Palace of Tears

by Julian Leatherdale

  ‘Who’s Angie?’ Lisa asked.

  Monika replied in a strange, distracted voice, dredging a memory from a well deep in her subconscious. ‘The girl who broke Adam Fox’s heart.’

  Lisa was astonished by the range of emotions that played across her mother’s face as she spoke these words: a flush of surprise, even wonder, at stumbling on this long-forgotten fragment of knowledge, but also an aching tone of regret. It was a powerful memory, obviously, but to Lisa it made no sense at all. Who on earth was Angie?

  ‘Broke Adam Fox’s heart, she did.’ Monika was not looking at Lisa. She was focused inwards, remembering.

  ‘Who, Mum? Who broke Grandpa’s heart?’

  A tear ran down Monika’s left cheek. ‘Angie, poor Angie, whatever happened to her?’ she sang quietly to herself as she stared into the fog of her past.

  ‘Who’s Angie?’ she repeated, but Monika would say no more.

  Even so, Lisa raised the name again on her next two visits. There was no response. Monika either refused to answer or had genuinely misplaced it in her disordered memories. But Lisa did not forget the name nor the description: ‘Angie’ niggled at her, haunted her. The girl who broke Adam Fox’s heart.

  Lisa’s grandfather had a reputation for liking women. The endless parade of glamorous female guests at his hotel had certainly offered plenty of opportunities for flirtation. Adam Fox was, by all accounts, a charismatic man who was very attractive to the fairer sex. Gossips said that he and Laura, his second wife, had begun an affair while he was still married to Adelina.

  Lisa never met her grandfather but she’d heard many stories of his taste for extravagance and risk. He also loved fun. Her favourite photo of him, archived in a musty album in her grandmother’s house, was taken at a formal dinner at the Palace in 1924. It was the Annual Staff Ball, a topsy-turvy celebration where rules were broken in the name of merrymaking. In the photo Adam wore a woman’s silk evening gown and sported an absurdly huge floral hat on his head. He smiled broadly, one arm wrapped around Laura’s waist as he brandished a champagne bottle to pour a glass for his gardener, Stanley Hicks.

  So who, apart from his two wives, had ever had the power to break the old man’s heart? After the death of her son, Robbie, the already frail Adelina had descended into a prolonged battle with insanity which finally won the day in the winter of 1921, when she sought peace by taking her own life. Surely that had broken Adam’s heart?

  And then there was Lisa’s grandmother, the startlingly beautiful Laura, who Fox fell in love with that same year and married the following spring. This marriage so soon after Adelina’s death and to a woman less than half Fox’s age was a scandal that set tongues wagging and heads shaking gravely. It was the kind of risky, rule-breaking venture that made Adam Fox’s unconventional heart race with excitement.

  Laura became the bright star at the centre of the hotel’s second golden age in the 1920s, when the Palace became a glittering hub of celebrity and fashion. But even that great romance, sustained by wealth and a shared wildness of spirit and imagination, had eventually lost its fire. This was the tragedy that cast a shadow over Monika’s childhood: her parents’ estrangement, her mother’s unpredictable moods and violent scenes. Was this not enough to break Adam Fox’s heart all over again?

  So who was Angie?

  And then, one evening, as Lisa sat in the silence of the bungalow and flicked through her old photo albums, a memory came floating unexpectedly to the surface of her mind: something her grandmother had once said to her.

  Lisa had not spent much time with Laura. She was a forbidding if alluring presence on the few occasions they had met at her beautiful flat in Mosman. The place was a treasure trove of luxury, art and exotica. Large landscape paintings hung on every wall and stunning silk rugs were spread on the floors. Grandma Laura spoiled Lisa and Tom with offerings of sweets and amused them with her frightening collection of curiosities: a shrunken head from Papua, a stuffed rattlesnake from Arizona and several witchdoctor masks from the Congo.

  ‘Your grandad brought these back from his travels,’ she told them. Sometimes she would bring out an old photo album and flick through the pages, telling stories of Adam Fox and the Palace. Their father would join them on the couch, as eager to hear this history as they were. Monika would storm into the kitchen to pour herself another drink, calling out, ‘Nobody is interested in all those old fairytales, Mother!’

  Monika did not encourage these meetings and tried to keep them to a minimum. After her divorce from Michael (during which Laura had provided plenty of unsolicited and unwelcome advice), Monika and the children saw less and less of her mother, their contact dwindling down to birthday and Christmas cards and the odd phonecall. But Lisa never forgot those nights of storytelling at the flat in Mosman and, out of the blue, had insisted on inviting Grandma Laura to her twenty-first birthday. To her surprise, Monika relented.

  It was a memorable night. Dressed all in white to match her long white plaited hair, Laura was a commanding figure, the very image of a grand matriarch. Downing glass after glass of French champagne, she had clapped loudly and enthusiastically as her granddaughter danced. Later, her grandmother had taken Lisa aside and presented her with a small velvet-lined box. ‘You remind me so much of myself when I was your age. This is for you, Lisa. To wear next to your heart.’ Inside was an exquisite brooch: a silver mermaid with emerald hair set against a lapis lazuli wave. It was breathtaking. ‘My mother gave this to me,’ whispered Laura, ‘to remind me to always keep listening to the mermaids singing.’

  Lisa knew the line from T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. She hugged her grandmother fiercely. She sensed that this private moment was precious, too soon to vanish like a bubble on the stream. ‘Can I ask you something, Grandma? I hope you don’t find it – you know – too personal.’

  Laura’s eyebrows shot up in surprise but she was smiling. ‘Try me.’

  ‘Were you and Grandpa Fox in love – at the end?’ she asked impulsively. It was a dangerous and absurd question, but she had to know the truth. Her own mother said little enough about the past but what she did say painted a bleak picture of her parents’ marriage.

  Laura stared at Lisa for what seemed an eternity. Lisa feared she had offended her. ‘You want to know the truth?’ she said finally.

  ‘Yes, Grandma.’

  ‘Always,’ she said at last. ‘Despite everything. We loved each other always.’

  Laura closed her eyes for a moment. She then looked up at Lisa intently, placing a cool finger against her granddaughter’s cheek. ‘Forgive your mother a little if you can, Lisa. She suffered more than the others.’ And then she said, so softly it was as if she did not care if anyone heard her words, ‘It was Angie who broke all our hearts, poor girl.’

  This strange scene and these words came back to Lisa with sudden force as she leafed through the photo albums on her couch. She got up and went to her room where she rummaged around and finally found the small velvet box shoved to the back of a dresser drawer. She took the mermaid brooch out of its velvet lining and examined it under the lamp on her bedside table. It was a thing of great beauty but also mystery. A memento. A clue.

  ‘It was Angie who broke all our hearts, poor girl.’

  That was the night Lisa decided that she must find out about Angie. She was the secret at the heart of her family that cast a long shadow over her grandmother’s and mother’s lives. It was why Lisa was here now, on the track from Sensation Point, making her way towards the Palace, where she had an appointment with a Mr Luke Davis, the professional historian hired to research the hotel’s past for its new owners.

  She tramped up the grassy slope towards the terrace. The crumbling salmon-pink battlements and patched domed roof rose out of the mist.

  ‘The locals call it the Palace of Tears,’ Luke had said on the phone.

  As she climbed the terrace steps and saw a man waving to her in the distance, it dawned on Lisa that she was carrying
a burden of sadness for three generations of her family. Maybe finding Angie would be a chance for her to find peace as well.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  Freya

  Meadow Springs, September 1904

  On this particular bright, calm, early-spring morning, Freya sat on her front veranda watching Angie in the garden at the bottom of the stairs. Her dark-haired angel was practising walking. She wobbled on her chubby legs and clutched without success at a spray of blackboy grass before sitting down suddenly with a look of comic indignation. Freya smiled.

  Thankfully it seemed that the peak of the winter winds had passed. All through August Freya had lain awake beside the snoring bulk of her husband, Freddie, and listened to the gum branches thrashing the cottage’s tin roof with their leaf-whips. Over and over she rehearsed the nightmare of a giant gum torn from its moorings and crashing onto their cottage, killing them in their sleep. Every night Freya lay awake, convinced that it was only her sleepless vigil that kept this catastrophe at bay.

  There had been no wind at all last night and Angie had slept without waking once. Her mood seemed much sunnier this morning. So did Freya’s for that matter. She took a sip of tea from her enamel mug and enjoyed the play of sunlight through slender, curving gum leaves. Maybe she would do some painting today.

  So much had changed in the last few years but this view barely changed at all. The blue smoky haze over the valley, the orange and purple of the cliff faces on either side, the silvery-green canopy of the gum forest flashing in the wind along the ridges. This view was a comforting constant in Freya’s life, a still point where she could anchor her mind when everything else was in flux. She liked to recall the sight of her father, sitting in his fold-up canvas chair, down at the bottom of the garden under the paltry shade of the tallest gum. He would sit there for hours in his dirty canvas hat, watching the sun creep across the valley, shadows shifting like pools of dark blue water, dabbing at his easel with small, precise strokes of his brush. White-haired, hoary-bearded, his eyesight starting to dim, Wolfgang made an imperious figure on his canvas throne, surveying his kingdom of kookaburras and cockatoos.

  Her eyes closed for a moment, the warmth of the morning sun bathing her face so that she felt something akin to bliss. Unbidden into this peaceful hiatus swam another image: his face, those restless brown eyes and slick of sandy hair, a spattering of freckles on the bridge of his nose. How she ached to hold him in her arms just once more. She knew this love was forbidden now, must be kept hidden. Promises had been made, negotiated in the best interests of all involved. A very civilised settlement, a gentlemen’s agreement, never to be mentioned again, a secret buried.

  Her good husband, the broad-shouldered and solid Freddie, had come to her rescue in her time of isolation and heartbreak. She would always be in his debt, she knew, though Freddie did not see it that way and refused to speak of it. Other men might have held this secret over her as leverage, always there to be used in anger or cold-blooded manipulation. Not Freddie. He was not that kind of man. He truly loved her and, in a deep sense that was neither trivial nor cynical, Freya loved him back.

  But the ache did not go away. How could it? Every now and then, just over the other side of her garden hedge when she least expected it, was the living, breathing reminder of that powerful, insoluble love that she had sacrificed. This sacrifice was all part of Freya’s strategy of survival. The discipline that Freya showed in this was something she had learned from her father.

  A kookaburra’s cackle broke the moment of stillness. Her father had told Freya about the first time he heard one of those raucous outbursts as a young man, less than two weeks off the boat from Germany. In panic, the red-headed artist had bolted from his tent in the goldfields of Ballarat one morning, brandishing a knife. ‘Mein Gott! Wo ist der Wahnsinnige?’ he had shouted, convinced that he was about to confront an escaped lunatic. Freya loved that story.

  Freya’s eyes fluttered open. Silhouetted against the morning light was a familiar figure. She felt the shock of recognition crackle against the nape of her neck and at her temples. Why did he insist on doing this, after everything they had negotiated? It was a sweet torment seeing him so close. She hated and forgave him at the same time, knowing how hard he found it to stay away.

  Adam Fox was wearing his usual blond-straw Panama and carrying that same gnarled ivory-handled walking stick she had seen him with the first time he came into her garden six years ago. Out of courtesy and neighbourliness, Fox had come to tell the painter and his daughter about his purchase of the adjacent allotments of land and his plan to refurbish and extend the old Belmont Hotel. A two-storeyed Queen Anne-style brick confection, constructed opposite the railway line in 1892, this red-and-white gingerbread hotel of multiple cone-roofed towers and fancy fretwork gables was well screened from the cottage but had still brought more human and horse traffic to the once quiet escarpment. The von Gettners had grumbled about the intrusion but eventually accepted that they had to share their valley views with others.

  Wolfgang and Freya had reluctantly invited the charismatic young man into their cottage for a mug of tea. Here, he had dispelled their initial aloofness by commenting intelligently on Wolfgang’s watercolours, several of which were hung about the modest parlour. Fox confessed to being a keen art collector himself and an admirer of Romanticism in particular.

  Freya had watched her father struggle with the decision as to whether to reveal his true identity. He had met many men like Fox – urbane, well-dressed, rich and with a dilettantish predilection for fine art. They had once been his champions and sponsors, the Melbourne business barons and their dynastic heirs, all silk-hatted peacocks strutting their wealth and good taste at auctions and gallery shows. But where were they now that he was poor and out of fashion? Fickle, preening, soulless bloodsuckers. It was they who had started buying up the canvases of the younger painters, Fred and Tom and Arthur – not because they appreciated their vision but because their works were favoured with prizes and critical attention and therefore ripened in value. It was those same men who had persuaded Wolfgang to sink his fortune into land and borrow against his assets. The collapse of the land boom saw his investments evaporate followed by the forced sale of his property to cover debts.

  Wolfgang sent his two daughters, Freya and Eveline, away to a friend in Sydney so they would be spared the agony of the public auction of all the family’s worldly goods and the mansion in the Yarra Valley. He was only thankful that his wife was not alive to endure this final humiliation. At least the ruined artist managed to hang on to his tiny cottage at Meadow Vale, as the township was called until Adam Fox prevailed upon New South Wales Railways to officially rename it ‘Meadow Springs’ in 1900. This four-roomed retreat in the bush became his hiding place from the world, where Freya joined him to share his seclusion. Her older sister, Eveline, had fallen in love with a newspaper journalist and settled into a flat in Cremorne.

  Wolfgang listened to the young man with the walking stick praising his watercolours and said nothing. Later, Freya wondered if Adam already knew exactly who her father was and had been strategic in his seemingly guileless admiration. The previous year she had resorted to teaching art classes in the local village to raise a little extra money and had disclosed the family name to attract attention. Gossip spread fast in small townships.

  The smooth young man explained his vision with a passion that even the weary painter and his protective daughter recognised as authentic. Fox described the beautiful hotel he wanted to build, modelled on the luxurious spas of France, Switzerland and Germany. It would be a place of calm and elegance where guests would come to heal both their bodies and souls with contemplation of the view and treatments from the local spring waters. It would feature the most modern technology available in the world, including a telephone system so that each guest would be able to make a call from their room and a German steam generator that would supply electrical power to the township. It would also boast the finest
artworks from Europe and Australia, reflecting Fox’s deep respect for cultural heritage: sculptures, frescos, murals, tapestries, ceramics and rich furnishings, as well as a gallery devoted solely to the display of paintings. He planned to spend more on these artworks than he had so far spent acquiring the land.

  He then made an offer of three thousand pounds for Wolfgang’s land and cottage. Freya’s intake of breath was audible; a sum like that would ease their financial situation for a considerable time.

  The young man explained: ‘I have purchased several allotments further along the escarpment closer to Blackheath where I plan to build cottages. I would be more than happy to rent you one of these or sell you a block for a most reasonable sum.’

  Wolfgang closed his eyes for a moment, his brow creased in thought. He opened them again and studied his visitor. ‘Mr Fox, you strike me as a very sincere and determined young man. I have always thought Australia had the potential to be as fertile a cradle of artistic beauty and refinement as anywhere on earth. And so I sincerely wish you all the best for your venture. But I am afraid that my land and cottage are not for sale. I have my own reasons, just as compelling as your own, for loving this piece of the world. And I have no intention of giving it up.’

  ‘I understand,’ replied Fox. ‘So I can safely assume that if I were to increase my offer to, say, four thousand pounds, and include the tenancy of a cottage rent-free for five years, this would not change your mind?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ Wolfgang’s tone remained unwaveringly civil and warm, almost one of sincere regret that he could not accommodate Fox’s request.

  ‘So be it.’ Fox then explained he would plant a tall hedge at his own expense around their land to protect their privacy during construction and for when the new hotel commenced operation. ‘I wish to remain a good neighbour and, at the risk of presumption, even a friend to your family over time.’

  ‘I have no doubt we will become firm friends, Mr Fox. Please feel free to join us for tea whenever you have the time to spare.’ Regrettably Wolfgang only met the passionate entrepreneur on three more occasions, during one of which Fox coyly asked if he would be allowed to buy one of his small watercolours.