Bright Air - Barry Maitland [6]
2
Anna was right, it was a fine old building, though it seemed somewhat forbidding now as I returned to the front door, its upper floor balconies dark like empty eye sockets. Mary had carefully researched its story, and had a summary printed in little pamphlets she gave to guests. She had also had a number of old photographs illustrating its history enlarged and framed and hung along the hall, and I paused over these now as a distraction, hesitating to approach the file that Anna had left for me.
The first picture was of the architect, an elderly man with a white beard in the Edwardian style, and I imagined him deciding to let rip on this final grand commission, for he chose an extravagant version of the Federation Queen Anne style that was already going out of fashion at the time. The house’s two storeys were a pattern book of wall finishes—shingles, roughcast render and tuck-pointed brickwork—and its roof was embellished with extravagant chimneys, attic windows and ridge tiles. It had oriel windows, bay windows and dormer windows, and its many balconies were draped with ornamental brackets and posts elaborated with curvilinear Art Nouveau decoration.
It was in fact a wonderful tour de force, and deserved the spacious leafy surroundings it had once enjoyed, and which were apparent in the second picture, taken almost a hundred years ago. It showed the building newly completed as The Moorings, the home of a broker and financier and his large family, who were all posed outside the front. They looked immensely pleased with their grand new house in the best residential suburb of the inner city, on the ridge of Potts Point, high above the boats in the bays of Sydney Harbour all around, but I knew that disturbances were on their way. Within a year, Kingsclere, the first Manhattan-style apartment building in Sydney, was being erected nearby in Macleay Street, and the character of the leafy suburb would begin to change forever. And a couple of years after that the war in Europe would be under way. I wondered how many of those teenage boys, ranged in ascending height next to their father, ended up on the Western Front.
But it was the Depression that did for the owners of The Moorings, apparently, and they had departed by the time of the third picture, taken at the start of the Second World War. The house had clearly gone downhill, turned into bed-sits for dockyard workers and navy people, and its decline continued into the 1960s, when it was photographed by Gordon Harris, newly arrived in Australia and armed with a small inheritance and some experience in the hotel trade in Inverness. The Moorings became the Harris Hotel, and almost immediately Gordon met and married my Aunt Mary. There was a picture of them both outside the hotel soon after their wedding, and it was clear that Gordon, something of a dreamer, had made a very astute choice in the practical and hard-working woman at his side. Together they turned the place into a refuge for visitors to Sydney, its reputation passed on by word of mouth between naval administrators visiting HMAS Kuttabul at the end of the point, lawyers attending the Family and Supreme courts, and country politicians with business in state parliament. When Gordon died, Mary just kept on going. The final photograph showed her at the front door, the house now shouldered by much taller, blunter neighbours, inner-city apartment blocks that overshadowed the remnants of its old gardens.
It had always had a magical, enveloping character in my mind, a true sanctuary, and it was the first place I’d thought of when I returned to Sydney. But, for all its sheltering homeliness, it couldn’t keep out the world, nor, it seemed, my own past.
There was some roast beef in the kitchen fridge, and I carved a few slices and made myself a sandwich. I took it to Mary’s sitting room, leaving the door slightly ajar so that I could hear anyone coming into the hotel. Helping myself to another Scotch from her bottle, I sat down in one of her plump armchairs with the folder on my