Rosetta travels widely. She has a taste for exploration, seeks out ships sailing for Bombay or Cairo or Rio de Janeiro. But, after each expedition comes to an end, she returns to her gabled Bronte home in Sydney.
Ever since her first visit in 1905, during the final, turbulent months of her marriage to Louis, Rosetta has been attracted to this inviting city. Her desire to stay near its sparkling waters remains a constant throughout her life, whether by the harbour where sailing boats and ferries are enveloped by soft azure serenity, or near the ocean and the rolling blue-green tides that rise and fall in endless, rhythmic waves.
An abundance of seductive physicality is not the only reason for the city’s enduring appeal. War has come and gone, but Melbourne continues to be more self-consciously aware of origins, of what distinguishes a person and their family. Sydney remains a different kind of metropolis; perhaps it is to do with being a great sea port. It is more forgiving. In Sydney, reinvention – Rosetta and Zeno’s stock in trade – is still a distinct possibility.
FORTY-SIX
Snapshots. It is in this way that Rosetta’s four remaining decades are revealed. Her life does not present in a continuous, unfolding flow of events, but as fleeting images constructed from anecdotes and reminiscences, from possibilities and hints. My father continued to play the reporter’s role, still chased leads and asked questions. On occasion, he recorded an opinion, sometimes he would speculate, or set down his dilemmas, perhaps write a brief vignette. Now it is these fragments that shape my understanding of the next forty years of my great-grandmother’s life, together with my own memories. They are not of Rosetta, of course, but of my mother and grandmother, the lived experience of them.
Although Rosetta’s child was named Frances Catherine at birth, for most of her life no one called her that. I remember Nana being very pretty, not tall but shapely, with that shape invariably enhanced by the wearing of a corset and a belt buckled at her waist. Perhaps it was a legacy of living in the convent: she was always particular about her appearance. In a way, I suppose that was how her change of name came about.
‘I couldn’t wait to have my hair bobbed after the Great War,’ she told me once when I was in her sitting room and she was drinking brandy and soda. It must have been five o’clock, because you could set your watch by her nightly consumption of the cocktail. The procedure was unchanging, as much ritual as habit.
‘It was the modern thing to do.’
My grandmother put her drink down and smiled, the coquette in her remembering, before she pursed her mouth into her customary ‘O’ and drew back on a cigarette. Nana would have been in her late sixties then and smoking had already etched deep lines that fanned out from her upper lip. Her flat reflected a liking for watercolours, pastel-coloured porcelain shepherdesses and other tasteful ornaments, though, such was her addiction to nicotine, the wallpaper always had a faintly sallow tint.
‘This was when I lived at home in Melbourne, of course,’ she said. ‘I was stepping out with a young man and when he came to the house to collect me he had the biggest shock. I’ll never forget it. He walked in, took one look at me and said, “You look just like a boy – I’m going to call you Billie!”’
In that carefree moment, her final link to her mother, the very name Rosetta gave her, was effaced. No one ever called her Frances again. She would be known as Billie for the rest of her life.
Billie marries my tall, blue-eyed grandfather Frederick Mitchell Jacobs on 30 December 1921. He has served his country. Now he is making his way in the commercial world. Fred’s smile is disarming. Billie finds him charming.
He has no intention of keeping his wedding vows.
Fred is a complicated man. His mother (she requires him to call her ‘Mater’) has always doted on Hubert, his brilliant elder brother. Fred, the lesser, second son, is resentful. He has acquired a cruel streak, at least as far as women are concerned. Desperate for their attention and devotion, at the same time he seems to hate women, hate his needing of them.
Rosetta is not aware that her twenty-one-year-old daughter has married, that Frances Raphael is Billie Jacobs now. She doesn’t know that her only, unhappy child has moved to Sydney, or what further misfortunes will befall her there.
My mother, Sybil, is born three years later, in 1924. After Billie brings her infant daughter home from hospital, Fred sets about seducing her nurse. But faithlessness is not Fred’s only flaw.
‘I have a memory.’ My mother’s voice catches. ‘The picture in my mind is of my mother on her knees, my father’s hands upon her, forcing her towards the floor.’
FORTY-SEVEN
Rosetta’s mother, Fanny, may have cautioned ‘only men can make their fortune’ but, as has so often been the case, her daughter has not heeded this advice.
She has become deft at the conduct of business. Professor Zeno’s fees provided her with the means to acquire property in Britain. For some time now, she has turned her attention to Sydney. The buying and selling of land and of the buildings that occupy that land; such speculation has been taking place ever since the establishment of the colony. It has long been a reliable way to attain wealth and, in that regard, nothing at all has changed.
Rosetta purchases a substantial number of properties. The flats and houses she has bought are rented out to tenants; it keeps her fully occupied. Indeed, she is so busy that sometimes it is difficult to keep track of exactly who her tenants are or to what purposes her properties are put. ‘Well, as long as the rents are met,’ she tells herself, ‘why should I be concerned?’ This blithe attitude remains until she discovers the disconcerting answer in unanticipated circumstances.
Like most citizens of Sydney, Rosetta has read about an infamous local madam with the name of Tilly Devine. Tilly is so successful in her chosen field that newspapers dub her the ‘Queen of Vice’. One journalist, writing for The Daily Telegraph, describes her to his readers as ‘a vicious, grasping, high priestess of savagery, venery, obscenity …’.
Matilda Twiss was born in 1900 in the crime-ridden London slums of Camberwell, where her family existed in a state of unforgiving poverty. She learnt quickly that the luxury of scruples would serve only to compromise her ability to survive.
Tilly’s good looks, her halo of fair hair and voluptuous body allow her to enjoy a little more success than most girls whose livelihood depends on the patronage of eager men. She starts at age thirteen; at fifteen, for a girl from Camberwell, she is making a good income. Tilly might be a common street-walker, but the street in which she plies her trade is smart: London’s fashionable Strand. Life changes when she meets James (Big Jim) Edward Devine, a gunner in the Australian army. Jim shares with Tilly a questionable moral code. He is both by nature and profession a criminal; a thief, drug dealer, pimp, gunman and vicious thug who will not hesitate to kill or maim.
They marry. When Jim returns to Australia in 1919, she soon follows him and then the fun, as Tilly would put it, really begins. Soon they set up house in the dangerous, gang-ridden district of Darlinghurst, described by the scandal sheet Truth as, variously, ‘Razorhurst’, ‘Gunhurst’, ‘Dopehurst’ and ‘Bottlehurst’ for reasons that are self-apparent. Pretty Tilly, just nineteen, is ‘on the game’ again: at ten shillings for a half-hour encounter she is doing well. But Tilly has her sights set higher. Why limit her income when there are so many hungry girls who have the capacity to make her rich? She adjusts. No longer solely a prostitute, young, quick-witted Tilly sets up a dozen houses of ill fame and puts a ruby light in the window of each one. She is successful, a born madam.
Tilly Devine becomes well known, indeed, infamous. Her notoriety derives not just from the fact that she supplies carnal services to a uniquely egalitarian range of many men, from Macquarie Street’s black-suited politicians to tattooed dockworkers. Tilly is also known, feared, for her violence. At a time when razor gangs regularly battle for dominance, her willingness to wield a blade, to slash at a soft cheek, or ear, a nose or exposed throat, is singularly shoc
king.
There are many contretemps with members of the New South Wales constabulary, raids on her premises, inflammatory stories in newspapers and threats to close her down. Yet Tilly, who is clever and experienced in the ways of men’s corruption, knows the power of favours given and what can be demanded in return, remains in business. A former New South Wales Police Commissioner named Norman Allan, no stranger to controversy himself (he will be accused of taking bribes from those responsible for some of the state’s most nefarious activities), is heard to describe her as a ‘villain’ before adding, ‘But who am I to judge?’
Tilly is irrepressible, buoyant as a cork. More than that, she thrives. The street-walker from Camberwell acquires a taste for luxury, for those things she considers constitute evidence of a successful life. When the Great Depression strikes, the starving wait their turn at soup kitchens for steaming bowls of paltry sustenance doled out by well-intentioned Salvation Army officers bent on saving souls. Tilly slows as she glides past in her Cadillac: she has come to find wives and mothers sufficiently desperate to consider her offer of some easy earnings. It is as simple as picking up bruised fruit. The women see the glint of diamonds on her fingers, fox furs around her neck and, despite the sound of hymns and tambourines ringing in their ears, find themselves tempted.
Tilly Devine is, then, a formidable woman. But so is her landlady, my great-grandmother.
I found my father’s description of Rosetta and Tilly’s unexpected nexus on one untitled piece of paper.
Rosetta, who was very jealous of her reputation, was shattered by unfounded rumours which came to her ears suggesting that she was a brothel keeper. This arose from the fact that two cottages that she owned in the inner City were being used as houses of ill-fame.
… what had happened was that the cottages were being rented on behalf of the notorious Sydney moll and associate of criminals, the infamous Tilly Devine. When Rosetta discovered what had happened she summarily locked the inhabitants out.
‘That bloody woman’s done what?’ is Tilly’s vociferous demand when Jim tells her the news.
She is not a woman it is safe to cross; her appetite for retribution is renowned.
‘Jim, I reckon I’ll take one of the boys with me and pay Mrs Norman a visit. Won’t be ’ard to sort the bitch out.’ Tilly’s rouged mouth assumes a gleeful smirk.
‘Easy does it, Til,’ is Big Jim’s response, though he is no stranger to savage violence. ‘You’ve already done two years in Long Bay on account of your razor. I’ve got a new shipment of cocaine coming in any day now. It’s worth a hell of a lot and I’d like to keep life nice and quiet. Bugger it, Til, I’ll just nip down and fix things with me bolt cutters.’
Tilly Devine would have none of this.
‘Yer bloody won’t!’ she cries. ‘I’ll sort it out meself.’
She kicked down the newly bolted doors to ensure that her girls could carry on business as usual.
In a moment of cool reflection following her initial impetuous action, Rosetta becomes aware that she has escaped lightly from a hazardous situation. She decides that she will not enlist the help of the police, or Carl, who knows a trick or two. Nor will she, in a potentially foolhardy act, go to treacherous Darlinghurst herself to confront Mrs Devine.
What Rosetta decides to do next demonstrates that she, too, is skilled in the art of survival. ‘Carl, darling, about this unsavoury affair,’ Rosetta says to her husband after she has collected her thoughts, ‘I think it would be best to continue with the same arrangement we had before; you know, business as usual. In any case, one day that wretch will get what she deserves.’ Her tone is philosophical.
‘And until then, Rosie?’ asks Carl. He knows his wife well enough to suspect that there is more.
‘Strangely enough, I don’t think it’s going to take very long for Mrs Devine to discover that she is having considerable problems with the law.’ Rosetta smiles enigmatically. Tilly is not the only woman in this city with favours upon which she can draw.
FORTY-EIGHT
For the first decade of her life my mother, Sybil, lives in a rambling, harbourside house in the fashionable suburb of Vaucluse. Directly opposite, the construction of the mighty Sydney Harbour Bridge begins in 1924, the same year she is born. As the years pass, she watches its two sides slowly creep across the sky, wonders if they will ever meet. And then, one day when she is aged eight, as if by magic they join together, a perfect fit.
Two years later, she is sent away. Her parents, unlike that great grey span, are not united; their marriage is in disarray.
Billie has been abandoned yet again, this time by her great love, the father of her child. She is but one of many women in Fred’s life, now and in the future. They include not only several mistresses but three more wives.
And so, for Sybil, the pattern is repeated. Another only child, another little girl whose parents part amid trauma and who is deemed, like an awkward piece of furniture, to be in the way. This time the boarding school is in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. During the freezing winters, desolation settles in her poisoned, chilblained hands.
She returns to live in Sydney after an absence of two years, though to considerably lesser circumstances than before. Mother and daughter have been obliged to move. The large waterfront house has gone. The Harbour Bridge has disappeared from view. Instead, their small apartment looks over a narrow passageway. The flat will do; it is far better, really, than many people have. But it isn’t home, and they are no longer a family.
‘After the divorce I used to see my father once a week,’ my mother recalls. ‘I remember one Saturday when we were at the Watson’s Bay Hotel, eating fish. He and his latest girlfriend, Jo, started laughing about my mother. I think I was around twelve. I just stood up, walked out and got on the tram.’
I tell her she was brave.
‘I had to learn to cope and did it in my own way,’ she says.
‘Which way was that?’
‘I just let things go over my head. I was charming and amusing.’
‘But not that time,’ I say.
‘No, not then.’
I am sitting on a comfortable wing-back chair, gazing at my ninety-year-old mother as she reminisces. She lies on her bed, a vision spun from sugar in her pink, lace-edged peignoir amid a cloud of frilled white pillows.
I see myself in memory gazing at her as I do now; the years liquesce. I am aged three or four. For the first time, I am aware of the way she looks. My mother is sitting at her dressing table, her back to me. I see her waved hair and long neck. She wears a dress that is green and smooth and gleaming like the surface of a leaf after the rain. The mirror has a hinged wing on each side so there are three images. She gazes straight ahead but I see more. I see her back before me, but as if by magic I see, too, the reflection of her face and each profile. She is like a jewel, her face carved in facets and each one luminous. I watch as she applies carmine lipstick. Inky mascara darkens lashes above opal eyes. She lifts her perfect face, puts on earrings and a necklace. I see four mothers doing this, all mine.
Now, despite the inevitable marks of age, the elegant harmony present in the line of her jaw, the curve of her cheek and the arch of her brow remains. Spread around her upon the bed are objects she can reach easily. Books, spectacles, the radio for news and a television guide. I see she has marked the classic films she wants to watch, the kind that star Lauren Bacall or Joan Crawford. Like them, she has a face that matters. It seems beyond the reach of time.
I turn my gaze away, look instead at the family photographs standing on the wide ledge beneath the window, closed and shuttered as it always is. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren; we are all there, captured at weddings and graduations and other celebrations. On the right there is a picture of my grandmother, Billie, in a silver frame. She must have been in her eighties when it was taken. She wears a smart dress and her hair has been carefully styled, but her expression is not happy. Some new, imagined slight seems to be
playing on her mind. Of course, there are no photographs of Rosetta. Then my mother reaches behind one of her books and gives me a picture in a frame.
A figure, white as alabaster, in a dark, sylvan glade.
In the background, a pale aquamarine river, winding through a mysterious landscape. The figure, a woman, lies near the river bank beside the twisted, silver-grey limbs of trees. She glows with a pearly sheen; moonlight, I think. Her form is as devoid of colour as a classical sculpture but she is not quite nude and, in any case, she has a modern air. This woman doesn’t have the cool remove, the Apollonian reserve admired by the Romans and the Greeks. She looks down with intensity at an object in her hand. It is difficult to tell what she is holding; something is laced through her fingers, trailing a long, looping cord.
The woman has thick chestnut hair, cropped short. She wears a brief garment, striped, that rides up high, stretched tight across her thighs. The intensity of her examination of the hidden object in her hand frees me to indulge in uninhibited scrutiny. I contemplate the woman’s fleshy upper arm, then her torso until, finally, my eye travels along the full length of her slim, bare legs until it reaches a sudden, unexpected counterpoint: crimson slippers. They provide the only flare of colour in this otherwise monochromatic, sombre scene. Her body, though it reclines, appears tense to me, and if her legs are still for now, the brightly shod feet are flexed, which makes it seem as if at any moment they might spring away, lead her to dance like a river sprite underneath the shadowy canopy of leaves.
Rosetta Page 21