The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  “I look forward to that,” said Alexander, and left the room.

  Education, education…First a governess, then a tutor to prepare his daughter for university. Education was everything.

  She isn’t going to be sent to school in Sydney, I don’t trust that place. Nell—yes, I like that better than Eleanor—will stay under my eye, no matter how often Constance tries to tell me that girls need to mingle with other girls and learn to be pert flirts, society snobs. Yes, my daughter’s future is mapped out already: a tertiary education in languages and history, and then marriage to Lee Costevan. If my luck hasn’t utterly deserted me, Elizabeth’s next child will be a boy, but I shall hedge my bets with Nell and Lee. Their children will fuse my blood with Ruby’s—och, that’s a formidable inheritance!

  SIR EDWARD and Lady Wyler departed eight days after the birth of baby Eleanor; Elizabeth had suffered no more seizures, and was recovering rapidly. The obstetrician had advised that no conjugal intercourse take place for six months, but was of the opinion that a second pregnancy would proceed smoothly. Eclampsia was a disorder of first pregnancies.

  His only qualm lay in Elizabeth’s choice of a wet nurse, as she had no milk of her own. She had grabbed at a cousin of Jade and Pearl’s, Butterfly Wing, who had lost her own baby at about the moment Eleanor was born. Chinese milk?

  “You don’t know what that might do to your child,” said he, voice reasonable. “The races of Man are distinct and different, so it may well be that the mother’s milk of one race is not suitable for the child of another race. Please I beg you, Mrs. Kinross, try to find a white wet nurse!”

  “Rubbish,” said Elizabeth, looking as stubborn as any Scot ever did, and that is stubborn. “Milk is milk. Why else can a cat nurse puppies or a dog nurse kittens? In America, I have read that Negro women nurse white babies. Butterfly Wing has enough milk to feed twins, so my Eleanor won’t want.”

  “Have it your own way,” said Sir Edward with a sigh.

  “They are very peculiar,” he said to his wife as they boarded the train for Lithgow. “Doesn’t Alexander Kinross listen to the politicians of all persuasions? Robertson, Parkes, even those crass fellows who woo the working class are adamant that the Chinese are a danger, that the immigration of Chinese to Australia must stop. Many want to deport the Chinese already here. Yet Kinross has built his empire on Chinese, and his wife wants her child suckled by a Chinese, for pity’s sake! If they persist in this attitude, there will be trouble.”

  “I fail to see why,” said Lady Wyler placidly. “If Alexander exploited his Chinese, that would be a weakness in his armor. But he doesn’t, which gives no one any reason to interfere with him.”

  “My dear, some politicians don’t need reasons.”

  BABY ELEANOR thrived on Chinese milk and behaved perfectly. At six weeks of age she was sleeping through the night, and at three months she was able to sit up.

  “A very forward little thing, aren’t you, snookums?” cooed Ruby, kissing the chipmunk cheeks. “Auntie Ruby’s darling—oh, Elizabeth, she brings back memories of what it was like to mother my jade kitten! He was so adorable.”

  “Her eyes are going to be blue,” said Elizabeth, feeling no jealousy at the way Eleanor had taken to Ruby. “Not navy like mine, nor the sky of my father’s. Deep yet vivid. Though I think her hair will stay black, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Ruby, handing Eleanor to her mother. “Darker skin than yours, more like Alexander’s. Except for her eyes, she looks more like him than you all round—that long face.”

  The eyes under discussion were fixed on Ruby with what did seem cognizance, though babes of three months were not supposed to do that. As if, Ruby fancied, the mite understood what was being said. Ruby dug into her purse and produced a letter.

  “I received this from Lee,” she said. “Would you like to hear it, Elizabeth?”

  “Please,” said Elizabeth, playing with the baby’s fingers.

  Ruby cleared her throat. “I won’t bore you with the first paragraph, I’ll just read out snippets. The second paragraph says ‘I have now moved into the senior school, and have commenced Latin and Greek. My house master, Mr. Matthews, is a decent sort of chap who doesn’t believe in the cane, though I suspect that canings at Proctor’s are rather frowned upon because the pupils are all foreigners of exalted station. Don’t you like that phrase? I am better at Maths than I am at English, but that means I am expected to work harder at English. Mr. Matthews says that no boy under his tutelage will emerge a literary idiot! He has set me to a special course of reading the English Classics, from Shakespeare and Milton to Goldsmith, Richardson, Defoe, and about a hundred others. My reading, he says, is not yet up to speed, but will be. I like history better, I confess, though not those interminable English struggles like the Wars of the Roses. They’re mostly just crusades, battles and treachery—not enough science involved for me. I like the Greeks and the Romans, who fought under far better generals and for nobler causes. Scientific warfare.’ ”

  “How old is he now?” Elizabeth asked, smiling at the pride in Ruby’s voice.

  “Twelve in June,” said Ruby, eyes shimmering with tears. “The time drags for me, but not for him, which is the important thing. Shall I read more?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “ ‘I shall post this in the village so that I can write with frankness. No one at Proctor’s would dream of censoring one’s mail, but I am never quite sure that mail handed in to the school post isn’t opened and read. There are all sorts of boys here, and not every one of them is either a good swot or an admirable character. When I first went to the junior school, I learned that the sons of maharajahs and princes sometimes covet the property of others to the point of stealing it, and are at least as clever at lying as the English. So it may be that the masters open and read our letters home, if only to monitor the currents and eddies among the pupils. I have prized Alexander’s letters because they are so full of good advice and good sense.’ ”

  “Alexander writes to him?” asked Elizabeth, surprised.

  “More often by far than I do. He’s Alexander Kinross, owner of the world’s most productive gold mine—irreproachable as a correspondent. I don’t know why, but he took to Lee when he met my jade kitten in Hill End.”

  “Go on,” Elizabeth prompted.

  “ ‘My life at Proctor’s is very easy since the gold. I can look any of the other chaps in the eye and not suffer, for I am quite as able as they to have my school suits made in Savile Row or pay for my share of a box at some play or opera in London to which the masters escort us. Mum, I would so much like to have a photograph of you now that you can wear lots of jewels and look like a real Russian princess! And a photograph of Papa, please.’ ”

  “I hope you’re doing that,” said Elizabeth.

  “Yes, I am. Sung is rather tickled at the thought of posing for the next itinerant photographer in his most majestic robes.”

  “More of Lee, Ruby. How well he writes!”

  “ ‘My Maths are so good that I am already being tutored with the chaps preparing to go up to Cambridge. Mr. Matthews says that I have a Newtonian grasp of mathematics, but I suspect that he is simply trying to ease me into an academic career. I have no yearnings in that direction. Engineering is more exciting by far. I want to build things out of steel.

  “ ‘My best friends remain Ali and Husain, who are sons of Shah Nasru’d-Din of Persia. Life there is pretty hectic; it seems someone is always trying to assassinate the Shah, but he doesn’t look very likely to die in this way, he’s too well protected. Not to mention that the would-be assassins are executed in public—a deterrent, Ali and Husain tell me.’ ”

  Ruby laid the letter down. “And that’s all that would be of interest to you, Elizabeth. The rest is motherish stuff, and if I read it out, I’ll cry.” She preened, lifted an arm to her head. “Do you think I could pass myself off as a princess of Russia? With a new dress from Sauvage, of course. And my diamonds and rubies.”


  “I’ll lend you that ridiculous diamond tiara Alexander just bought me,” said Elizabeth. “I ask you, Ruby, a tiara! Where on earth am I to wear the thing?”

  “When some royal prince comes out to visit the colonies,” said Ruby nonchalantly. “Alexander’s bound to be invited to lick the royal bum.”

  “Where do you get your metaphors?”

  “In the gutter, dear Elizabeth, where I grew up.”

  CONNUBIAL DUTY resumed for Elizabeth six months after Eleanor was born, with no pretense on Elizabeth’s side that she welcomed it. What flummoxed her was how, knowing very well that she found his attentions distasteful, Alexander managed to do his duty. He always did, loveless and pleasureless though the exercise was. An instinct that, if he found out she had discussed this with his mistress, Alexander would be furiously angry, drove Elizabeth to ask him how this could be.

  “You say I am cold, that there is no pleasure in the Act for you because there is none for me. Yet you come to my bed and you produce your—your seed. How can you do that, Alexander?”

  He laughed, shrugged. “It’s how men are made, my dear. If presented with a naked female body, a man will react.”

  “What if the naked female body is repulsively ugly?”

  “I have no idea of the answer to that, Elizabeth. So far none of the naked female bodies I’ve encountered have been ugly or repulsive. One speaks as one finds,” said Alexander.

  “I can never best you in an argument!”

  “Then why try?”

  “Because you’re so complacent!”

  “Actually I’m not. That’s only how you see me thanks to the state of affairs between us. You threw down a gauntlet, Elizabeth, and I picked it up. It wasn’t I wanted a war. All I wanted was a loving wife. I’ve not ill treated you in any way, nor will I. But children I will have.”

  “How much did my father receive for selling me?”

  “Five thousand pounds, plus whatever he kept of the thousand I sent to bring you out.”

  “Nine hundred and twenty pounds.”

  He leaned to kiss her forehead. “Poor Elizabeth! Between your father, old man Murray and me, you haven’t been very lucky in your men.” He sat up in the bed and crossed his legs like a pasha. “Who would you have chosen as a husband, if you’d had a choice?”

  “No one,” she muttered. “Absolutely no one. I’d sooner be Theodora than Ruby.”

  “Yes, that makes sense. The perennial virgin.” He held out a hand. “Come, Elizabeth, let’s admit that what we do in bed pleases neither of us, and try to get along with each other when we’re not in bed. I haven’t forbidden you to consort with Ruby, or indeed with anyone. Though it hasn’t escaped me that, since the Presbyterians got their kirk and minister, you haven’t once attended a service there. Why?”

  “Your godlessness, as Mrs. Summers calls it, has rubbed off on me,” she said, still ignoring the hand. “In all honesty, I just don’t want to go to kirk anymore. What’s the use? Will you have Eleanor raised a Presbyterian? Or anything else?”

  “No, of course not. If she’s of a spiritual bent, she’ll find her own way to God. If she takes after me, she never will. But subject her to the prejudices, hypocrisies and clannishness of any specific religion, I will not. I notice that since our daughter’s birth you’ve taken to reading the Sydney newspapers, so you must have read enough to see how riddled with religious dissension this colony is—as the whole of Australia is. Well, I may be godless, but at least I stand above all that. And so will Eleanor. I’ll have her tutored in philosophy, not theology. On that kind of platform, she’ll be intellectually equipped to choose for herself.”

  “I agree,” said Elizabeth.

  “You do?”

  “Yes, I do. I have grown enough to realize that breadth of knowledge is more productive of freedom than narrowness. I would have my daughter free of the shibboleths that dog me. I want her to amount to something. To be able to talk geology and mechanics with you, literature with poets and essayists, history with true historians, and geography with those who have traveled.”

  He burst out laughing, hugged her. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth! That I should live to hear you say such things!”

  But the hug broke the moment; Elizabeth withdrew, turned on her side and pretended to sleep.

  ELEANOR’S PROGRESS suggested that all these parental hopes had some basis in fact, for she continued to develop ahead of her age. At nine months she began to talk coherently, which enchanted her father, who from that time on began to pay the nursery little visits during the day, when she was awake and alert. She adored him, so much was plain in the way she held out her arms the moment he entered, clutched him as soon as he picked her up, chattered away rather unintelligibly. Her eyes were her most striking feature, widely set, widely opened and the deepish blue of a cornflower; they would fix on him as intently as intensely, her infant prettiness in full bloom at Dadda’s advent. Soon, he would think, she will have to have a kitten, a puppy; I’ll have no child of mine grow up petless, as I did. She must learn that death is a part of life through the demise of beloved animals—far rather that, than through the demise of a parent.

  MUCH TO Jade’s dismay, Butterfly Wing had graduated from wet nurse to nurserymaid; Eleanor was passionately attached to her, and would not be parted from her. Indeed, in many ways she seemed to love Butterfly Wing and her father more than she did her mother, who was pregnant again and not thriving. So it was Butterfly Wing who took the child out into the garden, stripped her naked for ten minutes’ worth of sun, guided her first tottering footsteps, gave her her food, her baths, her herbal medications for teething and colic. Alexander approved, delighted that Eleanor would grow up bilingual; Butterfly Wing spoke to her in Chinese, he spoke to her in English.

  “Mum is sick,” she said to Alexander at twelve months of age, brow wrinkled in a frown.

  “Who told you that, Nell?”

  “No one, Dadda. I can see it.”

  “Can you indeed? How?”

  “Her skin is quite yellow,” said the child with all the aplomb of a ten-year-old. “And she vomits a lot.”

  “Well—you’re right, she is sick. But nothing that won’t pass. She’s expecting a baby brother or sister for you.”

  “Oh, I know that,” said Nell scornfully. “Butterfly Wing told me when we were picking carnations.”

  So much precociousness had Alexander at a loss, particularly because he had come to realize that his daughter seemed more interested in maladies than in toys; she knew when Maggie Summers had a headache or Jade pain in her arm from an old break. More disturbing was her observation that Pearl suffered a depressed mood at regular intervals, though of course Nell knew nothing of monthly courses. How long, wondered Alexander, has this tiny creature been watching us with a thinking mechanism behind her lovely eyes? How much does she see?

  It was certainly evident that Elizabeth ailed; when her morning sickness continued into her sixth month, Alexander sent for Sir Edward Wyler.

  Who said, “As yet she isn’t pre-eclamptic, but I think I ought to come up to see her in another month. She feels the child move, which is a good sign as far as the child is concerned, but her own constitution isn’t strong. I don’t like her color, yet so far her feet and legs are not edematous. It may just be that Mrs. Kinross doesn’t carry easily.”

  “You haven’t really allayed my fears, Sir Edward,” Alexander said. “I thought she wouldn’t have a second eclampsia?”

  “It is very rare, but at this stage I do not know. Until—or if—she develops swelling, I would rather that she kept moving about, exercising her limbs.”

  “Get her through it, Sir Edward, and you have another icon.”

  WHEN THE swelling appeared in her twenty-fifth week, Elizabeth took to her bed voluntarily. Fifteen weeks of it this time.

  Oh, will I never be rid of this bed? Will I never be able to do all the things I want to do, from playing the piano to learning how to ride a horse, drive a buggy? My daughter
is being brought up by others, she hardly knows that I’m her mother. When she toddles in to see me, it’s to ask me how I feel, demand to see my feet, quiz me as to how many times I’ve vomited, or if I have a headache. I don’t know where she gets this preoccupation with diseases, yet I’m too miserable to fish in her mind. Such a sweet little thing—so like me, Ruby insists. But I think her mouth is Alexander’s—straight, firm, utterly determined. And she has inherited his intelligence, his curiosity. I had wanted her to be known as Eleanor, but somehow she has decided to be known as Nell. I suppose the Chinese find it much easier to say, but I suspect it was Alexander started it.

  As with the first pregnancy, it was Ruby who comforted her, Ruby who spent long hours by her bed playing poker, reading to her, talking. When she wasn’t able to come, Theodora Jenkins took her place—less stimulating company, but since her trip to London and the Continent, Theodora was able to talk about more than the flowers in her front garden or the plague of cabbage moth in her vegetable patch.

  Everyone worried constantly about Elizabeth save Mrs. Summers, enigmatic as ever, proof against the most charming of Nell’s wiles. Elizabeth had hoped that in Nell Mrs. Summers would see the child she hadn’t been able to bear, but her behavior gave the lie to any such hope; Maggie Summers was retreating, not advancing. As well then for the four Chinese women, upon whom Elizabeth depended for everything; they never let her down.

  “Miss Lizzy, you have to try to eat,” said Jade, holding out a dainty triangle of prawn toast.

  “I can’t, not today,” said Elizabeth.

  “But you must, Miss Lizzy! You’re getting so thin, and that is no good for your baby. Chang will cook you anything you fancy—all you have to do is ask.”

  “Baked custard,” said Elizabeth, who didn’t want that either, but knew she had to voice a wish for something edible. At least it would slide down easily, and perhaps it would stay down. Eggs, milk, sugar. Nourishment for a bedridden invalid.