Rosetta (20 page)

SYDNEY, FEBRUARY 1940

She stands in her open doorway, her eyes half closed against the glare. The amber shards of light have an eerie quality, as if refracted by an alien sun in a strange galaxy.

‘Bushfire season,' she whispers, blinking.

In valleys and gorges, thousands of eucalypts are burning in the Blue Mountains forty miles west of Sydney. As their silvery leaves and sap-filled limbs ignite, fiery clouds rise and billow, race towards the city. There, in Bronte, Rosetta lives by the sea, but even in this haven the air is thick and heavy. She can taste the acrid smoke; her tongue feels rough and gritty.

She looks up, startled by a chorus of screeching cries. A flock of ragged cockatoos are perched in the branches of an exhausted jacaranda. The birds throw back their sulphurous heads, flutter their pale, singed wings. ‘At least,' she thinks, ‘they have escaped the flames.' Her garden is a sanctuary.

Rosetta hurries across the parched lawn. She has seen the red-faced postman pause by her front gate and is impatient to discover what letters he might have.

‘Hot enough for ya?' the man asks laconically when he sees her approaching. ‘I reckon this summer'll be a record breaker,' he adds, wiping his face.

She gives him a quick smile of commiseration, then takes the mail and strides back to the welcome coolness of her house, filled with a sense of anticipation. One letter has captured her attention: it bears a distinctive crest with a frond-like curlicue at each side extending from an embossed crown at its centre. Quickly, she picks up a chased silver knife, slides it along the seam of the envelope and extricates the letter. Then she pauses. The printed address at the top of the watermarked page is Brook House, once the grand Park Lane mansion owned by the multimillionaire and intimate confidant of the late King Edward, Sir Ernest Cassel.

Apparently, the writer is not living in Brook House at this precarious time for underneath are typed the words of a different, even more illustrious residence, Kensington Palace. This is the grand London home of a dozen members of the British royal family. A glance at the foot of the letter confirms what Rosetta has suspected. The signature, written in a forceful hand and underlined, is that of Edwina Mountbatten.

The letter's date is 28 December 1939. An English winter, Rosetta thinks to herself, snow and ice, Christmas trees and sugared mice. She wonders how easy it has been to celebrate; while Australia's current inferno is the result of a natural conspiracy between heat and drought, in Europe a conflagration made by man has, once more, broken out.

Lord Louis Mountbatten, Edwina's husband and the cousin of the King, is captaining the destroyer HMS
Kelly
, though soon his drive, ambition and connections will propel him into a more elevated role. Edwina is busy doing other things.

For years regarded as among London's most glittering, albeit promiscuous, socialites, she has acquired an outrageous reputation.
In 1932 King George himself insisted that the Mountbattens sue for libel when it was suggested by
The People
that Edwina had been ‘caught in compromising circumstances' with her lover (rumoured to be the black American actor Paul Robeson but in fact Leslie ‘Hutch' Hutchinson, a West Indian cabaret singer). The King considered legal action to be the only way in which to mitigate the scandal's impact on the royal family.

Since then, Lady Mountbatten has undergone a remarkable change. Now she devotes her considerable energy and passion to the Red Cross and St John's Ambulance. Edwina works tirelessly. Lord Louis, filled with pride, says approvingly to his daughter Pamela that her mother has found her ‘purpose in life'. Rosetta knows of these recent developments. She is aware that Lady Mountbatten will not wish an indelicate revelation to interfere with her new self-sacrificing status.

Rosetta skims the letter. She tries to swallow, finds her throat constricted. ‘It is this hideous weather,' she tells herself and gulps a glass of water. Then she reads again, notes Edwina's sentiments, their careful wording. Edwina thanks Rosetta for her ‘
kind letter
' of 3 December and expresses gratitude for all Rosetta did for her aunt. Next, she thanks Rosetta for passing on ‘
various enclosures
'. Edwina then moves on to the matter of the grave and headstone: her nephew, Dermot Pakenham, and her nieces will more than likely reimburse Rosetta for her ‘
expenses
', she says.

Yes, Rosetta thinks, that is to be expected. She has not begrudged the fact of meeting the cost of Lilian's funeral expenses, not for a moment, but she sees the family's assumption of responsibility for this outlay is their equivalent of closing ranks. Far be it for a Mountbatten, an Ashley or a Pakenham to permit exposure of another scandal.

The ‘war to end all wars' has not fulfilled its promise. Now, once more, it is a time for the defence not just of that island nation, but of those qualities that the people of her upper classes profess to hold so dear: decency, honourable family values. Lilian and her
husband, Arthur, never divorced, nor formally separated. Their irregular relationship was not made public.

Edwina, however, is a woman of the world, and as such knows its ways better than do most. She fully appreciates the meaning of discretion at all costs, for others if not always for herself.

When she wrote her letter in December, Rosetta devoted considerable thought as to the wisdom of including one of the ‘
various enclosures
' to which Edwina refers. At last she decided to proceed, though with the addition of a pertinent question. Now Rosetta reads her correspondent's firm response.

Edwina writes that she is returning ‘
the one letter
' and agrees with Rosetta's suggestion that it not be forwarded to the children. In fact, she goes a step further and asks Rosetta to destroy it. After this, there comes a request for photographs, then additional expressions of gratitude and thanks. Nothing of particular consequence, unlike that brief, undated letter from Lilian that Edwina has returned. It shares a potential for damage similar to that of an incendiary device.

The note is unsigned, save for the letter
L
.

Rosetta has a distant look in her dark gold eyes. Ah, dearest Lilian, she reflects, you were always artless, prone to emotional excess, and yet … she sighs, remembering how it was in those days when desire electrified their every thought and nothing seemed to matter more than each other's happiness. Then she does what Edwina wants. Rosetta strikes a match and in an instant there is no evidence that such rapture ever existed.

Ménage à trois.

A household of three. The phrase is French, of course. The French are so much better at expressing these things, the subtleties of human relationships.

I see it typed on a page. Just three words, though they make an impact, summing up the nature of the intimate relationship that my father deduced had existed between my great-grandmother, her best friend and my step-great-grandfather.

My father not only recorded his belief. He told me about it, more than twenty years ago. I remember entering his room on some small errand and he, looking up from the research scattered on his desk, declaring apropos of nothing in particular: ‘A threesome, t hat's what your great-grandmother was in.'

A statement like that came as a surprise. It wasn't the kind of pronouncement I was expecting from my father, nor one I could easily forget. I think it might have been then that I first began to consciously consider the trajectory of my
great-grandmother's rebellion, to wonder just how many taboos she was prepared to break.

Rosetta returned to Australia in early 1915, but whether in Australia or anywhere else in what was then referred to as ‘the civilised world', women simply did not do the things Rosetta did. She was thirty-four years old. She had already left a husband, deserted a child, run away with a half-Chinese fortune-telling wizard. Now, having only just returned after completely reinventing herself on the other side of the world, bewitching European and British society and, in the process, creating considerable wealth, she embraced an entirely improper domestic arrangement. Was she a woman ahead of her time – a revolutionary, strong and extraordinarily brave – or simply selfish, wayward, mad? Rosetta did not just ignore convention, she tore at it.

My father didn't judge, at least as regards this latest development. It was the improbable conjunction that fascinated him, the unique melange of race, religion, class and sex; their incongruence.

Rosetta, Zeno and Lilian: the Jewish granddaughter of a convict who had acquired position and respect, the tradesman turned magician son of a goldfields Celestial from Canton, and the aristocratic Irish-born granddaughter of the Earl of Shaftesbury and aunt of the future Countess Mountbatten of Burma, Vicereine of India. Surely there could rarely have existed as unlikely a trio as this.

 

I remind myself that I must stop referring to my step-great-grandfather as Zeno. By now the name and the persona that went with it had transmogrified yet again. Just as was the case when, in an earlier incarnation, Zeno the Magnificent disappeared into a churning slipstream somewhere off Port Said, Professor Zeno, too, had gone. Vanishing: it was by now a practised conjuring trick. Once the Professor left the shores of Great Britain, Zeno simply ceased to exist.

The couple travelled via the United States. Rosetta had been claiming to be American; why not see the country of her invented birth? In any case, war-torn Europe and the Middle East were no longer safe. Travelling westward, towards the setting sun, was the wiser course. During the voyage from San Francisco on the SS
Sonoma
my great-grandmother's versatile husband reverted to his original name.

They passed through the wave-swept, sandstone cliffs of Sydney Heads on 11 January 1915. When they stepped ashore into the brilliant Antipodean sunshine it was not with the sea-induced stagger of other passengers but with the greatest ease: they had always been sure-footed, comfortable with self-belief. Husband and wife were, once more, officially Mr and Mrs William Norman, although the former professor continued to refer to himself as Carl. Rosetta followed suit: both found it difficult to break the habit.

 

In England, Lilian's confusion is soon at an end. Despite the existence of her children, her husband and the expectations that accompany her elevated social position, just a few short weeks after their departure, she sets out to follow her dear friends. At the age of thirty-eight, she realises that she cannot bear to live without them. Lilian sails to the other side of the world on the SS
Remuera
, though during the long voyage she begins to be plagued by doubt. Perhaps her decision was unduly precipitous; might she have been too rash? On sleepless, starlit nights, she paces the
Remuera
's timber decks and, as she does so, wrestles with the wisdom of her choice.

The ship's first Australian port is Hobart, that same far settlement to which Abraham Rheuben was transported nearly a century ago. Hobart was the place where he married, raised a family, made his fortune. ‘So this is where it all began,' thinks Lilian, as tugboats help the ship negotiate the Derwent
River's erratic currents and fickle winds. The landscape strikes her as primitive and dense, a wilderness, its wild beauty bleak and threatening. She feels the bitter edge of the Antarctic's icy air as she surveys the austere, windswept town. It leads her to consider the qualities possessed by Rosetta's grandfather. A man of such wretched circumstances – how was it that he thrived in such a place? She contemplates this question and, as she does so, gains a new understanding of Rosetta, her determination and resourcefulness.

Lilian leaves the
Remuera
after the ship reaches Melbourne. She has been awaiting this arrival with anticipation, anxious to rediscover the city in which she and her husband once lived, where he served an imperial governor and she hunted with a lord. But time has passed and the Melbourne that she knew in the year of 1900 seems very different now; the sounds in the street are sharper, more discordant, its smell has a new, metallic quality, the very rhythm of life has changed. ‘Perhaps it is me,' she thinks. ‘I am not the woman I once was.'

She finds she is relieved to board a locomotive at Flinders Street Station. Yet, strangely, the trip from Melbourne to Sydney, past dusty paddocks and small country towns, seems harder to endure than all the months at sea. After so much time, Lilian now feels a sense of urgency. She yearns for discovery, to determine if her agonising choice has been correct for, if not, she asks herself the question that has tormented her the most: ‘What will become of me?'

As Lilian's train draws into Sydney's Central Station, that vast colonial tribute to late Victorian excess, she finds she is trembling. She has pictured this moment, many, many times, the way the platform would appear to rush towards her, how the flattering green dress she would be wearing might flutter as she descends; yes, that she had imagined, but not how she would feel, not this whirlpool of terror, hope and expectation, both perilous and thrilling.

Lilian smooths a tendril of dark-blonde hair. Then, struggling to place her quivering fingers into a pair of white kid gloves, thinks, ‘Why have I been so unwise, so impetuous?'

The train stops. She sees her friend and lover, waiting. Rosetta, dressed in cornflower blue, is smiling. Carl, nearing forty now and as relaxed as ever, languidly raises his hat. Lilian alights. Amid the noise of porters calling, the throng of hurrying travellers arriving and departing, she steps uncertainly towards them. They reach for one another and, as the three of them embrace, Lilian discovers that her doubts have taken flight.

She will stay, always. Lilian Pakenham becomes the third apex of an intimate triangle though, for the sake of discretion, she maintains a separate address. All the same, it is a rather shocking arrangement.

 

Colonel Hercules Arthur Pakenham does not remain on the Western Front. He will fulfil a more clandestine duty. In 1917 he is appointed the British security service's man at the French War Ministry. By early 1918 he is head of MI5's Washington DC office and immersed in counter-espionage. Colonel Pakenham is not only good at keeping secrets: he is practised in the analysis of troubled situations. He doubts that, once the Great War has ended, he and Lilian will reunite.

The Colonel's judgement is correct: even after he returns home something of a hero, twice mentioned in despatches and the recipient, among other decorations, of the Legion d'Honneur from the French and the Distinguished Service Medal courtesy of the Americans, his wife chooses not to return. Nor, it seems, does Lilian reclaim her three children. They remain in Britain. When she leaves, Dermot is turning fourteen, Joan (known as Esther) is eleven and the youngest, little Beatrix, barely five.

Once more I contemplate what leads a woman to make such an immense and terrible decision. There are so many heartbreaking
stories of mothers, Indigenous, unmarried, too poor or too young, who had their children torn from their arms and grieved bitterly. Yet, somehow, for Rosetta and for Lilian, relinquishment was necessary. Perhaps it was one of the elements that drew them to each other, this willingness to leave behind such precious things.