The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  He came back and stood next to Ingrid again. ‘Fleur won’t be joining us tonight. Sorry to disappoint.’ He gave a quick smile to me and Ralph and his voice betrayed only a small hint of frustration.

  The English artist seemed let down. Now the expression that Maeve had worn when she came in from the phone call made more sense; she had looked just like an exasperated parent fighting with their child, and the pieces of the exchange we had overheard sounded like that too. She was busy in the kitchen now, opening wine. Ingrid’s face showed concern and she seemed about to ask Grey about his conversation with Fleur, but he looked away from her and started talking to the artist again. The food arrived from a local restaurant – the best modern French in the neighbourhood according to the artist’s wife – and the man who delivered it stayed and arranged it all on the table for us.

  It was a little while after that, just before we sat down at dinner, that I saw the look that passed between Maeve and Grey. I sometimes wonder if I hadn’t seen that look whether I might have come to like him or trust him more. I only saw it the once. Most of the time in Ingrid’s presence he and Maeve didn’t look at each other much at all, even when talking; their glances slid away, quicksilver. Ingrid had risen to go to the bathroom. Her hair was falling down from its knot. She wore a short dress in a dirty purplish-blue, legs long in black stockings, and her hips twisted, rose and fell with her steps. Grey was watching her too, and then his eyes met Maeve’s and I could see that she had been watching him look at Ingrid. They didn’t actually nod at each other; they didn’t need to. It was conspiratorial in a quiet, understated way. Maeve’s eyes showed triumph – it reminded me of Eve, pleased with herself after she’d brought Ingrid back from Perth, displaying her to us. It was just as though Maeve had handed Grey a gift, and had been waiting for him to accept it. Grey seemed to be indicating his approval, his gratitude and a kind of pride in his own achievement.

  It shouldn’t have been strange, in a way; it was partly through Maeve, after all, that they knew each other. It was through her that the connection between them was consolidated by networks of acquaintance. It was natural, wasn’t it, for Grey to feel grateful to Maeve for helping to bring a woman like Ingrid into his life, and to feel pleased with himself, I asked myself later when the memory of the look sat with me in the early hours. And in that sense of appreciation the look could have been more open – but there was something in it that couldn’t have been spoken, an intimacy that was shocking in its depth and nakedness, in the same way I’d been shocked by the heat and speed of sexual passion that I’d seen when I’d glanced through the taxi window.

  I seemed to understand then that if they ever had been lovers, Maeve and Grey, it was long in the past, and whatever it was that bound them now was more lasting and more complicated. It was a quick, silent look, and then Ingrid had left the room and Maeve looked over at the passageway Ingrid had just walked through, and Grey turned his eyes the other way, where they met mine and held my gaze for a long second without changing. He seemed to know that I’d seen the look, and calculated that it didn’t matter, whatever I had made of it.

  I broke the gaze and stood up, too quickly, almost knocking over my tall-stemmed glass. It shivered and rocked for a second before I picked it up. The others were all moving towards the table. Grey stood and waited for Ingrid, and when she reappeared he put his hand on her back, just as he had outside the restaurant, and guided her towards the table. It was a stiffer gesture than the one the other night, more expressive of control.

  It was warm in the big, open room but I couldn’t shake the chill that had entered me. The food was rich and delicious – plenty of roasted duck and buttery vegetables. Ingrid ate with her usual good appetite, more lively now, one hand always under the table on the side next to Grey, resting on his leg. This was how she had never acted with any of her admirers in Sydney; this was how I would have imagined her looking in love, right down to the slightly worshipful way she regarded Grey, ecstatically glad of his attention and approval.

  At the end of the meal we stayed sitting at the table, drinking wine and picking at the remains of a flourless chocolate cake. The artist’s wife glanced towards the window, and said, ‘Look. It’s snowing.’ We all looked. Tiny flakes were drifting down, illuminated by the streetlights.

  Ingrid’s eyes were alive with excitement. ‘Quickly,’ she said, ‘let’s go down.’

  She and Ralph were downstairs and out the door in seconds. I followed, struggling to pull on my coat. Ingrid turned her face up, eyes squeezed shut, and let the snow fall on her skin. The flakes stayed for a second on my hand, then melted to water. It was just the three of us down there, and for a moment it had the feeling of us being the children sent out to play while the adults stayed inside to talk. The snow fell more heavily. It wasn’t cold enough for it to stick to the ground and it disappeared on the concrete path.

  I left them together on the footpath, absorbed in a snowflake that had come to rest on Ralph’s sleeve; back inside, all the others were gathered around the big windows looking out. I wondered why Grey didn’t go down to Ingrid. She and Ralph came back up a few minutes later. The evening was over.

  New Year’s Eve was only a couple of days away. Ralph and I hadn’t made it very far when we had talked about plans for what to do with ourselves but we had assumed that Ingrid would be part of it. So we were both surprised, and Ralph was visibly hurt, when she told us at the end of that dinner, just after they had come back in from the snow, that she was going to join Grey up at his place on the Hudson.

  ‘He always spends New Year there,’ she said to us. ‘And we want to spend it together – and I want to see the house. So we’re driving up tomorrow. It’ll be for a few days. I’ll see you when I get back.’

  Ralph was silent and mutinous-looking.

  ‘Well – I think it’s really romantic,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said with relief. ‘Exactly, right.’

  Ralph looked disappointed in me, and sighed, and then seemed to come around. ‘We’ll drink a toast to you,’ he said, and kissed her cheek. ‘Several.’

  We said our goodbyes and went downstairs with the English artist and his wife, who were walking home the other way. The street was quiet; a few busy cabs drove by and we walked a block or two until we found one to take us back to the hotel. It drove fast up the long, straight avenue. The snow was still falling, a white fuzz on our coats that disappeared as soon as we were inside the car.

  Ralph was grumpy and unsettled. ‘He’s a cold fish,’ he said, and played with his packet of cigarettes.

  I thought of the decidedly hot kiss I’d seen between Grey and Ingrid in the cab.

  ‘I don’t mean –’ Ralph started, and looked at me. ‘I mean, emotionally. He’s cold. Like Maeve.’

  He put the cigarettes away in his pocket.

  ‘I don’t like the way he looks at her,’ he said.

  The look between Grey and Maeve was still with me, and the way that Grey had held my eye afterwards, indifferent.

  I agreed. ‘But did you see how she was looking at him?’

  Ralph gave a little snort. ‘What did you call it? Romantic?’

  ‘It is romantic!’

  I wanted somehow to be happy for Ingrid, to join in with her own clear happiness. I remembered Ralph’s dismissal of the affair before we had left Sydney – ‘He lives in New York, what’s going to happen?’ – and I thought of those two sets of looks, Grey’s and Maeve’s, and Ingrid’s gaze at Grey, and felt a stirring of unease.

  ‘She’s really in love,’ I said in wonder.

  It hadn’t meant to sound so sad, but Ralph nodded slowly and cast his eyes down with an expression of sorrow and resistance as though I had made the most tragic of pronouncements.

  8.

  We found a party to go to on New Year’s Eve and got drunk on cheap sparkling wine at a tiny apartment in the East Village decorated with orange paper lanterns. Overcrowded little rooms – a blur of faces – Ralph’s good
suit rumpled the second we walked in the door – his kiss, hard and fast and passionless, at midnight in that second before the whole place went up in a roar. The rest of our time in New York was more shopping and days spent walking around Chinatown and the Lower East Side, eating enormous sandwiches piled with pastrami in the Jewish delis down there and working our way around all the bars in Ralph’s guidebook. He made me go to the opera, La Bohème, and I surprised myself by loving it and crying all the way through – he smiled at me knowingly and settled far down into his chair – but I refused to go to the ballet and ate room service food instead.

  I was falling asleep in front of the television when Ralph called from the bar downstairs. ‘Come down,’ he said. ‘Ingrid’s here.’ We hadn’t seen her since the dinner at Maeve’s over a week before.

  She was red-cheeked from the cold, some kind of dark red, velvet cloak on the seat beside her, and she and Ralph couldn’t stop talking about how good the dancing had been. We drank Kir Royales, one after another, and there was happiness in Ralph’s face as he looked at her. We didn’t talk about Grey at all.

  I grew tired after an hour or so and went up to bed, but for some reason I couldn’t help myself before I left. ‘How’s Grey?’ I asked her. Something slithered down inside me, a feeling as though I were pushing a pin into Ralph’s arm, and disappointment in myself for doing it.

  ‘Gil,’ she said, smiling up at me. ‘He’s great. We had a really great New Year’s.’ Her eyes were warm. ‘Goodnight! Sleep well!’ And then she turned back to Ralph and picked up the conversation right where it had been before.

  He flicked his eyes towards me. ‘See you in a little bit,’ he said.

  He was there in the morning, heavily asleep in the second bed. I went out before he woke and spent all day in the Metropolitan Museum, getting lost over and over again, alone. Paintings, golden frames, bronze, stitched leather seats, acres of canvas and marble and wood. By the end of the afternoon I was wandering around the Arms and Armor section and found myself facing the four towering armoured warhorses for the third time after taking the wrong turn.

  Tears of exhaustion started in my eyes and sat there. The room was filled with pale, wintery light from the skylights. I looked down at my map and turned it over in my hands and tried once more to plot a way from this room to the front entrance. The shape of the room didn’t seem to conform to its image on the paper. I became aware then of eyes on me, and looked up just as a man on the other side of the nearest horse turned his head away. A few seconds later he was next to me, looking at the map I was holding.

  ‘Do you mind?’ he asked. I handed it to him. He studied it unconvincingly. ‘Where are you headed?’ His voice was English, low and neutral.

  ‘I’m leaving. I’m looking for the exit,’ I said. He nodded, slowly. The entire scene struck me as being very Victorian and ridiculous – damsel in distress, chivalrous knight. I waited for him to offer me a folded handkerchief.

  He pushed his hair out of the way. It fell straight back into his eyes, the colour of wet sand with light blond strands. He looked as though he was struggling not to smile. The room seemed to empty itself of people as we stopped there.

  He studied the horse in front of us carefully. It stood there, massive, not alive, one foot raised, prepared to charge into battle. Was it a real horse, I wondered, dead and stuffed, or a model they had made? A woman next to me was trying to restrain a small child from climbing up next to it.

  ‘I’m going this way, if that’s the way you’re going,’ he said. He looked down at the map and touched his finger to the room we were in, and pointed out through one of the doorways.

  ‘Thanks.’ I took back the map and held on to it. He paused, and I thought he was going to comment on my accent, but he didn’t. Beside us the child – a little boy – was victorious and clung to the horse’s hind leg, his face firm, exultant, as the woman tried to drag him back down.

  We walked together in silence through several more rooms – medieval screens painted with weeping saints, sets of decorated china behind glass – and came to halls filled with classical statuary and Roman glass and coins.

  ‘I’ll leave you here,’ he said, stopping beside a statue. It was a man – or a god, I couldn’t tell – spearing a stag that lay fallen beside him. He looked straight at me for the first time. ‘I mean, I’m stopping here. If you’re going out, it’s that way.’ He pointed ahead. ‘Or you can stay here and enjoy the wonders of Roman art.’ He smiled ironically. His eyes were hazel green with fractured shards of brown.

  He was being kind to me, but I had the uncomfortable sense of my embarrassment being a source of interest. It felt curiously like cruelty. I drew myself up to my full height – I was almost as tall as he was, but he remained slightly slouched. His eyes travelled swiftly over me, and then he turned back to examine the statue, and there was a small black notebook in his hand.

  ‘Well, thanks again,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it’s all my pleasure,’ he said, with a quick sideways glance at me.

  The front entrance was just around the end of the hall, less than a minute away. The long, long set of stairs led down to the street, where vendors were selling pretzels and hotdogs from their carts. I bought myself a bagel and a grey coffee in a paper cup and walked for blocks in the cold to the subway, feet aching and my heart an oddly unfamiliar-feeling pressure in my chest.

  The meeting in the museum disturbed me more than I realised at the time and I reflected on it often in the weeks after it happened: the intensity of my embarrassment, my attraction to him that might or might not have been returned. I tried to describe it to Ralph a day or so afterwards, but it was hard to explain the acuteness and singularity of it. Instead it came out sounding clichéd, like the chivalrous scene it had briefly conjured up for me at the time.

  Ralph made fun of me. ‘You were too embarrassed to ask him for his phone number? That’s not like you,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I told him.

  He chided me. ‘Of course he liked you. I’m sure he fell madly in love with you.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You never know. And you don’t know his name. The mysterious stranger. Now that’s romantic.’

  But it wasn’t, somehow. It made me feel uneasy. His nameless face stayed with me, handsome and amused.

  Ingrid agreed to come to Paris with us after all – she had decided that she had to see the Louvre – and was planning to go on to London with Grey after that. Her taking this time to spend with Ralph and I seemed in a way calculated to show that she wasn’t enslaved to this new relationship; for Ralph especially it was an important signal that he still mattered to her. He seized on it with a desperate gratitude that he kept well hidden from Ingrid, pretending to her that he was simply pleased, and wouldn’t have minded either way. But there was a triumphant shine in his eye, a confident straightening of his shoulders that extended into a hint of a swagger for days after the decision. Ingrid booked her own room in the same hotel we were staying at, an old building near the Jardin du Luxembourg enclosing a square courtyard. Her room ended up being across the courtyard from us, one floor below. The city was blue with cold, a frosting of snow on the old slate roofs when we arrived. Our room was really a series of rooms, all straight in a row with a bathroom at each end, then a bedroom next to that, and a long sitting room in the middle. ‘It’s like a palindrome,’ Ralph said. The walls seemed to be papered in the same thick golden stripes as the Plaza, but the whole thing was on a smaller scale. Each room opened onto a balcony that ran the length of the apartment, little pedestals forming a railing. It was just wide enough to stand on, no room for tables or chairs, no plants. Our beds were covered with golden chenille bedspreads. Everything smelled a little like paint but none of the paint seemed to be particularly new.

  I woke early the next morning and had breakfast sent up and stood with my coffee, wearing my coat and pyjamas, on the balcony. The sky grew bluer from its pale purple dawn colour. Ingrid appeared on he
r balcony across the way, a huge white bathrobe wrapped around her and her hair wet. She shivered and turned around to go back inside; I waved, and she saw me and smiled and pulled her robe tighter. ‘Come over!’ she called.

  I wrote a note for Ralph on the hotel stationery on the desk in the sitting room – neat brown type and a little picture of the hotel that looked as though it had been traced by a child – and pushed it half under his closed bedroom door.

  When I knocked on Ingrid’s door she was still wearing the robe and white pyjamas. There was a tray on the table behind her filled with coffee and bread and pastries. Her apartment was just like ours would be if it were cut in half down the middle. Through the glass doors the sun was striking the opposite wall of balconies.

  Ingrid pulled her fingers through her wet hair, easing out tangles. She sat at the table and started spreading butter on a croissant.

  ‘Isn’t this beautiful?’ she asked, her mouth full.

  I agreed, and poured coffee.

  ‘Is your room gorgeous like this one too?’

  I nodded again. I felt her eyes narrow on me. ‘Except it’s bigger,’ I said. ‘It’s like this times two.’ I spread out both my hands.

  She nodded and seemed satisfied. I wondered if she was curious about our sleeping arrangements. She sipped her coffee and looked out at the balcony.

  The coffee table next to us held a stack of several guidebooks and one hefty-looking art book, all of them marked with sticky notes. She noticed me looking at them.