The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  WHEN LEE rode toward the house shortly before dawn shouting that he had found Elizabeth, her sleeping form was gently handed down to a white-faced, shaking Alexander, who carried her into the house and Nell. When he emerged, brimming with gratitude, it was to find that Lee had given the mare to Summers and taken himself home to Ruby.

  “That’s rum,” said Alexander, frowning.

  “Oh, I dunno, Sir Alexander,” said Summers with superb logic, “the poor coot was wet through, and he’s a much heftier man than you. Your clothes won’t fit him, will they?”

  “True, Summers. I’d forgotten that.”

  So it was about thirty-six hours later before Lee had to endure Alexander’s fervent thanks, delivered at the hotel after what Alexander said had been a visit to old Brumford, his lawyer.

  “Is Elizabeth all right?” Lee asked, feeling that to express anxiety was natural under the circumstances.

  “Surprisingly, yes. Nell’s a bit flummoxed. She was all set to deal with anything from pneumonia to a brain fever, but after a twenty-four-hour sleep, Elizabeth woke up this morning fresh as a daisy, then ate an enormous breakfast.”

  Alexander, however, looked anything but fresh; his eyes were redrimmed, his face drawn. Though he was clearly trying to look jaunty, it wasn’t working.

  “Are you all right, Alexander?” Lee asked.

  “Oh, lord, yes, perfectly! It just gave me a bit of a fright, coming out of the blue like that. I really can’t thank you enough, my boy.” He looked at his gold wrist-watch. “I have to take Nell to the train. What a grand girl! With you at my side again, I can wish her well in Medicine.”

  Nothing that Lee wanted to hear, though it relieved him that Nell was leaving Kinross. A grand girl, yes, but as sharp as a tack and no friend to him—or, he suspected, to her mother.

  I hate it! thought Lee. All this subterfuge and sneaking around. There’s only one thing worse than having Elizabeth this way, and that’s not having her at all. I can’t even tell my mother what’s happened.

  He didn’t have to. The moment he walked into the hotel trailing water all over the carpet, Ruby knew.

  I have lost my son. He’s given himself to Elizabeth. And this is the one subject I dare not bring up with him. He hates it but loves her. To want is one thing, to get what you want is quite another. Oh, pray this doesn’t kill him! All I can do is light candles at that abode of sanctity, the Tyke church.

  “My goodness, Mrs. Costevan,” said old Father Flannery (he always accorded her the dignity of a married title), “you’ll be coming to Mass next!”

  “Fuh—bother that!” snarled Ruby. “Don’t get your hopes up, Tim Flannery, you old soak! I just like lighting candles!”

  And perhaps she does at that, thought the priest, clutching the fistful of notes she had thrust at him. He had enough here to drink the finest Irish for months.

  ELIZABETH AWOKE into a whole new world, one that she hadn’t—couldn’t have—known existed. She loved and was loved. The dreaming phases of her sleep had been filled with images of Lee, but to wake and know they were real—! Some twist in her mental processes had blotted out all memory of visiting Anna’s grave, of the roses, of walking into the bush with the blind drive of an animal seeking its home, intent only on reaching The Pool. What she remembered was Lee finding her there, and all the wonderful, beautiful, glorious emotions and sensations that had followed. To have lived as a married woman for twenty-three years and never to have understood what true marriage was!

  Her body felt different; as if it truly belonged to her soul, rather than was a cage imprisoning her soul. No aches or pains plagued her when she woke, not even a tiny stiffness. I was dead, and Lee gave me life. Almost forty years of age, and this is my first taste of pure happiness.

  “Well, you’re finally compos mentis!” said a brisk voice: Nell moved to the bed. “I can’t say you had me worried, Mum, but you’ve slept for almost twenty-four hours.”

  “Have I?” Elizabeth yawned, stretched, made a purring sound.

  Her daughter’s shrewd eyes were fixed on her face, and wore a puzzled look; had Nell only known it, this was one of those situations Ruby had referred to, when her own ignorance of life rendered her blind to what someone more experienced would have seen immediately. “You look absolutely splendid.”

  “I feel it,” said Elizabeth, the shutters beginning to come down. “Did I cause much trouble? I didn’t mean to.”

  “We were frantic, especially Dad—he had me very worried. Do you remember what you did? What you were thinking of?”

  “No,” said Elizabeth, speaking the truth.

  “You must have gone miles. Lee found you.”

  “Did he?” Her eyes looked up at Nell with mild curiosity, nothing else. Elizabeth was an expert at secrets.

  “Yes. He took Dad’s horse—it never occurred to any of us that you’d move at the speed of light in that weather, so Lee had the least likely alternative. Dad would rather have found you himself.” Nell shrugged. “Still, it doesn’t matter who found you—the important thing is that you were found.”

  No, thought Elizabeth, the important thing is that Alexander didn’t take the horse. Then it would have been Alexander who found me, and I would still be his prisoner.

  “I suppose I was a mess?” she asked.

  “That’s putting it mildly, Mum! You were caked in mud, slime, God knows what. It took ages for Pearl and Silken Flower to get you clean.”

  “I don’t remember being bathed.”

  “That’s because you were sound asleep. I had to sit at the top of the bath and keep your head out of the water.”

  “My goodness!” Elizabeth swung her legs out of the bed. “How is Dolly? What does she know?”

  “Only that you’ve been ill, but that you’re all right now.”

  “Yes, I am all right. Thank you, Nell, I’d like to dress.”

  “Do you need help?”

  “No, I can look after myself.”

  An inspection of her body in two big mirrors revealed cuts and bruises galore—strange, that they didn’t hurt a bit—but nothing that betrayed what had happened at The Pool. She closed her eyes, sagged in relief.

  Alexander came in a little later. Eyes wide, Elizabeth gazed at him as if she had never seen him before. How many times had he made love to her between her wedding night and the onset of her illness when she became pregnant with Anna? She hadn’t counted, but many times. Yet never once had she seen him naked, or wanted to. He had known that much, and not forced the issue. But only now, because of what she and Lee had done together, did she understand. Where there is neither love nor physical desire, said her newfound insight, nothing can ever happen to improve matters. And yes, Alexander had done his best to change that. But he was a driving, straightforward man whose physical desires reflected his nature; by no means unsubtle, but learned. I never shook with want for him, she thought. There is nothing in him, nothing he could do to me, that could lift me to that exalted, ecstatic state I have just known with Lee. I could no more have borne to have a shred of clothing between my body and Lee’s than I could have sent him away from me. I wouldn’t have cared if the whole world watched, or if it ended, with Lee’s hands on my skin and my hands on his. When he said he had always loved me and always would, it was like coming home. Yet how can I tell this man any of that? Even if he could bear to listen, he wouldn’t begin to understand. I don’t know what happens between him and Ruby; with no other yardstick than Alexander and me to go by, how could I? But from today everything has changed, everything is different, everything is a source of wonder. I have undergone a miracle, I have lain with my beloved.

  Alexander was staring at her as if at someone he knew he ought to know, but didn’t. His face was lined and looked older than she remembered it—how long ago seemed Anna’s death! To her he seemed to have lost essence, but she gazed at him with all her usual tranquillity, and smiled.

  He smiled back. “Are you hungry enough to eat breakfast?”
r />   “Thank you, I’ll be down shortly,” she said serenely.

  So they settled together at the table in the conservatory, upon whose transparent, white-ribbed roof the rain beat down so steadily that the panes ran in shimmering ripples.

  “I am hungry!” said Elizabeth in amazement, wading her way through grilled lamb chops, scrambled eggs, bacon, fried potatoes.

  Nell had joined them; she was going back to Sydney shortly.

  “You must thank Lee, Elizabeth,” said Alexander, not hungry.

  “If you insist,” she said, swallowing toast.

  “Aren’t you grateful to him, Mum?” Nell asked, surprised.

  “Yes, of course I am.” Elizabeth reached for the chops.

  Alexander and his daughter exchanged a rueful glance, then abandoned the subject.

  Having eaten her fill, Elizabeth went to see Dolly; Nell, about to accompany her, was detained by her father.

  “Is she right in the head?” he asked. “She’s so unaffected by what happened.”

  Nell considered the question, then nodded. “I think so, Dad. At least, as right in the head as she’s ever been. You used the correct word—Mum is fey.”

  WHEN HE REALIZED that Elizabeth had gone missing, Alexander suffered a shock of such magnitude that he knew a part of him would never get over it. For most of the last twenty-three years he had thought of Elizabeth as a thorn in his side—a staid, prim, frigid creature whom he had married for all the wrong reasons. He’d taken the blame because the wrong reasons belonged to him, not to her, and tried to make amends. But her ever-growing distaste of him had wounded him to the quick, set off a chain of reactions founded in pride, resentment, self-esteem. The love of her that had come so soon after their union she had rejected, so he attributed the unhappiness that clouded both their lives more and more as time went on to her and her rejection of the love he had offered. Convinced himself that his love had died. Well, how could it not die, when it was planted in such unforgiving soil? And somewhere along the way he had lost sight of anything except his own thwarted impulse to conquer. All the while calling her a pillar of ice. Yet how could one conquer a pillar of ice? Grasp it, and it melted away into nothing one could take hold of.

  But as he searched for her in a frenzy of fear and guilt, he saw for the very first time in their long relationship how terribly he had failed her. All the things he had given her, she didn’t want; all the things he hadn’t given her, she craved. He equated love with fabulous gifts, immense luxury. She did not. He equated love with fantastic sexual satisfaction. She did not—or, if she did, he was not the man who could give her that. A fire did burn in her, he was sure of it now, but it didn’t burn for him. And what he asked himself over and over as he searched for her was where and why the erosion of her esteem for him had started. But his panic was too great to see the where, the why. He could get no further than the realization that the love for her he had deemed dead for many years was not dead after all. A poor emotion, unreturned, so injurious to his sense of self that he had blotted it from his mind. Now here it was, risen to the surface again, thrust there by the horror of imagining her mad and dead. His fault if she was. His fault, no one else’s.

  And there was Ruby. There was always Ruby. Once, he remembered, he had asked her if a man could love two women at once; she had turned the question aside with a trace of malice, but it was in her own interests to do that. Yet she must have known that he loved both of them, for she joined herself to Elizabeth as a confederate. He had thought she did so in a spirit of charity, as the victor. Now he understood she had done so as a sure way to keep that part of his love that belonged to her. If he hadn’t loved Elizabeth, the two women in his life would still have become friends, perhaps, but more distant ones. He was, he admitted, a man who liked to have his cake and eat it too. Ruby meant more; Ruby was romance, sex, intimacy, an illicit thrill, and that curious combination that a beloved woman becomes to her man, of lover, mother, sister. But he had lived his life with Elizabeth, fathered her children, gone through the torments of Anna and Dolly with her. And that took love, else he would have let her go.

  So when Lee rode across the lawn and gave her back to him, Alexander underwent an enlightenment that brought him lower than a surrendered captive. He owed his wife a debt he couldn’t hope to pay with any coin save one: open the cage and let the bird fly.

  AFTER FIVE DAYS the rain blew out; Kinross, so close to flood, gave thanks. If Alexander had been a less careful custodian and left the river as it had been after the mining of the placer, flooding would have been inevitable, but he had shored the banks and returned the stream to a proper course dredged deep enough to take the overflow.

  Seven days after her disappearance, Elizabeth mounted Cloud and set off for her customary ride. Once she left the immediate vicinity of the house she swerved into the saturated bush and let the mare pick its way between boulders and hazards for a full mile before returning to the bridle path that led to The Pool.

  Lee was there, waiting, came to Cloud and held out his arms to receive her. Kisses wilder and more passionate, a degree of starvation that even she hadn’t gauged; she couldn’t wait for him to touch her, to bare her body, to take it. And always those alien sensations of ecstasy, a pouring forth of everything she was into the crucible of love. Then he took her into The Pool, and made love to her in what seemed their natural habitat, water.

  When they were dry she unbraided his hair, enchanted by its length and thickness; played with it, entwined it among hers, led it over her breasts, buried her face in it. And told him of how she had seen him swimming in The Pool, and never managed to banish the sight of him from memory.

  “I didn’t know it could be like this between a man and woman,” she said. “I have entered a whole new world.”

  “We can’t stay here much longer” was his answer: why was it always he who had to remind them of reality? Then he asked her what had haunted him since he found her. “Elizabeth, dearest love, you’re not supposed to do this. I know we can do it, but only after I’ve seen Hung Chee, who knows the table of the woman’s cycle. So far we’ve taken no precautions, and you can’t be let conceive. That’s a death sentence.”

  She laughed, a carefree sound echoing its joy around the forest. “Darling Lee, there’s nothing to worry about! Truly, nothing! No child I bore to you would hurt me. If I am lucky enough to conceive, there will be no eclampsia. I am as sure of that as I am that the sun will come up tomorrow morning.”

  Three

  Alexander in Control

  THE ENTIRE burden of what had happened between Elizabeth and him fell upon Lee, who hadn’t realized the enormity of its weight until he met Elizabeth at the pool seven days after he had found her. From the moment when she laughed and ridiculed his fears for her safety in the event of a child, he understood everything that he had pushed from his mind for a week. All that had filled it was Elizabeth, the incredible fact that she loved him, had loved him for as long as he had loved her. The qualms he suffered he had assumed would vanish when they met again and could talk the matter through—surely there was an honorable answer! But she wasn’t interested in answers, she didn’t see the point of answers; she had found her answer in him, and nothing else mattered to her.

  He had gone to their meeting determined it would have no physical side because he remembered his mother explaining that sexual intercourse was a death sentence for Elizabeth. He knew it was not: conception was. His mother knew that too, which was why she had never fallen pregnant to Alexander. But they were tied to the Chinese nobility, weren’t ignorant like Europeans.

  Oh, but let there be no issue of that one unforgettable ascent into paradise! It might be forgiven him, as he hadn’t intended it or imagined it could happen, but now they had to wait. Then she had slid from her horse into his arms and he saw her, smelled her, felt her, tasted her. The power in her overwhelmed him, he just couldn’t stop himself. Then, when he had raised the subject of conception, she had gone into fits of laugh
ter!

  Time! Where had it gone? They hadn’t discussed more than a small fraction of what had to be discussed before she was back on her dappled mare and riding off. They were to meet again at the pool in four more days; she had begged for an earlier tryst, but he had managed to stand firm. They were on a collision course with disaster, as he well knew and she ought to know. But for all his experience with women, Elizabeth represented the one and only love, so he had no idea how single-minded women in love were, or how ruthless, or how indifferent to any factor save the preservation of that love. He had thought that they would be as one about sparing Alexander as much pain as possible, but she didn’t care one iota about sparing Alexander. Dolly, yes. Only Dolly held her immobile. It was he, Lee, who cared about Alexander, who saw what they were doing as a kind of treason to the man responsible for Lee’s good fortune, career, opportunities. His mother’s most dearly beloved. Elizabeth feared Alexander; for the rest, he didn’t exist.

  She had ridden away obviously convinced that they could keep their secret forever if necessary, and hugging that secret to herself as if it were a trophy in some ongoing war against her husband. For Lee, on the outside of this very long marriage, it was shrouded in mystery. Only now could he appreciate that even his mother did not fully understand it. Probably Alexander was as much in the dark as he was, for the fulcrum on which it turned was Elizabeth.

  So Lee went back to Kinross down the snake path in the face of the dying sun more confused and rudderless than ever. All he knew was that he didn’t possess the duplicity or furtiveness to maintain a secret relationship with Alexander’s wife. For a week he had believed that she would betray it in all innocence by a chance remark, an imprudent reference to him, but now he realized that she never would. Even if she swelled up with his child, she would preserve her silence.

  This thought, rising to the surface of his mind as he passed the poppet heads and waved at their attendants, made him stop in his tracks. Oh, Jesus! No, no, no! Not for anything would he do that to Alexander! He knew the story, told to him in a tiny coffeehouse in Constantinople: Alexander’s mother had had a lover whose identity she had refused to disclose, and her husband had known that the child wasn’t his. To let the wheel describe that particular full circle was manifestly impossible. Sneaking around was bad enough; repeating history was intolerable. To humble such colossal pride, to reduce a life’s work to insignificance, to impose upon Alexander his titular father’s fate—no, and no, and no! Unthinkable!