The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  Ruby was waiting for him as he entered the hotel, the worry she felt not written on her face, which smiled at him even as its eyes quizzed him.

  “Where have you been? People kept ringing up for you.”

  “I’ve been on the mountain looking at ventilation shafts.”

  “Is that important?”

  “Oh, Mum, and you a director of Apocalypse Enterprises! It always is, but Alexander’s planning a big blast where the old vein’s run out in number one tunnel—he says there is another vein twenty feet in, and you know his nose for gold.”

  “Huh! His nose for gold!” Ruby snorted. “He might have a Midas touch, but he never seems to remember that the original King Midas died of starvation because even his food turned to gold.” But that wasn’t what she was thinking. My son looks dreadful. The incubus of this affair is so tight around his neck that it’s strangling him. It’s time I went to see Elizabeth and wrung the truth out of her. “Dinner?” she asked.

  “Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”

  No, what you’re hungering for is another man’s meat. But is it still a going thing? Is that why you’re so tormented, my jade kitten? She can’t run the risk of a pregnancy, so probably what you’re going through is hunger pure and simple. My poor Lee.

  Lee went up the stairs to his own room. It wasn’t very large because he wasn’t a personal possessions kind of man—the clothes he had to have for all occasions, a few hundred treasured books, little else that mattered. Photographs of Alexander, Ruby, Sung. None of Elizabeth.

  For a while he sat in his armchair and looked into nothing, then got up and went to the phone.

  “Lee here, Aggie. Sir Alexander, please.” No need to tell Aggie whereabouts; she knew exactly where he was at all times, just as she knew that X was eating dinner at Y’s house, that Z was on the sports oval training his new dog, that M was in Dubbo visiting his mum, and R stuck on the lavatory with diarrhea. Aggie was the spider at the center of the Kinross telephonic web.

  “Alexander, when do you have a moment? I need to speak with you privately as soon as possible.”

  “Privately as in privately?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Tomorrow morning at the poppet heads. Eleven?”

  “I’ll see you there and then.”

  The die was cast. Lee went back to the armchair and wept his goodbyes. Not to Elizabeth yet—Alexander might consent to divorce her, even give her Dolly. No, Lee wept for Alexander. After tomorrow morning, they would never meet again. The break would be cruelly complete, for neither man believed in half measures. And how hard that would make things for his mother! Somehow he had to fix it so that she at least didn’t suffer from the repercussions.

  ALEXANDER TOOK the cable car to the poppet heads, Lee walked the snake path. The day, April 24, was one of those mid-autumn idylls that sometimes follow a summer that had lasted too long and been too harsh; a sweet-smelling breeze off the freshly washed and pungent bush, a gentler sun, a few puffy clouds wandering through the sky as if lost.

  At this hour the poppet heads were almost deserted. Alexander was standing beside a massive air compressor powered by a steam engine, which was why it couldn’t be put inside the mine—too much smoke, too much poisonous gas. When he had switched from hand drills to pneumatic percussion drills for boring the charge holes and from picks to pneumatic percussion hammers for breaking down the rock face, he had had to devise a way to supply compressed air to these air-powered machines, located as far away from the compressor as a quarter or a third of a mile. A large steel pipe inside a slightly bigger hole pushed the air down to a cylindrical steel tank six feet in diameter and twelve feet long that sat on the gallery floor; from this, sections of steel pipe led to the drills and hammers.

  Drilling and blasting didn’t happen every day by any means, however, nor was it ever done in more than one tunnel at a time. Alexander’s inclination lay to electrically powering the air compressor, but that was for a future when electric motors were adequate. For the moment, steam was the only way to go, so the compressor was one of, if not the largest, in the world.

  “Your private talk can wait” was Alexander’s greeting. “I want to go into number one tunnel for another look.”

  They took a cage and traveled down 150 feet to the vast main gallery, brilliantly lit by electricity; men appeared regularly, pushing small ore-laden skips on rails to the open side of the gallery, where there was a fifty-foot drop down to the big skips in the main adit. A small skip on reaching the edge was tilted by a lever and cascaded its contents into a big skip below. An engine outside the adit hauled the big skips out by a steel cable to where they could be hitched to a locomotive and towed off to the sorting and crushing sheds. Dust hung in the air, which otherwise was fresh, fed in and sucked out by electric fans. All around the blind three-quarters of the gallery walls the tunnels dived into the mountain, some traveling straight, some upward, some downward, the newer ones branching many times.

  Together they walked into number one tunnel, the oldest and most exploited, their way lit by electricity; as mining in it had ceased, they met no one. Typical Alexander, it was more than adequately shored up by massive beams, though Lee knew that the granite in this part of the mountain didn’t have enough greywacke to make a collapse likely.

  It was a thousand-foot walk, punctuated by the wet, sloshing suck of their boots and the slow, steady dripping of water the crushing pressure of the mountain squeezed out. In this climate, no danger of the water’s turning to ice and acting as a wedge to split the layers apart. That could only happen when blasting, the most delicate and demanding of all mining operations—which was why, if the blast were a big or unusual one, Alexander preferred to do it himself.

  Finally they reached the blind end of number one tunnel, to find some preparations already assembled for the blasting: a spool of insulated wire, an Ingersoll pneumatic drill perched on a tripod, the last section of steel pipe leading from the cylinder of compressed air in the gallery, a box of tools. One end of a heavy rubber hose was clamped by steel cuffs on to the steel pipe, the other on to the drill. Dynamite and detonators would not appear until it was time to set the charges, and then in proper custody. The magazine wherein the explosives were kept was a concrete bunker with only four keys: one each for Alexander, Lee, Summers and Prentice, the blasting supervisor.

  “This blast is a bit of an experiment,” Alexander said after both of them had run their hands down the relatively smooth rock face as sensitively as if they caressed a woman’s skin. The lights blazed on it, throwing every fault line into prominence. “There’s no more gold for at least twenty feet, so I want to bring down more rock than usual. Start at the middle on that fault there, then explode the rest of the charges concentrically. Each group wired in series. I’ll drill the holes myself.”

  Lee listened in some bewilderment; no one knew this art as Alexander did, but he wasn’t being very forthcoming.

  “How much rock do you intend to bring down?” Lee asked, a frisson of fear streaking down his spine.

  “Quite a few tons.”

  “If you were anyone else, I’d forbid it, but I can’t very well do that to the master.”

  “You certainly can’t.”

  “But you are sure? You haven’t discussed it with me.”

  “This is dear old number one. She likes me, the bitch.”

  They turned to plod back to the gallery.

  “When do you plan to blast?”

  “Tomorrow, if it’s as nice a day as today—no winds to fuck up the ventilator shafts.” He gestured at a cage. “Up or down?”

  “Up.”

  There could be no more procrastination. Lee gulped, trying to find enough moisture in his mouth to talk. A thousand recitations through the night, choosing or discarding the words that he must use. Rehearsing the most important speech of his life.

  “Now what’s this private matter?” Alexander asked briskly.

  The steam engine powering the compresso
r was big enough to drive a freight locomotive, so it made a lot of noise as it forced the compressor to supply air to the gallery cylinder and its lines. Off to the far side the poppet heads engine chugged more gently, a stoker leaning on his grimy shovel, another man checking dials.

  “Over here,” said Lee, leading Alexander to a spot on the parapet of the limestone shelf away from the engines, poppet heads and personnel on duty. There was nowhere to sit, so he hunkered down with his buttocks resting on his heels, Alexander following suit.

  A leaf lay on the ground; Lee picked it up as if examining it, began to pick its dry fragility to pieces. And in the end, of course, every rehearsed word vanished from his mind. All he could do was get it out.

  “I have loved you better than my father, Alexander, but I’ve betrayed you,” he said, shredding the leaf. “Not a plotted and planned betrayal, but a betrayal all the same. I can’t bear to live with a lie. You have to know.”

  “Know what?” Alexander asked, as calmly as if what Lee had to tell him would turn out to be a minor peculation, a tiny fraud.

  The leaf was gone; Lee lifted his eyes, swimming with tears, to rest them on Alexander’s face, his lips moving soundlessly as he groped for words. “I’m in love with Elizabeth, and when I found her eight days ago, I—I betrayed you.”

  Some unnamable emotion flared briefly in the black eyes, which then went dull, opaque. Alexander’s face didn’t change. Nor did he say anything for what seemed an age, just squatted in the laid dust with his wrists propped on his knees, his hands as loose and relaxed as they had been before Lee spoke.

  “I thank you for your honesty,” he said at last.

  That immense dignity which had so drawn Alexander to a child eight years old was still very much at Lee’s core, and it kept him from pouring out excuses, self-exculpatory explanations, all the protestations of virtual innocence that a lesser man would have tripped over himself to make. If a lesser man could have screwed up the courage to confess to someone like Alexander.

  “Easier to tell you than to live a lie,” Lee said. “I am to blame, not Elizabeth. When I found her she wasn’t herself, she was—was terribly distressed. But it happened, and it happened again yesterday. Elizabeth believes that she loves me.”

  “Why shouldn’t she?” Alexander asked. “She’s chosen you.”

  “It can’t be, I know that. So I should have broken it off yesterday. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.”

  “Does she know that you’re telling me this, Lee?”

  “No.”

  “Does your mother? Is she in on this too?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s our secret.”

  “Yes.”

  “Poor Elizabeth,” said Alexander on a sigh. “How long have you loved her?”

  “Since I was seventeen.”

  “Which is why you dreaded coming home to Kinross. Why you once disappeared off the map.”

  “Yes. Though you must understand that I never expected or intended to do anything about it. I have always loved you too much to hurt you, but it happened when I had no defenses and she had no defenses. She was in no condition to resist. I caught her with her guard down.”

  “That’s a victory,” said Alexander dryly. “I’ve never caught her with her guard down. If it had been me to find her instead of you, her guard would have stayed up. That’s the story of Elizabeth and me. I live with someone bled of all vitality. A ghost. I’m just so pleased that the fire does burn.”

  He was taking it like the strong, honorable, unflinching man he was, Lee told himself. Which only made Lee’s suffering worse. The hideous hurt had to be there, but Alexander wasn’t about to show it.

  “Anyway,” said Lee, “I have put her at great risk. She shouldn’t have children, I know that, yet I couldn’t help myself. Yesterday I went to talk to her, just talk to her, but it didn’t work out that way. And when I spoke of the danger, she laughed!”

  “Laughed?”

  “Yes. She refuses to believe there’s any danger.”

  “There probably isn’t.” Alexander got up, extended a hand to Lee. “Come, we’ll walk a bit. I want to go up to the spot that lies over the end of number one tunnel. I like it there, my soul or spirit or whatever you want to call it communes with my gold mountain there.”

  To the engine hands they looked what they were, the mine’s owners having some deep discussion about its future; of great interest to all employees.

  “I couldn’t live a lie,” Lee said again when they reached the spot and perched on a couple of rocks.

  “You’re too honorable, my boy, that’s your trouble. But she was happy to live a lie, wasn’t she?”

  “Not because she’s naturally deceitful, honestly,” said Lee, laboring. “I think it’s how she’s organized herself over the years. And she so dreads your finding out. Oh, she’s aware of your kindness, your respect for her. Yet she’s afraid of you, and that is a complete mystery to me.”

  “Not to me,” said Alexander, stroking the surface of his rock. “I’m an incarnation of Satan.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Elizabeth is the victim of two twisted, evil old men. They are both dead, but their influence will always be with her. I’ve been a way station for her, someone who sired her children, someone who houses her and shares her food. And there’s your mother, whom I’ll love until the day I die. Which Elizabeth well knows. My dear Lee, we can’t force other people to be or do what we want, though it’s taken me fifty-five years to find that out. For many reasons I don’t intend to go into, Elizabeth can’t bear me. A physical thing too. If I touch her, I can see her flesh crawl. I ceased to love her years ago,” he lied—spare Lee everything you can, Alexander—“if I ever did love her. I used to think I did in the beginning, but perhaps I was simply in love with the idea of what we might have been to each other if she had loved me. Is her love for you very recent?”

  “She says not,” Lee answered, hating this detached, quite passionless interview for its very detachment. He wanted—he needed!—to be roared at, punched, kicked. Anything but this!

  “Then both of you have suffered, yet you’ve remained loyal. That counts for much with me.”

  “I know today’s an end, Alexander. I’m prepared for that.”

  “Your bags are packed, you mean.”

  “Metaphorically, yes.”

  “And what of Elizabeth? Are you going to sentence her to yet more years of living with a man she can’t bear?”

  “That depends on you. She won’t go without Dolly, and Dolly is your only grandchild. A court would award her to you—if Elizabeth could face a court branded an adultress.”

  “Adultery is the only suitable ground for divorce. Cruelty is also a ground, but it doesn’t apply, and there’s many a judge beats his wife. However, she could divorce me for adultery with Ruby.”

  “And wouldn’t that look wonderful? The divorced wife of the famous man then marries her former husband’s mistress’s son. A half-caste Chinese. The press would have a field day.”

  “If she loves you enough, she’ll do it.”

  “She does love me enough. But the scandal would follow us for years unless we moved abroad. Perhaps that’s the answer.”

  “Yet I need you here, Lee, not abroad.”

  “Then there is no answer!” Lee cried wretchedly.

  Alexander changed tack. “Are you positive that she doesn’t know you intended to see me?”

  “Yes, absolutely positive. She’s walled herself up in a new secret compartment, and she’s happy there.”

  “And you’re just as positive that Ruby doesn’t know?”

  “I am. It’s always been my habit to talk to her about anything, including my love for Elizabeth. A more worldly woman than my mother doesn’t exist. But I haven’t told her about this new development. She can keep a secret as well as Elizabeth, but I—I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her.”

  Alexander lifted his head to look straight into Lee’s eyes. “
I need time to think,” he said. “Give me your word that you’ll not mention this to anyone, even Ruby or Elizabeth.”

  Lee got up from his rock and held out his hand. “Word of honor, Alexander.”

  “Then that’s set in stone. Tomorrow, after the blast, I’ll give you my answer. Will you be there?”

  “If you want me there.”

  “I do, I do. Summers has ten thumbs and Prentice puts me off. He’s fine if he’s doing the blasting, but when I do it he hops up and down like a jumping bean.”

  “I am aware of all that,” Lee said gently.

  “I’m aware you’re aware. It’s just that I’m a bit knocked off center by your news. I thank you for your candor, Lee—very much. I knew I wasn’t mistaken in you, and I want to apologize to you for the way I treated you back in 1890. I’d grown too big for my boots.” He stamped the ground, which sounded a little hollow. “Now I wear the right-sized boots again. No man could ask for a loyaler or more capable second-in-command, and you’ll make a fine commander-in-chief one day.” He cleared his throat, looked wry. “But I’m drifting off the point, which is that I have to work out a way to keep you yet free Elizabeth.”

  “I think that’s impossible, Alexander.”

  “Nothing is impossible. Eight tomorrow morning in the main gallery. I’ll probably still be in number one tunnel, but don’t go inside. Powder monkey’s orders.”

  And he swung in the direction of the cable car, while Lee headed for the snake path.