‘I’m curious. But no, I don’t care.’
She eyed me suspiciously.
‘I’m not going to. blackmail you,’ I said.
Her laugh was hard. ‘I don’t think you would. So. There you go. Are you all through here?’
Just about.’ I paused. ‘So, Fleur. Hypothetically. It occurred to me that if someone – if someone wanted to leave town – hypothetically – without anyone knowing – September 11 would be a good day to choose. To leave.’
She was very still, and met my eyes, expressionless.
‘Of course, everyone you left behind would have to believe that you were dead,’ I said.
We looked at each other.
‘Everyone,’ she echoed, eventually. ‘It would only work if everyone believed that you were dead. This hypothetical person.’
I waited.
‘I can’t help you,’ she said. ‘You can’t make sense of it. You need to stop now.’ Her words came out stilted, as though she were making a conscious effort to use as few as possible to convey what she needed to say.
‘Can you just tell me –’ I started.
‘No.’ Her voice was firm. She went and sat down on a beanbag under the window and pulled out her cigarettes. Her hands were steady as she lit one.
‘You can’t tell me where she went.’
When she faced me she was innocent-looking, eyebrows lifted and knitted just slightly in concern, and her eyes were unreadable.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said flatly, quietly.
‘Did you help her?’ I asked.
But she had said everything she was going to say to me.
If I wanted to make her tell me whatever she knew, the things in my manila envelope would provide some leverage. But she had a steadfast look about her and I wondered what choice she would make in the end, whether the leverage would be effective. Something told me it might not work. I understood why Ingrid had trusted her.
‘OK,’ I said.
And why would Ingrid have trusted me? And why should Fleur trust me now? That little stone, the secret pebble in my chest, pressed hard against me, its compressed currency of resentment and envy grown hollow over the years. I felt transparent as water in front of her, and ashamed.
Her expression was blank in its studied way and I saw everything there I looked for, and probably imagined it all: fear; relief; anger; guilt.
Downstairs the velvet sofa was still there in the shopfront window, pair of unlaced boots on the floor beside it. A woman coming out of the door of the shop almost collided with me. She was carrying two large shopping bags in each hand and wearing high heels that made a scratching noise on the pavement as she stopped. She smiled, embarrassed, and swung her bags out of the way. Her face was familiar: she was the woman in the painting at Maeve’s gallery, the updated Madame X. She continued down the block, purposeful, a little unsteady in her heels, walking north. I paused, and turned around, and walked downtown.
By the time I reached Ground Zero it was late afternoon, the air grey with smoke rising from the grates and holes in the street, and evening waited, almost there. The sky in the west had a yellowish tinge. Getting there had been trickier than I had expected; without the landmarks of the towers to guide me, my sense of direction got turned around and I had circled back once or twice before reaching the site. As I turned onto Church Street it was there in front of me very suddenly, and I walked past the little chapel and the tall, black, glass Hilton until I was standing there at the wire fence. There were people all around, some looking at the site, most on their way somewhere, as usual. Someone tried to give me a leaflet with a heading that was something to do with Bush and Osama bin Laden and Iraq, a conspiracy. I raised my hand and refused. Glimpses of the hole in the ground showed through the fence, the chalky concrete white and grey. It was pitifully small, and empty. I looked back at the chapel across the road, St Paul’s, still standing there in its green surround of lawn and trees. Paul, 9, I remembered, and wondered if she had been indicating this place in her brief note for that day.
Shoppers poured out of the solid bulk of the department store opposite, red-and-white bags in hand. The footpath felt very narrow, congested with people. I had carried away a sense of loneliness from Fleur’s apartment that sank and grew within me. I thought of the manila envelope and the secrets in it that Fleur had carried around for so long, and the burden of whatever Ingrid had entrusted her with before her departure, as I had decided now to call it.
Other people stood next to me at the fence, visitors at a gravesite. A man paused a few feet away, a bunch of roses in his hand, red roses, and looked uncertain what to do with them. I moved away. I did not know how I felt, or what it was I thought I had understood, ever, about Ingrid’s life or death. Or departure. Evening fell and I walked back uptown.
Horrible doubts circled me, walking those blocks. I’d wanted to imagine that she could have escaped, that she might have, from the life she had made with Grey. Even when I’d expected her to, she hadn’t. Was I reframing her story to make it more consonant with what I wanted to believe of her – the bravery and brilliance that I had admired as her friend? It was romantic to believe that she had escaped after all, and fooled us all, and made a new life for herself somewhere unknown, like a person in a witness protection program. Maybe that was real freedom. It was easier to bear than the thought that she had meant to continue her life as it was, refusing help and understanding and any other way out. It was easier to bear than imagining her face in Richard’s Polaroid photograph, and the bruise, and whatever violent death he thought that she had faced in the end. I thought of the picture of her on the Promenade, my black-and-white copy, and again regretted having returned it. And then, as I approached SoHo, the blocks close to Fleur’s studio, I wondered if Fleur had seen this desire of mine to believe in Ingrid’s escape, and manipulated and fed it. It was the secret, cherished hope of everyone who had lost someone on that day, after all – that she was not dead but missing, just as it said in the few remaining notices posted by relatives that still fluttered from telegraph poles and the walls of phone boxes here and there downtown. I saw Fleur as Ingrid’s secret champion but there was every reason to think that she was also protecting her father, Maeve, herself. Her face when I left had been unreadable – had there been triumph in there as well, the sense of her own escape, her own success?
My mind ran again and again to thoughts of where Ingrid would have gone, if she could have escaped. It was difficult to imagine Victoria entering into the picture, and I couldn’t imagine her wanting to talk to me. Aside from her I couldn’t think of anywhere or anyone; I didn’t know Ingrid’s early life well enough to know what places there might be that were truly secret from Grey, from Fleur. I believed now that Ingrid would have kept the details of her plan secret even if Fleur had known about the escape itself and had been there with her after that first departure from the island, over the bridge to Brooklyn, to the Promenade where Fleur had taken that last picture. Where to from there? JFK? A rental car? A Greyhound bus? Now the skyline from that photograph grew hazier as I tried to remember it, and it seemed as though it could have been taken from any city, any place. It looked like a solid thing that dissolved into particles of air under any pressure, any touch; a mirror that reflected back to me my own unrecognised desire.
The decision that was hardest, that I put off and came back to, was whether to tell anyone else, and who to tell. If it was true that Ingrid had escaped, then it seemed as though I ought to keep it to myself. I saw myself and Fleur as lone secret keepers, guarding a dangerous truth. Grey lurked on the edge of this vision, prowling, patient, threatening. Fleur had counted somehow on the fact that I wouldn’t tell anyone and that I would stop asking questions. But more questions pulled at me and I battled the need to share my thoughts with someone else. If Richard really started to believe that Ingrid might be alive then he would surely go tearing off to find her. Ralph would not rest until he found out
the truth, and his expectations of me might never end. I thought of Richard’s cold face against my neck the night before, his broken voice, and I knew that I would keep everything to myself, for now.
My feet began to hurt and the pavement felt harder and harder. I found myself on Bleecker Street, passed the place I had visited with Fleur, and walked into another bar one block away. Jones’s fair hair appeared at the end of the room, behind a brightly coloured jukebox; I saw the angle of his arm resting on a table, then he moved and it wasn’t him at all. Someone younger, with an American accent I could hear from my seat at the bar. He caught my eye and I looked away. Little illuminated plastic skulls hung on a cord across the mirror behind the bar, glowing green and black. The American voices around me talked on, here and there another accent, an unplaceable one pitched lower than the others. I missed Jones’s ability to show up when I didn’t expect it, when I needed it. I half-expected him to walk in now, but he didn’t. The jukebox was playing a track that had been everywhere in the city over the past weeks, a song by Wilco about a heavy metal drummer, innocence, the river. I thought about calling Eve but couldn’t think of how to ask the questions I wanted to in a way that would make sense.
I had been chasing this story half-heartedly in pieces and fits and starts for months now, and I let myself wonder for the first time what it had all been for. I had been acting as Ralph’s surrogate in the beginning and now, unhappily, held information and suspicions that I didn’t want to share with him. I was a hopeless detective. Nothing felt the way it did in stories about private investigators or hard-boiled journalists who would risk everything to know the last piece of truth. The burning desire in me now was not to know, but to forget; not to go on digging, but to stop and rest, especially if, as I suspected, Ingrid had calculated the risk herself and decided to stay hidden from everyone – me, Ralph, Richard. If Richard wanted to pursue his version of the story, he could. My turning away from that was probably a form of cowardice, but I could live with that. If Ingrid was out there somewhere and wanted to come back in one day, she would know where to find me.
A vista of infinite patience seemed to open up before me. It had only been a year, just over a year, since it all happened; a year from now, Fleur might decide to tell me more. Things could change. It might seem less important to her by then.
In all the places and scenes of my life I saw myself having drifted slowly to the margins: on the edge of the conversation, overhearing; playing at being Jones’s bit on the side; downstage in shadow, with Ingrid in the spotlight. But I wanted my part in it to be finished, for the script to change. There was something else here for me, if I could find my way to it without Ingrid.
Back at the apartment in the early hours of the morning there were messages scrawled next to the phone in Matt’s writing. Richard. Jones. Trinh. The freezer was empty, nothing left to drink.
In the bedroom Ingrid’s tiny red elephant stood on the chest of drawers, half-buried by a scarf and a folded newspaper from days before. I took it in my hand. Something about it looked wrong. The red wasn’t quite what I remembered when I pictured it on the dresser in Ingrid’s room at Kirribilli. It might have been the light. Was it a replacement, a decoy? The real one could be with her now, perhaps the one thing she had decided she couldn’t leave behind. I was good at spotting small differences, or so I liked to think. There were little black marks for eyes and tail, and the legs and trunk weren’t quite symmetrical, carved carefully but not with absolute precision. The elephant looked much like it always had, but the more I looked at it the less it seemed to be the same. It now looked like an impostor. But my memory wasn’t good enough; I couldn’t be sure. In the end I decided it didn’t matter.
I went to bed and prayed for a dreamless sleep.
The dreams of Ingrid’s death that had forced themselves on me those first few weeks in the city had gone since I’d come back, replaced by occasional visions of her as the menacing Carlotta. But that night, after I’d looked at the elephant and crashed in bed, was different. I woke up to the sound of an impossible bird call, a mournful Sydney sound that I’d never heard in New York, unsure if what I’d seen was a dream or a vision, a premonition or a wish, future, past or present. It could have been an image of heaven or hell or that strange afterlife of the ancients where spirits live on in a sorry half-existence, deprived of the ability to touch.
As it sometimes is in dreams, I wasn’t sure if I was myself or her or some other being entirely; it was both my body and not my body, and it carried itself forward with an exhausted determination, all other feeling spent. I had arrived at this place after a long drive, after several wrong turns that had led only to gullies and dead ends. The house that appeared through the trees was as I had expected it to be: wooden shingles, old paint, a casement window opened at the side that seemed to promise that someone was home.
The cars on the distant highway sounded like the roar of waves, and then the break of actual waves sounded. They broke and tore at the edge of hearing, another set following in their wake.
The front door was wide and painted eggshell white, chipped in places. Six high squares of mottled glass showed a white-walled hallway inside; a framed photograph hung just opposite. I recognised the two girls in it, one laughing and looking into the camera, eyes squinted in a smile, the other looking at the laughing girl, just smiling, one hand raised to her mouth.
The keys were light and cold in my hand. All my patience left me and I longed for the journey to be over.
‘Are you there?’ The words disappeared into the space, no echo back.
I opened my eyes; the mournful cry of the bird dissolved into a siren’s wail. My hand shook when I lifted it to my face but my eyes and cheeks were dry.
There was quite a story to tell Ralph in the end, woven from pieces of the actual or possible versions. We stayed on the phone for hours, with him listening and me patiently sharing with him a carefully constructed edition of the past weeks. Fleur fascinated him, the child genius, and I told him more about how sweet and grown-up she was, the privilege of being shown some of her early works on paper, the disturbing brilliance of her photographs and videos and how she had let me assist in a photo shoot at her studio.
‘It seemed as though she and Ingrid had a special kind of relationship from the beginning,’ I told him. ‘I think she probably did see Ingrid as a kind of mother, or a sister, a friend. They loved each other.’
‘She said that,’ he said. ‘Ingrid said how much she loved her.’
Hearing about Fleur seemed to calm some of Ralph’s anguish, the idea of her being there as a positive presence in Ingrid’s life, so that it wasn’t all defined by her miserable subjection to Grey. ‘I’ll send you pictures,’ I said, thinking of a snapshot I had from my earlier visit, of Fleur in the studio near the astroturf set. This made him happy.
He was scandalised and fascinated by the story of Trinh’s secret working life as a masked dominatrix. It injected a frisson of sex and danger into the dull conservatism he had expected of a Classics department.
‘Does she like doing it?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell. It seems like the best option for her.’
‘What does she wear? Does she have to provide her own outfits?’
I made it up.
I embellished my own tale of heartbreak too, the inevitable fate of the discarded mistress. Ralph pushed me again, insensitively, on the question of whether Jones had slept with Ingrid, but I told him that it was very unlikely. Richard I left out of it and he didn’t ask.
The conversation ended formally, like the conclusion of a presentation. I wondered whether Ralph was taking notes. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re all finished up there?’
‘I’m all finished with Ingrid,’ I said.
And with you, I thought – feeling treacherous, proud, sad, relieved. I pictured him there in the conservatory – but something told me he was in another room, perhaps at the dining table or on the sofa faci
ng Ingrid’s velvet chair. Would her presence in the house slowly drain away, or would it persist, for him? What difference would it make, being able to know the story as he now did? If there was going to be some kind of process of moving on, it wasn’t clear where he would go from here. I thought about his medicated heart struggling to stay in time and turned away from the thought as surely as if I had removed my hand decisively from his skin. Empty air filled the gap.
‘I might stay on for a while anyway. I could find some work – of the non-dominatrix variety. There’s a show of Bonnard’s late interiors coming on at the Met next month. I’d like to see it.’
He didn’t seem to mind. My obligations were discharged. I was a liar and a thief. We said goodbye.
After that conversation I wanted to leave the apartment, get out of sight of the phone that seemed to look at me accusingly, knowing all the words I hadn’t said. The day was cold and sharp, early afternoon sky the pearly whitish-grey of a dove’s wing. A couple of subway changes brought me to Brooklyn Heights and I started off down Montague Street, intending, I suppose, a kind of farewell to the Promenade and all the questions and doubts that had come to inhabit that few feet of pavement, the empty miles of view. A few days earlier the first snow had fallen, just an inch or two that hadn’t stuck anywhere much, but here and there a few frozen, grey lumps of it sat on the pavement, pushed into shady corners and pressed up against garbage cans on the street. I turned into a shop a couple of blocks down the streets incongruously called Manhattan Muffins, the name in faded green capitals on the awning next to a simple rendering of the city skyline. It was both shabbier and more busy than the muffin shop I had visited before, the last one on Montague before the Promenade. Waiting in line for my coffee and bagel I noticed a picture tacked to the wall – one of those commemorative images of the Twin Towers, a photograph that seemed to distort the buildings so that they stood even taller and more apart from the others than they ever really had. A red banner unfurled across the bottom of the image with 9-11 – Never Forget inscribed in machine-made cursive letters.
The Legacy Page 37
