Rosetta (5 page)

Carlton is very smart these days. Its renovated Victorian architecture has been painted in fashionable twenty-first-century colours such as charcoal and pale grey. The streets are lined with interesting bars and restaurants and boutiques selling designer clothes, mostly black. There are wonderful food shops; some offer dozens of different kinds of olive oils that glimmer on crowded shelves, others display ribbons of freshly made pasta or tempt with fragrant, sultana-studded pastries. In cafes where a multitude of coffee blends, grinds and flavours are on offer, patrons sit and sip and smile. When not consulting their smartphones or laptops, they watch other, similar people going by.

After this introduction to slick and thriving Carlton, arriving at Frances Villa is a shock. This was where, in December 1901, legal records show my great-grandparents and their infant daughter next took up residence.

Presumably, Louis had determined that the house be called after their child, though the name is no longer on display. I see
only a modest cottage, the last of a row of six in Faraday Street. All are in varying states of dilapidation, several are enveloped by graffiti and a couple look frankly uninhabitable. The house in which Rosetta lived with Louis and Frances is in better condition than the others, though still poor. The wounded roof bears red streaks of rust and the corrugated-iron awning above the veranda slopes at an alarming angle.

Feeling awkward, I ring the doorbell and explain the reason for my interest to Leanne, a friendly blonde woman who, though anxious to leave for work, generously invites me inside. ‘These are the last unrenovated places in Carlton,' she says. From the look of the house, the years have not been kind.

I step inside and am instantly transported to another time, in the very place where my great-grandparents with their new baby tried to go about their lives. I see the bedroom in which Rosetta spent long, troubled nights beneath the white plaster ceiling rose, the kitchen with its modern shiny stove placed in the same arched alcove where Ivy helped her to produce cakes and puddings, bread and roasts.

I want to believe that in those first few years at least my great-grandmother found space for Frances in her heart. So I stand before the empty hearth and picture her, sitting by the fire, her child nearby. Perhaps Rosetta invited Frances to play with the silky scraps of fabric that fell from her sewing box, or took her into the garden, pointing out bright rosellas flashing blue and green between thick clusters of scarlet gum blossom and sun-dappled leaves. It seems possible to me.

I thank Leanne who, with a flick of her ponytail, takes off down the street. As I watch her go I feel a shiver. No doubt it is the result of the cool Melbourne breeze whipping down the side lane, but as the door slammed shut I'd felt a sort of presence. It was as if Rosetta had just slipped by, as if she too desired to see where she had been.

JANUARY 1901

A restless energy pervades Melbourne's quiet tree-lined streets. Though the old Queen still sits upon the throne, her loyal subjects in even this distant dominion know it will not be for long. Change hovers in the air and, with it, the promise of transformation.

First comes Federation: six mismatched colonies are forged into a new nation. On the first day of January, beneath a fierce sun, Australia's inaugural Governor-General, the vainglorious Lord Hopetoun, mounts a grand dais in Sydney's Centennial Park and reads the Proclamation of the Commonwealth.

Louis, studying the newspaper at breakfast the next morning, turns to his wife and says, ‘I do not understand why it wasn't done in Melbourne. Everyone knows this is the superior place. What was it that writer Richard Twopeny said about Melbourne? “The people dress better, talk better, are better.” He was right.'

Louis puts the paper down, then pushes his toast and marmalade away in an exasperated fashion. ‘Honestly, it's enough to make a man choke.'

Glaring, he opens the pages once again. ‘Rosetta, listen, there's more.
The Age
says there was an enormous crowd, more than 250,000 strong, and a vast procession. Five thousand shearers led the way and, apparently, two women with long, flowing hair displayed themselves on a sort of float. One stood on the shoulders of the other, who was seated on a chair of gold.' He looks over at his wife. ‘What do you say to that?'

Rosetta does not say anything. But she wonders how it felt to be one of those women and what it might have been like to be there, with them.

Just a few weeks later Ivy arrives at Faraday Street, excited and distraught. She has passed by the freckle-faced paperboy on the corner, yelling the most extraordinary news, as she made her way to work. ‘Oh, Mrs Raphael,' she cries, ‘have you heard? Our dear sovereign is dead!'

Life pauses. Victoria was queen for sixty years; what will the future hold now? A shocked, grey pall is cast across the land. The inhabitants of Frances Villa, in the midst of their own disquiet, respond each in their own way. Louis ensures that, at least as far as he is concerned, correct mourning will be assumed. He draws comfort from the outward observation of form. Every morning, as he readies himself for the day's work, he puts on black crepe armbands over the sleeves of his dark suit. Before he leaves he checks they are secure. He knows that they, if nothing else, will stay just as they should.

Rosetta, by contrast, feels rebellious. She is secretly pleased when she discovers that her usual dressmaker has been overwhelmed with orders for sooty dresses and that even the dependable department store Buckley & Nunn has sold out of black veils.

‘I will wear my violet and grey,' Rosetta announces with a toss of her head when her mother pays a call. ‘Anything else is simply too depressing.'

Fanny is used to Rosetta's moods. Still, she is puzzled by the cause of her daughter's lack of ease, cannot understand why this is not the life, with all its certainties, that she wants to lead.

‘What is wrong with you, my dear?' she asks. ‘I know you are distressed.'

‘I cannot tell you that for I hardly know myself,' is all Rosetta says. She walks over to the dresser, begins rearranging the long-stemmed crimson roses she placed there in a vase only that morning. A moment later she starts adjusting picture frames that are already level. How to explain this agitation? Like an unruly genie, she feels her dormant spirit, contained for far too long, begin to press against life's boundaries.

Then in August, Prince Edward is crowned King and the world seems to shift on its axis; become more vivid, faster, brighter. Unlike his late mother, who lived a life of largely secluded gloom, confident, charming Edward adores fashionable society. The
new sovereign is a man of great good humour with a knack for
bonhomie
. Edward is known to conduct a number of amorous liaisons with voluptuous beauties. He sets trends; wears tweed suits and homburg hats; embraces extravagance.

Constraint seems to melt away. The twentieth century beckons and, with it, all manner of tempting possibilities.

 

By the following November, in 1902, my great-grandparents had left Frances Villa for another, grander Carlton home. Louis must have kept it, though, as they were to return there twice more. That year's electoral roll describes Louis as a man ‘of independent means', while his wife's name is listed as Rose. Neither one was quite as they had been.

I find their new house on a day of dense cloud and bruised, rain-filled skies. As I seek shelter beneath the silver-grey leaves of a dripping eucalypt I note that, unlike the ailing Frances Villa, number 66 Elgin Street is in pristine condition. It is equipped with an impeccable wrought-iron balustrade on its first-floor veranda and a front fence consisting of a row of perfectly aligned metal spears. Like its neighbours, the house is painted mint green, though it is distinguished from them by the presence of a single, sentry-like tree.

I begin taking photographs – probably I look suspicious – and a tall man stops and speaks to me. He explains that it is no longer a home, but a showroom for a fashionable clothing brand; little will be gained from venturing inside. Feeling damp and cold I tell myself that it is just another house in which Rosetta lived and, therefore, only a small piece for me to puzzle over as I try to solve the mystery of her life. Yet something still draws me to the place.

After consulting my damp map it strikes me just how close I am to Station Street, and all at once I understand. Here is one of the secrets that my father had unearthed. For in a small cottage at number 55 lived the mysterious man who would transform my great-grandmother's life.

His name, William Norman, was good and plain and, unlike the person who bore it, quintessentially British. Perhaps his Chinese father thought that like William, the Norman duke best known for his victory at the Battle of Hastings, his son might in time conquer the English.

I expect all William felt was that his historic appellation didn't seem to bestow a single discernible advantage. No doubt this was one reason why he chose to style himself Carl Zeno. The name ‘Carl' has a certain distinguished European sound, while ‘Zeno' hints at mysterious Eastern origins. ‘The Magnificent' would come later, a title calculated to evoke potent images of other-worldly powers.

In fact, Zeno of Elea was an ancient Greek sage. He was most famous for his nine paradoxes, particularly the one in which, impossibly, a tortoise continuously outruns Achilles, swift-footed hero of the Trojan War. An article I found in the academic journal
Science
said that this paradox ‘gives the feeling that you're perpetually on the verge of solving it without ever doing so'. I know this
sensation well. Being near to unravelling a mystery but never quite managing to do so is very often the way I feel about Zeno and my great-grandmother. At times they seem to come just into view before moving, ever-tantalisingly, further away.

The original Zeno maintained that time and motion are but illusions. His latter reincarnation, whose stock-in-trade was artifice wrapped in a vaporous cloak of scientific mystique, also seemed fond of this idea. Carl Zeno had barely any education. But he was a master of invention with a magnificence, albeit entirely self-created, all his own. He had his books and charts, had learnt something of Chinese herbs and medicines, but not much more than this. Zeno did, however, have one precious gift, and that was his uncanny ability to divine an anxious supplicant's dearest, most heartfelt wish.

Born in 1875 in Tuena, a small town that lay in a picturesque valley between Goulburn and Bathurst in New South Wales, Zeno was the son of a Chinese immigrant from the plague- and rebellion-wracked province of Guangdong. China's emperor referred to himself as the ‘Son of Heaven'; he called the vast realm over which he ruled the ‘Celestial Empire'. As a consequence ‘Celestials' was the term that English speakers bestowed upon those tens of thousands of Chinese labourers who arrived at Australia's goldfields during the 1850s. Suggestive of an ethereal race who dwelt in a heavenly world of clouds, the term was not one of approbation, nor was the place from which they came benign. Despite the Emperor's title, it was more hell than paradise.

Zeno's mother, Elizabeth, known as Eliza, was the Australian-born daughter of a stonemason and illiterate; she could not even sign her name. Marriages like hers – Eliza was of British descent – were highly unusual for racism was rife.

‘Alarming' was the way in which the Reverend William Young summed up the phenomena in 1868. I find this pronouncement, displayed in close proximity to a selection of dazzling opera costumes and a red and yellow dragon of tremendous
size, in Melbourne's Chinese Museum. There is worse to come in the Museum of Sydney – one wall displays in oversized bold type an even blunter opinion belonging to no lesser person than Sir Henry Parkes, the father of Federation. ‘There can be no … intermarriage or social communion between the British and the Chinese,' thunders his proclamation. I begin to understand just how shocking the attraction that Rosetta felt for Zeno really was.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, prejudice increased. Reports circulated about youths with flaming torches attacking Chinese miners at Lambing Flat. Angry men were seen pouring into public halls to protest against future arrivals. Next, ships with Chinese passengers on board were turned away from Sydney Harbour. Finally, in 1901, one of the first acts of the new Federal Parliament was the effective ban of Asian immigration. Dubbed the White Australia Policy, this notorious legislation was enforced by a dictation test, deliberately chosen in an improbable European language – it might be Romanian or Danish or Czech – that would ensure failure.

Growing up, the position William Norman found himself in would have been at best uncomfortable; at worst, dangerous. Carrying as he did the burden of his Chinese race yet also feeling strongly that he was his mother's son, it must have seemed as if there were no safe place in which he felt he belonged. By trade he was a tinsmith. I wonder if, as he beat upon that insubstantial metal with his workman's tools, it was then he decided he would fashion a new persona, one based on magical words and wishes that would protect him like a charm.

 

I make my way down Elgin Street with the rain now increasing in intensity, pulling up the hood of my raincoat as I turn left into Canning and take a quick right into Palmerston. It is easy to imagine the way it was, in 1903, when both Rosetta and Zeno lived in the neighbourhood. The small Victorian villas and dignified
terraces all remain, save for the occasional contemporary block of flats, multicoloured and with odd angles asserting a vaguely post-modernist aesthetic.

A sudden left again, this time into Station Street, and there it is. I stand before a modest red-brick cottage with a white fence and, above its awning, a glossy dark-green trim. The walk between Rosetta's house and Zeno's has taken only a few minutes to complete.

Though the couple are not officially recorded as meeting for at least another two years, their proximity suggests that it was here in Carlton that they initially encountered each other. I imagine that it might have been in the grocer's King & Godfree, established in 1874 and still serving customers today, that Rosetta dropped a parcel containing her favourite Lapsang Souchong tea.