The Touch (49 page)

Her tears seemed to ooze out of unbaked dough; he felt ill, couldn’t think of her with desire. Don’t leave me with no one! he cried silently, but to whom he cried it, he didn’t know.

“Go, Alexander,” said Ruby, stubbing out her cheroot. “Just go, please. She’s Sam Wong’s eldest daughter, and I love her.”

He went straight to the cable car and took it up to the top of the mountain, facing, as all the seats did, Kinross below. A lake of shadows blue and lilac and pearl, the smoke of its chimneys adding a layer of the somber North Sea grey they were painting the new iron warships that, it seemed in another existence, had so fascinated him scant months ago.

Elizabeth was sitting in his library, something new; he did not remember her ever choosing it. How old was she now? Thirty-three in September. His own forty-eighth birthday was only a few weeks away. Now they really had been married for more than half of her life. An eternity, she had called it. And so it was, if eternity were flexible, and who was to say that it was not? What was the difference between the span of eternity and how many angels could dance on the head of a pin? A philosophers’ squabble.

Elizabeth was thinking that Alexander improved with the years, and wondering why iron-grey hair streaked with white was so very attractive on a man, yet so ugly on a woman. His trim, slender body hadn’t sagged or shrunk, and he moved with the graceful ease of a youth. Of Lee. The lines graven on his face were not evidence of age but of experience; she had a sudden wish to urge him to have a great sculptor craft a bust of him in—bronze? No. In marble? No. In granite. That was the stone for Alexander.

His black eyes held a new expression, of weariness, sadness, a grim determination fueled more by disappointment than by success. This won’t break him because nothing can. He will weather every tempest his life throws at him because his core is granite.

“How are you?” he asked, kissing her cheek.

“Well,” she answered, the pain of this peck driving through her like a javelin.

“Yes, you do look well, all considered.”

“Dinner is some way off, I’m afraid. I wasn’t sure when you would arrive, so Chang has planned Chinese food he can cook in a few minutes.” She rose to her feet. “A sherry? A whisky?”

“Sherry, please.”

She poured two full-sized wineglasses almost to the brim, carried one to him, took one back to her chair with her. “I’ve never understood why sherry is served in such small glasses, have you?” she asked, sipping. “One is forever jumping up and down to replenish it. This way, one doesn’t have to jump up and down.”

“A brilliant innovation, Elizabeth. I thoroughly approve.”

He studied her over the brim of his glass, savoring the keen aroma of the amontillado before taking some into his mouth and letting it rest upon his tongue. Feeling the anticipation of its course down his gullet like a caressing ember. Her beauty grew; each time he saw her again it was with amazement at some new and perfect addition to her beauty, from a change in the way she held her head to a tiny crease at each corner of her mouth. Her figure in the smoky mauve dress was shading to voluptuousness without a trace of fat, and the hands that bore his rings looked like sea flowers, bending, swaying, borne by the currents of her mind.

Her mind he didn’t know. She would never admit him to it. An enigma, that was Elizabeth. The mouse had become a quiet lion, but not remained that. What was she now? He had no idea.

“Do you wish to discuss Jade with me?” he asked, finally letting the sherry slide down his throat.

“I imagine that you’ve discussed it with half the world, so I’d rather let it lie, if you don’t mind. We both know what must happen, and words once said can never be snatched back, can they? They are all there somewhere, ringing like bells.” A glitter of tears filmed her eyes. “It is unbearable, that’s all.” Then the tears were gone; she smiled at him. “Nell will be here in a minute. Do compliment her on her appearance, Alexander. She’s so desperate to please you.”

As if on some director’s cue, Nell came in.

What Alexander saw was himself in a feminine mold. Not a new experience, yet utterly novel. During the six months of his absence Nell had grown up, passed from girl to woman. His dark hair was piled up on top of her head, his wide but thin-lipped mouth looked as sensuous as determined, tinted with some pinkish substance she had also smeared faintly along her cheekbones. His long and slightly cavernous face was alluring on her, yet told the world that she wasn’t to be trifled with. Imperious. Her skin was clear and healthily tanned as far as the bottom of her neck, ivory below it. Like her mother, she had abandoned the bustle in favor of a skirt that was fuller at the back than the front, of peau-de-soie silk the color of storm clouds. Not a busty, strapping young woman of Ruby’s ilk, nor perfectly proportioned like her mother, but at ease with her rounded spareness. And she did have Elizabeth’s long, swanlike neck.

Alexander put the glass down, walked to her quickly, held her first at arm’s length, smiling, then folded her against him. Over his shoulder Elizabeth could see her face, its chin tucked into his coat, its thick-lashed eyes closed. A portrait of bliss.

“You look superb, Nell,” he said, kissing her tenderly on the lips, then led her to a chair near his own. “Some sherry for my grown woman?” he asked.

“Yes, please, Daddy. I’ve turned fifteen, and Mum says I should learn to drink a little wine.” Her eyes sparkled at her father. “The trick is never to drink more than a little.”

“Which is why you’re getting sherry in a sherry glass.” He lifted his own glass in a toast, so did Elizabeth. “Here’s to our beautiful daughter Eleanor. May she always prosper.”

“May she always prosper,” Elizabeth echoed.

Always sensitive to atmosphere, Nell made no mention of Jade or their troubles. Instead she concentrated upon regaling her father with tales of the job Ruby had given her, able to poke fun at herself, eager to tell him of this blunder, that mistake, what a pleasure it was to work with men once they stopped thinking of her as a woman.

“That happens in an emergency,” she said, “when the only one who sees the solution is the trusty Nell Kinross.”

From this she passed to an animated discussion with Alexander that embraced the technical difficulties they were experiencing in the cyanide refinery, then to a hot argument about the respective merits of direct and alternating electrical current. Exponents of the latter were newer, younger men; Alexander thought alternating current overrated and wasteful.

“Daddy, Ferranti has proved that an alternating current can work harder! Power bigger things than telephones and light bulbs! Electric motors are poor things, but I swear that soon, using alternating current, there will be electric motors powerful enough to run our cable car!” Nell said, face alight.

“But you can’t store it in batteries, my girl, and you have to store it. Alternators mean running the dynamos all the time, which is shockingly wasteful. Without storage batteries, the whole production of current ceases the moment a dynamo breaks down, and they’re notorious for that.”

“One of the reasons for that, Daddy, is that the idiots wire the alternators in series when it’s obvious they should be wired in parallel. Wait and see, Daddy! One day industry will need the kind of high voltages and transformers only alternating current can supply.”

The good-natured argument raged on while Elizabeth sat listening to this truly extraordinary young woman whose grasp of mathematics far exceeded her father’s, and whose knowledge of mechanics was phenomenal. At least in Nell, Alexander had a kindred spirit; she had the key to unlock his essence. Granite and granite. Later, Elizabeth mused, their battles will be titanic. All Nell needs is time.

Pleading his late arrival as a valid excuse, Alexander put off seeing Anna until the next morning.

“Anna’s not happy,” Elizabeth explained as she walked with him to the nursery. “She wants Jade, and of course we can’t make her understand why she can’t have Jade.”

The sight of his younger daughter shocked him. The beauty, which he had forgotten, the sheer normality of her face, which his imagination had transformed into something more stigmatic, and the swollen belly bulging under a loose robe.

But at least she recognized him, said “Dadda!” several times, then began to howl for Jade. When Butterfly Wing tried to soothe her, she was pushed away rudely. As the howls and wails increased Alexander walked out, unable to bear the overwhelming smell of a gravid woman who took no care of herself nor, in her present mood, would let anyone else care for her.

“What a business,” he said in the hall.

“Yes.”

“When is young Wyler coming up?”

“In three weeks. Sir Edward is looking after his practice in Sydney.”

“Is he bringing a midwife?”

“No, he says Minnie Collins will do very well.”

“I understand that Anna won’t let Nell see her.”

Elizabeth gave a deep sigh. “That is so.”

ANNA WENT into labor two days after Dr. Simon Wyler arrived toward the end of April, screaming her way through every cycle of pain, fighting and thrashing around so strongly that the obstetrician was obliged to tie her down. Neither he nor Minnie Collins could get it into poor Anna’s head that she must co-operate, bear down, follow orders. All Anna knew was that she suffered agonies entirely alien to her, and protested against them shrilly, wildly, incessantly.

When her labor entered its last stage Dr. Wyler resorted to chloroform, and twenty minutes later withdrew a big, strong baby girl from the birth canal. Her color was pink and healthy, her lungs in excellent condition. Elizabeth, in attendance, could not help but smile down at this new human being, so unwanted and, until now, so unwelcome. But the dear wee scrap couldn’t help her parentage, nor should she be punished for it.

Informed of the successful outcome of Anna’s travail, her father simply grunted.

“A name?” Elizabeth asked.

“Call it whatever you want,” Alexander answered curtly.

Elizabeth decided on Mary-Isabelle with a hyphen, a name that lasted only as long as Anna lay half conscious and exhausted. Which wasn’t for more than six hours; no matter how inadequate her mental equipment, Anna was physically sturdy and in perfect health. Worst factor of all, her milk was coming in copiously.

“Give her the baby to nurse,” said Dr. Wyler to Minnie.

“She won’t know what to do!” said Minnie with a gasp.

“We can but try, Minnie. Do it.”

Drawing the swaddlings back, Minnie handed the bundle to Anna, lying propped up in her bed. Looking amazed, Anna stared down into the tiny, working face, then gave a huge smile.

“Dolly!” she cried. “Dolly!”

“Your very own dolly, Anna,” said Dr. Wyler, blinking away tears. “Put Dolly to the breast, Minnie.”

Minnie loosened the neck of Anna’s nightgown to expose one breast, pushed Anna’s arms upward, and guided the baby and Anna toward each other. When the baby’s mouth groped for and found the nipple, began to nurse, Anna’s face underwent a transformation.

“Dolly!” she cried. “Dolly! My Dolly! Lovely!”

It was the first time she had spoken an abstraction.

The watching Elizabeth and Butterfly Wing gazed at each other, heedless that they wept. Anna would forget Jade now; Anna had her very own dolly, and the bond was made.

So when Sir Alexander Kinross registered his granddaughter’s birth at the Kinross town hall, he entered her name as Dolly Kinross. Against the slot for the father, he wrote “S. O’Donnell.”

“It seems I’m cursed with bastards,” he said to Ruby when he called in to see her at the hotel on his way home, and shrugged wryly. “Not to mention cursed with girls.”

She had taken the hint and was losing weight, but too fast; stripped of some of its youthful elasticity, her skin sagged under her chin and beneath her reappearing eyes. How long now will I hold him? she had wondered every day when the mirror showed her the turkey neck, the fine, crepey wrinkles on her upper arms and cheeks. But her breasts hadn’t wavered from their high, firm stance, nor her buttocks subsided. As long as they are all right, I will hold him, she thought. But my menses are dwindling and my hair is thinning. Soon I will be an old hag.

“Tell me what you did abroad, where you went,” she said to him after their lovemaking, which he seemed to enjoy as much as ever. “You were even more secretive than usual before you left.”

He sat up in the bed and linked his hands around his knees, his chin on them. “I went on a quest,” he said after a long pause. “A quest to find Honoria Brown.”

“And did you succeed?” she asked, dry-mouthed.

“No. I’d hoped, you see, that I might have quickened her, that she might have borne me a son on her hundred-acre Indiana farm. But the people who have it now had bought it from people who used to have it, and they in turn had bought it from earlier owners. No one remembered Honoria Brown. So I put a Pinkerton man on it, told him to find her. The news caught up with me in England. She’d married some fellow and moved to Chicago in 1866, and was childless at that time. There have been children since, but she died in 1879 and her widowed husband married again a year later. Her children scattered because they didn’t like their new stepmother, I gather. When the Pinkerton man asked if I wanted their whereabouts located, I said no, and paid him out.”

“Oh, Alexander!” She got out of bed, pulled on a frilly robe. “And what else did you do?”

“I’ve already reported it to the board, Ruby.”

“Most impersonally.” Her voice wobbled when next she spoke. “Did you hear anything of Lee?”

“Oh, yes.” Alexander began to dress. “He’s doing very well for himself, mostly by dropping in on his old school chums at various Asian localities. I’d been planning to import a tribe of Indians from the Himalayan foothills to work in the Ceylon mine, but Lee nipped in first and set them to prospecting for diamonds in their own neck of the woods. The local rajah’s son was most helpful in securing his father’s agreement to this—for a price, of course. Fifty percent of the profits, which isn’t bad. From there he went to England, saw Maudling at the Bank of England—these British institutions don’t believe in retirement ages, do they? Maudling must be almost as old as the bank. He’s on the board now, thanks to his activities with Apocalypse Enterprises. Like me, Lee’s interested in the new iron battleships, especially their engines. There’s a man named Parsons has a new sort of steam engine in development—he calls it a turbine.”