The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  I shrugged.

  My drink arrived, a squat tumbler filled with clear liquid and shattered blueberries. I asked her what it was and she said, ‘Absinthe,’ and laughed at the face I made. ‘They don’t make it so poisonous these days. Don’t worry. Let’s sit.’

  We moved to a black vinyl booth under a panel of leadlight glass. The place was so shut off from the outside that it seemed as though no sunlight would ever make it into these corners during the day.

  We went through questions and answers about how long I’d been in New York, whether it was my first time here.

  ‘I lived here for a few months,’ I explained. ‘A few years ago.’

  She nodded. ‘Where have you been since then?’

  ‘Sydney.’

  Trinh pulled off her jacket. The vinyl seats squeaked as she moved. Her arms were traced all over with dark and intricate designs. I tried not to stare.

  ‘So Jones told you to talk to me.’

  ‘Yes, I met with him very briefly today.’

  ‘Did he have anything to tell you?’

  ‘No, not really. We were … interrupted before we really got talking.’

  ‘Ah, yes. He is busy with the students.’ She smiled. ‘You might find it interesting to talk to him. I don’t know. He was devastated when she disappeared, you know. She was one of his students. He doesn’t take many on. And they don’t tend to – well, nothing like this has ever happened before.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I know this must seem a little strange. It has been – it had been – a long time since I heard from Ingrid. An old friend of mine – her cousin – asked me to come over here and find out a bit more about her life, about what was going on with her.’ I wondered what to say. ‘He’s not able to travel.’

  Trinh looked at her glass. ‘I wasn’t close to her. We were friends, sort of. She was a very private person. She was close to Fleur – her stepdaughter, you know – and I suppose she did have other friends.’

  I nodded. It didn’t sound like the Ingrid I used to know.

  ‘Ingrid had dropped out of contact before September, but she surfaced occasionally. Very occasionally.’ She drank and set down her glass. ‘And now she is one of the “missing”. I suppose they’ll find a piece of her somewhere when they finish sifting through all that rubble and bone.’ She regarded me with a neutral face. I could almost feel every bone in my body, inside, connected, not pulverised in a heap of ash.

  ‘Another?’ She indicated my empty glass. I nodded.

  We drank on and I found myself telling her about myself – stories of the bookshop, the odd customers, the boredom of shelving, the pleasure of coming to understand the intricacies of rare book values, first editions. Plans for law school. Mark. I worked out the shapes of things in the stylised designs of her tattoos: a vine, or a vein. Flowers, or maybe hands.

  She leaned back in her seat. ‘So tell me about Ralph. I think I remember Ingrid mentioning him, maybe. He hadn’t talked to Ingrid in a while?’

  ‘They had a falling out. After the marriage. I mean, they fell out of touch.’ I looked at Trinh’s eyes, blue and plastic and shadowed in the semi-darkness.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I want to know too. We were friends once. We were all friends. We just sort of drifted apart when she left.’

  ‘That does happen, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it does.’

  It made me think about Ingrid’s last visit, the year after the wedding. Ralph and I didn’t talk for a while after the party fiasco, and then we did, and he took to stopping by the bookshop again every so often. He took up drinking pretty seriously, drinking alone, at home and elsewhere. I talked to Ingrid maybe twice in that time; not long after she got back to New York, when she called me to say thank you for the wedding gift. A card arrived too, saying thank you from both her and Grey. And I called her once, a couple of weeks into the new year, feeling depressed and nostalgic. It was 2000, the new millennium. We didn’t talk for long. She had been on her way to class, rushed and monosyllabic. It was just over a year after the wedding that Ralph wound up in hospital. A heart attack, an arrhythmia, a lot like his father. Ed called me, same as with George. It was an inherited disorder, he told me, and it had reached a crisis point. It was turning out to be a tough job to get him stabilised. Ralph had been with Eve when it happened.

  Eve was there at the hospital when I went to see him, thinner than I’d seen her before, aged and strained in the face. Ralph looked terrible, frail against the sickly-coloured green sheets of the hospital bed. He asked me to bring him some cigarettes. I gave him some of mine when Eve wasn’t looking. He complained that they weren’t letting him drink, whining like a child.

  I was furious with him for not telling me how bad his illness had become. ‘I know you talked to Ingrid about it, didn’t you?’ I said, accusingly. ‘It’s not like you didn’t know. You could have been taking better care of yourself. There’s no point pretending this doesn’t exist. You could be dead.’ I had always indulged his refusal to talk about his health, not wanting myself to believe that anything was really wrong.

  He didn’t apologise or act defensive. He looked at me, his face composed and serious. ‘Please tell Ingrid.’

  I had already called her and left a message on the machine the day before, letting her know that he was in the hospital and giving her the number. I didn’t tell him that.

  The next day I called her again, with no luck. Ralph looked worse. They were trying new medicines to make his heart beat in a safer pattern.

  ‘Do you think she’ll come?’ he asked me, wanting an answer, but I didn’t know.

  I finally got through to Ingrid the following day. Fleur answered the phone. It was the first time we had spoken. Her voice was like any teenager’s.

  Julia,’ she repeated after me when I’d said who I was. Long, silent seconds passed and Ingrid came to the phone.

  ‘Julia?’ she said.

  ‘Ingrid – did you get my message?’

  ‘No – no.’ Her voice was fuzzy, as though she had just woken up. ‘I didn’t get any message. The machine sometimes plays up.’

  ‘Ingrid, it’s about Ralph.’

  I told her. ‘It’s kind of serious,’ I said. ‘He’s asking for you.’

  She said that she would call. I waited for her to say she would come to Sydney, but she didn’t.

  When I next saw Ralph we didn’t talk about it, but a few days later they had obviously spoken. He looked optimistic. The table beside his bed was piled with novels that I’d brought over the past week. I tried bringing him other things to read but he insisted on reading Thomas Hardy. It didn’t seem like something that would do any good in the circumstances. She was going to come, he said. I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t talk to her again over the next week. Once they figured out the right combination of drugs Ralph got better quickly, enough to go home to his flat. He and Eve fought over it – she wanted him back at Kirribilli, but he said he wouldn’t be treated like a child and did she want to give him another heart attack by arguing. That made her quiet, and furious.

  I went around the next day to the flat with some more books – the latest Booker winner, something else new. Ingrid was there, on the couch next to him. The scene had the look of a Vermeer painting with that morning light coming through the windows, still and silent. She was wearing light-coloured clothes, a crushed-looking white shirt, and the light struck her at an angle that made her glow like an angel, or a ghost. The face she turned to me was stricken, lips as pale as her skin. Her hair was a few inches shorter, and when she twisted it to the side and over her shoulder there was less of it to pull through her fingers. She had just arrived, straight from the airport. A silver suitcase sat inside the door.

  Ralph smiled beatifically. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I told you.’ Or am I remembering it wrongly – was that just what his expression said?

  There was a fine layer of dust on the kettle when I lifted it from the stove and filled it from
the tap to make tea. Ingrid didn’t move from the couch. She looked sicker than Ralph. ‘Horrible flight,’ she said, and smiled thinly.

  I gave her the tea and she sipped it slowly. ‘It’s just for a few days,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to get away at this time of year.’

  ‘I’m glad you came.’

  ‘Thank you for calling me, Julia,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you reached me. Let me give you my cell phone number.’ She grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down a string of numbers. ‘It’s easier to reach me that way.’

  The moment I had interrupted between the two of them hung there in the air. I finished drinking my tea and left them just as they had been.

  I called Ralph later that night. Ingrid had gone out to have dinner with Eve but would return.

  ‘It’s bad for her, over there,’ he said. ‘With him. It’s worse than we thought.’ I thought about her pale mouth and her drawn look and wasn’t surprised.

  Ralph had plans of talking her into staying in Sydney, proving to her that he’d been right about this whole thing being a mistake. ‘Why should she go back?’ he said. ‘Why not just stay here in Sydney?’

  ‘She’s married,’ I said. ‘She lives there now.’

  ‘It was all a mistake.’

  ‘Maybe it was. Maybe it’s like any marriage, any relationship. Ups and downs.’

  ‘No. You don’t understand. It was – he didn’t want her to come out here.’

  ‘To see you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She told you that?’

  ‘I could tell.’

  I waited. ‘You two never liked each other. That doesn’t mean that Ingrid’s marriage is a failure.’ That’s what I said, impatient with him, but I knew in my heart that he was right.

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with me.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘No, I mean the problems – with him.’ The urgency in his voice faded. ‘She’ll be back soon.’

  We said goodbye.

  Two days passed. And then late the next night he showed up at my house. It was raining and he stood in the hallway, soaked. He didn’t say anything. He came inside. All I could think of was that he shouldn’t be out in the rain, he was just out of hospital, and that he looked as though he needed brandy. I didn’t have any brandy. We sat on the couch together. His face was the same as it had ever been, but it was empty. He leaned into the corner of the couch, his body stiff. I lit a cigarette and passed it to him. He held it in his fingers without smoking it. The smoke rose up through the air in a sheet, straight as a curtain.

  I asked him, ‘Is it Ingrid?’

  He nodded, and he leaned in to me. I put my arm around his shoulders. His hair was damp when I rested my cheek against it briefly, and he smelled of rain and wet hair. There was another smell, too, that wasn’t him, and I almost pulled away from him when I recognised it: it was her. She was all over him. I loosened my hold and we sat there. Minutes passed and my arm around him grew numb. The rain fell hard outside, glaze of water against the windows. It was strange the way his body spoke all at once of his possession of her, finally, and of his absolute loss. I thought of my yellow dress that morning months and months before, pulled over my head and stuck on my outstretched arms in my imagination. It had ended up at the bottom of a drawer, seldom worn.

  Trinh’s voice called me back to the present. ‘A love triangle,’ she said.

  ‘It wasn’t always terrible.’

  ‘No. It must have been wonderful.’

  She looked at me with low-lidded eyes. ‘I have to go now. But I’d like to see you again.’

  I finished my drink.

  ‘I have an appointment, someone I have to meet. But why don’t you come by the department tomorrow? My office is 520.’

  We agreed to meet at two. She smiled again, the one I’d seen the time I’d left her in the corridor, and was gone.

  I asked for another of what she was drinking, and sat at the bar.

  At two the next afternoon I knocked on the door of room 520 in the Classics corridor. Several names on small pieces of paper were taped to the door with consultation times written alongside them. The door was opened by a man with curly dark hair, wearing a brown cardigan. ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m looking for Trinh.’

  ‘She’s not in. She was working in here this morning, but I think she left a while ago. Can I help you?’

  I was sure it was the right time. ‘No, no, I’ll catch up with her later.’

  I looked around the room. It was an office crowded with furniture, desks and overflowing bookshelves. I wondered which desk belonged to Trinh. The space over each desk was filled with papers stuck to the wall: quotations in Latin and Greek and other languages, images of ancient temples and broken vases and jars, grainy pictures of inscriptions, clippings.

  The man with the curly hair had sat down at one of the desks, a laptop computer open in front of him. The surface of the desk was littered with paper coffee cups.

  I asked him, ‘Did you know Ingrid?’ ‘Ingrid?’

  ‘Holburne. Or Grey.’

  ‘Not really – a little.’ He shook his head. ‘Gabriel.’ He offered his hand. He had a South American accent.

  ‘I’m Julia, I was a friend of Ingrid’s …’ I trailed off, unsure of what to say next.

  ‘She was working with Jones, yes?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Well, I’ll leave a note for Trinh in her mailbox.’

  ‘OK. Goodbye.’ He had a friendly smile.

  I leaned on the counter near the wall of mailboxes to write my note. There was only a pencil in my bag, almost blunt at the point. No pen. I wrote a short message, and the phone number at the apartment. I wrote my email address and then crossed it out. The only computer in the apartment was in Matt’s room – he let me use it but the modem was slow and unreliable so I rarely checked my mail. I was ready to put the note into Trinh’s mailbox when I realised that I didn’t know her second name. There were rows of slots in the shelves and no way of guessing. The woman with glasses at the desk in the adjoining room was talking on the phone, twirling a pen in her fingers. She was wearing a similar twinset to the one I had seen her in the day before, but in a slightly different colour.

  Turning back around I saw that Jones had entered the mailroom. He was wearing a light-coloured suit that looked all wrong for the season. He gave me the same serious look as the previous day. ‘Julia Alpers.’

  ‘Hello. I was meeting Trinh. But she’s not here.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Do you know her name?’ I asked, holding the note. Of course he knows, I thought, and felt stupider, and more frustrated.

  He stepped forward and took the note from my hand and placed it into a slot. I couldn’t see which one. He pulled a couple of letters from his own slot, glanced at them, put them back.

  I remembered my conversation with Trinh the night before. ‘Are you busy?’ I asked him.

  He inspected me, considering. ‘Have you eaten lunch?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Then let’s go.’

  He was conventionally good-looking, arrogant, ambivalent, no doubt concealing a cache of psychic wounds or at least a few complexes. My heart plunged and I followed him anyway. Walking along the corridor we passed the crying girl from the day before. She wasn’t crying now. He nodded at her. She gave a small nod in acknowledgement without meeting his eyes.

  Once we were out of the building Jones walked fast, his eyes moving quickly across the faces we passed on the street. After several blocks he made a sudden turn into a crowded deli. He pressed through to the counter while I waited at the back of the crowd and studied the menu, a huge wall-mounted blackboard covered in writing, variations on sandwiches, bagels, heros, a thousand kinds of bread in slices and rolls. Behind the counter hands sliced and grabbed. I was working out something with tomato and basil and mozzarella when Jones appeared beside me, close enough to whisper, and held my elbow in a light grip.

  ‘I�
�ve ordered you a sandwich,’ he said, eyes over my head somewhere. ‘I’ll pick it up. Wait here.’

  I waited. My elbow felt hot where he had held it. He came back with his hands full of food and motioned me to a table, magically empty in the busy space.

  I kept seeing Ingrid in the place like a ghost, wondering if she had come here and stood there, and sat here, and ordered lunch, and chosen a cold drink.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, and squeezed past a throng of people to reach the fridge. I pulled out a cranberry juice, violent pink, and made my way back to the table.

  The sandwich was good, a crusty baguette with bacon and avocado.

  Jones asked a lot of questions about where I was staying, with that obsessive interest in location peculiar to New York. He knew the block, he knew the building, he knew the building across the road where his friends used to live. He was impressed by the terrace as I described it, and I told him about the empty cage. How big was the terrace, he wanted to know, and I couldn’t put it into square feet.

  ‘How many people could you fit there?’

  I imagined the terrace full of people. The strings of lights on at dusk, men and women standing around and sitting on the low chairs. I wasn’t sure how to count them: they grouped awkwardly in my mind into lots of two and four and five.

  ‘About twenty? Thirty?’ I guessed. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You should have a party.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘We’ll think of something. Take advantage of that space in this city.’

  We didn’t talk about Ingrid. He had been in New York for six years, he revealed, after his doctorate at Oxford. His first name remained a mystery. The short silences while we ate were strangely casual and seemed to assume an intimacy shaped by long acquaintance. He ate a lot and drank my juice freely, taking in half of it in one swallow while I chewed.

  ‘You’re drinking my drink,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll buy you another.’

  My elbow burned. He touched it again lightly as he stood, and seemed almost to help me up from the table.

  16.

  The next day I decided to try again. I was standing in front of the closed door to 520, reading the names on it, when Trinh turned up beside me and said hello.