The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘There’s so much to see here in Paris. I thought we could start with the Louvre today?’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘That sounds good.’

  Ingrid’s schedule was gruelling. I went with her for the first three days – the Louvre for the first two, Notre Dame and other sights in the Ile de la Cité the next – and by the fourth day was exhausted. It wasn’t the sheer number of places she wanted to see; it was that she regarded her sightseeing as a serious educational experience and went about it with a kind of intensity that depressed me, despite her real pleasure in what she saw. Ralph came with us to the Louvre and stayed only long enough to see the Mona Lisa. We made our way together through the crowd to look at the painting behind its thick glass shield but after that he disappeared. He was back at the hotel that afternoon when I came back, reading The Little Prince, in English, with his feet up on the coffee table. He peered at me over his glasses.

  ‘Don’t let her drag you around the whole time to all these museums,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I want to see them too,’ I said, faintly.

  He smirked at me. ‘It’s all Grey’s doing. This European tour he’s got planned out for her.’

  I frowned. ‘She was like this about Rome too.’

  ‘Well, he’s really brought it out in her.’

  ‘Is she proving something to him, do you think?’

  He closed his book. ‘He’s given her a bunch of places to tick off her list here before they go on their educational tour of London. There’s restaurants too. That should be worth something at least. I’d like to eat at that one where Sartre used to always hang out.’ His finger was still marking his place. ‘Let’s go there tonight.’

  I had seen the notes in the eating sections of Ingrid’s guidebooks. ‘Actually I think she had somewhere else in mind.’

  ‘Alright.’ He settled into his chair and opened the book again. ‘I’ll call her in a little while.’

  In Ralph’s room, visible through the half-closed door, a bottle of whisky stood on the nightstand, half-empty. He was holding a glass of it as well. He didn’t seem drunk. That was more worrying in a way, and made me wonder if he was drinking more than I realised on a regular basis.

  He called Ingrid from the old-fashioned phone with its heavy, black handpiece. I wanted to take it home with me but couldn’t quite see how it was going to work. In my bag was a cord from our room at the Plaza, a twisted golden rope with a tassel at either end that was used to tie the curtains back. That had been an easy one. He leaned back, standing against the wall, smiling and nodding and laughing a quiet laugh. He was wearing new shoes that he had bought in New York, brown leather brogues, and he looked down at them, bringing his feet together.

  ‘Alright. See you shortly.’

  He hung up and sat back down.

  Things were easier between the three of us there in Paris than they had been in New York. It might have been a holiday that we had planned all together from the start. It was easier to forget that Grey was part of the picture, or to imagine that he wasn’t, or to just leave him out of the conversation. I knew Ingrid talked to him every night or so but she didn’t talk about him much. His name wasn’t taboo as it had been in New York though; she dropped the occasional reference to a wine he particularly liked when we were eating out and choosing something to drink, or a highly regarded artwork that he personally despised and that we had seen at a museum that day. Ralph tended to roll his eyes a little at these statements about Grey’s good taste.

  I called Ingrid on the fourth morning to say I didn’t want to go out to Versailles. She was happy to go alone. I imagined her taking careful notes on the train on the way back.

  Ralph came out of his room as we said goodbye. ‘So what do you want to do today?’ I asked him. He smiled and rubbed his head, creating even more of a mess on the side where his hair was untidy from sleep. ‘Pas de Versailles?’

  ‘Non.’ I had made virtually no effort to learn any French, relying on Ralph’s fluency with the language and Ingrid’s passable knowledge.

  He said something else incomprehensible in French and smiled. The sun shone weakly outside through a thin layer of cloud.

  He sat down in one of the armchairs and stretched his arms above his head. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s go to that place on the corner down the street for coffee and something to eat. I’m trying to figure out how to ask for the number of the guy who makes the coffee.’

  ‘Ooh la la.’

  ‘That’s right!’ He laughed. ‘One hopes.’

  The coffee guy remained aloof and inscrutable, his back turned to us the whole time we were there, dedicated to the espresso machine. After dawdling for a long time over our coffee and croissants – and croque monsieur, croque madame, more coffee – Ralph left the hotel number on the back of the bill and we went on the Métro to look for the house Voltaire had lived in. We came up from the subway to find the day changed, the sky low with clouds and puddles already on the ground from light rain. We walked down a steep hill past short, narrow streets, around corners, up another hill.

  ‘Shit,’ said Ralph. ‘I thought it was around here.’

  ‘You don’t know where it is?’

  He shrugged. ‘I didn’t bring the guidebook. I thought I’d remember from reading it this morning …’ He felt through his pockets and pulled out his copy of The Little Prince. ‘But we have Saint-Exupéry!’

  ‘Well, are we in the right area? Won’t it have a plaque? Won’t there be signs?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  We kept walking. It became clear that we had come out of the Metro at the wrong station and probably on the wrong line. We came to a short cobbled laneway running off to our right; Ralph squinted down it. ‘I think I see a plaque down there on a house.’ We walked towards it. The house was covered in yellow stucco and I couldn’t tell how old it was. The cobblestones on the street looked ancient but the concrete under our feet on the narrow path was relatively new, covered in dog shit and gum stains. One sodden woollen glove lay in the wet gutter. Ralph read the plaque and told me that Henry Miller had lived there. We looked at the house. There was no sign of whoever lived there now. I pictured Henry Miller sitting at a table in a badly lit room, pen in hand, some woman or other sitting on his lap, glass in his other hand.

  ‘I don’t think I even like Henry Miller,’ Ralph said.

  ‘Me neither.’

  The alley was a dead end. We walked back the way we had come and looked for somewhere to escape the drizzling rain.

  When we got back to the hotel it was dark. We opened the door to find Ingrid in our room, sitting with her feet up on the sofa reading a novel. She put it down when we entered. I wondered how she had found her way inside. She was happy to see us.

  ‘We went to Henry Miller’s house,’ Ralph said.

  She tilted her head to the side a little.

  ‘Is he a friend …?’

  ‘No, no, a writer. A writer. And not Voltaire’s house …’

  ‘Oh, Voltaire’s house! I would love to see that. Wait – did you go there – could we go tomorrow, after the d’Orsay – where were you, again?’

  Ralph and Ingrid talked on, making plans. Ralph had admired the wineglasses at the bar we stopped at after Henry Miller’s house, and I’d slid one into my bag before we left. When we entered our room I had reached for it, to show him, and my hand was still in there, inside the bag, fingers around the glass with its dark green, slippery stem, as I listened.

  9.

  Back in Sydney the three of us seemed to come apart so quickly, from those evenings in the hotel to the hot, long days of January and February where we hardly saw each other all together. Our schedules were all different that semester. The one exception was a film class I was taking with Ralph, which he rarely attended. The months passed slowly. Ingrid and Ralph came to visit on separate nights at the video store.

  Ingrid drove me around in her BMW every now and again, long drives where she explored the city and the Satur
day markets in every neighbourhood. She was in her honours year. I was taking longer, going part-time so I could work more hours at the bookstore, a job I had come to enjoy more than the hours I spent studying. On the drives she would tell me about her coursework and her thesis, on British appropriations of Roman divinities. I half-listened.

  During the break she went back overseas to see Grey and came back engaged. She told me about it over at Kirribilli the weekend after she returned to Sydney. It was a cold July winter, rivers of rain streaming down the streets. Ralph was not around.

  She wore an enormous diamond on her finger, emerald-cut in a long oblong shape. White-gold claws on each side held the stone in place. She explained to me that it had been Grey’s mother’s ring. It wasn’t clear whether it had also belonged to his first wife. Marrying was the only way to make it possible for her to move there, to New York, and live with him, she explained, which was what she wanted more than anything. We were sitting on her bed like we had those months ago, with tea. She was wearing a mustard-coloured cardigan with sleeves too long for her. It should have given her a childish look but instead, as she folded the cuffs and pushed them up to her elbows, she looked older.

  ‘And, it’s what we both want,’ she said. ‘Well, you know,’ – emphasising you – ‘I love him.’ She still had that look she had worn in New York when she and Grey were together: unmistakably in love, and a proud, determined set to her face.

  I held her fingers – short fingers, hands squarish but pretty – and looked at the ring. The stone was so large it looked as though it would weigh down her hand. Little rainbows glinted from its facets like light from a crystal chandelier.

  ‘He’s so much older than you,’ I said after I’d congratulated her. My feelings towards Grey had hardened over the months. At first I’d wanted to think well of him but that hadn’t lasted. The memory of his shared look with Maeve was too strong. I never spoke to Ralph about the look. He hated Grey enough already, just as he had from the beginning.

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t mind that I’m so young,’ she said. And it was clear that from her perspective he was the one bringing everything to the marriage that was really valuable: wisdom, experience, knowledge.

  ‘Is Ralph coming?’ I asked as we went downstairs.

  ‘Isn’t he?’ She half-turned back to look at me. ‘I thought you would know.’

  We ate without him, Eve at the head of the table, and he showed up as I was finishing my coffee and getting ready to go. Ingrid stood there in the doorway into the living room, ready to receive him.

  ‘Stay, won’t you?’ he said.

  It was one of the last times that we were all together in one place. I left.

  My aunt was making dinner for me that night. The rain drummed softly on the tin roof at her house and the kitchen was filled with the smell of tomatoes roasting in the oven. Keith was there, drinking wine with her in her studio. I told them the news of Ingrid’s engagement.

  ‘She’s so young to be getting married,’ Jenny said. ‘But they’re very happy together, aren’t they?’

  Keith looked at the floor.

  ‘You introduced them, Keith, didn’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes. In Venice. Of course. Well, that’s wonderful news.’

  ‘They should invite you to the wedding,’ Jenny said to Keith.

  He glanced at me. His intelligent eyes looked guilty now, and serious, and for a second it seemed as though he was about to apologise for something. Then he smiled, and let my aunt tease him about being a matchmaker. They joked about finding collector husbands for all her artist friends. You don’t like him either, I thought.

  The time with Ralph and then with Ingrid seems so short when I look back on it now – the time when things were good, just beginning, the dynamic I seemed to spend forever trying to recapture and recreate afterwards. It was short in terms of the actual days, weeks and months involved. There weren’t many, compared with how many there have been since then. But those months were so full of what felt like then, and looks like now, an almost perfect kind of intimacy and intensity that makes that time extend outwards artificially in the track of memory: technicolour, oversaturated with detail, compared with the dimmer pasts that surround it.

  It was all very ordinary in a way, apart from our luxurious weeks in New York and Paris: in Sydney we went to class together and separately, and read our books and talked about them. There was some lounging around on the green lawn out the front of the sandstone quad and sitting under the shade of the jacaranda tree – a few of those conventional scenes of university romance – but it was mostly drinking together at the bar, finding each other at messy parties, recovering afterwards in late mornings, talking late at night, at home, at the video store, on the phone. Eve and George ignored each other frostily, but they welcomed me into the house, and compared with my own unpredictable, fractured childhood family experience it was a haven of stable, caring relationships. I loved the sense of discontinuity between the frantic, late-night urban world we moved through – winding inner-city streets strewn with garbage and seedy interiors and neon light – and the high-class opulence of Ralph’s house at Kirribilli, the lamplight and soft carpet and good wine, the aristocratic kind of wealth of the North Shore. So many Sundays we wound up there for lunch, crystal glasses laid out for us, so hungover or strung out after all night up on beer and cocktails and badly cut drugs, feet sore from staggering down city blocks and narrow staircases, and I would sink into the big leather sofa in their living room as though it were a hot bath, listening to Ralph’s father quoting Macbeth or Churchill and tuning the radio to the classical station.

  And Ralph was my key between these places: he knew the dealers who sold the badly cut and well-cut drugs in tiny plastic bags, he knew the places open latest, down tiny laneways, where you could still get a drink after hours. He led me to the beautiful house across the harbour, and took me out to the theatre at the Opera House on the family season ticket when his mother couldn’t make it, and knew the ferry as a way of getting around the city better than the rail line. Half the time at Kirribilli I expected him to disappear upstairs in his old jeans and corduroy jacket and reappear dressed for dinner in a tuxedo suit, descending the stairs like a figure from a 1930s film, completing the transition from low to high, depraved to refined.

  Doing anything from the depraved range of our behaviour in that house seemed to make it at once more sordid and more sophisticated, full of audacious, gritty glamour: cocaine cut with a London postcard on a large, heavy book of Monet’s landscapes in the upstairs bathroom, all gold taps and black tiles, while his mother set the table with all their silver; sneaking a bottle of good merlot into the garden and sitting out there smoking cigarettes and marijuana and drinking the wine from translucent china teacups. If we could have filled out the picture with covert, half-clothed sex in the black-tiled bathroom I think my happiness would have been complete, but it never came to that. Quite a few times I thought it would – his trembling hand against mine, closing the door behind us; other moments of unbearable proximity and almost-contact.

  I suppose that feeling of remembered intensity is made keener by that sense of unrequited longing that suffused everything in those first months with Ralph, despairinducing at first, and then fading to a background hum. He annoyed me, I adored him, I teased him, we had petty arguments and ones that seemed big but were really abstract and absurd, about whether George Eliot was better than T. S. Eliot, and were old movies better than ones now. We just seemed to love each other instantly, though evidently not in the same way. It usually took me longer to like someone, although he made friendships quickly and with ease. And then when Ingrid came along he loved her instantly, and I liked her too after my initial mistrust. That affection was fraught with ambivalence but there was a kind of harmony between us that still seems musical and beautiful when I remember it, even when I can see the notes of discord that made it often shot through with sadness and envy. A little operetta.

  Those w
eeks and months weren’t long but when it all fell apart I held a commitment to them and a flagging belief that something of the friendship between all of us could be resurrected. My faint struggle to achieve this lasted much longer in the end than that first happy time ever had. Right towards the end of the process, in the weeks before Ingrid left Sydney at the end of the year to marry Grey, I began to calculate it in those terms, and the act of calculation itself signalled that it was really finished.

  I was living at my aunt’s by then – I moved there just before Ingrid left. The lease came up on the Newtown house and my housemate, Leah, was leaving to move into a flat in Petersham with her boyfriend. Jenny offered one night when we went to see a film together.

  ‘You don’t talk about Ralph much anymore,’ she said when we were waiting to buy our popcorn and soft drinks.

  She had always liked Ralph, but had told me a couple of times that she was concerned about the extent of my feelings for him. They were awkward conversations that never failed to make me feel like a walking cliché: woman in love with gay best friend. ‘I see other people,’ I told her in response at those times, defensively.

  ‘I’m not going to set you up on a blind date,’ she would say, ‘although I’d love to. But if you could start seeing people that you actually liked it would make me a lot happier.’

  When Ingrid was still around those conversations were even sharper. ‘You’re a little in love with her too,’ she said once, shocking me, when things were just starting to go onto the rocks.

  ‘I’m not,’ I had said, overcome by surprise that this would be her criticism of Ingrid; I’d expected her to say something else, that my friendship with Ingrid existed just to bring me closer to Ralph. Both possibilities, seemingly impossible to reconcile, made me so uncomfortable that I supposed there must be some truth in them.

  The machine went on pouring popcorn and a hand reached in to scoop some up into a paper bucket. Jenny didn’t sound as happy to hear less about Ralph as I thought she would be. I changed the subject by telling her about the end of the lease.