The Touch (57 page)

“That won’t last,” said Alexander cynically. “They don’t have the experience with steeling iron that the Americans and the British do. They can precision engineer, but Germany pinched all their metallurgists, industrial plant and Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War. The French have never recovered.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have a motor-car yet, Alexander.”

“I’m waiting for Daimler to produce something really worth having. The Germans and the Americans are the best precision engineers in the world, and the engine design is so simple. The wonderful thing about a motor-car, Lee, is that you don’t need a degree in engineering to fix it. A little mechanical aptitude and a few tools, and Mr. Motor-Car Owner can fix it himself.”

“It will decrease the amount of noise on the roads too. No iron-bound wheels on the vehicles, no iron-shod hooves on its horses. Easier to turn, easier to drive than a horsed carriage. I’m surprised that you haven’t gone into manufacturing it.”

“Someone in Australia already is—they’re going to call their horseless carriage the Pioneer. But no, for the time being I’ll stick to steam,” said Alexander.

AFTER LEE had been provided with suitable apparel, the pair set out for the naval dockyards in Portsmouth armed with letters of introduction, there to prowl all over the Majestic.

“You’re right about her speed, Alexander—she’s slow. The American ships are doing eighteen knots with heavier armaments, though admittedly with thinner armor plating.” Lee eyed the coal hatches thoughtfully. “She takes two thousand tons, they say—enough to sail five thousand miles at twelve knots. But I’d be willing to bet that it’s older ships will sail the oceans. At her cost, she’ll be kept in the North Sea.”

“I read your mind as if it were sending flags up a mast, Lee. They’re putting the Parsons steam turbine engine into liners and merchant ships, and I’ve even heard that the Royal Navy has put it into a few torpedo boats. When they put it into one of these fifteen-thousand-tonners and change from barbettes to good rotational turrets, they’ll have a real battleship.” Flashing Lee a grin, Alexander trotted down the gangway with a twirl of his amber-headed cane and a wave in the direction of the bridge. “Let us,” he said as they walked into a misty rain, “keep an eye on developments, eh?”

“I read your mind as if it were sending flags up a mast,” said Lee gravely.

OF COURSE the engineering works of Mr. Charles Parsons had to be inspected, together with several other factories producing innovative machinery, but by August they were on a ship for Persia and the Peacock oilfields. There Lee found that his Farsi-fluent American second-in-command had done well in his absence, and would go on doing well. No more excuses; he had to go home.

Half of him had expected that Alexander would decide to visit his plantations of Brazilian Para rubber trees in Malaya en route, but no. They boarded a fast steamer in Aden that was heading straight for Sydney.

“That is,” said Lee, “via Colombo, Perth and Melbourne. I think therein lies the reason for Sydney’s unpopularity as the national capital. Perth may as well be on another continent, but ships get to Melbourne first. It’s another thousand miles up to Sydney, so a lot of ships don’t bother going on to Sydney. Now if some way could be found to approach Australia from the north, Sydney would be far more important than Melbourne.”

He did a lot of rather feverish talking during that voyage, unwilling to give Alexander the slightest hint that he dreaded returning to Kinross. How would he manage to behave normally to Elizabeth, especially given that Alexander was determined to keep him closer than ever before? He could live in the Kinross Hotel, yes, but since Anna’s departure Alexander had moved all of his administrative duties and paperwork to his own house; the offices in town had been partially converted to a research facility under the aegis of Chan Min, Lo Chee, Wo Ching and Donny Wilkins. Lee was to work with Alexander at all times, and would certainly have to eat lunch at the house, if not dinner.

The years had been lonely, only bearable because of what he had learned from the monks of Tibet; were it not for Elizabeth, Lee believed that he might have elected to stay there, abandon all the training and precepts his mother and Alexander had instilled in him for a life that had a hypnotic element to it, a communal synchrony governed by the soul. The Oriental in him liked that, could have been happy living on the top of the world removed from time, pain, yearning. Except that Elizabeth mattered more, and that was a mystery. Not one look or gesture of encouragement, not one word to give him hope. Yet he couldn’t banish her from his mind, or cease to love her. Is it that some of us do genuinely have a soul mate, and, having found that soul mate, are borne along helplessly on the tide forever striving to engulf and dissolve in the soul mate? Make one out of two?

“Have you told Ruby and Elizabeth that we’re on our way?” he asked Alexander as the ship neared Melbourne.

“Not yet, but I can actually telephone them from Melbourne. I thought that was the way to go,” said Alexander.

“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 that 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.