She leaned against the warm wall of the cliff face and waited. A parrot’s call tinkled bell-like above her in the fork of a gum tree. They would have their first romantic kiss here, at Sensation Point. The valley she loved so well would be the silent witness to their vows of love. It was her valley and her mother’s valley and her grandfather’s long before the Foxes came. It had a hypnotic power that had captured Mr Fox’s soul and emboldened him to gamble against all the odds on an absurd dream. And the valley had repaid his daring a thousandfold. Maybe it would do the same for her.
Robbie saw her as he came round the corner, stooping so as not to bang his head on the overhang. He slowed now, realising that Angie was waiting for him. There was even a trace of his usual carefree, arrogant saunter as he came closer. As if he had chosen to have a stroll in the bush rather than engage in a desperate pursuit. His outfit was caked in dust, his hair and face damp with sweat. He wheezed a little but did not seem to be in any distress.
She smiled at him. But he was not smiling back.
‘Where is it?’ His eyes blazed and there was a definite note of urgency in his voice, maybe even anger. This was not the way the game was meant to be played, thought Angie. Or was it? The intensity of Robbie’s gaze alarmed her.
‘Robbie . . . ?’
She was trying to read the mood in his dark brown eyes, but the meaning of his gaze eluded her. She could hear her own voice pleading with him. It was not meant to sound like an apology, more a surrendering, a softening, inviting him closer. She hoped he would understand.
‘I said where is it?!’ Robbie was definitely angry now.
Angie let the postcard she had hidden up her sleeve slide into her hand.
He lunged at her and grabbed her wrist roughly.
‘Robbie, please don’t . . .’
‘Give it to me.’
His voice was demanding, petulant. Angie felt her resentment rise like a surge of blood behind her eyes. Robbie’s face was close to hers. She could see the blond downy hair on his upper lip, the lushness of his long lashes, the pink moisture of his mouth. He had grown into a handsome man like his father.
Leaning against him, she pressed her mouth against his and realised with a shock that she was the one who desired, who yearned, who loved. Robbie was only interested in the girl on the postcard. Not her. In that instant she saw a different Robbie, a tricky, lying, impatient Robbie who, like his father, got everything he wanted no matter what it took.
What happened next was hard for her to recall.
Did she push him away? She was not sure. She felt the card fall from her hand, felt his fingers reaching for it. Then they were both buffeted by a blast of hot air. The giant tree behind them groaned like the mast of a ship in a high gale, its branches grinding against each other in agony.
Robbie turned away from her in time to see the postcard flicked by the wind over his head. He did a strange little twist and leap, trying to catch it, and landed awkwardly, jamming his foot against the thick root of the gum tree.
And then he fell.
‘Angie?’ His first cry was a confused question, rising shrilly to pure terror. ‘Angie!’
She watched his body tumble over the tree root and pitch forward through a gap in the scrub on the other side of the path. His foot dislodged a clod of earth that rolled away into the void. The struggle was brief. Robbie’s arms flailed wildly, searching in vain for a firm handhold. She heard a soft grunt as he crashed through a wattle bush on the cliff edge. And then he was gone.
Angie heard her own scream and the shrieks of a flock of startled cockatoos as if in response. Below, the valley rippled like the waves of a cruel ocean that had swallowed up the only son and heir of Mr Adam Fox.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
Lisa
Meadow Springs, April 2013
Lisa stood in a kind of prayerful silence for at least five minutes. Her hands were numbed by the cold as they clutched the slick metal railing of the chain-link fence. Out of the sea of white mist she could hear the delicate chimes of bellbirds pinging in the distance and, much closer, the screech of yellow-tailed black cockatoos, invisible but unmistakeable, as they launched themselves into the cotton-wool-filled valley below. A steady drip-drip-dripping of water pattered mournfully on the leaves of the huge gum near the cliff edge. Behind her, the wail of a train horn and the high-pitched keening of its wheels added to the unnerving atmosphere.
Sensation Point. She sighed and a patch of mist escaped her mouth, mingling with the larger mist all around her. She could feel melancholy seeping into her soul as stealthily as the clamminess of the mist through her anorak and jumper. She hugged herself for warmth but also for comfort.
The local history librarian at Springwood had told her on the phone that a marble plaque had been set into the sandstone to mark the tragic spot but it had been removed some time after the First World War. Now all Lisa could find was a ghostly rectangle of less weathered rock punctuated by the rust marks of four bolts. She had found a photo of the original plaque online. It read: In Memory of Robert James Fox, beloved son of Adam and Adelina, who was taken up to the embrace of God on 14th January, 1914. She smiled sadly at the brave metaphor of ascending – in complete denial and contradiction of the boy’s fatal fall.
Lisa secured her Nikon to the railing with a flexible octopus-grip tripod and waited. As a young girl growing up in Katoomba, she had read about the Blue Mountains’ most famous photographer, Harry Phillips. Leaving his wife in charge of his commercial studio in Katoomba, Harry would spend days at a time trying to capture the evanescent, dramatic beauty of clouds and mist over the valleys with a passion that bordered on religious fervour. According to village folklore, the sight of a heavy mist rising out of the Jamieson would prompt the locals to declare ‘Harry’s happy!’
The mountains were a breeding ground for eccentrics and Harry was no exception. He was most famous for his photo War Clouds, taken in March 1914, in which he claimed a sinister black cloud formation, backlit by sun and shaped like a double-headed eagle, was a portent of the coming war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Despite such nonsense, Lisa admired Phillips: for his craft, his work ethic, his prodigious output, his willingness to experiment and his gift for marketing himself. It took a single-minded vision to make a living as a professional photographer. A kind of madness, really. She should know.
This morning the surface of the mist crested like sea spray, flung up into the air in slow motion, and then drifted in ragged scraps of cloud above the ridge line. Satisfied with the composition, she shot off twenty exposures at different f stops and checked her watch. Her meeting was in ten minutes. It was time for her to return to the hotel.
Was it because she knew what had happened here that made the place feel so sad? she wondered as she repacked and zipped up her camera bag. Or was it something else, some intangible but real reminder of loss that lingered here at this cliff edge and touched people’s souls?
As a photographer she understood the appeal of ruins. She was fascinated with the bittersweet triumph of nature and time over every human effort to control them both, moss and root and earth overwhelming brick and iron and glass. She was drawn to abandoned places and loved the lurid colours and riotous growth of verdigris, rust and mould. She also knew the power of a telling detail: a broken cup, a crippled chair, a lifeless glove. Lisa understood all this and sought it out in her art photography. But she rejected the idea of such places having ‘spirit’ or ‘memory’. That was getting far too close to the idea of ghosts. She had stopped believing in ghosts when she was six.
So why did she feel so stirred up? Lisa asked herself as she trudged back along the track. It was not that hard to understand really. She was connected to this place by family history. The memories and stories of her mother, Monika, and grandmother, Laura. As Lisa turned the bend, ducking under the sandstone overhang, she saw the hulk of the Palace loom out of the mist above her. This was Monika’s place, her childhood playground, her h
ome away from home. If he had lived, Robert James Fox would have been Monika’s older half-brother: Lisa’s uncle.
The hotel was there at the very start of Monika’s story. She was born there by accident. Adam Fox and his heavily pregnant second wife, Laura, were staying at the hotel for a weekend during the summer of 1930 while renovations were being completed on their new house in the nearby township of Leura. Three weeks before she was due, Monika decided it was time to enter the world. It would remain her way for most of her life: always in a hurry. As if there was never enough time to do everything she had to do.
Now, time really was running out for Monika Fox with the onset of Alzheimer’s and, more recently, a stroke. Lisa had visited her mother at the Ritz nursing home in Leura earlier that morning. The rehab nurse had said encouraging words about Monika’s progress but, in her heart, Lisa knew that her mother’s story had entered its final chapter.
It was not easy for her to accept that this tiny birdlike creature, with her darting pale blue eyes and restless, bony hands, was the same woman who had ruled her life with an iron will for so many years. Seeing her mother’s aloof and unwavering authority crumble into this pitiful wreckage of anxiety and dependence gave Lisa no satisfaction, though no one who knew her history could have blamed her if it did. Instead, being forced to watch her mother’s decline was like witnessing the demolition of a magnificent cathedral. It was heartbreaking.
In her time Monika Fox had been celebrated as one of Australia’s most gifted children’s writers. Her Kitty Koala books had won the hearts of thousands of fanatically loyal young readers as well as praise from publishers, book councils, critics and librarians. For forty years she enjoyed a successful partnership with the illustrator Eric Blakeson, who’d brought her family of blundering, comic marsupials to life ‘with irresistible charm, wit and unkempt fur’ as one reviewer phrased it.
As fashions in children’s literature changed, Monika’s reputation remained that of an elder stateswoman whose readers were now parents and grandparents themselves. Their fond childhood memories kept her backlist in print and on library shelves, but it had been many years since she had produced a new title. The truth was that her Australian publisher had long ago been swallowed up by a global behemoth and her agent had retired from the game. Monika’s time seemed to have passed.
By her late sixties, Monika didn’t want to write another Kitty Koala book despite talk of a possible animated movie. She worked for six years instead on a manuscript entitled ‘The Castle of Ice’. It was the story of an unhappy princess living in a castle carved from solid ice who escapes to the forest where she becomes the servant of a gifted witch. Publishers rejected this surreal, dark fairytale in an Australian setting, saying it was not the kind of book people expected from the famous Monika Fox. She didn’t write another word after that, though she continued to ‘make notes’, a writer’s habit of a lifetime that never deserted her.
While generations of Australian children felt a familial closeness to the vivacious red-headed woman on the back of their favourite copy of Kitty Goes to Town or Kitty’s Big Mistake, Lisa knew her own mother largely as an imperious, remote figure. This was an irony that Lisa grasped from an early age.
Locked away in her study and her bubble of celebrity, Monika dedicated herself to these countless other children who in turn showered her with adoring letters, drawings and handmade offerings. Their flattery and affection contrasted starkly with the irritating demands of her own flesh and blood. As a smart, handsome first-born, Tom was an object of pride for his ambitious mother – at least for a while. But Monika’s daughter was a different story.
Lisa was an unexpected and unwelcome change-of-life baby who spent most of her early years in the care of nannies. In the company of these crisp, professional women and her often moody older brother, Lisa would have most of her childhood to learn how to survive with little more than sporadic attention from her mother. Except, that is, in the matter of manners and grooming. Here, Monika Fox proved to be an old-fashioned martinet. As part of the famous author’s public profile, her two offspring were wheeled out at promotional events with fixed smiles and brutally brushed and plaited hair as embodiments of doting progeny. Her ‘biggest fans’. Despite this hypocrisy, Lisa could not give up entirely on the notion that, in her own obscure, unexpressed way, Monika really did love her.
So where were all those adoring children now? thought Lisa a tad bitterly, soothing Monika’s forehead as she drifted in and out of a mid-morning nap. Lisa had brought the usual box of Monika’s favourite handmade chocolates from the village: an eye-popping array of pralines, truffles and clusters. Monika had always had a weakness for ‘the finer things in life’, as she put it. Given her substantial inheritance from Adam Fox, the child support from her ex-husband and the healthy income from her best-selling books, she had always had the means to indulge this ‘weakness’, even as a single mother.
While Monika dozed, Lisa slipped the silk ribbon off the box and snuck one of the almond pralines into her own mouth. The chances were her mother would misremember how many she had eaten. Lisa felt a blush of shame at this childish act of deception. And then felt angry with herself for feeling ashamed.
By the window a vase of stock – a birthday bouquet from an admirer – was browning at the edges. Before the stroke, Monika had been lured from her room at the Ritz every now and then to be a monumental presence at a local writers’ festival or book launch, but it had been at least eighteen months since her last public appearance. The dying flowers were the only acknowledgement that anyone apart from Lisa knew or cared about the existence of Monika Fox.
Why am I here? Lisa asked herself. It was a question that continued to preoccupy her but remained unanswered. Her brother Tom had left Sydney as soon as he finished his science degree and started his own life – a public service career and a family – in Canberra. He dutifully sent Christmas and birthday cards but rarely visited. Monika took even less interest – if that was possible – in her two grandchildren, Oliver and Sasha, than she had in her own children.
As for her own father, Michael, Lisa had not heard from him since he walked out of their lives two weeks before her ninth birthday, leaving his children alone with the famous author behind the locked study door. It was as if he had been killed in a car accident – like her poor uncle Alan – or lost at sea, fates Lisa had childishly imagined for him as preferable to his cold-blooded vanishing act.
Lisa had memories of Michael as a loving father when she was little. But his corporate legal career had enforced longer and longer periods of absenteeism from family life over the years. Hastily purchased souvenirs from Tokyo and LA airports were handed over as tokens of appeasement on his return from business trips. When Monika discovered Michael’s year-long affair with a female colleague, the collapse of their marriage was no less noisy and heated for the fact of their largely separate lives. Nights of slammed doors, hurled objects and shouting were followed by their father’s swift overnight departure followed by a legal battle to untangle assets and decide the fate of the children. Their father made no claims for custody. His relocation overseas for work meant the court decided they should stay with Monika. Her ready agreement to this arrangement was underwritten by a generous alimony scheme that paid for a live-in nanny who performed the general administrative and pastoral duties of a parent.
So what was it that kept Lisa here at her mother’s side? Was it the absurd hope that she would be rewarded with some sign of maternal love, no matter how fleeting? As pathetic as that seemed, Lisa had to admit that it was probably true; that she was still that little girl standing outside her mother’s study door longing for admittance.
Monika’s eyes fluttered open and she stared vacantly at the fair-haired woman seated by her bed. She was momentarily bewildered, her voice a touch slurred as an after-effect of the stroke. ‘Lisa?’
‘It’s okay, Mum. I’m here.’
Lisa wrapped her hand around Monika’s frail fingers to reassu
re her of her protective presence. The tension in Monika’s face subsided at this touch and the sound of Lisa’s voice but her eyes still darted about questioningly.
‘When is Tom coming?’ she asked.
‘Soon, Mum, soon.’ Lisa had given up explaining to Monika that her son hadn’t visited for two years and was unlikely to do so any time soon. Monika also asked for her own father, Adam Fox, who was even less likely to visit as he had passed away in 1957. She never asked to see her mother. Or her ex-husband.
For short periods each day, Monika’s mind wandered freely, unconstrained by any sense of the present or past. She would conduct one-sided conversations with the long dead – her older sister, Lottie, her younger brother, Alan, and her father, Adam – which would sometimes end in bursts of angry confusion or weeping. Lisa did her best to calm Monika after these episodes and had even become used to them, but one such occasion had stuck in her mind more vividly than the others.
It was a morning about three weeks earlier, and they had been sitting in rattan chairs on the balcony of the Ritz on a cool, sunny autumn afternoon enjoying a cup of tea. Monika was making notes, as she liked to do most days in the dog-eared black notebook that she carried with her everywhere and kept locked in her bedside cabinet. She stopped writing, turned her pale, watery eyes on her daughter and said something completely unexpected.
‘Whatever happened to Angie, poor Angie? Whatever happened to her?’
The words came out in a lilting rhythm like the refrain of a song. At first Lisa assumed that’s exactly what it was: a snatch of some old show tune or love ballad that had bobbed up to the surface. But there was an urgency and emotion behind the question that seemed at odds with the singsong tone.
‘What did you say, Mum?’
Her mother repeated the refrain word for word, her eyes widening with dismay as if she was hearing it again for the first time in an age.
Palace of Tears Page 3
