Palace of Tears

by Julian Leatherdale

  Freya could hear the steady trickle of a fountain in the adjoining room and could not resist the temptation to peek inside. This was the water-cure bar, dominated by a monumental ceramic fountain. A faint sulphuric smell filled the room. Freddie had told Freya that the steel containers in which the German mineral water was stored gave the water such a pungent odour and taste that, in Freddie’s opinion, it was undrinkable. Dr Liebermeister insisted that the appalling taste only confirmed the water’s powerful medicinal qualities. He was able to use his intimidating personality to persuade guests that they must take a swig of the stuff before every meal. ‘Willkommen, Frau von Gettner.’

  Freya turned to see Dr Liebermeister with his usual tight little smile and stiff-backed stance. At Adam’s insistence, Liebermeister had examined her during her first few weeks of pregnancy and administered several tonics in the cottage before she was sent away to Victoria, far from prying eyes.

  Freya had only met the doctor twice socially, and then only briefly, as he did not make a habit of spending time with his employer or the hotel guests outside official hours, no doubt to maintain an air of professional aloofness. This was no great loss, as he disapproved of alcohol and had only one topic of conversation, which consisted of sermonising about the scientific principles of hydropathy and its benefits.

  ‘Good afternoon, Herr Doctor. You are looking well as always.’

  The lenses of Liebermeister’s round glasses flashed like a pair of bright shillings in the overhead electric light, momentarily obscuring his eyes.

  ‘Thank you, Frau von Gettner. I understand that you are here to add a much-needed touch of beauty to our clinical surroundings. I think this will prove a great boon to both our guests and staff.’

  ‘You are too kind, Herr Doctor.’ Freya could not quite put her finger on why she felt so uncomfortable in the presence of this man except that she felt naked under his unblinking gaze. And there was that small, tight smile, as if he knew some secret about you that you did not want known.

  ‘Sorry, I’m late.’

  Given the unpleasantness of their meeting at the cottage, Freya was surprised at how relieved she felt to see Adam.

  He touched her lightly on the arm by way of greeting and apology. ‘Let’s take a look around.’

  ‘If I may be excused, Herr Fox, I have some patients to attend to.’ The white-bearded doctor nodded his head in a formal salute and turned smartly on his heel, leaving Adam and Freya alone.

  Adam was brisk and businesslike at first, and then increasingly warm and enthusiastic as he explained what he had in mind for Freya to paint: a large mural of mermaids – plump and gorgeous like Herr Böcklin’s – in the lobby and rest room, and smaller panels of sea maidens swimming up the walls in the water-cure bar, gym and reception area. They walked side by side, nodding politely at the nurses and patients, many of whom were barely conscious as they lay on beds wrapped in wet sheets or clothed in cotton gowns, being soaked from overhead pipes or hand sprays.

  Freya tried hard to disguise the war of emotions in her heart. She looked sideways at Adam as he illustrated what he wanted with a play of his hands, his handsome face a study in sweet earnestness. She had always loved him best when he was like this, unguarded and uncalculating. Every now and then he brushed the loose fringe of sandy hair out of his eyes as he talked, a gesture so familiar it triggered a rush of memory in Freya that made her dizzy as moments of intense intimacy – lips, hands, seeking, exploring, taking – flooded her mind.

  How easily she could submit to Adam’s intemperate passion again. Her body craved him, every secret place of her. But it was not just about their love anymore. Everything had changed. Adam had made his choice. And remembering that, she felt afresh the heat of her anger and sense of betrayal that Adam had sacrificed her. Money and respectability had trumped art and love. The unfairness of it drove her into a kind of frenzy: to think that her family had once enjoyed the wealth and position that would have made Adam’s choice so different.

  And then she saw her.

  As they passed through one of the bath rooms, Freya glimpsed a familiar face in the distance. It was Adelina. She lay floating in a large green tub, her cotton gown billowing in the dark water that bore her up, her face a bloodless, almost corpse-like white. She had her eyes closed and her head tilted back in the repose of sleep, cushioned it seemed on a pillow tied to the rim of the tub. Her arms, enclosed in water-swollen sleeves, were spread open in an attitude of total surrender, her wrists turned out, palms up. She was Ophelia, half-submerged in the flower-strewn stream, suspended in a dreamlike trance moments before drowning. Dr Liebermeister stood beside her as a nurse drew a canvas cover over the tub as if to encase Adelina in her watery coffin.

  Freya gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. Liebermeister looked up and his glasses flashed again, those two menacing discs catching the light. He spoke to the nurse, who rushed to pull a curtain across the strange scene.

  For a moment, Freya was too frightened to look at Adam. Her heart was racing and she had to steady her breath. What had she just witnessed? Her rational mind tried to reassure her it was some well-meaning medical procedure, but there was something about Adelina’s utter helplessness, the deathly pallor of her face, the water lapping at her chin, threatening to close over her, that disturbed Freya deeply.

  She had hardened her heart against Adelina for good reason. The White Witch had triumphantly snatched away one of the greatest joys of Freya’s life. She would never be able to forgive her for that. But to see Adelina like this, so powerless and exposed, caught Freya off guard. For one rare, brief moment, her heart was pierced with pity for this other woman. Despite the disparity in their situations, Freya and Adelina had one thing in common: the vulnerability of their womanhood. Even with her inheritance, the truth was that whatever status and protection Adelina enjoyed as Mrs Fox depended wholly on her husband and the state of their marriage. To underpin that marriage, she had given Adam her fortune. To rescue that marriage, she had endured his unfaithfulness. With his eager consent, she surrendered herself to the tender mercies of Dr Liebermeister. Freya and Adelina both knew that beneath the true bonds of love, duty and affection between men and women there often lurked something else.

  Fear.

  Freya saw and understood all of this in a passing moment of insight but her empathy with Adelina stopped well short of forgiveness and would soon be forgotten.

  She looked into Adam’s face. What she saw took her breath away: a storm of humiliation, grief and anger that left no doubt about Adam’s sincerity. Mr Fox desperately wanted to help his wife.

  As she turned to leave, Freya prayed that she would never be in need of such help.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  Lisa

  Meadow Springs, April 2013

  ‘So I have my work cut out for me,’ said Luke Davis. ‘I wish someone had taken the trouble to interview your mother about her life here years ago. You know, before . . .’ The historian coughed apologetically.

  Lisa had already explained to Luke in their first telephone conversation why an interview with her mother would be unlikely to produce any reliable stories. ‘Not that she ever wanted to talk that much about the past, to be honest.’

  Lisa was surprised to discover that Luke Davis was younger than her, if only by a few years. When she had first contacted the hotel’s new owners about their ‘historian’, she had expected someone much older: a white-haired, bespectacled fellow in a cardigan and bow tie. Luke did wear glasses and did have old-fashioned dress sense – a corduroy jacket and wool twill trousers for heaven’s sakes – but he carried it off with a touch of hipster irony signalled by his chunky, black-framed spectacles and the leather satchel in which he carried his laptop. He had a handsome, slightly careworn face, olive-skinned and featuring a generous mouth, intelligent blue eyes and short dark hair.

  Luke had been overjoyed when she rang. ‘What great timing! You were next on my list.’ He was clearly excited to
have the interest and cooperation of a member of the Fox family for his official history.

  Luke described the hotel’s steady decline as they did the grand tour, avoiding several badly damaged rooms sealed off by plastic tape and wooden barriers. They stood inside the casino with its velvet-curtained theatre stage, Corinthian columns and distinctive dome. Luke explained that ‘casino’ was the old-fashioned name for a music and dance hall rather than a gambling saloon. ‘Nobody ever gambled here,’ he said. ‘Gambolled, perhaps. Waltzed, foxtrotted, charlestoned, cake-walked. But never wagered a penny.’ The room had resounded to the music of many decades and even played host to famous opera singers. Now a musty, broken shell of its former self, the casino was silent except for the fluttering of birds high above them, no doubt protecting a nest.

  Lisa’s heart was heavy. There was no nice way of tarting up the truth: the fact was that the ‘old lady’, as Grandma Laura used to call the hotel, was in a sorry state. The Palace had lost its lustre under the previous owners and business had continued to slump despite a major refurbishment. Five years ago, they shut down the property, searching in vain to find a buyer to recoup their investment. The Palace fell into disrepair, abandoned since the day the front doors were last closed.

  Lisa’s Nikon still hung around her neck. She had been taking photos of the hotel interiors as they wandered the echoing corridors and rooms. In the gallery, she stopped to catch a wedge of light slanting sideways through the filthy cracked windows onto the golden drapes, thick with a fur of dust, hanging limply from scalloped canopies overhead. In this sepulchral gloom, the walls were an accidental mosaic of squares and rectangles where paintings had once hung.

  Luke showed her a storeroom full of antique objects that had been rescued from the hotel so far, hiding behind walls and closed doors or under floorboards: shelves of odds and ends all tagged and awaiting closer inspection. Tennis racquets in screwed wooden frames, a rosy-cheeked china doll, a stack of old records and a gramophone horn, a steamer trunk with a luggage tag from the SS Saratoga. Most eerie of all was a dark green rust-ringed steel tub with a rotting canvas cover and rubber pillow. ‘We found it behind a partition in the hydropathic clinic,’ explained Luke. ‘A continuous bath I believe it was called. A patient would spend hours, even days, immersed in warm water to cure depression, that sort of thing.’

  Each empty room held some mute testament to frozen time: a martini glass, rimed with dust, sitting on the Art Deco cocktail bar; a broken-heeled woman’s shoe lying in the corner of the casino under the peeling fresco and cobwebbed chandelier; a shabby umbrella with no handle leaning inside the open case of a silenced grandfather clock in the billiard room.

  Lisa concentrated on each shot for the right balance of composition and mood, trying to capture a sense of suspended time in isolated, quirky details and the interplay of past glamour and present ruin. She tried to shut out the smell of mouse droppings and mildew and the sound of wings in the rafters and scrabbling behind the wainscoting. She tried to not think about how her grandfather would have felt to see his magnificent hotel reduced to this shambles. A knot of grief tightened in her chest when she let her mind wander in that direction.

  As they entered the conservatory, a long, plaster-ceilinged room with panoramic views of the valley, Lisa experienced a flashback. She saw herself at age six, sitting up at a white-damasked table next to a big picture window, eating vanilla ice-cream out of a monogrammed china bowl. It was her birthday and she was the special guest of Uncle Alan who, like his ageing but elegant hotel, had an air of seedy grandeur and old-fashioned stuffiness about him. She had loved that visit to the Palace as a little girl even as she was puzzled by its ambience of moth-eaten decay.

  This memory came back with a rush of emotion so strong that it took her off guard. It was enough to make her reconsider her decision to dig up the past. Her only consolation was to hear how the new owners planned to restore the property to its former glory with the help of heritage architects. And Luke. He was equally determined to restore the hotel’s past using whatever resources he could find. He already had scans of documents and photos on his laptop which he had brought to show Lisa. He was keen to make her an ally in his hunt for whatever other scraps of the past could be saved.

  ‘I wish I’d taken more of an interest when I was younger,’ confessed Lisa as they walked out the front doors and onto the portico. ‘Monika refused to set foot in the place once she’d met my father and left home for good. I only came here a few times when I was little. Of course, Grandpa was dead long before I was born, and my aunt and uncle both died before I was twelve. By the time I wanted to know more, it was too late. I wish I could be more help to you.’

  ‘Well, maybe you can. Do you think your mother might have anything stored away? Any family papers or photos?’

  ‘I can check,’ said Lisa. ‘She has a basement full of stuff that no one has really been through for years as far as I know.’

  They crunched their way up the gravel driveway, the mist clearing a little now as sunshine struggled through the low cloud cover.

  Lisa stopped near the giant hedge on the western side of the hotel grounds. ‘Can I ask you a silly question?’

  ‘Please. Those are the best kind.’

  ‘Have you come across the name “Angie” at all in your research?’

  ‘Angie, Angie.’ Luke flipped open his laptop and began searching. ‘There’s nothing coming up. Do you know anything about her? Was she a staff member?’

  ‘I don’t know anything really. It’s just that . . .’ Lisa hesitated. Suddenly she felt self-conscious, even guilty. As if she was about to betray a confidence.

  ‘What is it?’ Luke prompted her gently.

  Lisa sighed. There was no point in being coy if she was going to peel back the layers of family history. ‘Well, it’s just that Monika mentioned an Angie the other day. She said something about her breaking my grandfather’s heart, which makes no sense to me at all from the little I know.’

  Luke looked thoughtful. ‘Sounds unlikely to be a staff member, though I suppose we shouldn’t discount anything. Most of the staff stayed with the hotel for many years. I have a copy of a letter here from Mr Fox commending his cook to a new employer. It’s quite touching how much he values the man’s loyalty; he seems deeply upset to be letting him go. Maybe that’s what your mother meant by “heartbroken”.’

  Lisa did not think that fitted the force of the emotion with which her mother and grandmother had spoken of Angie.

  ‘And then, of course, there is the possibility she was a guest.’ Luke coughed politely.

  ‘Yes, I know, I know.’ Lisa smiled. ‘Grandpa was no saint. There were always rumours about his eye for the ladies.’ She had heard quite a few stories of Adam Fox’s legendary charm and his attraction to his famous female guests, from American burlesque actress May Yohé – a striking beauty of Algonquin Indian descent who had scandalised British society by marrying Lord Francis Hope and helping him fritter away his fortune, including the infamous Hope Diamond – to ‘Sweet Nell’ Stewart, acclaimed Australian songbird and star actress of Drury Lane who had performed at the opening of the nation’s first parliament in Melbourne. Mr Fox had apparently charmed Nell into giving an impromptu concert in the casino for the hotel’s guests. ‘I agree it’s possible, but it still doesn’t feel right.’ Lisa had a strong sense that Angie was more than an affair or passing fascination; according to her grandmother, she had broken all their hearts. She had to be someone intimately involved in the family’s fate. ‘Who else was close to the family apart from the staff, do you know?’

  ‘Well, it’s hard to say. His first wife, Adelina, was a notorious recluse, rarely seen in public. She became even more isolated after the death of her son, as you probably know. His second wife, Laura, was very active in the local community with charities and what have you, but very little seems to be known about her family background. Adam, of course, had friends and business colleagues in Sydney and entertained
them up here in the mountains at the hotel. He enjoyed company. Especially parties.’

  ‘So he did.’ Lisa smiled. Adam Fox and the Palace were famous for parties.

  A yellow-tailed black cockatoo soared over the hotel’s dome and landed in the fork of a huge gum tree on the far side of the hedge. Out of habit Lisa raised her camera and focused for a shot. Through the zoom lens she saw a dark-green door set into the hedge further down the gravel driveway as it swept towards the terrace.

  ‘Where does that go?’ she asked, pointing over Luke’s shoulder.

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot. The cottage. Do you want to take a look? It became part of the hotel after the Great War. We haven’t decided what to do with it yet.’

  There was something about the wooden gate tucked into the giant hedge that tickled Lisa’s curiosity. Was it childhood memories of reading The Secret Garden, the fascination of a portal into a forbidden realm? Or was it something else stirring in her memory that drew her to this almost hidden entrance?

  ‘Sure. If you can spare the time.’

  The gate’s hinges were badly rusted and it took several determined shoves from Luke to open it, twisting the iron-looped handle in his fist to lift the latch.

  On the other side was what must have once been a well-ordered oasis of flowerbeds, topiary shrubs, arbours and lattices: a formal European-style garden but with the odd, disruptive presence of towering gums here and there, along with their litter of shredded bark and massive, earth-splitting roots. The result presented a strange juxtaposition of picturesque cottage garden and unruly bush; five or more years of neglect had seen bush gain the upper hand, swallowing up all the paths and beds in a sea of native grasses and thick wattle and bottlebrush. The huge tangled photinia hedge surrounded it on three sides but left the cliff-facing side open to a view of the valley, still sunk deep in mist.