The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘I might have got a little carried away when I talked to you before,’ she said. She swept her hair back behind one ear. She looked young again and she opened and closed her eyes in a way that made her eyelashes look pretty. ‘It’s just still so hard, and I miss her a lot sometimes.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  She looked at me. ‘I know it’s hard for you too – I can imagine. I just think – for your sake too – it would be better if you let it go.’

  She was all calmness and persuasion. I drank my drink.

  ‘I’ve seen the bruises,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen a photo.’

  She smiled at me curiously, but with a knowing look on her face that showed me her intelligence and something of the strange life she’d lived so far. ‘You’ve seen a photo,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen plenty of photos.’

  I thought about the bruise and the white stairs and the pale carpet that absorbed so much sound.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It was her life.’

  And one conversation with Ingrid, one of the last ones face to face before she left for New York for good, came to my mind.

  ‘It’s my life,’ she had said angrily. ‘Not Ralph’s. He’s acting as though – as though he paid for it,’ she spat the words out, ‘as if he bought it, so it’s his – but he didn’t.’

  ‘That’s not it,’ I said. ‘He just wants you to be happy.’

  She had sighed. ‘Then he’ll see. I’ll give him time. But stop acting like his stupid messenger.’

  Fleur held my gaze, her expression serious. ‘Photos tell all kinds of stories. I should know.’ I thought of the dolls, acting out their dramas in the damaged interiors she made for them. ‘You’ve seen enough,’ she said, ‘that you should know by now: let it go.’

  I looked away. It sounded like a warning. I wondered how much I ought to fear Grey, and thought about the envelope somewhere in Richard’s cabinets.

  ‘What are you doing here anyway? Why don’t you go home?’ Her voice was gentle, a subtle blade. ‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘Listen. Ingrid wouldn’t want all this.’ She faced me, her eyes still young and now filled with something like panic. ‘Please let it go.’

  ‘Are you protecting him?’ I asked. ‘Are you trying to protect me? From what?’

  She gave me that disbelieving look again, and then forced it away. Her face went blank. ‘Do you have the photo?’ she asked. ‘I want the diary back too.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  She stared at me. ‘I want it back. Look – I’ve got others.’

  She took out an envelope and opened it. I caught sight of a few pictures of Ingrid in Fleur’s studio, smiling, and sitting at her desk, the light behind her, mouth serious. It was unbearable to see her face. Fleur leaned closer.

  I asked her, ‘Don’t you have the negative, another print, whatever?’

  She shoved the envelope into my hand. ‘You are not helping,’ she said. She was almost whispering. ‘You could ruin everything.’

  I put the photos she had just given me back on the table in front of us. ‘I’m not interested in your secrets – in the paintings,’ I said.

  She frowned. I could see, in the second before she rearranged her face, that she hadn’t been thinking about the paintings. I held her gaze with difficulty, the room suddenly close. She swallowed.

  ‘I don’t know what you think you know about the paintings,’ she said. ‘Or what Ingrid knew. I don’t care.’

  ‘Fleur –’

  But she was gone, out the door, her face filled with rebuke and fear and something else: determination.

  At Richard’s the next night I described my two conversations with Fleur. He asked me to repeat what she had said, with as many of the actual words as I could remember.

  I had gone over it in my own mind since then, her half-whispered comment about my ruining everything, and the look that told me she wasn’t thinking about the paintings. It had the clarity and strangeness of a dream with a significance I hadn’t yet understood.

  But Richard was busily working through the possibility that Fleur could have known about the envelope that Trinh had given to me, and that she wanted to cover up any evidence.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘But what else could she have meant?’ he asked. ‘If you leave out the idea that she was a conspirator in the actual murder. And I don’t think she was. Or that she’s just trying to protect her father after the fact. And that’s a possibility. She doesn’t seem to like him much but she is loyal to him.’

  Her face had been so worried at the bar, her arms tight around me when I’d left her apartment. Sorry.

  Richard’s voice pulled my attention back. ‘Are you still seeing Philip Jones?’ he asked me, suddenly.

  I didn’t ask how he knew about that.

  ‘It’s hard to say.’

  He looked down at the newspaper open on the table in front of him. He seemed to read a whole story, following it from the front page through to its finish at the end of the paper.

  ‘I dislike him,’ he said eventually.

  Jones.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was he your teacher?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked up at me. ‘He’s smart,’ he added grudgingly. ‘Ingrid idolised him.’

  ‘So he had more luck than you then?’ I asked, bitter. It was about Ingrid, of course it was, whatever jealous drama was playing out here.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ His voice was calm. ‘No more luck than me.’

  He folded the paper once across. ‘Forget it. I’m sorry I asked. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘I used to know his wife. At college.’

  ‘Oh.’ I felt suddenly naked, and pushed my hair back from my face. It was the first time he had spoken about his past.

  ‘She’s as bad as him. They deserve each other.’

  I pulled a bagel out of the paper bag on the counter and chewed on it.

  ‘He’s not so bad, at times. He has his moments.’

  ‘He’s – ‘ He stopped. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m sure you’re right.’

  Days passed. I tried to call Jenny at the rehab centre but she wasn’t yet able to speak. Peter said she was doing OK when I spoke with him. Rachel was living in the Mosman house now. Whatever it was she had going with her good friend over in Rozelle hadn’t worked out.

  ‘Where is she sleeping?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. Jenny’s room? Our old room? What does it matter?’

  The phone rang one afternoon and I answered it after listening to it ring for a while. It was Ralph.

  ‘What time is it there?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Late. Early. Look, how is it going?’

  I sighed. ‘It’s so complicated.’

  ‘Complicated?’

  I waited. ‘There have been … developments.’

  ‘You’re being very mysterious.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘How’s your professor?’

  It took me a moment. ‘Married, I guess.’

  We chatted awkwardly. I told him I’d been seeing a bit of Richard, and Ralph’s voice grew envious and tight. I couldn’t understand why. It could have been just that Richard had been a friend of Ingrid’s, connected with her by association. Finally I told him that I would call him in a few days’ time. He seemed satisfied.

  Matt came and went grumpily. I went for long walks around the area, winding streets to the west, starkly straight avenues to the east. When I wasn’t walking I was reading books about New York architecture and the buildings of the East and West Villages. The skyscrapers didn’t interest me so much, with all their chrome and steel, but I loved the apartment buildings, the tenements and tall, high-ceilinged buildings of flats with their rows of windows onto other people’s lives. Many writers and artists and musicians had lived in the buildings along these streets. Matt seemed to know all their addresses, especially the ones still living. ‘Elvis Costello’s old
place is there,’ he’d say when I told him the street I’d walked by that day. Or, ‘Didn’t Philip Glass live on that block? I swear I saw him taking out his trash one day right there.’ These minor celebrities weren’t interesting to me but I came to be something of an expert on the shape of brickwork around windows and doors between the wars.

  Richard phoned one morning, saying that he’d seen some of Grey’s writing – I didn’t ask how he came by it – and that he still wasn’t sure about the writing in the diary, whether it was Ingrid’s or not. His voice was anxious and preoccupied. He was calling from the library. He was having trouble with the translation he was working on. It was a novel by a dead German writer. I could picture him standing in a quiet corner, hand running nervously through his hair.

  ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to figure it out,’ he said.

  ‘The translation? Don’t you have, you know, dictionaries – other translations?’

  ‘No,’ he said, and I realised my mistake. ‘The writing. I don’t know if I’ll be able to decide, conclusively, if it’s his, or hers. Or by someone else. I thought about taking it to an expert, a friend of mine who does some forensic work along this line.’

  ‘You should do whatever you need to do,’ I told him, but the prospect was depressing. ‘But maybe it’s not something that can be proved, or resolved.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can accept that,’ he said.

  ‘You might have to. Acceptance. Isn’t that one of the five stages?’

  He snorted. ‘Don’t think I’ve made it to that stage yet.’

  ‘Well, hurry along. It’s the final one.’

  ‘I know.’

  There was a silence that felt long. Since leaving the diary at his house it had taken me a while to feel really clean again. I didn’t want to go back into it. We said goodbye.

  I found myself in a bookshop that afternoon, in front of a table full of notebooks and diaries, stacks of little books identical to Ingrid’s diary in a rainbow of colours – pink, blue, yellow, pebbled white leather, all with the same shape and clasp. They seemed to multiply in front of my eyes. I blinked and turned away.

  There were shelves of books on architecture and I bought a couple on the buildings in the West Village and the Lower East Side. Back at the apartment I looked through them. Our building was there in the corner of one photograph, taken chiefly to display a building a few doors down. The edges of the terraces were visible, pieces of greenery showing over the ledges.

  When Richard came to the door that night, the first thing that struck me was that he was drunk, a thing I’d never seen or imagined before.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ I said.

  He lurched silently through the doorway. I stepped aside to let him pass and a cold halo of air came with him, as though it had stuck around his clothes all the way from the freezing street. I felt it on my face and it passed through to my skin. The cold and its passing over me seemed to take long, liquid seconds, during which he stopped, still and dark against the paleness of the walls. He was poised, deeply unsteady, about to spill.

  When he moved, he just about fell against me so I crashed into the wall. The door was still open, I saw out of the corner of my eye. It began its slow swing closed. His face was cold, cold against my neck, the hulk of his body a blackness beyond that, and then in seconds hot, a quicksilver interchange of temperature between our bodies.

  ‘Richard,’ I said. ‘Richard.’

  I wanted him to be there. But I thought in bitterness of those other times when Ingrid had indirectly driven a wanted man to me. Ralph, on my bed, hand on my leg; sitting on the couch, wet with rain.

  I knew what Richard was going to say before he said it: ‘I can’t bear it.’

  ‘I know,’ I sighed.

  28.

  I took a cup of coffee onto the terrace the next day, even though it was cold out there. My book was open on my lap, the pages fluttering in the breeze, and my coffee cooled quickly. The light was alternately soft and hard, fading in and out of bright sun as small clouds drifted over and across the sky. The bells in the birdcage tinkled. A pigeon came to sit on the high brick ledge that ran around the edge of the terrace. It was grey and blue with a baleful, redrimmed eye; an ordinary kind of pigeon. It hopped up on top of the birdcage, pecked it once or twice. I wondered how the cage looked to the bird, and whether the bird understood what it was, that it was meant to cage a bird like itself. Not exactly like itself; a more glamorous cousin of some kind. I had invented an imaginary inhabitant for the cage: a green and gold finch with a sweet, chirping voice. The pigeon tottered around awkwardly on its feet, twitching its head to one side and another, then it took off in flight, made graceful for a second by that motion. I stood to see it fly. It disappeared over the ledge and was gone; a few seconds later it landed on a windowsill on a building across the road and stayed there for a moment, greeting a couple of other pigeons, or that’s what it looked like. Then it flew away again, out of sight. I looked down at the empty cage. It didn’t show any rust, which seemed odd. The mirrors twinkled in the light.

  The sensation I felt was a bit like drinking a very cold drink and feeling the chill suffuse quickly through your stomach and into your body, leaving you just a little colder, or sometimes, somehow, hotter than before. Seeing the pigeon fly away from the cage made it all seem somehow more possible and more obvious than it had before. It must be true, I thought. She escaped. The metaphor was so conventional that I felt disappointed in myself. The clouds cleared so that the sun shone clear and bright, casting my shadow across the concrete ground.

  The sun kept shining. I walked down in the direction of Fleur’s studio. As it turned out we ran into each other on the street halfway between my place and hers.

  ‘I was on my way to see you,’ she said.

  Her hair was tied back from her face and she was wearing what looked like a school backpack on her shoulder and carrying a shopping bag from Toys R Us in one hand. The big schoolbag looked out of place on her thin body. She held a cigarette and smoked it quickly, finished it, threw it away. We walked downtown in the direction of her street and stopped outside a café not far from her studio. ‘Let’s go here,’ she said, and I followed her in. It was a cavernous space lit with a huge set of skylights in the back of the room, tall trees in pots along the side and back walls. We bought coffee and sat at a table.

  I pulled the photograph out of my bag and put it on the table between us. She took it quickly, covering it with her hand, as though hiding it from sight. I saw her glance at it before she unzipped her bag and put it inside. As soon as it disappeared I regretted having given it back to her, but it seemed like an important gesture of good faith.

  ‘And the calendar?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll get that to you later,’ I said.

  She was visibly anxious, her small hands moving nervously on the table from her coffee cup to her lap.

  ‘I think I understand,’ I said.

  She looked at me with a mix of condescension and impatience.

  ‘I meant it when I said I didn’t care about the paintings,’ I told her. ‘I don’t.’

  She glanced around us. The place was fairly quiet. The sound of a blender started up from behind the counter at the front, and the coffee machine hissed.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said. ‘Not here.’

  We stood up.

  ‘Can we talk at your place?’ I asked.

  She wanted to refuse. ‘OK,’ she said, unwillingly, and we left.

  Once inside her studio she shut the door and stood with her arms crossed in front of her. The Toys R Us bag clunked heavily on the floor as its contents came to rest. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘For a start, you can’t prove anything.’ I didn’t know whether she was talking about Ingrid or the paintings, or both.

  She went to the room at the back, the one with the futon bed, and came back out carrying a wide, black portfolio case. I followed her to the beanbags under the window, where she
kneeled on the floor. She opened the case, and I saw that it was full of paintings on paper. She pulled one out and laid it in front of me, closing the case. There were purple handprints on the painting, the hands of a little girl, as well as marks made by fingers and a brush, a smudged cloud in the corner, a triangle that looked like a lightning bolt folded back on itself.

  There had been handprints like these on some of the paintings at the Whitney. They served, I saw now, as some kind of sign of authenticity – the actual mark of the artist’s hand on the work. But who had laid down all the paint that surrounded them – who had held the paintbrush? She had been so dismissive of her father’s romantic concept of art – ‘the hand holding the brush’ – before. Her photography seemed more clearly than ever to be a statement refuting everything the paintings had stood for. The pathos and fury of the white-washed, dismembered little dolls on the walls nearby encoded something unspeakable. The triangle that appeared in almost every painting looked now like a silent gesture towards the trinity behind the work: Fleur, Maeve and Grey.

  ‘This is yours, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  ‘This one’s mine,’ she said, meditatively, gazing at the painting. ‘All mine.’ She looked up at me. ‘But they’re not – I think you know – they’re not all all mine, exactly,’ emphasising the repeated words.

  There was agony in her expression, although her voice was level and steady, and I looked away. It was as close as she would come to actually admitting anything. The long weight that she had carried, caught up in the intricacies of Maeve and Grey’s deception, was almost visible in the strain of her shoulders, the careful carriage of her head and body that was at times, like now, too mature, too knowing.

  Fleur put the painting back inside the case, but didn’t zip it shut. She stood up. One hand on her waist, she was again like any other passive-aggressive teenager.

  ‘There’s been speculation in the past,’ she said, dismissively. ‘It never went anywhere. It usually came from people who were jealous. There’s a lot of that in the whole art world.’ I could only imagine what lengths Grey and Maeve would go to in order to squash those kinds of questions. ‘Ingrid figured it out. And you say you don’t care?’