I rubbed my finger on a spot of tarnish on the jug. Ralph’s hand brushed mine as he grasped the handle. A drop of milk spilled over the side.
‘We’ve even been in class together. I hadn’t been paying attention to anything Eve said to me. I thought she’d been talking about a Cousin Margaret. Ingrid says she just didn’t guess. Maybe she’s shy. You like her, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘She’s brilliant, you know.’
‘I like her,’ I said. Why did it sound as though I was protesting? ‘I don’t know – I’m surprised, that’s all.’
He cradled my cheek for a second with one hand, his thumb just to the side of my mouth. I could hear Ed’s voice, enquiring, Ingrid’s voice, responding. It was a nice voice, slightly hoarse and light at the same time. Ralph dropped his hand and walked back to them all.
Ingrid was the centre of attention at the lunch table and bore it with a detached kind of ease. It wasn’t clear whether she was aware of her own beauty. It wasn’t exactly modesty although it was something like that. Ed made attempts to impress her. He was a friend of Ralph’s from school, and Ralph looked pale and thinner than usual next to Ed’s muscle. He was a rower with a square jaw and extremely good teeth, studying Economics, probably destined to be a conservative politician. I had met him a few times with Ralph on campus. He was always expressing frustration with his apparently Marxist tutor. Ed was the only person I knew who lived on campus, in one of the wealthiest and oldest residential colleges, built of stone with picturesque, leadlight casement windows set deep into the walls. All my other student friends were still at home, or had moved into a shared student house like mine if they could afford it. As well as being the most privileged, Ed’s college had the worst reputation on campus for debauched parties at which women students were routinely date-raped. He didn’t strike me as someone who would take part in that aspect of college culture, but I maintained a kind of prejudiced wariness of him for a while all the same.
My hair was newly cut in a short, straight bob with a high fringe and George took to calling me ‘Pandora’ over lunch, saying I looked like Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box. There was a poster from the film on the wall of the video store in a cheap plastic frame, Louise staring down with her heavy-lidded gaze and rosebud mouth.
‘Yes …’ Ralph said, happily. He was sitting next to me.
‘Yes, well, you can’t quote a silent film at me,’ I said.
‘That’s true.’ He looked disappointed.
‘I was going for a kind of flapper-ish Lois Lane,’ I said. ‘Try that.’ But he had turned back to Ingrid, across the table.
Ingrid looked over and caught my eye and gave a small smile. We didn’t talk much to each other over lunch. She was monopolised by the men at the table.
Eve looked admiringly at what she had brought home with her, pleased at her success. She shared with me her impressions of Perth. ‘It’s such an innocent-looking place,’ she said. ‘So dull really.’
Ingrid ended up in the kitchen with me after the meal, clearing the remains of roast chicken and preparing plates for the enormous pavlova that Eve had bought for dessert.
‘I’m sorry about your father,’ I said.
I ran my fingers across the paintwork on the plates in front of me, gold paint over black-and-red-painted designs on the borders. It looked as though it would scratch away with a fingernail, but it didn’t. She turned off the tap – she had been rinsing plates in the huge porcelain sink.
‘Thanks,’ she said evenly. She dried her hands on a red-and-white-checked towel. ‘You’ll meet Victoria if you come over next week,’ she said. ‘My sister.’
‘Your sister?’
‘Oh, she’s the pretty one.’ Ingrid smiled.
‘Really?’ I wondered what that made Ingrid.
She answered my thought. ‘I’m the one, I suppose, into books.’
I steadied the dessert plates in their stack on the counter. She leaned back against the sink. ‘Do you want to go and get a drink after this?’ she asked. ‘Back over on your side?’
‘OK,’ I said. I was curious about her. And something even then told me that she was destined to be part of Ralph’s life in a way I couldn’t ignore. ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘I don’t know!’ Ingrid laughed. ‘I’m new in town, remember? From innocent old Perth.’
She took a large knife and started to slice the pavlova with some clumsiness. ‘Let’s do this at the table.’
Eve had flown over to Perth just after the death of Ingrid’s father, ‘to help take care of things,’ she told me as we sat in the living room after eating. Ingrid had been alone there in the house, trying to decide what to do with it after her sister, Victoria, had gone back to Queensland following the funeral. Eve arranged for the house to be put on the market. ‘It was in good shape,’ Eve said. ‘In a good area. Too far out from the city but near the beach at least. They’ll do well with it.’ Real estate was one of her many areas of knowledge and expertise. Ingrid had been thinking of applying to the University of Sydney in any case – she was in her second year at the University of Western Australia then, studying Classics and English – and Eve helped to ‘speed up the process’ so that she could start this semester, even though it was a week or so into term. Eve was good friends with someone on the University Senate and not afraid to call on them. ‘It would have been nonsense for her to have been stuck over there.’ She grimaced. ‘So I brought her back with me. It’s not bad to have some company here in this big old house anyway.’
Ingrid didn’t seem to be listening to any of this. She was talking to Ed and Ralph, and George was watching them. Racer sat up beside her, his grey jaw on her knee, and she stroked his head gently. George seemed older than he had the last time I’d seen him; his greying, sparse hair was thin, swept back from his face, and his cheeks were sunken. He was wearing slippers instead of his usual battered loafers. Despite his look of tiredness there was a light of interest in his eyes, turned on Ingrid.
He looked over at me and winked. ‘The dog thinks he’s hers now,’ he said cheerfully. ‘No loyalty.’
Ingrid protested, smiling. Racer stayed next to her, his body stretched along the floor and paws out in front of him. Ralph stood up and stepped over the dog carefully and came over to me.
‘Come on outside,’ he said. ‘I’ve hardly talked to you.’
We stood outside the back door and he smoked a cigarette.
‘Dad’s happy,’ he said. ‘He adores her.’
‘That’s good.’
‘It’s good, isn’t it?’
‘It’s really good.’
The grass of the back lawn was darkening as the light went and the air smelled damp.
‘Ralph,’ I said. ‘Are you sick too?’
I don’t know what made me ask it. His arms were folded across his body. He didn’t look at me.
‘It’s all in the bloody genes, isn’t it?’ He ground his cigarette under his shoe. ‘Well, not exactly. Let’s go in.’
‘Ralph.’
‘No. Julia, I don’t want to talk about it. I mean, I’m fine.’
He took my hand quickly, just the fingers, and let it go, and went back inside. My pulse raced and slowed. I followed him in.
It took a while for the gathering to wind down. George was drinking sherry by then, Eve eyeing him grumpily, Ralph fussing over him, finding him the particular glass he liked, the one with the gold rim. Ralph and Ed were staying at the house to ‘watch the game’ with George, a ritual that revolved around tennis on television.
‘See you next week,’ Eve said to me, and kissed my cheek.
When Ingrid and I left, Ed insisted on driving us to the ferry stop in his newly bought car, a vintage Jaguar, just to show it off. The car was sitting in the driveway next to the house, green with dark green seats and the little leaping cat on the front. The body was a bit knocked around, a dent in the driver’s door, and the paint was wearing thin. I fought an urge to take hold of the cat, to see how firmly it was stuck the
re, to see if it would break off in my hand.
‘It’s nice,’ Ingrid said.
She opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat. Ed looked nervous. He was holding the keys in his hand and looked unsure about what to do with them. His other hand rested on the roof of the car. Ingrid put her hands on the wheel.
‘I need a car,’ she said. ‘I like this one.’
For a moment Ed looked as though he was going to hand the keys over to her right there. If she’d looked up at him just then I think he might have. But she gazed ahead and dropped her hands and got out of the car.
‘You can help me buy one,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything about cars.’
‘Sure, great.’ Ed sounded relieved. ‘I can help you find one.’
‘I’d like a Karmann Ghia,’ she announced. ‘Or a bug. One of those old ones but it has to go well. Do you think I can find one of those?’
Ed said he thought that would be possible. Ingrid opened the back door and sat down, hands on the back of the driver’s seat. ‘It’s so strange to have money,’ she said, almost sadly.
Everything today was strange, I reflected. Even more than usual the North Shore felt like another – much richer – planet compared with the city I knew across the bridge and I felt suddenly impatient to leave. I went around the other side of the car and sat down in the front passenger seat.
Ed took us down the hill, driving too fast, and returned to the house. As we waited there the sky turned into night over the water. On the ferry we sat outside and shivered. Ingrid looked at the city hungrily as it came closer. I didn’t know whether they had ferries in Perth. It seemed like a stupid question.
‘Do you like Sydney?’ I asked.
‘I love it. It’s great to finally be here. I’ve wanted to come east for so long.’
Everyone from Perth who made it east always seemed happy to have left. The salt and spray hung in the air, and the dank smell of the ferry itself, metal and wood. Fireworks started to explode in the sky over Darling Harbour in the distance, followed by a series of muffled bangs as the sound travelled across the water. Showers of orange and green fell and disappeared. We looked at one another, wondering what they were celebrating. I shrugged.
Her cheeks were pink from the cold, eyes shining. We talked about buses and trains and which one we would catch next. The ferry pulled in and we stepped across the swaying deck onto the pier.
We wound up at a pub near my house in Newtown and drank steadily until closing. Ingrid played pool well and beat me three games in a row. ‘There’s not much else to do in Perth,’ she said.
‘I thought you were the bookish one.’
‘Oh, I am,’ she insisted. She shot a red ball into its pocket with a neat clack and chalked her cue.
She drank and talked with me with a kind of obscure determination, as though she were practising for a part or fulfilling an obligation to its furthest extent. It was hard to tell some of the time whether she was actually enjoying herself. It wasn’t that she was ill at ease. Her composure was the same as it had been all that day. It was a sense of presence that conveyed a strange lack of depth, although her cleverness was obvious. Or it was that whatever depths there were seemed entirely unguessable, unplottable. A dark flash of sadness and seriousness crossed her face now and again, cloud across the sun, and then was gone just as fast. ‘She’s brilliant,’ Ralph had said. She probably was. It was easy to imagine her being a very good student and turning in all her work on time. The jealousy I had felt when she appeared with her empty necklace and pretty hair was a little stone in my heart. It never went away; I feel it still, sometimes, pushing gently against my insides.
But that wasn’t all there was to it. I reminded myself that she was grieving, and recognised the robotic aspect it could produce, the need to concentrate harder than usual to perform everything normally. Perhaps this was behind the earnest way she questioned me about life in Sydney, curious about the neighbourhood we were in, how long I’d lived there, the girls who shared the house with me.
I told her what I could about Leah and Joanna. We didn’t all hang out together outside the house, preferring to keep our lives separate. Joanna seemed to spend all her time either studying, or partying hard on drugs mixed up by some chemical-whiz med student friends, two boys with permanently bloodshot eyes who dropped over once a week and managed to seem competent and smart despite their obvious addictions and insanely risky hobby. It was a different recipe every time, some version of ecstasy or cocaine in little misshapen pills that I tried once or twice but never enjoyed much. Leah was wrapped up with her boyfriend, an intense and silent guy who tried not to stare at my legs if he ran into me coming out of the shower, or making breakfast in the morning.
‘It sounds like living with two sisters,’ Ingrid said.
I blinked in surprise. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so, anyway. But I guess I wouldn’t know.’
Ingrid nodded thoughtfully. She finished her drink at exactly the same time as me, went to the bar with our glasses in hand and fetched fresh ones, lined up the balls neatly and shot them down, never faltering when she missed, smiling brightly when she won. Losing to her didn’t worry me, and I felt a glow of satisfaction about her skill, pleased and somehow proud to be with someone who played so well. She wasn’t competitive in any straightforward way; it seemed that her pleasure was in the game well played, the difficult shot achieved, rather than in simply beating me. She wore her superiority in the game calmly, but I couldn’t help wondering how she would react if I suddenly pulled off a string of successful shots, as occasionally happened after my second drink. My winning streak didn’t arrive that night and I didn’t get a chance to find out.
She put her hair up into a ponytail that snaked over her shoulder and sank the black with fierce concentration, staying bent over her cue for a second. I raised my glass to her.
‘Oh, cheers,’ she said, and hurried over to the table to pick up her glass and clink it against mine. ‘Cheers!’
She gave a happy glance around as though she expected the whole pub to celebrate her victory. There were several people looking in our direction – admiring men, all of them – and her radiant smile seemed to include them all. She finally seemed a little drunk and silly then, and I liked her more. I realised that we had spent many of the past twelve hours in each other’s company and it wasn’t bad.
She got into a taxi when the pub closed and we said goodbye. I called Ralph when I got home, wanting to tell him about our evening, but he wasn’t answering at the Kings Cross flat. He was probably staying with his parents, where she would be in a little while.
The semester finished and a new one began; the course Ralph was studying now included a lot of science fiction and we watched many aliens on screen. He came into the video shop one night and put The Story of O into the machine. I asked whether there were aliens in this that I had forgotten about.
‘No,’ he sighed, and watched the credits glumly. ‘It’s for English. I thought I’d see the movie before I read the book.’ He pulled a crumpled syllabus out of his bag and inspected it. ‘Servitude, Sex and Subjectivity. Next week, Jane Eyre! I love Orson Welles. OK. Is there a film of Wuthering Heights?’
I turned the sound down and shuddered. ‘If there is, you can’t watch it here.’
Ralph tilted his head slowly to the side as he followed the action on screen.
‘I don’t think that part is in the book,’ I said.
‘I bloody hope it is,’ he murmured.
‘The second one is actually closer to the original,’ offered a woman at the counter, waiting with a cassette in her hand.
I had invited Ingrid to come and visit me at the video shop, and that was the night she first came. She was wearing her red coat, which swung open over a yellow dress, the necklace on again, locks of hair forward over one shoulder. She said hello. Her eyes went to the screen, where O or one of the other girls was thrashing around. A flush rose from her throat up across one side of her fac
e.
I smiled and kept my gaze forward.
‘Is that The Story of O?’ she asked.
‘Were you interested in renting it?’ Ralph asked her.
Ingrid laughed, a full-throated laugh, and her cheeks glowed as the flush faded away. Her skin was the tan that comes with a whole life spent outside in the summers. ‘No!’ she protested. ‘I recognised it because I’m reading it for class. The one I’m in with you.’ She studied the screen. ‘I do need to finish reading it,’ she said, and looked back and forth between me and Ralph. ‘Do you mind? Is there space back there?’
Ralph slid from his chair, his eyes on her.
‘What do you want to see now?’ Ralph asked Ingrid blurrily, later, when we had finished The Story of O and had a serious discussion about its narrative departures from its source and were casting about for what to watch next. The store was busy that night, a Saturday, and I was up and down fetching films and reshelving returns.
‘Oh …’ Ingrid trailed off. ‘Casablanca.’
‘Let’s watch it,’ Ralph said.
I rolled my eyes. The cover was right there on the top of the returns. Ingrid had obviously just seen it before she’d said the name. I put it in the machine.
‘Why don’t I get us something to eat?’ Ralph said when the film had started, just as I had expected. ‘There’s great sushi down the road.’
He left. I finished putting a stack of cases back on the shelves and came back to the counter.
‘What would you really like to watch?’ I asked, flicking the pages of the big movie reference book.
Ingrid gave me a look that asked for sympathy. ‘Well – you know what I thought of when I came in – it’s stupid – I would love to see St Elmo’s Fire. She inspected her fingers, short, bitten nails, and laughed, embarrassed. ‘Is that terrible? I’ve been having a nostalgic moment today.’ She looked at me. ‘Now I’ve told you, I’ll have to kill you.’
The Legacy Page 4