shiny and black and I caught sight of a photograph stuck to the side of it with a magnet. It showed Maeve standing with a young girl.

  They were in a large room filled with people, dimly visible in the background, while the faces of Maeve and the girl were brightly lit by the flash. It looked like a recent photo of Maeve. Her hair was pulled back, and her lips shone with gloss. The girl had an elfin face, hair pushed back behind her ears, and smiled warily at the photographer, an almost ironic expression. The pose suggested a photograph of a mother and daughter, but there was very little resemblance between the faces. The girl’s face was familiar, but it was the contours of Grey’s features that I saw there.

  Maeve stood next to me, holding my coat, and followed my eyes. ‘That’s Fleur,’ she said, as though explaining something obvious to a slow-witted person.

  It soon became clear that Grey was courting the artist in some way. He had just moved to the city not that long before – he was English, and his wife German, or Swedish, a name I forgot as soon as she said it. He was showing at Maeve’s gallery and was looking for a new dealer. I followed their conversation loosely.

  Ingrid had a kind of languid air that I assumed came from long nights of passion, thinking of the kiss I had seen through the cab window. She seemed tired and I saw her covering yawns with the back of her hand. Grey looked at his watch and went to another room to use the phone. He came back looking dissatisfied. When the phone rang a few minutes later he shot Maeve a quick look and she almost hurried to answer it. She was gone for a couple of minutes – her voice came through, muffled, from the other room. It sounded like an argument; her contributions were alternately firm and cajoling. She came back in and nodded to Grey, and he went to the phone and was gone a while. He closed the door and talked quietly so we didn’t hear any of the conversation.