FORTY-FOUR
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 fiv
e.
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.
FORTY-FIVE
SYDNEY, 1918
War changes everything and nothing. After the fighting has ended and despite the senseless sacrifice of tens of thousands of young lives, Australia continues to be fiercely loyal to the British Crown. Though jobs are often hard to come by, most men don’t want their wives to work; they think it shaming. The White Australia policy remains as well. The country may be part of a vast empire that includes the peoples of a number of African and Asian nations, but Australia’s politicians continue, steadfastly, to turn all such individuals away. They are found lacking, unacceptable.
The Great War has not only deprived Australia of the flower of its manhood; among those who return home, damage is commonplace. More than one hundred and fifty thousand men have been injured or taken prisoner. Many are without a hand or arm, some have lost a leg or cannot see; the mines and mortars have maimed indiscriminately. Others, their lungs scarred by poisoned gas, struggle for each gasp of breath. Most terrible of all is the devastation that lies within, the wounds that no one sees but which impose savage consequences; the awful screaming in the night that wives and children hear but know not to remark upon; the sudden anger; the drinking that is done in a new, determined way that seeks only oblivion; the violence.
The war’s horrors – worse, the appalling decisions that so often led to misfortune and disaster – are rarely acknowledged. Gallipoli, Gaba Tepe and Lone Pine, Fromelles, Villers-Bretonneux and Passchendaele; the men who come home from these places are changed forever. They have seen and done unimaginable things, had the unimaginable done to them in return. They do not speak of it. Their experience binds them to one another, separates them from their wives and children.
This war has also altered Carl. Communing with the dead no longer holds the same fascination as before. In fact, the practice fills him with distaste. He is well aware of the irony; now, more than ever, sweethearts, wives and mothers will do almost anything to establish contact with their lost lovers, husbands, sons. Carl considers this lucrative new market of grieving clients and finds that his heart is no longer in his old profession. There are too many unquiet spirits among the dead, too much sorrow among the living. It is unbearable.
Then there is the matter of his visions. The fire-filled, awful scenes of war that occupied his dreams still sometimes pass before his eyes. He wonders if perhaps it is the fault of opium. In London, faced with the prospect of another turbulent night, he frequently succumbed to the poppy’s soporific spell. He thinks now that perhaps it may have done more harm than good; promising heaven, it has imposed a kind of hell.
Carl sits in his study late one evening and turns the matter over in his mind, then finds himself considering another substance, this one capable of undreamt-of effects. Once he claimed that radium had ‘revolutionised the modern methods of healing’. But is it possible that the same material he had so enthusiastically endorsed has undiscovered properties that have contributed to his distressed mental and physical state? He doesn’t know. No one does.
Most disturbing is the knowledge that his visions did not remain, as could reasonably be expected, merely the products of his fertile mind. Too many predictions came to pass. War of unparalleled scope and terror has waged across the world, just as he forecast. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge have both lost a son; he saw these things quite clearly.
The two distinguished men write to him and tell him of their tragedies. Briefly, he slips into the role of Professor Zeno once again. The famous author and the leading scientist are prepared to try anything, risk ridicule and humiliation, if there seems any prospect (no matter how absurd) of achieving contact with their beloved boys. In desperation, the two engage the services of seers and mediums. They beseech the Professor to return to England though, wisely, he declines their invitations.
Not so long ago, when alone with his Rosetta, Carl would have scoffed at those gullible souls who believed his visions and prognostications to be as true as the gospels. Since then, it has occurred to him that his own ability to separate illusion from delusion, imagination from reality, truth from fiction, is less certain. Even worse, Carl has the disturbing thought that, in calling forth his visions, he has been in some way instrumental in conjuring them into existence, making them concrete.
He doesn’t tell Rosetta of his fears. She will not like it, will look at him with doubt flickering in her eyes. In any case, Carl knows that to travel down this path can bring nothing but torment, even madness. There can be only one way forward. He must put such thoughts aside and, with them, his long-standing practice of the art of magic.
Carl makes an exchange. The black arts for the black market. He has not told his wife about his fears; now he omits to confess the solution he’s found. He makes sure that transactions are conducted discreetly, far from home. If Rosetta suspects, she doesn’t say a word.
They are wealthy now; it’s not a matter of the money, but of sensation. Spirits (though not the ethereal kind), cigarettes and, increasingly, art of unspecified provenance fly through his hands. Life is once more dangerous and thrilling. Yet, despite this promising beginning, the satisfaction doesn’t last. When all is said and done, it’s commerce. He misses sorcery.
Long ago, when Rosetta was still married to Louis, she’d claimed she visited Zeno’s Swanston Street premises for instruction in watercolours. Much later, favourite clients were touched when he sent them small examples of his work. In a letter penned from her Cannes villa, La Fôret, on 20 December 1913, Princess Charlotte wrote:
My dear Professor
I can’t thank you enough for your … exactly pretty card just received, a proof that you are even an artist, for the roses are exactly painted, and I have put them on the mantelpiece, just behind the chair in which you sat, when I tried to learn from you during your alas! Far too short stay.
Now he turns to these artistic pursuits with renewed pleasure. In the careful preparation of white surfaces and the blending of concentrated colours, in the dipping of his brush into singing oranges and yellows, deep blues and greens and brilliant reds and, finally, in the application of pigment onto canvas, his equilibrium is recovered. He paints his way back to tranquillity, to happiness.
Carl spends his time with those engaged in similar pursuits. Artists, writers and poets are much like seers and magicians. Unbothered by the unconventional, they accept not only his unusual domestic arrangements and his distinctly chequered past but seem not to mind his oriental origins. He finds he is at home with them.
My great-grandmother, at thirty-eight, finds fulfilment in other ways.
‘You understand,’ she tells her husband, ‘I can’t be confined. You have your painting and your artist friends, but I still need something more.’
Rosetta seeks adventure. Why not cross Russia one day, take the Trans-Siberian railway from frozen Vladivostok to Moscow? Or go to the floating lakeside palaces of Rajasthan, or the ancient temples of Peru? Perhaps she will. But first, she thinks, she’ll sail for London.
Taking tea at The Ritz and drinking cocktails at The Savoy, viewing the paintings at the Royal Academy and watching Nellie Melba sing at the Albert Hall – Rosetta realises just how much she has missed these diverting pastimes. Paris, too, she must go there, see the divine new clothes designed by Jean Patou and Madame Paquin. Then there is racing at Longchamp and the ballet at the Palais Garnier before the quick dash to catch the train from Gare de Lyon and the journey south to the Riviera.
All these things remain, yet Rosetta knows that much else can never be the same. So many men, dashing and elegant,
have perished on the battlefields and her dear friends, Baroness Stern, Princess Charlotte and the Empress Eugenie, are not long for this world. As for the Russian grand dukes and princes, there are no more sumptuous villas and winter palaces. In fact, she’s heard that one of the late Czarina’s godsons is now employed on the Côte as a hotel concierge. It seems incredible.
When Rosetta reflects upon the heady life she knew so well, the ravishing women wrapped in ermine and sable, the private railway carriages lined like jewel boxes in plush ruby velvet, the glittering balls attended by countesses who wore diamonds in their hair and, around their throats, ropes of glistening pearls; when she thinks back upon the sheer self-indulgence of an existence where each whim was treated by a fleet of servants with urgent diligence … well, it might have been a fairytale, except that she was there and knows that, for a brief time at least, this fantastic, hedonistic world was real.
How much has changed, or disappeared? She’s curious to know.
Florence and Winifred go to Sydney Cove and wave farewell to their glamorous sister. ‘I don’t know how she does it – and all alone,’ one says to the other. ‘How brave Rosetta is, how fearless.’
They see her, high above them on the great ocean liner, veiled by nets of coloured paper ribbons. Rosetta raises one hand, waves in return. With the other she holds on to her new summer hat, gay with blood-red poppies. Just for a moment, a single streamer becomes entangled with the blooms before a wanton gust of wind sends it spiralling into the sky. The sudden movement catches the eye of a fellow passenger. Gesturing, he says, ‘I saw flowers like that in Flanders,’ as the ship slips from its moorings, begins to pull away.
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