Palace of Tears

by Julian Leatherdale

  The German master demurred. ‘I seem to be always saying “no” to you, Adam,’ he said with a regretful smile. ‘It is unfortunate, as I have grown to like you. But the fact is I have developed a strong distaste for the buying and selling of art. Let me give it some thought. When your Traumschloss is finished, Herr Fox, maybe I will give something to you to put in your gallery.’

  Fox never got his watercolour. Wolfgang died of pneumonia the following winter, one of the coldest on record with a fall of snow so deep that a path had to be cleared to the cottage for the undertaker and his boy to collect the old man’s body.

  Eveline and her husband visited as often as they could but the next year proved the hardest and loneliest of Freya’s life. Looking back, she understood how, in her state of grieving isolation, she had let her guard down so that this charming and endlessly considerate man stole his way, little by little, into her affections.

  He paid regular visits to the building site of the hotel and always found an excuse to drop by the cottage to check that the workmen were not disturbing her. Sometimes he had an artistic matter on which he sought her opinion or a problem he wanted to air in her presence. Sometimes he came bearing small tokens of his appreciation for her help. He was never accompanied by his young wife, Adelina, who preferred to stay in Sydney or in the family’s country house in Meadow Springs.

  The first time they kissed was in Freya’s studio, where she was showing him a new painting she was working on. Almost idly, he leaned towards her and tucked a strand of unruly copper hair behind her ear. His hand lingered there and traced a line tenderly to her cheek. She sighed, almost groaned, surprised at the depth of her response to this unexpected touch, and rested her head in his open hand. He drew closer and kissed her exposed neck. Without a word spoken, they fell into a frenzied exchange of kisses, hands clutching and caressing with unbridled urgency.

  Their affair lasted all through the building and opening of the Palace and its first giddy, golden year of parties and balls. It was, for the most part, conducted discreetly behind the giant hedge that Fox’s gardeners had planted around the von Gettner cottage. Adam even helped Freya design a garden for her cottage which she insisted should be planted with native shrubs and flowers. Freya joked that she was a fairytale princess, a Sleeping Beauty, trapped behind an enchanted barrier and in thrall to the lord of the castle next door.

  Fox opened the Palace on 4 July 1900 in the middle of a winter snowstorm. His guests were all motored up into the mountains from the railway station at Penrith in a fleet of closed-in, heated charabancs provided with woollen blankets and flasks of hot chocolate and rum. They arrived in excellent spirits to be greeted by an honour guard of bagpipers along the driveway and the dazzling spectacle of the immense Edwardian hotel covered in a layer of snow, perfect and pure as white marzipan icing on a cake. Freya watched all this from the far side of her hedge as Fox stood in the grand doorway welcoming each guest personally, his pale, marble-limbed wife at his side.

  Guests gasped at the sight of the imposing edifice illuminated in a blaze of electric lights and were astonished to find that each guestroom boasted a telephone on the wall linked to the Sydney exchange and able to make a trunk call to anywhere in the world. More exotic and novel delights awaited them. Under the elegant barrel-vaulted ceiling of the grand dining room with its Art Nouveau frieze and Corinthian columns, a team of Chinese waiters in gorgeous silk jackets served up a seven-course banquet while two Turkish boys in embroidered vests and white fezzes poured steaming aromatic coffee into glasses from swan-necked copper pots. It was a masterful piece of theatre.

  It seemed in those first heady years that nothing could dampen the zeal of Adam Fox, master showman and hotelier. The failure of his hired geologist to locate the local spring on the escarpment momentarily threatened to unwind Fox’s whole vision for his health retreat until he found an exporter willing to ship him barrels of mineral water from Germany at a reasonable price. The elegantly curved dome of the casino, specially designed and prefabricated in a factory in Chicago, ran into endless delays and escalating costs, but Fox negotiated a good price for the stock and improvements on the six-hundred-acre farm he purchased in the valley that would provide fresh produce every day for his hotel. He managed all these problems with his characteristic optimism and calm.

  He handpicked all his staff, including Freddie Wood, local mechanic and all-round handyman, as his head storeman. Given odd jobs over at the von Gettner cottage, Freddie became a laconic friendly presence in Freya’s garden, making observations about the weather and the state of the garden and hotel over short tea breaks. Then, one day, he addressed her in impeccable German. ‘Heute ist ein schöner Tag, Frau von Gettner.’ He blushed to the roots of his sandy-brown hair. It was obvious he had not intended to give away his secret.

  ‘Sind Sie Deutsch?’ asked Freya, her eyes widening.

  He nodded and looked at her sheepishly, crumpling his hat in his big hands.

  She laughed out loud and gently touched his shoulder. ‘Freddie! Why did you not tell me before?’

  In an agony of hand-wringing, Freddie confessed to being intimidated by her father’s reputation and aristocratic mien. Freddie was from Saarbrucken, capital of the coal and iron district of Saarland. The son of a coalminer who had emigrated to New South Wales forty years earlier, he had grown up in Cessnock and worked as a farm labourer before settling in Meadow Vale. He had been raised speaking German and English and was indistinguishable from most sun-browned Aussie men of few words. By way of explaining the gap between himself and the von Gettners, he concluded: ‘I am a simple man. I work with my hands.’

  Freya held up a paintbrush from the studio. ‘So do I, Freddie.’

  Freya felt even more comfortable than ever having this quiet, sturdy man around. They still spoke little but more often now in their native German just as she and her father had done. She liked to wander over to his machine sheds to borrow gardening tools and watch the subtle dance of his fingers as they fiddled with the intricacies of a lawnmower motor or the rewiring of a damaged fence line.

  When the nausea and vomiting started, Freya knew her world was about to change forever. The announcement of her pregnancy to Adam Fox came like a thunderclap out of a blue sky on a summer’s day. She knew that ‘arrangements’ would have to be made, a ‘solution’ found to this ‘problem’. There was never any question of Adam deserting his young wife or allowing his reputation to be compromised in any way. Freya did not make any demands; they had both been careless. But she refused to slip quietly away somewhere and leave her father’s property. The cottage and this valley were the centre of her life.

  Freddie approached his employer before he even breathed a word of his plans to Freya. His offer was approved and so Freddie Wood proposed marriage. Freya accepted.

  She believed in survival at all costs. She had seen her father walk away from the wreckage of his life and survive. She would follow his example. Sacrifices had to be made. This way she kept her father’s cottage and her old life but with a husband and handyman. She desperately needed the money and help maintaining the cottage. That was what she told herself, at least.

  Sickly, frail Adelina had her suspicions and finally confronted her husband. He did not lie to her and they came to an understanding. Freya assumed that Adelina still held the purse strings to the fortune on which Adam had built his hotel. She exacted certain promises from her husband, insisted on certain rules. And Adam was a master of managing things, striking deals, making people see his point of view. After a difficult period of readjustment, life settled back down to a semblance of normality.

  Now here he stood on this calm early-spring morning, patting Angie on the head, chucking her under the chin, a little self-consciously as he knew Freya was watching him. She had not seen him for months and certainly never here, alone, in her garden.

  ‘What is it, Adam? What do you want?’

  ‘I have an idea for the spa. I want you to paint me a mural.’r />
  Freya gave a short hard bark of laughter. ‘You are impossible. Adelina will not tolerate having me anywhere near you or that hotel.’

  A sly smile spread slowly across Adam’s face. ‘It’s not her I’m afraid of.’

  ‘I think it’s a terrible idea.’

  ‘But you still want to do it, don’t you?’

  Adam was like a child in many ways. When he wanted something, he wanted it greedily, unreasonably, passionately and would hear no arguments to the contrary. It was one of his more charming qualities but, if Freya were completely honest, it was also what made Adam Fox frightening. Like a spoilt boy, he would lose his temper without warning if he didn’t get his way. She had witnessed this on more than one occasion, including a time when he had smashed a chair to pieces in her studio and left a bruise on her wrist. He had replaced the chair and begged forgiveness for the way he had held her against the wall. She was ashamed to remember that the violent display had thrilled her at the time because he had shown her how the white heat of his love for her conflicted with his duty to Adelina and his cold-blooded calculations of social disgrace. But it also left her worrying how far Adam Fox would go to protect himself and everything he had built.

  They were not so different, Freya and Adam. Fox’s father was a poor Irish immigrant, one of the thousands who had come to Victoria to try their luck on the goldfields and one of the few who had then found their nugget of good fortune in commerce. After studying painting at the Arts Academy in Dusseldorf with fellow student Arnold Böcklin and then travelling around the art capitals of Europe, her own father had jumped on a boat to Australia to seek gold at Ballarat. Gold had eluded him for a whole wretched year on the fields; instead he had painted small sketches of his fellow Diggers and come to the attention of some wealthy pastoralists who commissioned paintings of their vast holdings, the beginnings of his illustrious career. As children of immigrants who had climbed the slippery ladder to wealth and respectability, both Freya and Adam knew what was at stake if they put a foot wrong.

  Except that Freya had a much higher opinion of her father’s calling than Adam’s. Art trumped retail. She teased Adam about this and it upset him, because he knew it was true. The other difference, of course, was that Freya knew what it was like to fall from the exalted heights of society whereas Adam could only imagine – and fear – that fall.

  ‘Your father would understand,’ said Adam now. ‘A commercial proposition. Nothing wrong with that is there?’ He shifted restlessly and the veranda creaked under his weight. He was only twenty-nine, barely seven years her senior, but he was starting to grow a belly under his white linen waistcoat. Too much of his private chef’s cooking and too many expensive bottles of whisky and champagne, no doubt; the occupational hazard of the rich. He had always taken pride in his fitness and had been the best advertisement for the Palace as a health retreat.

  ‘You’re getting fat!’ Freya was not smiling.

  Adam ignored her insult. ‘We have a real rajah staying at the Palace. An Indian king, can you believe it? The Rajah of Pudukkottai. Molly has been paying him a lot of attention as he’s a pretty well-turned out chap in a dinner suit. Muntz has gone to ridiculous lengths to impress him: curried kangaroo and barramundi kedgeree, that kind of nonsense. We’re having entertainment on the terrace at six if the weather stays nice and the wind doesn’t get up. Why not come and join us?’

  Freya glared at him. When they had been in the deepest throes of their affair, Adam had risked inviting her to parties at the hotel when his wife stayed in town. There were lots of parties in those heady, early days. It was his secret risky pleasure: to show off his lover even though no one among his guests or friends officially knew of their liaison. He had purchased her a stunning mint-green beaded gown that set off her copper hair and blue eyes to perfection. Adam would introduce her as Frau von Gettner, daughter of the famous painter and a talented artist in her own right. ‘I have one of her works in my collection in the gallery – a beautiful vista of Mount Wilson.’

  She was grateful for his appreciation of her talent as well as the commissions she received from some of the hotel guests. And she loved the parties. They gave her a chance to experience once again the world of sophistication she had admired and expected to inherit as a young girl: the world she had lost when her mother died suddenly and her father’s fortune evaporated overnight. At the Palace, an interesting crowd of regulars either motored up for the weekend or were long-term residents of the hotel, renting rooms in a separate wing, simply called the Apartments. Molly Fink, whose cultured family had fallen on hard times and moved into the Palace, was snaring the heart of an Indian king with her golden hair, perfect oval, ivory face and pert pomegranate lips. Quiet, handsome, muscular swimmer Freddie Lane, one of Adam’s closest companions, had become an instant national hero as the only Australian to win a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Olympics. And charming American actor and master of comic impressions Hugh Ward, a star with J.C. Williamson’s in Sydney, was in the middle of a spectacular world tour, winning plaudits in London.

  Freya enjoyed this lively company and the sense of a world beyond this windy cliff top. Much as she treasured the quiet of the cottage for her painting, she definitely missed the talk of theatre, art and politics, the latest plays and exhibitions in London, Paris, and New York. One day, she would see these cities for herself. But with the pregnancy, the confinement, the marriage to Freddie, the shameful secret hidden behind the hedge, all this had ended. Under the new rules, the new reality, the parties and world of the hotel and beyond were closed to her.

  Until now. ‘What is the meaning of this, Adam?’ she demanded.

  ‘The meaning of what?’ Adam pouted.

  ‘Don’t play games with me. You know exactly what I mean. I thought we had an arrangement. To keep the peace.’

  Adam sat down in the chair next to her. They lapsed into silence for a moment as they both watched baby Angie make another courageous attempt at walking. Small hands floated on the air and pudgy feet pounded the grass as the excited toddler took two, three, four steps in a rush before her knees buckled again and she plumped back down in the grass. She clapped her hands to applaud her own cleverness, checking her mother had been watching.

  ‘Well done, my sweetheart!’ cheered Freya, raising her mug of tea in salute. She turned again to Adam, her question still hanging between them.

  ‘Well . . . ?’

  ‘Oh, Freya, if you only knew . . .’ Adam groaned. His hand wandered from the arm of the chair and came to rest on hers. She pulled away.

  ‘If you only knew, Adam,’ she hissed at him, ‘what this costs me. Every day. I have agreed to everything you asked, made every sacrifice, and asked nothing of you – except that I be left alone with Angie and Freddie. Is that too much?’

  ‘But Freya . . .’ His dark eyes misted, his voice grew husky. A twinge of pain crumpled his handsome face for a moment.

  ‘What?’ She spat the word out, blood throbbing at her temples. She knew what he wanted to say. That he loved her. That he wished the whole situation could be different. That he should have chosen her over Adelina. That he wanted to turn back the clock. Something like that. But he had had his chance and he had traded this love for his marriage, his wealth, his reputation, his hotel. ‘It’s too late, Adam. We both know that.’

  Adam stared at her for a long time, his right hand white-knuckled on his walking stick, but she refused to meet his gaze. Angie had crawled towards the cottage steps and was now making an attempt to climb them. Freya rose from her chair, leaving her empty tea mug on the veranda boards, and scooped the baby up in her arms, kissing her cheeks and cooing in her face.

  ‘Forget this evening,’ he said finally. ‘But I want you to meet me at the spa in half an hour to talk about the mural. You need the money and I am willing to pay you. I’ll send one of the house girls over to look after the baby.’ With that, he got up and walked away through the garden, without stopping once to look back.

  T
he Hydropathic Establishment at the Palace was the undisputed domain of Herr Doctor Gustav von Liebermeister and his team of assistants and nurses. The doctor was a well-respected expert in hydropathy who had worked at health resorts in Switzerland and Germany. He been lured to Australia by Adam’s vision of a state-of-the-art spa on which the hotelier promised to spare no expense. Adam kept his promise, giving Liebermeister licence to fit out his facility with the most modern equipment available.

  The labyrinth of rooms included two Turkish baths; a packing room with twelve beds; three rooms with hot and cold baths (from sitz baths and Hubbard tubs to spinal, foot and head baths for shallow, plunge, douche, wave and common morning sponge baths); two shower rooms (needle and rose sprays, and the latest Leiters tubes); two poultice and bandage rooms for local applications (such as stupes, fomentations and rubefacients); an electrotherapy room with galvanic and electro-vapour baths; a gym fully equipped with standing bicycles and weights; a water-cure fountain and bar; and a large well-appointed rest room with steamer chairs and potted palms. The money and space had run out, however, for Fox to include a salle de gagarisme (a gargling room) like the one at Vichy. The good doctor claimed he could cure, or at least mitigate the symptoms of, an astonishing array of common diseases affecting every major system and organ of the body, extending to mental dysfunctions and disorders including alcoholism and drug addiction. His clinic was open to everyone from severely afflicted patients with chronic and debilitating conditions – the sufferers from gout and dropsy and lupus – to guests who felt they just needed a rejuvenating ‘tune-up’.

  Freya stood in the reception area, waiting for Adam. She had never trespassed in this sacred space with its stern priestesses in starched white aprons and caps and its hushed atmosphere of earnest whisperings and whimperings. The moss-green tiled walls and bare concrete floors with their water gutters and drains also gave the rooms the echoing reverberation of a church.