The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  Fuck, I thought, and almost said it, so strong was my own desire to forget and escape these reminders. Muffins of all varieties were arranged on the shelves of the glass case in front of me when I reached the counter. I asked for a coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. The dark-haired guy in a clean white uniform turned around to call the order across to the others and turned back for my money. By then I was holding the photograph, the black-and-white copy of the photograph that was still sitting in my bag. One last try, I thought. My throat wanted to close over but I held it out to him.

  ‘Do you know her?’ I asked. My weeks in the city had already trained me out of the use of any unnecessary preliminary words.

  He looked at it. His whole body seemed to nod very slightly, as though he were rocking back and forth on his toes. ‘Joe!’ he called out suddenly, whipping his head around to the three men behind him who were pouring coffee and spreading cream cheese on bagels. ‘Someone’s asking about your girlfriend.’ He looked back at me and met my eyes for a short second, neutral shading into something else – contempt, resentment, pity – and held out his hand for money. I paid him and he passed me my change and my bagel in a white paper bag.

  Another man passed me a white paper cup of coffee and said, ‘I’m Joe.’ He exchanged a few muttered words with the guy at the register and then squeezed out from behind the counter to meet me. His eyes flicked quickly to the picture in my hand and then he nodded towards the door.

  He was thin and young, a few years older than Fleur maybe, with a beautiful, serious face. He wore the white uniform with a diffident slouch. It looked as though he was experimenting with growing a moustache. I wanted to tell him to give that up. We stood on the street just outside the shop doorway. He lit a cigarette, cupping his hands around the lighter. The smell of the smoke was acrid, poisonous and tempting, and everything around us seemed to grow dirtier and more toxic as I waited, all of it becoming solid and determined in a new way by what I felt I was about to discover. A stubborn patch of snow near the kerb was fast becoming ice, trapping like fossils all the cigarette ash and pieces of dirt that had got stuck in it over the past day.

  ‘Did Ingrid come here?’ I asked him.

  He nodded. ‘Ingrid? That was her name, yeah.’ It was a Brooklyn accent, born and bred. I guessed that he hadn’t been sure of her name before and I could see him attaching it to the woman in his mind.

  ‘When did you see her last?’

  ‘That was a long time ago, lady.’

  ‘How long?’ I was persistent. My feet had turned to ice, my heart to stone and metal.

  He shrugged. ‘Last summer.’ He gave me a long, sad look. ‘I saw her picture in the paper. In the Times, you know, the pictures they ran of all the victims.’ He dragged on his cigarette. ‘I had to look at all those pictures. Saw them all.’

  ‘So you didn’t see her after that?’ I asked.

  ‘I was surprised – to see her picture with all those, you know.’ He glanced up and down the street nervously, probably anxious to get back to work, and nodded towards the store. ‘The guys. They knew I liked her.’ He smiled halfheartedly. ‘She used to come in every now and again. I always took her order.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’ I repeated.

  He shrugged again. ‘It was a few days later. Not quite a week. After 9/11, after that. It wasn’t her that came in. It was her little sister.’

  The word ‘sister’ tore across my hearing – Victoria, with her big sunglasses and flashy ring, out of place inside the little shop in her summery black dress. Here. A few days later.

  Then he said, ‘You know, the young one. With the dark hair.’

  He was talking about Fleur. I breathed out. ‘That was her stepdaughter.’

  He blinked. ‘Whatever. You know who I mean? Skinny girl, make-up on her eyes. They were usually here together.’

  I nodded.

  ‘She came in. She ordered Ingrid’s order. I knew it was for her, she always had the same thing, this kind of weird thing – a blueberry muffin warmed up in the microwave, sliced in half, butter on it.’

  Yes, I thought. There it was, a memory of Ingrid’s hands, their short fingers, spreading butter on a muffin, waiting while it melted in. A thick, old china plate. A dented Sydney table.

  ‘She came in by herself, the girl. But she ordered her own thing too, her own bagel, her own coffee. Two coffees.’ He looked at the long, wooden bench on the street in front of the shop window. One leg of it was chained to a heavy link set into the cement pavement. No-one was sitting there now in the cold. ‘I noticed it because, you know, I liked seeing her. Ingrid – that was her name.’ He blinked slowly. ‘I guess she was waiting outside here on the bench. I looked out – I saw her from behind. She had that blonde hair.’ He looked at me, and his gaze was intelligent and direct. ‘So what was her picture doing in the paper that day? I wondered about that.’

  One eyebrow lifted and lowered. His mouth was thin and handsome under the ridiculous short moustache. He ground his cigarette out with the heel of a steel-toed boot. It joined all the other crap dredging into the cracks in the concrete path, the ice, the gutters. My coffee cup was warm against my hands and I took a sip, scalding my lips and tongue.

  ‘So where is she now?’ he asked me.

  ‘That’s the big question,’ I said.

  He nodded slowly.

  ‘Well. Thanks,’ I said eventually.

  He shoved his hands down into his pockets and pushed the door open with his shoulder, disappearing back inside.

  I lifted my coffee to my mouth more warily this time and sipped at it. The sky above had grown denser, more pearlescent. I looked down the hill towards the Promenade, knowing that if I went down there I would find a changed landscape; my steps would lead irresistibly to that formerly elusive spot where Fleur had stood and taken the picture; the buildings in the skyline would align themselves as if by magic to match the pattern of shapes in the background of the photograph.

  I looked down at the picture in my hands, at Ingrid’s mocking smile. With one layer of mystery stripped away her look was somehow more silent, more inscrutable even than before.

  That narrative of escape I had wished for seemed to be true. So why didn’t I feel more elation? I was glad to know that Richard was wrong, that Grey hadn’t murdered her. It felt good to give up that image of him as a killer, which had never sat quite comfortably with me. But a guilty, resentful part of me was sorry to give up the possibility that Ingrid had died in the terrible events of that day just like all those other, ordinary hundreds and thousands, all her promise and exceptionality turned to that sudden end. I grudgingly admired the fact that she had chosen that to be her known and accepted fate. But it wasn’t so ordinary after all, when I considered it: to join the martyred mass of people – heroes – whose names would be read out at memorials for a long time to come, whose pictures had appeared with an obituary in the Times in those big spreads.

  I remembered the feeling I had experienced at Fleur’s apartment that last time, knowing and accepting that Ingrid had not trusted me with any of this information, any of these secrets. I tried to turn my mind to wondering about her whereabouts. I pictured an overnight bag, already packed and prepared for weeks, waiting for the right moment to leave, the grip of a hand on it – and that was as far as I could get. My imagination stopped and baulked, just like a horse refusing to jump over an obstacle too high, a river too wide. It was enough for the moment to know that she was somewhere; not there, across the river, in particles of dust. It was a secret that, for now, still belonged to her.

  I went back inside the store and grabbed a card from a stack next to the fridge full of juices and Coca-Cola. Manhattan Muffins. The little green line drawing of the skyline stretched across the card. I took another. I had my manila envelope; now I had a witness, of sorts. At the stationery store a few doors down I bought a stamp and an envelope, borrowed their pen and wrote Fleur’s address on it, wrote my name and email address on the back
of one of the cards, sealed the card inside. By now I was familiar with all the signs of dissembling that marked my handwriting, in Richard’s estimation: the uneven slant, the give-away ‘shark’s tooth’ sharp angle of the upstroke of the letters r, n, m. I let them be.

  That vista of patience I had found at the end of my long walk from the Trade Center site a few days earlier opened up in front of me again and softened the new hardness I saw all around, with everything now too sharply defined. There was no forgetting; I would never need the imperative reminder of the memorial picture inside the muffin shop. The ancient residue of smog and ash shadowed the bricks of the building behind me, the corners of the mailbox, and I closed my hand over the dirty lever, opened it, pushed the letter in, and walked away. Then I remembered my recent dream, the sense of arrival at a journey’s end, and felt a renewed certainty that I had glimpsed a piece of reality. The frozen street gave way to another landscape altogether, a blurry, brilliant blue horizon in the distance, fringed with green and warmth.

  Richard sat across from me in the coffee shop where we had arranged to meet that first time, when I was playing at stalking him. After I had told him I was through with it, that I wanted to get on with mourning, he hadn’t called me back for a couple of weeks. I had relied on my store of forbearance, knowing it was a risk to wait but part of me knowing it would pay off. His voice on the phone had sent a surge of relief through my veins, along with something else. Hope, a delicate shaft of light. Now we sat at the same table, only on different sides than we had before. When we first met it had been Richard who had banned her name from the conversation; now it was me. He poured sugar into his coffee and stirred it.

  ‘Trinh won the fellowship she was applying for,’ he said. ‘I heard from her the other day. So she’s going to Rome.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘And Jones is spending his sabbatical in London, I hear.’

  He didn’t look at me. I didn’t reply.

  My cherry pie arrived, two forks on the plate.

  ‘And where are you off to?’ I asked.

  ‘Me? Nowhere. I have a lot of work to do. And I’m getting very attached to my seat at the New York Public.’

  The ice cream next to the pie had started to melt and puddle, black flecks of vanilla dust against the white. ‘I suppose I should be off home again soon myself,’ I said. Money was running out. I had pretty much decided to take Matt up on the offer of working for the artist Carson, whoever he was. When I thought about Sydney, now, it felt somehow less substantial than before, and it was becoming harder to imagine a place for myself there. Here in New York it was easier to imagine – not a place, exactly, yet, but a way of making one. A lot, not everything, depended on what Richard had to say. Something rattled for a moment way down in there behind my ribs – a brief, guilty, excited flutter like a bird’s wings against my back, and then quieted into silence.

  He picked up the other fork and turned it over in his fingers. Flip, flip. It caught the light gently. ‘But you’ve only just arrived.’

  I let myself smile.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks firstly to my mother Lyn, a fantastic agent and a great reader, and to my father John, for their unstinting support and encouragement. I am indebted to the brilliant Bruce Gardiner, who inadvertently inspired this story years ago in a tutorial on Henry James and George Eliot. Thanks also to Debra Adelaide, one of the earliest and best readers of this book; my editors, Nicola O’Shea and Linda Funnell; my fabulous agent in New York, Claudia Ballard; my friends Tanya Agathocleous, Yelena Baraz, Bridget Crone, Heather Furnas and Tina Lupton; and my patient husband, Danny Fisher.

  Many thanks to Faber and Faber Ltd for kind permission to include an extract from ‘Portrait of a Lady’ by T.S. Eliot, published in full in his Collected Poems 1909–1962.

  About the Author

  Kirsten Tranter grew up in Sydney and lived in New York from 1998 to 2006, where she completed a PhD on English Renaissance literature at Rutgers University. She has published fiction, poetry and literary criticism. This is her first novel. She lives in Sydney with her husband and son.

  Praise for The Legacy

  ‘[Kirsten Tranter’s] first novel, The Legacy, shows her to be a novelist with a commanding talent – a tough plain-stylist who can people her fictional world with characters of great vivacity and vigour … Full of suave and stunning evocations of Sydney and Manhattan, this sparkling and spacious novel captures the smell and sap of young people half in love with everyone they’re vividly aware of, and groping to find themselves like the answer to an erotic enigma’

  Peter Craven, The Monthly

  ‘This hypnotic debut from Australian author Tranter pays homage to Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady while offering a suspenseful story line worthy of Patricia Highsmith … While Tranter’s sedate pacing avoids typical thriller antics and conventional crime plot twists, she raises some wickedly keen questions about art world wheeling and dealing’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘An intelligent and engaging novel that is dense, intricate, detailed, acutely observed, and beautifully written in a voice that is measured and consistent from start to finish.’

  Debra Adelaide, author of The Household Guide to Dying

  ‘The Legacy never lacks self-assurance or narrative drive’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘[Tranter is] an innovative revisionist unafraid of challenge and more than up for the risks, tempering the satisfaction of the known with the surprises of the new. The Legacy is an entertaining literary thriller that skilfully describes the almost pleasurable pain of love and life denied’

  Weekend Australian

  ‘the journey through this nuanced and assured first novel is a compelling one’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Tranter’s characters are well-written, her prose sophisticated and rich (but never heavy handed, despite many literary references), and self-conscious in the right moments so that it never dips into cliché’

  Australian Bookseller + Publisher

  ‘Tranter’s novel is an assured, complex and beautifully crafted work with a measured and restrained tone that is lyrical and never cloying’

  Courier Mail

  ‘Beautifully written. You will be immersed in the story from a couple of pages in’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘You can’t/won’t put it down. Riveting’

  Woman’s Day

  ‘Fully realised, fascinating characters inhabit a rarefied world split between Sydney’s upmarket North Shore and the New York art scene. An elegantly written exploration of love, art, loss and grief, this is one of those books whose world you miss once you’ve turned the final page’

  Who Weekly

  Copyright

  The author gratefully acknowledges the support of

  the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts

  during the writing of this novel.

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  First published in Australia in 2010

  This edition published in 2011

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  harpercollins.com.au

  Copyright © Kirsten Tranter 2010

  The right of Kirsten Tranter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Tranter, Kirsten.

  The legacy / Kirsten Tranter.

  ISBN: 978-0-7322-9081-8 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 978-0-7304-9431-7 (ePub)

  Missing persons–Fiction.

  A823.4

  Cover design by Natalie Winter, adapted by Mark Thacker

  Cover images: ‘Whisper’ © Samantha Everton; branches by Shutterstock.com