The Touch (63 page)

But as he searched for her in a frenzy of fear and guilt, he saw for the very first time in their long relationship how terribly he had failed her. All the things he had given her, she didn’t want; all the things he hadn’t given her, she craved. He equated love with fabulous gifts, immense luxury. She did not. He equated love with fantastic sexual satisfaction. She did not—or, if she did, he was not the man who could give her that. A fire did burn in her, he was sure of it now, but it didn’t burn for him. And what he asked himself over and over as he searched for her was where and why the erosion of her esteem for him had started. But his panic was too great to see the where, the why. He could get no further than the realization that the love for her he had deemed dead for many years was not dead after all. A poor emotion, unreturned, so injurious to his sense of self that he had blotted it from his mind. Now here it was, risen to the surface again, thrust there by the horror of imagining her mad and dead. His fault if she was. His fault, no one else’s.

And there was Ruby. There was always Ruby. Once, he remembered, he had asked her if a man could love two women at once; she had turned the question aside with a trace of malice, but it was in her own interests to do that. Yet she must have known that he loved both of them, for she joined herself to Elizabeth as a confederate. He had thought she did so in a spirit of charity, as the victor. Now he understood she had done so as a sure way to keep that part of his love that belonged to her. If he hadn’t loved Elizabeth, the two women in his life would still have become friends, perhaps, but more distant ones. He was, he admitted, a man who liked to have his cake and eat it too. Ruby meant more; Ruby was romance, sex, intimacy, an illicit thrill, and that curious combination that a beloved woman becomes to her man, of lover, mother, sister. But he had lived his life with Elizabeth, fathered her children, gone through the torments of Anna and Dolly with her. And that took love, else he would have let her go.

So when Lee rode across the lawn and gave her back to him, Alexander underwent an enlightenment that brought him lower than a surrendered captive. He owed his wife a debt he couldn’t hope to pay with any coin save one: open the cage and let the bird fly.

AFTER FIVE DAYS the rain blew out; Kinross, so close to flood, gave thanks. If Alexander had been a less careful custodian and left the river as it had been after the mining of the placer, flooding would have been inevitable, but he had shored the banks and returned the stream to a proper course dredged deep enough to take the overflow.

Seven days after her disappearance, Elizabeth mounted Cloud and set off for her customary ride. Once she left the immediate vicinity of the house she swerved into the saturated bush and let the mare pick its way between boulders and hazards for a full mile before returning to the bridle path that led to The Pool.

Lee was there, waiting, came to Cloud and held out his arms to receive her. Kisses wilder and more passionate, a degree of starvation that even she hadn’t gauged; she couldn’t wait for him to touch her, to bare her body, to take it. And always those alien sensations of ecstasy, a pouring forth of everything she was into the crucible of love. Then he took her into The Pool, and made love to her in what seemed their natural habitat, water.

When they were dry she unbraided his hair, enchanted by its length and thickness; played with it, entwined it among hers, led it over her breasts, buried her face in it. And told him of how she had seen him swimming in The Pool, and never managed to banish the sight of him from memory.

“I didn’t know it could be like this between a man and woman,” she said. “I have entered a whole new world.”

“We can’t stay here much longer” was his answer: why was it always he who had to remind them of reality? Then he asked her what had haunted him since he found her. “Elizabeth, dearest love, you’re not supposed to do this. I know we can do it, but only after I’ve seen Hung Chee, who knows the table of the woman’s cycle. So far we’ve taken no precautions, and you can’t be let conceive. That’s a death sentence.”

She laughed, a carefree sound echoing its joy around the forest. “Darling Lee, there’s nothing to worry about! Truly, nothing! No child I bore to you would hurt me. If I am lucky enough to conceive, there will be no eclampsia. I am as sure of that as I am that the sun will come up tomorrow morning.”

THE ENTIRE burden of what had happened between Elizabeth and him fell upon Lee, who hadn’t realized the enormity of its weight until he met Elizabeth at the pool seven days after he had found her. From the moment when she laughed and ridiculed his fears for her safety in the event of a child, he understood everything that he had pushed from his mind for a week. All that had filled it was Elizabeth, the incredible fact that she loved him, had loved him for as long as he had loved her. The qualms he suffered he had assumed would vanish when they met again and could talk the matter through—surely there was an honorable answer! But she wasn’t interested in answers, she didn’t see the point of answers; she had found her answer in him, and nothing else mattered to her.

He had gone to their meeting determined it would have no physical side because he remembered his mother explaining that sexual intercourse was a death sentence for Elizabeth. He knew it was not: conception was. His mother knew that too, which was why she had never fallen pregnant to Alexander. But they were tied to the Chinese nobility, weren’t ignorant like Europeans.

Oh, but let there be no issue of that one unforgettable ascent into paradise! It might be forgiven him, as he hadn’t intended it or imagined it could happen, but now they had to wait. Then she had slid from her horse into his arms and he saw her, smelled her, felt her, tasted her. The power in her overwhelmed him, he just couldn’t stop himself. Then, when he had raised the subject of conception, she had gone into fits of laughter!

Time! Where had it gone? They hadn’t discussed more than a small fraction of what had to be discussed before she was back on her dappled mare and riding off. They were to meet again at the pool in four more days; she had begged for an earlier tryst, but he had managed to stand firm. They were on a collision course with disaster, as he well knew and she ought to know. But for all his experience with women, Elizabeth represented the one and only love, so he had no idea how single-minded women in love were, or how ruthless, or how indifferent to any factor save the preservation of that love. He had thought that they would be as one about sparing Alexander as much pain as possible, but she didn’t care one iota about sparing Alexander. Dolly, yes. Only Dolly held her immobile. It was he, Lee, who cared about Alexander, who saw what they were doing as a kind of treason to the man responsible for Lee’s good fortune, career, opportunities. His mother’s most dearly beloved. Elizabeth feared Alexander; for the rest, he didn’t exist.

She had ridden away obviously convinced that they could keep their secret forever if necessary, and hugging that secret to herself as if it were a trophy in some ongoing war against her husband. For Lee, on the outside of this very long marriage, it was shrouded in mystery. Only now could he appreciate that even his mother did not fully understand it. Probably Alexander was as much in the dark as he was, for the fulcrum on which it turned was Elizabeth.

So Lee went back to Kinross down the snake path in the face of the dying sun more confused and rudderless than ever. All he knew was that he didn’t possess the duplicity or furtiveness to maintain a secret relationship with Alexander’s wife. For a week he had believed that she would betray it in all innocence by a chance remark, an imprudent reference to him, but now he realized that she never would. Even if she swelled up with his child, she would preserve her silence.

This thought, rising to the surface of his mind as he passed the poppet heads and waved at their attendants, made him stop in his tracks. Oh, Jesus! No, no, no! Not for anything would he do that to Alexander! He knew the story, told to him in a tiny coffeehouse in Constantinople: Alexander’s mother had had a lover whose identity she had refused to disclose, and her husband had known that the child wasn’t his. To let the wheel describe that particular full circle was manifestly impossible. Sneaking around was bad enough; repeating history was intolerable. To humble such colossal pride, to reduce a life’s work to insignificance, to impose upon Alexander his titular father’s fate—no, and no, and no! Unthinkable!

Ruby was waiting for him as he entered the hotel, the worry she felt not written on her face, which smiled at him even as its eyes quizzed him.

“Where have you been? People kept ringing up for you.”

“I’ve been on the mountain looking at ventilation shafts.”

“Is that important?”

“Oh, Mum, and you a director of Apocalypse Enterprises! It always is, but Alexander’s planning a big blast where the old vein’s run out in number one tunnel—he says there is another vein twenty feet in, and you know his nose for gold.”

“Huh! His nose for gold!” Ruby snorted. “He might have a Midas touch, but he never seems to remember that the original King Midas died of starvation because even his food turned to gold.” But that wasn’t what she was thinking. My son looks dreadful. The incubus of this affair is so tight around his neck that it’s strangling him. It’s time I went to see Elizabeth and wrung the truth out of her. “Dinner?” she asked.

“Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”

No, what you’re hungering for is another man’s meat. But is it still a going thing? Is that why you’re so tormented, my jade kitten? She can’t run the risk of a pregnancy, so probably what you’re going through is hunger pure and simple. My poor Lee.

Lee went up the stairs to his own room. It wasn’t very large because he wasn’t a personal possessions kind of man—the clothes he had to have for all occasions, a few hundred treasured books, little else that mattered. Photographs of Alexander, Ruby, Sung. None of Elizabeth.

For a while he sat in his armchair and looked into nothing, then got up and went to the phone.

“Lee here, Aggie. Sir Alexander, please.” No need to tell Aggie whereabouts; she knew exactly where he was at all times, just as she knew that X was eating dinner at Y’s house, that Z was on the sports oval training his new dog, that M was in Dubbo visiting his mum, and R stuck on the lavatory with diarrhea. Aggie was the spider at the center of the Kinross telephonic web.

“Alexander, when do you have a moment? I need to speak with you privately as soon as possible.”

“Privately as in privately?”

“Definitely.”

“Tomorrow morning at the poppet heads. Eleven?”

“I’ll see you there and then.”

The die was cast. Lee went back to the armchair and wept his goodbyes. Not to Elizabeth yet—Alexander might consent to divorce her, even give her Dolly. No, Lee wept for Alexander. After tomorrow morning, they would never meet again. The break would be cruelly complete, for neither man believed in half measures. And how hard that would make things for his mother! Somehow he had to fix it so that she at least didn’t suffer from the repercussions.

ALEXANDER TOOK the cable car to the poppet heads, Lee walked the snake path. The day, April 24, was one of those mid-autumn idylls that sometimes follow a summer that had lasted too long and been too harsh; a sweet-smelling breeze off the freshly washed and pungent bush, a gentler sun, a few puffy clouds wandering through the sky as if lost.

At this hour the poppet heads were almost deserted. Alexander was standing beside a massive air compressor powered by a steam engine, which was why it couldn’t be put inside the mine—too much smoke, too much poisonous gas. When he had switched from hand drills to pneumatic percussion drills for boring the charge holes and from picks to pneumatic percussion hammers for breaking down the rock face, he had had to devise a way to supply compressed air to these air-powered machines, located as far away from the compressor as a quarter or a third of a mile. A large steel pipe inside a slightly bigger hole pushed the air down to a cylindrical steel tank six feet in diameter and twelve feet long that sat on the gallery floor; from this, sections of steel pipe led to the drills and hammers.

Drilling and blasting didn’t happen every day by any means, however, nor was it ever done in more than one tunnel at a time. Alexander’s inclination lay to electrically powering the air compressor, but that was for a future when electric motors were adequate. For the moment, steam was the only way to go, so the compressor was one of, if not the largest, in the world.

“Your private talk can wait” was Alexander’s greeting. “I want to go into number one tunnel for another look.”

They took a cage and traveled down 150 feet to the vast main gallery, brilliantly lit by electricity; men appeared regularly, pushing small ore-laden skips on rails to the open side of the gallery, where there was a fifty-foot drop down to the big skips in the main adit. A small skip on reaching the edge was tilted by a lever and cascaded its contents into a big skip below. An engine outside the adit hauled the big skips out by a steel cable to where they could be hitched to a locomotive and towed off to the sorting and crushing sheds. Dust hung in the air, which otherwise was fresh, fed in and sucked out by electric fans. All around the blind three-quarters of the gallery walls the tunnels dived into the mountain, some traveling straight, some upward, some downward, the newer ones branching many times.

Together they walked into number one tunnel, the oldest and most exploited, their way lit by electricity; as mining in it had ceased, they met no one. Typical Alexander, it was more than adequately shored up by massive beams, though Lee knew that the granite in this part of the mountain didn’t have enough greywacke to make a collapse likely.

It was a thousand-foot walk, punctuated by the wet, sloshing suck of their boots and the slow, steady dripping of water the crushing pressure of the mountain squeezed out. In this climate, no danger of the water’s turning to ice and acting as a wedge to split the layers apart. That could only happen when blasting, the most delicate and demanding of all mining operations—which was why, if the blast were a big or unusual one, Alexander preferred to do it himself.