The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘Later,’ I said, and he stepped back quietly.

  There was a long strand of hair on the red carpet, I saw as I was leaving, an S shape against the geometric lozenge shapes of the rug, glowing gold in a shaft of sunlight. It could have been anyone’s.

  Matt sized everything up in one long look when I arrived back at the apartment carrying bags of groceries.

  ‘Your hair’s a mess,’ he said, folding his arms and leaning back against the kitchen sink. ‘You look great.’

  The radio was on, and he hummed along. I unpacked the contents of the bags: bread, butter, mustard, four kinds of ham, lettuce. He helped me make a salad and sandwiches but in the end neither of us ate much. We drank a fizzy drink made with the juice of a berry with an unpronounceable name – Matt was crazy about it – and he asked me dumb questions about Australia. He’d seen a tourist special on TV the night before.

  ‘So are the koalas really cute?’ he asked. ‘Or are they pests?’ He had some idea that they were everywhere in the city, infesting all the trees like squirrels.

  ‘It’s not like that in Sydney,’ I explained. ‘No koalas.’ He looked at me doubtfully. ‘No kangaroos.’

  ‘I didn’t think there were kangaroos in the city,’ he said defensively. ‘Right.’

  ‘So … Sydney is not rich in wildlife.’

  ‘Not where I’m from. There are lots of cockroaches.’

  Matt was disappointed.

  He disappeared into his room to make a phone call and I went to lie down and read a book but fell asleep instead. The lettuce was wilted when I came back out a couple of hours later, bread dried out around the edges. Matt was gone and the place was quiet, and it felt like mine at last.

  17.

  It was mid-morning a few days later when I went to see Grey at the apartment he had bought with Ingrid on Central Park West. A thin fog hung in the air, paling the buildings and obscuring the view down the long avenues. It was a light-coloured brick building from the 1920s, the front flat against the street, border of dark hedges neatly clipped. An intimidating display of flowers rested on a table just inside the front set of doors, in the centre of the passageway so that you had to walk around it. Birds of paradise turned their spiky heads out to the side, in profile, and sharp green leaves fanned out from the centre of the arrangement.

  All the surfaces were polished but not shiny, grey and tones of sage green. The doorman stood behind a granite desk, dressed in a navy blue suit. He nodded at me gravely and let me through. As I passed I saw him raise a telephone handset to his ear. A mirrored lift took me up to the fifteenth floor and opened directly across from the apartment door. When Grey opened it the smell of coffee tinged the air, beans freshly ground. He gripped my hand gently with both hands, a gesture of consolation, or blessing. His hands were cool.

  ‘Welcome.’ He gestured me through the door.

  We stood together in the kitchen, all marble countertops and stainless steel, while he made the coffee and poured it into white cups. From another room the sound of classical music came through faintly, piano, melodies weaving around one another, in and out of hearing, in counterpoint. I looked for the blue teapot and saw it set up on a high shelf, squat and handsome. A pile of pomegranates sat in a crackled gold bowl on an island in the middle of the room. There was a large sink in the centre of the island, three stools at the other end. The espresso machine steamed and shone, little dials quivering. I thought of the spit and hiss of my own battered coffee maker, never quite balancing on the gas burner, and missed it.

  Grey was wearing a black sweater with a round neck, the colour of mourning, with charcoal pants and black shoes. I looked at his grey eyes, the skin around them more lined than I remembered, his lean body, watching for signs of grief. He projected the same imposing presence, the same compressed elegance. He moved quietly between the counter, sink, fridge. This was the first time we had been together, just the two of us. It was as though Ingrid had just left the room and we were waiting silently for her to return in a moment, not bothering to find our own point of conversation.

  ‘Come on through.’ He led me to the living room and motioned for me to sit.

  Everything – the walls, carpet, furniture – was shades of light grey, ivory and white, eggshell and cream, except for a black baby grand piano set into one corner. Behind it a folded screen leaned against the wall, a Japanese scene in faded silver and gold with lacquered edges. The proportions of the room and windows had a classical, balanced aspect: tall ceilings and tall windows hung with long, fine curtains, the one aspect of excess in the room. They fell from their high rail like the pleats in Ingrid’s wedding dress and hit the floor in a tumble, lengths of extra fabric crushed in peaks and waves, a bride’s train. I held my coffee carefully, imagining the stain a drop would make on the cover of the deep armchair Grey had offered me.

  There was a curious lack of expectancy in the way he sat there drinking his coffee. On my way over it had been impossible to think through what I might have to say to him or ask him, and now my mind was a similar blank, flattened by the expanse of pale linen on the sofa across from me, the colour of new concrete.

  Across the room, glossy white stairs led up to a small mezzanine level. It was lined with built-in bookshelves stacked with books, the floor yellowish oak. From there more stairs led to another level, a passageway filled with white doors.

  ‘I’ve got this for you,’ Grey said, and handed me a slick leaflet. The Grey Room: American Abstract it was headed, with the logo of the Whitney Museum at the bottom. It unfolded to a page of text and some images of paintings. I took in words here and there: … generous donation from family … showcase American abstract art … legacy.

  In memory of Ingrid Grey.

  At the end of the leaflet was the briefest description of Ingrid’s life: born and raised in Australia, promising Classical scholar, Columbia, dedicated patron of the arts.

  ‘We’d been planning on adding to our other gifts to the Whitney,’ Grey said, ‘and this was … well, an opportunity –’ He stopped. ‘They’ll open the room later next year.’

  I re-read the text. The room would showcase acquisitions purchased with the assistance of funds provided by the Grey family.

  ‘It seemed like the right thing to do with the money. With some of the money.’

  ‘The money,’ I repeated. I thought at first he was talking about Ingrid’s money.

  ‘The compensation is quite substantial,’ he said. He cleared his throat. I realised he was talking about September 11, the money that went to the victims’ relatives. ‘I thought you might like to know about this project.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Would he mistake my lack of words for a symptom of grief, I wondered. Was it grief? Was this another aspect of what that felt like – dumbness, tongue bound in my mouth? I didn’t exactly feel a sense of loss sitting here in the pale grey room. I didn’t feel Ingrid at all in this place, and it was hard to imagine her in this grown-up environment of expensive coffee makers and well-made bookshelves and light-coloured sofas. Ralph’s family home had always exuded a sense of wealth, but in a way completely different to this – rooms filled with antiques and beautiful side tables and carpets, so many carpets that they were all laid over the edges of another, and one old couch sat in a room upstairs with many rugs piled up on it. It was careless and disorderly. But this was a refined environment of sophistication and the careful display of taste.

  I asked him the one question that was suddenly clear in my mind. ‘What was she doing down there? Downtown?’

  His face betrayed – what? Sympathy; horror?

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to ask.’

  ‘It’s perfectly alright,’ he said, composed again. ‘I believe she was keeping an appointment with her financial adviser. She used a firm based. down there.’

  I looked down at the coffee table between us, a stack of art books carefully placed to one side. One of the paintings hanging on the wall right across from me
, a roughly painted red triangle with more coloured marks at the bottom of the frame, was reproduced on the cover of the book on the top of the stack. I recognised the image.

  Grey noticed me looking and smiled his slightly predatory smile. ‘That’s the book of Fleur’s work from the Whitney.’ Steam rose faintly from his cup. ‘She’s the youngest artist to have had her own show there. Of course – you remember. You saw the show with Ingrid.’

  There had been stacks of the books in the bookstore just inside the entrance to the museum that day. I lifted the book and opened it. There was a photograph of Fleur on the inside back jacket, a sullen child standing against a window. One of her hands hung down limply at her side, holding a paintbrush as if it were about to slide out of her grip. The ends of the brush were dark with paint. I flipped through the first pages and saw another picture, a tiny girl kneeling and holding up two hands in front of her, both covered in paint, head lifted up and laughing, eyes squeezed almost shut. In front of her, on the floor, was a large canvas showing the beginnings of a painting.

  ‘How old is she here?’

  Grey looked for a moment. ‘Four.’ He drank his coffee. ‘That was her most productive year. And the year she incorporated brush and hand painting into the single canvas.’

  The photograph faced the first page of an introductory essay written by Grey himself, followed by several others.

  ‘Does she still paint?’ I asked.

  He shifted slightly in his chair, and his face tightened. ‘You’ll have to ask her that yourself,’ he said. ‘Not as far as I know – she certainly doesn’t paint to show.’ He paused, and continued, obviously pained. ‘She started taking. photographs,’ he admitted, embarrassed, as though he were explaining that she had taken up thieving as a profession, ‘and also video.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’

  A quick scan of the walls revealed no photographs on display, only paintings. There were a few small photographs in silver frames resting on bookshelves; a different order of image.

  ‘She has a great talent,’ he said, with a sound of having said it often. ‘I hope she will return to painting. She developed as an artist so young – I imagine that she’s still developing her vision in her own way, and she will return to the canvas as the most truthful medium of that vision.’ It was a carefully considered statement.

  ‘Do you own many of her paintings?’ I asked. ‘Are any more of these hers?’

  Grey straightened keenly, and nodded towards a canvas on the wall behind me. It showed the characteristic triangular shapes I had noticed in the painting on the cover of the book and other images in it. He took this as a cue to give me a tour of the apartment and his art collection, and led me over to the side of the room.

  ‘Now, this artist – very underrated – this is a study for his most famous work …’ He stood with his arms folded low, hand raised now and again to gesture towards some aspect of the painting, a wash of tones in grey and blue. A smaller version of what looked like the same image, only with more pink in it, was next to it on the same wall. ‘And an earlier one,’ he said, nodding towards it. He went on, and I began to really understand what it was that Ingrid had seen in him. He was a natural teacher. He talked about the works and the artists with real feeling, explaining without giving the sense that he was talking down to me. I felt that he assumed in me an intelligence and capacity for appreciation, and it was flattering; that sense would have been powerful for Ingrid, the eager student.

  He showed me his office on the same floor, a stark room with a desk in the centre and just one painting on the wall facing the door. ‘De Kooning,’ he said simply, and I saw a shadow of that possessive expression he wore in the photograph I remembered from the wedding, holding Ingrid’s hand. ‘A gift from Ingrid.’

  There was a framed photograph set low down on one of the bookshelves behind the desk: a woman with her face turned away from the camera so that only a fraction of her profile was visible. It looked as though she was sitting in an artist’s studio. Her shirt had paint marks on the sleeves and her dark hair was pulled back. Paintings were a blur, slightly out of focus on the wall behind her, and sketches. She was familiar in a half-remembered way.

  Grey left the room and I followed him. Across the hall, a door to another room was half open, and the mountainous piles of clothes that covered the floor – jeans in black and denim and white, t-shirts, red sweaters, pink scarves – suggested that it was Fleur’s. We reached the stairs and I noticed that he had passed over one picture, hung out of the way under the staircase. The image contrasted with the rest of the collection in the house, which were all abstract. I recognised it with surprise as one I had seen hanging in Ralph’s house at Kirribilli, a small, hazy painting of the Thames river in an ornate gold frame that swallowed the image. It was a valuable object, a study by Turner. George had been fond of it. ‘Worth more than this house,’ he said proudly to me once. ‘Can you believe that?’ He’d sighed. ‘I love it though.’ I couldn’t remember Ingrid ever noticing it.

  Grey saw me looking at it.

  ‘A wedding present,’ he said brusquely, and started up the shallow stairs, his back to me. ‘I’ve wondered if I ought to return the thing.’

  I guessed that this had been Ralph’s gift.

  ‘Would you like to see her room?’ he offered when we came to the top of the stairs.

  He led the way and we walked down a short, carpeted hallway. I glimpsed a bedroom to my left, the door half-open, and we passed other doors. At the end of the passageway we turned and reached another door. It was white, like the others, and like them it had a heavy glass knob. It stood just ajar. Grey stood and held out his arm, directing me in.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  I stepped past him and pushed the door. It opened silently. I took a step inside.

  ‘What’s it like – what’s it been like – without her?’ I asked, inspired by a sudden breath of courage and curiosity about what lay beneath his smooth exterior. As I spoke an awareness of her absence came over me again, a vague tingling sensation on my skin as though ghostly fingers had brushed past and withdrawn. I could sense the space of the apartment around me, the building, the whole city, extending in all directions, everywhere, all empty of her.

  His face didn’t betray any feeling but his eyes held mine in a questioning gaze that made me feel presumptuous for asking. Eventually he gave me a small, sad smile. ‘This place feels so much darker without her,’ he said. ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t feel like talking about it.’ ‘With you,’ he might have added, but didn’t.

  ‘Perhaps you would like to take a moment here?’ He hovered just inside the doorway. I nodded.

  He hesitated, as though reluctant to leave. ‘Yes. Well.’ His hand rested on the door frame. ‘I’ll be downstairs when you’re ready.’

  He left, footsteps silenced by the carpet.

  My eyes were drawn to the only picture on the walls of the room. It was a version of the painting I remembered from Ingrid’s room in Sydney. I always thought of the woman as the Lady of Shalott, and the Tennyson poem came into my mind again now as it always had when I looked at the image, but I knew that it was Ophelia, as Ingrid had told me, by Millais. On Ingrid’s Sydney walls it had been a print of the painting, a poster from an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, framed behind Perspex. It had sagged a little in one corner, the plastic coming away slightly from the paper behind it. The image I saw now was the same, but looked as though it had been put through a kind of digital process, like a photograph of the painting that had been enlarged to show the coloured pixels. Minute coloured dots made up the picture, the colours dulled towards grey apart from the flowers that surrounded the woman’s head, bright fuchsia pink, and her hair floating in the water, a brilliant yellow. The woman’s face was a collection of points, and as I looked the picture seemed to lose shape and grow in randomness: a mess of disconnected spots. Examining it closer I was unable to tell whether I was seeing paint on canvas or a photograph. I
could see the grain of the canvas and wanted to touch it to tell if it was actually canvas, or engineered to look that way, but the surface of the image repelled me. I looked away.

  The room had the same pleasing proportions as the rest of the apartment. Shelves had been built into one wall, on either side of a tall panel surrounded by a Grecian-looking decorative plaster motif. The shelves were filled with books relating to Ingrid’s studies, carefully organised and neatly set back from the edge. There were titles on ancient Rome, writing, orthography. One half-shelf was dedicated to books on magic in the ancient world. Against the adjacent wall there was a wide chest of drawers covered in a walnut veneer. The slightly curved design of the body stood out, at odds in the room and the apartment, with its classical proportions and linear features.

  Each drawer in the dresser had a small brass keyhole set into it. I tried the first drawer on the right. It opened stiffly, empty except for a handful of coloured pencils. The sight of them – blunt and worn – prompted a sudden self-consciousness, a sense of acting without permission. The pencils rattled as I tried to close the drawer, and it stuck. I felt sweat begin to break. The drawer gave way suddenly and slid home.

  Several objects sat on the chest of drawers: five or six tiny wooden elephants painted in bright colours; some coloured glass bottles; a jewellery box made of inlaid wood and mother-of-pearl. I recognised all these things from Ingrid’s old room in Sydney. There was one unfamiliar thing: a small brass key. It seemed to be made to fit the keyhole in the drawers. I picked it up and felt the familiar stirrings of desire. I wondered if Grey came in here much. The room had an untouched feeling about it, as though it had been empty for a long time. He had seemed so reluctant to enter, reluctant to leave. It was impossible to know whether he came in here or not, or how often, or how well he knew the collection of objects on the chest. Taking the key would be a risk. I decided against it, but held the key in my hand anyway as I inspected the rest of the room.