‘I don’t want to leave Jenny,’ I said.
‘She’s doing alright, you know,’ he replied. ‘Your mother’s around quite a bit. I think they’ve had some kind of.’ He smiled, searching for a word. ‘Rapprochement?’
‘I suppose that’s good.’
‘It is.’
I hadn’t looked at the photograph of Ingrid since coming back. It was still inside the book, which was on a shelf in the wardrobe in my room. I’d felt such an urgency about it on that flight back, and it had all drained away. I had called Fleur several times, never able to get through to her, and had decided it was something to talk to her about when I saw her next, always assuming that I was going back. But then there was the hospital, and my mother, a series of waves that had crushed me into a whole other state of mind by the end of that first week. It had opened up a new kind of rawness about Ingrid, so that I had avoided thinking about her.
Keith looked at me. ‘Grey’s doing very well. So I hear. There was a rumour that he was going to split from Maeve, from the gallery, but I think that’s all sorted out now.’
He started to get that guilty look that he wore when he talked about Grey. I didn’t say anything.
I stood in the kitchen after he left and looked at the calendar on the wall. It showed the month of October, when I’d come back to Sydney. I knew it wasn’t October anymore, but wasn’t sure if it was the next month, or the one after that. I had to think hard to figure out what day of the week it was. I was scaring myself. Rain fell steadily outside, running off the verandah roof. The night was cool but the day had been warm. It seemed like the end of November. October on the calendar was a picture of an old church somewhere in France. November was a French farmhouse with a sea of coloured flowers out the front of it. This seemed like a wrong kind of image for a European November. The flowers looked like the tiny purple ones that were coming out now along the side of the house near the verandah.
Back in my room I looked at the books on the shelf in the wardrobe, the novel with the photo inside its jacket, and Perspectives on Tribute in the Late Roman Empire. The spine of Jones’s book was still fresh and uncracked. I opened it now to the only page I had really looked at, the title page he had inscribed to me that afternoon in his office. His writing was a swift, level dash across the page, sharply angled. For Julia – Yours, Jones. It was the simplest of inscriptions and I couldn’t tell if it was impersonal or intimate in its brevity. It had nothing to say, or was loaded with things unsaid. The dash after my name was long, so much that it looked as though the line indicated a blank space that had yet to be filled in.
The phone rang. It was Peter.
Just checking in,’ he said.
‘Peter,’ I began, ‘Keith came over today. He says that Mum’s been around. And that she’s getting on well with Jenny.’
‘Yes,’ he replied, sounding surprised – at what I’d said, or the situation, I couldn’t tell. ‘I thought you knew that. Mum seems to be entering some sort of responsible phase.’ He laughed, a dry, ironic sound.
‘Keith said they’d had a rapprochement.’
‘I suppose you could call it that. They never exactly fell out, did they? They just didn’t get along. Not that they’re exactly good friends now. But it’s getting to be that way.’
‘I’m thinking of taking another trip.’
‘By all means. I’m here too, you know. I knowJenny loves having you around. But.’
‘It’s not going to happen again, is it?’ I asked. ‘Another stroke.’
He breathed out heavily. ‘It’s possible. But not that likely. If that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘I don’t know what I’m worried about.’
‘Well, don’t worry about that. There’s nothing you can do about it.’
There was a brief silence.
‘Are you breaking your heart over someone over there?’ he asked impatiently. ‘I thought it would be good for you to get away from Mark – that wasn’t going anywhere – but it doesn’t seem that way.’
I sighed. The only time Peter asked about my personal life was in contexts like this, acting from some kind of intermittent frustrated desire to protect me from my own unwise impulses. I knew better than he did that my love object choices were unfailingly bad.
‘It’s so self-destructive,’ he said.
We had had this conversation before.
‘You don’t know anything about it,’ I said. ‘And no, I’m not breaking my heart.’
‘No, that would involve actually getting involved, I suppose.’
‘You can talk. Is that why you’re checking up on me?’ I asked.
‘You’re so fucking prickly,’ he said.
‘Sorry.’
‘Checking in. Just saying hi. I thought you’d want to know that Jenny’s doing well this week. I’m going to be there Sunday if you want to stop by, get some lunch.’
‘OK.’
‘Mum won’t be there.’
I breathed with relief. ‘Alright.’
‘I won’t hassle you about the guy, whoever he is. You can tell me about it if you want to.’
‘As if.’ But the irritation had fled.
The next morning the garden was green and freshened by the rainfall. I took my tea outside to the verandah and sat in a chair watching the sun break through patches of thin cloud. The sound of the radio came through from the kitchen and told me the day and the date. I had taken the little elephant out of my suitcase and held it in my hand now. The radio told me what time it was: too early to call anyone. I walked to the local shops and bought the paper, took it back, read it in the shade. The sun rose higher. I called Ralph. Aaron answered, as usual, and Ralph took a long time getting to the phone.
‘Ralph? I think I want to go back to New York.’
‘Thank god. I knew you would eventually. You’re turning into a fucking corpse here in Sydney. Giving me a run for my money.’
‘I didn’t realise it was that bad.’
‘No, I know. OK. When do you want to leave? I’ll get Aaron to arrange the flight.’
‘It’s OK – there’s no need –’
‘No, Julia.’
I was silent.
‘You’re going back for her, aren’t you?’ he asked.
I thought again of the picture, her mysterious smile. ‘I suppose so. There are a few more things to look into.’
‘Let me pay. I want you to feel obligated to me. That way I can feel justified in getting you to tell me everything.’
‘I’ll tell you everything anyway.’
‘I know you’re really going back for that cruelly beautiful professor of yours. Good luck with that.’
‘Oh, him.’ I tried to sound casual. But it was Richard’s face that came to my mind, bent over the table, explaining my own writing to me.
‘And whatever else you get up to. Oh, I’m seeing Victoria for lunch tomorrow.’ He started coughing and it went on for a disconcertingly long time. ‘Sorry,’ he said eventually, his voice still harsh. ‘Do you want to come?’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘Well. She called me up yesterday and said she’d run into you.’
‘In Mosman.’
‘She’s curious about your visit to New York.’
‘She’s engaged.’
‘I know – Eve told me. Gold Coast money, a developer. Now we know why she wasn’t that upset about her sister becoming a multimillionaire.’
‘Are we too hard on her?’
‘Probably. Yes. No. It is sad – she’s lost everyone now. All her immediate family. Eve’s tried to be supportive.’ He paused, and said painfully, ‘She looks so like Ingrid.’
I couldn’t tell whether he was about to say that he loved seeing her, or hated it.
‘But Ingrid never talked about her,’ I said.
‘No. But they were close in their own weird way.’
Were they? I supposed that Ralph would know better than me.
It was late November. I could get a
flight the following week. Aaron booked it.
23.
I waited a long time for a taxi at the airport in New York, and the sky darkened quickly into night during the drive. The driver talked into his phone the whole way in a language I couldn’t identify. A word that here and there sounded Spanish. I pressed myself into the corner of the seat and watched the buildings go past, the dark, glowing hulk of the skyline as we travelled towards the island.
The downtown streets were strangely empty and we drove for blocks with barely another car on the street, catching every green light. It was cold when I got out of the cab, patches of dirty water hardening to ice on the pavement. No light showed from Mrs Bee’s window onto the street. There was a coldness inside the building too; winter had stolen in while I was gone. The whole city seemed to have gone into hibernation, closing its doors, closing down.
The apartment was empty. I looked through the rooms but there was no sign of Matt. His bed was rumpled, with three pairs of identical-looking jeans strewn across it and a black scarf thrown down in a folded zigzag against the dark red bedcover. The fridge held several takeout containers that could have been days or weeks old. My room – I thought of it as mine, and it still felt that way – looked emptier than before, and silent. I tugged open the curtains across the French doors and breathed dust as they moved. The bed was bare, no sheets, showing the mattress with a couple of faint stains on the quilted cover. The place had an abandoned, sad feeling.
I looked into one of the closets in the hallway, the one I’d found the boots in weeks ago, thinking it might hold some linen or blankets. It was still mainly full of coats and rugs rolled up at the end of the space. I looked through the coats, thinking of the cold night outside, and borrowed Matt’s scarf instead.
The place was just as empty when I came back half an hour later with orange juice and pizza. I took a glass from the kitchen and sat down in front of the TV. Friends was on. It quickly went to a commercial. I took the book from my bag, the one with the photos still tucked inside it in their envelope, and looked at the pictures again, and put them away.
I called Ralph. Aaron answered after a few rings. I was prepared to give him a message, but he said, ‘I’ll get Ralph for you.’
Long seconds passed, then Ralph’s voice.
‘Julia.’
Keep talking, I wanted to say. Say anything. That longing I’d felt when I had seen him last in Sydney, the desire to clutch his shirt between my fingers, became a wild undulation in my chest right where I thought it had gone to sleep forever, filling up the silence.
It calmed down as soon as I heard his tired, expectant tone again. ‘You’re there?’
‘I’m here.’
‘OK.’
Laughter from the television.
‘It’s, like, winter here.’
He didn’t respond.
‘I just wanted to let you know I’m here.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ I could hear a smile. ‘Well …’
‘Ralph,’ I said. ‘Have you heard from Victoria?’
‘Victoria?’
I thought of her long legs and tense back walking quickly away from me on the street that day; her hostile response to my statement that I’d been to New York.
‘Not since that lunch. I guess she’s back to sunning herself to death in Queensland. Why?’
‘It’s nothing. I’ll call again, later.’
‘Good.’
‘Goodnight.’
‘Right. Goodnight.’
That thing in my chest gave a restless twitch and subsided. I tried reading the novel again but by the end of the chapter I’d forgotten the beginning and had to re-start; after two times I gave up. Another episode of Friends started, and another.
I woke up on the bare mattress with the down cover from Matt’s bed wrapped around me. It took a while to remember that I’d taken it in with me when I’d gone to bed, brain slowed by sleeping pills. The room was frigid. There was no radiator that I could see. Instead there were vents in the floor that seemed to be letting out no heat at all. I shivered and ran the shower as hot as I could stand.
It was a hazy morning when I got out of the subway in Brooklyn and walked down through Brooklyn Heights along Montague Street to the Promenade, stopping on the way to buy coffee and doughnuts. The coffee tasted faintly of hazelnuts and artificial milk. At the Promenade I walked down the footpath until I had almost reached the south end and sat on a bench. Nannies and mothers wheeled blanketed babies in strollers and the shouts of children sounded from the playgrounds behind. Joggers ran past. Down the other end of the walkway a small film crew was setting up with cameras and large foil umbrellas. I shaded my eyes against the glare of the sky and took out the envelope packet, removed the photograph of Ingrid. It seemed very small in my hand. I looked across at the city, the cascading shapes of the buildings. The mirrored sides of glass-walled structures reflected and distorted the buildings next to them, making ghostly twins of their neighbours.
Ingrid smiled out at me, a half-smile. I looked closer at her mouth and thought I saw the shadow of a bruise on her lower lip, one side more swollen than the other. The blue of her eyes was barely there in the picture, all the colours bleached out. I could see the stepped shape of a building behind her and I looked up to match it with my view. It looked sort of like one building I could see, and sort of like another. I tried to remember the placement of the towers and where they would stand next to and behind these other buildings. It seemed like they should be there, in the picture, whether it was one building I thought I was seeing, or another. I went to the railing and walked down the Promenade, holding the photograph, checking. By the time I left, the sky was taking on the glare of noon.
I pressed the buzzer next to Fleur’s name and waited. There was no response. I tried again. I had tried calling her from a payphone in Brooklyn with no luck. There was a phone at the end of her block but the mouthpiece was missing from the receiver, the plastic shattered. I stepped back from the door.
The storefront on the street level of the building had changed its display but was no less ambiguous than before. A single red velvet sofa sat in the window, a book lying open on the seat and a pair of high-heeled boots on the floor at one end. The laces were undone and the right boot had fallen over on its side. A tall lamp lit the arrangement. Velvet hangings blocked the view of what was inside and a sign on the door said Closed. Shoes? Furniture? Lamps? Art? I wondered. Books? A pair of opera glasses rested on the seat of the sofa.
The day had turned into afternoon. Fleur was probably at school.
I went to find something to eat. A couple of hours later I pressed the buzzer again with not much hope of success, and a second time. The opera glasses were gone from the sofa in the window. The front door clunked open and Fleur’s face appeared, pinched and cold-looking.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘The fucking intercom is broken. The whole thing. I can hear you but I can’t buzz the door from upstairs.’
Her eyes were light greenish-grey against silver and black eyeliner.
‘Come in,’ she said and held open the door.
It was warm inside. She was wearing jeans and a heavy, white, cable-knit jumper that came halfway down her thighs. The sleeves were too long, rolled up and pushed up her forearms. She had sheepskin boots on her feet.
‘What is that place downstairs?’ I asked on the way up.
Fleur shrugged. ‘It’s always changing. Right now I think they sell underwear.’ We came to her door. ‘Or maybe it’s still a gallery. I don’t know.’
There was music playing in the loft, and two teenagers, a boy and a girl, sitting on the beanbags and looking at a camera. The girl had one of Fleur’s dolls in her lap. They both had black hair and black fingernails, the polish chipped.
‘Hi.’ I waved at them. They smiled back.
‘They’re helping me with a shoot,’ Fleur said. A couple of tall lights stood over in the corner where
I’d seen her photographing the dolls the last time, looking as though they were waiting to be put into action. The astroturf surface was gone and the set was covered in shag-pile carpet on the floor and peeling gilt paper on the walls. Over on the beanbag the black-haired girl lifted the doll and moved its arms up and down in a series of gestures, displaying it for the boy. He nodded and they talked in low, serious voices.
‘So, here you are,’ Fleur said. ‘Haven’t heard from you in a while.’
‘I was back in Sydney.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘My aunt had a stroke.’
‘God, I’m sorry. You know, Dad mentioned that. That’s awful.’
‘Thanks. It’s OK.’
‘So you came back over here to get away from all that?’
‘I suppose so.’
She watched her friends with the doll for a while.
‘Fleur. I wanted to talk to you about this photo.’
I held it out and her face changed when she saw it. Her arms remained folded.
‘That’s mine.’
‘I know – I’m sorry.’
‘Well, thanks for bringing it back.’
‘Would you mind – I don’t have many photos of Ingrid …’
She studied my face, and looked at the floor for a second, calculating, and looked back up at me decisively. ‘OK, for now. But I’ll dig out some others for you. I’d like that one back. Come round again in a few days and I’ll see what I have.’
She looked at her friends and back at me. ‘Do you want to hang out? We’re going to start setting up – but I don’t know, if you want to help, you could help me with these lights.’
‘Thanks. But, Fleur, I wanted to ask you about the photo.’
‘What about it?’ she demanded briskly.
‘I’ve just been down to the Promenade.’
She frowned.
‘Where’s it taken from?’ I asked.
‘Right – the Promenade – you’ve just been down there. What did you want to ask?’
The Legacy Page 29