Rosetta

by Alexandra Joel

  When I ask her what the Colonel had thought of her shorthand and typing skills, she says blithely, ‘He didn’t seem particularly interested.’

  Apparently, the Colonel had been obliged to share his office with his secretary and, as my mother observes, ‘He must have wanted something attractive to look at.’

  She hasn’t met my father yet: he is out of the country. Dad, now thirty years of age, serves in Papua New Guinea and then the Philippines. He is a naval officer, seconded to the staff of the charismatic Supreme Commander of the South West Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur.

  When we were young Dad delighted my brother and me with his stories. He said the Americans had fought with their stomachs filled with ‘hot rolls and ice cream’; that they had flown an entire orchestra into the Tacloban jungle ‘for one show only’ so the troops could hear Ravel’s Bolero the night before the major thrust to liberate Manila.

  We heard how General MacArthur would stride down a beach under enemy fire, seemingly both oblivious to and immune from the bullets that flew past him, and about Commander Branson, the ‘Pirate King’ of Milne Bay, who conducted military operations half naked, wearing a sarong. Dad told us about sharing a small shack made from palm leaves with a python, about drinking watery soup with a young impoverished lieutenant, Prince Philip of Greece (later the Duke of Edinburgh), and about the way he had distracted himself as he rode a warship into battle by reading poems by Shelley and watching the flying fish spin.

  My father had a knack for storytelling. He made war sound not like the hell it was but rather a kind of Boys’ Own adventure set on foreign beaches and gentle southern seas.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  SYDNEY, 15 AUGUST 1945

  At 9.30 on a Wednesday morning Rosetta is dressing for a trip to town. She has an appointment at the bank to discuss some future plans. She selects a suit, a blouse, a hat and gloves (wartime has limited the choice); the radio is on. That is the moment, so ordinary, so everyday, when the longed-for announcement comes. Rosetta hears the Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, say that the Second World War is at an end. He tells the nation that hostilities with Japan have ceased. ‘Let us offer thanks to God,’ he says. Rosetta drops her gloves and gives a small, involuntary scream.

  Sirens rend the air and crowds gather across the country to cheer and celebrate. When Rosetta arrives in Sydney’s Martin Place she is soon swept up in the elation. There are thousands crammed together in a spontaneous outpouring of joy. People of all ages run and shout to each other, they sing and embrace. One man kicks his legs up and begins an exuberant dance; another kisses Rosetta full on the mouth. From city offices high above, a blizzard of hastily torn up paper floats down in billowing white clouds onto hats and hair and blissful, upturned faces.

  At the same time, clouds of a more lethal kind continue to discharge their deadly vapours upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the release of atomic bombs on the 6th and 9th of August have led to the conflict’s cataclysmic termination. Few Australians contemplate this new menace; they are too relieved that their own travails are at an end. What matters is that the boys, those who have survived, are safe. They will come home again.

  Lord and Lady Louis Mountbatten have had not so much a good as a triumphant war. Handsome, clever Lord Louis is now the Supreme Allied Commander of South-East Asia; his elevation has been both showy and rapid. Edwina, widely applauded for her selfless work among the sick and wounded, still contrives to look chic even while wearing her army uniform. (The hand-stitched ensemble has been made to measure by one of Savile Row’s finest bespoke tailors; even Edwina’s shoes have been created just for her.)

  Not long after the war has ended, the Mountbattens arrive in Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald of Saturday, 30 March 1946, reports that their plane, en route from Melbourne, landed the day before at 11.55 am. Next, according to the paper, Lord and Lady Louis ‘drove straight to Admiralty House to visit the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester’.

  HRH Prince Henry William Frederick Albert, Duke of Gloucester, Earl of Ulster, Baron Culloden, third son of the King and Mountbatten’s cousin, has been Australia’s Governor-General since his arrival on 28 January 1945. The decision was not without controversy. This had nothing to do with the secret mistress for whom he maintained a suite in London’s Grosvenor Hotel, nor the illegitimate child thought to have resulted from the affair, nor even that Queen Mary is said, once an incriminating letter was revealed, to have bought the woman’s silence for one million pounds; all these details emerged much later.

  It is Prince Henry’s excessive partiality to strong drink that drove the Labor Party’s new Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, to question his reputation. The then Prime Minister John Curtin, though no stranger to the difficulties associated with the immoderate ingestion of alcohol himself, was not persuaded. The royal appointment went ahead.

  Nobody really knows whether the Duke wanted the position. He was obliged to take it on in the most unfortunate of circumstances when the first choice, his younger brother the Duke of Kent, died in an aviation crash in Scotland. But he applies himself to the task, and if the official residence in rural, fly-blown Canberra is not to his taste, who can blame him? Much better that his rich and glamorous relations join him at Admiralty House, his official Sydney residence.

  The Herald sets out their crowded schedule on its front page. The newspaper notes that the couple will both attend a Lord Mayoral reception, go to dinner at Government House, visit Canterbury Park races and the Returned Soldiers League at Anzac House. The itinerary also states that ‘at 1.00pm, Lord Louis will lunch with the Premier, Mr. McKell’.

  Then, almost as an afterthought, the paper adds, ‘Lady Louis will remain at Admiralty House.’

  This welcome respite from official duties provides the perfect opportunity for Edwina to engage in private conversation with her late Aunt Lilian’s dear friend, Mrs Norman.

  In a brief note my father wrote:

  Edwina invited Rosetta to visit her in Sydney … so that they might discuss Lilian Pakenham’s affairs and recompense her for the funeral, so apparently Dermot did not receive [the invoice for] the expenses.

  Tragically, on 2 April 1940, just six months after Rosetta and Edwina Mountbatten’s initial correspondence, Lilian’s son succumbed, according to Debrett’s, to ‘wounds received in action’. He had been on patrol in West Flanders when he was shot by a lone German sniper.

  The magnificent Vice-Regal car is despatched. It creates something of an impact when it pulls up in suburban Murray Street and its liveried chauffeur steps out. One neighbour, not normally given to the expression of emotion, is heard to emit a low whistle and mutter, ‘Crikey, look at that.’

  Conscious of Lady Louis’ reputation for modish style, Rosetta has dressed carefully. She has chosen a fine chocolate-brown and white checked linen suit, so well cut you would never suspect it was crafted from the meagre lengths of fabric permitted by the ration book. A small hat, its brim turned up on one side with a single rust-speckled feather to add panache, completes the outfit. It is not showy but elegant, in good taste. It will give the desired effect.

  As Rosetta is driven northward, across the commanding gun-metal span of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, she withdraws into a world of private thought. Ferries, sailing boats and tankers, tugs and ocean liners, all ply the pellucid waterway she rides above, yet she hardly notices these craft. She doesn’t see the tiny island of Fort Denison, its golden sandstone walls and iron cannons, nor the many looping coves and bays that indent the harbour. Instead, Rosetta thinks about a distant Melbourne day when she first gazed into Lilian’s eyes, blue as pieces of the sky. She reflects on all they did and shared together since then, and who they loved. For a moment, she is filled with longing for the way it was.

  Rosetta’s reverie is interrupted by her arrival at Admiralty House. Like most Sydney-siders she is familiar with the appearance of this graceful mansion; it stands, surrounded by verdant lawns, poised on the city’s northern foreshore in an ey
e-catching position. Now Rosetta crosses its distinctive wide veranda beneath the vaulting arches of a white colonnade. Just before she passes through the entrance she turns, takes a moment to admire the sweeping, sun-drenched scene laid out before her; water shading from malachite to aquamarine, land that dips and curves, and city buildings pressing hard against the sky.

  Rosetta is met by Lady Louis’ private secretary, a thin woman with the keen expression of a fox, who briskly ushers her past the elaborate staircase and into an informal reception room. Despite its handsome timber wainscots and commodious proportions, Rosetta notes the modest furnishings; there are landscapes on the walls of an uneven quality, a number of tired, chintz-covered couches and some woven rugs, rather threadbare in places. She expects it is the result of wartime stringency. Rosetta sees that someone, no doubt for the benefit of the illustrious English visitors, has arranged a vase of native Australian flowers; there are spiky banksias, red kangaroo paws and Sturt’s desert peas. There, on the mantelpiece, amid these polite, indifferent surroundings, the blooms strike her as out of place; they look too wild, too primitive.

  Lady Mountbatten enters, soignée in navy and white coin-spotted silk. While extending conventional greetings, she evaluates her guest, ponders strengths and weaknesses.

  A moment later she gives one of her famously dazzling smiles and says, ‘Mrs Norman, I do believe I can be quite frank.’

  Rosetta has passed an invisible test; she can be trusted. Edwina pours tea and offers sandwiches, tiny triangles filled with pink slivers of smoked salmon and frills of lettuce. Then the two women speak about Lilian, and the past, and what it meant.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  It was 1991, the year after my child had died, the year my second daughter was born. Impaled between grief and joy, I paid scant attention to the preoccupations that held my father in their thrall.

  Now, I read the results of that year of his research with intense fascination. He left the transcripts of five interviews behind, all but one conducted during what was for me a transcendent twelve months of change. Reading my father’s words brings forth the sensation that I am walking in his footsteps. Type, like footprints, fades of course, but not the words themselves, they retain their clarity. Words keep their capacity for surprise.

  It is through the transcripts that I learn the way in which my great-grandmother met her third and final husband. His name is Thomas Reginald Rufus Tait, otherwise known as Tom Tait.

  Rosetta’s last husband is not like Zeno the Magnificent. He is not a magician, nor a seer, not a healer nor a black marketeer. Tom does not amaze. He is a painter, though not an artist. He paints more prosaic things – fences, doors, the window frames of houses; he is a regular sort of man. But, as has so often been the case in Rosetta’s life, all is not as it seems. There is, in fact, something remarkable about Tom, after all. At just thirty-three years old, he is half Rosetta’s age.

  My great-grandmother has managed to astonish me once again. If I had any thought that, nearing seventy, her defiance of convention might be diminishing, I now know how mistaken I have been.

  When news reaches them of her impending nuptials, the family – Rosetta’s five sisters, Florence, Ivy, Winifred, Daisy and Evelyn, and their husbands, her much younger brother, Clifford, his wife and all their children – are aghast. There is ample speculation as to young Tom’s motives. They speak of dark purposes.

  ‘He doesn’t love her. It’s the money, can’t you see?’ One of Rosetta’s nephews puts voice to the family’s worst suspicions. ‘Just look at what she has. Houses and flats everywhere, in Bondi, Bronte, Tamarama. Plus she owns half of Bondi Junction. There are probably fifty, maybe sixty places. Why wouldn’t he want to marry Auntie Rose?’

  Though not so extensive as her nephew would like to believe, Rosetta’s portfolio is by now impressive. She has even bought cottages in Wonderland Avenue, a street named after the old amusement park that, in another lifetime, she used to know so well. It amuses her, this proof of how far she has come. Once a mere dependent young wife, trapped by an ill-fated marriage, now she has the deeds to many properties. Rosetta has not just remade herself. She has created her own version of Wonderland.

  It is the Yellow Peril that brings Tom and Rosetta together. Ironic, really, considering this is the unpleasant, xenophobic way that Australians describe an imagined Asian threat. When Rosetta’s neighbours laugh and throw this term about, they carelessly ignore the fact that her late husband was half Chinese. Nine years have passed since his death; perhaps they never knew the man. In any case, it isn’t Carl Norman they are referring to. It is Rosetta’s enormous twelve-cylinder vintage Packard motor car, coloured just as brightly as the yolk of an egg.

  Rosetta acquired a taste for the finer things in life a long time ago and Packards, with their smooth leather upholstery, their gleaming finish of rich paint and shining chrome, have a reputation for unparalleled American opulence. The King of Yugoslavia, the Queen of Spain, the Shah of Iran and the Aga Khan had all bought them. The Emperor of Japan was rumoured to own ten of these glamorous vehicles while, prior to the Russian revolution, the Czar selected a Packard for his luxurious imperial state limousine. Now, it is in this eye-catching brand of automobile that Rosetta alarms her staid neighbourhood, hence the sobriquet. Rosetta is still drawn to danger, remains partial both to speed and risk. She is mad about fast motor cars. The Yellow Peril is her pride and joy.

  By now, Rosetta is increasingly volatile: ‘the epitome of stormy’, as Tom Tait will later remark. The temper she had as a young woman, the flare of annoyance that over the years she has contained, is starting to become unchecked. People who know her say she ‘flies off the handle’. She lacks restraint.

  ‘Wretched, wretched thing!’ Rosetta is shouting when Tom, all taut muscles and thick sandy hair, first catches sight of her. He has been occupied painting a large house in Murray Street, opposite her own. As it is a big job and the work has made Tom hot, he decided to take his lunch over to Rosetta’s shady garage, just across the road. But it is not his sitting there, eating ham sandwiches and drinking tea in a place in which he has no right to be, that ignites Rosetta’s ire. She’s having trouble with the Packard. ‘This damn car won’t start!’ she cries. Her eyes flash and her hands fly to her hips.

  Tom watches as she floods the engine. He is a self-confessed erratic driver. Nevertheless, he offers his assistance. Tom starts the Packard up and, as he put it to my father more than forty years after this propitious intervention, ‘She thinks I am a miracle man.’

  As the car roars into life so, too, does the marvel of this new relationship.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Rosetta and Tom appear to have little in common, save for their religious persuasion, though this faith is not the same one into which my great-grandmother was born. During her life with Zeno Rosetta traversed the furthest reaches of a plethora of Eastern creeds, became familiar with the gods of ancient Egypt, Hindu philosophy, the sayings of Buddha and the principles of Zen. At various stages theosophy and, of course, spiritualism were all encountered and embraced. Of late, however, Rosetta has adopted a new set of heavenly beliefs. She is devoted to the Roman Catholic faith. Though Rosetta does not formally convert, she brings to this most recent set of religious convictions a passionate zeal.

  It began after Carl died in 1938 when, as had so often been the case, a new man entered my great-grandmother’s life. She was lonely when she first met Father Martin Riley yet, even after Tom became a fixture, their relationship would endure. Father Riley has the black hair and emerald eyes of Ireland’s sons. His female parishioners agree that he is really far too handsome for his ecclesiastical vocation.

  As for Rosetta, she has never lost her allure. Though in the year of Carl’s death she turned fifty-eight, there was something about her, beyond her full figure and the dark gold in her eyes, some inner, carnal appeal still capable of tempting even a man of God. Despite the fact that Father Riley had long been a member of the Order of the Sa
cred Heart, had vowed to maintain a state of chastity in thought and deed, he was entranced.

  Rosetta now visits this good-looking man at least once a week. It has continued for four years; Tom discovers that Rosetta ‘won’t make a move without consulting him’. She no longer has a fortune teller by her side. Perhaps she thinks that Father Riley has unnatural powers; that with his Celt’s eyes he can see into the future just as Zeno the Magnificent once did.

  Despite her ardour, Rosetta is not truly a member of the Catholic faith. All the same, she wants to enter into the sanctity of the confessional: Martin Riley might be persuaded to make an exception in her case. Perhaps not in church, but in a less formal place. It is interesting to speculate on what version of the truth she might have decided to reveal, or what penance would have been required.

  Something gnaws, it needles. Rosetta does not acknowledge, even to herself, what could be the cause of her disquiet. Whatever it is, she decides that it might help to do some good during her life. On a warm spring day scented with gardenias, in that tranquil moment which so often follows one of their intimate exchanges, she asks her spiritual guide, ‘Is there anything I can do, perhaps, for one of your charities?’

  ‘Why of course, my dear.’ Father Riley smiles, relieved that there is a way for him to expiate such feelings of disturbing guilt as might arise. He covers her hand with his own and says, ‘I know St Catherine’s would welcome your help.’

  St Catherine’s is an orphanage for girls. Situated north of Sydney in the tiny hamlet of Brooklyn, it occupies a narrow stretch of land by the peaceful waters of the Hawkesbury River. Surrounded by dense bushland, the setting is idyllic, though life within the orphanage itself is desolate. This is not unusual. It is the way the disenfranchised live.