The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  “No, I’ve never liked him.”

  “Do you like anyone, Elizabeth?”

  “Ruby…Sung…Constance…Mrs. Surtees.”

  “And your children?”

  “I love my children, Alexander. Never doubt it.”

  “But not me, like or love.”

  “No, not you, like or love.”

  “Do you realize that you’ve been married to me for just about half of your entire life?”

  Her head came down, her eyes opened wide to stare at him. “Is that all?” she asked. “It seems an eternity.”

  “Did I say a quiet lion?” Alexander pulled a face. “An eternity with me has turned you into a bitch, my dear.”

  RETRENCHMENT AT the Apocalypse Mine might have taken place without much fuss if it hadn’t been for Sam O’Donnell, a miner who hadn’t been on the job for long enough to merit more than a token sum when he was paid out. Nor did he have a wife or children to augment this. Even in his worst moments of parsimony Alexander retained a healthy self-preservation that told him it was prudent not to fire his workers without compensation, though there were no laws or statutes thus to compel him. Had he been on speaking terms with Ruby, she would have told him that when push came to shove he had too much heart to be a complete robber-baron, whereas Elizabeth might have said he was too vain to like being cursed as a complete robber-baron. There was some truth in both. His misfortune was that he couldn’t care about his colliery workers in the same way as he did the Apocalypse gold men; they were simply dismissed with two weeks’ pay. Generous, compared to some.

  Sam O’Donnell went straight to the Amalgamated Miners’ Association, the most militant section of which looked after the interests of coal miners. Most of the Australian colliers were Welsh immigrants and the mines, like Alexander’s at Lithgow, were privately owned.

  When Sam O’Donnell came back from Sydney, he was accompanied by a rising young political light in the labor movement, Bede Evans Talgarth of the New South Wales Trades and Labour Council. Though Australian born, Bede Talgarth, as his name suggested, had Welsh roots. He was more formidable than a simple agitator or union negotiator; self-educated to a high degree, he understood account books and economics, and had already, at the age of twenty-five, made a reputation as a wonderful orator. Soaked in the new gods Marx and Engels, he burned to disband the Legislative Council, which was the for-life unelected upper house of the New South Wales parliament, and destroy the influence of the British Government in all Australian affairs. He hated England passionately. Despite which, he had a cool head and a great deal of subtlety.

  An interview on the first day of August with Sir Alexander Kinross proved to be the irresistible force colliding with the immovable object; the two men, alike in their humble beginnings, had each chosen a very different path in life and faced each other in no mood to concede the tiniest point. Since their conditions and wages had been so good over the years, Alexander’s miners and refinery workers had never bothered to join a union. Except for Sam O’Donnell, a member from Gulgong days. Therefore Bede used him as his wedge by demanding that the man be reinstated.

  “He’s a troublemaker and a whiner,” said Alexander, “and as such, the last of the men I’ve laid off who would be reinstated. In fact, if at some time in the future I were to hire again, I’d not hire Sam O’Donnell.”

  “The price of gold is falling, Sir Alexander. This is a ploy to keep your gold in situ until its price rises again.”

  “ ‘In situ,’ eh? Such an elegant phrase for a shirtsleeves demagogue! What you suggest is ridiculous. I’m laying off because I can’t afford to continue full production, that simple.”

  “Reinstate Mr. O’Donnell,” said Bede.

  “Go to hell,” said Alexander.

  Bede Talgarth walked out.

  The only accommodation in Kinross was at Ruby’s hotel, where Bede had rented the smallest, cheapest room. Scrupulous about using union funds, he preferred whenever possible to pay his way out of his own pocket, which he filled, scantily, by writing for the Bulletin and a new labor paper, the Worker, and by passing a hat around after one of his stirring speeches in the Sydney Domain on a Sunday afternoon. What he hoped was to stand successfully for the next New South Wales parliament, whose present members had resolved that after the next elections all sitting members would be paid a handsome salary. Until now, a parliamentarian was unpaid, which meant poor men couldn’t afford to belong to the elected lower house. In future poor men could.

  A little above average height at five feet nine, Bede was heavily built, a legacy from the Newcastle coal face—he had started working alongside his Welsh-born father at twelve—and from far better nutrition than his father had ever enjoyed as a child in the Rhondda Valley of Wales. Despite his bulk, he was very trim, though he walked like a sailor due to the musculature of his thighs. His thick, waving hair was dark red, his skin was faintly freckled, and his eyes were the same black as Alexander’s. People didn’t call him handsome, but women found his square but regular features attractive and, if they chanced to see him with his sleeves rolled up, stared at his massively developed arms in awe. Ruby was more forthcoming when he encountered her in the hotel foyer after his meeting with Sir Alexander.

  “What a bonny boy you are!” she said, her green eyes peeping coyly from behind an ostrich feather fan. “If the bit I can’t see is like the rest of you, I’ll amend boy to stallion.”

  His nostrils flared; he reared back as if she had struck him. Bede reverenced women as vulnerable servitors, and deemed vulgarity in them intolerable. “I don’t know you from a bar of soap, madam, and if that’s an example of your style of conversation, I don’t want to know you.”

  Her answer was a guffaw. “A prude! A Bible-basher too, eh?”

  “I fail to see what God has to do with women who talk smut.”

  “So you are a Bible-basher.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m not.”

  Ruby dropped the fan and produced a dimpled smile of such glee that it was hard to resist. “You’re the Trades and Labour Council man, Bede Talgarth,” she said. “Typical of the breed too—full of fire to free the downtrodden workingman, yet determined to keep women in their place—childing, cooking, cleaning, forever pegging out the washing. I’m Ruby Costevan, proprietor of this hostelry and ardent enemy of the double standard.”

  “Double standard?” he asked blankly.

  “You’re a man and at liberty to say fuck, I’m a woman and not at liberty to say fuck. Well, sport, fuck that!” She strolled up to him and linked her arm through his. “You’ll go farther faster if you accept women into the race of Man as equal. Though I’m of the opinion that not many men are my equal.”

  He was softening, quite why he didn’t know, except that she was so extraordinarily beautiful yet managed to radiate good humor. In the end he suffered her arm and let her lead him into the hall. Of course the moment she said her name he knew who she was: the mistress of Sir Alexander Kinross and a director of Apocalypse.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “To have lunch in my private dining room.”

  He stopped. “I can’t afford it.”

  “Be my guest—and don’t give me any of that shit about you and I being on opposite sides of the fence and you won’t eat off the proceeds of Mammon! You’re a stiff-necked young labor Turk, and I’ll bet you’ve never had a meal with a millionairess. Now is your chance to find out how the other half lives.”

  “More accurately, the other one-hundredth of one percent.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  There was a clatter and a thump in the foyer; Ruby and Bede turned to see a female form spread-eagled on the floor.

  “Oh, bugger!” the female form said as Bede helped her to her feet. “I hate these bloody long bloody dresses!”

  “This is Bede, Nell. Bede, this is Nell, who is fourteen and a half and just out of short skirts,” said Ruby. “Unfortunately we haven’t been able to persuade her to put her
hair up yet, and she won’t wear a corset for love or money.”

  “You’re the union man,” said Nell, accompanying them with a swish of the abominated skirt. “I’m Alexander Kinross’s elder daughter.” Her bright blue eyes threw him a challenge as she sat down opposite him at the small round table.

  “Where’s Anna?” Ruby asked.

  “Not to be found, as usual. Anna,” Nell informed Bede, “is my younger sister. She’s mentally retarded—that’s a new phrase I’ve just found in the literature, Auntie Ruby. I like it better than mental, which implies the ability to think rather than an inability to think.”

  Mind reeling, Bede Talgarth proceeded to have lunch with two women of a kind he had never before encountered. Nell’s vocabulary was less salty than Auntie Ruby’s, but he suspected that was only because she was a little shy of him and didn’t trust him, her father’s enemy by definition. Not that he blamed her for filial loyalty. How like him she was to look at! But what sort of foul nest did Sir Alexander Kinross inhabit, that his own daughter lunched with his mistress? Called her Auntie? For as Nell chattered he became uncomfortably aware that the girl was fully acquainted with Ruby Costevan’s status. It horrified him, for all that he thought himself a free spirit, emancipated from religion and the hidebound conventions it incorporated. Decadence, that’s what it is, he decided. These people have so much money and power that they’re like the ancient Romans, depraved and degenerate. Yet Nell didn’t seem depraved or degenerate, even if she was quite shockingly outspoken. Then he realized that her head was stuffed with brains of a quality he couldn’t hope to match.

  “I’m going up to Sydney University to do engineering next year,” she told him.

  “Engineering?”

  “Yes, engineering.” She sounded patient, as if she talked to an idiot. “Mining, metallurgy, assaying and mining law, actually. Wo Ching and Chan Min are doing it with me, but Lo Chee will do mechanical engineering and machine construction. Donny Wilkins—he’s the C of E minister’s son—will do civil engineering and architecture. That way, Daddy has three of us for his chief interest, mining, one for his engines and dynamos, and one to build bridges and design his opera house,” said Nell.

  “But you’re a girl and three of the others are Chinese.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” asked Nell, sounding dangerous. “We’re all Australians, and all entitled to as much education as we’re able to cope with. What do you think rich people do with their lives?” she asked truculently. “The answer is that we do exactly the same thing as poor people do—fritter away our days if we’re lazy, or work our arses off if we’re industrious.”

  “What would you know about poor people, young miss?”

  “About as much as you know about rich people—very little.”

  He changed tack. “Engineering isn’t a profession for women.”

  “Poop to that!” Nell snapped. “I suppose you think we ought to deport Wo Ching, Chan Min and Lo Chee too?”

  “Since they’re already here, no. But I do think that Chinese immigration has to be stopped. Australia is a country for white people earning white men’s wages,” Bede said rather pompously.

  “Jesus!” said Nell on a gasp. “The Chinese are a damned sight better immigrants than the lazy, drunken lot who flock here from all parts of the British Isles!”

  An interesting skirmish that didn’t become outright war due to Sam Wong’s entry with the first course. Nell’s face lit up, and to Bede’s amazement she began to talk to him in Chinese, her face aglow with affection.

  “How many languages do you speak?” he asked her after Sam disappeared. He tasted his prawn-filled pastry rolls drizzled with a sweet sauce and found gastronomic heaven.

  “Mandarin Chinese—all our people are Mandarin rather than Cantonese—Latin, Greek, French and Italian. When I go to the city I’ll have to find a tutor in German. A lot of engineering papers and texts are written in German.”

  “Our people,” he thought, walking through Kinross later. “Our people” are Mandarin rather than Cantonese. What on earth does that mean? I always thought a Chinaman was a Chinaman. We will have great opposition from Sir Alexander Kinross when the real push to ban Chinese immigration begins. It’s a natural federal law so it has to wait for federation, and all our white businessmen will be opposing it because they can pay newly arrived Chinese less than half what they pay white men. Yes, it’s Labor will have to force the law through a federal parliament. That means our need to organize ourselves politically is even more vital than our union business.

  Oh, and why has this Kinross situation blown up now, when we have a dangerous situation in Queensland, and the New South Wales squatters have formed their wretched Pastoralists’ “Union”? If—no, when—the shearers go on strike, it’s going to be a powder keg. And I’ll be needed in Sydney, not in this backwater, for all its gold. Bill Spence is under such pressure from the shearers that he’s going to have to insist on all-union labor in the wool sheds, and if he succeeds in bringing the Sydney wharf laborers on side, we’re in for a hell of a time. But where is the strike pay to come from? We gave thirty-six thousand pounds to the London dockers last year and enabled them to win. But we are skint. And here I am in Kinross.

  Bede wished he could like Sam O’Donnell, but the more he had to do with the man, the less he could bear to like him. Though Bede was more inclined to call him a shiftless charmer than a genuine troublemaker. The fact that he had plenty of friends among the refinery and shop workers and none among his fellow miners suggested that he irritated those alongside him. However, Bede was determined to use O’Donnell’s best features to the hilt. The man was handsome, supple when he moved, smooth-spoken. And he hated the Chinese, about whom he was a valuable source of information. Kinross and the Apocalypse Mine were a mystery to the Trades and Labour Council. Not that Sir Alexander had favored the Chinese in his retrenchments. Their jobs had gone too, and in about the same proportion as white jobs.

  An application to Sergeant Thwaites of the Kinross police for permission to speak in public in Kinross Square next Sunday afternoon was received with wary suspicion, but a telephone call to Sir Alexander fixed that.

  “You can speak, Mr. Talgarth, and so can any other man if he wants. Sir Alexander says that free speech is the foundation of true democracy, and he won’t oppose it.”

  So the rumors are correct, thought Bede, striding away with that sailor’s gait. Alexander Kinross did spend time in America. No Scot born and bred who hadn’t been there would use phrases like “true democracy.” Even mention the word “democracy” to a stout supporter of the British in Sydney, and he reacted like a bull to a red rag—arrant American nonsense! All men were not equal!

  Damn, where was O’Donnell? They had agreed to meet at the hotel just after lunch, but the afternoon wore on without a sign of the fellow. Finally, coming on dusk, he appeared looking a trifle disheveled.

  “What have you been up to, Sam?” Bede asked, picking burrs off O’Donnell’s coat.

  “A bit of slap-and-tickle,” said O’Donnell with a chuckle.

  “You were supposed to be with me so you could introduce me to the laid-off workers, Sam, not off philandering.”

  “I wasn’t phil-whatever,” O’Donnell said sulkily. “If you saw her, you’d understand.”

  DURING THE six days he was in Kinross, Bede Talgarth began to make inroads among the laid-off workers who were boilermakers, fitters, turners, mechanics or laborers in the refinery and the many other workshops affected by a cut in gold production; the train would now run only once a week, as coal consumption was well down. Only one in every four coal miners at the Apocalypse colliery in Lithgow still had their jobs.

  The gold miners, Bede learned, were impossible to woo for his cause. Extremely well paid, working a six-hour shift once in each twenty-four hours for five out of each seven days with additional compensation for night shifts, they stood at a clean mine face illuminated by strong electric light and well ventilated from
air shafts equipped with electric-driven fans. Blasting was safe and no man entered the blast area before the dust had fully settled. Into the bargain, they were heavily outnumbered by colliers in the Amalgamated Miners’ Association, which they deemed a union for colliers. Finally came a point that Bede Talgarth, ex-collier, had never taken into account until he came to Kinross: gold miners looked down on coal miners as inferior beings because gold miners were better paid and did cleaner work in better conditions, didn’t come off a shift black with coal dust and coughing their lungs out from silicosis.

  His speech in Kinross Square on Sunday afternoon went down very well. He had had a bright idea, and brought in a big group of colliers from Lithgow to swell that part of the audience willing to cheer. Feeling vindicated, he discovered that the Lithgow contingent also contained men from the brickworks, the ironworks and Samuel Mort’s freezing works. Too clever to rail against Sir Alexander Kinross alone, Bede concentrated upon how little the employees made from Apocalypse’s colossal profits, and painted a verbal picture of utopian days wherein wealth would be equally distributed, no man living in a mansion, no man living in a slum. Then he proceeded to the Chinese, who threatened the livelihood of every white Australian worker; cheap labor was a vital part of the capitalist equation, witness the kidnapping of black Melanesians to work as virtual slaves on the Queensland sugar plantations. They were yet another reason why Australia had to be a white country, all other races excluded. For, said Bede, the human species was naturally exploitative, so the only way to prevent exploitation was to make opportunities to exploit nonexistent.

  The speech made Bede Evans Talgarth famous overnight in Kinross, and on the Monday he walked about surrounded by admirers. The Lithgow contingent begged him to speak in Lithgow the following Sunday, and even some of the Apocalypse gold miners patted him on the back. More, he admitted to himself ruefully, because they had enjoyed listening to a superb orator than because they intended any industrial action. That two-faced bastard Sir Alexander was also doing some speaking, but to small groups, and to the tune that he had always been a good employer, therefore they should believe him when he said he couldn’t afford to keep up production. Bede still had a lot of work to do in Kinross.