Legacy (7 page)

13

Rachel still shuddered every time she remembered Tony's daughter discovering them in that playful embrace. She usually wouldn't have been so reckless but the rest of the staff were off at a training day and she had thought it was just the two of them in the office. Being discovered by Tony's daughter made everything so much worse, especially as she admired Simone.

She never thought she would find herself having a relationship with a married man and was surprised at how easy it was to block out the fact that Tony had a whole set of other commitments, a whole other life. She had known of Tony Harlowe since she was at school. She had read his writings and even gone to hear him speak when she was at university. He was dynamic, captivating, the type of person who brought people with him. She had applied to work at the Aboriginal Legal Service knowing that he was in charge and, quite frankly, she believed in him.

When Rachel had begun working with Tony, she enjoyed the tension, the electricity, between them. She was acutely aware of the competition between her male colleagues for her attention - the aggressive, unrelenting suggestions and invitations. Once John Franks pushed up against her in the photocopy room. She could feel his hardness as he muttered, ‘How'd you like to get this into you?'

His rank smell of stale cigarettes was as repulsive to her as his unkempt hair and sleazy smirk. ‘As if,' she had snapped sharply at him, shoving him back but she was still shaking as she walked back to her office.

From the moment something happened between her and Tony - that evening of their first kiss and the admission of deep attraction - the other men stopped bothering her. All except for John Franks who had slipped past her in the hallway and muttered, ‘Should have known you would only put out for the boss.'

‘What did you say?' Rachel challenged him, but he only responded with a sneer.

In their growing intimacy, Rachel saw Tony's vulnerabilities, his insecurities - a side of him that others didn't see - and she was beginning to love him more because of them. His prepared speech about how he couldn't leave his wife had clearly been delivered many, many times before and with such seriousness that she had to fight to suppress a giggle. She had not expected him to say that he loved her though. He had seemed too tough for that. When the words had slipped from his mouth she could tell they were not rehearsed, not one of his corny, over-used lines. In fact, he looked surprised that he had uttered them.

Rachel had always been interested in Aboriginal issues. Growing up, she came to suspect that she had Aboriginal heritage herself even though she could not confirm it until she was enrolled in the first year of her university studies.

Raised in the inner-west Sydney suburb of Strathfield, Rachel's father and mother were both English teachers and her mother heavily involved with the Teachers Federation. When she went to high school she was one of the few students in her class whose parents were still together. She would joke with her younger brother, James, that they should form a support group. ‘The secret to a good marriage,' her mother would say, ‘is never to go to bed angry.' ‘The secret,' her father would quip, ‘is to smile and nod and say “yes dear”.'

It was always clear to Rachel how much her father adored her mother. He would beam when she addressed the union meetings and his gaze would follow her as she took charge and busied around. Her mother's energy was the efficient whirlwind around which everything revolved while her father was the family's quiet, contemplative centre. Her parents were focused on resourcefulness and thrift. Her mother made all their clothes when they were young and later would buy outfits for them at the markets, searching through bins and racks. They would purchase all their groceries in bulk and her mother always knew how to spot a bargain.

But amidst this prudent frugality, her parents were demonstrably affectionate to both Rachel and her brother. They were lavished with affection and encouraged to pursue whatever interested them - for Rachel it was ballet, the flute and later the debating team; for James it was soccer, then football and cricket. Even when she did something wrong - like the time she and her friend Janelle were caught smoking on the school excursion - her parents would say, ‘We're not angry, just so very disappointed in you,' and that would make her more ashamed and sorry than any other punishment that they could have meted out.

Both her parents loved word games and puzzles. Instead of answering questions simply, even everyday queries like, ‘How are you today, Dad?' would be answered cryptically. ‘Feeling very happy like the mountaineer who climbed Mount Everest,' her father would grin. ‘I see, you are “on top of the world”, Daddy.'

When she was only fourteen, Rachel's father began to teach her how to do cryptic crosswords and solving them soon became a ritual they shared. They had a pattern. The paper would arrive in the morning and they'd make a head start. They would look at the crossword, read all the clues and make a mark beside them if they had an idea of what the answer might be. If part of the clue was an anagram, it was underlined
(A Dior
creation in most homes (5) - Radio).
When sure of the answer, it was placed in the grid. After school Rachel would look at it again. Her father would have a go at it when he came home from work and then after dinner they would try to solve the hardest clues, the ones that still eluded them. If stuck, they would take a break and come back to it later. If they could not complete the puzzle, they would look up the clue the next morning and see where they had gone wrong.

From time to time her father would slip a folded piece of paper into her lunchbox, a riddle for her to solve during the day. The note might say
‘Over it Wilts' by Cheer Sick Lands
and she would have to work it out (an anagram!
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens, which she had just started reading). Another day the note might read:
‘Honest but careless, famous last words.'
They had seen
Gone with the Wind
on the weekend and she knew it was ‘Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.'

She didn't fight often with her brother but then he tended to keep to himself. James had no aptitude for words or numbers the way Rachel did and instead was preoccupied with sports; he was naturally good at them, while she had no talent and even less passion. When he was a teenager, he became even more withdrawn, more reclusive, moodier. Her room was next to her parents' and she could sometimes, late at night, hear them through the walls. ‘You don't know what he suffered before he came to us,' she once heard her mother say, and ever since suspected that James was adopted.

It explained why her brother had so much trouble fitting in while she enjoyed the same pursuits as her parents. Although she resented the way her mother's frugality meant her clothes were not as trendy as her friends, she shared her parents' values and their tastes. She felt she was the ‘good girl' while James was the ‘problem child'.

The suspicion that James had been adopted planted a nagging thought and before long she began to question her own heritage, wondering if she had been adopted too. She was darker in her features than her parents, didn't look like them at all, and she would get called ‘wog' or ‘Abo' at school.

She found herself drawn to Aboriginal issues, always felt a deep sympathy for the way they had been treated and for the conditions that they lived in now. She wanted to learn as much as she could about Aboriginal art, culture, politics and history, and she could not but take it personally when people around her - her friends, for example - were not interested, didn't seem to care or were even hostile towards and intolerant of Aboriginal people. How could you hear all that happened to them, Rachel wondered, and not be moved to care?

Her parents confirmed her suspicions about her own adoption when she was eighteen. She knew the circumstances would most likely be hard to face, that perhaps should be left in the past, but she could not help but wonder.

At university she did her Honours thesis on the role of Aboriginal women in traditional society, countering the dominant stereotype that they were subordinate to Aboriginal men, treated like chattels. This was a particularly important myth to dispel in relation to criminal law where defence lawyers used it as an excuse to get more lenient sentences for their clients when the victim was Aboriginal. She had looked at the cases where judges had made pronouncements about how rape was not such a serious offence in the Aboriginal community and she knew this was something she wanted to change by showing that those stereotypes did not properly represent the role - and respect - given to Aboriginal women in traditional society.

But the yearning to find out who she might be - what was in her genes? what was in her blood? - eventually drove her to make some inquiries.

In the final year of her studies, Rachel made an appointment at a Link-Up office, an organisation that helped Aboriginal people reunite with their families. She met a case-worker, Robynne, and told her, ‘I don't have any proof that I am Aboriginal but I think I might be. I know that sounds kind of crazy but I don't know how to explain it.'

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 passion,' 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.