The cottage itself was in a sad state, its tin roof heavily rusted, its deep wooden verandas riddled with termite damage and sagging with rotten floorboards.
‘Careful,’ cautioned Luke as Lisa mounted the two steps to look through the cracked windows at the front. It was only a small building, not more than three or four rooms at the most, Lisa guessed, but it had an irresistible charm: this quintessentially Australian bush cottage perched next to the overblown mock European folly of a hotel. Lisa found herself smiling, wondering how it had managed to survive all these years in the shadow of Adam Fox’s fortress.
‘So who lived here?’ she asked.
‘Well, for many years, it was part of the hotel. It was a small teahouse or kiosk serving food for a short while, and then a kind of exclusive private villa that guests could book separately. Quite something with that view.’
‘Yes, I can imagine. And presumably the garden was in better shape then.’
‘Before that it belonged to . . . I have a copy of the original title deed, believe it or not.’ Luke found the relevant document on his laptop. ‘Wolfgang von Gettner. See, here.’
He pointed to the screen and Lisa looked at the fancy signature at the bottom of the deed. ‘I know that name,’ she said.
‘He was a nineteenth-century landscape painter.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Lisa’s mind was immediately crowded with images of deep canyons, purple and gold in the coppery glow of a sunset, of roiling bluish cloud banks tinged with pink against pale lemon skies, of tiny figures in wind-blown hats and walking coats atop rocky outcrops, dwarfed by the expanse of a snow-capped mountain range or a river-carved, forested valley. She had studied the German Romantic-inspired landscapes of Wolfgang von Gettner in her art history classes at university, and had even seen some of his works up close: large, iconic gilt-framed canvases hung in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the National Gallery in Canberra.
‘He lived here?’
‘Yes. He bought the property in 1878, as you can see. And we know he died here in 1899. His wife had predeceased him in Melbourne in 1890.’ Luke was glancing down at his laptop again but he seemed to know this historical background fluently. Lisa tried not to smile at the use of the word ‘predeceased’.
‘So why did he move here? He had lived in Victoria his whole life.’
‘True, but his brilliant career there was coming to an end by 1881. That year he resigned from his position as Master of the School of Painting at the National Gallery of Victoria. His vision of the landscape was going out of fashion and young students like Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts and other painters from the Heidelberg School were painting the bush in a newer, more popular style. And then, to make matters worse, he lost nearly all his investments in the crash of 1891.’
‘Poor man.’
‘It must have been terrible. He had a reputation for being very proud.’ He stared out at the misty valley, his face clouded with thought. ‘He’d been one of Melbourne’s wealthiest and most respected citizens, but all he managed to salvage from his bankruptcy was this cottage he’d bought for the odd painting trip to the Blue Mountains. This became his refuge from a world that had rejected him. He must have loved this valley; he painted it many times, mostly in small watercolours. Several of them still survive. There are stories of a last great oil painting of this view but it’s never been found.’
‘So he died here alone?’
Lisa tried to imagine the crusty old German, once the grand master in oils, sitting out here in his cottage garden making modest watercolours of this beautiful valley.
‘No.’ Luke snapped out of his reverie. ‘He had two daughters, Eveline and Freya. We know Eveline married an Australian named Marsh and lived in Sydney for some years. Freya lived here with him.’ He pulled up another image on his laptop. ‘Here’s an announcement in the local newspaper from April 1897 offering painting classes at a church hall in Katoomba with a Miss Freya von Gettner. Her father might have decided to retreat from the world but his daughter could not afford to be so proud. One of the exigencies of a rapid demotion in socioeconomic status, I’m afraid.’
Lisa laughed. ‘Well, as long as you promise not to use any phrases like that, I think you’ve got a best-seller on your hands,’ she teased before she realised what she was doing.
‘Sorry, professional hazard.’ Luke grinned. He didn’t mind being teased, it seemed.
To be honest, Lisa was impressed. Luke seemed undaunted by the task of re-creating the hotel’s past from the smallest clues. His enthusiasm was infectious; she wanted to help him – and she was keen to know more about her family’s history.
She glanced at her watch. She had a meeting at her agency in Sydney with a client later that day. ‘Well, I’d better not keep you any longer. I’ll give you a ring when I’ve had a look through the basement. Fingers crossed something will turn up.’
‘Thank you, I appreciate that.’ Luke extended his hand and she shook it. ‘And I’ll keep an eye out for any mention of an Angie.’
Lisa slung her camera back in her zippered bag and headed back towards the green door in the hedge. She had just about reached the door, when she heard Luke calling after her.
She turned. ‘Yes?’
‘I don’t know if you’d be interested, but I’m having a cup of tea with a Rosemary Cuff next Saturday, up at Mount Wilson. She’s the great-niece of Mrs Wells, the original housekeeper here before the Great War. Mrs Cuff says she has quite a few letters written by her great-aunt. Would you like to join us? I’m sure she’d be thrilled to meet one of the Fox family. Maybe she could even shed some light on Angie?’
Lisa gave it a moment’s thought. ‘Yes, that would be wonderful. Thank you.’ She then remembered Luke’s ancient Toyota parked outside the hotel on her arrival. ‘I’m happy to take us both out there if you like. It’s been ages since I got out that way for a drive. Text me the time and I’ll pick you up from here if that’s convenient.’
‘Thanks, that would be great.’
Returning to her car, Lisa heard the clarion blast of a freight train passing through Meadow Springs. The mist over the valley had lifted. All traces of the melancholy that had seeped into her soul down at Sensation Point were now gone, replaced by a kind of giddy excitement she hadn’t felt in years; here, poised on the edge of something new and unknown, she felt it drawing her forward.
CHAPTER 5
* * *
Lisa
Mount Wilson, April 2013
Lisa sat on an ancient weathered bench which sprouted pale-green wisps of lichen. The sycamore towering overhead had a canopy of golden yellow and brown but many of its leaves had already dropped. They littered the lawn in front of her like a pile of desiccated scrolls. She picked up several of these crackly leaves, each one larger than the palm of her hand, and crumpled them slowly into flakes with a sense of contentment that was hard to beat.
She remembered jumping into a heap of autumn leaves that her father had just raked up and kicking the heap apart with a squeal of defiant pleasure. Dad would chide her with a playful prod of his rake or, if he was feeling particularly energetic, chase her round the big garden at Beecroft, chanting: ‘Lisa, Lisa, gonna squeeze her, roll her out like a big fat pizza.’ A memory from the good times.
That part of her life seemed so far away now it was hard to believe it was even real. She normally hated dwelling on the past because it confronted her so starkly with the present. Lisa would turn thirty-eight in two months’ time. Her last serious relationship had come to an end over four years ago. She realised recently that she was spending far too much of her time alone, but her life as a freelance photographer meant she was often on the road for work, which made dating difficult. She had no day-to-day work colleagues as such, though she did catch up with other photographers for social drinks and networking now and then. On her worst days, she told herself that was the only reason she had become her mother’s carer: for the company, unrewarding as it was.
Her life felt frozen and mysterious to her in other ways too. She had just spent eight months preparing a portfolio which she’d submitted to a well-respected art gallery director in Sydney in the hope of mounting an exhibition. Two weeks ago, the director had called her. She appreciated how much time he spent on the phone with her and how thoughtful he was in his reasons for rejection. ‘The work is technically faultless, Lisa, and in some cases truly excellent. But the problem is I don’t know what to think or feel when I look at the body of work as a whole. There’s something missing: a story, an overall idea. I think you need to be bolder. To decide what you believe and not be afraid to express it in your work.’
After shedding some tears of dismay, Lisa decided that the director was right. It was time to be bolder. It was time to stop running away from the truth of her life and herself, no matter how confronting or absurd that might be.
She feared the truth. In dark moments, Lisa struggled with an almost superstitious belief that the women in her family were cursed. Was she mad to even contemplate such a thing? There was no denying that they made unhappy wives and bad mothers: Adelina’s suicide following her son’s death; Laura’s turbulent marriage, which had embittered Monika’s childhood; and Monika, in turn, losing her marriage and withdrawing her love from Tom and Lisa.
What chance did Lisa have? She had been told that, as an unwanted child, she had never learned what was reasonable to ask for emotionally, always scared of being either too needy or too detached. She was still the little girl at the locked study door, desperate for her mother’s attention but finally deciding that she expected too much.
This curse was the burden carried by three generations of Fox women: a psychological inheritance of failure handed down from mother to daughter. It was time for that chain to be broken. Lisa wanted to know what had happened to her mother in order to understand and, if possible, forgive. It was the only way Lisa would be free. It was why she was here today. To put the family curse to rest.
Lisa took her camera out of its bag and took several shots of the church near where she sat while she waited for Luke, who had popped into the bakery next door to pick up something sweet – a ritualistic threshold gift, he explained in his dry amusing manner – for the afternoon tea they had scheduled with Rosemary Cuff.
The drive west from the Blue Mountains had been shorter than Lisa remembered. Once they turned off the main highway, there were few cars on the quiet, winding back roads. She remembered the views to the distant bluffs of the mountains and the expanses of undulating hay-brown farmland before climbing into the lusher foothills around Mount Wilson. She loved this retreat into deeper seclusion and calm. It was a photographers’ mecca too, especially in autumn and spring, when flocks of shutterbugs came to walk in the cool, moist air of its rainforests or revel in its lavish heritage gardens. Velvety moss-clad drystone walls, the backlit tracery of tree ferns, fragile tapestries of fallen leaves, the hypnotic underwater light below avenues of plane trees and beeches – all these photographic treasures waited to be plundered.
Every time Lisa drove out here and saw the tall trees in the distance, picked out in startling oranges, yellows or golds against the uniform drab blue-green of the bush, she thought of her grandfather. Adam Fox was just like the pioneer horticulturists who had felt compelled to transplant these cool-climate exotics to the Australian countryside. It had once been fashionable to sneer at this colonial mindset, but Lisa believed that botanic and heritage gardens had their place in the bush, as did exotic hotels that mimicked the luxuries of Europe.
She was intrigued to learn from Luke – in one of the gathering tide of emails in her inbox over the last week – that Freya von Gettner’s cottage garden was unconventional for its time: it had been planted with natives. He had found a grainy photo taken in 1911 that clearly showed beds of banksia, acacia, hakea and clumps of xanthorrhoea under stands of Blue Mountains ash, scribbly gum, coachwood and casuarina. Several of Freya’s surviving botanical sketches, still in the hotel’s collection, showed her eye for the jewel-like beauty of grevilleas, boronias, geebungs and wattles. Later photos of the garden, when the cottage was part of the hotel grounds, revealed the natives were all replaced with azaleas and rhododendrons.
‘I hope she likes chocolate cake.’ It was Luke, bearing a white carton in both hands as he approached the bench beneath the sycamore.
They climbed back in the Honda and followed Rosemary Cuff’s directions to her house.
Rosemary Cuff was not what Lisa had expected. Knowing that head housekeepers usually came with reputations for discipline and stern high-mindedness as they struggled to impose order on the physical and moral chaos bubbling away behind a hotel’s closed doors, she had imagined a prim, forbidding woman with her hair in a tight bun. Why Mrs Cuff should be anything like her great-aunt made no sense on reflection, but Lisa still smiled to herself when she and Luke were greeted at the door of ‘Toadhall’ by a cheery, thin, nut-brown woman with long, flowing steel-grey hair, wearing a Balinese-print chemise over cheesecloth pants.
‘Come in, come in. I’ve got some chai brewing on the stove.’ Rosemary beckoned them into her tinkling, polished cave of a cottage bedecked with dream-catchers, ceramic chimes, and mobiles of glass and crystal. ‘Oh, aren’t you thoughtful!’ she crooned as she took the white box from Luke and ushered him and Lisa to an old divan draped in a faded sarong. ‘I won’t have any, dear, as I’m allergic to gluten, but let me cut you both a slice.’
The room smelled of vanilla and something pleasantly spicy. Smoke wafted from a candle on a sideboard among a huddle of ceramic burners, carved animals, sea shells and a gorgeous brass Buddhist handbell. Lisa made herself comfy on the divan and ran her hands through the fur of the large ginger tom curled up asleep on a cushion next to her.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Darwin. I know I really shouldn’t have a cat out here in the bush, but he’s so old now and stiff in the legs he couldn’t harm a bird if his life depended on it.’
Once settled round the low coffee table with their chai and cake, Lisa and Luke were joined by their hostess, bearing a box stuffed to the brim with manila folders. Luke had obviously communicated with Rosemary at some length as she seemed well-prepared for this visit and quite businesslike.
‘Before we begin, I hope you don’t mind me saying this,’ said Rosemary, clutching Lisa by the hand warmly and bestowing on her a beatific smile, ‘but it is very exciting to have Adam Fox’s granddaughter sitting right here in my cottage. Your grandad is quite the legend in our family.’
‘Well . . . thank you. It’s nice to be here.’ Lisa decided she liked Rosemary.
Rosemary turned her attention to the box. ‘I’ve been doing some digging of my own. Don’t worry, I’ve made some copies for you, Luke.’ She took out a manila folder and handed it to the historian. He thanked her, sliding out the contents, clearly impatient to take a look.
‘It’s mostly letters from Daphne to her brother Eddie in Geelong,’ explained Rosemary, ‘She was a keen letter-writer, as you can see. She wrote to him at least once a month for the whole time she was at the Palace, right up to when she left in 1921. Thankfully my grandfather saved most of them.’
‘Why did she leave?’ asked Lisa, adding, ‘If you don’t mind my asking.’
‘No secrets here,’ said Rosemary. ‘We must shine the historian’s light unblinkingly into dark places. She left because she was unhappy. At least that’s what she writes to Eddie. It was a terrible year at the Palace in many ways. Lots of things went wrong – the worst being the suicide of Adam Fox’s first wife.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard about poor Adelina.’ Lisa felt a pang of guilt when she spoke the woman’s name. This part of her grandfather’s story made her feel very uncomfortable. She had always hoped the reason for Adelina’s despair was grief for the loss of her son rather than Adam’s affair with Laura. Whatever the truth, there was an undeniable whiff of shame about the haste with which Laura had supplanted Adelina
in Fox’s affections.
‘Yes, yes. Very sad affair. Daphne seems to think she never did really recover from Robert’s death. And she wasn’t that strong to start with.’
‘These are wonderful,’ said Luke, looking up from the folder that he had been leafing through. ‘She talks about the dismissal of the German staff in 1916 because of fears they were “disloyal and dangerous”. I didn’t know about this.’
‘Oh yes, I’m afraid she does not cover herself in glory there,’ said Rosemary. ‘I suspect anti-German feeling was running high at the time. She was a dry old stick, Daphne, pretty narrow-minded in many ways. Admired your grandfather immensely, of course, but makes it clear that she thought he was far too soft on his staff.’
Lisa was interested, of course, in any light that the housekeeper’s letters could throw on the past, but she was most curious to know if they made any mention of ‘Angie’.
Luke must have picked up on Lisa’s impatience. ‘Rosemary, do you remember that I asked you about an Angie? Did you find any reference to her?’
‘Ah, yes. I certainly did.’ Rosemary became quite excited as she shuffled through letters and pulled one out marked with a pink sticky tab. Lisa felt a tingle at the back of her own neck.
‘I think this is who you mean,’ said Rosemary, finding the right page. ‘Listen to this from 2 February 1914. May I?’ They nodded, and she read the letter out loud.
Dear Eddie,
I am sorry for the long gap in our correspondence but these last weeks have been among the most intolerable in living memory. It is hard even now for me to write this letter as we are all here in the deepest shock and mourning. As I put pen to paper, I still find it impossible to believe what I am about to tell you.
Palace of Tears Page 7
