The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  Wherever Nell went she was booed and hissed; whatever she was deputed to do in the laboratory was sabotaged; her notes were stolen and defaced; her textbooks disappeared. None of which rattled Nell, who soon demonstrated in class that she was head and shoulders above the rest when it came to intelligence, knowledge and ability. If they had thought they hated her during Orientation Week, that was nothing compared to how the white male students felt after she displayed no compunction in humiliating them before Professor Warren and his tiny group of lecturers. It gave her immense satisfaction to correct their calculations, to demonstrate that their conclusions were wrong, and that they didn’t know one end of a steam engine from the other compared to her. Or the Chinese boys, an additional mortification.

  The most mortal insult to white male supremacy was Nell’s invasion of the school’s lavatories, in a separate building and never intended for women. At first the users bolted when she appeared, but then Doman and his cohorts decided that it was better not to bolt, but to behave grossly: display their penises, shit on the floor in front of her, foul the stalls, remove their doors.

  The trouble was that Nell didn’t play fair, or even female. Instead of bursting into tears, she retaliated. Doman, wiggling his penis, received a vicious slap on it that had him doubled up. Her scornful remarks as to penis size—was nothing sacred?—soon had the urinators scrabbling to hide their members the moment she walked in. The filth she dealt with unscrupulously by going to Professor Warren and escorting him on a tour of the lavatories.

  “You’re asking to be fucked silly!” Doman snarled, catching her alone soon after the men had been commanded to scrub the premises and behave properly in future.

  Did Nell flinch, either at the language or the concept? No. She eyed the ringleading senior student up and down contemptuously and said, “You couldn’t fuck a cow, Roger. You like sucking cock, you pervert.”

  “Cunt!” he spat.

  Her eyes danced. “Ditto, brother smut,” she said.

  So there didn’t seem to be any way of driving Nell Kinross out short of brute strength; the bitch was as foul-mouthed as any bullockie and utterly ruthless in revenge. She didn’t play by the rules, and she certainly didn’t act like a girl.

  The plot to beat her and the Chinks up was hatched a month after classes started. Carefully planned, it necessitated lying in wait for them as they walked home along a deserted path amid a grove of trees where, later on, a university sporting oval would sprawl. The only difficulty was Donny Wilkins, a white man; in the end the would-be attackers decided that he had demonstrated where his allegiances lay, and would have to take his punishment too. The assault party, twelve strong, was armed with cricket bats and sandbags, but Doman carried a horsewhip that he intended to apply to Miss Nell Kinross’s naked back after she and her yellow friends were subdued.

  But it didn’t work out that way. Pounced upon, Nell, Donny and the three Chinese boys countered like—like—

  “Whirling dervishes” was the only way Roger Doman could put it as he tended his wounds afterward.

  They kicked, whacked with the sides of their hands, wrested the bats and sandbags away from their attackers with ridiculous ease, sent bodies flying through the air to land flat and be stomped on, wrenched shoulders out of their sockets, broke an arm or two.

  “Face it, Roger,” said a panting Nell when it was over in a few seconds, “you’re not up to our weight. As a mining engineer, you’d better bite the bullet or my daddy will see that you never get a job anywhere in Australia.”

  Which was worst of all. The bitch had power and wasn’t a bit afraid to use it.

  So by the time that the new students were sent to various workshops in Sydney’s industrial areas, student opposition to the female in their midst had died a shameful death, and Nell Kinross was famous from Arts to Medicine. When she turned up in overalls to tackle dirty jobs, no one said a word. A fascinated Professor Warren—no advocate of women in engineering, any more than were his lecturers—admitted to himself that some women were just too strong to succumb to the traditional ways men had of getting rid of them. She was, besides, by far the most brilliant student he had ever encountered, and her grasp of mathematics entranced him.

  One might have been pardoned for thinking that Nell would become a heroine to the university’s tiny contingent of militant women, out to get the vote and equal rights for females. But that didn’t happen, chiefly because, once her difficulties were over, Nell Kinross displayed no interest whatsoever in these women, all enrolled in the faculty of Arts. A man’s woman to the core, Nell found women boring, even if they were, as they called themselves, feminists, with very legitimate complaints.

  That first year of Nell’s saw a worsening in the economy that meant some of the engineering students had to count their pennies and worry about whether their parents could afford to keep them in the relative leisure of a degree course exhaustive enough to prevent part-time work. But a word from Nell saw her father offering scholarships to those engineering students unable to continue. That should have earned her gratitude, but of course it did not. The scholarships were accepted, but Nell loathed even more for having the connections and power to create them.

  “It isn’t fair!” cried Donny Wilkins to her. “They should be down on their knees thanking you. Instead, they’ve gone back to booing and hissing whenever you appear.”

  “I’m a pioneer,” said Nell, unbowed and unimpressed. “I’m a woman in a man’s world, and the men know I’m the thin end of the wedge. After me, they’ll never manage to keep women out, even women who don’t have Sir Alexander Kinross for a daddy.” She laughed, a delightful sound.

  “One day they’ll have to put in a women’s lavatory. And that, Donny, is the end of resistance.”

  THE “PRACTICAL WORK,” as it was called, required the students to pick up skills on the shop floor. Textbooks and theory were not enough; Professor Warren’s principle was that an engineer had to be as capable of welding, brazing and treating metal as any tradesman, and if a mining engineer, capable of working at a mine face, of blasting, drilling and dealing with the product, be it coal, gold, copper or any other mined substance. Practical work in mining for the mining engineers wouldn’t happen in this first year; practical work for first-year students consisted of shop floor experience in factories and foundries.

  In Nell’s case, the industrial proprietors had to be apprised of her sex in advance and agree to accept her. Not a difficulty in premises that had—or hoped to have—custom from Apocalypse Enterprises, but impossible otherwise. Which didn’t slow Nell down until toward the end of that first year, when she wanted desperately to spend some time on the shop floor of a factory in southwestern Sydney where new mining drills were being made—by new, of a design that promised to revolutionize drilling into hard rock faces. Because Apocalypse was a big customer, she got permission, only to be told that the metalworkers’ union, which ran a closed shop there, refused to have a woman inside the doors, let alone prancing around the machinery.

  This was not a problem Sir Alexander could fix; Nell was on her own. Her initial move was to seek an interview with the shop steward, who served as liaison between the factory’s metalworkers and their union’s headquarters. The meeting was rancorous and didn’t go as the shop steward had imagined, thinking to send the capitalist bitch packing in floods of tears. He was a bigoted Glaswegian Scot who regarded Sir Alexander Kinross as a traitor to his class, and swore solemnly to Nell that he would die before he’d see any woman on his shop floor. Instead of tears he got unanswerable questions, and when, exasperated, he swore at her, she swore right back.

  “She’s worse than a woman,” he said to several cronies after Nell had stalked out, “she’s a man in woman’s clothing.”

  Where to now? Nell asked herself, steeled to win no matter what the cost. Old goat! Shop stewards were notorious as the laziest or least competent among union employees, which was why they sought the union liaison position. It protected them a
nd freed them from too much hard work. Angus Robertson, you’ll suffer me no matter how hard you fight against it!

  After perusing Labor journals like the Worker, she saw her next move: enlist the help of the local Labor M.L.A., an avowed republican and dedicated socialist. His name was Bede Talgarth.

  Bede Talgarth! She knew him! Or at least, she amended, she had once had lunch with him in Kinross. So off she set for his parliamentary office in Macquarie Street, only to be refused an audience because she was neither one of his constituents nor connected to the Labor movement. His secretary, whom he shared with a number of other Labor backbenchers, was a stringy little man who sneered at her and told her to run away, have a few babies like a proper woman.

  A few enquiries at the parliamentary library revealed that Bede Talgarth, previous profession collier, marital status single, born on May 12 of 1865, lived in Arncliffe. This was a sparsely populated working-class suburb inland from Botany Bay, and not very far from the drill factory. Since she couldn’t see him in his offices, she would beard him in his domestic den. Which was a small sandstone house dating back to convict days, set in about an acre of ground that no one tended.

  When she marched up to its peeling dark green door and plied the knocker, no one answered. After several more tattoos and ten minutes of waiting, she abandoned the front door and walked all the way around the house, eyeing its grubby curtains and grimy window panes, the overflowing garbage can outside its back door, revolted by the stench coming from an outhouse at the bottom of the neglected backyard.

  Since she detested inactivity yet was determined to wait until Bede Talgarth came home, she began to pull out the weeds around the house. Hard to grow flowers or vegetables in this poor and sandy soil, she thought, piling the weeds into a heap that soon grew into a small hill.

  It was dusk before Bede came through the battered gate in the paling fence that separated the grounds from the unsealed pavement outside. The first thing he noticed was the smell of uprooted plants, the second, that impressive heap of them. But who was the gardener dedicated to such a thankless task?

  He found her around the back, a tall, spare girl in a dark grey cotton dress that fell almost to her ankles, had no shape worth speaking of, a high neck and long sleeves which she had rolled up above her sharp, bony elbows. He didn’t recognize her, even when she straightened and stared straight at him.

  “This place is a disgrace,” she said, wiping her dirty hands on her skirt. “It’s not difficult to see that you’re a bachelor who’d be happy eating off a packing case and sitting on an orange box. But if you’re short of money you could grow vegetables with a bit of cow manure to help the soil, and the exercise would be good for you. You’re growing a little pot belly, Mr. Talgarth.”

  Since he knew this fact only too well and was exasperated by it, her observation rankled. But he had recognized the voice, crisp and autocratic, and stared at her in astonishment.

  “Nell Kinross!” he exclaimed. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Weeding,” she said, her blue eyes traveling over his navy-blue three-piece suit, the celluloid collar and cuffs, the clubby M.L.A. tie and links. “Gone up in the world, eh?”

  “Even Labor members of the parliament have to conform as to dress,” he said defensively.

  “Just as well it’s Friday, then. You can put on some old clothes and spend the weekend among the weeds.”

  “I spend my weekends going the rounds of my constituents,” he said stiffly.

  “Accepting bikkies and sugary tea, probably scones with jam and cream, and later on, big mugs of beer. You’ll be dead before you’re forty, Mr. Talgarth, unless you reform your ways.”

  “I fail to see that my health is any of your concern, Miss Kinross!” he snapped. “I suppose you want something—what?”

  “To go inside and have a cup of tea.”

  He winced. “It isn’t—er—very clean or tidy.”

  “I didn’t assume it would be. Your curtains need a wash, so do your windows. But tea is made on boiling water, so I will undoubtedly survive it.”

  She stood waiting, her pointed brows raised, that bony face looking derisive save for its eyes, which twinkled wickedly.

  He heaved a sigh. “Be it on your own head. Come in.”

  The back door opened into a scullery that contained a pair of concrete washing tubs supplied with water by a tap.

  “At least you have water laid on,” she said. “Why do you still have a long-drop down the backyard?”

  “The sewer hasn’t been connected,” he said shortly, leading the way into a small kitchen that had another sink, a four-burner gas stove and a big deal table with one wooden chair tucked under it. The walls were a dingy, yellowed cream so sprinkled with the peppery dots of fly excrement that they made a kind of design statement. The table itself bore the larger droppings of cockroaches, the floor pebbles of mouse and rat droppings.

  “You really can’t live this way,” said Nell, pulling out the chair and seating herself; she extricated a handkerchief from her large leather hold-all and flicked it across the table to make a clean spot for her elbows. “The parliament pays you a good salary these days, doesn’t it? Hire someone to clean.”

  “I couldn’t do that!” he snapped, growing angrier with each of her disparaging remarks. “I’m a Labor man, I don’t condone servants!”

  “Rubbish!” she said scornfully. “If you want to argue from a socialist point of view, then you’d be offering employment to someone probably desperate for a little extra money, and sharing your own prosperity with one of your constituents—a woman, most likely, therefore not empowered to give you a vote, but I’m sure her husband would give you his.”

  “Her husband would most likely already give me his.”

  “One day women will vote too, Mr. Talgarth. You can’t subscribe to all this equality and democracy stuff without seeing that women are citizens too.”

  “I am absolutely opposed to the concept of servants.”

  “Then don’t treat her like a servant, Mr. Talgarth. Treat her as what she actually is—an adept at her trade, which is to clean. There’s no disgrace in that, is there? You pay her well and on time, you thank her for her wonderful work, and make her feel wanted, needed—it won’t do you any harm with your voters to have a woman singing your praises as a democratic employer to all her friends. Men vote, yes, but women can influence their votes, and I’m sure often do. So you hire a woman to keep your house clean, and set aside enough time in your grounds to keep that pot belly at bay.”

  “You have a point,” he conceded uneasily, pouring boiling water into his teapot. The sugar bowl was dumped on the table. “It’s got cockroach doings in it, I’m afraid, and I don’t have any milk.”

  “Buy yourself an ice chest. Arncliffe must have an iceman, and there’s no reason why you have to lock him out if you’re not here—there’s nothing worth stealing. You’ll have to get rid of the cockroaches, they live in drains, sewers, anything filthy, and they sick up what they’ve eaten—see it all around the rim of your sugar bowl? It’s a death trap. I’ll bet there’s a lot of typhoid in Arncliffe, not to mention smallpox and infantile paralysis. You’re in the parliament—get the slugs on to the sewerage. Until people learn to be clean, Sydney’s a dangerous place. Get rid of the rats and mice too, or one day there’ll be an outbreak of bubonic plague.” Nell accepted the mug of black, sugarless tea and drank it gratefully.

  “You’re supposed to be an engineer, aren’t you?” he asked feebly. “You sound more like a doctor.”

  “Yes, I’m finishing my first year in engineering soon, but what I really want to be is a doctor, especially now they’ve opened Medicine to women.”

  Fight it though he did, he found himself liking her; she was so businesslike, so logical, so free from self-pity. And, despite her criticisms, not in the least repelled by his bachelor habits. Nell Kinross liked to produce sensible answers. Such a pity she’s on the other side, he thought. She’d be a
valuable addition to our forces, even if behind the scenes.

  Her joy was complete when he produced an orange box and sat on it—just as she had suspected, he didn’t care about material things. How much it must irk him to wear a suit! I’ll bet when he goes out on weekends to visit his constituents, he’s back in dungarees and rolled-up sleeves.

  “I have a good idea,” she said suddenly, holding out her mug for more tea. “Instead of eating bikkies and scones with jam and cream when you’re making your calls, you could offer to dig holes, chop wood, shift furniture. You’d get exercise, and not have time to stuff your face.”

  “Why,” he asked, “are you here, Miss Kinross? What is it you think I can do for you?”

  “Call me Nell and I’ll call you Bede. Such an interesting name, Bede. Do you know who he was?”

  “It’s a family name,” he said.

  “He was the Venerable Bede, a monk of Northumberland, who is said to have walked all the way to Rome and back again. He wrote the first real history of the English people, though whether he was a Saxon or a Celt isn’t known. He lived in the seventh and eighth centuries after Christ, and was a very gentle, holy soul.”

  “That leaves me out,” he said lightly. “How do you know all this sort of thing?”

  “I read,” she said simply. “There wasn’t much else to do in Kinross until Auntie Ruby put me to work. That’s why engineering is so easy for me—I know the theory backward, and the actual business, especially mining, very well. I just need a degree.”

  “You still haven’t told me what you want.”

  “I want you to talk to a cantankerous old Scot named Angus Robertson, who is the union’s shop steward at Constantine Drills. I need to get some experience on the shop floor there, and the owners gave me permission. Then Robertson said a flat no.”

  “Oh, yes, the metalworkers. I don’t see why they should feel threatened by women—I can’t see any woman, even you, wanting to drill and weld and hammer and rivet and whatever steel.”