The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  Alexander studied his face, sighed. “It’s a pickle, isn’t it? I take it that no other evidence has come to light?”

  “None, sir. He must have been very careful.”

  “Can we get her off, do you think?”

  “Not a hope, sir, even with you on her side.”

  “So it’s a matter of putting up a good show for the sake of my family and preparing them for the worst.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If only she’d reported her suspicions to you or Ruby!”

  “Perhaps,” said Summers diffidently, “she knew even then that it would boil down to his word against Anna’s, and decided it was better not to involve Anna.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure of that. Poor, poor Jade! I owe her a great debt.”

  “I don’t think that’s ever crossed Jade’s mind. She did it for Anna, only for Anna.”

  “Who have Lime and Milliken recommended?”

  “Sir Eustace Hythe-Bottomley, sir. An elderly chap, but a Queen’s Counsel and the most eminent criminal barrister in—well, all of Australia wouldn’t be far from the mark,” said Summers.

  BEFORE HE LEFT Sydney for Kinross, Alexander had done what he could. In conjunction with Sir Eustace (who could foresee no other decision than the death penalty unless the accused were to recant), he had used his connections to ensure that the presiding judge would be a reasonable sort, and that the sentencing hearing would be held in camera in Bathurst rather than in Sydney. And as quickly as possible. Sir Eustace traveled in Alexander’s private car as far as Lithgow, where it was detached to be coupled to the Kinross train, then went on alone to Bathurst in a first-class compartment with his numerous staff still jammed into one second-class compartment, there to mull over the Laws of England as they applied to the colonies.

  His interview with Jade in the Bathurst Gaol was a futile business. Coax, cajole and sing like a bird though he did, she remained obdurate: she would not recant, she was proud of what she had done, her baby Anna was avenged.

  WHEN ALEXANDER arrived at Kinross station, only Ruby was on the platform to welcome him.

  The sight of her was a shock—do I look as suddenly old as she does? Her hair is still that unique color, but she’s put on so much weight that her eyes are disappearing into a pudding of flesh, her waist is nonexistent and her hands like podgy little starfish. But he kissed her, linked his arm through hers and walked with her through the waiting room.

  “Your place or mine?” he asked outside.

  “Mine for the moment,” she said. “There are things we have to talk about that you won’t be able to talk about with either Elizabeth or Nell.”

  The town, he was relieved to see, looked exactly as it ought despite the halving of its work force. Its streets were clean and tidy, its buildings well kept, Kinross Square’s flower beds awash with dahlias, marigolds, chrysanthemums, all the proper blooms of late summer. A riot of yellow, orange, red, cream. Good! Sung Po’s gardeners had done what he ordered, excavated an artificial bank to insert a gigantic mechanism that drove the ten-foot hands of a flowering clock through the twelve hours of each half day, brightly colored leaves and tiny blossoms picking out the Roman numerals, the disc of the clock face, the ponderous hands. What’s more, the thing was correct: half past four in the afternoon. And the bandstand was freshly painted—had O’Donnell done it, or that sot Scripps? The trees that lined the streets had grown, crepe myrtles in vivid bloom, melaleucas with bark like multiple layers of peeling paint—oh, come, Sir Alexander, think of metaphors that have nothing to do with paint!

  How he missed the place that bore his name, yet how he longed to be free of it the moment he was in it! Why wouldn’t people do as they were supposed to do, live their lives with logic, reason, common sense? Why did they fly around like thistledown in the eddies and surges of a hot summer’s day? Why couldn’t husbands love wives and wives love husbands and children love everyone? Why did the differences between people always outweigh the things they shared as one? Why must bodies grow older than the minds that fuel them? Why am I so surrounded, yet so alone? Why does the fire burn as brightly yet the flames grow ever dimmer?

  “I’m fat,” she said, sinking on to a sofa in her boudoir and fanning herself with an accordioned affair the color of bile.

  “You are,” he said, sitting opposite.

  “Does it irk you, Alexander?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then just as well that this business is proving extremely good for my figure.”

  “We had a monster in our midst.”

  “A very cunning monster who half the town is convinced was no monster, but a harmless odd-job man.”

  “The idol of fools like Theodora Jenkins.”

  “Of course. He had her measure, got a kick out of charming her into adoring him—didn’t desire elderly virgins or widows, but probably masturbated on making them wet their drawers.”

  “How is Elizabeth? Nell?”

  “Elizabeth’s much as always. Nell is dying to see her daddy.”

  “Anna?”

  “Due in about a month.”

  “At least we know the pedigree of the child.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Summers is positive that the man was Sam O’Donnell. He was there when Anna thought she recognized the dog, and I think he saw more of Anna’s face than Jade did.”

  “Bully for Summers!”

  “More importantly, Ruby, how do I tell Elizabeth that Jade will hang?”

  Her face changed, squeezed itself up into grosser folds. “Oh, Alexander, don’t say that!”

  “It has to be said.”

  “But—but—how can you be so sure?”

  His fingers groped in a pocket, fished out a cheroot. “Are you not smoking these days?”

  “Yes, give me one! But how can you be so sure?”

  “Because Jade is a political pawn. Both the Free Traders and the Protectionists—not to mention the trade unionists, who are now beginning to call themselves Labor—need to make the people see that they’re opposed to the Chinese, that they’ll obey the people when the time is right and get rid of the Chinese. How better to soothe feelings now than by hanging one poor little half-Chinese girl, Australian born though she may be, for what is seen as an unspeakable crime? A crime against men, Ruby. Castration. Amputation of manhood! The man she did that to was white, and of evidence against him there is none beyond my mental daughter’s recognition of his dog. Can Anna be called into a court and made to testify, even if the court is a closed one and there is no jury? Of course not! The judge may call for any testimony he likes before passing sentence, but to call Anna would be seen as a travesty.”

  Her tears seemed to ooze out of unbaked dough; he felt ill, couldn’t think of her with desire. Don’t leave me with no one! he cried silently, but to whom he cried it, he didn’t know.

  “Go, Alexander,” said Ruby, stubbing out her cheroot. “Just go, please. She’s Sam Wong’s eldest daughter, and I love her.”

  He went straight to the cable car and took it up to the top of the mountain, facing, as all the seats did, Kinross below. A lake of shadows blue and lilac and pearl, the smoke of its chimneys adding a layer of the somber North Sea grey they were painting the new iron warships that, it seemed in another existence, had so fascinated him scant months ago.

  Elizabeth was sitting in his library, something new; he did not remember her ever choosing it. How old was she now? Thirty-three in September. His own forty-eighth birthday was only a few weeks away. Now they really had been married for more than half of her life. An eternity, she had called it. And so it was, if eternity were flexible, and who was to say that it was not? What was the difference between the span of eternity and how many angels could dance on the head of a pin? A philosophers’ squabble.

  Elizabeth was thinking that Alexander improved with the years, and wondering why iron-grey hair streaked with white was so very attractive on a man, yet so ugly on a woman. His trim, slender body hadn’
t sagged or shrunk, and he moved with the graceful ease of a youth. Of Lee. The lines graven on his face were not evidence of age but of experience; she had a sudden wish to urge him to have a great sculptor craft a bust of him in—bronze? No. In marble? No. In granite. That was the stone for Alexander.

  His black eyes held a new expression, of weariness, sadness, a grim determination fueled more by disappointment than by success. This won’t break him because nothing can. He will weather every tempest his life throws at him because his core is granite.

  “How are you?” he asked, kissing her cheek.

  “Well,” she answered, the pain of this peck driving through her like a javelin.

  “Yes, you do look well, all considered.”

  “Dinner is some way off, I’m afraid. I wasn’t sure when you would arrive, so Chang has planned Chinese food he can cook in a few minutes.” She rose to her feet. “A sherry? A whisky?”

  “Sherry, please.”

  She poured two full-sized wineglasses almost to the brim, carried one to him, took one back to her chair with her. “I’ve never understood why sherry is served in such small glasses, have you?” she asked, sipping. “One is forever jumping up and down to replenish it. This way, one doesn’t have to jump up and down.”

  “A brilliant innovation, Elizabeth. I thoroughly approve.”

  He studied her over the brim of his glass, savoring the keen aroma of the amontillado before taking some into his mouth and letting it rest upon his tongue. Feeling the anticipation of its course down his gullet like a caressing ember. Her beauty grew; each time he saw her again it was with amazement at some new and perfect addition to her beauty, from a change in the way she held her head to a tiny crease at each corner of her mouth. Her figure in the smoky mauve dress was shading to voluptuousness without a trace of fat, and the hands that bore his rings looked like sea flowers, bending, swaying, borne by the currents of her mind.

  Her mind he didn’t know. She would never admit him to it. An enigma, that was Elizabeth. The mouse had become a quiet lion, but not remained that. What was she now? He had no idea.

  “Do you wish to discuss Jade with me?” he asked, finally letting the sherry slide down his throat.

  “I imagine that you’ve discussed it with half the world, so I’d rather let it lie, if you don’t mind. We both know what must happen, and words once said can never be snatched back, can they? They are all there somewhere, ringing like bells.” A glitter of tears filmed her eyes. “It is unbearable, that’s all.” Then the tears were gone; she smiled at him. “Nell will be here in a minute. Do compliment her on her appearance, Alexander. She’s so desperate to please you.”

  As if on some director’s cue, Nell came in.

  What Alexander saw was himself in a feminine mold. Not a new experience, yet utterly novel. During the six months of his absence Nell had grown up, passed from girl to woman. His dark hair was piled up on top of her head, his wide but thin-lipped mouth looked as sensuous as determined, tinted with some pinkish substance she had also smeared faintly along her cheekbones. His long and slightly cavernous face was alluring on her, yet told the world that she wasn’t to be trifled with. Imperious. Her skin was clear and healthily tanned as far as the bottom of her neck, ivory below it. Like her mother, she had abandoned the bustle in favor of a skirt that was fuller at the back than the front, of peau-de-soie silk the color of storm clouds. Not a busty, strapping young woman of Ruby’s ilk, nor perfectly proportioned like her mother, but at ease with her rounded spareness. And she did have Elizabeth’s long, swanlike neck.

  Alexander put the glass down, walked to her quickly, held her first at arm’s length, smiling, then folded her against him. Over his shoulder Elizabeth could see her face, its chin tucked into his coat, its thick-lashed eyes closed. A portrait of bliss.

  “You look superb, Nell,” he said, kissing her tenderly on the lips, then led her to a chair near his own. “Some sherry for my grown woman?” he asked.

  “Yes, please, Daddy. I’ve turned fifteen, and Mum says I should learn to drink a little wine.” Her eyes sparkled at her father. “The trick is never to drink more than a little.”

  “Which is why you’re getting sherry in a sherry glass.” He lifted his own glass in a toast, so did Elizabeth. “Here’s to our beautiful daughter Eleanor. May she always prosper.”

  “May she always prosper,” Elizabeth echoed.

  Always sensitive to atmosphere, Nell made no mention of Jade or their troubles. Instead she concentrated upon regaling her father with tales of the job Ruby had given her, able to poke fun at herself, eager to tell him of this blunder, that mistake, what a pleasure it was to work with men once they stopped thinking of her as a woman.

  “That happens in an emergency,” she said, “when the only one who sees the solution is the trusty Nell Kinross.”

  From this she passed to an animated discussion with Alexander that embraced the technical difficulties they were experiencing in the cyanide refinery, then to a hot argument about the respective merits of direct and alternating electrical current. Exponents of the latter were newer, younger men; Alexander thought alternating current overrated and wasteful.

  “Daddy, Ferranti has proved that an alternating current can work harder! Power bigger things than telephones and light bulbs! Electric motors are poor things, but I swear that soon, using alternating current, there will be electric motors powerful enough to run our cable car!” Nell said, face alight.

  “But you can’t store it in batteries, my girl, and you have to store it. Alternators mean running the dynamos all the time, which is shockingly wasteful. Without storage batteries, the whole production of current ceases the moment a dynamo breaks down, and they’re notorious for that.”

  “One of the reasons for that, Daddy, is that the idiots wire the alternators in series when it’s obvious they should be wired in parallel. Wait and see, Daddy! One day industry will need the kind of high voltages and transformers only alternating current can supply.”

  The good-natured argument raged on while Elizabeth sat listening to this truly extraordinary young woman whose grasp of mathematics far exceeded her father’s, and whose knowledge of mechanics was phenomenal. At least in Nell, Alexander had a kindred spirit; she had the key to unlock his essence. Granite and granite. Later, Elizabeth mused, their battles will be titanic. All Nell needs is time.

  Pleading his late arrival as a valid excuse, Alexander put off seeing Anna until the next morning.

  “Anna’s not happy,” Elizabeth explained as she walked with him to the nursery. “She wants Jade, and of course we can’t make her understand why she can’t have Jade.”

  The sight of his younger daughter shocked him. The beauty, which he had forgotten, the sheer normality of her face, which his imagination had transformed into something more stigmatic, and the swollen belly bulging under a loose robe.

  But at least she recognized him, said “Dadda!” several times, then began to howl for Jade. When Butterfly Wing tried to soothe her, she was pushed away rudely. As the howls and wails increased Alexander walked out, unable to bear the overwhelming smell of a gravid woman who took no care of herself nor, in her present mood, would let anyone else care for her.

  “What a business,” he said in the hall.

  “Yes.”

  “When is young Wyler coming up?”

  “In three weeks. Sir Edward is looking after his practice in Sydney.”

  “Is he bringing a midwife?”

  “No, he says Minnie Collins will do very well.”

  “I understand that Anna won’t let Nell see her.”

  Elizabeth gave a deep sigh. “That is so.”

  ANNA WENT into labor two days after Dr. Simon Wyler arrived toward the end of April, screaming her way through every cycle of pain, fighting and thrashing around so strongly that the obstetrician was obliged to tie her down. Neither he nor Minnie Collins could get it into poor Anna’s head that she must co-operate, bear down, follow orders. All Anna knew
was that she suffered agonies entirely alien to her, and protested against them shrilly, wildly, incessantly.

  When her labor entered its last stage Dr. Wyler resorted to chloroform, and twenty minutes later withdrew a big, strong baby girl from the birth canal. Her color was pink and healthy, her lungs in excellent condition. Elizabeth, in attendance, could not help but smile down at this new human being, so unwanted and, until now, so unwelcome. But the dear wee scrap couldn’t help her parentage, nor should she be punished for it.

  Informed of the successful outcome of Anna’s travail, her father simply grunted.

  “A name?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Call it whatever you want,” Alexander answered curtly.

  Elizabeth decided on Mary-Isabelle with a hyphen, a name that lasted only as long as Anna lay half conscious and exhausted. Which wasn’t for more than six hours; no matter how inadequate her mental equipment, Anna was physically sturdy and in perfect health. Worst factor of all, her milk was coming in copiously.

  “Give her the baby to nurse,” said Dr. Wyler to Minnie.

  “She won’t know what to do!” said Minnie with a gasp.

  “We can but try, Minnie. Do it.”

  Drawing the swaddlings back, Minnie handed the bundle to Anna, lying propped up in her bed. Looking amazed, Anna stared down into the tiny, working face, then gave a huge smile.

  “Dolly!” she cried. “Dolly!”

  “Your very own dolly, Anna,” said Dr. Wyler, blinking away tears. “Put Dolly to the breast, Minnie.”

  Minnie loosened the neck of Anna’s nightgown to expose one breast, pushed Anna’s arms upward, and guided the baby and Anna toward each other. When the baby’s mouth groped for and found the nipple, began to nurse, Anna’s face underwent a transformation.

  “Dolly!” she cried. “Dolly! My Dolly! Lovely!”

  It was the first time she had spoken an abstraction.

  The watching Elizabeth and Butterfly Wing gazed at each other, heedless that they wept. Anna would forget Jade now; Anna had her very own dolly, and the bond was made.