The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

I knew ‘video’ as Latin for ‘I see’, dredged up from some mental warehouse of etymology. I looked up ‘maneo’ later in my aunt’s battered old Latin dictionary. To stay, remain anywhere. To wait. To await one’s fate.

  But neither of us had ever met Ingrid that night Ralph first came into Videomania. It was late 1996, towards the end of second semester, a warm October night. Ralph came in just behind another, older guy who dumped a stack of videos in the return slot. They slid down in a jumbled pile into the box below. Ralph was wearing a brown jacket made of velvety corduroy, his hands deep in the pockets, and tortoiseshell-framed glasses. His brown hair was damp and he ran his hand through it. He watched the screen above for a moment. There were two other customers in the shop, two girls together, and they came up to the counter with two movies. I glanced at them – comedies, new releases – and fetched them from the shelf in the back. They giggled with each other. When they left, Ralph leaned towards me on the counter and tipped his glasses forward so that he was looking over them at me.

  ‘Would you happen to have a Ben-Hur, 1860, with the duplicated line on page one-sixteen?’

  I smiled and held his gaze for a second. He was quoting from the movie on screen, a scene that had passed a moment before he’d come in. I reached down to flick the pages of the telephone-book-sized volume on the counter, a big reference list of movies that you could use to look up any film and any actor, pretending to search.

  ‘Or a Chevalier Audubon 1840?’ he asked.

  I closed the book with a slap. ‘Nobody would,’ I said, playing along. ‘There isn’t one.’

  He smiled with his lips closed and looked down, tapped his fingers lightly on the counter.

  ‘Isn’t this the part where I tell you it’s going to rain and you bring out a bottle of whisky?’ I asked.

  He looked up. ‘I can pop around the corner for that,’ he said. ‘Or we could try The Maltese Falcon. That’s the film I’m meant to be watching for class tomorrow.’ He stood up straight and began to pull his shoulders back, gave up and slumped.

  ‘You begin to interest me. Vaguely,’ I said, and he blinked, hands back in pockets, and gave me a sidelong look.

  I bent down to collect the stack of returns. Soft porn with an Arthurian legend theme. A large, jewelled sword featured prominently on the first cover alongside a woman with very long and thoughtfully placed blonde hair and a knight with his visor up who was either tying her to a tree or undoing her bonds. It was from the refined end of the section over in the far corner of the shop. When I straightened up, the little bell on the door rang as it opened and closed and Ralph was gone.

  An hour later it seemed unlikely that he would return. I was stifling a yawn and watching the start of The Maltese Falcon when he walked back in, soaked a little by the rain and more rumpled than he had looked before. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Got distracted.’ He was holding a bottle in a brown paper bag and there was a soft packet of cigarettes crumpled in his top pocket.

  ‘Come on back,’ I invited him, and opened the section of the counter that came up like a drawbridge.

  He grinned, and showed his teeth for the first time. One of his incisors overlapped the other teeth at a crooked angle. There were a couple of chairs behind the counter, cracked vinyl that could have started out any colour and were now greyish green, and he took one. His legs were long and thin and he crossed them at the knee with a practised motion, wound close around each other.

  When Ralph told the story at parties and in the campus bar he was usually quite drunk but could always remember the names of the films we watched in the store and back at his flat around the corner after my shift finished. At one point we started Sir Galahard, the returned Arthurian porn that I hadn’t got around to shelving, and stopped in fits of laughter after ten minutes as the second band of maidens entered the knight’s chamber. Mostly we had stuck to noir, and better-tailored damsels in distress.

  I remembered the movies too, but it was never me who told the story. By the third time I heard him tell it, to some people who had probably heard it already the first or second time, I stood up and went to get another drink when he got to the part about me inviting him back behind the counter. The next time I stayed to hear it, and it didn’t feel so bad. Ralph and I couldn’t have told this part of the story the same way. The hopeless flip my heart had made when he’d smiled and ducked through the drawbridge of the counter, and pushed a cigarette into his mouth as he grabbed one of the small glasses I had pulled out. What would he have said to that?

  He didn’t strike me as exactly good-looking at first, although his face was intelligent and interesting. Usually I fell for conventionally attractive men with evidently damaged personalities and psychic wounds, against all my better instincts. I had been in love before, or so I had thought: a long high-school romance that ended in boredom on my part and chronic infidelity on his; passionate, short-lived flings in various places in the year I had spent travelling before going to university. But I’d never believed in love at first sight, so I dismissed the sheer clarity of that feeling when he smiled and joined me. I didn’t understand it or reflect on it; it was a note in a new key, unknown, pure-sounding. It made more sense to me later to believe that my feelings for Ralph grew over time like a friendship – like our friendship actually did – but in reality the dark heart of it, complete and complex as an old city, was there from the very start.

  Occasionally, in Ralph’s retelling, he included a brief version of the story of what he’d been doing in that hour before he came back with the bottle; it involved something anonymous in the laneway behind the bottle shop.

  ‘I’ve never seen Ben-Hur,’ the guy next to me said the fourth time I heard the story, sitting on a sagging couch that seemed determined to swallow us all over the course of the evening. We were at the campus bar.

  ‘The book, not the movie,’ Ralph said to him scornfully. ‘We’re talking about The Big Sleep.’

  The point of the story seemed to be mainly to display the extent of his ability to quote film dialogue on the spur of the moment, and to exhort admiration for my own abilities in that respect. I agreed that The Big Sleep was worth knowing so well, although not that many people did. In this sense I did feel that we had found a soul mate of sorts in one another. But that wasn’t what Ralph showed by the story. By that fourth time his seemingly endless displays of cleverness were beginning to grate on me. I grabbed the knee of the guy who hadn’t seen Ben-Hur. He was wearing black jeans. ‘Maybe we could watch it sometime,’ he said, and kissed me. I sank further into my seat and felt Ralph get up from his place on my other side and leave.

  The night Ralph and I first met, I’d fallen asleep on his couch and woken up in the morning to the faint buzz of static on the television screen in front of me and violent sounds of smashing glass outside as the recycling trucks trundled by. We had made bacon and toast for breakfast together, with strong tea. Ralph lived alone in a small flat with high ceilings and lemon-coloured walls in one of the art deco apartment buildings in a street at the back of the Cross as it sloped down towards wealthy Elizabeth Bay. It was only about a ten-minute walk away from the video shop down narrow, unevenly paved laneways and doglegged streets.

  I sometimes dreamt about living on my own, the pleasure of a space that was entirely mine, but the expense meant it was out of the question for me. I’d finally graduated up to the best room in my house, the balcony room at the front, after living there for a year. It was a crumbling Victorian terrace in Newtown a few blocks away from the south side of campus that I shared with two other students in fields that were mysteriously alien to me – speech pathology and medicine. The balcony sagged alarmingly in one spot, but that was easy to avoid, and I loved to lean on the iron-lace railing with a drink in the evening, watching the smog hanging dense in the sky through the leaves of a tall eucalyptus tree at the front of the house and the fizz of the streetlights starting up for the night.

  After that night Ralph came to sit with me at the video store
most Wednesday nights and we would watch whatever he’d been assigned to see in his Film Studies class, or a Humphrey Bogart film, or whatever was on top of the return pile that we hadn’t seen. We watched The Big Sleep together every now and again. For some reason Ralph hated Casablanca and left in a bad mood the one night I wanted to watch it. I watched it to the end, and was crying into a tissue when the last customer of the night came in and wanted a list of every film with any of the Baldwin brothers in it, and rented them all. There had been stranger requests.

  It turned out that we were both students at Sydney University, the old, gothic sandstone campus in the inner city, miles west from the Cross – I was in my second year and Ralph was in his third – and had somehow never wound up in the same classes, although we were both studying Arts and taking classes in English and Art History. Ralph’s schedule was chaotic, with courses in every department from Russian to Archaeology, Philosophy and Linguistics while he tried (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to decide on a major.

  I used to tease him that he chose a subject determined by the beauty of the building it was housed in, always avoiding the ones stuck in the ugly modern extensions around campus. Ralph stuck with Philosophy much longer than he should have simply because he loved the winding stone staircases in the old quad and the worn gargoyles that jutted out from the gutters, vomiting water when it rained. That, and the fact that the classes were filled with more thoughtful, good-looking boys than other subjects. The big concrete library was a source of constant disappointment and disgust to him, and whatever time he spent studying on campus was based in the small Art History collection in the Mills building, with its whitewashed, mossy exterior walls, next to the dilapidated tennis courts. We shared a fascination with the Transient Building across from Mills, a huge, rust-edged structure of corrugated metal that had stood there since the nineteen forties and was almost beautiful in its bleak simplicity, fluorescent strip lights winking through the aluminium windows.

  We met every Friday in the bar on campus where my other friends went and played Trivial Pursuit in the corner over beer, sitting on one of the dirty red couches until it was dark outside. It turned out Ralph knew some of my friends in the scene there and slotted right in. There was an intensity to our connection right away that was different from the rest of my friendships – most of them people I had met in class, and their friends who hung out in the bar and coffee shops in the student union buildings. These had never quite managed to turn into closeness. I found something with Ralph that I had been longing for without even realising it, a rapidly formed version of intimacy. My social circle expanded to include his other friends as well and we trudged from one party to another over the weekends, from Newtown – where I lived – to Surry Hills in the east, another neighbourhood bordering on the Cross with a high proportion of students. Once or twice we made it out to Bondi, where I ended up alone one night, freezing, waiting for the late night bus, after Ralph disappeared downstairs with someone I vaguely recognised from my English tutorial (all I remembered was that he was very enthusiastic about Keats).

  I started going to lunch with Ralph at his family’s house every couple of weeks, a meal that went on for hours into the late afternoon and invariably included roast meat of one kind or another. The big old mansion sat on the north shore of the harbour and had a rambling garden filled with frangipani trees, poinsettias and climbing jasmine. It was solid and squarish and beautiful with a red-tiled roof and walls painted a dirty peach colour that had faded over time and showed through more brightly in little patches under the windowsills. Inside it was all burnished wood and bronze and antiques, a wide carpeted staircase and rooms with perfect proportions and tall windows.

  The day I met Ingrid it had been several weeks since Ralph had visited, and I was meeting him there. His mother was around, back from one of her frequent long trips, and he had been avoiding her. She was a buyer for some kind of high-end boutique, a job that she didn’t seem to need but liked. It seemed mainly to involve flying all around the world looking for pretty things to take home.

  Ralph’s father, George, was good-natured with a kind of surface crankiness that he performed happily, embracing the role of grumpy old man in his late middle age. When I visited he liked to start half-hearted fights with me. He was tall like Ralph and always wore the same checked shirt in a slightly different colour, sometimes with a grey cardigan. His wealth came from his work in finance, trading stocks and lending money, but he seemed to be now mostly retired after a bad heart attack the year before. Every now and again I heard him on the phone yelling at an office underling or talking intently, advising a colleague. The heart condition was serious but he hated any mention of it; he waved his arms, glass of wine in hand, and argued when Ralph made any suggestion at the table about something he might want or not want to eat or drink.

  ‘No damned difference!’ he would shout. ‘It’s all damned genetics! Now pass the bottle or I’ll get up and fetch it myself and give myself a cardiac arrest.’

  He had it in his head, wrongly, that I was a film student, having put that together with studying art history and working in a video store. I wondered sometimes if he was a little deaf. ‘How’s the opus?’ he would ask every time, studying me attentively. By this he seemed to mean my own film, or possibly a film script or long essay. ‘Eh? How’re the studies? Studying hard, I hope!’

  Ralph was subdued around him. He made more thoughtful displays of cleverness, hoping to get his father’s attention, but there was real affection between them. It was always Ralph who fetched the bottle and poured from it in the end, or passed the potatoes, and handed him his cup of tea at the end of the afternoon.

  It was Ralph’s mother, Eve, who answered the door that Sunday. I was late. Eve kissed me and covered me in a cloud of Chanel. ‘Come in, darling. I’m so glad you’ve come. Come in and let me introduce you to my niece. You’ll be thrilled to meet her.’ Their little greyhound, Racer, came with her and sniffed me disinterestedly, and loped away.

  We passed through the hallway. It was wallpapered in dark red and black, wooden coat racks and side tables shining. The living room we stepped into was dominated by a large bay window. A velvet armchair was facing away from me as I entered, showing above its back the dark-blonde head of the figure sitting in it. It was flanked by George on one side, sitting in his usual worn club chair, and Ralph’s friend Ed on the other, in a chair that looked as though he’d dragged it across the room to be closer to the velvet one in the centre. Racer had gone to sit next to it too. Ralph himself stood, one foot crossed over the other at the ankle, gazing down at the woman in the chair with rapt attention. He glanced up and gave me a brilliant smile.

  Julia!’ he said. ‘Come and meet Cousin Ingrid.’

  Ingrid looked then, showing the full beauty of her profile as she turned towards me, and the solemn eyes, hair gathered at the back.

  Eve was busying herself with tea and coffee on the other side of the room. She wore an emerald green shift of shot silk, the brightest thing in the room, and no shoes. Her toenails were painted a perfect, bright red. She was small, a full head shorter than Ralph. I had never seen her exchange more than a sentence with Ralph’s father. Their antagonism was rooted in some ancient feud that Ralph couldn’t even remember the source of. In front of me they just seemed to ignore each other as much as possible, but, according to Ralph, without visitors around, whenever they did talk to each other there were arguments.

  ‘I’ve been telling Ralph for weeks now to come home and meet Ingrid,’ Eve said. ‘You know I brought her back from Perth, from Western Australia. Ralph, get some more milk. Julia, Ingrid’s at university, she’s just started – maybe you know her too.’

  Ralph disappeared into the kitchen. Ingrid remained in her seat. We said hello. She was wearing a dress that looked as though it was covered in squashed roses. Her thick blonde hair was drawn all over to one side of her neck and forward over one shoulder. She pulled at the ends of it. There was a delicate silver ov
al frame that looked as though it had once held a cameo, now empty, hanging from a chain around her neck.

  She looked at me, a trace of reserve. I recognised her: two rows in front of me in the big lecture theatre the week before, a lesson on Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ and some other poems. She had been wearing a red coat, shrugged off to sit crumpled behind her on the seat. There was something solid to the shape of her shoulders, the look of a frequent swimmer. Her chin had been cupped in her hand for the whole hour, elbow on the little fold-up desk, other hand busy taking notes. The boy sitting next to Ingrid had noticed her too, and I had watched his little glances to the side, his swift smile upwards when he dropped his pen and bent to pick it up. Ingrid had barely turned her head then but had chatted graciously with him when the lecture ended and they filed out, red coat clutched in her hands. I had looked down at my own sparse notes at the end of the hour.

  Neptune???

  How we know

  Command he can’t refuse

  Secret – spot – stain of feminine sexuality – smile

  Image – something to be possessed – statue, power

  Speaker/audience

  They went on like that, a telegram with no finished clauses.

  I looked at her now. Up close the squashed roses on her dress looked as though they had been painted on, brushstrokes of red against old silk. Eve started talking to her, continuing a conversation that my arrival must have interrupted.

  ‘I’ll help Ralph,’ I said, and retreated.

  He was pouring milk from a carton into a silver jug.

  ‘Cousin Ingrid?’ I asked him.

  ‘Half-cousin. But yes.’ He closed the fridge door and leaned his arms on the counter. ‘You know Eve was over in WA after her brother-in-law died, to help close up the house or sell it or whatever – it turns out that Ingrid was his daughter, she’s my cousin. Her mother was Eve’s half-sister. She died years ago. Eve didn’t see that much of her sister to begin with, and didn’t like her husband, so we never had anything to do with those cousins – I’d forgotten I had cousins on that side to tell you the truth – and now she’s staying here.’