The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  So they sat in the conservatory over tea, sandwiches and cakes while Elizabeth plied him with questions. After all that, he had taken a doctorate in mechanical engineering, he told her, though he had also done some geology.

  “And I worked for a while in a stockbroking firm in an attempt to understand how the share market functions.”

  “Is that useful?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Not a scrap,” he said cheerfully. “I discovered that there is only one way to learn business, and that is by doing it. My real education happened at Alexander’s hands, going around with him whenever I had a chance. Now he trusts me to administer the Apocalypse and Apocalypse Enterprises in his absence, though I gather that Sophia Dewy’s husband is also very shrewd in business, and has just been employed by us.”

  “More on the accounting side,” said Elizabeth, pleased to be able to contribute something. “He works out of Dunleigh rather than Kinross—poor Constance has never recovered from Charles’s death, and her daughters are very protective of her.”

  “He can take the books home, that’s true, but if Sydney’s telephone exchange would only join the march of progress, he could do far more from Dunleigh,” Lee said.

  “We do have telephones in Kinross, but with no telephones in Bathurst or Lithgow, it’s purely local.”

  “Trust Alexander to be in the forefront of the march!”

  When he rose to go Elizabeth looked regretful. “Will you come to dinner?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Even if I produce Nell as a chaperone?”

  “Even if Nell is there, no, thank you. I also have to keep an eye on my mother’s hotel.”

  She watched him walk across the terrace with an ache in her breast, as if some wonderful treat had suddenly been snatched from her without warning. Lee was back, but had made it clear that he didn’t intend to spend any time in her company. Just when she had found sufficient confidence to thaw a little. Just when she felt sure enough of herself to treat him as a friend rather than the dangerously alien creature who had invaded The Pool. Oh, it was too bad!

  HE WAS, however, true to his word; he sent her Dragonfly, an elderly Chinese woman as inscrutable as all Orientals are supposed to be. Wherever Anna was, there also was Dragonfly, so unobtrusive that within two days Anna forgot her presence.

  “A perfect watchdog,” Elizabeth said to Lee over the telephone, since she saw nothing of him at the house. “I can’t thank you enough, Lee, truly. Dragonfly gives Jade and me a much needed rest, so that when she has her days off, we’re quite capable of taking over. Please come to morning tea sometime.”

  “Sometime,” he said, and rang off.

  “Sometime, never,” said Elizabeth to herself with a sigh.

  AS FAR AS Lee was concerned, “never” was the word that said it all. When he had come around the hedge and seen Elizabeth grimly shepherding a younger edition of herself, Lee’s hopes that he had finally shaken free of Elizabeth vanished as if they had never been. The feelings rolled over him like a wave—love, pity, desire, despair. Not trusting himself, he had refused to drink tea with her, only to come to a sudden understanding of her loneliness that forced him out of common decency to say yes. It was there in her eyes, in the set of her face, in the way she held herself—terrible loneliness! Yet that one pleasant tea with her found him teetering on the brink of a declaration that he knew she would reject with fear and finality. Therefore he couldn’t see her again unless others were present, and such occasions were rare with Alexander away.

  He hadn’t wanted to come home, but acknowledged Alexander’s right to command him; after doing all that could be done at a distance, it was high time that he proved himself at the nucleus of the Apocalypse Enterprises network. Alexander was forty-six and clearly seeking a successor who would free him to travel, to perform a less onerous duty for the Company.

  When his mother and Alexander had met him in Sydney, he saw their transparent happiness at being together, at the prospect of going far away together, and his heart smote him. By now he knew Alexander’s story—the ostensibly legitimate birth that hid his bastardy, his mother’s unresolved secret, his utter determination to acquire wealth and power, the pleasure he took in that wealth and power. But of his relationship with Elizabeth he said nothing worth hearing; all Lee knew was what his mother had told him, that Elizabeth could not be allowed to have children and thus lived in Alexander’s house as his wife without actually being his wife. But that didn’t answer the mystery; in a town with so many Chinese, Lee knew that either Alexander or Elizabeth could have found a way to enjoy conjugal relations without pregnancy. Though they were famous for multiplying, the Chinese also knew how not to multiply if they so chose. Especially the educated ones. Certainly Hung Chee at the Chinese medicine shop. Nature was rich in abortifacients, if not in things that prevented conception.

  His love for Elizabeth had sensitized him to Alexander’s every unspoken expression of face, eyes, body, when he talked of his wife. And those unspoken expressions were of bewilderment, of pain. Not of an all-pervasive love, no—Alexander felt that for Ruby, Lee had no doubt of it. Yet he wasn’t indifferent to Elizabeth. Certainly he didn’t hate her or loathe her. Lee was always left with the impression that Alexander had given up on Elizabeth, which meant that the nature of their relationship must stem from her. No man could be indifferent to her, she was too beautiful for that—inside as well as outside. Beautiful in a way that drew men rather than repelled them; her aura was of unattainability, and that brought out Man the Hunter, Man the Conqueror. But not in Lee, who ached for Elizabeth in a less primitive way. Underneath the aloof composure he had twice glimpsed a panicked creature caught in a trap. What he yearned to do was set her at liberty, even if freedom meant she continued to regard him as the nothing she had once called him.

  Oh, but she had been glad to see him! Glad enough to speak out against his going. To beg him to visit again. Well, that was the result of her loneliness, and wisdom had dictated his refusal. He must continue to refuse. Alexander was his friend and mentor; to betray Alexander’s trust in him was unthinkable.

  So Lee went about his Apocalypse business removed from the house on the mountain and Elizabeth, burying himself in his work.

  Two

  Disputes, Industrial

  and Otherwise

  A MUCH REFRESHED Alexander returned home in April of 1890, just in time to celebrate his forty-seventh birthday; that the trip hadn’t been longer was due to Ruby, who liked the concept of travel more than she did the actual sensation.

  “Or perhaps,” she said to Elizabeth before she so much as removed her hat, “it’s that Alexander is such a ruthless sort of traveler—he hardly stops. There were times when I offered to every god in creation for a pair of wings. San Francisco, then on a train to Chicago, another train to Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston—and the United States was just the start.”

  “Which is probably why he left most of the tripping around to me and a guide when I went with him,” said Elizabeth, very pleased to see Ruby. “Did you get to the Italian lakes?”

  “I did. Alexander stayed in Turin and Milan—business as usual! I mean, here we are just off the train, and he’s touring the workshops and the mine with Lee.”

  “Did you like the Italian lakes?” Elizabeth pressed.

  “Gorgeous, my dear, gorgeous!” said Ruby, at a loss.

  “I loved them. If I had a choice, I’d live on Lake Como.”

  “I hate to be a spoilsport, but I’d sooner the Kinross Hotel myself,” said Ruby, kicking off her shoes. She shot Elizabeth an enquiring green glance. “Have you managed to get on better with my jade kitten?”

  “I’ve seen virtually nothing of him, but he’s been very kind to me,” Elizabeth answered.

  “In what way?”

  “Anna took to disappearing off the property after you and Alexander left, even got as far as the poppet heads—she’s so cunning, Ruby! You know Jade, so you know how carefully Anna’s w
atched. But the little wretch was more than a match for Jade and me combined.”

  “And?” asked Ruby, looking up at Elizabeth.

  “Lee found us Dragonfly, who is perfect. You see, Anna knows us and is clever enough to distract our attention, then slips away like lightning. Whereas Dragonfly is a block of wood—there, yet not there. She can’t be shaken off. I tell you, Ruby, Lee took an enormous weight off my mind.”

  “I’m tickled that you’re finally getting on with him. Ah, tea!” Ruby exclaimed as Peach Blossom brought in the tray. “I know you’re a bit on the short side, Elizabeth, but do sit down. I’m dying of thirst—no one abroad makes a decent pot of tea. Well, outside of England, and that was a long time ago.”

  “You’ve put on a bit of weight,” said Elizabeth.

  “Don’t remind me! It’s all those delicious custardy things they make on the Continent.”

  A small silence fell that Elizabeth broke. “What are you hiding from me, Ruby?”

  Startled, Ruby stared at her. “Jesus! You’ve grown very perceptive.”

  “Hadn’t you better tell me?”

  “It’s Alexander,” said Ruby reluctantly.

  “What about him? Is he ill?”

  “Alexander, ill? Not in a fit! No, he’s changed.”

  “For the worse.” Elizabeth didn’t make it a question.

  “Definitely for the worse.” Ruby scowled, drained her cup and poured another. “He’s always had a tendency to be arrogant, but nothing that I for one couldn’t put up with. It even had a sort of charm. Sometimes I deserved to be slapped down.” She giggled. “Metaphorically, of course. Though once I slapped him!”

  “Did you? In my time, or before me?”

  “Before you, but don’t try to change the subject. These days he hobnobs with industrial barons and top-of-the-tree politicians—Apocalypse Enterprises is a power almost everywhere. It seems to have gone to his head, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that he listens to some pretty ghastly men.”

  “What ghastly men?”

  “His fellow tycoons. You never met such a hard lot, sweetie-pie! They don’t care about anything except making money, money, money, so they treat their employees shabbily and resort to all kinds of nasty tricks to curb what’s called the ‘labor movement’—you know, trade unions and suchlike.”

  “I didn’t think Alexander was susceptible to that,” Elizabeth said slowly. “He’s always taken great pride in treating his own employees magnificently.”

  “In the past,” Ruby said ominously.

  “Oh, Ruby! He wouldn’t!”

  “I’m not so sure. The trouble is that times are getting hard and all businesses are feeling it. There’s a general agreement among the better-off that it’s all because of some book that’s just come out in English—its German title is Das Kapital. In three volumes, but only the first has been translated, and it’s more than enough to set the cat among the pigeons, if I’m to believe Alexander and his cronies.”

  “What’s it about? Who wrote it?” Elizabeth asked.

  “It’s about something called ‘international socialism’ and its author is a man named Karl Marx. I think there’s another chap involved as well, but I forget his name. Anyway, it damns the well-off, especially the industrialists, and something called—um—capitalism. The idea is that wealth should be equally distributed so that no one’s rich and no one’s poor.”

  “I can’t imagine that has any chance of working, can you?”

  “No, people are too different. It says the workingman is shamelessly exploited, and demands a social revolution. The labor movements everywhere have grabbed it like a drowning man a spar, and are even talking about entering politics.”

  “Dear me,” said Elizabeth placidly.

  “I tend to agree with you, Elizabeth, but the trouble is that Alexander and his cronies seem to take it very seriously.”

  “Well, that’s over there. Now Alexander’s home where he belongs, he’ll settle down.”

  LEE DIDN’T agree. It hadn’t taken his mother to tell him that Alexander had changed; he saw it for himself as they walked from mine to workshops to Lee’s pride and joy, the new plant to separate the gold from its ore by immersion in a weak solution of potassium cyanide and precipitating the gold out on to zinc plates and shavings.

  For one thing, the new Alexander harped constantly on the worldwide decline in prosperity, and for another, he looked at everything in a different way than of yore—how to cut costs, even if that meant cutting corners.

  “You can’t economize in a cyanide process if there’s safety involved,” said Lee. “Potassium cyanide is lethally toxic stuff.”

  “Yes, if it’s highly concentrated, but not at point-one of one percent, my dear young man.”

  Lee blinked. Alexander was patronizing him!

  “One still starts off with the pure cyanide salt,” Lee said, “so you can’t let just anybody mix the solution. It’s a job for intelligent, highly responsible men—men I’ve budgeted for in our wages accounts.”

  “Needlessly.”

  And so it went. There were too many hands in the locomotive workshop because servicing of the iron horses was too frequent—why hadn’t Lee moved to automate the delivery of coal to the steam engines?—there was no reason to retire those old coal cars from the Lithgow-Kinross line—he hadn’t seen any fault in the number three bridge when he came through.

  “Oh, come, Alexander!” Lee expostulated, astonished. “You’ll have to examine the bridge from underneath to see the fault!”

  “I refuse to believe that it necessitates rebuilding the entire structure,” Alexander said curtly. “That would put the railway out of action for weeks.”

  “Not if we do it as Terry Sanders suggests. A week at the most, and we can stockpile coal.”

  “You’re a good engineer, Lee, but not a businessman’s rear end, that’s obvious” was Alexander’s verdict.

  “I FEEL AS if I’ve been savaged by a tiger, Mum,” Lee said to Ruby when they met for a drink that evening.

  “He’s that bad, my jade kitten?”

  “That bad.” Lee took Scotch whisky instead of sherry, and didn’t dilute it. “I know I’m not all that experienced, but I don’t agree that I’ve spent money needlessly, which is what Alexander says. Suddenly safety isn’t important. I could accept that if it didn’t mean imperiling the lives of some employees, but it does, Mum, it does!”

  “And he’s the major shareholder,” said Ruby. “Shit.”

  “Exactly.” Lee laughed, helped himself to a second whisky. “I’m in the shit over shit as well! The sewage treatment plant desperately needed some work that I authorized, only to be told that it isn’t necessary. I never thought of Alexander as a miserly Scot in all the time I’ve known him, but that’s what he is now.”

  “Because he’s taken bad advice overseas. He listens to men who’d shave a shilling if that meant saving a farthing for every hundred pounds. Dammit,” said Ruby, leaping to her feet, “we’re so profitable, Lee! Our overheads are negligible compared to how much we make, and there are no shareholders to satisfy—just the four original partners. None of us has complained. How could we, for Christ’s sake?” She too resorted to the Scotch. “Well, we can inform him at the next board meeting that we don’t approve.”

  “And he’ll ride roughshod over our protests,” said Lee.

  “I don’t feel like going up the mountain for dinner.”

  “Nor do I, but we have to go, if only for Elizabeth’s sake.”

  “She tells me,” said Ruby, draping a fluffy feather boa about her neck, “that you’ve been very kind to her.”

  “It would take a monster not to be kind to her.” He eyed the boa with amusement. “Where did you get that mad thing?”

  “In Paris. The trouble is,” she said, kicking her train to fall behind her as she turned, “that it molts like an old chook.” A chuckle. “Still, I am an old chook!”

  “You’ll always be a spring chicken to
me, Mum.”

  THE DINNER started off well considering that just the four of them sat down. Some of Alexander’s bonhomie had returned, so Elizabeth tried to keep the conversation light.

  “You’ll be tickled to know, Alexander, that this colony’s ongoing war between its various religions has been complicated by the arrival of three new sects—the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Methodist Mission and the Salvation Army.”

  “And there’s a group drawn from every religion,” Lee said a little feverishly, “who call themselves Sabbatarians, and demand that all activities cease on Sundays, even visiting museums or holding cricket matches.”

  “Huh!” said Alexander. “None of them will be welcome here.”

  “But Kinross does have plenty of Catholics, and they’re not too happy with Sir Henry Parkes since he stripped State aid away from their schools,” Elizabeth said, passing the salad. “He thought, of course, that the move would force Catholic children into the State school system, but that hasn’t happened. They battle on.”

  “I know all that!” Alexander snapped. “I also know that the Grand Old Man of Politics is a Protestant bigot who despises the Irish, so shall we change the subject?”

  Elizabeth went crimson, put her head down and ate salad as if it had a dressing of hemlock. Furious with Alexander, Lee longed to reach out and squeeze Elizabeth’s hand in comfort. Not able to do that, he changed the subject.

  “I take it that you’re aware of the federation situation?”

  “If by that you mean that the colonies have agreed to join as something called the Commonwealth of Australia, yes, of course,” Alexander said, face lightening; apparently he preferred talking to Lee than to Elizabeth. “It’s been on the table for years.”

  “Well, it’s definitely going to happen. The big debate is when it’s going to happen, but the latest news is that it will be the dawn of the new century.”