The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  “So it’s back to the hospital grind?” he asked as they went down in the cable car.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you enjoy it?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t enjoy me.”

  “No.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You put me in my place once—Otto von Bismarck?”

  “Dear me! You must have been all of six. But you’re still conceited, I see. That’s a pity.”

  They didn’t speak again until they reached the train station and he carried her bags into the private compartment.

  “This is grossly sybaritic,” she said, gazing about. “I can never get used to it.”

  “It will go in the fullness of time. Don’t grudge Alexander the fruits of his labor.”

  “What do you mean, ‘go in the fullness of time’?”

  “Just that. Eventually taxation will prohibit all such—er—sybaritic grossness. Though there will always be a first-class and a second-class.”

  “My father loves you to death,” she said abruptly, sitting.

  “I love him to death too.”

  “I disappointed him, doing Medicine.”

  “Yes, you did. But not in a spirit of vengeance. That would have cut him far deeper.”

  “I should love you. Why can’t I?”

  Lee lifted her hand and kissed it. “I hope you never find out, Nell. Goodbye.”

  And he was gone. Nell sat as the whistle blew and the train emitted the cacophony of noises that heralded its imminent departure. Frowning. What did he mean? Then she burrowed into her carry-all and found her materia medica textbook; within a minute both Lee and the sybaritic nature of her father’s private compartment were forgotten. This coming year was her third-last, haunted by examinations that fully half the students would fail. Well, Nell Kinross wasn’t going to fail, even if that necessitated not living a life. Bugger boyfriends—who had time?

  THE SUMMER continued at its relentless peak until its very last gasp, which happened on the fifteenth of April, 1898.

  Anna died in a status epilepticus early in the morning of the fourteenth, aged twenty-one. Her body was conveyed to Kinross for a tiny funeral held at the graveside on top of the mountain, attended only by Alexander, Nell, Lee, Ruby and the Reverend Mr. Peter Wilkins. Alexander had chosen the site, not far from his gallery wing, shaded by immense gum trees with pure white trunks; they could have been a row of pillars. Elizabeth didn’t go; instead she looked after Dolly, who frolicked in her pool on the far side of the house. Nell assumed that the door was closed forever.

  But later, after Lee, Ruby and Mr. Wilkins had gone down the mountain and Nell sat with her father in the library, Elizabeth went to the mound of sweet-smelling, freshly turned earth and laid all the roses she could find upon it.

  “Rest in peace, my poor innocent,” she said, turned and walked into the bush.

  The northern sky was a soaring mass of mighty indigo storm clouds, their edges curling over in icy white billows like terrible waves roaring in from the sea; summer’s last gasp was going to be a cataclysm. But Elizabeth never even noticed as she pushed into the undergrowth, thinned and sticked by lack of rain, deserted by its denizens for fear of the coming tempest. Her mind was devoid of conscious thought, it simply hummed with a thousand thousand memories of Anna that shut out the sky, the bush, the day, the image of herself.

  The storm rolled closer; an eerie darkness fell, redolent with a sulfurous glow and the sickly-sweet stench of ozone. Without any prelude, lightning and thunder flashed and cracked together. Elizabeth didn’t notice. She came back into herself when she was drenched to the skin by what seemed a waterfall, and then only because the path she had been following had turned to a brook under which lay mud so slippery that she couldn’t keep her feet. This is how it should be, she thought dreamily, crawling forward on her hands and knees, blinded by the rain. This is how it should be. How it must be.

  “THANK GOD the weather’s broken,” said Nell to Alexander as they watched the storm commence from the library’s bay window.

  He gave a convulsive start. “Anna’s grave!” he cried. “I have to cover it!”

  And off he ran into the rain while Nell went kitchenwards and shouted at people to help him.

  When he returned he was soaked and shivering; the temperature had dropped forty degrees in half that many minutes, and the wind was rising to a howl.

  “Was it all right, Dad?” Nell asked, giving him a towel.

  “Yes, we covered it with a tarpaulin.” His teeth chattered. “The odd thing is that it was already covered. With roses.”

  “She came after all,” said Nell, wiping at tears. “Go and change, Dad, or you’ll catch your death.”

  No risk of bushfires from lightning strikes in this downpour, thought Nell, going to find her mother.

  Peony was giving Dolly her supper—is it that late? Nell wondered. The storm had twisted time, blotted out the sun.

  “Where’s Miss Lizzy?”

  Peony looked up; Dolly waved her fork cheerfully.

  “I don’t know, Miss Nell. She gave me Dolly—oh, a good two hours ago.”

  As Nell walked down the hall Alexander came out of his rooms looking worn but curiously relieved; with Anna’s death, the worst was over. All of them could breathe a little more easily.

  “Dad, have you seen Mum?”

  “No, why?”

  “I can’t find her.”

  They searched the house from attics to cellars and then explored the sheds and outbuildings, but in vain. Elizabeth was not to be found.

  Alexander had begun to shiver again. “The roses,” he said slowly. “She’s wandered off into the storm.”

  “Dad, she wouldn’t!”

  “Then where is she?” Suddenly looking every day of his age, Alexander went to the telephone. “I’ll notify the police station and we’ll get a search party together.”

  “Dad, not now! It’s almost night, and raining like buggery. You’ll only end in getting half the search party lost—no one knows the mountain except us!”

  “Then Lee. He knows the mountain. So does Summers.”

  “Yes, Lee and Summers. And I.”

  By the time that Lee and Summers arrived in mackintoshes and sou’westers, Alexander had assembled compasses, miner’s lamps, spare flasks of kerosene and whatever he thought might be needed; dressed himself for the weather, he was standing over a survey map of the mountain while Nell prowled up and down looking frustrated.

  “You’re half a doctor, Nell, I need you here,” he had said to her when she begged to search too.

  Inarguable, but having nothing to do didn’t suit Nell.

  “Lee, you take the farthest perimeter, which means you’ll ride my horse,” said Alexander. “Summers and I will search closer to home because I doubt she’ll have gotten very far between the storm and her state of mind. Brandy,” he said, producing hip flasks. “Luckily it’s warming up again, but we’ll need it.”

  Lee looked peculiar, Nell thought as she paused in her pacing; his strange eyes wide and almost black, the fine full mouth quivering slightly.

  “We’d best find her tonight,” said Summers, hoisting his pack. “This rain is setting in, the river will be a torrent, and it might be that tomorrow everyone is too busy fighting a flood to mount a big search party. We’ll catch her before she gets too far, that’s the ticket, eh, Sir Alexander?”

  Cold comfort, thought Nell, left to watch the three men go while she, a half-trained doctor, was left behind. Oh, how much she admired her father! Everything had been taken care of while he waited for Lee and Summers; the night shifts in the mine had been canceled, all employees told to go home, Sung Po alerted that a flash flood was likely, volunteers called to fill sandbags in case the river broke its banks. When he had tried to get through to Lithgow, he had found that the line was down, which meant no communication with Sydney.

  Oh, Anna, thought Nell, piling her textbooks up on a table, what did lif
e do to you that your going is so fraught with pain?

  Mrs. Surtees came in, trying to conceal her anxiety. “Miss Nell, you haven’t eaten anything. Can you manage an omelet?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Nell calmly. “I’d appreciate that.” No point in being too faint to deal with whatever the men brought in—pray that Mum’s all right!

  ALEXANDER’S HORSE was a pretty chestnut mare these days, docile and strongly built. Lee hadn’t gone very far before he shed the mackintosh and sou’wester, folded them into a packet and slipped them into a saddlebag. The wind had turned to blow from the northeast, which had sent the temperature up enough to take the chill out of the rain; it was easier to scan the ground without that wretched hat flapping in his face, the mackintosh lifting with each gust. The miner’s lamp, optically adjusted to give out as narrow a beam as possible from a burning wick, hadn’t been designed for wet weather, but hurricane lanterns were too dim for this kind of work. He kept it sheltered from the rain by capping it with his broad-brimmed work hat and swung it tirelessly from hand to hand as he nudged the horse along at a snail’s pace.

  The news that Elizabeth was missing had struck him like a killing blow, except that this was slow dying, not a quick death. He hadn’t seen her that afternoon when they buried Anna, though he had scented something on the wind that had nothing to do with the looming storm. As if fear, guilt and bewilderment were in the air. All he knew was what Ruby had told him: enough. They had had many talks since she had caught him out, talks that filled in the huge gaps in Lee’s knowledge of that sad, doomed marriage.

  Her mind had snapped, he was sure of it. So had Ruby been, fare-welling him outside the hotel.

  “The poor thing has gone mad, Lee, and vanished into the bush to die like a wounded animal.”

  But she couldn’t die! She mustn’t die! Nor could he let her go mad. Exchange Elizabeth for Anna in that barred cell? No, not if he had to give up his own life to prevent it! Only how would that benefit her, who liked him well enough these days, but only as a fairly distant friend?

  Several times he dismounted to track some faint movement that didn’t look like wind-tossed foliage, but found nothing. The chestnut mare, a good and willing goer, plodded on without complaint. An hour went by, another, yet another; he was now two miles from the house, and still no sign of her. Alexander had decided to use dynamite as a signal that she had been found, but Lee doubted that he would hear it above the wind, the rain, and the grumbling of the trees. Pray Alexander or Summers had come upon her closer to the house! If she had gotten this far, she might be ten feet away from him and not be visible.

  Then, sweeping the lamp from hand to hand across the horse’s head, he saw something fluttering on one of the those thorny shrubs that made walking in the bush unpleasant for the ignorant. He could reach it by leaning in the saddle, plucked it off. A shred of thin cotton fabric. White. She had been wearing a white dress, Nell said, one of the few encouraging facts they learned before setting out. It probably indicated loss of mind rather than loss of the will to live. Had she been determined on dying, she would have worn something as dark as the night.

  He had come out of the thicket on to a bridle path that led to the pool he had swum in an eternity ago, and wondered now if she had been following it almost from the time she left Anna’s grave. There were more signs of her progress, at the end on her hands and knees if the muddy grooves where the path was thickly sheltered from the elements were anything to go by.

  WHEN HE saw her huddled on a rock by the pool the gladness drove all else from his brain, for she wasn’t dead; she was sitting hunched over with her arms around her knees and her chin on them, a small white creature come to the end of its tether.

  He slid from the horse, tied its reins to a branch and came up to her quietly, not sure how she would react to his presence, terrified of startling her into blundering off again. But she didn’t move, even after a sudden rigidity told him that she knew someone was there.

  “You’ve come to take me back,” she said, very tiredly.

  He didn’t answer because he didn’t know how best to answer.

  “It’s all right, Alexander, I know I can’t escape. But I needed to come to The Pool. I suppose you think I’ve gone mad, but I haven’t. Not really. I just needed to come to The Pool.”

  He edged close enough to have touched her, but settled next to her instead, cross-legged, his hands dangling limply off his knees. Oh, the relief! She sounded exhausted, but, as she said herself, not mad.

  “Why did you have to come to the pool, Elizabeth?” he asked above the wind and the rain.

  “Who is that?”

  “It’s Lee, Elizabeth.”

  “Ohhhhh,” she said, drawing it out. “I’m still dreaming!”

  “It is Lee. You’re not dreaming, Elizabeth.”

  The reservoir of the miner’s lamp was almost empty, but it shed a wan light from where it sat on the rock at his knee that barely reached his hands; she turned her head to study them.

  “Lee’s hands,” she said. “I’d know them anywhere.”

  His breath caught, he began to tremble. “Why?”

  “They’re so beautiful.”

  One of them reached out to unlock hers from about her legs, its arm sliding across her back to turn her toward him. “They love you,” he said, “along with the rest of me. I’ve always loved you, Elizabeth. I always will, forever and ever.”

  So little light, yet it seemed to blaze like a sun, showed the look in her eyes before they closed to feel his first kiss, soft and tentative, as befits a moment waited for half a lifetime.

  Too terrified of losing her and the moment to think of going to the saddlebags, wherein lay blankets, a mackintosh, a supply of kerosene, he put her down on his clothes, and she was so exalted that she knew nothing beyond his mouth, his hands, his skin. When he eased her shoulders out of the dress to bare her breasts and gather them against his chest, a huge stab of some utter pleasure shook her to the marrow and wrenched a groan from her. Yet it went on and on and on….

  Who knows how many times they made love on that hard bed amid the rain? Certainly not the lamp, whose flame diminished to a pinpoint and snuffed itself out.

  But finally Elizabeth lay in an exhausted sleep, and Lee, wide awake with the wonder of it and her, was forced to remember reality. Though it physically hurt to leave her, he groped to the patient horse to extricate the spare kerosene and his watch: three in the morning. It would be a late dawn because of the heavy skies and the rain, but not more than two hours off. Since he had found her, the others had not, and a frantic Alexander would be ready to go at dawn with that part of Kinross not needed to stem a flood. The level of water in the pool had risen considerably, and would continue to rise; he would have to move Elizabeth anyway. And how were they going to deal with this? The one thing he could not let happen was to have Alexander find them still entwined like the lovers they had become.

  Lee slipped the saddlebags from the mare and carried them back to the rock, unscrewing his flask of brandy.

  “Elizabeth! Elizabeth, my love! Elizabeth, wake up!”

  She stirred but muttered mutinously back into sleep; it took him several minutes to persuade her to sit up, but once she had taken a little brandy she roused fully, shivering.

  “I love you,” she said, a hand on either side of his face. “I have loved you forever.”

  He kissed her, but pulled away before the whole thing could start again; she was chilled to the bone, only sustained by the night’s excitement, the warmth of his body.

  “Put your clothes on,” he said—not an order, but a plea. “We have to go before Alexander mounts a full-scale search.”

  It was too dark to see her face beyond a blur, but he could feel the anxiety and tension flood into her at the mention of that name. On went the clothes; he wrapped a blanket around her and put the mackintosh over that, then refilled the lamp and lit it to guide them.

  “Do you have any shoes?”
r />   “No, I lost them.”

  It was a struggle to get her across the horse’s withers; still, once he was in the saddle and had a good hold of her, they could talk as he rode, curbing the mare, which sensed home and a warm stable in this direction.

  “I love you,” he started, not wanting to start anywhere else.

  “And I love you.”

  “There’s more to it than that, though, dearest Elizabeth.”

  “Yes. There’s Alexander,” she said.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “Keep you,” she said simply. “I couldn’t bear to let you go, Lee. It’s too precious.”

  “Then will you go away with me?”

  But reality had asserted its claim on her too; he felt her shrink against him, felt her sigh. “How can I, Lee? I don’t think Alexander would let me go. Even if he did, I still have Dolly to look after. I can’t desert Anna’s child.”

  “I know. Then what do you want to do?”

  “Keep you. It will have to be a secret, at least until I can think more clearly. I’m so tired, Lee!”

  “Then our secret it is.”

  “When will I see you again?” she asked, alarmed.

  “Not until the rain’s over, my sweet love. If we have floods, a week at least. Let’s make it a week anyway.”

  “Oh, I’ll die!”

  “No, you’ll live—for me. We will meet at the pool seven days from this coming dawn. That will mean an afternoon, won’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think you’ll be able to keep our secret?”

  “I’ve kept myself a secret since I married Alexander, so why should this be any different?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “What if something happens and you can’t come?”

  “You’ll know through Alexander, because I’ll be with him. Go to sleep, my dearest.”