The Touch by Colleen McCullough
Change is in the wind, Nell thought; the new century is here, and within one or two years a woman medical graduate will be awarded an honors degree. It should have been me.
“You look different, Nell,” said Lee to her as they sat in the hotel lounge over coffee and after-dinner drinks.
“In what way? Scruffier than ever?”
His white teeth flashed—Jesus, she thought, he really is something to look at! Just as well my taste runs in another direction entirely.
“The spark’s rekindled,” he said.
“You are perceptive! Though it isn’t exactly rekindled—at least, not yet. I ran into him yesterday at uni.”
“Is he still a parliamentarian of the wrong persuasion?”
“Oh, yes, but federal. I tore into him about Labor’s anti-immigration of colored races platform,” she said with a purr.
“But that didn’t put him off you, did it?”
“I doubt anything could put him off anything if he gets his teeth stuck in. He’s a bit of a bulldog.”
“That should suit you. Think of the fights you’ll have.”
“After living with my mother and father, I’d prefer a life of peace, Lee.”
“They rarely fought, that was one of their problems. You’re Alexander’s spitting image, Nell, you’ll relish a fight. If you didn’t, you’d never have finished Medicine.”
“Point taken,” she said. “Do you and my mother fight?”
“No, we don’t need to. Especially with two babies in our nest, and another—one, I hope!—on the way. Barely, but she says it’s definite.”
“Jesus, Lee! Can’t you leave it inside your trousers for a while? She needs time to recover from bearing twins.”
He laughed. “Don’t blame me! It was her idea.”
Ruby was burbling to Sophia about Mary-Isabelle. “Another me!” she crowed. “I can’t wait to teach the scrumptious pet to call a spade a fucking shovel. My new jade kitten.”
“Ruby!” gasped Sophia. “Don’t you dare!”
NELL GRADUATED with two other women and a far greater number of men. Watching in decent obscurity, Bede Evans Talgarth waited until the new lady doctor had been hugged and kissed by her small crowd of relatives. If that was her mother, Nell certainly had not inherited the beauty or the cool, calm manner. And her stepfather, a striking man, wore his hair in a Chinese pigtail. If he had not, it would have been hard to tell exactly which touch of the tar brush he had. Each carried a baby, the mother a boy, the father a girl; two pretty Chinesey women in embroidered silk trousers and jackets stood nearby with two perambulators. And there was Ruby Costevan—how could he ever forget that day in Kinross? Picking Nell up off the floor and lunching with her and a millionairess, as Ruby had called herself. What fascinated him today was to hear Nell’s stepfather call her “Mum.”
They all looked expensive, but they didn’t have that high-society air that so many of the graduates’ parents exuded as they strutted with their round vowels and the Australian twang buried underneath. Words like “Mafeking” and “Uitlanders” came faintly to Bede’s ears; his lip curled. Second-hand jingoism. It was the Boers in the right of it. Why didn’t we in Australia have a revolution like the Americans and throw the British out? he asked himself. We’d have been a damned sight better off.
He edged up to Nell’s group nervously, aware that, despite his good suit, his stiff-collared and stiff-cuffed shirt, his parliamentary tie and his soft kid shoes, he looked what he was—a coal miner’s son who had worked the coal face himself. This was insane! She’d never fit into his life!
“Bede!” Nell cried in delight, taking his outstretched hand.
“Congratulations, Dr. Kinross.”
She performed the introductions in her customary blunt way, first her family to him, then, “This is Bede Talgarth,” she ended. “He’s a socialist.”
“A pleasure to meet you,” said Lee in real round vowels, shaking Bede’s hand with genuine warmth. “As the head of the family, welcome to our capitalist coven, Bede.”
“Care to have lunch with a millionairess tomorrow?” asked Ruby, ogling him.
The Chancellor and the Dean appeared, sniffing money and possible endowments.
“My wife, Mrs. Costevan,” said Lee to the Chancellor, “and my mother, Miss Costevan.”
“They asked for that!” said Nell, doubled up with laughter as the pair scuttled away. “I’m a woman doctor, so I can’t even get a residency in a hospital, but do they give a shit? No!”
“Then you’ll be hanging out your shingle somewhere?” Bede asked. “In Kinross, I suppose?”
“With bubonic plague in Sydney, rats by the millions, and so many people who can’t afford to call a doctor? No, not I! I’m hanging my shingle out in Sydney,” said Nell.
“Then how about hanging it out in my electorate?” he asked, taking her elbow and drawing her a little apart. “There’s not an income in it, but I daresay you don’t need to earn an income.”
“True, I don’t. I have fifty thousand pounds a year.”
“Christ! That tears it,” he said gloomily.
“I don’t see why. What’s yours is yours, and what’s mine is mine. The first thing I have to do is buy a motor-car. So much better for house calls. One with a tonneau in case it rains.”
“At least,” he said, laughing, “you’ll be able to fix it when it breaks down, as I believe they do all the time. I can’t even change the washer on a tap.”
“That’s why you went into politics,” she said kindly. “It’s the perfect profession for people with ten thumbs and no common sense. I predict you’ll end up prime minister.”
“Thank you for the vote of confidence.” His eyes lost their amusement, became bold yet caressing. “You look very nice today, Dr. Kinross. You should wear silk stockings more often.”
Nell blushed, which mortified her. “Ta,” she muttered.
“I can’t have lunch with you tomorrow because I’m lunching with a millionairess,” he said, ignoring her confusion, “but I could make roast leg of lamb at my house any night you care to name. I’ve even got some new furniture.”
“NELL,” SAID Elizabeth, sounding very pleased, “is going to be all right after all.”
“There’s someone for everyone,” said Ruby comfortably. “He’s a working-class bigot, but she’ll soon knock that out of him.”
Five
Alexander Rides Again
WHEN ELIZABETH and Lee returned to Kinross, they brought Alexander’s statue with them in a gigantic wooden crate. In the end it had been fashioned from marble rather than granite, for an unexpected reason: the Italian sculptor Lee commissioned insisted that, if this masterpiece was to be a masterpiece, it must be in marble! Not any old marble, but a special block that he had found at Carrara and reserved for just such a work as the statue of Sir Alexander Kinross. This would not be one of those shoddy public monuments city councils erected, Signor Bartolomeo Pardini declared with scorn. This would be a masterpiece! Up there with Rodin, though why that man chose bronze—pah! As for granite—pah, and pah again! A substance for gravestones.
Impressed by such Latin passion, Lee talked to Elizabeth and they agreed that the great Pardini should be let have his way.
Some superstition that neither understood forbade Lee and Elizabeth to see the finished work before it was crated; let it be put in place first. There would be no solemn unveiling, none of those pretentious ceremonies the statue’s subject had personally loathed. Alexander would simply be put on his dark brown marble plinth in Kinross Square by a team of men and a crane, and when he was in place—why, everybody could see him anytime.
It was a masterpiece. The block of stone had the layered qualities of cameo shell or agate; the mane of hair was white, the face a pale tan, the fringed buckskin suit a darker tan, and the horse, a mare, was amber-brown. The effect was startlingly lifelike, so much so that strangers would get as close to it as they could to see if it had been painted or glued together, and mar
Ruby more than loved it. If she had nothing better to do, she sat on her upstairs verandah staring at Alexander in profile, for since he faced the town hall, he was sideways to the Kinross Hotel. Only Elizabeth found the statue upsetting. Whenever it intruded on her sight, she averted her gaze. Perhaps that was because Alexander had eyes; the sculptor had inserted two orbs of white marble inlaid with glassy black obsidian. Kinrossians swore that those eyes followed you as you walked by.
IT WAS ONLY after the statue was erected that a miner, at the rock face of number seventeen tunnel with his percussion hammer, felt as if someone watched him, and turned his head. To see Sir Alexander close behind his shoulder. A hand reached past, plucked at a friable piece of glittering ore, rolled it between fingers of solid flesh right down to the dirt beneath their nails. The leonine head, white hair like crystal in the brilliant light, nodded; up went the pointed brows.
“Good! We’ll get a fair whack out of this vein,” said Sir Alexander, and vanished, not into thin air, but more as if he rolled backward without moving his feet, faster than lightning.
After that he was often seen deep down in the Apocalypse, walking abstractedly, or supervising a miner, or inspecting a set of charge holes. It became tradition that if he walked or supervised, the Apocalypse was right and tight, but that if he checked the charge holes, he was warning them that an accident was likely. The miners were not afraid of him. Somehow it was a comfort to see Sir Alexander going about the only business he had really loved.
If Lee was in the mine, he was sure to be there, and at times the poppet heads men would see him walking the mountain with Lee, who had a habit of visiting the dent below which lay the end of number one tunnel; whenever he did, Alexander would appear to sit with him.
He also sat with Ruby on the upstairs verandah of the Kinross Hotel gazing at his statue.
But he never showed himself to Elizabeth.
Also by Colleen McCullough
The October Horse
Morgan’s Run
Roden Cutler, V.C. (biography)
The Song of Troy
Caesar: Let the Dice Fly
Caesar’s Women
Fortune’s Favorites
The Grass Crown
The First Man in Rome
The Ladies of Missalonghi
A Creed for the Third Millennium
An Indecent Obsession
The Thorn Birds
Tim
Colleen McCullough, The Touch
(Series: # )