The Touch (52 page)

“I couldn’t do that!” he snapped, growing angrier with each of her disparaging remarks. “I’m a Labor man, I don’t condone servants!”

“Rubbish!” she said scornfully. “If you want to argue from a socialist point of view, then you’d be offering employment to someone probably desperate for a little extra money, and sharing your own prosperity with one of your constituents—a woman, most likely, therefore not empowered to give you a vote, but I’m sure her husband would give you his.”

“Her husband would most likely already give me his.”

“One day women will vote too, Mr. Talgarth. You can’t subscribe to all this equality and democracy stuff without seeing that women are citizens too.”

“I am absolutely opposed to the concept of servants.”

“Then don’t treat her like a servant, Mr. Talgarth. Treat her as what she actually is—an adept at her trade, which is to clean. There’s no disgrace in that, is there? You pay her well and on time, you thank her for her wonderful work, and make her feel wanted, needed—it won’t do you any harm with your voters to have a woman singing your praises as a democratic employer to all her friends. Men vote, yes, but women can influence their votes, and I’m sure often do. So you hire a woman to keep your house clean, and set aside enough time in your grounds to keep that pot belly at bay.”

“You have a point,” he conceded uneasily, pouring boiling water into his teapot. The sugar bowl was dumped on the table. “It’s got cockroach doings in it, I’m afraid, and I don’t have any milk.”

“Buy yourself an ice chest. Arncliffe must have an iceman, and there’s no reason why you have to lock him out if you’re not here—there’s nothing worth stealing. You’ll have to get rid of the cockroaches, they live in drains, sewers, anything filthy, and they sick up what they’ve eaten—see it all around the rim of your sugar bowl? It’s a death trap. I’ll bet there’s a lot of typhoid in Arncliffe, not to mention smallpox and infantile paralysis. You’re in the parliament—get the slugs on to the sewerage. Until people learn to be clean, Sydney’s a dangerous place. Get rid of the rats and mice too, or one day there’ll be an outbreak of bubonic plague.” Nell accepted the mug of black, sugarless tea and drank it gratefully.

“You’re supposed to be an engineer, aren’t you?” he asked feebly. “You sound more like a doctor.”

“Yes, I’m finishing my first year in engineering soon, but what I really want to be is a doctor, especially now they’ve opened Medicine to women.”

Fight it though he did, he found himself liking her; she was so businesslike, so logical, so free from self-pity. And, despite her criticisms, not in the least repelled by his bachelor habits. Nell Kinross liked to produce sensible answers. Such a pity she’s on the other side, he thought. She’d be a valuable addition to our forces, even if behind the scenes.

Her joy was complete when he produced an orange box and sat on it—just as she had suspected, he didn’t care about material things. How much it must irk him to wear a suit! I’ll bet when he goes out on weekends to visit his constituents, he’s back in dungarees and rolled-up sleeves.

“I have a good idea,” she said suddenly, holding out her mug for more tea. “Instead of eating bikkies and scones with jam and cream when you’re making your calls, you could offer to dig holes, chop wood, shift furniture. You’d get exercise, and not have time to stuff your face.”

“Why,” he asked, “are you here, Miss Kinross? What is it you think I can do for you?”

“Call me Nell and I’ll call you Bede. Such an interesting name, Bede. Do you know who he was?”

“It’s a family name,” he said.

“He was the Venerable Bede, a monk of Northumberland, who is said to have walked all the way to Rome and back again. He wrote the first real history of the English people, though whether he was a Saxon or a Celt isn’t known. He lived in the seventh and eighth centuries after Christ, and was a very gentle, holy soul.”

“That leaves me out,” he said lightly. “How do you know all this sort of thing?”

“I read,” she said simply. “There wasn’t much else to do in Kinross until Auntie Ruby put me to work. That’s why engineering is so easy for me—I know the theory backward, and the actual business, especially mining, very well. I just need a degree.”

“You still haven’t told me what you want.”

“I want you to talk to a cantankerous old Scot named Angus Robertson, who is the union’s shop steward at Constantine Drills. I need to get some experience on the shop floor there, and the owners gave me permission. Then Robertson said a flat no.”

“Oh, yes, the metalworkers. I don’t see why they should feel threatened by women—I can’t see any woman, even you, wanting to drill and weld and hammer and rivet and whatever steel.”

“No, I want to learn how to turn steel on a metal lathe. No engineer worth his or her salt can design steel stuff without understanding what a metal lathe can and can’t do.”

“I agree that shop-floor experience is essential.” He turned the corners of his mouth down, frowned into his own undrunk tea. “All right, I’ll talk to Angus. But I’ll also talk to the union leaders. They can exert more pressure on him than I can.”

“That’s all I ask,” said Nell, rising to her feet.

“How can I contact you?”

“I have a telephone in my house. It’s in the Glebe. If the answer’s yes, you can come to dinner and eat healthy food.”

“By the way, how old are you, Nell?”

“Sixteen and—um—eight-tenths.”

“Jesus!” he said, breaking into a cold sweat.

“Stop panicking,” she said scornfully as she departed. “I can look after myself.”

I’ll bet you can, he thought, watching her cab disappear down the road. Jesus! Jail bait, and he’d had her inside his house! Still, no one knew, so what had it mattered?

And she was right, of course. Everyone in his electorate pitied him as a bachelor in a dreadful house, incapable of caring for himself. Hence the food he was always offered as he did his rounds. How could he explain to these people that the parliament put on a tip-top lunch every day it sat? That the Trades and Labour Council had food too? He would get into the grounds with a hoe and hire—for a decent wage—a desperately poor woman to clean for him. Set rat- and mousetraps, lay down poison for the cockroaches, and buy flypapers to twirl from the ceiling and trap the flies on their sticky, toxic surfaces. I don’t want to die before I’m forty, he said to himself, but I’ve noticed that my gut isn’t all it ought to be. If the place is cleaner, maybe I won’t get those bilious attacks. Nell Kinross, all of sixteen in years and all of sixty in sheer gall.

THE ANSWER was yes, on one condition: that Nell rivet two steel plates together. If she could do that, then she could learn to work the metal lathe. Much though he hated to admit it, Angus Robertson announced that she could rivet well. But when she returned three days later for her lesson, she found the whole workshop idle.

“Steam engine’s down,” said Angus Robertson with quiet triumph, “and our steam engineer’s crook.”

“Dear, dear,” said Nell, walking across the floor to where the engine stood producing steam and brushing the three men around it aside to peer at it. “How crook? Not a fever, I hope?”

“Nay,” said Angus, watching in fascination as she studied the governor assembly that regulated the amount of steam passing through the slide valve into the combustion chamber. “Rheumatics.”

“Tomorrow I’ll bring you in some sachets of powder that you can pass on to him. Tell him to take one sachet three times a day and wash it down with plenty of water. It’s an old Chinese remedy for rheumatic pains and fevers,” said Nell, one hand groping for a tool that wasn’t there. “Pass me that socket wrench, please.”

“Some Chinky poison?” Angus recoiled, gasping dramatically. “I’ll no’ give Johnny anything like that!”

“Oh, rubbish!” snapped Nell, brandishing the wrench. “It’s mostly willow bark ground up with other beneficial herbs—not an eye of newt or toe of frog in sight!” She indicated the governor assembly with the air of someone who found it hard to believe that the problem hadn’t been solved. “The weights are cockeyed, Mr. Robertson. Two broken straps, which won’t take long to fix.”

Within two hours the governor fly weights—brass balls the size of Ping-Pong balls—and the riser assembly were back in place, the straps holding the weights brazed on to the crown and riser. The balls spun out with centrifugal force, the slider valve opened to let sufficient steam into the combustion chamber, and the fly wheel began to turn, permitting all the machinery that the steam engine powered to work again.

Bede Talgarth had turned up to watch; so had the junior partner of Constantine Drills, Mr. Arthur Constantine.

“Is there anything she doesn’t know, or can’t do?” Arthur Constantine asked Bede.

“I’m as ignorant about her as you are, sir,” said Bede with the formality suitable to an encounter between a capitalist and a socialist, “but I gather that her father is a hands-on sort of chap, and that she’s been his offsider since she was little. Professor Warren, who is Dean of Science, says that she’ll top her class so easily that it’s hardly worth examining her.”

“A frightening prospect,” said Arthur Constantine.

“No, a warning bell,” Bede said, “and it tells me that out there in the weaker half of our population there are women being wasted. Luckily most women are content with their lot. But Nell Kinross is a message that some women despise their lot.”

“Then let them go nursing or teach school.”

“Unless their talents lie in engineering,” Bede sniped, not because he was converted to women’s struggle for equality, but because he wanted to make this sleek man uncomfortable. He and his kind spent an increasing amount of their hours worrying about their workers, so why not add the spectre of women workers?

“I suggest, Mr. Constantine,” said Nell, coming to join them, “that you invest in a new governor assembly for your steam engine. Those straps have been brazed up a dozen times, so they’re going to go again. It’s true that one steam engine can power all your machine tools, but only if it works. You’ve lost three hours of production today, and no manufacturer can afford that when he’s employing just the one steam engineer.”

“Thank you, Miss Kinross,” Constantine said stiffly, “the matter will be attended to.”

Nell winked at Bede and strode away in her overalls shouting for Angus Robertson, who scuttled to her side with the mien of one who had been bested—temporarily at least.

Grinning, Bede decided to stay and watch Miss Kinross make even finer mincemeat of Arthur Constantine, Angus Robertson and the metal lathe, which she took to like a duck to water.

There’s a certain poetry of motion about her, Bede thought; she moves with such certainty and fluid grace, expression rapt, oblivious to everything outside the sphere of what she’s doing.

“I CAN’T get over how strong you are, Nell,” he said to her when he came to dinner at her house. “You heft steel around as if it weighed a feather.”

“Lifting is a trick,” she said, unimpressed by this token of admiration. “You know that, you have to. You haven’t always worn the seat of your trousers shiny sitting on a parliamentary bench or negotiating with employers.”

He winced. “What I really like about you,” he said, “is your tact and diplomacy.”

The meal, he discovered when he arrived, was not a cosy tête-à-tête, but a cheerful, noisy repast shared by the three Chinese and Donny Wilkins. Delicious Chinese food, good company.

Yet none of them is in love with her, he realized; they’re like brothers with a bossy older sister, though she’s the youngest.

“I have a message from Angus Robertson,” he said when the meal was over and the “brothers” had gone to their books—final exams were looming.

“Crusty old Scots engineer,” she said affectionately. “I brought him round, didn’t I? By the time I’d learned the lathe, he was eating out of my hand.”

“You proved your worth in a man’s world.”

“What’s the message?”

“That your Chinese powders worked a treat. The steam man is back at work feeling a box of birds.”

“I’ll drop Angus a line to tell the chap that he can buy more of the powders at a Chinese herbalist’s in the Haymarket. Though if he’s going to take them regularly, he should wash them down with milk rather than water. It’s terrific stuff, but it’s hard on the stomach. Milk is the answer to that for any medicine of any nationality that’s hard on the stomach.”

“I’m beginning to think that for all your engineering skills, Nell, you’d make an even better doctor,” Bede said.

She ushered him to the door, more pleased by that statement than by any compliments he had paid her. “Thank you for coming.”

“Thank you for asking me,” he reciprocated, hopping down a step without trying to touch her. “After your exams are over and before you go back to Kinross, will you come to dinner at my house? Believe it or not, I’m a good cook when I have a reason to cook. In our family, all the children had to take a turn in the kitchen. The place will be cleaner, I promise.”

“Thank you, I’d like to come. Just phone me through the exchange,” she said, and closed the door.

He walked away toward Redfern thoughtfully, not sure of his feelings. Something about her attracted him strongly—that fearless, indomitable quality, perhaps. The way she went straight for what she wanted, yet never moved before the right time. I wonder does her father know that she hankers to be a doctor? Medicine is the most strenuously defended male bastion, probably because, when you think about it, medicine is a perfect career for a woman. But Sir Alexander wants her with him in the business, and he’s used to getting his own way. On the other hand, so is little miss Nell.

THEY HAD no contact between that dinner and the end of the exams, which Nell flew through, even more confident because her “practical work” had been so varied and satisfactory. In one corner of her mind she was wondering whether her teachers would try to cut her down to size by marking her down, but if they did, she was prepared. She would subpoena her examination papers and insist that they be marked again by someone at Cambridge who did not know her sex. A court order would not please the faculty of Science or its engineering branch.