The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  It had been costed at £8,000 per mile and it came in at £841,000—an enormous sum of money that Apocalypse Enterprises condescended to borrow from Sydney banks rather than the Bank of England—in return for concessions on the tax it paid to export gold to the Bank of England, which went guarantor. No surprise; the Bank of England already held more Apocalypse gold than that as collateral, and Mr. Walter Maudling confidently informed his directors that the gold would keep coming for many years yet. Alexander and Ruby were its customers. Charles Dewy preferred to bank in Sydney, Sung Chow to bank in Hong Kong, the up-and-coming new entrepôt in eastern Asia.

  Alexander bought two similar but superseded locomotives from the Great Northern Railway in England, now doing well from amortizing its older stock, still in excellent condition and a great deal cheaper for a colonial railway company to buy than factory-new models.

  Rolling stock came from a different English source. One car was a refrigerated van, as Mr. Samuel Mort’s freezing works in Lithgow and Sydney were now fully operational; Apocalypse Rail could rent the van out to the Government railway when it wasn’t needed, which would be most of the time. All rolling stock were fitted with spring-buffers at each end and spring draw-bar connections. Alexander’s greatest worry was the braking system, that of Fay and Newall: a continuous rod that passed under the train had to be triggered by several men at different parts of the train, which meant it could not be halted much short of a mile, and that men had to ride the train for no other reason than to apply the brakes if necessary. When he read of Mr. Westinghouse’s compressed air brake, he put in an order for Westinghouse air brakes, to be shipped from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as soon as possible.

  The single passenger car was a new one, thirty feet long and eight feet wide, mounted on bogied wheels. It had a private compartment for the Apocalypse directors, and well-padded seating on either side of a central aisle for other passengers, who would pay a second-class fare. It also had something absolutely revolutionary: a lavatory cubicle, thanks to Ruby’s nagging.

  “You can witter on all you like about bogies, locomotives and brakes that work by air,” she said at a very early meeting of the board, “but it’sa disgrace that the men who design and own and run trains do not provide a lavatory for passengers. Oh, just lovely for you men! You nip out the carriage door on to the plate and pee to your heart’s content! You can even drop your trou and take a shit if you’re caught short. While we women sit in agony for nine hours between Sydney and Bowenfels unless the train stops, when there’s a stampede for the station lav. Well, I can’t do anything to boot the Government railway up the arse, but I can definitely boot the Apocalypse railway up the arse! I’m warning you, Alexander, put in a lavatory! Otherwise your life won’t be worth living.”

  By the time the line was opened that late October of 1875, the bill stood at £1,119,000. That sum included the locomotives, the rolling stock, passenger car (with lavatory), refrigerated van, locomotive turntables, loading facilities at the Apocalypse coal mine and unloading facilities at Kinross, locomotive sheds, points systems and dozens of minor necessities. Despite this gargantuan expenditure, none of the Apocalypse directors deemed the railway a silly mistake; in the years to come it would pay for itself ten times over in the cost of shipping coal alone. For gold continued to come out of the mountain in ever-greater amounts, some of the ore so rich that whole chunks were lifted out hardly adulterated by quartz or slate, and the original vein had been joined by several more of equal quality.

  The residents of Kinross town scarcely believed their luck. With the exhaustion of the placer fields its population had dwindled to 2,000 souls, all of whose work force was employed by Apocalypse in one way or another. Though Alexander chose not to sit on the town council, Ruby and Sung did, and one of Sung’s nephews, Sung Po, was the town clerk. He had been educated at a private school in Sydney, spoke English with a clipped Anglo-Australian accent, and was remarkably efficient. The miners and workshop hands were mostly white, the council employees Chinese, who were happier digging and hoeing than underground or whanging away at machines. Sung Po’s job, as spelled out by Alexander, was to dismantle the ugly relics of alluvial mining days, macadamize the streets with rock excavated from the mine and specially crushed, see to the erection of a town hall and offices, and badger the New South Wales Government for contributions toward a school and a hospital. A school for the 300 children of the town was already in place, but housed in a wattle-and-daub hall, while the hospital was still a wooden cottage next door to Doc Burton’s residence. There was to be a park in a central square around which the town hall, the Kinross Hotel, the post office, the police station and an assortment of shops would stand.

  Of course the arrival of coal by train meant gas lighting for Kinross’s streets; Po hoped to find the funds to pipe gas into private dwellings within two years, though (of course) the Kinross Hotel piped it in immediately, much to Sam Wong’s delight; cooking on gas stoves was wonderful.

  The only rumbles about the high Chinese population came from transients like commercial travelers, who soon learned to button their lips; the white Kinrossians knew well that the real power in the town, Alexander Kinross, would not tolerate anti-Chinese attitudes. For which reason, probably, it was the Chinese segment that grew in numbers, especially among Mandarins, in far fewer numbers than Cantonese throughout Australia. Here in Kinross they could live peacefully, go about their business without the risk of being arrested by the police, or beaten up in some alley. Like the white children, Chinese children went to school from the age of five to the age of twelve. One day Alexander hoped to see a high school come into being, but be they white Kinrossians or Chinese Kinrossians, the adults of the town saw no virtue in keeping their children at school for years and years. The best that Alexander could do was to offer scholarships to schools in Sydney for the very few children with educational aspirations. Even this was sometimes opposed by parents who didn’t want their sons or (horrors!) daughters talking down to them. Such feelings of inferiority appalled Alexander, who came from a country that prized education above all else; Australians, he had noted, were not on the whole enamored of educating their children to a higher level than they were themselves. And the Chinese felt the same. Time, he thought; that’s all it will take. One day they’ll all prize education the way we Scots do. It’s a ticket out of poverty and ignominy. Look at my poor little wife, with her two years of reading and not much writing or arithmetic. She may say that she would have preferred not to marry me, but her education has resumed since she has married me. Better words, better expressions—look at how well she attacked me over Ruby! She couldn’t have done that in Scottish Kinross!

  BY LATE OCTOBER, when the Apocalypse railway opened, pregnant Elizabeth was too uncomfortable to attend, though she was able to be hostess at a dinner for the various dignitaries who came from Sydney, some of them red-faced because Kinross had a train before Bathurst did. In Lithgow, citizens of Bathurst picketed.

  And finally Elizabeth met Ruby Costevan, who couldn’t possibly be omitted from the guest list. The only invitees who actually stayed in Kinross House were the Dewys; everybody else was at the Kinross Hotel.

  The guests arrived on top of the mountain breathless and exclaiming; the ride up on the cable car was so novel that the ladies especially were as enthralled as frightened by it. Elizabeth wore an artfully cut dress of steel-blue satin and a new suite of jewelry Alexander had given her for the occasion: sapphires and diamonds set in white gold, the sapphires paler and more translucent than those inky stones tended to be. And, of course, her diamond ring on one hand and her tourmaline on the other.

  Pregnancy had enhanced her beauty, and her slowly stiffening pride meant that she held her lovely head high on its graceful neck, her black hair piled up in rolls surmounted by a sapphire and diamond ornament. Be regal, Elizabeth! Stand beside your unfaithful husband at the door and smile, smile, smile.

  Though naturally she didn’t credit Ruby with tact, Rub
y did possess tact when she felt it called for, so she came up on the last car in the last place, escorted by Sung in full Mandarin glory. She had pleaded with Alexander to be excused, to no avail.

  “In which case,” she had said, “you really ought to have offered your wife the opportunity to meet me in private before this pretentious affair. It’s hard enough for the poor little bitch to have to deal with this train-load of toffee-nosed swells without her having to deal with me as well.”

  “I prefer that your first meeting with Elizabeth be among a crowd of strangers,” said Alexander in the voice that brooked no arguments. “She’s a trifle fey.”

  “Fey?”

  “Away with the fairies. Talks to herself a lot, so Summers tells me—Mrs. Summers is quite afraid of her. It wasn’t as bad when she could sit at the piano for music lessons, but once Miss Jenkins ceased her visits, she went downhill.”

  “Then why,” Ruby had asked, exasperated, “didn’t you keep Theodora coming, even if she can’t teach the girl piano? Your poor little wife must be desperately lonely.”

  “If you’re implying that I’m not paying Miss Jenkins, Ruby, you’re wrong!” Alexander snapped, nettled. “She’d saved a bit for a holiday in London, so I gave her the rest as well as a comfortable stipend. I am not stingy!”

  “No, you’re not stingy! You’re just a prick!”

  Alexander had thrown his hands in the air and given up. No matter what a man did, he couldn’t please a woman.

  Ruby arrived dressed in ruby velvet and wearing a fortune in rubies; she looked magnificent, deliberately so. If Elizabeth had been forced to meet her amid a crowd of strangers, some of whom knew that Alexander still consorted with her, then she would at least show Elizabeth that she wasn’t the common alley trollop Elizabeth’s imagination no doubt pictured. The gesture was as much to salve Elizabeth’s pride as her own; though, she thought wryly as she walked up the steps on Sung’s arm, Alexander’s wife probably wouldn’t get the message.

  Her own curiosity was piqued, of course. Gossip said that Mrs. Kinross was quite lovely in an understated way—understated because she was terribly quiet and reserved. But the truth was, as Ruby well knew, that no one in Kinross had seen her at all. Mrs. Summers was everyone’s source of information, and in Ruby’s opinion Maggie Summers was a spiteful bitch.

  So when Ruby set eyes on Elizabeth she saw a great deal more than Alexander, for one, would have wanted. Her lack of height was a handicap, but she held herself very well, and she was indeed beautiful. The skin was white as milk and unsullied by rouge or powder, the lips naturally red, the brows and lashes too black to need enhancing. But in the very dark blue eyes there lurked a panicked sadness that Ruby instinctively knew was not on her account. Alexander took her hand to draw her forward, and those eyes flared distress, that mouth formed itself into an almost invisible moue of distaste. Oh, Jesus! thought Ruby, her heart melting. Physically she loathes him! Alexander, Alexander, what did you do when you chose a bride you’d never seen, didn’t know? Sixteen is such a sensitive age, it makes or breaks.

  Elizabeth saw the dragon woman on the arm of a man clothed in dragons, both of them tall and majestic. Sung in royal red and yellow, Ruby in ruby. But Sung she knew; her gaze moved to Ruby and assimilated those extraordinary eyes, so incredibly green, so incredibly kind. That, she had not expected. That, she had not wanted. Ruby pitied her as woman to woman. Nor could she be dismissed as a trollop, from garb to manners to a deep and slightly husky voice. Her speech, Elizabeth noticed, was surprisingly well rounded for someone from New South Wales—especially someone from her background. She didn’t flaunt her voluptuous body, but moved it in a queenly fashion, as if she owned the world.

  “So good of you to come, Miss Costevan,” Elizabeth whispered.

  “So good of you to receive me, Mrs. Kinross.”

  As this was the last pair of guests, Alexander moved away from the door on the horns of a hideous dilemma: should he give his arm to his mistress, his wife, or his best friend? Custom said that it ought not to be his wife, but custom also said that it could not be his mistress. Yet how could he leave his wife and his mistress to walk together behind him and Sung?

  Ruby solved it by giving Sung a shove between the shoulder blades that propelled him toward Alexander. “Go on, gentlemen!” she said cheerfully. Then, sotto voce to Elizabeth: “What an interesting situation!”

  Elizabeth found herself smiling back. “Yes, isn’t it? But I thank you for making it easier.”

  “My poor child, you’re a Christian thrown to the lions. Let us demonstrate that it’s Alexander thrown to the lions,” Ruby said, linking her arm through Elizabeth’s. “We’ll shine him down, the bast—reprobate.”

  So they entered the large drawing room arm in arm, smiling and looking well aware that every other woman in the room was cast into permanent shade, even Constance Dewy.

  Dinner was announced almost immediately, much to the hired French chef’s horror; he had counted on thirty minutes, so the spinach soufflés weren’t anything like ready. He was obliged to fling cold prawns on small plates and slop a dollop of pedestrian mayonnaise on each—merde, merde, merde, what a culinary fiasco!

  This was Alexander’s ruse to separate his mistress from his wife, as they were, naturally, seated far apart. Elizabeth sat at one end with the Governor, Sir Hercules Robinson, on her right, and the Premier, Mr. John Robertson, on her left. Because Sir Hercules governed too autocratically, he wasn’t getting on with the Premier, so it fell to Elizabeth to maintain the social decencies. A task made harder by Mr. Robertson’s cleft palate and speech defect, not to mention the rate at which he consumed wine, and the tendency of his hand to stray on to her knee.

  Alexander sat at the other end of the table with Lady Robinson on his right and Mrs. Robertson on his left. Though a notorious womanizer and drinker, John Robertson was a nominal Presbyterian; his extremely retiring Presbyterian wife was ordinarily never present at any public function, so to get her to Kinross was a mark of Alexander’s standing in the State.

  What, wondered Alexander as he stared at his cold prawns, am I going to say to this sophisticated addlepate and this kirk-bound martyr? I am not cut out for this.

  Midway down the table, Ruby had Mr. Henry Parkes on her right and Mr. William Dalley on her left, and discreetly flirted with both men, to their high delight. So well done was it that the women in her vicinity felt more eclipsed than outraged. Parkes was Robertson’s political foe and the state premiership had a habit of oscillating between them; if Robertson was up at the moment, Parkes would likely be up the moment after. It was as necessary to separate Parkes and Robertson as it was to keep Elizabeth and Ruby apart. Of course Sung was his usual charming self; no one made the mistake of deeming him a heathen Chinee, even though he was. Immense wealth could gild far less promising lilies than Sung.

  The spinach soufflés when they finally appeared were worth waiting for; so too the sorbet, made from pineapples shipped by refrigerated van from Queensland, where such delicacies grew. Poached coral cod followed, then roast rack of baby lamb; the repast ended with a salad of tropical fruits arising from whipped cream like volcano peaks from a bed of cloud.

  All this took three hours to eat, three hours during which Elizabeth grew more and more at ease with her duties as hostess. They might be disgruntled with each other, but Sir Hercules and Mr. Robertson responded to their beautiful companion like bees to a flower laden with nectar, and if Mr. Robertson was dismayed at so much Presbyterianism in this delectable woman, he wisely obliged her fancy—after all, he had one at home.

  Whereas Alexander floundered, trying to make harmless chitchat with two women who weren’t in the least interested in steam engines, dynamos, dynamite or gold mining. Compounded by the fact that he was anticipating a verbal drubbing from Premier John Robertson, and was looking forward to slapping Robertson down. This verbal drubbing would take place as soon as the ladies left the room, to the tune of: Why wasn’t there land for a
Presbyterian church in Kinross? How had the Catholics got enough land to build a school on as well as a church without paying a penny, while the Presbyterians were quoted an astronomical price for a postage stamp–sized piece of urban Kinross? Well, if Robertson thought that Alexander was going to back down, then Robertson could think again! Most of Kinross was either Church of England or Catholic, its Presbyterian element amounting to four families. So he shut out the women talking children across him, and dreamed of how he was going to tell John Robertson that he was going to donate land to the Congregationalists and the Anabaptists.

  It went the way all formal dinners did; the moment the port decanters appeared, the ladies rose as one and retired to the large drawing room, there to wait a minimum of an hour for the men to join them. This was a custom designed to afford the ladies time to empty their bladders without the embarrassment of having men watch them come and go; as most of the ladies were dying to come and go, a procession began.

  “Just as well there are two water closets downstairs,” said Elizabeth to Ruby, “but if you’d like to come with me, we can go upstairs to my bathroom.”

  “Lead the way,” said Ruby, grinning.

  “I never thought for one moment that I’d like you,” Elizabeth said as they prinked in front of a plethora of mirrors.

  “There, that looks better,” said Ruby, twitching the feathers springing from her ruby and diamond aigrette. “Well, I thought I’d detest you—tit for tat. But the moment I saw you, I just wanted us to be friends. You’ve no friends, and you need them if you’re going to survive Alexander. He’s a locomotive, rolls over all opposition.”