The Touch (31 page)
Perhaps because these musings were so painful, Ruby switched her attention to Kinross. How it had changed! The ugliness had gone, replaced by macadamized roads, curbing and guttering, tree-lined streets, a few fine brick buildings including the Kinross Hotel and St. Andrew’s church. On one side of Kinross Square, now green and gardened, a new structure was rising: Alexander’s precious theater and opera house. Why should Gulgong have the only opera house, why should Bathurst have three theaters and Kinross none? All the houses were wooden, the last wattle-and-daub effort torn down when the school was moved to a much larger, more imposing brick home. Even the hospital was respectable. And the river flowed between concrete embankments equipped with park benches, trees and ornamental gas lamps, though its water, alas, was as dirty as ever.
For between the town and the base of the mountain lay an industry, with rail tracks, machines, engines, the refinery plant, dozens of corrugated iron sheds and belching chimneys. The gold continued to come out in the same quantity, but its attendant structures had been joined by a gasworks, a dynamo house, and the refrigeration unit. Kinross now shipped in fresh milk and meat from Bathurst, as well as fish and fruit from Sydney.
What would this colony have done without people like Alexander and Sam Mort the freezer king? In England they would probably have moldered, but here in New South Wales they have put their hands on mighty undertakings and prospered. I wonder what my convict grandfather Richard Morgan and my convict mother would say could they only see what has become of the place they were sent to as a punishment? And look at me, Ruby Costevan: once an old man’s darling; then a madam; now a company director. Men cannot help it. They put their hands on things and change them forever. Especially Alexander Kinross and Samuel Mort. So thought Ruby, going home to her posh hotel.
TIME REELED on, its public facets very discouraging due to the flaws in public men. The Irish-ancestry part of Kinross’s population seethed with indignation when Premier Sir Henry Parkes, speaking in the parliament, informed its members that Irish immigration must be held down in order to make sure that the proper British feel of the colony be preserved, together with the dominance of Protestant religions. It was his wish, he said, to ensure the teaching and influence of the Protestant ethic, therefore no favors could be extended to the Irish and Catholicism that would alter the status quo, already too Irish and Catholic. A stupid statement that only exacerbated the widening rift between the Irish Catholics and their Protestant cousins from other parts of the British Isles; it also widened the rift between the working class and the classes above them, as Irishness and Catholicism were at their most numerous among the working class. There were also mutterings about the “Mongol and Tartar hordes,” who weren’t even Christians of any kind. But when the bigotry and intolerance stemmed from persons as exalted as state premiers, it simply indicated just how widespread these retarding sentiments were, and how indifferent public men were to uniting rather than dividing people.
In January of 1881, an intercolonial conference had met in Sydney to discuss restricting Chinese immigration and submitted a paper to the British Government complaining that the Australian colonies should not have to adhere to the British policy toward China, which was conciliatory. It also protested against the Government of Western Australia’s decision to assist Chinese immigrants willing to work as farm laborers or domestic servants.
Sung joined with several other prominent Chinese businessmen to submit the Chinese side of the question, and drew the colonial conference’s attention to the fact that it was foolish to antagonize a country of so many millions in such close proximity to a vast and largely unpopulated land:
“…if you substitute arbitrary violence, hatred and jealousy for justice, legality and right, it may be that you will succeed in carrying your point; it may be that a great wrong will be accomplished by the exercise of sheer force, and the weight of superior numbers: but your reputation among the nations of the earth will be irretrievably injured and debased, and the flag of which you are so justly proud will no longer be the standard of freedom and the hope of the oppressed, but will be associated with deeds of falsehood and treachery.”
In fact, this new decade that Alexander had had such hopes for had commenced in a mood of bitterness and resentment between many different groups in the Australian community. Women began to protest that they were unfairly treated when it came to education, so tellingly that Sydney University decided to open all its faculties to women students—with the exception of Medicine, of course; the very thought of a female medically qualified to inspect, handle and probe the penis and scrotum was horrific.
Because most Kinrossians read the newspapers (joined now by the Daily Telegraph and a weekly magazine of comment, the Bulletin) all these events and opinions were assimilated and discussed, but as far as Ruby and the town’s publicans were concerned, those wretched wowsers were gaining too much power in the parliament; legislation was passed forcing hotels and bars to close at 11 P.M. from Monday to Saturday, and all day on Sunday. Like many of her confederates state-wide, Ruby informed the Liquor Commission that, as liquor licenses under the old law were valid until June of 1882, the old drinking hours would prevail until June of 1882. So there.
FOR ELIZABETH, time was mostly a matter of birthdays. Nell turned six on New Year’s Day of 1882, and Anna turned five on April 6. It was like being in the middle of some extraordinary play dreamed up by the irreverent and earthy eighteenth-century comic theater, only it wasn’t funny: Nell had acquired a polysyllabic vocabulary and could already make sense of trigonometry and algebra, whereas Anna had not yet learned to walk and still said “Mum,” “Jade,” “Nell” and “dolly.” However, Anna was saving up a surprise; on her fifth birthday she crawled across the nursery floor, laughing and squealing, to Jade, coaxing her.
Elizabeth did her duty unflaggingly, but found it very hard to like that duty. Jade obviously didn’t mind in the least, so Elizabeth felt that something must be wrong with her, the child’s mother. Of course she knew that Anna was the spike that nailed her forever to life as Alexander Kinross’s wife. It had occurred to her during those interminable weeks in bed before Anna’s birth that if she saved the very generous allowance Alexander gave her, one day she would be able to leave him, disappear back to Scotland and live there in a cottage as a respectable maiden lady. Her children, she had thought, would survive very well without her; Nell already did. But then she looked at Anna properly and saw the shape of her fate. How could she leave this poor, helpless little creature who was doomed to be a lifelong burden? She could not. She just could not. Which meant that she loved Anna, no matter how she detested looking after Anna.
Oh, the uselessness of crouching on a toy chair at Anna’s level repeating the same words over and over again, words like “wee-wees” and “poohs” and “yum-yum”! Sometimes she thought she would go mad from the sheer futility of it. Yet Ruby’s fabulous earthiness encompassed mental children as easily as it did the monumental follies of men. Ruby never turned a hair when Anna dribbled down her expensive dress, or threw up on it, or smeared it with feces in an ecstasy of happiness. Whereas when Anna did those things to her, Elizabeth had to bolt from the room fighting nausea and a deeper revulsion. And, being Elizabeth, she told herself that she was lacking in common decency and humanity, that her churning stomach and appalled disgust were evidence that she might love Anna, but that love wasn’t enough to quell the horrors of looking after a mental child.
Alexander once called me nice, but I’m not, she castigated herself. I am that worst of all women, an unnatural mother. Mothers are supposed to be able to cope, yet here am I unable to cope with either of my children. If Anna is a crawling lump of dough, Nell is a frighteningly superior being with whom I have absolutely no communion. Give Nell a doll, and she operates on it—takes a sharp knife and slits it down the middle, pulls out its stuffing with learned remarks about the state of its innards. Then she goes off and fashions accurately painted body parts for it from that ghastly atlas of anatomy Alexander won’t part with because its etchings are by Albrecht Dürer, whoever he may be. And if she isn’t doing that, she’s out of her bed at midnight on the flat part of the roof with the telescope Alexander gave her, looking at the moon or raving about something’s rings. I have given birth to a minature Alexander and a cabbage, and I cannot find it in me to like caring for either of them. I just love them because I carried them, they are a part of me.
With Anna, who knows what she thinks, if indeed she can—Jade swears she can. Yet in her way Nell is as much a monster as Anna—imperious, restless, arrogant, determined, insatiably curious, fearless. Though her eyes are blue, not black, when Nell looks at me from under her pointed brows, it’s Alexander I see staring at me. Six years old, and she considers her mother only a few degrees higher in intelligence than Anna. She hates being cuddled, she hates being kissed, and dismisses feminine activities with scorn. The box of my discarded clothes I gave her last birthday to play at dressing up sits there unopened—oh, the scathing glance she shot me for what any other little girl her age would have deemed a treasure chest! As if to say, Mum, who do you take me for, an idiot like Anna?
I can love both my daughters, but I cannot like one of them because she has a gigantic mind and I cannot like the other because her habits revolt me.
Oh, dear God, tell me where I go wrong? What do I lack?
When she said some of this to Ruby, Ruby snorted in derision.
“Honestly, Elizabeth, you’re too hard on yourself! There are people like me who have strong stomachs and don’t mind dirt and messes, probably because we grew up surrounded by dirt and messes. You grew up in one of those immaculate Scottish houses, I suppose, everything swept and mopped and dusted. No one vomiting up too much booze, or shitting in a drunken stupor, or forgetting to wash the dishes until they grew mold, or leaving the garbage to rot inside the house—Jesus, Elizabeth, I grew up in a cesspit! And if your stomach’s weak, it’s weak. You can’t control that, pussycat, no matter how hard you try. As for Nell, I agree with you—she’s a sort of a monster. She’s never going to be a person everybody takes to at a glance, she’s more likely to put most people off. You suffer because you had very little education, and Alexander made you feel that. I had no education either, but I wasn’t an immature girl of sixteen when I met him. Cheer up, and stop this self-castigation. To love your children is far more important than liking them.”
WE NEED RAIN, Elizabeth thought one May morning in 1882 as she mounted Crystal to ride the three miles between the house and The Pool. The Pool saves my sanity. Without it, I would be shut up, gibbering, in a place where they hosed me into submission. Still, then I wouldn’t know anything, and that is a kind of peace. Self-pity, Elizabeth! The worst of all crimes because it leads to delusion, imagined injuries and loss of contact with the feelings of others. Whatever you are, whatever you go through, you have brought on yourself. You could have said no to Father—what could he have done, apart from beat you and send you to see Dr. Murray? You could have said no to Alexander—what could he have done except send you home again in disgrace? Ruby is right, I think too much about myself and my faults. I must think about The Pool instead. There I can forget.
She pushed the mare along the track, now so well worn that anyone might have followed it had anyone had a wish to, or been allowed to. Yet it had never once crossed her mind that The Pool might be invaded by any person other than herself.
Until, perhaps three hundred yards from it, Elizabeth heard the sound of a man’s laugh, lighthearted, joyous. Her reaction contained no fear, but she didn’t ride on. Instead, she slipped off Crystal and tied the animal to a tree branch, patted its shiny white hide and walked on softly. Her temper was up: how dared this fellow trespass on Kinross property? No fear, but prudence all the same. It dictated that first she should see who the interloper was. If, for instance, some party of bushrangers had discovered it, she would retrace her footsteps undetected and ride back to the house, there to use the new toy Alexander had installed before he left—a telephone linked to the Kinross police station and Summers’s house. It went nowhere else, but its ability to summon help was instantaneous. The other possibility was a group of natives, but they rarely if ever came close to white settlements in this area, and were afraid of the mine; there were so many hundreds of square miles of uninhabited forest that these far from populous people preferred to safeguard their tribal identity by avoiding the white man’s corruption.
No horses tethered nearby, no signs of desperadoes or of natives. Just one man, standing with his back to her on a rock that jutted out over The Pool like a flayed shoulder blade. Her breath caught, she slowed and stopped. He was naked, the light streaming over golden skin and a mane of straight black hair that fell down his spine to far past his waist. A Chinese? Then he turned in her direction, lifted his arms above his head and dived in a blur of movement to disappear with hardly a splash under the surface of the water. Her attention was focused on his face as he swung around, and she knew it as if it were her own in a mirror. Lee Costevan! Lee Costevan was home. Her knees gave way; she sank to the ground in a heap, then realized that the moment he came up for air, he would see her. Oh, what a confrontation! What an embarrassment for both of them! What could she say? Scrambling, she wriggled into the shelter of the undergrowth just in time.
His private delight was almost painful to witness as he projected himself out of the water in a leap as high and powerful as one of the fish that lived in it; then, flinging back his soaking hair from his face, he lifted himself effortlessly out of the water on to the rock, gazed about, entranced, and stretched himself flat to bake in the sun. Elizabeth stayed where she was, immobile as a lizard, until he decided to go back into The Pool. Then she crept away.