‘You have to be kidding.’ I slapped his hand away. ‘And anyway, no. Fuck off. Go back out there.’
Horribly, I remembered then that it had been his knee in black jeans that I had grabbed years ago. The one who hadn’t seen Ben-Hur, the movie. What had I been thinking? The dark hallway was lit with a frame of light falling from the bathroom door, our shadows in the way.
‘OK, man.’ He shrugged. ‘Do you want some smack?’
‘Derek, no. And don’t hit up here. Go home.’
He went back to the table, and he was there, with Mark’s vodka in his hand, chatting up one of the other guests when I got back from the bathroom. I wondered how close he was to becoming a real junkie. I thought twice about his offer of drugs and decided to stick with my red wine. I thought of Ralph, and wondered what he was doing. The remembered sound of the phone ringing and ringing at his end, unanswered, wouldn’t go away. At the end of the table a man and a woman from upstairs had opened a CD case and were studying the lyrics printed on the leaflet inside. They seemed to be settling an argument. The man returned to his chair and shrugged defensively. ‘I always thought it said “glue” not “hue”, it makes more sense anyway.’
I thought of Ingrid, too, and for the first time in many months wondered what she was doing with her morning; imagined her at home in the Upper West Side place that I had never seen. I hoped she was alive. Pain hit me then and I realised with a small shock that I had been numb all day. Most of it was familiar, mundane pain – Ralph, and Ingrid, and loss. I wondered what the next day would bring, and dreaded it. I wondered if the last glass of wine had been a mistake. I looked around for another.
Mark was slicing up two round lemon tarts. ‘Can you start whipping some cream?’ he asked me, eyes on his knife.
It looked like a boring job. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’
He looked up at me. ‘Why don’t you go and sit down,’ he said, softly, and took my arm and led me over to the couch.
I sat down in a small space between two other people who shifted over to make room. Mark was back in a couple of minutes with a plate of yellow tart and a fork. It was sweet and sour just like it ought to be. Every sense of feeling had concentrated in my tongue.
‘She’s waiting to hear about her friend,’ the woman next to me said, half-whispering, to the man sitting on the armrest of the couch. He nodded, solemnly. I swallowed and found it strange to know that she was talking about me. The days ahead seemed to stretch out into the rest of the week, and next week. I’d hear from Ralph, he’d get in touch with Grey eventually, probably fight with him on the phone, and it would all have been a false alarm. Of course she was alright. They lived uptown. She didn’t ever go down there, that far downtown. What was there for her down there? What did I know about her life anyway?
‘She’s not a close friend,’ I heard myself say.
Right on cue, the phone rang. The sound was followed by a little ripple of silence that was quickly, steadily, filled by talk. By then I’d stopped attending to it, didn’t imagine it would be for me. But whoever answered it stepped over to Mark, and he came over and stood behind me and put his hand on my shoulder.
Julia,’ he said. ‘It’s Eve.’
My ears filled with a rushing sound. It must have been my own blood. Eve’s voice told me everything before I heard the details; it cut through the noise in my head enough to tell me that she’d heard, she’d heard from Grey, that there was no word, that they hadn’t heard, and that Ingrid had been there.
The next hour. The screen goes dark, fades in and out into the next morning with quick, frozen images where I see myself as though in a dream: seated, listening, with the black plastic phone to my ear; standing in the bathroom, clinging to someone (is it Derek, or the woman from next to me on the couch?) with the taste of vomit and lemon in my mouth, sickly sweet now. Lying naked in bed, eyes red and throat sore, next to Mark, who rolls off me heavily. Still in bed, this time dressed in one of his blue striped shirts. It comes clear when I open my eyes and the room is dim with the blinds pulled down, mid-morning, and the sound of dishes being rinsed and stacked comes through from the kitchen, and the smell of coffee on the stove.
Mark was there in the kitchen, grey T-shirt and jeans, bare feet. One of the upstairs neighbours from the night before was there too, both of them standing at the sink. The radio was on. I looked at Mark cautiously.
‘Is it true?’ I asked him, because it was starting to come back. I was hoping it had been a bad dream without much sense of that being right.
‘Bye, mate,’ said the neighbour, and patted Mark on the shoulder. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled to me as he passed.
I went to the bathroom and vomited again. There wasn’t much to show for it but I felt better. Back in the kitchen Mark was still washing plates.
‘OK,’ I said to him.
‘You’re still in shock.’
‘No, I’m alright now.’
‘Alright.’
He poured me a cup of coffee. I drank it and sat down at the table. The surface was clean, pitted wood, all traces of last night gone. The radio was playing music: guitars and voices.
‘Are you going to call Ralph?’ Mark asked.
Some small, fine thread broke inside me, opening a yawning space. I closed it up and sat up straight on my chair.
‘No.’
And I didn’t.
Mark didn’t mention the moving-in idea again for a while. It was a relief, although I was curious to see where he would go with it. His neighbours all met my eye with concern when they saw me now in the building or on the street nearby, even ones I was sure hadn’t been at Mark’s place that night. I had become the person they knew who knew someone. Sometimes one or another of them came into the bookshop – it was only a short walk away – and it got so that I would leave the counter and go out the back to Martin’s cramped little office to avoid them, ashamed of myself and cross. I suppose it looked like overwhelming grief. Maybe it was. It felt the same as any kind of avoidance.
Ralph didn’t call me, and I didn’t call him. The days were much the same as they had been before, except now when I thought of Ingrid I had to make a sharp turn left or right, any direction, in my mind to avoid going there. Before then it had been a more lazy kind of manoeuvre. Sometimes I didn’t turn quickly enough, and those times were sometimes very hard. Stupid little things would bring it on: someone buying a book in Latin (not many of those in the shop); catching a frame of St Elmo’s Fire on TV late at night; the sound of fireworks in the sky. The first time I heard fireworks after the towers came down, I lost my breath on the street in a kind of panic attack and stepped inside the nearest doorway. It was a nasty, expensive hotel full of men in suits after work on Friday. I drank something fast, the sounds of distant explosions in my ears, in my nose the memory of salt air on the ferry at night.
Ten days after September 11, I received a mailing from the Classics department. In conjunction with the English department, they were holding a ‘memorial gathering to celebrate the life of Ingrid Holburne-Grey’. It was a slim notice on thin paper with a date and time. I folded it in half so the words didn’t show and left it on my desk where it sat, so light it looked ready to fly away with any breeze. I had wondered about the funeral in New York, the memorial service, whatever it was people did when they were left without an actual body. Grey hadn’t sent me any word about it – I hadn’t heard from him at all, only fragments once or twice from Eve in a couple of short phone messages. This was all we were going to get.
12.
The service was scheduled for four o’clock on a Thursday. I decided that morning that I would go, and told Martin I would need to leave early.
‘Of course, of course,’ he said, blinking and nodding when I went into his office.
I lingered there at the shop after it was time to leave. The afternoon had turned warm and dry. Traffic was sparse on the street.
‘Out you go,’ Martin said in the end, emerging to take over the til
l, and opened the door for me on the way out.
The ‘celebration’ was being held in the Classics department common room. I could hear someone speaking as I walked upstairs. It was Ingrid’s honours supervisor, I saw when I reached the glass-paned door and pushed it open. He looked much older than I remembered him. There was a crowd of about thirty people, all standing, and some tables at the side with bottles of wine and trays of terrible-looking sandwiches. The ancient head of the English department sat on a chair near the front of the room, frowning darkly, a walking stick held in his hand. I tried to focus on what Ingrid’s supervisor was saying – it was difficult to see him through all the people, and his voice didn’t carry well. I’d figured out that he was talking about her honours thesis and how respected she had been by the department at Columbia when they had admitted her, when he stopped.
Ralph was standing towards the front of the group, shuffling some papers in his hand. He was wearing a corduroy jacket, I noticed with a pang, in mossy black. It had some soft, ironic-looking leather patches on the elbows. He didn’t see me until he’d stepped up to the cleared space where Ingrid’s supervisor had stood. Then, when he surveyed the audience, he looked right at me, right into my eyes. He didn’t seem surprised to see me, and barely showed any recognition. His hairline was damp with sweat and he looked as ill as I’d ever seen him. He cleared his throat and raised his chin as he began to speak in his lovely, drawling voice.
He didn’t talk for long. He thanked Classics, English, for holding the event and talked about how much Ingrid had loved both those disciplines. ‘She was a luminous presence,’ he said, ‘as you all witnessed who knew her and taught her, and all of us who knew her could not but hold high hopes for her. We could not wait to see what she would do next.’
I remembered then with a blinding vividness his father, laughing and coughing and almost starting to choke, wheezing his words out. ‘I can’t wait to see what you’ll do next, Ingrid!’ He had always said her name with a vaguely musical intonation, so that it seemed to have more syllables than it really did. It had been a week before he died – or was it longer, a month? How long had he planned his bequest, his great contribution to her desire for an interesting life? I hung my head.
When I looked up Ralph was reading from the papers in his hand, but he didn’t need them, and he folded them with one hand and continued speaking. I couldn’t understand the Latin but somehow recognised the cadence and the words. People were looking down at little folded leaflets they held in their hands, where the poem was printed with a translation.
It was Apollo, chasing Daphne, and her plea for escape. The goddess heard her and changed her into a laurel tree. Ingrid had recited that passage to us, to Ralph and me, one afternoon on the lawn near the bar. Ralph had squinted at her when she paused. The sun was in his eyes and he shaded his face with his hand. Ingrid’s eyes stayed on her book. He had taken a paperback out of his bag and leafed through it and read from it:
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow,
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph,
but for a reed.
They were lines from Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’ – I knew because I’d sat through a lecture on it the day before with Ralph beside me. Ingrid had frowned and then smiled at him in her indulgent way. I couldn’t tell what she thought. It was a chilling vision of the heartless gods chasing those poor nymphs, and I saw its cold logic of desire. The laurel of victory and the reed of the musical flute were not substitutes, after all, for the women who could not be caught. They were the ends of the chase all along, the women simply a sacrifice for that aim.
Whether Ralph was thinking of Marvell now or not, it seemed a strange choice even though Ingrid had loved Ovid. Daphne cried out in fear and despair, and felt herself turning into something else. It seemed a long time since I’d heard Ralph’s voice. I closed my eyes for a second and was aware of how much I loved it and also how irritating it had sometimes been. Another compressed moment of mourning. I opened my eyes. His voice was very steady but his hand shook. He finished, and the previous speaker stepped back up briefly and asked everyone to stay and talk and have a drink and make a toast to Ingrid, our departed and cherished friend.
I moved as quickly as I could to the table of food and drink.
There were no photographs of her on display, thankfully. One of my fears in coming was that someone would arrange a slide show of pictures. Bach played softly on the stereo system. Ralph would have arranged it, made a CD mix especially for the occasion. The walls were unplastered old brick, a mix of rust and blood with seams of white. There was no air-conditioning in the rooms. Hanging from large exposed ceiling beams, two fans churned the air around. My black crepe dress clung to my back.
Ed stood a few feet away, a fierce look of grief in his eyes. His rower’s body was still there but fading, and he was dressed in a severe pinstriped suit. He was working in banking. I wasn’t even sure if I knew that for a fact or had made it up. He looked as though he hadn’t slept well for a long time. Eve’s profile appeared across the room, deep in conversation with a grey-haired academic. I looked again and she was gone.
A man in a white shirt addressed me. ‘Excuse me. Are you Julia Alpers?’
‘Yes.’
He had hair that had been red and now was mostly grey, and pale eyelashes. ‘I’m Roger White. An old teacher – old friend – of Ingrid’s.’ He was shaking my hand, taking a long time about it. ‘It’s very good to meet you. I did hear a lot about you over the years.’
His smile was very sad. I remembered that he was Ingrid’s high-school Latin and French teacher, the one who had mentored her and overseen her entrance to university. She had talked about him like a saviour. ‘In this … this wilderness, this high school,’ – she said the words ‘high school’ as though they stood for a special circle of hell – ‘he was just. this beacon. Of intelligence, learning, that we weren’t all there just to get prepared for our jobs as finance executives and business managers and doctors or doctors’ wives. That there was something more to it.’ She had been close to him, from what she said, and I had wondered sometimes if she had been in love with him, or he with her. Meeting him now I couldn’t quite see it, but I could picture them together, going over translations in the library after class, making grand plans for her academic success.
I wasn’t sure what to say. ‘I heard a lot about you too.’
‘It’s such a tragedy – I was so happy to hear that she was going to Columbia, was pursuing those dreams. And now …’ He sighed. ‘She was such a bright girl. But you know that.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it’s good to finally meet you.’
He drifted away. He was the only representative there of her life before Sydney, her life in Perth. Before Ralph, before me, before any of it. Other people talked to me. No-one else touched me or shook my hand. Back to the table with the wine on it – my shoulders collided with Ralph’s.
‘Oh, hello,’ I said.
‘Hello.’
I remembered his voice on the phone that day: ‘I know, Julia.’
‘Eve called me,’ I said.
‘I know.’
He refilled my glass and his own. I drank quickly before he could propose a toast, then realised that it would be unlikely in these circumstances. It was a habit he used to have, of proposing a toast with every drink, random, exuberant, silly ideas. Drinking to whoever it was holding the party we were at, or the person who had just won the game of Trivial Pursuit, or the most obscure or depressing of the poets or film-makers we had studied in class that week. ‘To good old George Meredith. And modern love!’
‘I asked her to call you,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t up to it.’
‘She said that.’
We moved away from the table and back into the thinning crowd.
‘I wasn’t up to much of anything for a while there.’ He gave a thin smile and wouldn’t look at me
. ‘It’s bizarre to be back here, isn’t it?’ he asked.
I looked around. I had been in the room maybe twice before, and maybe once with him and Ingrid. A public lecture, a retirement event for one of our professors.
‘On campus, I mean. In the old building. The old place.’
‘Yes. I suppose so.’
‘The sandwiches are terrible. Not surprising, I suppose.’
‘My wine is good though.’ That was surprising.
‘Oh, that.’ He glanced away. ‘I brought that,’ he confessed. ‘I couldn’t bear to drink the stuff they would normally serve here at something like this. Sandwiches are one thing, but …’ He took a sip. ‘I raided the old Kirribilli cellars for a few bottles of something.’
‘That’s good of you.’
‘Yes, quite.’
There was a tiny glint of mischief and self-mockery in his voice – so small, a little speck, under the thick overlay of grief and desperation. He had taken off his jacket and his shirt looked loose on him; it was coming untucked at the back. He pushed his hand down into his pocket. I wanted to say ‘I love you’ as much as I ever had. It was alarming. I wanted to take his hand. I wanted to leave.
Ed came up to us. He looked hard at me, studying my face. ‘Julia,’ he said. ‘It’s been a while.’
He seemed years older than either Ralph or myself. His tie was too wide for the suit he was wearing.
He clapped Ralph on the back. ‘Got to go. Back to the office.’ His face was sombre and harsh. The two of them clasped hands for a moment and he was gone.
Everyone else was an academic or someone who had been a student with us. I recognised some faces from the lecture hall, classroom, bar. Somewhere I knew that the thing to do was to talk to those people and reminisce – wasn’t that what these things were for? The prospect was unbearable. I remembered why I had thought of not coming.
Ralph’s breath was hot and low against my cheek. ‘Let’s get out of here – can we – let’s go for a drink.’
The Legacy Page 16
