Legacy

by Larissa Behrendt

  To Rachel’s relief, Robynne smiled. ‘Don’t worry. Lots of people say that. It’s a gut feeling. And we often find out that they are right.’

  Robynne helped her obtain her adoption documents and traced her mother. She also broke the news to Rachel that her mother, a woman named Belinda Ryan, identified as Aboriginal on her death certificate, had died when Rachel would have been about eight years old. Rachel wondered if she shouldn’t have felt something the moment her mother passed away and tried to remember if anything significant had happened at that time, a sign that her mother had passed from this world to the next. Her instinct that she was Aboriginal had proven to be correct and this gave her some comfort against the strange, complex grief of losing a mother she had never known.

  Rachel determined to use her law degree to work on issues related to Aboriginal people, her people - and the job at the legal service, working with Tony Harlowe, seemed just what she had been looking for.

  Out of home now, she had a different routine and she liked the independence. She would get to work at 6.30 am and have her first go at the cryptic crossword, look at it again at the end of her lunch break and if there was anything left unsolved, take it home to ponder, even call her father if there was a really tricky one. He would do the crossword too and they’d exchange notes. She could tell by his voice how pleased he was when she got an answer that he couldn’t figure out and the smugness he felt when he got one that she had missed.

  Rachel used the crossword as a bit of a talisman as well, a touch of superstition in what was otherwise a very practical attitude to life. She would look for hidden clues in the crossword to guide her own decisions. On the first day she began working at the legal service there had been a clue: Destined to capitalise for all the eternities (4). The answer was fate. And on the night she decided to lean in and kiss Tony there had been a clue: Admirer for millennium’s six balls (6). The answer, of course, was lover.

  14

  BOSTON, USA

  The red figures 3.17 beamed from the electronic alarm clock. John’s sleep was sporadic, restless. His tired limbs were a tense knot against the mattress. He looked at Charmaine, lying with her back to him, the slender smooth crest of her body wrapped under the blankets visible in the greyish blue dimness of the early hours.

  John slipped noiselessly out of the bed, his bare feet treading on the wooden floorboards as he passed down the stairs to his study. He switched the light on and sat at his desk. He took a silver key from a small wooden box sitting on the polished desktop. He slipped the key into the lock of the top drawer of the desk and opened it. He pulled out a small photo album and opened to the first page. Two neatly groomed, golden-haired girls in matching white dresses, sitting on dark blue fabric with a cloudy background. Angels in the sky.

  He placed his finger on Lucy’s face. Her beautiful smile illuminated just as it had the last Christmas they were all together. She had unwrapped and hugged her new bicycle with all the energy an eleven-year-old could muster. That same bicycle would mangle her body when she carelessly turned a corner and rode into her death.

  Jessica was practical and reserved like her mother, intellectual. But he could see himself clearly in Lucy. She had been inquisitive like him, her thirst for knowledge unquenchable, reaching out for everything she could grasp, asking endless questions, always with new ideas. She was like the person he had been at his best, before his sense of self had been poisoned by Charmaine.

  His eyes then fell on to Jessica, Louise’s child. He moved his finger to her image. ‘I thought losing one child was the end of the world. Now, it seems, I have lost two. And it is too late to go back.’

  John gently pulled a leather-bound book from the drawer. He flipped the pages over at random, his eyes resting on his own handwriting. His words. His poems.

  Once these lines poured from him, swelling inside him until he freed them with a fluid hand. He had almost forgotten that sensation, the heat that came with deep feeling, the zeal in every living word. He flipped the pages again, running his fingers over the fading ink and so-familiar words.

  John closed the book and held it between his two palms, wondering if the energy and emotion caught in the words on the pages could filter back into him. But he remained immune from that world. He finally, softly, placed the book on the desk.

  His last two conversations with Simone still haunted him. After their discussion about Nabokov he had reflected on the idea of how immoral it is not to understand the impact of your own behaviour on somebody else. And inevitably he thought of Jessica - so lost to him now but only because of his own actions. He had sunk so deeply into his grief over Lucy’s death that he had been unable to respond to anything and as he wallowed in his despair and anguish, he was blind to the pain of everyone else.

  Now he could clearly see how this had affected his other daughter. She had been neglected by him when she was just as devastated and uncentred by the inexplicable tragedy of Lucy’s accident as he was. Rejected when she needed him most, she learnt not to need him at all and turned hard against him. He had tried in these last years to win her back but she resented his efforts as being too little too late. She had been fifteen years old when he left Louise for Charmaine and now, able to make decisions about her own life, she chose not to be around him, made it clear that she didn’t respect him.

  And that’s why his last conversation with Simone Harlowe also haunted him. In discussing Remains of the Day they spoke about the great tragedy in the way Stevens chose a life of duty over a life with a family. While he hadn’t put his work first, what he had done, in his smothering depression and desperation, was reach for Charmaine to rescue him rather than reaching for his family. He chose her over them. Charmaine’s deceit about wanting children meant he had lost the promise of a new family and he had turned his back on the one he already had. Little wonder that Jessica couldn’t forgive him.

  ‘Would you like to come over for your birthday?’ he had rung to ask just three days ago.

  ‘No. I’m busy.’

  ‘You should make time to see your old dad.’

  ‘Why? You never made time for me.’

  ‘That’s not true, Jess,’ he sighed. ‘I’ve always loved you.’

  ‘Not as much as you loved your other daughter and not as much as you love yourself.’

  This was typical of the way Jessica spoke to him. Her hostility towards him made him feel defeated and deflated. And in the end, because he knew he had made her feel that way, that it was a result of his own failings, it made him want to disappear, to have all the atoms that made him float apart until they melded into the thin air.

  He opened the lowest desk drawer and pulled out a large envelope, then searched for his address book across the desktop, finally locating it under a stack of photocopied articles that he had been meaning to read. He opened it and looked for a newer entry. He copied the address under the letters that formed Simone Harlowe’s name. He slipped his treasured leather book of poetry inside, opened the wooden box that had housed the key and pulled out as many stamps as he could find.

  On a piece of paper he wrote:

  … a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.

  He slipped the paper into the envelope.

  After sealing the package with tape, John walked to the hall. Still in his pyjamas, he huddled into his coat and wrapped a scarf around his neck without letting the book out of his grasp. Once he had checked his coat pocket for his keys, he quietly slipped out of the house and into the night.

  The walk to the post box at the corner of his street was no more than a three-minute one but the cold seemed to lengthen the time to twice that. John’s body tensed up from the cutting chill, his bare feet numbed. When he reached the mail box he looked at the name written forcefully across the package. He brought the parcel to his lips. ‘Never lose that pas
sion,’ he whispered. He opened the flap of the post box and listened as the leather-bound emotions of his life dropped to the bottom.

  Returning to his house, John pushed his hands deep into his coat pockets, heard the soft scrunching of snow underneath his feet. He could see his footsteps in the fresh snow as he returned to the house, the only one who had ventured out on this cold night. ‘I never could get used to this damn New England weather. Always too cold for my liking,’ he thought. ‘But it’s no colder than my wife. And no colder than my own heart.’

  John entered his house as quietly as he left it. Still in his coat and scarf he returned to his study. He searched through the still-open top drawer until his fingers found the small gun. He held the barrel to his temple as his eyes fell to the smile on Lucy’s face on the page in his photograph album. Her name floated on his last breath as he squeezed the trigger.

  PART II

  15

  SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

  I am lying on my bed pondering how so much has gone wrong in such a short space of time. My bag’s already packed even though my plane does not leave until late in the afternoon.

  It all began three days ago when the phone rang at 6 am. I panicked and my first thought was that I had forgotten a call with Professor Young until I realised the next had been scheduled for just over two weeks away.

  Mum had reached the phone before I even got out of bed. ‘It’s for you, sweetheart,’ she said as she came to my bedroom door with the handset.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, Simone. It’s Glenda Barnes, Professor Young’s secretary.’

  ‘Hi. Do I have a meeting with the Professor?’ I asked, confused.

  ‘No. I have bad news. The worst, I’m afraid. I’m ringing to let you know that Professor Young passed away two nights ago.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Yes. It’s awful. Just awful. And such chaos. I only just realised that you wouldn’t have heard. It’s been on the local news here. It was so unexpected and he was so well known. So popular.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘I know. Such a shock. There’s a family service on Friday but the faculty is having a memorial service in the church in the University Yard in two weeks. Thought you might like to be back for that.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I would. I was coming back soon anyway but I’ll definitely be there.’ And suddenly I realised that I would never see Professor Young again. ‘I just can’t believe it. Was it a car accident or a heart attack?’

  The secretary hesitated, then she whispered, ‘We’re not supposed to tell but, well, if you can keep it quiet, he killed himself. Shot himself in the head. Can you believe it?’

  ‘No. No, I can’t.’

  When I got off the phone Mum was waiting with a cup of tea. She could tell it was bad news. She has her own kind of telepathy.

  ‘Oh Mum,’ I stepped into the comfort of her arms. ‘Professor Young is dead.’

  She didn’t speak or fuss too much, just waited patiently until I was ready to talk.

  ‘I just feel numb. I guess it hasn’t sunk in yet.’

  ‘Grief is like that. You won’t feel it deepest until you least expect it. And then something little will trigger everything locked up inside you.’

  She comforted me until I stepped out of her embrace.

  ‘What does this mean for your studies?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. I haven’t thought about it. I’ll need to find a new supervisor I guess,’ I replied glumly.

  Who could be to me all the things that Professor Young was? Who else would understand me and my work the way that he could? I put my head into my hands. My mother hugged me again. ‘There, there.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ my father asked, coming into the room, sensing the mood. He looked at me, then at my mother, then back at me. I could feel his rising fear about what we might be saying. I savoured his discomfort until my mother put him out of his misery.

  ‘Simone’s supervisor has passed away.’

  ‘That’s a tough break, Princess,’ he said sincerely.

  I nodded.

  ‘What does it mean for your studies?’

  ‘God, Dad. You are so fucking insensitive.’

  He looked stunned as I stormed off to my bedroom. I slammed the door. I don’t know why I reacted this way, why his asking the same question that Mum did elicited such a different reaction. I knew he had been genuine with his sympathy so why did it make me so angry?

  I decided to ring Jamie. I really wanted to talk with him, to tell him the terrible news, but his phone was off. Not surprising. Sydney time is three hours ahead of Perth’s. He would have been asleep.

  While I was lying on my bed, thinking about Professor Young, my thoughts drifted back to my father. Despite my current grief, the resentment I was feeling towards him wouldn’t soften. It was a frustration I couldn’t articulate. It was more than his womanising that was making me instinctively push him away.

  I tried Jamie again but there was no response. So I called Tanya. She was heading off to work but we agreed to meet at her place that evening.

  ‘What a year we are both having,’ Tanya sighed.

  We were sitting on her balcony, watching the sun creep slowly behind the horizon.

  ‘I know. But I think you win. I wasn’t left for a barmaid who is barely the legal drinking age. Mind you, finding my father kissing someone would have to rate high on any list of “worsts”.’

  ‘He wasn’t kissing her.’

  ‘No. He was giving her a free breast examination.’ I turned to look at her. ‘Why do you always defend him?’

  ‘Why do you always attack him?’

  ‘Um … because he is the kind of person who feels up the young women who work for him?’

  ‘But he’s more than that.’

  ‘Yeah. You’re right. He is more than that. He’s a man who betrays the wife who sits at home innocently supporting him so that everyone else foolishly thinks that he is some great man when, clearly, he isn’t.’

  ‘No one’s perfect, Simone. Look at all he has achieved.’

  ‘Other men achieve great things without such personal flaws. Take Professor Young. He never slept with his students or had affairs. He was a man with integrity and wrote some of the most influential books on the intersection between law and equality. At least he could be reflective about the world. About relationships. About how human beings treat other human beings.’

  And in the lull of my heated conversation with Tanya my thoughts ran to my discussion with Professor Young about Remains of the Day and the tragedy of choosing a life of servitude over a life with family. I felt again that familiar deep stab when I realised he really was gone and began to comprehend what I had truly lost.

  ‘You always do this. You idolise men. Put them on a pedestal.’

  ‘I do not.’ I’m taken aback.

  ‘You do. Except for your father. And your feelings for Jamie are the worst. He leaves you rather than supports you to go overseas. He moves to the other side of the country. He tells you not to call because he says it’s too hard when really he means he hasn’t got the guts to tell you that it’s actually over. And you not only hang on to him, you treat him as though he’s a saint.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I snarled. ‘You always see the worst in people. The way Terry treated you has made you bitter. Jamie and I are different to that and you know it. And you know why we couldn’t stay together.’

  ‘No. I know he told you why you couldn’t stay together. But I also know that you loved him - you still love him - and you didn’t want to break up. You going to study overseas should not be a deal breaker if he really cared for you. He used it as an excuse. You just can’t face the fact that he doesn’t love you anymore but didn’t have the guts to tell you the flat-out truth. And because of that he has strung you along. You pine for him all the time. How convenient for him!’

  The white heat of anger surged inside me. I was too furious to s
peak, too bewildered by all Tanya had said to answer her.

  I snatched up my car keys and headed for the door.

  16

  My bags are packed - including a copy of Billy Budd, Professor Young’s favourite book.

  All morning I have been moping around, turning my fight with Tanya over and over in my mind. It’s three days since our tiff, the longest we have gone with no contact when we are in the same city. It’s true that I still love Jamie, that I idolise him. But I also believe his decision to end the relationship had been selfless. Tanya was right that it was not what I wanted but it wasn’t true that he had used it as an excuse. Yes, he had told me not to call him because it would make it easier on both of us but I could see the sense of that, even if I didn’t like it.

  I want to tell him that I miss him. I want to say: ‘I remember how soft your bottom lip is when I kiss you. I remember how smooth the skin on your spine is against the tip of my finger and I remember the smell of your neck, like heat and sawdust.’

  I called him several times yesterday to tell him that I was going back to the States but he didn’t pick up his phone and I didn’t leave a message.

  Mum yells out that the mail has arrived and that there is something for me. I shuffle out to the lounge room and look at the package she has left on the table. The first thing I recognise is Professor Young’s distinctive, determined handwriting. I pick it up and look more closely at it. Pressed on top of all the stamps is a postmark dated the day after he died. And the stamps show that the parcel was not sent from his office or it would have been franked.

  ‘What is it, sweetheart?’ my mother asks.

  ‘I think it’s from Professor Young …’

  Mum and I stare at the package in my hands. Slowly I open it. It is a leather-bound book. As I pull it from its packaging a note falls to the floor. Mum picks it up and hands it to me. In Professor Young’s hand it reads: