‘I was looking at the photos again today,’ said Luke.
‘Which ones?’
‘The ones of your grandmother. Laura.’ He had a sly look on his face.
‘And . . . ?’
‘You are much more beautiful than she was.’
Lisa looked down, laughing, dismissing it as another joke.
‘No, I mean it.’ Luke was serious, she could tell. She sensed his dark eyes studying her face, hands, body. There was an attentiveness in his gaze that sounded a note of deep desire inside Lisa that she could not ignore.
He leaned closer and took her face in his hands. ‘Ah, Lisa.’ He spoke her name with such fervour. Like a confession. They kissed, tenderly at first and then with more urgent passion.
Lisa pulled away, breathless. ‘Is it me you want, Luke?’ she asked.
He looked at her, puzzled.
‘Or my family?’ She had not anticipated the question. It burst out of her, unbidden, like a self-protective trap, sprung from some well of self-doubt and suspicion. Luke looked at her solemnly for a moment. Had she offended him? Scared him off? Stupid, stupid Lisa.
‘I could ask you the same question,’ said Luke. ‘What do you want?’
‘I – I want you.’
‘Because I’m the historian of your family’s hotel?’
‘No. No, not at all.’
‘Well, there’s your answer. Because that’s not all I am. Like you’re not just one of the Fox family. These are parts of who we are. Important parts, but not the whole story. It’s you I want to get to know, Lisa. You. Not anyone else.’
He grabbed her then more forcefully than before, his hands clasping her head, his fingers entwined in her hair. Lisa uttered a cry of delight and surrender as Luke’s deep kisses explored the sweetness of her mouth. How long, how long, how long she had waited for this feeling again! To be desired.
When they reached the couch, Lisa felt the laptop dig into her back. Luke dropped it onto the floor. ‘I thought we could leave that to the morning. Over breakfast,’ he said. Lisa laughed.
She could not remember the last time she had felt this good.
Luke made the coffee and toast and Lisa the scrambled eggs. They set up their laptops on the dining table.
‘You first,’ said Luke.
She showed him the letter from Miss Glanville-Smith.
He looked stunned on finishing it. ‘Well, that changes everything. The fire wasn’t arson after all. And Freya wasn’t in Germany in 1921, she was here. But she went back on the boat with Angie in 1920. I have the record from the shipping lists.’
‘Maybe she came back. Maybe she heard about Adam’s plans to display her father’s painting – probably through Miss Blunt – and decided it was time for revenge. But why? That’s the question that haunts me. Is it because Adam stole the painting and her land? Or was there more to it than that?’
‘I think you already know the answer,’ said Luke. ‘Why else would a woman spend so long plotting revenge? The painting and the land would be reasons enough, but there’s an obsessiveness in this. It suggests something more. She was his lover.’
‘Another reason for Adam to get rid of her and her family,’ Lisa mused. Her eyes widened. ‘Oh my God! You don’t think . . . ?’
‘What?’
‘You don’t think Angie was his illegitimate daughter? It would make sense. “The girl who broke all our hearts.”’
Luke let out his breath. ‘It’s entirely possible. In most cases like this, the whole thing was covered up. The woman was either bullied or bribed into silence and the child adopted out or sent to an orphanage. Sometimes, rarely, the father would adopt the child under his own name.’
‘Hard to imagine Adelina agreeing to that.’
‘Yes. Why would she? So if Fox refused to acknowledge Angie as his daughter, it would give Freya another reason to hate him.’
‘Whichever way you look at it, it’s not flattering to my grandfather.’ Lisa sighed. ‘I was so naive. I just wanted to believe the fairytales about him. The ones my grandmother told. The great man, the visionary, trying to bring something new and exciting to the mountains. And now this . . .’
There was a long silence. They both watched the clouds of steam rise from their coffee cups in the shaft of sunlight on the dining table. It was a fresh, early-winter morning. Lisa had lit a fire in the slow-combustion heater in the lounge room. The wood fire crackled and popped, imploding every now and then in a shower of sparks. The bungalow had begun to warm up but they could both feel the chill air pressing at the windows and under the doors.
Luke idly stroked the wrist of Lisa’s left hand, admiring the softness of her skin there, its blue-veined creaminess. How quickly this intimacy came, the afterglow from the roaring fire of last night. They both basked in its warmth.
Luke spoke at last. He did not look at Lisa at first but stared at the table, at her wrist, distracted, puzzled. ‘You can’t be so surprised about your grandfather. Can you? Did you honestly expect him to be a nice man?’
Lisa felt a blush rise to her cheeks. It sounded like a reprimand. She felt ashamed of her confession of girlish hero-worship. ‘No, not nice,’ she said tartly. ‘Please give me some credit!’
Luke winced. ‘I’m sorry if that sounded harsh. All I meant was . . . well, men like Fox are not unusual. They have big visions, big ideas. They push hard for what they want. People get hurt along the way. Used up, cast aside. It’s not right, perhaps. Not fair. But it’s the way the world works.’
Lisa pulled her hand away. ‘In business, yes. In war. In politics. Yes, I get that. But we’re talking about him disowning his daughter. His own flesh and blood. Cheating her out of her inheritance, her future, her rightful name. Is that justifiable?’
Luke looked at her. ‘We’re arguing over a hypothetical. We have no proof.’
‘I guess I’m just curious how far you’re prepared to go to protect the Adam Fox legend. You are the Palace’s official historian after all. I assume they’re not paying you to dig up dirt on the great man. To make him look bad.’
Luke frowned. ‘Believe me, Lisa, as long as Fox hasn’t murdered anyone, any acts of bastardry on his part will only add colour to his legend. Sins never look so bad at a distance.’
‘Don’t they? Maybe for the idle reader of history. The curious bystander.’ Lisa was getting agitated. ‘But it’s a bit different when the bastard in question is your grandfather. When his sins affected the lives of everyone around him. Laura, Lottie, Alan, Monika. Me and Tom.’
Tears were falling now. What was she doing? Luke would run a mile if he had any sense. She was screwing up the best thing that had happened to her in years. Far from releasing herself from the Fox curse, she was letting it destroy her, rob her of any chance of happiness.
‘I’m sorry, Luke. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’
Luke put his arm around Lisa’s shoulders. ‘No, I’m the one who should apologise. This is much harder for you. Of course it is. I’m the one being naive. I’m sorry, Lisa.’
They kissed again: their first ‘make-up’ kiss.
Lisa realised it was time for her to share everything. It was possible Monika was losing her battle with oblivion. Lisa didn’t want her mother to slip away before she knew her story.
And Luke? If she did not let him into her life fully, with all its shameful secrets, well what was the point of this whole night? Lisa was thirty-eight, alone, adrift. She had to let go of her pride. Monika’s diaries were the key. ‘Let me read you something.’
Luke cancelled the rest of his day. So did Lisa. They sat in the lounge room of Monika Fox’s bungalow while Lisa read pages she had bookmarked in her mother’s diaries. About the midget sub raid, the move to the mountains, the trials of Osborne College, the closing of the hotel. She showed him the staff photo taken on the steps. ‘Have you seen this?’
Luke had not. He agreed with Lisa that her grandfather looked sad.
‘I guess he had no idea if i
t would ever reopen,’ said Luke. ‘The US Army handed it back in late 1943 and paid for damages. Even so, he had a lot of work to do to rehire staff and refurbish the place when the Yanks left. He finally reopened the hotel in July 1945. He turned seventy that year and combined the relaunch with his birthday celebrations. But some people say the glory days were over by then.’
Lisa turned over another page of her mother’s diary and read aloud.
CHAPTER 26
* * *
Monika
Leura and Meadow Springs, February–July 1945
The war was nearly over. At least the war with Germany. But there was another war going on inside the Fox family that was not over.
The big rambling house on Jersey Avenue held a thousand happy memories. Childhood games with Captain Pogo on the well-rolled lawns and hide-and-seek on the creaking verandas. Birthday parties with clowns and jugglers, Aeroplane jelly and pass-the-parcel. Her parents playing tennis or croquet with friends on seemingly endless sunny weekends. Cocktail parties with paper lanterns in the trees and the convivial babbling stream of music and conversation late into the night, their parents’ laughter occasionally bursting above the hubbub to comfort the dozing children upstairs.
But in the last two years this same house had become a battlefield where Adam and Laura waged a subtle war of small resentments and withering glances. At home from boarding school on weekends, Monika noted her father’s little jabs and her mother’s tearful silences with growing alarm. This was all much scarier than the real war. What was going wrong with her parents and their once blissful family life?
During 1943, the VADs had taken on more shifts to deal with the flood of wounded from the battlefields of the Pacific. Laura worked until late most days. When she was home, she talked openly about her visits to the US 118th General Hospital up at the Palace and how much she admired the hard-working doctors, brave soldiers and long-suffering nurses. She was proud of her work and her colleagues, despite her exhaustion and the moments of genuine despair when her patients died.
Monika scrutinised her mother’s face for any signs of her hidden love for the American medical officer she had seen Laura with that day at the hospital, but failed to detect any telltale changes or signs. But then her mother had always been a gifted actress. Adam listened to Laura’s talk about the hospital with a pained expression, grunting sulkily. Did he suspect anything? He must, Monika reasoned, or why else the sullen temper and sour looks?
The conversation always ended the same way. Laura sighed and made a point of asking Adam about his squad of Retreads and their drills down at the Valley Farm.
‘Please don’t patronise me,’ Adam fumed. ‘No one gives a toss about the Retreads. They’re a bloody joke. The Japs are never going to invade us now.’ He would storm out of the room and lock himself in his study. Or take the Hudson for a spin and not come home until late. It was not hard to guess the angst that ate at his heart: it was a young man’s war now and Adam Fox had been left behind.
But by 1944, when the Palace had been returned to the Foxes and all the doctors and patients transferred to the new hospital complex at Herne Bay, Adam was busy again. He spent days at a time up at the cottage, supervising the refurbishment of his hotel and looking for reliable staff.
Now it was Laura’s turn to sulk. She retired to her bedroom for long stretches with her door closed. One afternoon Monika knocked, impatient to share a story with her mother. When no reply came, she burst into the room to discover Laura bent over her writing desk. She was deep in thought, pen in hand. She started at the intrusion and quickly folded the letter she was writing in half – but not before Monika spied the bright red ‘V . . . _ MAIL’ logo with its Morse code ‘V’ for Victory. Maggie Bosely had shown Monika one of these V-mails from her American sweetheart sergeant. It was the US Army’s free airmail service, nicknamed ‘Funny Mail’. Letters handwritten onto V-mail forms were photographed onto microfilm which was then flown all over the world by aeroplane and reprinted in miniature for delivery to soldiers in the field and loved ones back home.
Her gaze rapidly took in the other contents of the desktop: a stack of V-mails with the censor’s red stamp on the front; envelopes bearing the Red Cross flag in the corner and postmarked Geneva; aerogrammes, torn and resealed with sticky tape, marked RETURN TO SENDER. And, most startling of all, a bright pink postcard with the words: CARD OF CAPTURE FOR PRISONERS OF WAR.
‘Out! Out!’ Laura shouted at her, sweeping everything on the hinged desktop into the desk’s inner chamber of pigeon holes and tiny drawers. Her mother slammed the desk closed and locked it. She then grabbed Monika roughly by the shoulders and steered her out of the room. ‘How many times do I have to tell you to knock before you come in? This room is private.’
Monika saw that her mother’s cheeks were wet with tears which Laura hastily wiped away with the back of her hand.
‘Are you alright, Mama?’ Monika asked.
‘Don’t be silly. I’m fine, darling,’ said her mother in a more conciliatory tone as she closed the bedroom door behind them. She kissed Monika on the forehead. ‘Sorry I got so cross. I’m just overtired, that’s all. Now, what did you want to tell me?’
Monika had worked it all out. Over and over she replayed the scene she had seen at the hospital nearly a year ago: the handsome American officer with blue eyes and short blond hair, Laura’s laughter, the touch on the arm, the letter passing from hand to hand. Mama’s lover had been reposted somewhere in the Pacific or Europe. Laura pined for him, wrote him letters. He had stopped writing back. Maybe he had stormed the beaches of Normandy, liberated Paris and seen the destruction of Berlin. Or maybe he had ended up in a POW camp like poor Roger Merewether, whose parents fretted their hearts out, praying he was still alive.
Little wonder her mother was so sad and full of fear. Monika pitied her. But she hated her as well for bringing this terrible secret into the middle of their family. Like an undetonated bomb, hidden in the broom cupboard under the stairs or tucked away under the sofa, it waited to blow Monika’s world to pieces.
Every now and then its ticking grew so loud, Monika was sure the explosion was only seconds away. It was a Saturday morning in mid-February 1945 with the whole family at breakfast, one of the rare occasions that saw everyone gathered together. Adam perused the news stories in the Herald while the children studied their comic books: Captain Atom, The Panther and Tim Valour. Laura poured a fresh cup of tea and flicked through the society columns.
‘Listen to this,’ Adam said, folding the newspaper to the headlines:
DRESDEN BURNS AFTER DOUBLE RAID
Wednesday’s daylight attack on Dresden by 1350 American Flying Fortresses and Liberators followed last night’s smash at the city by 800 R.A.F. heavy bombers. Fires started were still blazing when the American bombers arrived to drop hundreds of tons of high explosives and thousands of incendiaries. The glare could be seen for 200 miles. In addition to Dresden’s normal population of 600,000, thousands of refugees from other parts of the Reich have sought shelter here. The 2250 planes in this attack included two Lancaster squadrons and one Halifax squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force.
Monika saw the colour drain from her mother’s face. The hand that held the milk jug for the tea was trembling. She put the jug down on the table so as not to drop it. She struggled to hide her emotions but the expression of grief on her face was impossible to conceal.
Adam continued, oblivious to Laura’s reaction:
A Berlin military spokesman said that the world famous museum, the art gallery, the castle, the opera house, and other famous buildings were destroyed.
An eye-witness reported that the authorities in Dresden had been forced to wall in 1000 corpses lying in the ruins because there was no one to bury them, estimating there were between 400,000 and 600,000 dead and homeless in the city.
Adam folded the paper and tossed it on the table in a gesture of triumph. ‘Well, that’ll even the score for what those bastards dr
opped on Coventry.’
‘Enough!’ Laura stood up, her face chalky white, fists clenched. ‘Do you think it’s right for our children to hear this kind of thing?’
Monika had never seen her mother so upset.
Adam looked shaken but remained defiant. ‘What? Do you think I should protect them from the truth? Pretend that this war costs nothing? Australian pilots flew that mission. Who knows how many have sacrificed their lives to bring an end to this slaughter?’
Laura glared at Adam with a mix of anger and contempt. ‘Don’t you lecture me about the truth,’ she said in a low voice. ‘And sacrifice! What do you know about that? What have you ever given up? For anyone?’
Laura’s words seemed to hit her husband with the force of a slap. As she rushed from the room, she bumped the table. The milk jug toppled, spilled its contents and rolled off the edge, smashing on the tiled floor.
The ticking in Monika’s ears was deafening.
‘Hitler dead,’ Monika recorded in her diary in early May, a footnote to the far weightier drama of her parents’ unhappiness.
Her father disappeared into his work. While painters and carpenters swarmed all over the Palace, Fox was making plans for the relaunch of the hotel in July. It was to be done with his usual showman’s panache. In the study at his house, he briefed his GM, Mr Merewether, the new food and beverages manager, Mr Nicholson, and the new chef, Pierre Fabrice. The relaunch would also be a celebration of Fox’s seventieth birthday, a calculated nose-thumbing to those who had insisted he retire years ago.
In the quiet of his study as he sat alone, Adam tried not to dwell on the past. But at nearly seventy, it was difficult to do anything else. So many good people gone. Lottie Lyell was only half Adam’s age when she succumbed to TB in December 1925, two weeks before her lover, Longford, was finally granted a divorce by his wife. Poor Raymond, whose brilliant film career crumbled after Lottie’s death, had ended up as a nightwatchman on the wharves in Sydney during the war, always dapper and proud. In 1930 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s great lion-heart had stopped with his final words for his beloved wife, Jean: ‘You are wonderful.’ In 1931, not long after she sang at the Palace, dear Nellie was silenced forever, dying in St Vincent’s in Sydney from septicaemia after botched facelift surgery in Baden-Baden. The mistress of her looks to the bitter end.
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