The ‘lost’ von Gettner was, of course, the dramatic surprise at the centre of Adam Fox’s grand gallery opening. The invitations had all been sent months ago and some of Australia’s most prominent artists had promised to attend. They included the celebrated landscape and war artist Arthur Streeton, who had been a student of von Gettner’s when he was Master of the School of Painting at the National Gallery of Victoria. The invitation did not reveal the secret identity of the painting that was to be unveiled but had alluded to ‘a discovery that will electrify the art world’.
‘I met Wolfgang several times before he died,’ said Adam, resting his hand gently on the nape of Laura’s neck, her skin cool to his touch. ‘I remember asking him once if I could have one of his works. “When your Traumschloss is finished, Herr Fox,” he said, “I will give you something to put in your gallery.” And here it is.’
Adam knew this was a simplified version of the truth, but the last thing he wanted was to talk about all that complicated history. To his mind Laura was a fresh start, a clean slate, a second chance at happiness. He knew he would be judged harshly for this affair but Adam prided himself on the fact he did not lack courage. He was used to standing against the tide of public opinion. He had ignored ridicule and scepticism when he built ‘Fox’s Folly’, stared down gossip and disapprobation when he introduced his lover Freya to his society friends, and withstood paranoia and anger for protecting ‘his Germans’ during the war for as long as he could.
And the fact was he no longer felt any guilt. True, he felt pity for his wife and a deep sadness that the long, affectionate companionship which was all that survived of their marriage was now dead. He had done everything in his power to help Adelina to be happy but to no avail. He was not completely blameless for the current state of affairs, he knew that, and he would never abandon Adelina, but he could not see why he should sacrifice his own wellbeing to her deluded and wilful misery. Carpe diem, that was his creed. Life was too short for senseless self-sacrifice.
Adam leaned down to kiss Laura tenderly in the soft crook beneath her right ear. She smelled so good, her silky skin’s perfume an intoxicating melange of lavender and salt. To his surprise he felt the muscles jump in her neck and she pulled away. ‘Is everything alright?’ asked Adam.
‘Yes, yes,’ the young woman murmured impatiently and retreated a step or two. She caressed the marble head of a young faun on a nearby plinth and looked at Adam from underneath her black fringe. ‘Just remember, Mr Fox, I am not part of your official collection. Not yet. Too much handling will spoil the merchandise.’
Her teeth flashed white in a sardonic smile and she drifted even further off among his assembly of artworks.
Adam was perplexed. He thought of himself as someone who respected an independent spirit in a woman. He certainly never wanted some wretched, cowed creature to worship him. Or so he told himself. But Laura was moody in a different way to the other women he had known. It was not so much that she blew hot and cold – he was used to that, even expected it – but that her entire manner was strangely detached. There were moments, certainly, when she expressed strong emotions and responded to his touch with genuine passion. But it was intimacy she shunned, revealing little of herself while still taking pleasure in Adam’s attention. In many ways this suited Adam Fox. Weighed down with the sorrows and regrets of middle age, he was happy to bury his past and content to live in an oblivious eternal present. Even so, Laura puzzled him.
Maybe this coolness, this diffidence, was characteristic of the ‘new woman’ everyone was talking about, thought Adam, to whom the old rules did not apply and for whom everything was an adventure. She smoked, she drank, she voted and spoke her mind, she was the equal of any man and did not need his approval. In that way, Laura reminded him of Freya. Twenty years earlier such a woman had been looked on with distrust, even fear. Now she was valorised. How the times had changed.
Adelina’s outburst about the Woods two weeks ago had taken him by surprise, but the truth was Freya was never far from his mind. Adelina was tormented by the ghost of her son because she had ‘unfinished business’ with him. That was what Mrs Wells had argued when she defended her meddling in Mrs Fox’s welfare. Perhaps she was right. It seemed that Freya was Adam’s ghost. She would haunt him to the end of his days. Unfinished business.
Three weeks ago, Adam had received another letter from Freya, postmarked Dusseldorf. It threatened to expose Adam’s theft of her father’s painting which he had claimed, back in 1917, was a fake. ‘Why then are you opening a new gallery with my father’s work to be unveiled as a genuine masterpiece?’ the letter asked, its writer claiming to have heard news of the grand opening from ‘friendly ears and eyes’.
The letter continued:
I beseech you for the last time, Adam, to hand back my cottage and land so I can give it to Angie as her rightful inheritance. I promise that you will never see or hear from me again if you right this wrong. I will exit your life forever and leave you and Adelina in peace.
I have appealed to your conscience and better nature before. I have pursued my rights in the courts and been denied justice. You know I cannot let this matter rest. What choice do you leave me, a poor woman so grievously wronged? With nothing left to lose, I am forced to consider desperate measures that will damage us both – but you most of all.
If you deny my request for the cottage, you leave me little alternative. Ignore my appeal and persist with this exhibition of my father’s painting, obtained by deceit, and I will make our secret dealings over this painting public and accuse you of being a thief and liar. I will insist the authenticity of the painting be tested by an independent authority. Either you’ve lied to me about this painting or you are lying to the world. Let us find out once and for all, shall we?
‘Do you love me?’ asked Adam playfully, trying to keep his voice as noncommittal as possible as he followed Laura in her idle meandering around the gallery.
‘Probably,’ said Laura coolly. ‘I barely know you. Do you love me?’
Adam nodded. ‘Yes, I think I do.’ He trotted a little faster to catch up to her.
‘Well, that is as it should be!’ said Laura, laughing as she ducked to avoid Adam’s outstretched hand. Their wandering had turned into a childish game of chasings. For a while, they did not speak but wove in and out of the marble busts and statues like two naughty children, breathless with laughter and the effort of running.
At last, Adam caught Laura by the wrist and reeled her gently in. She allowed herself to be kissed on the mouth. ‘Does it bother you that I love you?’
‘No. That’s perfectly fine,’ she said. And then her expression became more wistful and serious. ‘It’s all fine. But you have to admit, it’s just a nice fantasy, isn’t it, my Silver Fox?’ This was her pet name for her older lover with his crop of silvery-grey hair that she now ruffled with her fingers.
‘What do you mean?’ Adam tried not to look hurt.
‘It’s like Mr Longford’s film,’ said Laura. ‘We get to play our roles for a little while, pretending we are people we are not. And when we take off our costumes, what then? I’m a girl from Mount Victoria who Mr Longford saw by accident one day and put in his film. Just the maid, remember? It’s only a small part in a bigger story but I’m still having fun. I want to enjoy it while it lasts. That’s all.’
Laura pecked him on the cheek and pirouetted across the carpet. Adam stood still for a few moments, his hands in his pockets, leaning slightly on his left leg. He was trying to work out what he felt: the state of his heart was so much harder to calculate than the state of his fortune. He had been in love with Adelina once, long ago. And then Freya. How could things have altered so profoundly? How could he dare trust his feelings at all?
He suddenly felt very old. He realised he had fallen for this woman not just for her beauty and youth but because he looked on her as a possible route of escape from his life. His affair was a crazy kind of throwing of the dice to start over. Part of him
knew it was impossible and insane. There was no escape. He was as desperate to change the past as was his poor wife. And just as pathetic.
In a darkly comic moment, Adam saw himself as a character trapped inside a melodrama, A Blue Mountains Mystery, a tense tale of love, tragedy and betrayal. The blackmailing ex-lover, the mad wife, the ghost son. What would he be when the story finished? The rich and loyal husband, held hostage for a time but happily reunited with his wife in the end? Or his cruel doppelganger, the calculating, cold-blooded gangster who winds up dead? It was not a great choice.
He heard a gasp from Laura as she twitched a gold drape to look out one of the gallery windows. Hand-numbing coldness seeped through the glass and the light outside had deepened to that hypnotic underwater blue of early evening.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s beginning to snow.’
CHAPTER 20
* * *
Adelina
Meadow Springs, July 1921
There was no tapping at her door that night, no lights in the corridor, no small anxious voice from the end of the passageway, but Adelina could not sleep. And so she pulled on her dressing gown and slippers and left her hotel room.
The moon was three-quarters full over the valley: a bowl of silvery light glittering from the gum trees in the distance. She had not found the depth of courage or despair to step off the cliff at Sensation Point that afternoon. But the vertigo of the abyss had entered her soul and scooped her clean.
She was empty now, fleshless, a ghost of her former self, already waiting for fate to deliver whatever blow it had in store. While the rest of humanity slept, Adelina floated down the corridors of the Palace, directionless, without will or intent, like the snowflakes outside, borne on flurries, whirling slowly through the mercurial liquid of the moon-soaked sky. Outside, the cries of night birds and low moan of retreating trains were muffled by the huge eiderdown of snow-heavy cloud.
Except for the moonlight pouring in at the windows on the valley side and the warm glow of the fireplaces and a few table lamps, the Palace was sunk into almost total darkness. Adelina knew there would be lights on in the night auditor’s office downstairs where Mr Franklin worked, reconciling the day’s takings, and the night manager’s office where Mr Bosely was probably stealing a nap. Outside, a narrow triangle of light would swing through the gloom as Joe, the security guard, wrapped in overcoat, scarf, cap and gloves, did his hourly rounds with his torch and truncheon. Apart from those three, it felt as if she was the only person alive in the whole world.
Adelina was in no hurry as she padded noiselessly through the labyrinth of her husband’s hotel. The moonlight and her melancholy mood made everything seem alien. How vulgar it all is, thought Adelina as she drifted from room to room. How ridiculous. Without a single atom of refinement or restraint in his bog-Irish soul, her parvenu of a husband had conspired with his builder to indiscriminately pile architectural style upon style for the creation of this quixotic palace. As a result, it had grown higgledy-piggledy along the cliff top until it stretched into a rambling cavalcade of Art Nouveau, Edwardian, Federation and Queen Anne-style pavilions, wings and galleries, nearly a quarter of a mile long. A magnificent mess. Fox’s Folly.
The interiors fared no better. Take the casino, for example, this absurd room with its bizarre dome and skylight, its heavily draped proscenium stage, fake gold-leafed Corinthian columns and bright crimson walls hung with monumental canvases. A brand new Steinway grand stood off to one side, in aloof isolation from the clutter of potted palms, giant cloisonné vases, buttoned-down velvet chairs and S-shaped sweetheart sofas.
And what about the billiard room next door? Dominated by two giant stout-legged, blue-felted monsters, it featured a cavernous brick fireplace in red and white, and those peculiar asymmetrical arches over the doorways with their wooden fretwork screens, all held up by triads of liquorice-twist pillars. Standing on guard amid the smog of cigar smoke and brattle of ricocheting ivory was Adam’s most recent acquisition: a seventeenth-century mock-bronze Venetian page clutching his flambeau, its flame a sculpted-glass lamp with a flickering electric light bulb to mimic fire. Adelina shivered with disgust just thinking about it.
There was no attempt at balance or harmony; all was clutter and chaos. In the vast marble-floored lobby, the modish slickness of the Art Deco grille over the front-office windows clashed with the swirling ironwork of the Art Nouveau railings on the stairs and the mock Italian marble balustrade outside on the terrace. Arched leadlight doors – more fitting to a vicarage or country railway station – connected the general manager’s offices to the smoking lounge.
In every room Adelina picked her way past the dark-brown chesterfields, bookcases and cabinets, huddled together like brooding herds of cattle. Clocks ticked either sombrely – the ponderous brass-faced grandfathers sulking in corners – or impatiently, like the neurotic little ormolus on mantelpieces and console tables. The walls themselves were crammed with paintings, a sickening profusion of canvases, their varnish browning a shade darker every year. And then there was the statuary: a frozen bacchanalia in marble, bronze and plaster of satyrs, nymphs, nudes and goddesses. Adelina wondered why her husband even felt the need for a separate gallery when he had stuffed so much art into the Palace itself. It was all about excess: ostentatious, intemperate excess. Her husband’s Achilles heel.
The library boasted a huge oak table, a reproduction of the one on which Queen Victoria had signed the Commonwealth charter that gave birth to Australian nationhood. It was jam-packed with convict, Aboriginal and bushranger memorabilia: pistols, leg irons, boomerangs, woomeras. Tall glass cabinets displayed hideous vases and grotesque masks: souvenirs from Adam’s travels abroad. No inch of wall space was left unoccupied by antique weaponry, glass-eyed animal heads and mirrors of every conceivable shape, size and concavity.
It was in the merciless surface of one of the latter that Adelina caught a glimpse of herself as she passed through the lobby. She stopped to absorb this pitiful sight. Before her stood a creature she barely recognised. The last six months of worry had undone her looks entirely. Her once-glossy chestnut hair was as coarse as straw, hanging in unpinned disorder about her face. Her pale skin, which she had often likened to alabaster, was as dull as wax with livid marks of fatigue and sorrow. Her eyes were lustreless and downcast, her cheeks gaunt, her forehead lined with indelible furrows. And her body, once lissom and angular, was a wretched, half-starved thing of bony joints and stringy muscle. She was a ruin, a corpse, a white witch. How could anyone love this pathetic, moribund animal, halfway to becoming a spirit already?
Adam had once. He had loved her so fervently that it had taken a substantial bribe from his father Patrick Fox to engineer the alliance of their two families. Proud Adelina was the younger daughter of Thomas T. Musgrave, scion of an English dynasty with ancestral estates in Surrey, a country seat in rural Victoria and factories and warehouses in Port Melbourne. The Foxes were latecomers to wealth: Irish upstarts who had made their fortune in one generation with the largest store in Sydney dominating the retail trade of the city.
Haughtily aware of these differences, Adelina had dismissed Adam Fox’s advances at first. She succumbed in the end to his charm, passion and good looks. Not to mention his persistence as her suitor, driven by the same refusal to admit defeat that saw his unstoppable rise as Sydney’s richest retail entrepreneur. Even so, Adelina Musgrave was surprised when her father agreed to Adam’s proposal of marriage, learning only later about his secret dealings to seal a Fox–Musgrove business alliance.
Adelina’s older sister, Genevieve, died unwed and unexpectedly of pulmonary fever a year later, making Adelina sole heiress to the Musgrave fortune. This was settled on her less than three years later when her widowed father was struck down with cancer. Despite her own family’s grubby involvement in commerce, Adelina’s air of genteel superiority never really deserted her, even though nobody could deny she truly loved Adam. If Adelina were brutally honest, she was jus
t as insufferable a snob at heart as her nemesis, Freya.
But she was not thinking about Freya now. Only herself. ‘Sad old chook,’ Adelina murmured to the image in the mirror. ‘Ready for the chop.’
A flash of light in the distance caught her eye. Was it Joe doing his rounds out in the gardens? Shuffling to the high arched window overlooking the courtyard and west wing, she could see that it was coming from inside the new gallery.
‘That’s odd,’ Adelina whispered to herself.
With the slenderest hope that the light was her beloved Robbie, Adelina pushed open a side door and began walking across the moonlit courtyard towards the dark outline of the gallery. Snow crunched underfoot. The wind was freshening, light powdery flakes prancing on its invisible currents and sparkling in the lunar brilliance. Adelina’s hair thrashed in wild confusion about her face, obscuring her view at times and raking at her eyes and cheeks. She quickly became numbed by the cold except for her face and hands, which began to burn.
As she drew closer to the gallery she could make out the shadows of figures moving about inside, even though the building was in almost total darkness. The only source of light was a wavering glow of orange, probably from a lamp. Thieves, guessed Adelina. It was a natural assumption given the contents of the gallery. But how had they gained entry without raising the alarm? Presumably Adam had taken every precaution to lock the gallery up securely and protect it.
Adelina looked behind her, wondering where Joe was on his rounds. In the distance she spotted the wedge of torchlight moving steadily through the row of pines opposite the Apartments. If she called out now, she would most likely alert the intruders and fail to be heard by Joe at such a distance, over the rush of wind. It occurred to her that Joe’s routine was probably known to these thieves and the timing of their intrusion planned in advance.
To be honest, Adelina was not interested in protecting Adam’s precious artworks. What did she care? He had hardly earned her loyalty as far as that went. It was curiosity that drew her on, the impulse to discover what strange intervention fate had in store. She felt no fear, only a compelling conviction that, no matter who it was in the gallery, this meeting was preordained.
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