The Touch

  “Would you do me a favor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t tell anyone that I’m with you. I’d like to surprise them,” said Lee, trying to sound offhand.

  “It shall be so.”

  BUT THAT LED to complications. There were visits to be made in Sydney: to Anna, and to Nell. Would Nell keep the secret?

  “She’s living in Anna’s house these days,” said Alexander as they took a hackney to the Glebe. “After the boys finished their degrees and returned to Kinross, she couldn’t live alone in their digs, so when she suggested that I build her a little flat on to the back of Anna’s place, I was relieved. She has privacy, but she’s also there to make sure Anna is nursed properly.”

  “Nursed?” Lee asked, frowning.

  “You’ll see,” said Alexander cryptically. “Some things I didn’t tell you because they’re hard to describe.”

  Anna shocked him. The beautiful thirteen-year-old he had known in Kinross—she was just getting started with O’Donnell when he left—had become a slobbering, shambling, grossly fat young woman who didn’t recognize her father, let alone him. The grey-blue eyes wandered, and one thumb was raw and bleeding from being sucked.

  “We can’t break her of it, Sir Alexander,” Miss Harbottle said, “and I agree with Nell, we shouldn’t tie her arm down.”

  “Have you tried painting the thumb with bitter aloes?”

  “Yes, but she spits on it and rubs the bitter aloes off on her dress. There are less soluble compounds, but they’re quite poisonous. Nell thinks that she’ll eventually chew the thumb down to bone, at which point it will have to be amputated.”

  “And she’ll start on the other one,” said Alexander sadly.

  “I am afraid so.” Miss Harbottle cleared her throat. “She is also having fits, Sir Alexander. Grand mal. That is, they involve her whole body.”

  “Oh, my poor, poor Anna!” The eyes Alexander directed at Lee shone with tears. “It isn’t right, that someone so harmless must suffer all this.” He squared his shoulders. “However, you care for her wonderfully well, Miss Harbottle. She’s clean, dry and obviously contented. I assume that food is her great pleasure?”

  “Yes, she loves to eat. Nell and I agreed that she should be allowed to eat. To restrict her food would be as cruel as it is to restrict the food of a dumb animal.”

  “Is Nell in?”

  “Yes, Sir Alexander. She’s expecting you.”

  As they walked through the big house Lee noticed how well it was organized, and how many women there were to help nurse Anna. The atmosphere was cheerful, the premises spotlessly clean and well decorated—more these days, Lee thought, to keep the staff happy than the oblivious Anna. Though that’s not Alexander’s doing—it wouldn’t occur to him. Therefore it must be Nell’s.

  Her flat was accessible through a door painted yellow; it stood ajar, but Alexander called to warn her that he had arrived. She came out of an inner room at a sedate walk, her black hair screwed up into a tight bun, her spare figure clad in a plain olive-drab cotton dress that had no waist and finished inches short of her ankles. Her feet were shod in sensible brown boots tightly laced to above her ankles. A second shock for Lee: her likeness to Alexander was now striking, for the softness of her girlhood had passed from her face to leave it stern, unflinching and just a trifle mannish. Only the eyes were her own, grown bigger because she herself was thinner; they were like two high-powered blue rays that cut through anything in their path.

  At first she saw only Alexander, went to him to hug and kiss him unself-consciously. Oh, yes, they were close! Like twins. Grumble about her doing medicine though he did, Alexander was enslaved, putty in her hands.

  Then, withdrawing from her father’s embrace, she saw Lee, jumped a little, smiled. “Lee! Is it really you?” she asked, pecking him on one cheek. “No one said you were back.”

  “That’s because I don’t want anyone to know I’m back, Nell. Keep the secret for me, please.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Butterfly Wing had made a simple lunch: fresh bread, butter, jam, cold sliced beef, and Alexander’s favorite dessert, custard tarts topped with nutmeg. Nell let the men eat, then made a pot of tea herself and settled to talk.

  “How’s medicine?” Lee asked.

  “Everything that I had hoped.”

  “But difficult.”

  “Not for me, but then, I get along with my instructors and professors fairly well. It’s harder on the other women, who just don’t have my knack of dealing with men. The poor things can be reduced to tears, which men despise, and they know that they’re being deliberately marked down because they’re women. So they mostly have to repeat each year. Some are failed twice for the same year. Still, they battle on.”

  “Have you been failed, Nell?” Alexander asked.

  His own face looked scornful. “No one would dare! I’m like Grace Robinson, who graduated in 1893 without failing a single year. Though she should have been awarded honors, and wasn’t. You see, women’s schools don’t prepare them for chemistry and physics, nor even mathematically. So the poor souls really have to start from scratch, and the lecturers aren’t prepared to teach the basics. Whereas I’m a graduate engineer. That gives me a lot of clout with the faculty.” She looked sly. “Lecturers are very sensitive about being shown up, especially by a woman, so they tend to leave me alone.”

  “Do you get on with your fellow women?” Lee asked.

  “Better than I had expected to, actually. I coach them in the sciences and maths, but some of them never seem to catch on.”

  Alexander stirred his tea, tapped the spoon on the side of his cup, then put it in the saucer. “Anna. Tell me, Nell.”

  “The mental deterioration is accelerating rapidly, Dad. Well, you’ve seen that for yourself. Did Miss Harbottle tell you she’s having epileptic seizures?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s not long for this world, Dad.”

  “I feared you’d say that when Miss Harbottle didn’t talk of the years to come.”

  “We keep her warm and out of drafts, and try to make her do a little walking, but she’s increasingly reluctant to exercise. It may be that she’ll go into a status epilepticus—one fit after another until she dies of sheer exhaustion—but it’s more likely that she’ll catch a cold, it will go to her chest, and she’ll die of pneumonia. If one of the staff has a cold, she doesn’t come to work until the coughing and sneezing is over, but someone is bound to infect her before they even know they have a cold. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already. They are all very good to her, you know.”

  “Considering what thankless, unrewarding sort of work it is, I’m pleased to hear you say that.”

  “A woman with the temperament to nurse finds satisfaction in the most thankless work, Dad. We chose our staff well.”

  “Which would be the easier death?” Alexander asked abruptly. “Pneumonia or continuous fits?”

  “Continuous fits, in that consciousness is lost with the onset of the first one, and never regained. It looks frightful, but the patient doesn’t suffer. Pneumonia is far worse—a lot of pain and distress.”

  A silence fell; Alexander sipped steadily at his tea, Nell played with her cake fork, and Lee sat wishing that he was anywhere other than here.

  “Has your mother been visiting?” Alexander asked.

  “I’ve forbidden her to come anymore, Dad. It does no good, since Anna doesn’t recognize her either, and to watch her—oh, Dad, it’s like looking into the eyes of an animal that knows it’s dying. I can’t even begin to imagine her pain.”

  Lee reached for a custard tart—anything was better than having nothing to do, even chewing at sawdust. “Have you a boyfriend, Nell?” he asked lightly.

  She blinked, then looked grateful. “I’m too busy, I really am. Medicine doesn’t come as easily as engineering.”

  “So you’re going to be a maiden lady doctor.”

  “It looks tha
t way.” Nell sighed, then assumed a wistful expression that sat strangely on such a determined face. “Years ago I knew a chap I rather fancied, but I was too young and he was too honorable to take advantage of me. We went our ways.”

  “An engineer?” Lee asked.

  She burst out laughing. “I should say not!”

  “Then what was he, or is he?”

  “That,” said Nell, “I’d prefer to keep to myself.”

  IT WAS NOVEMBER, and a cicada year; even above the huffing locomotive and the clickety-clicking of the wheels it was easy to hear them shrilling deafeningly in the bush that came so close to the line. A hot summer for coast and inland alike, a vicious monsoon season in the north, that was what cicadas meant.

  Alexander was edgy during the trip from Sydney to Lithgow, only seemed to relax when their car was coupled to the Kinross train, back to running four times a week. What Lee couldn’t know was that Alexander sensed his reluctance to return, had prepared himself for a sudden announcement that Lee was sorry, but he’d changed his mind and was off back to Persia. So when they were heading for Kinross on a train that didn’t stop, Alexander felt better, more confident.

  He more than liked Lee; he loved him as the son he’d never had, Ruby’s child who was also a link to Sung. When he had dragged Lee to see Anna, he was hoping that a spark would kindle between Lee and Nell. To see that pair marry would put the finishing touch on his life. But no spark had passed between them, not even the vaguest kind of attraction. Brother and sister. And he simply couldn’t understand it, when Nell was so like him, and Lee’s mother loved him. Surely they were meant for each other! Then Nell started waffling about some fellow she had hankered after, and closed up like a clam, while Lee sat patently unaffected. The bastardy had long ceased to be an issue; Alexander had grown so far beyond that old hurt that he now regarded Lee’s birth as the ultimate irony. His heir would also be a bastard. Yet he wanted some of his blood in Lee’s issue, and that wasn’t going to happen. If Lee ever married at all. A nomad. Perhaps on his Chinese side he harkened back to some footloose Mongol only at ease roaming the steppes. Women literarlly swooned over him, trying to catch their breath inside tightly laced corsets, threw him lures of all sorts from utterly blatant to diabolically cunning, but Lee never took a scrap of notice. He always had a woman tucked away somewhere, be it in Persian Lar or an English town, but his attitude was pure Oriental: a Pekinese prince in need of a concubine—someone who played and sang, spoke only when spoken to, had studied the Kama Sutra backward, frontward and sideways, and probably jingled when she walked.

  What had Elizabeth called him? A golden serpent. At the time the metaphor had startled him, but he appreciated her reason for choosing it. The sort of wretched animal that crawled into a hole for four years and swallowed its own tail—how he had searched for Lee! Even Pinkerton’s hadn’t been able to find him, nor the Bank of England trace the tortuous route Lee’s hefty withdrawls took en route to his pocket. Dummy companies, dummy accounts, Swiss banks…Nothing was bought in his name, and who would have connected him to something called Peacock Oil? Everyone assumed it was the Shah.

  Sheer luck that when the golden serpent crawled out of his hole, he had been there to catch his tail. And hang on grimly. Entice the slippery creature back to his home. Now they were in the home stretch, and he was finally beginning to believe that he had his prodigal son firmly in his grasp. Time was fleeting; he himself was fifty-four, and Lee was thirty-three. Not that Alexander expected to die before he had logged up at least his threescore years and ten, but a seven-year interruption in the training program was a handicap.

  KINROSS HAD changed greatly during the seven years of his absence; Lee’s admiration began on the railway station platform, which was equipped with waiting rooms and lavatories in a smart yet cottagey building trimmed with cast-iron lace; baskets and tubs of flowering plants stood everywhere, with a garden bed beneath the two big signs that said KINROSS, one at either end of the platform. The original opera house had been converted into a theater, and a new, grander opera house reared on the opposite side of Kinross Square. Every street was tree lined and lit by electricity; both gas and electricity were laid on to every private dwelling. There was a telephone connection to Sydney and Bathurst now as well as the telegraph. Pride of ownership blazed everywhere.

  “It’s a model town,” said Lee, hefting his bags.

  “I hope so. The mine is back at full production, of course, which means the coal mine is too. I’m starting to come around to Nell’s opinion that we’d be better off with alternating electrical current, though I intend to wait until Lo Chee has a better design for a turbine generator—he’s brilliant,” said Alexander. He moved toward the cable car. “Ruby’s coming up for dinner, so I’ll leave you to have your surprise all to yourself. You can bring her up later.”

  I must remember, Lee said to himself as he entered the hotel, that she is now fifty-six years old. I can’t betray my grief, for there’s bound to be grief. Alexander didn’t say it, but I couldn’t help but gather that she’s aged more than he expected. It must be terrible for a beautiful woman to show her years, especially someone like Mum, who has always depended on her beauty. And hasn’t walled herself up in a blob of amber like Elizabeth.

  Yet she was just as he remembered: bold, voluptuous, oddly elegant. Yes, there were a few lines around her eyes and mouth, a little sagging under the chin, but she was still Ruby Costevan from the mass of red-gold hair to the wonderful green eyes. Expecting Alexander, she was clad in ruby-red satin with a thick choker of rubies around her neck to hide the loose skin, rubies on her wrists and in her ears.

  When she saw him her knees gave way and she sank, billowing, to the floor, laughing and crying. “Lee! Lee! My boy!”

  It seemed easier to get down to her level, so he knelt to take her into his arms, crush her close, kiss her face, her hair. I am home again. I am back inside the first arms I ever remember, her perfume coiling inside my head, the wonder who is my mother.

  “How much I love you!” he said. “How much!”

  “I’ll save all the stories for dinner time,” he said later, after Ruby had repaired the ravages of overwhelming joy and he himself had changed into evening dress.

  “Then we’ll have a drink together before we start—the car won’t be down for half an hour,” she said, moving to the row of decanters, a soda siphon and an ice bucket. “I have no idea what you drink these days.”

  “Kentucky bourbon if you have it. No soda, no water, no ice.”

  “I have it, but that’s a potent tipple on an empty belly.”

  “I’m used to it—it’s what my wildcatters drink when someone else is buying. Of course the country’s Mohammedan, but I import it quietly and make sure no one drinks outside the camp.”

  She handed him a glass and sat down with a sherry. “It gets mysteriouser and mysteriouser, Lee. What Mohammedan country?”

  “Persia—Iran, they call it. I’m in the petroleum business there in partnership with the Shah.”

  “Jesus! No wonder we couldn’t find hide nor hair of you.”

  They sipped without talking for a few minutes, then Lee said, “What’s happened to Alexander, Mum?”

  She didn’t attempt to prevaricate. “I know what you want to know.” She sighed, stretched her legs out and looked fixedly at the ruby buckles on her shoes. “A number of things…The quarrel with you, because he knew that he was in the wrong. After he came down off his high horse, he didn’t know how to mend the fences his high horse had kicked over. By the time he’d decided to swallow his pride and go to you, you had disappeared. He searched for you quite desperately. In the midst of that came the business with Anna, O’Donnell, the baby—and Jade. He saw her hanged, you know, and that took a terrible toll. Then Nell wouldn’t do what he wanted, and Anna had to be separated from her child. A different man would have hardened more, but not my beloved Alexander. All of it combined served to pull him up—not with a jerk, but gradually. And,
of course, he blames himself for marrying Elizabeth. She wasn’t much older than Anna—right at the age when impressions set in stone, and stone is what she’s become.”

  “But he’s had you, whereas Elizabeth has had no one. Can you wonder at her turning to stone?”

  “Oh, bugger that!” she snapped tartly, cut where she was vulnerable. His glass was empty, so she got up to replenish it. “I just keep hoping against hope that one day Elizabeth will be happy. If she met someone, she could divorce Alexander for his perpetual adultery with me.”

  “Elizabeth in a divorce court airing her dirty linen?”

  “You don’t think she would.”

  “I can see her running off into obscurity with a lover, but not standing in front of a judge and a room full of journalists.”

  “She won’t run off into obscurity with a lover, Lee, because she has Dolly to care for. Dolly’s forgotten all about Anna, she thinks Elizabeth is her mother and Alexander her father.”

  “Well, that alone would predicate against divorce, wouldn’t it? The whole Anna-and-the-unknown-man scandal would be dug up again, and Dolly’s what—six? Old enough to understand.”

  “Yes, you’re right. I should have thought of that. Fuck!” She underwent one of her lightning changes of mood. “And what about you?” she asked brightly. “Any wife on the horizon?”

  “No.” He glanced at the gold wrist-watch Alexander had given him in London and drained his glass. “It’s time we went, Mum.”

  “Does Elizabeth know you’re here?” Ruby asked, rising too.

  “No.”

  When they reached the cable car platform, Sung was waiting; Lee stopped suddenly, shocked. His father, now close to seventy, had transformed himself into a venerable Chinese Ancient of Days—the wispy beard straying over his chest, the inch-long fingernails, the skin like old, smooth yet sallow ivory, the eyes narrowed to slits in the midst of which two black beads slid in synchrony. This is Papa, yet I think of Alexander as my father. Oh, how far have we come on this incredible voyage, and whence will we sail when the wind next blows?