The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘It was meant to be!’ he would say with delight in his drawling, ironic way. I wasn’t sure if he meant me working in the shop, or him and me together. I didn’t ask.

  ‘It must be nice, to have a job,’ he said once, fingers tracing an invisible line along the counter, one day when he had stopped by with Ingrid. It was one of those times when things seemed to be back to a kind of equilibrium between them. I had just finished wrapping a stack of books for a customer. Ingrid glanced at him, alarmed.

  ‘It must be nice, not to need one,’ I said after a few seconds.

  He looked up at me. ‘Christ, I’m sorry. I’m an idiot.’

  ‘You could get a job, Ralph,’ Ingrid said, encouragingly. ‘What would you like to do?’ It wasn’t clear whether she was being sincere or sarcastic.

  Ralph never talked about what he wanted to do with his life; he didn’t have to think about it and didn’t want to.

  ‘Right now I’d like to get something good to eat.’

  ‘I thought we had decided that showering me with gifts was going to be our activity for the day?’ Ingrid asked.

  ‘That too,’ he reassured her.

  ‘It’s my birthday next week,’ Ingrid said to me. It was early October. She was going to be twenty-one.

  They left arm in arm. ‘See you tonight!’ Ralph called over his shoulder to me as they passed through the door.

  The bookshop was owned by Martin, a barely functioning alcoholic, and pretty much kept running by his assistant, Neil, who was a few years older than me. Martin mostly stuck to his tiny office out the back, doing the crossword and drinking from a flask in his bottom drawer. Neil was going over the procedure with me for closing the till at the end of the day when I heard a car horn sound outside. I looked up and a little BMW was there, a late 1980s model in dull silver with L-plates stuck on both ends, with Ingrid behind the wheel. Ralph was next to her and I could make out someone else in the back. She honked the horn again.

  ‘OK, we’ll go over it again next week,’ Neil said and smiled at me.

  ‘Sorry –’

  ‘No, fine, go.’

  I left.

  It was a joint present from Ed and Ralph. As I rode in the car with them I wondered whose idea it had been in the first place. Ingrid was rapturous. She had been borrowing Eve’s little Alfa every once in a while and mostly using George’s old car, an ancient Mercedes that needed a new transmission. The BMW ran beautifully. It looked like something out of a very cool music video and it had a new stereo. The seats were dark red leather. Ed seemed very pleased with himself. We hadn’t seen one another since the party where he had tried to grope me. I decided to make a truce and leaned in to kiss his cheek when I got into the car. His hand rested comfortably on my waist for a short second.

  ‘Hi,’ he said happily.

  ‘Good one,’ I told him, looking around at the car.

  Ingrid drove fast but Ralph and Ed didn’t seem to notice or to mind. It was the first evening that spring that we really noticed how long the days were getting. We drove for what seemed like hours, all the way out to a beach where we bought fish and chips and the most expensive champagne we could find – Ingrid bought it herself – and we ate sitting in the car, passing the bottle around. There was a fat white moon over the ocean.

  ‘I’m going to sleep in here tonight!’ Ingrid announced. ‘I don’t ever want to get out!’

  ‘OK, but you’ll have to let me drive now that you’ve drunk half the champagne,’ Ed said.

  She gave up the wheel grudgingly and Ralph joined me in the back.

  ‘When did you do this?’ I asked him.

  ‘Last weekend,’ he said. ‘It’s a good surprise, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s fantastic. Well done.’

  We ended up back at the Kirribilli house, getting drunker and drunker, sitting in the car in the driveway listening to the radio as Ralph went back and forth to the house, bringing bottles of wine and water and glasses to drink out of.

  Ed’s car was there. He had been drinking less than the rest of us.

  ‘Can I give you a lift home, Julia?’ he asked when he was ready to go. I wondered if he was thinking of reviving his attempt.

  ‘You’re staying, aren’t you, Julia?’ Ingrid asked.

  Ed looked at her with eyes full of regret. I think he realised that if his invitation to stay the night with Ingrid didn’t happen now, it was never going to.

  ‘You don’t have to leave,’ Ralph said to him.

  ‘No, it’s OK,’ he said. ‘Time to be getting home.’

  Ingrid embraced him and thanked him again and again. They stood a few feet away from the car. Ralph fiddled with the radio dial. I saw her kiss Ed firmly on the mouth – once, twice; they were almost the same height, she didn’t need to reach up much at all – and murmur something I couldn’t hear. Ed walked away, his shoulders tight. I couldn’t see his face.

  Ingrid turned back to us, leaning her weight over onto one foot and swaying her arms a little. She was wearing a new version of the red coat, one she had tried on with me a week before, shopping on an expensive side street in Paddington. Buttons were falling off the old coat with regularity now. This new one was much like the old one, only with more swing as it fell from the waist. She had given a huge mock gasp when she had looked at the price tag in the shop, and twirled around in front of the mirror before replacing it on the rack. I supposed it was a birthday present to herself, and then I wondered if Ralph had bought it for her.

  ‘Ed’s so sweet,’ she said. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, eyes shadowed. ‘You could do worse, Julia.’ She raised her eyebrow a little as she stepped over to the car and retrieved her glass from the dashboard.

  Ralph turned to me with a disbelieving look. If she was flaunting some kind of power, I didn’t know what she wanted to achieve with it. I decided that she was drunk and forgave her, but it was one of those moments when something in me hardened against her, instant scar over wound.

  A little while later Ingrid showed me to one of the extra guest rooms upstairs. It was the room Maeve had when she stayed and it held a faint trace of her perfume. I had recognised it when I had smelt it on her because my mother had sometimes worn it, and my father hated it. Fracas, it was called. It was a dark, intense smell – I always thought of it as the same colour as its square, blackish-purple bottle – and it made me catch my breath.

  Ingrid handed me a huge, folded towel. She was acting more and more as though she wasn’t just at home in the house but as though it were really hers. I wondered if she was alone here much; Eve was away less than she had been before George’s death but wasn’t around all the time.

  The bed was all soft down and cotton but I lay awake for a while. Voices sounded down the hallway, doors opening and closing, taps turning on and off, water running. I thought I heard the sound of the bath running and caught the smell of roses. Ingrid laughed in another room. I fell asleep at last and then woke again – I couldn’t tell how long I’d been sleeping – thinking I heard someone outside my door. The floor creaked but there was no knock, no door opening. When I woke again it was late morning and the smell of toast and bacon drifted up from the kitchen.

  Gil’s letter came a few days after that, the day after Ingrid’s birthday. She told me about it when I saw her next on campus.

  ‘He’s invited me to New York,’ she said. ‘Fleur’s having a major show there. There’ll be a big opening and I can go. And I’ll stay with Maeve.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘When?’

  ‘The end of November. I’ll miss the exams but I only have one and I’m going to just take it early, before I go.’

  ‘They’ll let you?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  I had forgotten Ingrid’s special ability to get any kind of extension or exemption from her teachers.

  ‘I was so hoping he would ask me,’ she said. ‘I was thinking of just going anyway, at the end of the year.’

  She had been talking about goi
ng to the States but for some reason I hadn’t put it together.

  ‘Are you in touch with him?’ I asked.

  ‘A little – we’ve written, just once or twice.’

  I wondered again how old he was. He must be in his mid-thirties – older? She had shown me a picture of him by then, slender and sharp-looking, leaning against a railing on a Venice canal. He could have been anywhere between thirty and forty-five. His hair was chestnut brown shot with silvery grey and he was wearing a beautiful linen suit.

  We had arrived at the library. Ingrid was going inside and I was going to work. She was wearing the new red coat again – it was taking a while to really turn into summer – and her cheeks were pink and dusky tan. Her hair was pulled down inside the collar. Ralph hadn’t been in class. I was about to ask her if she knew what he was doing when she said goodbye and walked into the building.

  There wasn’t the same tension as there had been before her last trip. Ralph seemed to accept it differently, and seemed more even-tempered when she talked about Grey. Then a week or so after the letter had come, he decided to go with her.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked when I met him at the campus bar in the late afternoon. ‘We’d been talking about going somewhere together anyway, for the break. London or New York or whatever. I’ll just spend a week or two in New York and then some in London. Maybe Paris. What do you think of Paris?’

  ‘But Ralph,’ I said. I didn’t know how to continue. It seemed like a bad idea to put him in the same room as Ingrid’s holiday romance, or whatever this thing now was. ‘Are you going just to check him out?’ I asked. This was verging perilously close to territory we did not touch on.

  To my relief he smiled. ‘Well, it wouldn’t hurt, would it? Aren’t you curious too? But look, he lives in New York. What’s going to happen?’ He tapped a cigarette on his hand. ‘I’m looking forward to it.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Now.’ He picked up the dice – we were playing Trivial Pursuit – and rolled them across the board. They were little coloured plastic things, mismatched from some other game. He counted up the numbers and groaned. ‘Geography. Did we decide to leave that one out this round?’

  ‘No. We’re leaving out Sport this round.’

  ‘I think if we’re leaving out Sport and Leisure for you then we should leave out Geography for me.’

  I picked up the card.

  ‘Give me a clue at least,’ he said.

  I read out the question.

  At the end of the second game, having won both easily, Ralph was content. I went to get another round of drinks while he packed the game away. The people on the couch next to us wanted a turn. When I came back, the Scrabble board was half-open and Ralph was smoking.

  ‘Look,’ he said when I sat down. ‘Why don’t you come as well?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Away. With me for the break. Come to New York. London. Paris. What did you think of Paris anyway? We could go anywhere.’

  I folded the board out, and refolded it.

  ‘I’ll pay. It can be a birthday present,’ he continued.

  ‘You got me a birthday present already.’ It had been a first-edition Chandler, The Lady in the Lake.

  ‘Go on. Don’t be stupid about the money.’

  ‘OK, I’ll think about it.’ I didn’t want to think about it, but it seemed better to end the conversation. ‘Thanks. I mean, it would be fantastic, obviously – I just don’t know –’

  ‘Moral support,’ he said wryly, his arm stretched out to ash his cigarette, the other folded across his knees. He was still smoking Camels, and I missed the smell of his old Marlboros.

  ‘I thought you were just curious.’

  He must have had some awareness of what he was asking from me, I thought, to support him in this preoccupation with Ingrid while I suffered through my own unrequited crush on him. I told myself that he didn’t realise it was painful for me, that he didn’t really guess, and at the same time denied the real destructiveness of it all to myself. I knew it was my choice to stick with him, so I couldn’t blame him after all.

  He didn’t say anything. Outside, the long sunset was over and the lights over the footpaths were bright against the dark, the old sandstone buildings spotlit. The Trivial Pursuit game at the table next to us was getting rowdy; someone had defaced an Entertainment card so that the answer was illegible and an argument was taking place over what the right answer was. I knew the answer, and thought about interrupting. Ralph leaned his head over to them a second later. ‘It’s 1967, for Christ’s sake,’ he said to the player. It didn’t help.

  ‘Choose your letters,’ I said, and unfolded the board.

  He called me a couple of days later.

  ‘OK, Julia, there’s a two-for-one sale with BA so you can’t say no.’

  And I couldn’t.

  7.

  Ingrid asked me to help her pack a couple of days before her flight, and I sat in her room working my way through a large chunk of brie I had found in the fridge while she pulled things out of her wardrobe and two enormous dressers. It wasn’t like Ingrid to worry so much about clothes, and she seemed to feel as though she ought to care about what she wore on this trip but wasn’t sure how to go about it.

  ‘How much are you taking?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m only going for three weeks.’

  She looked at the pile of skirts on the bed in confusion.

  ‘It will be really cold. But warm inside.’ I went through one pile and put aside anything that wouldn’t be warm enough. We wore the same size, but clothes looked different on her taller body. There was a few centimetres’ difference or more between us in height, and sometimes I looked at her and wondered where exactly the extra height went – legs, waist, neck, all more elongated than my own.

  ‘Thanks.’ She sighed and sat down.

  I went to work on the next pile. ‘Don’t you own anything black?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh, one thing,’ she said, pulling out a shirt. ‘This would suit you.’ It was pretty: eyelet lace with a round neck and three delicate crystal buttons in a closure at the back.

  ‘It’s New York,’ I said.

  ‘So I’ll be able to buy all the black things I need.’

  ‘Yes. In fact, you should pack light. Go shopping when you’re there.’

  ‘You’ll have to tell me where to go. Oh! You can come with me!’

  She looked at the piles of clothes.

  ‘Let’s stop. I’ll finish it tomorrow. Are you going to eat all that cheese or can we go down and make something for dinner?’

  It was a hot November, the smell of bushfires in the air already, and it was hard to imagine the cold streets of New York and the overheated interiors, the peeling off and putting on of layers, breath turned to mist in the air. From Ingrid’s window the little piece of water visible through the trees glittered sharply.

  Ralph and I left a couple of weeks later, the day after Christmas, and by that time we were glad to escape the summer. The bookshop was hot and stuffy by evening and the air on the street burned hot and dirty at the end of the day. My car broke down – sensitive to summer now, as well as winter cold – and ended up at the mechanics for days. I hated the long ride down the escalator into the train station to get home to Newtown, where the smog was even thicker. Ralph kept telling me to move over to the east –‘Why not, you’re sick of that house anyway’ – and I thought about it. But the old, thick brick walls of the terrace house in Newtown insulated it against the heat, and when I walked in the front door the coolness of the hallway always surprised me.

  We finished our final essays and exams with time to spare before we left and spent it at the beach, drinking lemonade and beer into the afternoons. For some reason Ralph had decided he wanted a tan, and his already olive skin darkened. I applied sunscreen with improbably high factors of protection –‘100 SPF? How is that possible?’ Ralph would scoff. All the same, as the days passed I noticed what looked like the white imprint of
a swimsuit growing whiter against my skin.

  Our plane was hours late getting into New York and Ralph and I arrived at the brightly lit Plaza Hotel deep into a freezing winter’s night. The room was a blur of warmth, all gilt and velvet. We bounced like children on the enormous beds when we first walked in the door. Minutes later I fell asleep on one of the overstuffed sofas in front of the windows, waiting for the heavy, strangely bright, grey clouds to start snowing.

  Ingrid met us for an early dinner at a tiny Japanese restaurant on the Upper West Side on our second night. We reached the door just as she stepped out of a cab in front of us. She was wearing her red coat and some tall black boots I hadn’t seen before, and a loose red beret with most of her hair tucked up inside it. She hugged us both and we went inside.

  Ingrid and Ralph sat next to each other, with me across from Ralph. We all fidgeted a bit in the unfamiliar space. The whole place was decorated in pine, with lime green cushions and carpets. Grey was supposed to be meeting us there too. After half an hour of waiting Ingrid started making small excuses: he’d warned her that he might be running a little behind; he was probably caught up talking to one of his biggest clients who was visiting the city for just a few days, a wealthy Russian collector with a passion for American abstract art, she explained. After another half hour we started eating without him and I relaxed at moments when I forgot that he was coming at all. The food was artful, carved and shaped into precise and delicate arrangements.

  Ingrid was staying with Maeve at her apartment in the Meatpacking District further downtown on the West side. There had been some issue of decorum over whether she would stay with Grey.