The Touch (68 page)

“Mum, you shouldn’t sit here alone in the dark,” said Nell, coming in. “Dinner’s in half an hour. Can I get you one of your enormous sherries?”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth said, blinking in the dazzle as Nell went around switching on more lights.

“Can you eat? Should I have Hung Chee make you up a tonic?”

“I can eat.” Elizabeth took the glass and sipped. “But a tonic from Hung Chee? Hasn’t modern medicine got something more effective? From Hung Chee, it might have anything in it from powdered beetles to dried dung to shivery grass seeds.”

“Chinese medicine is brilliant,” said Nell, sitting opposite her mother with her own enormous sherry. “We tend to go to the chemistry lab and manufacture something, whereas they go to Mother Nature. Oh, a lot of what we manufacture is excellent, can do things no Chinese medicine can. But especially for minor or chronic complaints, Nature has a wonderful pharmacopoeia. After I graduate, I intend to collect old wives’ remedies, cure-alls of custom and tradition, and Hung Chee’s recipes for gout, dizzy spells, rashes, bilious attacks and God knows what else.”

“Does that mean you’re not going into research anymore?”

Nell scowled. “There won’t be a post for me in research, Mum, that much I’ve learned. But I’m not brokenhearted about it—and that’s rather surprised me. I want to go into general practice in some desperately poor part of Sydney.”

Elizabeth smiled. “Oh, Nell, that pleases me!”

“I have to go back to Sydney tomorrow, Mum, or I’ll have to repeat Med IV, but it worries me to leave you here alone.”

“I won’t be alone for long,” said Elizabeth placidly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m going away for a while.”

“With Dolly? Where?”

“No, I’m sending Dolly to Constance at Dunleigh. Sophia’s children are there, so are Maria’s, and it’s time Dolly learned to mix with children around her age. The Dewy girls haven’t discussed Dolly’s parentage, and Dunleigh is a long way from here. They have an excellent governess. Constance suggested it.”

“That’s splendid, Mum. It really is. And you?”

“I’m going to the Italian lakes. I used to dream of them,” Elizabeth said in a slightly eerie voice, “whenever I planned to run away. But I never could run away. First there was Anna, then came Dolly. Do you remember them, Nell? The Italian lakes?”

“Only that they were beautiful,” Nell said through a choked throat. “Did you plan to run away often?”

“Whenever I found life here unbearable.”

“Was that often?”

“Very often.”

“Did you hate Dad that much?”

“No, I never hated him. I didn’t love him, and that grew into dislike. Hatred says that you can never find a reason for what you feel, it’s too blind, but I was always able to see the truth. I was even able to see Alexander’s point of view. The trouble was that it lay a world away from mine.”

“He did love you, Mum.”

“I know that now that he’s dead. But it doesn’t change anything. He loved Ruby more.”

“Bugger Ruby Costevan!” Nell snapped.

“Don’t say that!” cried Elizabeth, so loudly and sternly that Nell jumped. “If it weren’t for Ruby, I don’t honestly know what I might have done. You’ve always loved her, Nell, so you mustn’t start blaming her now. I won’t hear a word against her.”

Nell was trembling. Passion in her mother’s voice! And for the one person society said she should detest! “I’m sorry, Mum. I was wrong.”

“Just promise me that when you marry—you will!—you marry for the right reasons. Liking, most of all. Love, of course. But also for the pleasures of the body. It isn’t supposed to be mentioned, as if it were something the Devil invented rather than God. But I cannot tell you how important it is. If you can share your private life with your husband wholeheartedly, nothing else will matter. You have a career of your own that’s cost far too much to abandon, and you mustn’t. If he wants you to abandon it, don’t marry him. You’ll always have sufficient income to live comfortably, so you can be married and still continue to practice your career.”

“Good advice,” said Nell gruffly, beginning to see many things about her mother and father.

“No one can give better advice than someone who has failed.”

A silence fell; Nell studied her mother through different eyes, with a wisdom that had grown since her father died. Always Dad’s partisan, always exasperated with Mum’s passivity, that air of being somewhere else. What she had loathed about her mother was the martyr element, but now Nell saw that Elizabeth was not, nor ever had been, a martyr.

“Poor Mum! You just never had the luck, did you?”

“No, I didn’t. But I hope to have some luck in the future.”

Nell put down her glass and rose, went to kiss her mother on the lips—a first. “I hope you do too.” She held out her hand. “Come, dinner will be ready. We’ve laid the bogeys to rest, haven’t we?”

“Bogeys? I’d rather call them demons,” said Elizabeth.

LEE ACCOMPANIED Elizabeth back to the house after she saw Nell off on the train and followed her into the library feeling a little lost. The only physical contact they had had since Alexander’s death was that passionless, pathetic interlude in Anna’s temporary prison bed. Not that he condemned her for this withdrawal; on the contrary, he understood it very well. But to him it was Alexander’s presence that hovered between them, and he couldn’t find the right incantation to banish it. What frightened him was that he might lose her yet, for though he loved her and believed that she loved him, their relationship was thus far built on sand, and Alexander’s death had shifted that sand in many ways—his inheritance—his ignorance of how her mind worked. If Alexander didn’t know after so long, how could he? Through his love for her, said his instincts—but logic and good sense were not so sure.

Even now, with the library door firmly closed and the dark curtains drawn, she gave him no sign that she wanted him to come to her, take her into his arms, love her. Instead she stood pulling her black kid gloves through her fingers as if to torture these inanimate reminders of bereavement. Head bent, watching what she did with total absorption. Alexander is right, she goes away and leaves no key to the maze she wanders.

Minutes went by. Finally word burst from him: “Elizabeth, what do you want to do?”

“Do?” She lifted her head to gaze at him, and smiled. “I would like the fire lit. It’s cold.”

Perhaps that’s it, he thought, kneeling with a taper at the grate to touch it to the carefully laid paper and kindling. Yes, perhaps that’s it. No one has ever fussed over her, considered her comfort and well-being. The fire lit, he took her gloves from her, unpinned her hat, led her to a comfortable chair drawn up to the hearth, smoothed her hair where the hat had disarranged it, gave her a sherry and a cigarette. Her eyes, black in the gloom, reflected the leaping flames when they turned in the direction of the fire, but only if he was there. Otherwise they followed his movements until he settled on the carpet beside her knee and leaned his head against it. She picked up his pigtail and wound it around her arm, though he couldn’t see what her face said. It was enough to be here with her like this.

“ ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,’ ” he said.

She picked it up. “ ‘I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.’ ”

“ ‘I love thee to the level of every day’s most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.’ ”

“ ‘I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life!’ ”

“ ‘And, if God choose,’ ” he ended, “ ‘I shall but love thee better after death.’ ”

They didn’t speak again; the small sticks were glowing, so he rose to put dry old logs upon them, then sat on the floor between her knees, his head back to rest upon her stomach, his eyes closed to savor the feel of her hands stroking his face. The sherry stood undrunk, the cigarette burned itself to ashes.

“I’m going away,” she said a long time later.

His eyes opened. “With me, or without me?”

“With you, but separately. I’m free to go, free to love you, free to want you. Just not here. Not in the beginning, anyway. You can take me to Sydney and put me on a ship to—oh, it hardly matters! Anywhere in Europe, though Genoa would be best. I’m going to the Italian lakes with Pearl and Silken Flower. We will wait there for you, however long it takes.” A fingertip traced the contours of an eyebrow, feathered along his cheek. “I love your eyes…. Such a strange and beautiful color.”

“I was starting to fear that it was all over,” he said, too filled with happiness to move.

“No, it will never be over, though one day you may wish it was. I’ll be forty in September.”

“There’s not that huge a gap between us. We’ll be old together, and middle-aged parents.” He sat up and twisted to look at her. “Are you—?”

She laughed. “No. But I will be. That’s Alexander’s gift to me. I can’t imagine he did it for anything less.”

He gasped, knelt up. “Elizabeth! It’s not true!”

“If you say so,” she said, smiling a secret smile. “How long will it be before you can join me?”

“Three or four months. Woman, I love you! That’s not nearly as lyrical as the poet, but it’s said with just as much feeling.”

“And I love you.” She leaned to kiss him fiercely, then sat back in the chair. “I want us to be everything we can be, Lee. That means starting to live together somewhere that has no memories for either of us. I’d like us to marry in Como and honeymoon in the villa I find. I know that we’ll have to come back here, but by then we will have exorcised all the demons. And houses only become homes when they’re soaked in memories. This house has never been a home, but it has many memories. It will be a home, I promise.”

“And the pool will remain our secret place.” He got up, pulled a chair close enough to touch her if he wanted, smiling at her in a vague, dazed way. “I can hardly believe it, my dearest Elizabeth.”

“What do you have to do to get away?” she asked. “Can the Company manage without you?”

“It’s an entity with a life of its own—you might say, almost self-perpetuating. Sophia’s husband will be my second-in-command, so it’s time he earned his spurs,” said Lee. “Besides, the world is shrinking, my darling, and your late husband was one of the men who did the shrinking.”

“And my next husband will go on shrinking it, I suspect.” She finally sipped at her sherry, but when he offered her another cigarette she shook her head. “I don’t want one anymore. Do get yourself a bourbon, dear heart.”

“I don’t want one anymore. I’m switching to sherry.”

He kept putting more logs on the fire, thinking that this was what life with Elizabeth was going to be like: peace and passion, complete communion. Just sitting with her beside the hearth at the end of each day, feeling delighted to set eyes on her, missing her when she wasn’t there.

“By nature I’m a homing pigeon,” he said in a surprised tone. “How strange, when I’ve spent so much of my life wandering.”

“I’d like to see some of the places you’ve wandered to,” she said dreamily. “Perhaps on our way home from Italy we could see your oilfield in Persia?”

He laughed. “My barely profitable oilfield! But Alexander and I had the same idea at the selfsame moment as to how I could get rid of it with a very large profit. We were inspecting the Majestic—a battleship—in Portsmouth at the time, and he said, ‘I read your mind as if it were sending flags up a mast.’ Then I echoed him. We didn’t need to say anything else, we both knew.”

“In some ways you’re very like him,” she said, displaying pleasure rather than pain. “What was this simultaneous idea?”

“It won’t come to pass tomorrow—or next year, for that matter. But within ten or twelve years the British are going to want oil-fueled turbines in their battleships. If Britannia is to continue to rule the waves, she has to have battleships that can carry enormous guns, very thick armor plate, and still do more than twenty knots. Without a gigantic cloud of smoke. Oil—thin, pale smoke. Coal—a black pall. The rub, my darling, is that the British don’t have any oilfields. I intend, when the time is right, to sell my share of Peacock Oil to the British Government, which will please the Shah mightily. He’ll be able to fend off the Russian bear if he’s partners with the British lion. Though,” Lee ended thoughtfully, “I’m not sure which of those two predators is the more dangerous.”

“Well, it sounds like a happy ending to me,” she said. “My love, Alexander chose very well in you!”

“Alexander chose very well in you. If he hadn’t imported a bride from Scotland, I would never have met you, and that doesn’t bear thinking about. I’d still be a wanderer.”

“And I would be a maiden aunt in Scottish Kinross. I’m glad Alexander imported me.” A tear fell. “I’d change nothing except for Anna.”

To which he made no reply, just reached to hold her hand.

THE DEATH of her father made a big difference to Nell’s career in medicine; suddenly her marks went down, and not because her work had fallen off. She passed Medicine IV, but her professors chose to give her a bare pass—she had had too many absences, was their excuse. And in Medicine V and Medicine VI—her final year—nothing she did impressed them, though she knew very well that she should have been at the top of her class. Honors, even Second Class, were now out of the question, though she didn’t think they would dare to fail her. Or, put it this way, she dropped hints that if they did fail her, she’d go straight to the juicier newspapers, which had lots of digs at the faculty of Medicine for its discrimination against women. So they passed her—without honors, even Second Class—and she graduated a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery. Her doctoral thesis on epilepsy had been set aside as too abstruse and vague, unsupported by clinical evidence. It was not, besides, a fashionable disorder. So Sir Alexander Kinross’s daughter sent it to Sir William Gower in London and asked if it was worth a doctorate. Signing herself “E. Kinross.”

She was still waiting to hear back from London when her graduation day came around early in December of 1900. A time of curious excitement and more curious fears; federation of the colonies was about to take place and the Commonwealth of Australia would come into being. Still very much tied to Great Britain; her citizens would carry British passports and be British subjects. Australians per se did not exist. It would be a second-class country, its identity British, its constitution—very long—devoting itself to the rights of the federal parliament and the states; the People only got one mention, in the short preamble. No bill of rights, no sense of individual freedom, Nell thought resentfully. British-style democracy for the preservation of institutions. Well, we started out as convicts, so we’re used to being sat on. Even the Governor of New South Wales can refer to our “birthstain” in his first message to the people. Go to buggery, Lord Beauchamp, you superannuated English fool!