The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  In fact, this new decade that Alexander had had such hopes for had commenced in a mood of bitterness and resentment between many different groups in the Australian community. Women began to protest that they were unfairly treated when it came to education, so tellingly that Sydney University decided to open all its faculties to women students—with the exception of Medicine, of course; the very thought of a female medically qualified to inspect, handle and probe the penis and scrotum was horrific.

  Because most Kinrossians read the newspapers (joined now by the Daily Telegraph and a weekly magazine of comment, the Bulletin) all these events and opinions were assimilated and discussed, but as far as Ruby and the town’s publicans were concerned, those wretched wowsers were gaining too much power in the parliament; legislation was passed forcing hotels and bars to close at 11 P.M. from Monday to Saturday, and all day on Sunday. Like many of her confederates state-wide, Ruby informed the Liquor Commission that, as liquor licenses under the old law were valid until June of 1882, the old drinking hours would prevail until June of 1882. So there.

  FOR ELIZABETH, time was mostly a matter of birthdays. Nell turned six on New Year’s Day of 1882, and Anna turned five on April 6. It was like being in the middle of some extraordinary play dreamed up by the irreverent and earthy eighteenth-century comic theater, only it wasn’t funny: Nell had acquired a polysyllabic vocabulary and could already make sense of trigonometry and algebra, whereas Anna had not yet learned to walk and still said “Mum,” “Jade,” “Nell” and “dolly.” However, Anna was saving up a surprise; on her fifth birthday she crawled across the nursery floor, laughing and squealing, to Jade, coaxing her.

  Elizabeth did her duty unflaggingly, but found it very hard to like that duty. Jade obviously didn’t mind in the least, so Elizabeth felt that something must be wrong with her, the child’s mother. Of course she knew that Anna was the spike that nailed her forever to life as Alexander Kinross’s wife. It had occurred to her during those interminable weeks in bed before Anna’s birth that if she saved the very generous allowance Alexander gave her, one day she would be able to leave him, disappear back to Scotland and live there in a cottage as a respectable maiden lady. Her children, she had thought, would survive very well without her; Nell already did. But then she looked at Anna properly and saw the shape of her fate. How could she leave this poor, helpless little creature who was doomed to be a lifelong burden? She could not. She just could not. Which meant that she loved Anna, no matter how she detested looking after Anna.

  Oh, the uselessness of crouching on a toy chair at Anna’s level repeating the same words over and over again, words like “wee-wees” and “poohs” and “yum-yum”! Sometimes she thought she would go mad from the sheer futility of it. Yet Ruby’s fabulous earthiness encompassed mental children as easily as it did the monumental follies of men. Ruby never turned a hair when Anna dribbled down her expensive dress, or threw up on it, or smeared it with feces in an ecstasy of happiness. Whereas when Anna did those things to her, Elizabeth had to bolt from the room fighting nausea and a deeper revulsion. And, being Elizabeth, she told herself that she was lacking in common decency and humanity, that her churning stomach and appalled disgust were evidence that she might love Anna, but that love wasn’t enough to quell the horrors of looking after a mental child.

  Alexander once called me nice, but I’m not, she castigated herself. I am that worst of all women, an unnatural mother. Mothers are supposed to be able to cope, yet here am I unable to cope with either of my children. If Anna is a crawling lump of dough, Nell is a frighteningly superior being with whom I have absolutely no communion. Give Nell a doll, and she operates on it—takes a sharp knife and slits it down the middle, pulls out its stuffing with learned remarks about the state of its innards. Then she goes off and fashions accurately painted body parts for it from that ghastly atlas of anatomy Alexander won’t part with because its etchings are by Albrecht Dürer, whoever he may be. And if she isn’t doing that, she’s out of her bed at midnight on the flat part of the roof with the telescope Alexander gave her, looking at the moon or raving about something’s rings. I have given birth to a minature Alexander and a cabbage, and I cannot find it in me to like caring for either of them. I just love them because I carried them, they are a part of me.

  With Anna, who knows what she thinks, if indeed she can—Jade swears she can. Yet in her way Nell is as much a monster as Anna—imperious, restless, arrogant, determined, insatiably curious, fearless. Though her eyes are blue, not black, when Nell looks at me from under her pointed brows, it’s Alexander I see staring at me. Six years old, and she considers her mother only a few degrees higher in intelligence than Anna. She hates being cuddled, she hates being kissed, and dismisses feminine activities with scorn. The box of my discarded clothes I gave her last birthday to play at dressing up sits there unopened—oh, the scathing glance she shot me for what any other little girl her age would have deemed a treasure chest! As if to say, Mum, who do you take me for, an idiot like Anna?

  I can love both my daughters, but I cannot like one of them because she has a gigantic mind and I cannot like the other because her habits revolt me.

  Oh, dear God, tell me where I go wrong? What do I lack?

  When she said some of this to Ruby, Ruby snorted in derision.

  “Honestly, Elizabeth, you’re too hard on yourself! There are people like me who have strong stomachs and don’t mind dirt and messes, probably because we grew up surrounded by dirt and messes. You grew up in one of those immaculate Scottish houses, I suppose, everything swept and mopped and dusted. No one vomiting up too much booze, or shitting in a drunken stupor, or forgetting to wash the dishes until they grew mold, or leaving the garbage to rot inside the house—Jesus, Elizabeth, I grew up in a cesspit! And if your stomach’s weak, it’s weak. You can’t control that, pussycat, no matter how hard you try. As for Nell, I agree with you—she’s a sort of a monster. She’s never going to be a person everybody takes to at a glance, she’s more likely to put most people off. You suffer because you had very little education, and Alexander made you feel that. I had no education either, but I wasn’t an immature girl of sixteen when I met him. Cheer up, and stop this self-castigation. To love your children is far more important than liking them.”

  WE NEED RAIN, Elizabeth thought one May morning in 1882 as she mounted Crystal to ride the three miles between the house and The Pool. The Pool saves my sanity. Without it, I would be shut up, gibbering, in a place where they hosed me into submission. Still, then I wouldn’t know anything, and that is a kind of peace. Self-pity, Elizabeth! The worst of all crimes because it leads to delusion, imagined injuries and loss of contact with the feelings of others. Whatever you are, whatever you go through, you have brought on yourself. You could have said no to Father—what could he have done, apart from beat you and send you to see Dr. Murray? You could have said no to Alexander—what could he have done except send you home again in disgrace? Ruby is right, I think too much about myself and my faults. I must think about The Pool instead. There I can forget.

  She pushed the mare along the track, now so well worn that anyone might have followed it had anyone had a wish to, or been allowed to. Yet it had never once crossed her mind that The Pool might be invaded by any person other than herself.

  Until, perhaps three hundred yards from it, Elizabeth heard the sound of a man’s laugh, lighthearted, joyous. Her reaction contained no fear, but she didn’t ride on. Instead, she slipped off Crystal and tied the animal to a tree branch, patted its shiny white hide and walked on softly. Her temper was up: how dared this fellow trespass on Kinross property? No fear, but prudence all the same. It dictated that first she should see who the interloper was. If, for instance, some party of bushrangers had discovered it, she would retrace her footsteps undetected and ride back to the house, there to use the new toy Alexander had installed before he left—a telephone linked to the Kinross police station and Summers’s house. It went nowhere else, but its ability to summon
help was instantaneous. The other possibility was a group of natives, but they rarely if ever came close to white settlements in this area, and were afraid of the mine; there were so many hundreds of square miles of uninhabited forest that these far from populous people preferred to safeguard their tribal identity by avoiding the white man’s corruption.

  No horses tethered nearby, no signs of desperadoes or of natives. Just one man, standing with his back to her on a rock that jutted out over The Pool like a flayed shoulder blade. Her breath caught, she slowed and stopped. He was naked, the light streaming over golden skin and a mane of straight black hair that fell down his spine to far past his waist. A Chinese? Then he turned in her direction, lifted his arms above his head and dived in a blur of movement to disappear with hardly a splash under the surface of the water. Her attention was focused on his face as he swung around, and she knew it as if it were her own in a mirror. Lee Costevan! Lee Costevan was home. Her knees gave way; she sank to the ground in a heap, then realized that the moment he came up for air, he would see her. Oh, what a confrontation! What an embarrassment for both of them! What could she say? Scrambling, she wriggled into the shelter of the undergrowth just in time.

  His private delight was almost painful to witness as he projected himself out of the water in a leap as high and powerful as one of the fish that lived in it; then, flinging back his soaking hair from his face, he lifted himself effortlessly out of the water on to the rock, gazed about, entranced, and stretched himself flat to bake in the sun. Elizabeth stayed where she was, immobile as a lizard, until he decided to go back into The Pool. Then she crept away.

  The ride back to the house got itself done—how, she never afterward knew. Her eyes, her mind, her very soul were possessed by the memory of that beautiful, wonderful body that had no flaw, its muscles liquid beneath the smooth skin, the face rapt, frozen in perfect pleasure. All her life she had yearned for freedom, but had never encountered it personified in a human being until now, and it was unforgettable. A revelation.

  Lee Costevan was home.

  Seven

  A New Kind of Pain

  RUBY APPEARED not long after Elizabeth had bathed and changed into an afternoon dress.

  “Lee’s home!” she cried, face transfigured. “Oh, Elizabeth, Lee’s home! I didn’t expect it, I had no idea!”

  “How wonderful,” said Elizabeth automatically, forming the words as if they were wool in her mouth. “Some tea, Mrs. Surtees.”

  She ushered a fizzing, exalted Ruby to the conservatory and persuaded her to sit in a chair for more than a second at a time, finding it easier now to smile. “Ruby, dear, calm down. I want to hear all about it at once, but you’re in no fit state to talk.”

  “He just appeared off the Lithgow train last night, out of the blue—I wondered why it ran so late, but of course it waited for him to make the connection off the slow train from Sydney. I was in the lounge with the C of E bishop and his wife—he’s visiting the parish,” babbled Ruby.

  “I know he is. He’s coming here to dinner tonight, don’t you remember? Now you can come with Lee.”

  “And in walked Lee! Oh, Elizabeth, my jade kitten is a man! So handsome! So tall! And you should hear him speak—vowels as round as the toffiest toff in England!” She brushed away tears, smiled ecstatically. “Bishop Kestwick positively fell all over himself the moment he heard Lee speak, and when he realized that this was my son—oh, I soared in his estimation!”

  “I didn’t know that was an ambition of yours,” Elizabeth said, willing her heart to stop beating so fast.

  “Well, it isn’t, and the old boy is very confused about my place in the Kinross scheme of things, but he knows better than to treat me like a scarlet woman when I’m on the Apocalypse board and a potential donor to the church. Anyway, once he set eyes on Lee he decided that I was very wronged—my son had gone to none other than Proctor’s. Oh, Elizabeth, I’m so happy!”

  “A blind man could see that, darling Ruby.” Elizabeth wet her lips. “Does this mean that Alexander is coming home? Is he in Sydney and arriving later?”

  Some of Ruby’s animation died as she saw the expression in Elizabeth’s eyes, the way her face had donned its old mask. “No, sweetie-pie, Alexander stayed in England. He sent Lee home for the English summer because that’s Alexander—his letter says that he couldn’t contemplate my going another three and more years without setting eyes on my jade kitten. Lee is home until the end of July, when he sails again.”

  The tea arrived; Elizabeth poured. “So what are you doing here, Ruby? Why aren’t you spending every moment with Lee?”

  “Oh, Lee’s joining us here,” said Ruby, who looked a mere twenty-five years old, glowing with youth. “You don’t think that I’d wait until dinner time to introduce you to my son, do you? He set off to explore Kinross, and promised that he’d turn up in time for tea.” She mock-frowned. “The wretch! He’s late.”

  “We’ll make more tea when he comes.”

  That was half an hour later, by which time Elizabeth had composed herself. A little surprised, she had discovered a small twinge of regret when Ruby said Alexander wasn’t coming home; Nell at least would have been delirious to see him. Though she could understand why Ruby wasn’t very perturbed; it would be awkward to juggle a son and a lover who were the best of friends, keep the knowledge of what Alexander was to her from Lee.

  Who walked into the conservatory with his hair braided into its pigtail, clad in a pair of old but clean dungarees and an open-necked cotton shirt with its sleeves rolled up. Not realizing that her face froze immediately into an expression of cool remoteness, Elizabeth rose to her feet and extended one hand to the young man with an aloof smile on her lips and no smile in her eyes. Ruby was right, he was handsome, strikingly so; a look of Sung as well as of his mother, Sung in the sharply delineated features and patrician air, Ruby in the grace of movement and the spontaneous charm. But his eyes were all his own, their light green irises surrounded by much darker green rings that gave his regard a piercing quality. Yes, pale eyes set in black lashes and bronze skin were unsettling, fascinatingly incongruous.

  “How do you do, Lee?” Elizabeth asked, voice colorless.

  His delight in the day waned, his head went slightly to one side as those eyes inspected her with a touch of bewilderment.

  “I’m very well, Mrs. Kinross,” he said, shaking her limp hand. “And you?”

  “Very well, thank you. Please call me Elizabeth. Do sit down. Mrs. Surtees will bring fresh tea shortly.”

  He sat where he could see both women and let his mother do the talking. So this was Alexander’s wife, of whom Alexander hardly ever spoke. No wonder, Lee reflected. She wasn’t a warm or womanly woman, though an arctic composure suited her style. Quite the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, with that milk-white skin, black hair and very dark blue eyes. A lush mouth disciplined into a firmness alien to its natural contours, a long and graceful neck, and lovely hands on whose third fingers those massive rings looked out of place. Elizabeth Kinross wasn’t a splashy person, but of course Alexander would have given her the rings, and he was definitely a splashy person. I wish he had come with me, Lee thought. I miss him, and I suspect that in his absence I am missing the essence of Kinross. His wife doesn’t want me here.

  “How is Alexander?” she asked when she could get a word in.

  “Thriving,” said Lee with a grin that displayed Ruby’s dimples. “He’s with the Siemens Brothers in Germany for the summer.”

  “Looking at engines and machines.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know if he’s been to Kinross in Scotland?”

  Lee looked surprised, his mouth open to say that surely Alexander wrote of such things, then he closed it; when he did answer the question, it was directly. “No, Elizabeth, he hasn’t.”

  “I imagined that. Have you spent much time with him?”

  “Every moment that Proctor’s granted me.”

  “So you like him.” />
  “He’s more a father to me than Sung, though I don’t say that with bitterness or mean to imply a criticism. I love and respect my blood father, but I am not Chinese,” said Lee stiffly.

  Ruby was looking from one to the other with dismay—this was not how she had imagined the meeting of her most beloved son and her most cherished friend! They weren’t making a connection—worse, Elizabeth was radiating dislike. The ice was back with a vengeance. Elizabeth, don’t do this to me! Don’t reject my jade kitten! She jumped up, put on her hat.

  “Oops, it’s late. Up with you, Lee, while there’s still a sandwich left on the plate. Bishop Kestwick is coming to dinner here tonight, so you and I will be returning with the episcopal couple at half past seven.”

  “I look forward to it,” said Elizabeth woodenly.

  “WHAT DID you think of Alexander’s wife?” Ruby asked her son as they traveled down to Kinross in the cable car.

  Lee didn’t answer for a moment, then turned his head to look into his mother’s eyes. “Alexander has never discussed her with me, Mum, but meeting her has made me understand why you’re still his mistress.”

  Her breath caught. “So you know that.”

  “He made no secret of it because he knew that sooner or later I’d find out. That’s what he said when he told me. We had a long talk about you, and I loved him for it. He spoke of you with such deep affection, said that you were the light of his life. But he didn’t bring Elizabeth into it, or explain why he was still with you, except to say that he couldn’t live without you.”

  “Nor I without him. I gather you don’t disapprove?”

  “Of course I don’t, Mum.” He smiled at the town, drawing closer. “It’s his and your business, not mine, and it doesn’t affect you and me, does it? Except that I’m so enormously pleased to think that my mother and my self-chosen father are in love.”