The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  Something in me answered to the long, white line cut through the blue – sorrow, guilt, relief. Then it receded, flattened back against the canvas.

  Peter stood at the door. ‘There’s tea in the kitchen,’ he said quietly, his suit hanging awkwardly on his body. ‘Should I bring it –’

  ‘No,’ I cut him off. ‘I’ll come.’

  We finished the tea. Peter had used a strainer, so the cups were free of leaves, just a faint smudge of wet fragments around the bottom. He put the cups into the sink and ran water over them.

  We drove to the hospital and Peter filled me in on Jenny’s condition. She would recover – but for now she was having trouble speaking. Impaired movement on the left side of the body. Difficulty walking. It would be a lengthy process: more time in hospital, and then weeks in a rehabilitation facility. Once he’d explained it to me we drove in silence the rest of the way. He parked the car and seemed to come awake somehow once he’d pulled the handbrake on, before he switched the engine off, and glanced at me and then quickly away.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I didn’t tell you.’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  He gave a short sigh. ‘Mum’s here. Sorry, I should have said.’

  I sighed in turn. He flipped the key and the car shut down.

  My mother, Rachel, was sitting by the bedside in my aunt’s hospital room. She wore a purple cotton dress with a brown print, little boxy shapes like misshapen Mayan characters. Her hair was long and straight, grey mixed equally with brown. She was reading a book, and she wore purplerimmed glasses that I had never seen before. When my brother said hello she looked up quickly and folded them away in a swift motion. They seemed to disappear into an invisible pocket in her dress.

  She embraced me with her wiry arms, leaning in so that the rest of her body didn’t touch me. Julia,’ she said. ‘It’s so good of you to come.’

  I felt a flame of resentment then. I had been away for just weeks, while she hadn’t seen Jenny for years. Peter caught my eye with a warning look.

  Jenny looked small in the hospital bed, the starched sheets with their stiff folds around her. She smiled at me with half her face. There was a spiral-bound notebook on the bed beside her with a ballpoint pen next to it.

  My mother had moved quickly into a conversation with my brother about my aunt’s status and the doctor’s comments from the day before.

  ‘I came as soon as I could,’ I said to Jenny.

  She picked up the pen and slowly wrote good to see you J.

  I took the chair that my mother had been sitting in. Her book was on the bedside table now: the latest instalment in a self-help series that promised ‘A Course in Miracles’.

  The room was dominated by a huge television screen set up high in the corner, now switched off. The sounds of others in the rooms next door came faintly through the walls. There was a big, square window across from the bed with a tree pressed right up against it, dark green leaves touching the glass.

  Peter and my mother talked and the moments of silence between their exchanges grew longer. Eventually Rachel came over to the bed and inclined her head sympathetically at me.

  ‘Let’s get some coffee,’ she said.

  ‘You’re drinking actual coffee?’ I asked.

  Her brow creased. ‘Well,’ she said firmly, ‘I’ll have tea. You have whatever you like.’ Her smile returned.

  Peter came down with us to the hospital caféteria. We passed through the fluorescent-lit aisles, holding plastic trays that we filled with bad pastries, and sat down finally near a window. Peter brushed a pile of crumbs from the table and mopped up a small puddle of brown liquid that might have been tea.

  He watched Rachel carefully, as though ready to intercede in the conversation if necessary. She sipped at her peppermint tea and explained that she had been thinking about moving back to Sydney again in any case and that this was perfect timing. I looked at Peter nervously.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Jenny’s going to need quite a bit of support, initially at least,’ he said. ‘Rehabilitation. She’ll need someone around.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’ I asked Rachel.

  She smiled. ‘I’m staying with a good friend. In Rozelle. For the time being. Jenny will be out of hospital before too long. We’ll take it from there.’ The look on her face told me that the good friend was more than just a good friend. But it was typical of her to be enigmatic, even with us, about this kind of thing.

  The unspoken issue was there between us – she would be moving into the Mosman house. I caught Peter’s eye. He sat back in his chair, checked his watch. His hair was the same brown as Rachel’s, straight like mine, short and badly cut around his ears.

  ‘I have to be going,’ he said.

  We said goodbye and he left, walking quickly, straightening his jacket. Rachel and I were alone together. We both seemed equally uncomfortable about it. She kept her hands around her cup. Our talk was all about her: she had moved on from doing astrological charts and crystal healing and was now qualified as a Reiki practitioner. It had something to do with energy emanating from the hands. Everything was happening with perfect timing – ‘convergence,’ she said – there was an opening at a natural healing centre in Balmain that she was exploring. I didn’t like the idea of my aunt’s near-death experience being structured into my mother’s view of serendipity or whatever it was that was being timed so well. I wondered what had gone bad for her on the north coast that had really inspired her move, if that was what this was, but didn’t ask.

  Her blue eyes, lighter than mine, just like Jenny’s, were rimmed with blue eyeliner that had a kind of metallic sheen to it. Her hands went to the chunk of amethyst she wore on a cord around her neck, pointed at one end like the crystalline tooth of an animal. It had some kind of mystical significance I didn’t understand.

  ‘I’m glad we could have this little chat,’ she said. ‘I can see that you and Jenny have such a strong connection. It’s very powerful.’

  I swirled the last of my tea around in its paper cup. The room lurched. Rachel left and went off to Balmain and I went back upstairs to Jenny.

  22.

  I went over to Ralph’s a few days after that first hospital visit. The conservatory was warmer than ever. Aaron was still wearing his sarong, a long-sleeved white shirt with it this time. He poured me a brandy with lime and soda. Ralph sat in the same place, the same chair, but looked a little brighter than the last time. His black shirt was one I remembered from Paris. For a brief moment I wanted to take it into my hands, holding the cuffs so that my knuckles would graze against his chest, but it passed. A surprising sense of stillness took its place.

  He asked about Jenny. I didn’t want to talk about it. ‘My mother’s here,’ I told him. He looked concerned and allowed us to change the subject.

  ‘Have you seen Mark?’ he wanted to know.

  I shook my head. ‘That’s well and truly over,’ I told him firmly. ‘For the best.’ Our breakup before my departure had been quiet and formulaic, both of us almost embarrassed by our lack of feeling about it.

  Ralph sighed. ‘I told you to stay away from the Philosophy students.’

  ‘You did. Thanks for that.’

  He bit his lip with a little smile.

  ‘So,’ he said, with something of his old tone. ‘Tell me.’

  So I told him what I could: Fleur and her video doll dramas and parties; the off-white apartment full of art; Ingrid’s room with the chaise longue and the elephants on the dresser (leaving out the fact that one of them was still with me, now in a pocket in my suitcase). Ingrid’s office, her research, the curse tablets. Trinh and her glamorous style. Much of it came easily. I skipped over Jones, saying only that her teachers admired and liked her and seemed pretty smart themselves.

  Ralph listened, stopping me only occasionally to ask me to further explain something – more information about what the apartment was like, how it was laid out, the view from Ingrid’s windows.

  The phot
ograph was there with me, in my bag, still in that book with the others. I thought about showing it to Ralph but didn’t. The light was morning-pale through the glass, yellow from the lamps in the corners of the room. Aaron came in with a bottle in his hands and starting spraying the plants, sending a fine mist over the dark green leaves.

  ‘There’s something you’re not telling me,’ Ralph said.

  I hesitated. ‘I slept with one of Ingrid’s teachers,’ I said. It was the first thing that came into my mind – I didn’t want to talk about the photo, or the emergency room report.

  He looked faintly disappointed. It was nothing to do with her, really. ‘Oh.’ He raised his eyebrows and his eyes drifted off to the side, up towards the ceiling. ‘Is he good-looking?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  He grew more interested. ‘Wait – is it that English one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think she -’

  ‘No.’ I cut him off and shook my head. ‘Apparently not.’ His disappointment returned.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  I dropped my eyes to the floor. Dark slate.

  ‘If you want to go back …’ he began.

  I looked back up at him. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well. Go ahead, if that’s what you want to do.’

  I thought about it. ‘Ralph, what do you do with yourself here all day?’

  He smiled at me gently, almost peacefully, but I could see the lines of tension around his eyes. ‘You know me. I’m good at doing nothing. Next week I think I’ll have another go at Proust.’

  Ingrid was here with us in a way that I hadn’t felt her in New York – she had been barely there at all in that bleached-out room I’d sat in with Grey, only a ghost in her room and Fleur’s studio – but here in the Kirribilli house the imprint of her presence was strong. I half-expected to see her white silhouette behind a layer of foliage towards the back of the room. Plants rustled softly in my peripheral vision. She was alive for him here too. Whatever trace she had left behind was given more life by his grieving desire, the nostalgia that he somehow thrived on. Of course he was reading Proust, I thought – in search of lost time.

  Aaron appeared at Ralph’s side with a china plate in his hand filled with bottles of pills, four or five of them, and a glass of water. He brought a small breath of cool, refreshing air with him from elsewhere in the house, and I wanted to be outside.

  I stood up. ‘I’ll see myself out.’

  Aaron regarded me silently.

  ‘Ring me,’ Ralph’s voice called out as I was in the hallway, towards the door.

  The Sydney spring passed in a haze, numb and warm. Peter visited and drove me to the hospital and the rehab place to visit Jenny. I took her novels and read to her sometimes from them, or from a book of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry she kept by the bed.

  I did call Ralph, and he called me; we spoke on the phone every week, short conversations that included a lot of long silences and repetitive exchanges. Something of our old intimacy resurfaced in those phone calls; we seemed to be feeling our way back, very slowly, to somewhere we could talk again.

  My mother floated in to see me at Mosman every now and again in her badly printed dresses and leggings and expensive sandals. Whenever she came it was to drink the last of the tea or finish the loaf of bread, the last of the biscuits or the remainder of a piece of cheese. ‘Darling, sorry,’ she would say. ‘Next time I’ll bring something.’ The one time she did it was a loaf of panettone in a dusty yellow box tied with a ribbon. It wasn’t clear how the box actually opened, the thin cardboard folded in a complicated kind of aperture around the bottom. I could imagine that the bread inside would taste just like the yellow cardboard. We didn’t try it, and the box stayed on the kitchen counter, getting pushed further into the corner as the days went by.

  Her visits were never long, although they drained me of energy as though she had stayed for hours every time. I would fall straight onto the couch when she was gone, television on loud for the rest of the afternoon and night.

  My postcard arrived at the house with the mail one morning, the one I had sent from New York. My own writing on it was still uncanny. It had got beaten up in the journey over, several big creases and a little tear in one corner. A wavy red stamp covered the Statue of Liberty, and on the front, across the image of the skyline and the towers, was a long, thin sticker printed with an obscure set of numbers. When I started to peel it off, the paper underneath came off with it, so I left it there.

  I took the card over when I next went to visit Jenny and propped it up against a glass jug of flowers next to her bed. Her hair had grown longer, past her shoulders, and was pulled back in a plastic slide clip. She was wearing a lavender V-neck shirt with short sleeves that reminded me uncomfortably of the clothes that the nurses wore, serviceable, starchy cotton. She turned slowly from the flowers and the card and looked at me with concern for long seconds.

  ‘This card arrived the other day,’ I said. ‘I sent it just before I left.’ I told her the story of buying it, settled back in my chair and talked on.

  I saw Victoria, Ingrid’s sister, once, one weekday morning on the street in Mosman where the shops and cafés were. I was standing outside the grocer’s, an old-fashioned kind of shop with tilted boxes and crates of fruit set outside the doors. There were mandarins on display, bright, waxy orange in their rows and piles. Victoria came out of the chemist’s next door. She was wearing a little black dress like a slip, and her legs were slim and long in flat, strappy shoes that slapped along the concrete path. There was a short second where I wasn’t sure what to do, and she had only just passed me when I called her name.

  She stopped and turned to look at me. Her face showed no recognition. Large round sunglasses hid her eyes, and her mouth was expressionless, unsmiling under its sheer gloss. It seemed for a moment as though she were going to pretend that she didn’t know me and turn back around, and it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be sorry. But I’d stepped towards her without thinking.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  Her hair was pulled back from her face by a band. She chewed the inside of her lip.

  I hadn’t seen her since that party, Ingrid and Grey’s wedding party on the water.

  ‘Hi. How are you?’ she said reluctantly.

  ‘OK.’

  She raised her chin in a defiant kind of gesture. I was holding a mandarin; it was surprisingly light, the fruit loose inside the skin. The citrus smell mixed with exhaust fumes from a car idling next to us on the street. The morning sun was harsh and bright on the pavement. I was inside the shade cast by the shop’s awning but Victoria was in the full sun, skin glowing with a deep tan. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, ready to walk away.

  ‘I’ve just got back from New York,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ she asked, her nose wrinkling in seeming disgust and incredulity. ‘What were you doing there?’

  Her eyes were invisible behind the shaded lenses. I was sorry that I’d said anything, sorry I’d called her name.

  ‘Oh, just passing through,’ I said. ‘I met Grey. And Fleur.’

  Her body stilled to attention. ‘Both of them?’ she asked.

  I pulled a plastic bag from the roll next to the crate and started filling it with mandarins.

  Victoria folded her arms. ‘Who else? What were you doing there?’ she asked again. Two diamond studs glinted in her ears, and when she uncrossed her arms a diamond glittered on her finger. It was large, cut with many sharp facets, in a shiny platinum ring.

  ‘Are you engaged?’ I asked.

  She nodded and pursed her lips.

  ‘Congratulations. Are you seeing Eve while you’re in town?’

  She nodded, looking past me to inside the grocer’s. ‘Yeah. For lunch on Sunday. At her flat.’ She frowned suddenly. ‘Will you be there?’

  ‘Victoria,’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry about Ingrid.’

  She looked at me resentfully for a se
cond, and then relented.

  ‘OK. Thanks. Bye, Julia.’

  Her phone rang as she said it, a musical jangle from inside the leather bag on her shoulder. She didn’t answer it right away, and I thought she was going to ask me something else, then she turned and reached for the phone. I watched her walk away, phone held to her ear, other hand readjusting the thin leather strap of the bag. She paused a few shops down and half-turned back to look at me, still talking, then turned and kept walking, more quickly, down the street.

  *

  Keith came over once or twice. The gallery was going to go ahead with the show of Jenny’s paintings they had planned. He came in the late afternoon and would bring a bottle of wine to drink with me when he was done sorting and packing the paintings or papers. The spring sun was treating him well, adding new, pretty freckles to the ones already there on his face and arms. On his second visit I poured the last of the bottle and thought about opening another.

  ‘So, Julia,’ he said. ‘Are you still planning on law school?’

  I frowned. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Or going back to the bookshop? I know Martin misses you.’ ‘Oh.’

  He leaned across the table towards me. ‘You’ve got as much time as you need. But I think you’ll feel better if you start – you know – doing something with your time.’

  ‘Feel better?’

  ‘Less depressed.’

  It hadn’t occurred to me that I was depressed, but now it seemed obvious. I wondered if I should care, or do something about it. This seemed like a pretty typical sign of depression.

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘Or were you thinking of going back to New York?’ He sipped his wine. ‘It’s a great city – I know you love it.’

  I thought about the apartment, Matt and the birdcage on the terrace. The terrace made me think about Jones. I hadn’t spoken to him since I’d been back. The phone had rung late one night, three or four in the morning, and I had felt sure that it was him. I’d listened to it, and had just sat up in bed, thinking of going to answer it, when it stopped.