I stopped when we had just started up the monumental stairs at the front of the library. He stopped too. ‘Listen, I’m busy tonight,’ he said, apologetically. ‘But tomorrow – a drink maybe.’
We stood next to one of the pair of giant stone lions that guarded the entrance, handsome and impassive. I looked over at the other lion across from us. A girl was having her photograph taken in front of it, and she roared and raised her hands in a clawing gesture. ‘Raaarrr!’ Her friend with the camera stood still and attentive and pressed the button.
Jones looked at me and raised one corner of his mouth in a smile. He touched my arm and I felt it through to the bone. I thought about Richard inside somewhere, but didn’t want to follow Jones. He turned away and stepped briskly up the stairs to the door. I walked slowly the other way and headed down the avenue.
Richard found me waiting outside his building when he finally got home. It was an hour earlier than we had agreed to meet.
‘Hello,’ he said, his face composed.
I still didn’t feel like talking.
The flat was darkening in the early evening and he switched on lights. The manila folder was nowhere to be seen, although I had left it with him. Our trip to the Promenade a few days earlier had been inconclusive; once we got there, Richard had shown little interest in comparing the photograph with the view, and just said, ‘Maybe,’ and ‘Possibly,’ or nothing to anything I suggested. He had spent a long time standing at the railing, looking up towards the glittering buildings of midtown and the bridge. I’d given him my set of enlarged photocopies as we stood there looking towards the city and he paged through them expressionlessly. ‘It’s as I expected,’ he’d said.
We sat at the table in the lamplight. I pulled the diary out of my bag and pushed it across to him. He opened it, turned over a few pages and found the entry for 11 September. He looked at it for a while, and turned the page back, once, twice, examining other entries, and looked back at the original page.
‘She’s used a few different pens, but she seems to like this blue one, quite a thick line. It’s written in the same pen as a lot of the other entries.’
I nodded.
‘I don’t know if I’d want to swear to this in court,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sure it’s her writing.’
‘But – do you think it is or not?’ My voice was creaky.
He shrugged. ‘There’s an inconsistency – it could be an inconsistency – with the formation of the letter “a”, lower case.’
He turned the book and held his finger to the page to show me. I looked at it and looked back at some of the entries written on earlier days. In some of them the circle of the ‘a’ closed up with the down stroke; in some of them it didn’t quite seem to.
‘I should have thought of it,’ he said to himself, leaning back in his chair. ‘Grey’s writing. I need something to compare it with.’
‘Well, I’m not going back there to steal something else, if that’s on your mind.’
‘No. OK. There would be other ways. I suppose.’
‘I don’t like this.’
He looked up at me.
‘Reading through her diary like this. It feels wrong.’
‘It’s not like it’s a personal memoir – this is just a list of times and dates.’
‘I know. But it still feels wrong.’
He didn’t say anything.
‘You do this all the time – this is your job, reading things that weren’t intended for you and subjecting it all to analysis. Figuring out people’s secrets. But I’m not used to it.’
The diary looked small on the counter but Ingrid’s death gave it a kind of heaviness, a greater mass than it should have held.
‘You can leave it with me if you like.’
‘No, that’s not what I meant,’ I said.
‘You know what’s at stake here,’ he responded.
The bruise was there again, overlaying my vision, purple and dark. I screwed shut my eyes, and opened them. It wouldn’t go away.
‘What do I know about you anyway?’ I asked.
His face clouded.
‘This is a completely insane idea that you have. You’ve got me to help you – you’ve pulled me into this whole crazy thing.’
‘You brought me the stuff from Trinh, the drawings. What did you want out of that?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking.’ I forgot about the one thought that had been with me when I left the apartment that night and caught the subway here: that I trusted him for some reason, absolutely. Now there seemed to be no way of making sense of what I was doing. I think that even then I knew somewhere that I just didn’t want it to be true, what Richard was thinking, and the anger at him was misdirected. But the words came from somewhere, my voice having come back somewhat alien from that adjacent place. ‘I don’t know anything about you, except that you had a restraining order taken out against you. And you – you probably think you know everything about me, don’t you?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve probably still got that note I wrote, haven’t you? The one I left here on your door? Filed away somewhere?’ He shifted in his seat. ‘I thought so. And I suppose you ran up a full personality profile on me with it.’
He closed the diary.
‘But you don’t know anything,’ I continued. ‘And I don’t know anything about you. Look at this place – it’s like a hotel, or an office. I don’t know.’ I struggled to think of something. ‘All I know is that you drink whisky, and even that might be a decoy. Maybe there’s a stash of something else, some secret red wine in the locked cabinet. I don’t know who you are, where you came from, what your favourite colour is –’
‘My favourite colour?’ he asked. ‘What are you, five?’
‘Don’t patronise me,’ I said.
‘It’s true,’ he said after a while. He spoke very formally. ‘I don’t let people in easily.’
‘But you loved her. Ingrid.’
He put his forehead in one hand, eyes down, elbow resting on the table. I picked up my bag and left, leaving it all behind, the envelope, the pictures, the diary.
Matt was home, on the couch watching TV. ‘Hi,’ he called out. ‘There’s leftovers on the counter.’
I filled a bowl from a bucket-like plastic container of fried rice in a paper bag and sat down next to him. Rear Window was playing; I recognised the shot of the apartment building that is the scene of the crime, rows of windows, one of them showing a woman with a blonde ponytail practising ballet in her room. James Stewart looked on longingly from his wheelchair across the way.
‘Look,’ Matt said, pointing to the television.
‘Great,’ I replied, thinking the opposite.
‘I know,’ Matt said happily. ‘It’s a Hitchcock marathon. I’ve just watched The Birds. Vertigo is next.’
I settled in reluctantly.
‘What have you been up to?’ he asked.
‘Don’t ask,’ I said.
‘Haven’t seen the divine Mister Jones for a few nights.’
‘No. His wife’s in town.’
‘No way. Hey, if you’re still interested, that artist is still looking for an assistant. Carson. I think he’d like you. He’s a bit, you know, temperamental, but you’re good with people.’
I stared at him.
‘OK. You could handle him. You’d start next month. Think about it.’
I said I would.
The idea of a job was appealing, although I doubted the wisdom of entangling myself further with the art world. It wasn’t a career opportunity, I told myself; it would be a way to remain in New York on my own terms.
‘If you stick around much longer, you’ll have to start doing your share of watering the plants,’ Matt smiled at me.
‘Whatever you do, don’t ask me to do that.’
‘Sure. I’m going to tell Carson that you’re interested. He’ll be happy that you’re not an aspiring artist.’
I laughed. ‘But seriously. Ca
n I keep living here?’ When did it become living, I wondered, instead of staying?
He shrugged. ‘As long as you like.’
Grace Kelly swept us both into silence then as she made her entrance on screen.
I crawled into bed after Vertigo finished and met a dream of Ingrid, her face the face of the doomed Carlotta that looks down on Kim Novak from the wall of the museum, a posy of flowers in her hand, lavender dress hiding her injured side. Her hands were white and the bunch of flowers she held looked too small, as though it were missing some. Violets? Pansies? They were purple and yellow and green, the colour of blood when it has pooled under skin in an old bruise. She smiled at me sadly.
There was an envelope pushed under the front door when I got up in the morning, an ordinary letter-sized white envelope with my name written on it in blue ink. It looked like the ink that Ingrid used when she wrote Paul, 9. If she wrote it. Of course she wrote it, I scolded myself, and shook my head to clear it and picked up the envelope. There was one piece of notepaper inside with just one word written there. His writing wasn’t quite what I had expected. The letters weren’t very regular and didn’t sit exactly in a straight line. I noticed the small loop of the letter ‘e’.
Blue.
I found his card in my wallet and called his number.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about last night.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘I’ll buy you lunch.’
‘Alright. I’ll be at the library.’
‘Where can I find you?’
‘In the reading room. The left side. 650.’
I met him there and we ate sandwiches in Bryant Park. It was getting too cold to sit outside comfortably and we both sat hunched with our coats wrapped around our bodies, perched on two chairs at the edge of the grassy square in the middle of the park. The grass was fenced off. The paved space around the lawn was filled with chairs and tables like ours in random assortments, light enough to be moved around, half of them filled with people eating and reading.
‘You don’t need to keep on with this if you don’t want to,’ he said. ‘I understand. It’s painful stuff. In fact, it might be better if you leave it.’
‘No, I’m with you,’ I said. ‘For now.’
‘I saw how upset you were last night.’
I chewed. I’d found it hard to look at him since seeing him in the library just now, head bent over four books laid out on the desk under a lamp, pretty close to how I’d imagined it before. His hair had shone darkly in the lamplight and I’d stood there watching him for a moment.
‘It’s important to me to know the truth about what happened,’ he said. ‘But I realise that might be a little. obsessive.’
‘Obsessive,’ I repeated. ‘As long as you’re not just obsessed with getting this one version of the story that you’ve fixed on.’
‘I don’t want it to be true,’ he said. ‘That was why I gave it up before. Apart from the fact that I couldn’t get anywhere with it. I decided that it was more horrible than the thought of the accident.’
‘So why don’t you give it up now?’ I asked. But he didn’t say anything and I didn’t need the answer.
I offered to talk to Fleur.
‘She might be able to get some of his handwriting for us,’ Richard said.
‘I don’t want to ask her that,’ I said. ‘I just want to talk to her.’
‘Watch out for her,’ he said. ‘She’s no fan of mine.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, but he shook his head and didn’t reply.
Neither of us mentioned Richard’s note. I could only guess at how much of himself he felt he had betrayed. I wondered how many other instances there were, all over the city, of his handwriting. There were no credit cards in his wallet, I’d noticed, when he had left it open on the counter the morning after I had spent the night. He paid cash, never needed to sign. On the desk beside him when I had collected him before lunch just then had been a well-ordered pile of yellow library call slips for books, neatly filled out on the typewriter at home in advance so that he wouldn’t have to write in the details in his own hand.
I had left the note on my unmade bed that morning, inside its envelope.
Richard went back inside the library and I went down to the Village. I thought about calling Ralph and wondered what time it was there. I picked up some things at the mini-supermarket and the deli on the way, and knocked on Mrs Bee’s door. She opened it.
‘I brought you some things,’ I said, handing her a paper bag. Inside was milk and bread and some of the shortbread she liked.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Actually, I just got a delivery.’
‘Didn’t you know I was coming?’ I smiled at her, teasing.
‘You surprised me,’ she said.
The tea she made was hot and strong. It scalded my lips and I set the cup down to cool.
27.
Fleur let me up to the studio and eyed me reproachfully, one arm leaning against the bench next to the kitchen sink. She was holding a bottle of Coke, the small, old-fashioned kind in glass, and set it down sharply after taking a drink.
‘Look,’ she said, hardness in her voice, ‘I want that photo back. I want you to bring it back.’
‘I want to show you something.’
I took the diary from my bag. She stayed still but looked as though she were holding in a flinch.
‘Put that away.’
‘Please –’
‘No! I know what that is.’
‘It’s about that day.’
She relented. ‘OK.’
I opened the diary to the page and handed it to her. She looked at it briefly.
‘Dad said you had been around. Is this what you were doing? Julia,’ her voice was compassionate now, ‘if it would really mean something to you to have something of Ingrid’s – I can find something for you.’
I cleared my throat. ‘It’s about the appointment that Ingrid has listed for that day.’
‘Paul was her accountant, her financial adviser. She met with him every once in a while. His offices were in the Trade Center. It’s because of that appointment that she was downtown that day.’
‘I know.’
‘He was killed,’ she said, flatly. ‘Along with everyone in his company, everyone who was there in the office that morning. Is that what you wanted to know?’
‘I waited a second. I just was wondering – does that look like her writing to you?’
‘Yeah – she kept her own diary. Sometimes Dad’s secretary helped her out with organising, you know, responding to invitations and all that, but she wrote everything into this herself.’
‘So you don’t think – you don’t think someone else might have written this in?’
She frowned.
‘I’m not talking about a secretary,’ I explained. ‘I’m talking about it being added in … well, later.’
We stood there for a while.
‘Where are you going with this?’ she asked eventually.
I put the diary back in my bag. ‘Can I just talk to you about it? Fleur, I’m not sure – I just wanted to talk to you.’
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
What was it Richard had said? ‘I suppose – finding the truth?’ It didn’t sound right, even to me.
She stared at me, disbelieving, and then the anger returned.
‘Don’t you think it’s hard enough that she’s gone? What do you think you’re going to get out of this? When you were here before – that was different – now you’re seeing ghosts – you’re carrying her diary around? And making up big conspiracy theories?’
I was silent.
‘Richard’s crazy, you know. He’s just mad because she wouldn’t sleep with him. Jesus. I thought he had stopped with all this shit.’
She paced and smoked and finished her Coke and pulled out a beer from the fridge. She didn’t offer one to me. The dolls were propped up in a corner of the little video set on the other side of the room
; the furniture I’d seen there before was gone and there was a miniature television set and recliner chair in front of it. I wondered what story was being played out there now.
‘I don’t know why you’re … prying into her life like this.’
I could have said that she was my friend, but it would have sounded worse than the earlier truth comment.
‘And my life,’ Fleur went on. ‘All of our lives. She’s gone.’
I still wasn’t sure how much she knew – about the envelope Trinh had given me, whether she knew that Ingrid had it, that I had it, what understanding she had reached with Ingrid about the whole thing, if any. I didn’t know what to say. I felt doubtful and ashamed.
She met my eyes and hers seemed so much older than her face; they were lightless and stony, older than I’d ever felt.
‘Don’t you just think …’ She paused, stuck for words, unable to go on. She seemed to give up trying, and the tension in her body ebbed a little. I waited.
‘Just give me back that photograph,’ she said. ‘If you want some kind of – memento – tell me what you want. I’ve got plenty of other photos of her. I’ll send you one. That one’s special to me. That’s all. She’s gone, Julia,’ she repeated. ‘Now go.’
She came to the door with me, and surprised me when we got there. She put her arms around me tightly, clamping my own arms to my side, and buried her face in my neck. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered. I tried to move, to put my hands on her back, to respond, but she let go and turned away.
She called me the next night.
‘Do you want to get a drink? Anywhere you like.’
I met her at a bar on Bleecker Street that she suggested in the end. It was just one small room lined with red booths, red lampshades hanging from the ceiling. The bartender carried on a long, impassioned conversation in Russian with a customer while I waited for Fleur to arrive. The exit sign over the door flickered. There was a sticker over it, covering half the word, that said EXPLODING.
Fleur was wearing a coat with a hood that framed her delicate face, and pushed the hood back when she came in. We sat down at a booth in a corner. She drank a Coke through a thin straw.
The Legacy Page 35
