The Touch (30 page)

“I understand completely.” She commenced to walk. “If it should be possible, will you visit Lee?”

“Visiting Lee is the first item on my agenda. In fact, whenever he has school holidays, I intend to take him with me. It will be valuable experience for a budding engineer.”

“Oh, Alexander, that’s wonderful! Thank you!”

Now he stopped to look at her. “There’s a question I’ve never asked you, Ruby, I suppose because Lee left so soon after I met him, and you and I in those days were not—well, the rather bigamous couple we’ve become. What I want to know is how Lee can pose as a Chinese prince when his name is Costevan?”

Her laughter was so spontaneous and attractive that the crowd in their vicinity turned to stare at them openly; naturally Alexander Kinross with a strikingly beautiful woman on his arm drew stares, but usually they were furtive, as gossip said this particular woman was not his wife.

“Alexander, Lee’s nearly fifteen! It’s taken you six long years to ask! On Sung’s advice I simply told Proctor’s that Lee was incognito to protect his father from enemies who would go to any lengths to get at him, including the kidnapping of his son. The whole school is in on the secret, and Lee derives great fun from listening to their guesses as to his true identity. If there were other Chinese there, it would be harder, but until recently Lee was the only one. There are two more this year past, but they’re the sons of merchant princes from Wampoa who Lee says are sublimely indifferent to Peking.”

“Well, well,” said Alexander, grinning.

“You’ll miss some important legislation,” she said. “I hear that Parkes is going to strip financial aid from the Catholic schools—and from schools of other denominations. But they don’t matter as much because they’re funded by wealthy snobs. The children who go to Catholic schools come from a poorer background.”

“He’s a shocking Protestant bigot,” said Alexander.

“There’s a new land bill mooted, and one to limit Chinese immigration. Oh, and a few electoral bills—why do politicians fiddle with electorate boundaries?”

“To get more votes, Ruby. Don’t ask rhetorical questions.”

“Humph! The one that worries me is the liquor bill if it offers districts the right to go dry—bloody wowsers!”

“Rest easy, Ruby,” he said, cuddling her arm. “Kinross won’t vote to go dry, the place is too continent already, what with all the non-drinking Chinese. The wowsers won’t get enough votes to send Kinross dry because the Chinese don’t have a vote and the town’s whites like their liquor too much.”

“Anyway, I’m a residential hotel, not a pub. And I can slip the constabulary a bribe, shades of Hill End.”

“You won’t need to, I assure you.” His voice changed. “Don’t be surprised if I’m away for quite a long time.”

“What do you call quite a long time, Alexander?”

“Two, three, even four years.”

“Jesus! By the time you come home it will have grown back again—I’ll be a virgin for the fourth time.”

“I shall treat you as such, my darling.”

“Does that mean you’ll be there to settle Lee into Cambridge?”

“Yes. Perhaps Apocalypse Enterprises can endow a professorial chair, or build a research laboratory.”

“Lee is very lucky. I pray he knows it,” said his mother.

“Oh, I think he does,” said Alexander, smiling.

THOUGH HER husband’s departure toward the end of 1879 came as a shock, Elizabeth was not sorry to see him go. It was Nell who mourned inconsolably; her father had begun to take her with him to the workshops, the ore treatment plant, and even down into the mine since she had turned three last New Year’s Day. What would she do, stuck in the house day in, day out?

Alexander’s answer was to hire not a female governess but a male tutor who would teach her to read and write, commence her in Latin, Greek, French and Italian, and occupy her restless, ever-enquiring mind. The tutor was a bashful young man named William Stephens, whom Alexander set up in a large room on the third floor of Kinross House. Sung sent him three brilliant Chinese boys, the Reverend Peter Wilkins sent him his son, Donny, who was very bright, and Alexander managed to find three white girls whose parents said they could go to school on the mountain until they turned ten or thereabouts. Nell was the youngest; the three Chinese boys, Donny Wilkins and the girls were all five to her almost four.

After several days of tears and tantrums, Nell showed how like her father she was by stiffening her little shoulders and accepting her lot. One day she would be old enough to go away with Daddy; until then, the only way she could maintain her place in his heart was to excel in the schoolroom.

Half a dozen housekeepers had come and gone before Mrs. Gertrude Surtees arrived and fitted into the family like a hand into the right-sized glove. A fifty-year-old widow whose two children were grown up and married, she had been managing a seedy boarding house in Blayney when Constance Dewy found her. Mrs. Surtees was cheerful, unshockable, took no nonsense from Nell or Chang the cook, handled the rest of the Chinese servants deftly and kindly, and even contrived to get on the right side of Jim Summers. This last was rendered even more important after Alexander announced that he was going away, as Summers, for once, was not to go with him; Maggie Summers was suffering from a mysterious illness that her husband wouldn’t talk about.

Though executive power in Alexander’s absence did not devolve upon Summers. Sung doffed his embroidered silk robes and took over the running of the mine and all the other Apocalypse concerns: coal, iron and bricks in Lithgow; cement not far from Lithgow at Rylstone; several large wheat properties around Wellington; a tin mine in North Queensland; a steam engine factory in Sydney; and a new bauxite mine. Among other things.

As if to answer Alexander’s restlessness with some unrest of her own, Elizabeth decided to tear Kinross House apart while he was away and fit it out with the colors, fabrics and furniture she liked. Alexander had told her that she might indulge her fancy to the top of her bent, on two conditions: the first, that she left his library severely alone, and the second, that nothing was blue enough to cause an emotional decline.

“He loves red, you know,” said Ruby.

“Well, I don’t,” said Elizabeth, who had never gotten over finding out that scarlet was a color for whores. She looked dreamy. “Some rooms are going to be apricot and lavender-blue, others plum and butterscotch with a hint of yellow, and one or two chartreuse and deep cobalt with touches of white.”

“Modern, but nice,” Ruby admitted.

As Ruby and Constance both adored to shop, the three women gathered up Anna, Jade, Pearl, Silken Flower and Peach Blossom and periodically descended upon Sydney to pick over fabrics and exclaim at wallpapers, not to mention drive furniture salesmen mad when they weren’t being fitted for dresses or trying on shoes and hats. An unregretful Nell was left behind in the care of Butterfly Wing, Mrs. Surtees and Mr. William Stephens.

EVERY DOCTOR reputed to be versed in mental children had seen Anna, but the verdict was always the same: hope of recovery should not be entertained, as those who failed to walk and talk by two years of age were definitely going to be mental for life.

She did, however, improve; at fifteen months she was able to hold her head up and focus her eyes on any person trying to capture her attention. Her beauty became more marked once she focused her eyes, large and well opened like her mother’s, a light blue-grey between preposterously long black lashes.

By two years of age she could sit unsupported in her high chair and feed herself—a messy business that Jade regarded as a triumph and Elizabeth found turned her stomach. Anna’s attachment to Jade was complete, though she began to recognize Elizabeth shortly after she went into the high chair. Talk she would not, walk she would not. Nell was in a special category to Anna, who greeted her with frenzied screeches of what seemed joy.

Jade persisted gently and firmly, guided by Hung Chee in the Chinese medicine shop; his Oriental wisdom seemed of more benefit to Anna than any of the drafts and nostrums the Sydney doctors prescribed, for Hung Chee preached exercise, patience, diet and repetitive teaching. He had also porcupined the little girl with thin, whippy needles he stuck into her skin to help her lift her head. Elizabeth had pondered the efficacy of this, but not forbidden it, so when Anna could lift her head and Hung Chee wanted to embark on a new course to help her walk, Elizabeth gave him permission. Oddly enough, Anna enjoyed being porcupined with needles, possibly because she loved Hung Chee.

Oh, the elation when Anna learned to sit on a potty! Admittedly, six months went by before she associated this activity with defecation, but she did—most of the time. Shortly after Alexander left at the end of 1879, when Anna was almost three years old, she began to try to say a few words. “Mum,” “Jade” and “Nell” were the sum total of her vocabulary, but each was directed at the right person. The next word, added when she was three and a half, was “dolly,” the dirty and beloved rag creature she slept with and insisted stay with her through everything from sessions with the needles to eating and sitting in her high chair. Dolly had to be washed at least once a week, but when Elizabeth tried to substitute a new dolly, Anna screamed the house down until she got the old one back.

“That’s good,” said Ruby. “Anna knows the difference.”

“Mrs. Surtees suggests that I have Wing Ah at the Chinese tailor’s copy Anna’s dolly down to fading the fabric and putting all the marks we can’t get out on it. That way, when dolly falls apart, as she must, we can quietly substitute a new old dolly.”

“Good for Mrs. Surtees! She’s a treasure, Elizabeth.”

ELIZABETH STILL had time to ride Crystal to The Pool twice a week, which was all that really kept her going. As the horse disliked wading upstream, Elizabeth took a machete and cleared a bridle path through the forest, though with one part of her she feared that its presence would lead Alexander to discover her secret place once he returned home. Still, that was for the future; Alexander, away already for eighteen months, was in no hurry to come back to Kinross, so much was plain from his letters.

Those to his wife were brief and their language bordered on curt, whereas those he wrote to Ruby were longer, newsier. Full of Lee, who turned seventeen in 1881.

“You did well to send him away, Ruby,” one letter said, “though I suspect that he has missed his Mama acutely. Whatever I can tell him about you is sucked up like water into a sponge, and the photographs I gave him occupy pride of place in his room. As a senior boy, he now has a bedroom and study of his own, with the two Persian princes one on either side of him. His English is rounded, very upper-crust, and his manner royal in a completely unarrogant way. I enclose a photograph of him taken in his new school suit; he was reluctant to have it taken, as he seems to have absorbed some of his fellow pupils’ superstitions, and rather fears that the camera will steal his soul. Luckily he has too much engineer in him to quite believe this, hence the photograph.

“He is already six feet tall, and has a lot of growing yet to do, his house master says—I daresay the fellow has a great deal of experience with boys and youths, and knows what he’s talking about, so you may expect a moderate giant when you see him. In his rowing attire you can see that he has a very good physique that doesn’t go to pieces below the thigh like white men’s legs. His calf muscles are pure Chinese, massive. With the result that he is a champion sprinter and rows superbly well. Cricket has become a passion—he bowls as efficiently as he bats. He hopes to row for Cambridge when he goes up, and to play cricket for his college at least. That college will probably be Caius, as it doesn’t mind foreigners. From all of which you will deduce that he is very much looking forward to going up in October of next year. I am nosing around the Cambridge Powers That Be to see what I can do to ease his path there, as he isn’t, for all his accent, an English gentleman. The two Persian boys have also elected Cambridge; they lean on Lee quite a lot, as do some of the other Proctor’s pupils. Your son has a quality I’d call steadfast strength.”

Ruby took the letter back from Elizabeth and gave her the photograph, beaming in pride. “Lee at last,” she said.

The picture showed Lee seated on a chair, his legs crossed at the knee; Elizabeth studied it intently, trying not to be influenced by Ruby’s patent pride or Alexander’s rather surprising tendency to lyricism. Never, she had to admit, had she seen such a handsome youth, nor one so exotic. Not even Sung, whom Lee resembled, could boast such fine features. But Ruby was there too; Lee faced the camera with a faint smile that hinted at Ruby’s dimples, and the Caucasian eyes were obviously light in color. More importantly, they held great intelligence.

“He’s remarkable,” she said, handing the photograph back. “Are his eyes green like yours?”

“Not the same green, yet just as green. Is that sensible?”

“Oh, yes. His hair is combed back as if he loaded it with macassar oil—he must need antimacassar flaps on the back of tall easy chairs.”

“No, there’s no oil. He has a pigtail.”

“A pigtail?”

“Yes. Sung wished it.”

“So eight years are gone, and only four remain before you’ll see him again.”

Only four years to go, thought Ruby as she took the cable car back to Kinross. An eternity to add to the eternity passed. I never heard his voice break, or saw the first bristles on his chin, or experienced that enthralling, heartbreaking moment when a woman’s son suddenly excludes her from the sight of his manhood. Every letter he has written to me is tied in jade-green ribbon and put in its jade chest, every word of every one of them I know by heart, and yet when he returns to me it will be as a relative stranger. How could I tell Elizabeth that I hardly recognized him in the photograph? That I wept for hours, mourning his and my loss? My only consolation is that the eyes in his picture are steady, tranquil, without pain or insecurity. Well, once he got over the initial wrench of parting, his life at Proctor’s must have been fascinating and fulfilling. I can ask no more than that, save to hope that when he chooses a mate, he does so for the right reasons. Alexander hankers for her to be his Nell, though I’m not sure Nell will turn out the kind of woman he will find alluring. Even at five, she’s brisk and no-nonsense, very much an independent soul. Well, Elizabeth has had to devote her time to Anna, which has left Nell to find her own way. She’s so like Alexander, and while Lee adores Alexander, I find it hard to imagine that he’ll adore Nell. Still, these are all questions for the future. It will be four years before I really find out what sort of man my son is. When Lee returns, he will be twenty-one years old, and his own master. My baby will be a legal man, and I will sign over his share of Apocalypse Enterprises to him. He will sit on our board of directors as a stranger to me.